The Poem Of Human Consciousness
The treasure of Christian conscience is the infinity that man carries within him and which, with hope or despair, he tries to measure with the humility of the feeling of his being, by his deeds.
The reader guessed, of course, that Mr. Madeleine was none other than Jean Valjean. I have looked into the depths of this very demanding self-consciousness before. It is time for us to look again. We cannot do it without being engulfed by emotion. There is nothing more frightening than this kind of research. The eye of the spirit can find such brightness and darkness nowhere other than in man. One cannot dwell on anything more dreadful, more complicated, more mysterious, and more boundless. There exists a spectacle greater than the expanse of the sea: the sky. There also exists a greater spectacle than heaven: the human soul.
To write the poem of human consciousness, if it were a single man, the most insignificant of men, would be to merge all the epics into one superior and definitive epic. Consciousness is the chaos of delusions, lusts, and trials; it is the hearth of dreams, the cavern of thoughts of which you are ashamed; it is the hell of sophistry and the battlefield of passions.
Enter at certain hours beyond the livid face of a thinking human being and look at what is hidden there, look inside this soul, look into this darkness. Under this surface silence there are giant fights like in Homer, there are fights of dragons and scorpions, riots of ghosts like in Milton, whirlwinds like in Dante’s imaginations. How dark this infinity is which man carries within him, and which he desperately tries to measure with the will of his being and his deeds ! *
Are you able to probe the deepest depths of your own being, without knowing your greatest weaknesses, but only through a confession that bears the responsibility for what took place?
Pain and suffering bring to light one’s greatest weaknesses. From what man leaves behind, tormented by that desire to find a noble meaning in life, without stifling the sentimental spontaneity of choices of all kinds, important are some of the greatest potentialities of the self. That it has in it something of the tenderness of a soul that circulates under the signs of a bittersweet destiny that has its ups and downs, that it has in it something of the steadfastness of a fighter, this only shows us that in front of the world the most illuminated are a little more reserved.
This man, named Jean Valjean, given to us by the hand of destiny through Victor Jugo, so trembling with the emotion of his creator, remains not only sincere and shy towards himself as well as others, but he has given us a summary of the great conscience, in all the appearances of his personality, which in the last part of the novel had become so varied. He represents the destiny of an entire nation, the lonely spirit of the departed in the light of God, most likely returning higher and suffering less from the challenges of life.
You have everything you want in his life: sin and blessing, pain and love, loneliness and spirituality, you have the story, you have the symbol, you have the interpretation of the human soul in a good evolution of the life of those who do not speak, but who have feelings made to expresses beyond articulate language a whole conception of the world, namely: “Everything man does is to escape, to be saved from the limit.”
Scholarship also participates in this spectacle of impenetrable confessions, being available where moral firmness intervenes in the correct interpretation of divine laws.
Do you have the power to maintain that primordial state of inner life that lies “beyond the knowledge of the intellect”, through an encounter of the inner life with the speech of God’s mind?
The remembrance of the facts, if it has nothing to do with that sweetness of feeling, however light it may be, cannot highlight the true power of man — which is his meekness. Everything is there, and yet it is a unity that is the very note of his soul marked by an Estrapedanthar(a change of the inner life), which erudition turns into a corner of heaven. So there are tender people whose hearts mourn the longing for something they could never have, even though they may be very talented. There are others, with a high-performance computer attitude, but cold to the senses, who play skillfully with the simplicity of others and, when they want, bring tears to the eyes of others.
In the character of Jean Valjean, more than in any other person, comparable to other literary works, the feeling itself is shaken by what his character says. Without lowering his eyes to the power of passion, he is constantly struck by the shyness of a tender nature, he catches you in the spell of a story from which you can almost escape, and this is due to its most precious feature: the feature of being simple; lack of formality, complications; lack of artificiality, affectation, hypocrisy.
And while his face and the voice of others are indifferent to us, and we feel no closeness to their lives, Jean Valjean’s work can never be separated from him: the intertwining of his thoughts and feelings of love with the thirst for knowledge always enlightens us, even if it sometimes gives us a smile in which there is always a lot of grief. And in his way of talking to the world, one sometimes feels despair, as if having the caressing modulations of a child who feels a loving look gliding over him in suffering.
The speech of God’s mind highlights the dialogue you have with yourself in the same peace with which God welcomes the wonderful end of His ways, filling your heart with joy, because you have entrusted everything to Him.
The Poem Of Human Conscience refers to the very soul laid down in a true epic, called life, which God does not make easy, for it is part of the personal cross of salvation. For these reasons, we should not view life as a challenge to stand up and answer for it, but as a “ladder”, a continual ascension to the glory of God.
* Note: Victor Hugo, The Miserables, State Publishing House for Literature and Art, 1964.
