Séraphîta

THE HUMAN COMEDY – Honoré de Balzac XVth volume of works of Honoré de Balzac edited by widow André Houssiaux, publisher, Hebert and Co, successors, 7 rue Perronet – Paris (1874)

Philosophical studies

SERAPHITA (1833-1835)

Work dedicated by Honoré de Balzac A MADAME EVELINE DE HANSKA NEE COUNTESS RZEWUSKA MADAME, here is the work you asked for: I’m happy, in dedicating it to you, to be able to give you a token of the respectful affection you’ve allowed me to bear you. If I’m accused of impotence after having tried to wrest from the depths of mysticism this book which, under the transparency of our beautiful language, wanted the luminous poems from the East, your fault! Didn’t you order me to fight like Jacob, telling me that even the most imperfect drawing of the figure you dreamed up, as I dreamed it up from childhood, would still be something for you? here it is, this something. Why can’t this work belong exclusively to those noble minds preserved, as you are, from worldly pettiness by solitude? they would know how to give it the melodious measure that is missing, and that would have made it, in the hands of one of our poets, the glorious epic that France is still waiting for; but those will accept it from me as one of those balustrades sculpted by some artist full of faith, and on which pilgrims lean to meditate on the end of man while contemplating the choir of a beautiful church. I respectfully remain your devoted servant. De Balzac Paris, August 23, 1835

Analysis of the work Séraphita and Louis Lambert form the second part of the Livre mystique, to which Les Proscrits serves as an introduction. The relationship between these three works is explained in the Preface that Balzac placed at the head of Livre mystique : ” Les Proscrits is the peristyle of the edifice…Louis Lambert is the Seer walking to his vision, led to heaven by the facts… Seraphita is mysticism held to be true, personified, shown in all its consequences.” This statement needs some explanation. Balzac’s point is that Louis Lambert recounts a gradual discovery by which an exceptionally gifted young boy arrives at a certain explanation of the man who accounts for the facts he has observed. He believes that there are two natures in man: the inner being, which is all spirit, and the outer being, which is what we see and is essentially material. He becomes convinced that the purpose of life is the triumph of the inner being over the outer, a choice that leads him to mysticism. Séraphita portrays the ideal character Louis Lambert would like to be, an incarnation of mysticism that claims to show and bring to life before our eyes a being who has achieved seraphic perfection, in whom the inner being has already triumphed over the outer being. It is, says Balzac in the same Preface, “a pure expression of mysticism…the Word of the mystics incarnate”. Balzac’s affabulation is rather strange. He sets the scene near a Norwegian fjord… His character, who has reached the last degree of earthly perfection, is a being who presents himself to others in a double guise. For sixteen-year-old Minna, the daughter of Pastor Becker, he is a young man of marvelous beauty to whom she devotes a pure and total love. His name is Séaraphîtus. To Wilfrid, who is thirty-five and has led a life of adventure, he is a seventeen-year-old girl for whom he feels a deep passion. He then called himself Seraphîta. In reality, Seraphîtus-Seraphîta has reached the point where his inner being has triumphed over everything that attached him to the earth. He’s on the verge of angelic perfection. The demons will attempt a final assault on him, just as they tried to tempt Christ. He will triumph; this is his last test. He then leaves his earthly envelope, dies, and leaves Minna and Wilfrid the example they must follow if they too are to reach the perfection that opens heaven: the novel ends with Seraphîta’s Assumption, welcomed by the angels. This strange tale was greeted, as Balzac expected, with astonishment and irony. The debut of Séraphîta appeared in the Revue de Paris in June 1834. Buloz, the magazine’s editor, calmly declared that ” Séraphîta was a book the public didn’t understand, and neither did he”. Le Charivari joked about his “apocalyptic gibberish”, and this was generally the tone of the small press. Balzac consoled himself by evoking the admiration of “a few elevated spirits” who did not make themselves heard. Balzac’s best friends were taken aback. Mme de Berny herself, reading the first two issues in the Revue de Paris, found that Séraphîta spoke a little too much like a grisette. A more serious defection occurred: Madame Hanska, for whom Balzac had written this mystical poem in particular, considered his presentation of mystical spirituality to be a heretical deviation from Christian spirituality. Posterity avoided making up its mind. Most commentators seek to explain Balzac’s intentions, and remain cautious in their judgment. It was, however, a project that Balzac had been planning for a very long time, and which he had lovingly carried out. We get an incomplete picture of Balzac if we leave out this mystical tendency, which does not appear in the rest of his work, yet is an important feature of his temperament. We have irrefutable proof of this. Balzac sent Madame Hanska herself the manuscript of Séraphîta, preciously bound in the fabric of the dress she was wearing in Geneva at the time of their decisive meeting. At the head of this manuscript, Balzac had bound the manuscript of the first draft of his poem, which he had written under the title of Falthurne at the age of eighteen, accompanied by these words: “I have, by the greatest chance, rediscovered the shapeless essays I made at the age of eighteen or twenty on the subject of Séraphîta I’ve enclosed them so that you can have the sketch and the painting. Falthurne is the child’s manuscript, then comes the Séraphîta. ” This mystical tendency can be traced back to Balzac’s childhood, and then through several outcrops in his youth. At the age of five,” he says, tracing his life in Le Lys dans la valléeI prayed to God to renew in my favor the fascinating miracles I had read about in the martyrology, and my ecstasy gave birth to unbelievable dreams”. Is it Balzac who is described in this way, or a stranger whom no one could identify as Balzac? The reading he did as a teenager in his mother’s library, which contained “over a hundred volumes”, says Laure Surville, Swedenborg, Claude de Saint-Martin, Mme Guyon, Mlle Bourillon, led him to mystical reveries and ecstasy. A few years after the poem that sketched out the subject of Séraphîta, he began an unfinished Treatise on Prayer. Later, Madame Hanska’s first letters accentuated these dispositions: “The union of angels,” she wrote to him, “must be yours… Your genius seems sublime to me, but it must become divine… I think I sense your soul with all its celestial emanations…”. Their first letters remained at this altitude of the sublime for some time, before becoming an affectionate conjugal correspondence. A learned commentator on Balzac’s Christianity, Abbé Philippe Bertault, is probably not wrong to regard Séraphîta as a message addressed above all to Madame Hanska. It was the Balzac hidden from others that revealed itself to her. However, Balzac’s secret itinerary produced a composite work of uneven quality. It is at once a poem, an initiation and a pedagogy. The poem is too ethereal for the reader to identify with any of the characters. The pedagogical part is heavy and indigestible. Initiation is the most moving part, but does it bring about conversion? The poem’s momentum is broken soon after its departure by the philosopher’s laborious demonstration and, in the end, the very beautiful pages of the initiation fail to revive the poetic momentum with enough force to prepare the reader for the apotheosis of the final pages. The most cumbersome parts are those in which Balzac has endeavored to annihilate the claims of the philosophers. This excellent intention is presented in the form of a lecture by Seraphîta, respectfully listened to by her audience. Balzac was very keen on this line of argument, which he had already tried to sum up in a few sentences in a letter to Charles Nodier published in the Revue de Paris two years before Séraphîta. Matter and God are contemporaneous,” he declared, “or God pre-existed everything, alone, unique….Now, God’s power inevitably perishes in the first proposition, since by undergoing the action or coexistence of a substance foreign to his own he becomes, as it were, a secondary agent; and, in the second proposition, God having had to extract the world from his own essence, we must recognize as true the identical systems of Malebranche and Spinoza, strip God of all his attributes with which our soul decorates him, no longer admit any evil either in society or in the world… Everything is God : God, as Beyle writes in examining Spinoza, finds himself on two sides in battles and strikes himself…One must lie down in Pyrrhonism or throw oneself lovingly into the religion of Jesus Christ without examining anything more. ” This learned conference thus ends with the crushing of the philosophers. Balzac follows this with a presentation of Swedenborg and his visions. The philosophers said nothing in response to the indictment against them. Swedenborgians and scholars were less silent. The former rejected Balzac’s description of the prophet of the New Jerusalem and the truths he had made known. The latter accused Balzac of not having read Swedenborg, and of having known him only through a summary of his doctrine published by Daillant de La Touche in 1768, and another abridgement by Robert Windmarsh which had appeared in 1820 and which Balzac had read in 1834. Analytical table by B. Chastanier published at the end of the 18th century, from which Balzac probably drew some details of Swedenborg’s last moments. These clever details of Balzac’s sources of information do nothing to alter the purely didactic nature of this fragment, which informs the reader but does not stir any emotion. The destruction of philosophies is a starting point. Swedenborg’s account of the visions is a manual for the perfect mystic. Seraphîta ‘s true center comes after these preparatory exercises. The chapter entitled Le Chemin pour aller au ciel is the profession of faith and spiritual testament that Seraphîta left to Wilfrid and Minna before leaving her earthly life. It is in this chapter that Balzac expresses his personal conception of the mystical life. The principles are set out in a preamble in which Minna bids farewell to friends. Two of them support the entire building and provide a link to Louis Lambert. First, “the miracles are within us and not without…the rod of brass belongs to all”. That’s what the young prodigy from Vendôme taught us. Secondly, everything is connected in the universe, there is only one substance and correspondences between the various kingdoms of Creation: “Where you see bodies,” says Seraphîta, “I see forces…affinities which escape you and which are linked to centers…God did not create different kingdoms, but only one substance, only one plant, only one animal, but continuous relationships.” A doctrine that Balzac summed up in two significant phrases: “The earth is a man”, in Swedenborg’s words, and “only spirits prepared by faith perceive Jacob’s ladder”. Hence this peroration: “Farewell granite, you will become flower; farewell flower, you will become dove; farewell dove, you will be woman; farewell woman, you will be suffering; farewell man, you will be belief; farewell you, who will be all love and prayer.” What Seraphîta adds describes a disposition of the soul and a road through trials. The road to heaven is a difficult ascent. “All beings pass through a first life in the sphere of instincts, where they work to recognize the uselessness of earthly treasures…”; then they pass through “the sphere of Abstractions, where thought exercises itself (we would say tires itself) in false sciences, where the spirit finally tires of human thought… How many forms has the being promised to heaven worn out before coming to understand the price of silence and solitude…”. The soul then enters the “forecourt of the Spiritual Worlds”. We then have to wear out other lives to reach the plain where the light shines. Death serves as a relay on these journeys. “It often takes a lifetime to acquire the virtues that are the opposite of the errors in which man has previously lived.” Balzac defines these stages of perfection: the life of suffering, the life of love, the life of silent searching for the traces of the Word, the life of desire and the life of prayer. It’s a metempsychosis not of bodies, but of souls: a perpetual purification fanned by suffering and solitude, guided by prayer, but in which the chosen one climbs every step of the Calvary. For “the Angel is crucified in every place, in every sphere”. This is the true imitation of Jesus Christ. “The supreme virtue,” Seraphîta teaches, “is Resignation: being in exile and not complaining.” At the end of this chapter, Seraphîta’s beautiful prayer, the “Our Father” of mysticism, sums up all that is heretical in her pantheistic conception and all that is profoundly Christian in this disposition of the soul. Soul of all things, O my God,” she said, “you whom I love for yourself! Take me so that I am no longer myself. If I am not pure enough, plunge me back into the furnace…Grant me some dazzling martyrdom where I can proclaim your word…Whether you grant me triumph or new pain, be blessed…Take, seize, snatch, carry me away!” This was the message that was so poorly received, so poorly understood by the woman for whom it was intended. Taine found Minna’s Assumption through the choirs of angels very beautiful, and saw in it a page from The Divine Comedy. Readers today are ill-prepared for such apotheoses. Séraphîta will always remain an enigmatic work in La Comédie humaine. And yet, as Balzac intended, it is an essential crowning touch. This mystical dome is not an architectural ornament. Suffering, which is everywhere present in the pitiless world of La Comédie humaine, the suffering of those who love, the suffering of women above all, takes on its full meaning in this conclusion. Goriot doesn’t die needlessly on his bed, to which his daughters won’t come, and Henriette de Mortsauf is wrong to die in despair. These angelic natures, crushed and despairing by the century, are travelers on their way to a celestial destiny they don’t recognize. Their ordeal is redemption. This transmutation of souls robs La Comédie humaine of its sinister character and illusion-free philosophy. All suffering is useful; it’s in this fusion that souls change to reach their distant end, ultimately their only hope. That’s why this conclusion to La Comédie humaine was necessary. It repeats, in vivid, dramatic form, the words with which Balzac concluded the philosophical reflection he had been pursuing since his youth: “We must either lie down in Pyrrhonism or throw ourselves lovingly into the religion of Jesus Christ without examining anything further.”

Séraphîta was published in the Revue de Paris in 1834. The text went through seven editions: the first by Werdet in 1835, in the same volume as Les Proscrits and Louis Lambert, and the last illustrated Furne edition in 1846, where the novel appears in the Etudes philosophiques of La Comédie humaine. The work plunges into the fantastic, even the supernatural (a genre that Balzac has always successfully tackled). The theme of androgyny, which he tackles here, harks back to the ancient myth of human perfection: the androgynous being the total being.

The Story In a Norwegian castle near the Stromfjord fjord, Seraphîtus, a strange, melancholy being, seems to be hiding a terrible secret. He loves Minna and is loved by her, who sees in him a man. But Séraphîtus is also loved by Wilfrid, who sees him as a woman (Séraphîta). In reality, Seraphîtus-Séraphîta is a perfect androgyne, born of parents committed to Swedenborg’s doctrine of transcending the human condition, of which Seraphîtus-Séraphîta is the perfect example. Immensely erudite, gifted with mental faculties beyond the average person, he leads a solitary, contemplative life. But this almost celestial being dreams of experiencing perfect love, the kind that consists of loving two beings of opposite sexes together. Finally, as Minna and Wilfrid watch in awe, the total being transforms into a seraph and ascends to heaven. As the number of editions testifies, the novel enjoyed considerable public success.

The characters Séraphìtus-Séraphìta: Norwegian androgyne, born in 1783, ascended to heaven in 1800 Minna: Young Norwegian girl, in love with Seraphîtus. Wilfried: Young Norwegian, in love with Seraphîta. Becker: Norwegian pastor.

Emmanuel Swedenborg, 18th-century Swedish scientist, theologian and philosopher (1688-1772), placed great emphasis on love, both spiritual and physical: “Conjugal love – that is, conjugated, intimate love – is the only way to get to know the other person on the level of spiritual substance, i.e. on the level of interiority, of psychic induction. He says that metaphysical love far surpasses physical love, and that the former is given only to those who can establish a union of souls to complete the union of bodies.” Balzac developed this theme further in Séraphîta.

Source analysis: Preface from the 26th volume of La Comédie Humaine published by France Loisirs in 1987, based on the full text published under the auspices of the Société des Amis d’Honoré de Balzac, 45, rue de l’Abbé-Grégoire – 75006 Paris. Notes and topics from Wikipedia, the universal encyclopedia. Source for character genealogy: Félicien Marceau “Balzac et son monde” Gallimard.