Matthew Lewis -- The Monk

How often does a quotation actually portray the author's original intentions? I picked up Matthew Lewis's The Monk because of a quotation on the back of the book, in bold red ink, 'The Monk was so highly popular that it seemed to create an epoch in our literature'. Sir Walter Scott wrote these words. However, Scott was not necessarily saying what the quotation implies. The next sentence Scott wrote was, 'But the public were chiefly captivated by the poetry with which Mr. Lewis had interspersed his prose narrative.'

What The Monk is remembered for is certainly not its poetry, and any modern reader (and one has to assume the human race was not so different two centuries ago) is fascinated by the novel for the horror and the evil of its story. Scott, one suspects, was somewhat unworldy, not as fascinated by vice as most of us wretches. One never truly loathes any character in a Scott novel. As Chesterton wrote in his essay on Scott, 

He may deny a villain every virtue or triumph, but he cannot endure to deny him a telling word; he will ruin a man, but he will not silence him. In truth, one of Scott’s most splendid traits is his difficulty, or rather incapacity, for despising any of his characters. He did not scorn the most revolting miscreant as the realist of today commonly scorns his own hero. Though his soul may be in rags, every man of Scott can speak like a king.

The Monk has a much less generous view of human nature. And so for all its supernatural drama, it felt more realistic than a Scott novel (which is neither praise nor criticism of Scott nor Lewis, just an observation of difference). The dark journey on which Ambrosio, the titular monk, found himself will resonate with most people. We all know that the guilt of sin can almost be eliminated by way of familiarity. We can often persuade ourselves that if we sin in secret we have not done anything wrong, as if it were only the punishment that proves the sin. Ambrosio, in the beginning of the novel, was a man filled with pride and self-satisfaction -- the most virtuous of monks, a great teacher and orator admired by all. He was a man whose life relied on appearance and reputation, on comparing himself to the vices of others. He judged his own virtue by looking out externally for confirmation. Such a person is the most likely to end up regarding private sin not as 'real' sin -- that is, not the sort of sin that leads to hell. Only a loss of reptuation would convince him of his wrongness. Otherwise, it is his reputation that facilitates his sin: he hides sin behind holiness.

This of course makes one think of the scandals in the Catholic Church. This is most definitely an anti-Catholic novel to some degree, but I nevertheless found its depiction of moral corruption in a church hierarchy extremely convincing. It made me see, to some small extent, how priests could end up abusing deaf children and keeping nuns as sex slaves. (One narrative in The Monk even strikingly compares to the abuse in the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland.) I am nominally a Catholic, having been baptised into the faith, and though I am lapsed there is much I love in it. But the evil and degradation and corruption which has been revealed in my lifetime repels me from it. Although I do not think any other denomination or religion is necessarily much better, but that's hardly an excuse. They are corrupt in different ways and to different extents at different times. As an outsider, my impression is that the Catholic Church does suffer from excessive hierarchy and excessive superciliousness. Respect for order (which I strongly believe in in most areas of life) does not means uncritical deference to either those above you or your peers. The survival of a hierarchy depends on its integrity, on honesty and also fidelity to something outside the hierarchy, a greater truth -- these are undermined if one does not challenge corruption in those above. The body is a temple, but if it develops a tumour one needs to get over one's qualms about cutting into it in order to remove the tumour. The cutting into it may be unpleasant, but simply leaving the tumour would be far worse. This is surely what the Church has done.