The Temptation of Saint Anthony

The large order is compelled; inside it the subtractive test goes against the book, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve. The ladder runs from the body’s appetites, food, gold and the Queen of Sheba, to the mind’s, doctrine and heresy, then to all gods, to the cosmos without gods and to life without form. Each rung is a deeper temptation than the last, and the book could not be reordered. But the heresiarchs of the fourth part and the gods of the fifth come as processions in which one figure could be removed, or three added, without loss; the monsters of the seventh are the same kind of list. The scale is permitted by Flaubert’s reading rather than compelled by Anthony’s need. The cap is met, narrowly.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a mind that knows the history of belief can no longer believe, because every faith arrives with its rivals and its genealogy, and the scholar’s knowledge is itself the temptation. The tempters are mostly not lusts but learning, parades of doctrine, each sincere, each cancelling the last; Hilarion, the disciple who grows as Anthony’s certainty shrinks, is the plain figure of the claim. Beneath it, in the last part, lies a second disclosure: the wish to give up the self, “être la matière”, shown as the ascetic’s deepest desire, so that renunciation and pantheist ecstasy are one movement. Held below the gate because what is disclosed is more an intellectual predicament than a lived human one: the book shows a mind more than a person.

Score: 8.3 / 10

It rises often, and in several registers. The grand and sensuous: the Queen of Sheba’s arrival and her offers, a set piece of seduction and jewelled excess. The dreadful: the massacre in Alexandria in which Anthony takes part in his reverie, and the martyrs. The cosmic: the Devil’s flight, which carries him past the stars into a universe without a centre, where elevation is terror. Then the close, which turns from the Sphinx and the Chimera to the first cells and Anthony’s cry that he has seen life born, and ends with the face of Christ in the disc of the sun. Frequency is high. The charge is that the height is often the height of spectacle, and that the processions of the fourth and fifth parts flatten it, by a design of exhaustion, for long stretches.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Myth here is both evoked by the hundred and built once. Evoked: every god, idol, heresy and fabulous beast of late antiquity is summoned, and most come as allusion and pageant, which the gate is meant to discount. Built: the temptation of the saint in the desert, the oldest Christian scene of the soul’s trial, is made to carry the modern mind’s trial by knowledge, so that the hermit’s night becomes the myth of the nineteenth century’s loss of faith and of its pantheist desire. The Sphinx and the Chimera, the heavy and the winged, are built rather than cited: two principles of the imagination in dialogue, whom Anthony’s last wish follows. Held below the gate because so much of the myth is catalogue, and because Anthony as a particular man is thin.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance: the saint’s life as Athanasius wrote it, the mystery play, Goethe’s Faust and its Walpurgis night, Byron’s Cain and its flight through space, and the French philosophical prose poem of the 1830s, of which Quinet’s Ahasvérus is the nearest. The turn is large. The master of the realist novel spent a quarter century on a prose drama for no stage, without plot, whose matter is the erudition of the history of religions, documented to the footnote and presented as vision. The stake was paid: his two closest readers told him in 1849 to put it aside, the book of 1874 was received coolly, and his whole method, documentation and impersonality, was spent on a form no one asked for. Held off the top because the dramatic poem of ideas was an inherited genre.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Put this matter in a novel and it loses its knowledge. The drama without a narrator means no one judges the visions: there is no voice between Anthony and the procession, so the reader is tempted as he is, and the book’s scepticism is enacted, not stated. The stage directions, in an impersonal present, give hallucination the standing of fact; the speeches give each heresy its own sincere voice. The single night ending at dawn makes the history of belief one ordeal of one man. The ending works by the form: the last word is a stage direction, Anthony resumes his prayers, and nothing says whether that is victory or habit. Charged: the processional form is also a container, into which the matter of Flaubert’s notebooks is poured, and in the fourth and fifth parts it stops changing what the book knows.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Evidence over promise: a century and a half of return, of a particular kind. It has been reread with yield by artists and thinkers more than by common readers. Odilon Redon drew from it in his lithographs; Michel Foucault’s essay on it in the 1960s, “La Bibliothèque fantastique”, read it as the first work whose imagination is the library itself, and that reading opened it again. The text holds its questions open: whether the dawn is grace or exhaustion; whether Anthony’s last wish is the summit of the temptation or its cure; whether Hilarion is the Devil or the truth. Its formal depth lies in the relation of erudition and vision. Held a step down because much of its surface is reference, which exhausts rather than deepens on return.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The field is French literature of the nineteenth century and, through it, the European. The force: the book made the archive a source of the fantastic and the history of ideas a hallucinated drama, and it set out, before the Symbolists, the decadent repertory of idols, queens, chimeras and monsters. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Redon’s lithographs; the Symbolist and decadent imagination of the 1880s and 1890s; the hallucinatory drama of the “Circe” episode of Ulysses, where the debt is commonly traced; Foucault’s essay, which made it a founding text for theory’s reading of the library and the imaginary. The reach is real but oblique: it ran through painters, a few novelists and critics, not through the form of the novel, where Madame Bovary and L’Éducation sentimentale did the redirecting.

Score: 8.2 / 10

One hundred and fifty-two years since 1874. The text survives whole, in Flaubert’s final revision, with nothing lost, and the two earlier versions survive besides, adding to what is known rather than taking from it. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: its matter is late antiquity, and the learning of the nineteenth century behind it dates only in detail. Presence is continuous but narrow: in print in French throughout, translated into English more than once and into the main languages, taught in French studies and studied by specialists, kept in view by Redon and Foucault, and little read beyond them beside the novels. A text read mainly in the academy is charged for it, here by a tenth below what its span would otherwise bring.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Judged on the French as far as it can be heard here, which is in part; the cadence of the prose is credited from what is known of it, not from close study. The stage directions are Flaubert at his most exact: light, distance, colour and texture set down in the impersonal present, the noun weighed and the clause measured. The last sentence, from the golden clouds to the face in the sun’s disc to the prayer, is a model of his descending close. The speeches give each heresiarch and god a distinct register, archaic, doctrinal, oracular. A quarter century of revision shows in the compression of the 1874 text against the first version. Charged: the speeches of the processions run to recitation, and the erudition sometimes sits on the line rather than in it.

Score: 8.7 / 10

One law: everything that appears is Anthony’s, called out of his memory, his reading and his desire, and each apparition tempts by offering what the last withheld. Take the two most distant elements, the gluttonous banquet of the second part and the first cells of the seventh: they obey the same law, appetite rising from the stomach to the mind to the wish to be all things, and the book’s movement from the sensual to the cosmic is one movement. The tone holds from the Queen of Sheba’s coquetry to the Devil’s cold metaphysics. Charged: the comic grotesque of some of the monsters and the solemnity of the gods are not always held in one key, and the dawn arrives by stage direction with a force the law has not wholly earned.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Many orders, held in one night and one mind. The sacred above all, in every form the ancient world knew. Consciousness, in Anthony’s exhaustion and desire. The body, in fasting, appetite and the dream of dissolving into plants and water. History, in Alexandria, the persecutions, the councils and the empire’s cults. Knowledge and science, in Hilarion. The natural order and the cosmos, in the flight through space and the descent to the cell. They are held, not merely listed, by the ladder of temptation. What is missing is the human world below the doctrinal: the family, labour, the city as lived and the state as more than spectacle barely appear, and the orders that do appear pass as visions rather than being lived. The book is narrower in human range than its catalogue suggests.

Score: 8.1 / 10