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Philosophy dares to scale the sky.
Sad, it stands there. Who then built you, O Babel?
Oh! What a heap of aimless efforts! What spirals
Of dreams, of lessons, of dogmas, of morals!
Hive that a swarm fills with noise and turmoil
Of magi, of doctors, of popes, of lamas!
Hovel where hypothesis leans on fictions,
Having night for roof and the grave for cellar;
Blue porticoes gaping onto immensities,
Visited by all the whirlwinds of dreams;
Vain pediment bowed by the weight of the infinite,
A sort of sinister belfry of the abyss
Where terror, revolt, and the swarm all buzz
Of all errors sounding their black tocsin!
And, as, from confusedly scattered glimmers,
Through the breaches of a roof, smokes exhale,
The doctrines, the laws and the religions,
What today we believe, what yesterday we dreamed,
All that man invented, altar, cult or system,
Through all the vents of the pale edifice,
Across the blackness of the dreary and deep sky,
All the visions of the human race go forth,
Scattered, in tatters, unraveled by the winds,
In a livid discharge of clouds.
Temple, workshop, tomb, the edifice frightens.
One wants to take a stone, one touches a vapor.
No one could finish it. No cycle or age
That has not put its ladder to the dark scaffolding.
Who then lives there? It has fallen, it stands;
It is enormity that trembles and dissolves;
A house of night that the void dilates.
Pyrrho there pours water on the hands of Pilate;
Doubt roams there and circles the hut
Where Descartes says yes while Hobbes says no;
Generations beneath the gulf of the doors
Roll, like, in winter, heaps of dead leaves;
The stairways, endlessly climbed and descended,
Are full of cries, calls, muffled and lost steps
And of a swarming of crawling chimeras;
Frightful birds fly in the timbers;
It is Buddha, Muhammad, Luther saying: go!
Lucretius, Spinoza, all the black winged sphinxes!
All man is sculpted there. Socrates, Pythagoras,
Malebranche, Thales, Plato with eyes of dawn,
Combine the ideal while Swift, Timon,
Aesop and Rabelais knead the mud.
Is it day? Is it night? In the dreadful twilight
The grimacing rhetorician chuckles and gestures;
One knows not what reflection of a funereal orient
Whitens the naked torsos of the laughing cynics,
And of the sages, casting shadows of satyrs;
The seer dreams and twists in the strings of lyres
The green laurel mixed with eternal smilax.
Each half-open porch reveals a black tunnel
Whose end shows an ideal star;
As if, — You know it, Isis with triple veil, —
These caverns of science and these wells of reason,
Undergrounds of the human mind, without horizon,
Without air, without flame, having doubt for pilaster,
Employed the night to hatch a star,
And impure falsehood, deformed, limitless,
Vast, blind, to build the white truth!
Everywhere the false entwines the true, hideous ivy;
No dogma that lacks its weak point, and does not weary
A caryatid, a support, a prop;
Thebes has India for support, and India Cathay;
Memphis weighs on Delphi, and Geneva on Rome;
And, vegetation of the dark spirit of man,
One sees, bowed by a breath at certain moments,
Grow between the battlements of the high entablatures
Monstrous and vague trees whose stems
Shudder in the lugubrious azure of vertigos.
And from these black trees at moments falls a fruit
Into the crowd of hands open in the night;
What fruit? Ask the wind that howls and unleashes!
What fruit? The fruit of error. What fruit? The fruit of hatred;
The apple of Eve with the apple of Venus.
O tower! Construction of unknown masons!
It rises, it rises, and rises, and rises still,
Still, and one would say the sky devours it;
And while every sage or fool who passes puts
One more stone on its misty summit,
Ceaselessly through its base it crumbles and collapses
Into the shadow where Satan comes to merge with God;
Abyss where nothing is heard but the wind that pursues
These two larvae at the bottom of a trembling of night!
Victor Hugo
Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-idolatries-and-philosophies-victor-hugo/