Doubt

 “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”

Seneca



Lucian recounts the scene in his journal:
Ignatius remained for a long time before that image. He seemed shaken. I stayed silent, head bowed, for I feared to look at him, dreading he might be seized by one of those emotions from which there is no return. The image—or perhaps some precise memory he had not yet shared—struck him so deeply that he seemed imprisoned by it. I distinctly saw the image move as he recoiled... and then, as one must, I began to doubt.
I later added that he remained silent and pensive for the rest of the day. Not a single word left his mouth that day. This detail is crucial. Ignatius was sensitive—perhaps too much so—and his absences were often brought on by extreme emotions, sometimes by powerful aesthetic or religious experiences, though he never called them that.
The image he had brought us that day showed a man reduced to flesh, wholly delivered to death. There was no sign of resurrection, no halo, no hope. Yet, on closer look, the drawn figure—Don Carrot, I suppose—after having faced it, seemed about to flee. My doubt persisted, and Ignatius’s silence did not help.
The image intrigued me; it was a Protestant, realist work, heir to comic art, where grace no longer comes through beauty but through raw—though symbolic—truth. For Ignatius, a timid believer, to see the monster “entirely human,” without trace of divinity, must have been a dizzying spiritual experience. The monster spoke a language he did not understand, yet it pierced him through and through.
He said he had understood—or sensed—that this open mouth of death could shake even the faith of the most sincere believer… which he was not.
As Ignatius wrote in his notebooks:
“This image could drive someone mad.”
For him, if I understood correctly, the image became a symbol of a faith confronted with death, of the mystery of evil and the temptation of doubt.
The remote realism of that symbolic image became a dramatic instrument:
“As if I were going to die,” he told me, “like every man—without return?
And what would become of us without the love of the world, if there were no hope left?”
Faith exists only if it crosses the abyss of the absurd—where all seems lost.
“Only after facing this monster, this man before death, Ignatius, can Don Carrot believe in the miracle of resurrection.”
“I do not think I have the courage,” he answered me… yet already he began to turn around… and then told me he had heard a voice he thought was that of Hot Blood, saying:
“No knight should scorn his mount, whatever it may be, nor despise the road, however narrow or dark it may seem. For often braver is he who stoops to pass through the narrow gate than he who rides proudly along the wide roads. Greatness, my lord, is not seen in shining arms, nor in the shadow cast under the great sun, but in the heart that endures and consents to the trial without laughter or complaint.”
Lucian continues in his notebook:
“Thus Ignatius told me he had regained courage and the memory of his companion…
As for me, I struggled to discern—yes, I admit—whether it was myself, Don Carrot, or Ignatius wrestling with the age-old question: must I judge the trial by its appearance, or by its invisible meaning?”