The Pilgrim of the Absolute

257 Pages·2017·1.31 MB·English

by  Léon Bloy

T P A
HE ILGRIM OF THE BSOLUTE
THE PILGRIM
OF THE ABSOLUTE
Leon Bloy
A selection of his writings,
edited by Raissa Maritain,
with an introduction by Jacques Maritain
CLUNY MEDIA
Cluny Media edition, 2017
This Cluny edition may include minor editorial revisions to the original text.
For information regarding editorial revisions, please write to Cluny Media, Department of
Editing and Production 4619 Slayden Rd. NE, Tacoma, WA, 98422
Translations by John Coleman and Harry Lorin Binsse
All Scripture references are to the Douay-Rheims Bible, unless otherwise noted.
Cluny Media edition copyright © 2017 Cluny Media LLC
All rights reserved
ISBN: 9781944418472
Cover design by Clarke & Clarke
Cover image: Alfred Sisley, First Snow at Veneux-Nadon, 1878, oil on canvas
(Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)
Contents
Introduction
by David Bentley Hart
Introduction to the 1947 Edition
by Jacques Maritain
The Thankless Beggar
Marchenoir
Art and the Pilgrim of the Holy Sepulchre
The Wisdom of the Bourgeois
The Poor Man
The Hurler of Curses
Modern Christians
She Who Weeps
The Mystery of Israel
Suffering, Faith, Sanctity
The Sense of Mystery
Random Thoughts
Sources
Introduction
T
here are many angles from which to view Léon Bloy (1846–1917),
but only a very few that present him in a particularly flattering light—
at least, as regards his personality. Concerning his almost uncanny gifts as a
master of French prose, or concerning the great variety of his achievements as a
writer, no one can entertain any serious doubts. In the full swell and surge of his
voice, his language shines, flows, shimmers, thunders, sings. And his fiction,
even at its most disordered or intentionally rebarbative, possesses a power and
energy that more than compensate for any formal defects of narrative structure.
But, for the great majority of those who made his acquaintance, to know him
was to dislike him (if not at first, certainly in fairly short order), and even a great
many of those who know him solely from his writings find him frequently
insufferable. He may have been a prophet, in the most biblical sense, but he was
not a saint (or, at least, certainly not any kind of saint recognizable to ordinary
perception). He was a man of extremes—rhetorical, conceptual, artistic,
religious, emotional—who was quite incapable of the safe and comfortable
middle where most of us have to live out our lives and forge our
accommodations with the world around us. It is a waste of time to look for
moments of moderation or vacillation, either in him or in his work; there is none
to be found. On the one hand, he was an indefatigable engine of theatrical rage—
torrents of indignation, vituperation, objurgation, bitterness, and spite—and he
gave vent to his hostilities with an extravagance so remorseless as to verge on
the psychotic. On the other hand, he was an inexhaustible wellspring of fervent
and genuinely tender pity for the sufferings of the poor and forgotten, and there
was an undeniable innocence in his implacable anger against the rich and
powerful who left the destitute to their misery. But one does not have the luxury
of choosing one side of his character over against the other. They were not
merely inextricable from one another; they were inverse but equally essential
expressions of a single indivisible temperament. He abounded in love and hate,
and was capable of the one only to the degree that he was capable of the other.
There was a single Bloy, and he was an angelic monster.
Though, on second thought, a better way of putting this might be to say
that he was French. Exquisitely French, even. Hyperbolically French, in fact.
Certainly no other people in Europe is as prone to wild oscillations between
extreme poles—emotional, intellectual, spiritual, artistic, political—or better
able to hide the violence of their contradictions behind an appearance of elegant
equilibrium. Despite the mythos of “Les Lumières,” the secret animating
principle sustaining France’s majestic cultural supremacy is an almost total
incapacity for sane moderation. Even the celebrated “rationalism” of the French
Enlightenment was nothing more than a momentary fashion, an entirely
irrational passion for a new vogue in desiccated abstractions (rather like an
inexplicably insatiable taste for chiaroscuro etchings or charcoal brass rubbings).
And this cultural habit of ceaseless polarity has often produced prodigies of
glorious contradictoriness, of a sort that transcends mere paradox. Only the
French, for instance, could have perfected a form of Christian literature
consisting almost entirely in the negation of Christian piety. Call it a kind of
Christian Tantra, or Aghori Catholicism, or Catholicism of the left-hand path.
Baudelaire (1821–1867) provides perhaps the prime example, having so
brilliantly succeeded at concealing his deep if eccentric faith in his journaux
intimes while presenting the public with a façade of dissipation, wantonness,
blasphemy, and even Satanism, as if hoping to shock bourgeois society into
acknowledging the reality of the diabolical, and therefore (ineluctably) of the
divine. Perhaps even Lautréamont (1846–1870) was a specimen of the type,
though he died before the unveiling of his promised “devotional” sequel to Les
Chants de Maldoror. Certainly, Bloy’s master Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808–1889)
was, as also was Bloy’s (temporary) friend Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907).
And Bloy’s own literary imagination roamed many of the same “negative”
spaces. His Sueur de sang (1893) and Histoires désobligeantes (1894) brought
the fashion in “horrid” tales—pioneered by Barbey in Diaboliques (1874) and
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838 1889) in Contes cruels (1883)—to a kind of
ghastly perfection. If anything, Bloy’s stories were more brutal in their
unadorned hideousness; they established an entirely new standard for sordid
fictional material: bizarre depravities, battlefield butchery, putrescent corpses,
insanity, mutilation, infanticide, incest, sickly erotic fantasy, even a prostitute’s
reanimated cadaver—all of it played over a basso continuo of morbidly repellant
physical (and physiological) detail.
It was not, however, his taste for the macabre (which savored more of the
moralist’s bitterness than of the voyeur’s relish) that caused Bloy’s detractors to
find him so obnoxious. It was the man himself, or at least the indelible
impression he gave of himself in his writings. To be honest, a maliciously
exhaustive catalogue of Bloy’s moral faults would be all but indistinguishable
from a simple dispassionate account of his personality. While he attempted to
live the life of a holy renunciant, he excelled chiefly at subjecting his friends and
acquaintances to unremitting financial importunities; and the sanctimony with
which he demanded, rather than asked, for assistance earned him the title of “the
Ingrate Beggar.” True, as Bloy acutely observed more than once, Christians
should give freely, without any expectation of gratitude (lest the left hand
become aware of the right hand’s largesse.) Even so, he might have attempted an
occasional decorous expression of thanks, just to appear gracious. Moreover,
while his piety was undoubtedly deep and ardent, it frequently degenerated into
delusion, and of the most self-aggrandizing kind. Not only did he imagine that
this sinful world lay under the threat of some imminent moment of divine
reckoning; he seemed convinced that he himself would have a prominent role to
play in the final settling of all accounts. And his faith was often little more than
militant credulity. He was especially susceptible to the deliverances of religious
visionaries, so long as the revelations they proclaimed were sufficiently suffused
by an air of divine wrath. It was typical of him that he should become a truculent
champion of the Marian “apparition” reported at La Salette in 1846 by two
peasant girls, according to whom the Blessed Virgin had not only confessed
herself scarcely able any longer to restrain the impetuous rage of her Son against
the people of France, but had also threatened to kill countless children by famine
as heavenly retribution for the profanities regularly uttered by provincial cart-
drivers. To Bloy, the comic rusticity of the tale was rendered believable by the
very vindictiveness of it message. The again, by his own account he himself had
a positive genius for hatred, and it seems never to have occurred to him to draw
any kind of distinction between the sinner and the sin. Why then would God? It
is genuinely chilling at times to observe the unalloyed glee with which Bloy
contemplated the misfortunes, sufferings, and even deaths—the eternal
damnation, in fact—of those he disliked, either personally or as a class. He was
especially overjoyed by news of the deaths of the wealthy—wealthy women
most of all. The sinking of the Titanic or of any other luxury liner, though a
tragedy for the poor wretches making the crossing in steerage or laboring below
decks, filled him with delight. He could not contain the ebullience of his mirth
when a fire at the Opéra Comique in 1877 resulted in the “cremation of four
hundred filthy bourgeois.” Again, when a fire at the Charity Bazaar in May of
1896 (recounted in the pages of this volume) killed a great number of society
ladies and their privileged daughters, he rejoiced at the thought of all those
“chaste lilies” and “tender roses” being trampled to death under the feet of the
panicked crowd, and of their charred remains being swept up into dustpans the
following day. And, of course, he was a French chauvinist and bigot, even while
despising the complacency and moral lethargy of his fellow countrymen. He
adored Napoleon, oddly, with an almost idolatrous passion. He ventured out of
France only once, for a brief sojourn in Denmark, concluded that the Danes were
scarcely human and that their religion was a barbarous parody of Christianity,
and returned home for good. The British he hated with a vehemence bordering
on the genocidal. Russia he would have happily seen reduced to a sea of blood
spreading around high mountains of corpses. He was bellicose and choleric,
splenetic and vicious. His resentments were madly disproportionate to any
wrongs he had ever suffered. His prejudices were impregnable to any assaults of
charity. He was not merely irascible—he was cruel.
And yet...
This is the infuriating and baffling mystery of Bloy. All of this is true, and
all of it truly deplorable—and yet Bloy was a man of extraordinarily sensitive
and fierce conscience. His prophetic affectations were not, after all, completely
delusory. Underneath the searing fevers of his prose—the gleaming floods of its
lyricism, its vividly hallucinatory imagery, the chaotic opulence of its phrasing,
the sheer delirium of its verbal beauty—and even underneath the unabated
ferocity and malice to which it gave such overwhelming expression, lay a
bottomless reservoir of sincere compassion and incorruptible integrity. When
one encounters Bloy not in his role as a moralist but simply as a moral man, one
has to conclude that even his rhetorical savagery was an overflow of a deeper
and uncompromising spiritual purity. In those moments, it seems clear that his
polemical voice came from another age—perhaps early antiquity, or even
perhaps the days of the prophets of Israel—cursing in order to bless, calling
down God’s wrath in order to redeem. Even in its most extreme registers, there
is an audible tone of desperate, apocalyptic urgency, an almost frantic desire to
rouse Bloy’s contemporaries from their contented slumbers. Certainly Bloy often
seemed to speak out of a sense of God as the Lord who is wrapped in the cloud
and fire of Sinai, who dwells among his people only in the impenetrable
darkness of the tabernacle or of the sanctuary, or in the unapproachable and
deadly holiness of the Ark of the Covenant. His, moreover, was the Johannine
Christ, whose presence in history is already the final judgment, separating light
from darkness, life from death. And he clearly felt a certain contempt for those
of his readers who did not understand that Christian charity sometimes can—and
occasionally must—express itself in gall, indignation, sarcasm, even enmity. Or
rather, to put the matter somewhat differently, genuine love must often entail a
concomitant hatred. One is unlikely quite to catch the music of Bloy’s rages
unless one knows what it would be like to stand among the poorest and most
abused human beings, to see the neglect and heartlessness with which the great
world passes them by, and while standing there, amid that needless and ignored
human desolation, to imagine with satisfaction the rich of the earth made into
carrion for crows, and yet to do so out of a heart overflowing with charity. It
requires a very rare, delicate, and volatile temperament to be such a person; but
that is who Bloy was.
Something of the man’s measure can be taken from his vociferous
detestation of the anti-semitism of his time and place, especially the newly
fashionable variety promoted by the political journalist and pamphleteer
Édouard Drumont (1844 1917), but also the traditional, casually vicious French
Catholic variety. Even when the Dreyfus affair strained his loyalties from every
side (he sometimes seemed to resent Dreyfus for embarrassing his beloved
France by his innocence), and even when his rhetoric lapsed into the sort of
conventional supersessionism that his own more considered theological writings
rejected, Bloy never ceased to defend the Jews against persistent calumnies, and
to insist upon God’s special love for his people—indeed, for his kin. To Bloy’s
mind, it was not enough for him as a Christian merely to denounce lies about the
wealth and usurious ways of international “Jewry”; it was necessary to proclaim
ever and again “Le Salut par les Juifs” (to cite the title of his book of 1892), and
to insist that every Jew, being a cousin of God incarnate, owned a divine dignity
to which gentiles had no natural claim, and in regard to which the proper attitude
of any gentile was one of grateful humility. In fact, there is no other Catholic
thinker of the nineteenth or early twentieth century who better understood Paul’s
arguments about God’s enduring covenants in the ninth through eleventh
chapters of the Letter to the Romans chapters, or who was more immune to the
traditional Augustinian misreading of the text. For him, Christians are saved
only by being grafted into a vine that is eternally the vine of Israel. To appreciate
just how extraordinary all this was for a pious Catholic of Bloy’s time, one need
only compare his views to the noxious bigotries that pervade the writings of