Irish Jesuit Province

A Footnote to BalzacAuthor(s): John HannonSource: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 38, No. 443 (May, 1910), p. 282Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20502813 .

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r 282 ]

A FOOTNOTE TO BALZAC

N his strange, mesmeric novel, Utsule Mirouet, Balzac calls a deist, "' un athee sous belnefice d'inventaire." In French juris prudepce an heir-at-law receiving " benefit of inventory "

is free to accept or refuse an encumbered property, as he chooses. By the deists whom Balzac satirizes, as by the Neo-Kantian pantheists and agnostics of the German and English universities, the heavy debt of crude dogmatic atheism to Intellect-a creditor untiringly pressing for a Cause of first causes-is lightly paid off with an I.O.U. Thenceforward the legatees settle down into unhampered material and mental enjoyment of the atheist's personal estate, without thought of the morrow, or the pro

missory note to pay. Without doubt it is safely filed somewhere, but among Post-obit accounts.

Honore de Balzac knew something of law, and hence, perhaps, the neatness of his simile. Had he lived to study the chemistry of modern coal-tar products, he might have said that deists feel obliged to sweeten what godless bad logic they swallow, but will only use something inert like saccharin, which neither feeds the body nor causes heartburn when abused, passes through the system unabsorbed, and is not in reality sugar at all.

If we remembered better what Greek we learned at school, we should, instead of boggling at the blunt word " heretics," consider it an apt and even courteous title. It is from &tpiw, ' I select," and thus means " pickers and choosers." If heretics of the Christian sets claim benefice d'inventaire when offered a

Divine deposit or legacy of Faith, small wonder that votaries of deathly neo-pagan systems, which " have their day and cease to be," should be so particular in sorting the bones left on other

men's plates. No Bossuet will ever write the history of their " variations."

No Bossuet could deem it worth his while. The dissidence of pseudo-philosophical dissent is worth no more than a footnote in eventual history. And that, in its turn, is not worth much.

JOHN HANNON.

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