The Lament of the Sword - Léon Bloy

The first time the Spirit of Sabaoth spoke about me, it was to keep men from forgetting that I had been seen all aflame on the threshold of the lost Eden.

I was, in that day long past, a fiery sword in the fiery hand of the Cherubim who by my means kept watch over the path to the “tree of life.”

Under God’s fearful Irony, the Human Family was fleeing through the thorns of an unknown world, from thenceforward sown with curses, wherein huge animals—already hostile—watched this Family make a mess of things.

Ah! mankind then consisted of sad Gods, most singularly bereft. Mankind was dying of youth, and their inexperience of suffering matched, in these two Beings who were to give birth to all, the inexpressible wearinesses of mankind’s ultimate days to come.

It is likely that they did not dream much during the twilights of that exile. In vain were the mountains and rivers of the era before the Flood of prodigious size, and in sheer waste did the level places display their bombastic greenery.

The sun had forever become pale; and the vast sadness of Pride stooped over all Creation. The memory of Paradise was too keen, and too keen was the memory of me.

One day at last, long after the first Murder, committed I never knew how, it happened that a fearsome youth sprung from the Man with the bloody hand, forged some brightly shining thing that resembled me.

The Garden of Delights having existed only to the extent that man coveted the Heavens, and the Cherubim growing tired of preserving a symbol no longer threatened by the homesickness of any exile, I received permission to give bodily form to my glittering image and thus to travel through all the valleys of Death, as witness to the Chastisement and as divine reminder of the Ecstasies.

At once I became War, and my fearful Name everywhere became the sign of Majesty.

I appeared as the sublime instrument of Providential blood-letting and, in my wonderful unawareness as the Elect of Fate, I espoused through the centuries every human feeling capable of speeding Fate on.

Anger, Love, Enthusiasm, Greed, Fanaticism and Insanity I served in so perfect a fashion that the history books have been afraid to tell the whole story.

During six thousand years I have made myself drunk, at all points of the globe, on massacres and throat-slitting.

It was not my task to be just or to have pity. It sufficed that I be inexpressibly holy through my Vocation, and that I blind the eyes of mortals with so many tears that the proudest among them was thus induced to grope humbly in the direction of Heaven.

I have killed old men who were like palaces of Suffering, I have cut off the breasts of women who were like light, and I have run little children through who looked at me with the eyes of moribund lions.

Daily I have galloped on the pale Horse along the avenue of cypresses which stretches “from the womb to the grave,” and I have made a fountain of blood out of every son of man within my reach.

If I did not smite Jesus, it is because I was too noble for Him. I was too august for Him to accept the kind of death I give.

Such a death was fitting for His Apostles and His Martyrs, for His Virgins and for their executioners, who perished in their turn. I was not what was needed for that Lamb of Ignominy.

Surely I have the right to be proud, for I was passionately adored. Because I was the messenger or the acolyte of the Most High Lord, even in the apparent iniquity of my ways, it was well understood that I was accomplishing a divine task, and there came a day when Western heroism endowed me with exactly that sacred form possessed by the instrument of torture which had been preferred to me for the Redemption.

The world then was in ecstasy over my beauty. Christian lads dreamt of me, I was given the last kiss of dying monarchy, conquerors latticed in steel knelt with their eyes on me and whole continents were made to run with blood at the prayer I had inspired.

When enthusiasm for the Cross died away, I condescended to become the badge of what men called Honor, and, in this lowered state, I still appeared sufficiently magnificent for the whole of Europe one day to throw itself at the feet of a single Master who had placed me in the monstrance of his heart.

Most certainly he did not pray, this Emperor of Death, but all the same I strewed about him the ecumenical prayer of Sacrifice and Devotion—the dreadful red prayer that bellows forth in the slaughterhouses of nations.

Ah! it was not so splendid as the past! but who will say how beautiful it was? I know something about it, I, the Sword, of whom it is written that I shall devour everything at the end of ends!

In the meanwhile I am humiliated by unspeakable pollutions. After so many thousand years of idolatry, it took no less than nineteen centuries of Christianity for men at last to succeed in prostituting me. But today this has been accomplished beyond remedy, and that is why I, the impassive Killer, despair!

Ah! there’s no doubt I have often been seen passing into strange hands, the hands of oppressors, the hands of executioners or the hands of highwaymen. I have even been seen in the sacrilegious hands of cowards, from whence I fled the moment they heard the rolling of thunder.

It is not known how much I weigh in the iniquitous scales of the victorious, nor is it known how light I make myself in the clenched fist of adulterers or parricides.

For my kingdom is exclusively of this world, my dominion extends over the vast empire of the Fall, and every kind of expiation belongs to me. Shallow-sighted people can thus, in a strict sense, reproach me for everything, since I am at once the Crime and its Punishment.

But so disgusting is what goes on in this pip-squeak of a century, even disavowed by the riff-raff of the Abyss, that I know not in what the Exterminator will have one day to quench me, in order to cleanse me of the monstrous uses to which I have been put.

I have become the last resort and the prophetic slut of quarrelsome pimps or of bought journalists, so dripping with pus they would have appalled Sodom!***

And it is I, the most ancient Glaive of the Martyrs and of the Chieftains of War, who am used for this loathsome business!

But let them beware, these fellows who slinkingly curry the favor of the jade of popular acclaim.

I devour whoever touches me, and I shall appeal from myself to myself in order to punish those who profane me!

My laments are mysterious and full of terror. The first of them transfixed the heavens and drowned out the earth; the second made flow for two thousand years torrents of human blood; but with the third, which has now come, I am about again to take on my ancient shape. I shall once more become the fiery Sword, and men will know at last, to burst thereat in terror, what is that turning about which is mentioned in the Scriptures!

The images were kindly shared by Bouillon, check out his page:

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