9 h 32 minAudiobook17 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if the place that promises certainty becomes the place where your deepest doubts begin?
In George Sand’s philosophical novel Spiridion, Angel enters monastery life with its promises of prayer, obedience, and shared belief. Yet his search for religious truth brings him into conflict with the community’s teachings and habits. What troubles him is not simply whether to obey, but how to believe honestly.
Angel finds a guide in Alexis, an older monk marked by learning and religious struggle. Behind their conversations stands Spiridion, the monastery’s founder, whose spiritual legacy raises questions its settled practices cannot easily answer. Through study, solitude, and the pressure of authority, their search opens onto Christianity, history, and human progress.
What you’ll discover
- A monastery under question Enter a community where shared belief meets questions that obedience alone cannot settle.
- A searching young monk Follow Angel as his hunger for religious truth strains his place within the monastery.
- A guide with doubts Meet Alexis, whose learning and spiritual struggles give Angel’s inquiry a deeply human centre.
- A founder’s unsettled legacy Explore how Spiridion’s spiritual inheritance both defines the community and challenges its settled ways.
- Faith with a future Consider religion through its history and possibilities, rather than only as a body of rules.
Who will love it
Readers who enjoy gothic cloisters, haunted portraits and midnight voices, and who like a story where ideas about God, friendship and freedom are lived out by vivid people rather than only discussed.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A novice is shunned for no known crime
- An old monk teaches a young one to endure
- Voices in the night and a mask on the stairs
- The tale of Samuel, who became Spiridion
- Fulgence's confession and a noon oath
- Alexis loses his faith and wins a bitter election
- A descent into the vault and a descent into atheism
- A plague, a hermit and a stranger from Corsica
- Old age, failure at the stone, and a new belief
- What the story is about and how it is told
Who’s who
- AngelA gentle sixteen-year-old novice, shunned by his brothers, who needs affection and truth and becomes Alexis's pupil and heir.
- Father AlexisThe monastery's astronomer, old and ill, who has lost and slowly rebuilt his faith and wants to pass on what he learned.
- Abbot SpiridionThe founder, born Samuel and also known as Pierre Hebronius, a restless seeker of truth who now appears to a few as a ghost in the sun.
- Father FulgenceSpiridion's gentle disciple, who keeps his master's secret for sixty years and chooses young Alexis to receive it.
- The PriorThe shrewd, cold head of the monastery, who prefers obedient, distracted monks to fervent ones.
- DonatienThe sub-prior, ambitious, vindictive and secretly unbelieving, who longs to be Prior and fears Alexis.
- ChristophoreA simple, kind lay brother who nurses Alexis, with his little dog Bacco beside him, and teaches him the worth of humble love.
- The hermit of Saint HyacinthA beggar monk who buries plague victims and comforts the dying, and shows Alexis a living faith.
Formats and delivery
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- Large-print eBook
- The same book in bigger, clearer type, from the first page.
- Audiobook
- 9 h 32 min, complete, read by Lucas Linden.
- 15-minute summary
- The key ideas in about 17 minutes, to read or to hear.
- Paperback
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
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Spiridion
by George Sand · 1839
A bullied novice finds a dying astronomer monk, and a ghostly young abbot who walks the cloister at noon.
Challenging5–10 hours to read25 languages
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In short
Spiridion is a novel by George Sand, written in the mid 1800s and dedicated to her friend and teacher Pierre Leroux. She finished it in the ruined Charterhouse of Valldemossa, a setting that suits a tale of monks, tombs and winter winds.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A novice is shunned for no known crime
Angel enters a Benedictine convent at sixteen, gentle and eager to please. Within months the brothers turn cold. His friends leave him, the novices gather their robes as if he were a leper, and the abbot turns his head away. Only Father Treasurer hints that he has displeased the Prior, and he will not say how.
Angel searches his conscience and finds no fault. He prays harder and studies harder, yet the silence around him only deepens. In desperation he goes to his confessor, Father Hegesippe, and pleads for help. The priest answers with fury, calls him a hypocrite with a hidden sin, and throws him to the sacristy floor.
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What is Spiridion by George Sand about?
It follows a young novice named Angel in an Italian Benedictine monastery who is befriended by Father Alexis. Alexis tells him the story of the monastery's founder, Abbot Spiridion, and of his own search for faith, while a ghostly figure appears to both.
Who is Abbot Spiridion in the novel?
He is the monastery's founder, born Samuel into a Jewish family, who became a Lutheran, then a Catholic, and then a doubter. He appears in portraits and as a ghost with golden hair, and he left a secret writing in his tomb.
What does the Hic est veritas stone mean?
It is the motto cut on Spiridion's tomb, meaning here is the truth. He first used it in Catholic zeal and kept it when his views changed, so it becomes a symbol of the buried secret and of the monks' unease.
The author
George Sand
1804–1876 · French novelist and memoirist
George Sand was the pen name of Aurore Dupin, a French novelist and memoirist. She was born in Paris in 1804 and died at Nohant in 1876. She lived in Paris and Nohant. Her novels include Indiana (1832), Mauprat (1837), The Devil’s Pool (1846), and Little Fadette (1849).
More by George Sand
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