Hugo brings something to the forefront here that I hadn’t given much thought to before. If we drop ourselves into the time and place M. Myriel found himself, we might be surprised to find that the priesthood is full of ambitious young men who are hungry for political position and success. Hugo does a good job of showing how the path to becoming a cardinal or even the pope was one that was theoretically open to any ambitious young man who worked to put himself in the right place and sought to chase “success” in the form of promotion to positions of greater and greater power.
In this environment that Hugo describes as one where “ambition wears the guise of vocation” ambitious bishops who had a taste for the opulent and luxurious were the ones most likely to find a flock of young disciples surrounding them, hoping to ride the coattails of the bishop’s success to a new position of prominence for themselves. On the contrary, for someone like Myriel who was focused on loving and serving those with the most needs, there was no real promise of any kind of potential for holding a lofty position, and so rather than flocking to him, young men he would have ordained for service quickly found another position to feed their ambition.
Hugo ends the chapter with a digression around “the ugliness of success” that feels shockingly relevant to the realities of our day here in the 21st century. This idea of pursuing success rather than excellence, of wanting to move up regardless of the cost, is one that runs counter to the idea of vocation. It has become so normative in our society. We often talk about career plans and growth plans and those are seen as woefully inadequate if they look something like “I want to keep doing exactly what I am doing to the best of my abilities”. The expectation is advancement. It’s a measure of success that is shaped by a market system that demands perpetual growth. It’s a defiance of the natural order of things around us, of the seasons we all live through every year. Hugo details all the ways that true excellence gets discarded in the pursuit of “success” and ends the chapter with a banger of a sentence:
They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.
Maybe instead of success we should just keep pursuing truth, beauty, kindness and compassion and see where that lands us.