He curbed his thoughts sharply and broke the thread of his reflections.

“Well!” he thought, vexed, “I am even more affected than I had imagined.  Here am I arguing with myself like a very casuist!”

He was left pensive, agitated by a vague fear.  Certainly, if Lacordaire’s theory were sound, he had nothing to be afraid of, since the magic touch of conversion is not to be consummated in a moment.  To bring about the explosion, the ground must be constantly and assiduously mined.  But just as the romancers speak 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.