of the thunderclap
of love, so do theologians also speak of the thunderclap of
conversion. No one was safe, should one admit the truth of this
doctrine. There was no longer any need of self-analysis, of paying
heed to presentiments, of taking preventive measures. The psychology
of mysticism was void. Things were so because they were so, and that
was all.

"I am really becoming stupid," thought Des Esseintes. "The very fear
of this malady will end by bringing it on, if this continues."

He partially succeeded in shaking off this influence. The memories of
his life with the Jesuits waned, only to be replaced by other
thoughts. He was entirely dominated by morbid abstractions. Despite
himself, he thought of the contradictory interpretations of the
dogmas, of the lost apostasies of Father Labbe, recorded in the works
on the Decrees. Fragments of these schisms, scraps of these heresies
which for centuries had divided the Churches of the Orient and the
Occident, returned to him.

Here, Nestorius denied the title of "Mother of God" to the Virgin
because, in the mystery of the Incarnation, it was not God but rather
a human being she had nourished in her womb; there, Eutyches declared
that Christ's image could not resemble that of other men, since
divinity had chosen to dwell in his body and had consequently entirely
altered the form of everything. Other quibblers maintained that the
Redeemer had had no body at all and that this expression of the holy
books must be taken figuratively, while Tertullian put forth his
famous, semi-materialistic axiom: "Only that which is not, has no
body; everything which is, has a body fitting it." Finally, this
ancient question, debated for years, demanded an answer: was Christ
hanged on the cross, or was it the Trinity which had suffered as one
in its triple hypostasis, on the cross at Calvary? And mechanically,
like a lesson long ago learned, he proposed the questions to himself
and answered them.

For several days his brain was a swarm of paradoxes, subtleties and
hair-splittings, a skein of rules as complicated as the articles of
the codes that involved the sense of everything, indulged in puns and
ended in a most tenuous and singular celestial jurisprudence. The
abstract side vanished, in its turn, and under the influence of the
Gustave Moreau paintings of the wall, yielded to a concrete succession
of pictures.

Before him he saw marching a procession of prelates. The
archimandrites