Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [9]
The visionary bent that is so pronounced in Les Misérables emerges in Les Feuilles d‘automne, one of Hugo’s greatest collections of verse, in 1831. In the early 1830s, Hugo began to elaborate a visionary system of theodicy influenced by the Jewish Kabala that claimed God had had to conceal his grandeur from humans (the sun and stars are his masks), so that they could act independently and earn salvation without being overwhelmed by the unmediated spectacle of God’s glory. Only thus was free will possible. Regarding Creation itself, Hugo held the organic worldview widespread in European romanticism: as the DNA in a single cell allows modern geneticists to identify the creature from which it came, so the spark of spirituality inherent in every part of Creation allowed the visionary romantic writers to intuit its divine source. Thus the physical world can guide humans—more accurately, it allows poet-priests to guide their fellows—toward God. Hugo believed that all creation was ordered by hierarchy as well as affinity; it consisted in an endless gradated array of all conceivable creatures, separated by infinitesimal degrees of spiritual excellence. Humans, he thought, would be rewarded or punished by being reincarnated in “higher” (angels) or “lower” (animals, plants, and objects) forms after death, depending on how meritorious their lives had been. Once reincarnated in lower forms, they could see God directly, but could only suffer passively from memories of their sins and from their remoteness from the Creator, as they gradually expiated those sins. As for the angels, none fell after the fall of Satan and his legions, and the remaining angels plus new angels evolving from the ranks of saintly humans would gradually evolve toward a closer affinity with the Godhead—always separated from it, however, by an infinite spiritual distance. At the end of time, all living things, even Satan, would be saved, and reabsorbed into the bosom of God, from which they had emerged at the Creation. This theological system is close to the Pelagian heresy of early Christianity. As Hugo put it in the final lines of his collection of visionary poetry, Les Contemplations, at the end of time Jesus will lead his brother Satan by the hand up the stairs of heaven, and God will no longer be able to tell them apart. Les Misérables explicitly states this view: “The book which the reader has now before his eyes is, from one end to the other, in its whole and in its details, whatever may be the intermissions, the exceptions, or the defaults, the march from evil to good, ... from nothingness to God. Starting point: matter; goal: the soul. Hydra at the beginning, angel at the end (p. 698).” Not only did Hugo sketch and expound this vision throughout the last half-century of his career, but also he reserved many visionary poems that he planned to have published at five-year intervals after his death—and thanks to his faithful executors, they were. The posterity of his religious ideas, although unexpected, would have gratified him. The cult of Cao Dai Buddhism, which numbers several million adherents and several thousand temples throughout the world, believes that several of its priests are reincarnations of Hugo and his sons.
Hugo’s election to the Académie Française in 1841 consecrated the militant romantic movement. In 1845 he was appointed as a pair de France, equivalent to a member of the British House of Lords. Becoming increasingly liberal in politics, he became a member