To the Bishop Who Called Me an Atheist

by Brett Rutherford

Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "November 1870"

Me, an Atheist? let us find out, priest, once and for all.
Already I am spied upon, and watched, and listened to.
Look through the keyhole to the depths of my soul, then,
search how far and just how deep my doubts can go.
Go question Hell, consult its police register,
gaze through the basement window
to see what I deny or what I believe,
You needn’t take the trouble to send out spies.
My faith is simple, and I profess it. I like frank clarity:

If he is a man with a long white beard,
in the semblance of a pope or emperor, seated
upon a throne (the kind of boxy, high-backed thing
     we knock together in the theater),
perched in a cloud, with a bird on his head,
on his right an archangel, on his left a prophet,
in his arms his pale son pierced with nails,
one in three parts, listening to harps, a jealous God,
an avenging God, exactly as Garasse[1] records,
as annotated by Abbot Pluche[2] in the Sorbonne
     and approved by none other than Nonnotte[3] —

Ah, if it is this God that Trublet[4] observes,
God trampling underfoot those whom Moses
     found it convenient to oppress,
sacrificing all the royal bandits in their lairs,
punishing children for the fault of their fathers,
stopping the sun at the hour when the evening laughed,
at the risk of breaking the solar system’s
     well-wound spring completely, 

This God, a bad geographer
     and an even worse astronomer,
immense and small counterfeit of man,
angry, and pouting at mankind,
like a Père Duchêne with a large saber in his hand;
a God who willingly damns and rarely forgives,
who on a privilege consults a Madonna,
a God who in his blue sky gives himself the duty
to imitate our faults, and the luxury of owning
plagues, the way we keep pet dogs;
     God who disturbs his own order,
sets Nimrod and Cyrus loose on us, sends mad
Cambyses to conquer and rule,
     unleashes Attila to bite at our legs —
Priest, yes, I am an atheist
     to that venerable good Lord. 

But if it is a question of the absolute being
     which condenses above us,
all the Ideal within all the visible facts,
by whom, manifesting the unity of the law,
the universe can, like man, say: I am;
of the being whose soul I feel deep in my soul,
who speaks to me in a low voice, and demands
constantly for the true against the false, among
the instincts whose flow half submerges us;
if it is the witness within, whose shadowy thoughts
sometimes caress, and sometimes sting
according as in me, rising to good, falling to evil,
I feel the spirit growing or the animal’s will to grow;
if it is the immanent miracle that we feel alive
more than we live, and with which our soul is drunk
every time it is sublime, and it goes off somewhere,
to where Socrates went, where Jesus wound up,
for the just, the true, the beautiful, the right to martyrdom.

What does one strive toward?
Every time a great duty draws him to the abyss,
every time he is in the halcyon storm,
every time he has the august ambition
to go, through the infamous shadow that he abhors
and on the nocturne’s other side, find dawn;

O priest, if it is this deep someone
beyond your power and beyond your ken,
that religions neither make nor undo,
that we feel good and that we feel wise,
who has no outline, who has no face,
and no son, having more paternity
and more love than summer has light;

if it is a question of this vast unknown
     that cannot be named,
and in this sublime light does not explain
     or comment on any Deuteronomy,
that no Calmet[5] can read in any Ezra,
a shared all-being that the child in his manger
     and the dead in their sheets,
distinguish vaguely from below like a peak,
Most High who is not edible in unleavened bread,
who, because two hearts love each other,
     cannot be angry,
and who sees only nature where you see sin; 

If it is this dizzying All of beings
who speaks through the voice of the elements,
all without priests, all without bibles,
whose book is the abyss and whose temple is sky,
Law, Life, and Soul, invisible by dint of being enormous,
impalpable to this point that outside the form
of things that an airy breath dissipates,
we see it in everything without grasping it in anything;

If it is the supreme Immutable, the solstice
of reason, of law, of good, of justice,
in balance with infinity, now,
formerly, today, tomorrow, always, giving
to duration to all stars, patience to all hearts,
which, clarity outside us,
     is consciousness within us; 

If this is the God we are talking about, the one
who always in the dawn of life, and in the grave,
Being that which for him begins
     and that which for him begins again;
if it is a question of the eternal, simple, immense principle,
who thinks since he is, who is the place of everything,
and which, for lack of a greater name, I call God,

then everything changes, then our minds switch places,
yours towards the night, abyss
     and the cesspool where dwell
certain kinds of laughter, and nothingness,
     a place of sinister vision only,
and mine towards the day, holy affirmation,
my own Hymn, dazzling from out my enchanted soul;
and I am the believer, priest,
     and you are the atheist.

---

[1] Francis Garasse (1585-1631), a Jesuit preacher and polemicist, author of the contentious tract, Theological Summary of the Capital Truths of the Christian Religion.

[2] Abbot Pluche. Noël-Antoine Pluche (1688-1761), French priest and author of History of Heaven Considered According to the Ideas of Poets, Philosophers, and Moses (1739).

[3] Claude-Adrien Nonnotte (1711-1793). A French Jesuit whose writings attacked Voltaire, key of which was his Philosophical Dictionary of Religion (1772).

[4] Nicolas Charles Joseph Trublet (1697-1770), an abbot and moralist, and an enemy of Voltaire.

[5] Antoine Augustin Calmet (1672-1757). A French Benedictine monk, author of the 23-volume series, A Literal Commentary on All the Books of the Old and New Testaments (1707-1716).