Brother Cœlestin

Brother Cœlestin by Edna Worthley Underwood

High in the Apennines stands a gloomy Cloister, a stark stone fortress where, unbeknownst to its ascetic inhabitants, Satan himself dwells hidden in a painting of the Temptation of Saint Anthony that hangs in the Prior's cell, watching the monks through the eyes of a painted green frog and growing steadily more bored with their dull piety. Among the brothers lives young Brother Cœlestin, a gentle, dreaming soul unsuited to cloistered life, who spends his hours gazing from his tower cell's barred window at the mountains, finding in their sunsets and starlit nights a spiritual solace the community itself cannot offer him. Restless and yearning, he begs the Prior for permission to join Brother Andrew (the cross old monk, whose name is shared with the gray ass he leads) on the periodic mountain journey to gather provisions from the peasants. The Prior grants the request as a rebuke against personal wishes, but sends him anyway. The expedition is a disaster in practical terms: Cœlestin, unskilled at charming the peasants, returns the baskets empty. On the mountain summit, the pair find a ragged, half-dead stranger lying beside a flute. Despite Andrew's protests, Cœlestin insists on mercy and has the man loaded onto the ass and carried back to the Cloister, comparing the act to succoring Christ himself in the guise of "the least among men." The starving monks, expecting food, are furious at the empty baskets and the unwanted, dying guest. The Prior punishes Cœlestin by making him nurse the stranger alone; the man dies that same night. Before burial, Cœlestin secretly takes the dead man's flute. That evening, alone in his cell, Cœlestin experiments with the instrument and produces music of overwhelming, transporting beauty, conjuring visions in the landscape around him. Absorbed, he misses vesper prayers, and is hauled before the assembled monks; the skeptical Prior confiscates the flute as convent property. Cœlestin languishes without it until, the following evening, a cowled figure he takes for Brother Cleofas silently returns the flute to him. He plays again, is caught once more, but insists it was Cleofas who gave it back — though Cleofas was demonstrably in the church choir the whole time. Disbelieved, Cœlestin is locked in the Cloister's dark prison cell on bread and water until he confesses the truth. That night, a shadowy, yellow-faced, green-eyed visitor appears in his cell and identifies himself plainly as Satan. The two converse: Cœlestin laments the misery of his life, and Satan mocks his ignorance of true "life," insisting he has renounced woman — flesh, body, nature, death, eternity itself — and so remains a stunted, unripe child despite his lofty longings. Cœlestin begs to be taught, offering his soul in exchange. Satan produces the flute (revealing it as an extension of Cœlestin's own soul) and plays it, transforming into a winged, monstrous figure whose music conjures a phantasmagoria of cities, gardens, and finally a commanding woman in black velvet glimpsed beneath a cypress tree, who dissolves whenever Cœlestin reaches for her. The vision intensifies: mist coalesces into her form again, luring him from his cot; the window bars fall away, and Cœlestin follows her and the flute-playing Satan out over the Cloister rooftops and into the night sky, past a huge black cat with ruby eyes, spectral trees, ravens, blue flames, and giant frogs, until they reach a mountain precipice. There the woman leaps into the abyss riding the moonlight and vanishes; Satan, perched above, laughs scornfully. Cœlestin demands the flute to play her back out of the depths, offering his soul again; Satan only laughs. Cœlestin attacks him to seize the flute, but Satan enfolds him in his black wings, and they sink together to earth — and Cœlestin wakes no more. In the morning the monks find his cell's window broken and Cœlestin vanished without trace; the Prior discovers the flute missing from beneath the Saint Anthony picture and, examining the painting, notices for the first time the frog's eyes gleaming with red mockery and its goiter swollen — and has the picture removed from his cell. The affair is soon forgotten. Later, when Brother Andrew and the ass make another provisioning trip, Andrew drinks too much wine and, benighted, lets the ass lead him home in the dark. Waking at dawn, he finds beside him the rotted, skeletal corpse of a man in a decaying monk's habit, with a flute lying nearby. Terrified, he drives the ass onward without looking back, crossing himself repeatedly, and later tells the Prior only that he had spent the night at a peasant's house — leaving unclear whether he ever revealed what he actually found.

By Edna Worthley Underwood · First published 1919 · Genre: Gothic, Romantic, Allegorical · 7,303 words

First lines

High in the Apennines it stood -- a gloomy cloister. It towered blackly on the edge of a steep, forbidding, treeless abyss, and the sun beat pitilessly upon its bare, gray walls. There was something strange about this Cloister; here God and Satan dwelled side by side. God hid Himself behind the great altar in the church; Satan dwelled in the cell of the Prior, above his desk, and in fact right behind a picture. God knows to what school that picture belongs! It represented the Temptation of Saint Anthony. This had been a favorite subject for representation with a school of painters. Teniers and Tassaert had represented the subject with humor, Bosch with great imagination; it had been given by Callot to the modern world through the pen of Hoffman, that unjustly forgotten poet, and dreamer of golden vessels and magic draughts.

Similar titles

Genres

Tags

philosophical · monastic · short-story · spiritual-struggle · ascetic · romantic · psychological · introspective · religious-fiction · symbolic · european-literature · czech-literature

What this Textopian page supports

Brother Cœlestin is listed on Textopian as a short story by Edna Worthley Underwood, dated 1919 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Good citation fit

More by Edna Worthley Underwood