which love is the very substance and ground, is characteristic of nearly
all high mystical experience; and the literature of contemplation would
furnish many parallels to all that Lucie tells us of it. In this state,
as she says in another place, “the thirst of the spirit is suddenly
fulfilled by the Infinite,” and “God takes possession of the ground of
the soul, without passage of time or feeling of space.” Then, the
bewilderment and unrest produced in us by the disharmonies of daily life
are healed. “Là où tout raisonnement échoue,” she says in one of her
most beautiful passages; “où l’âme est tellement troublée qu’elle ne
saurait même expliquer ce qui la trouble, la divine presence paraît, et
soudain le vertige cesse et la paix renaît avec la lumière.”
Consciousness, ceasing more or less completely its normal
correspondences with the temporal order, then becomes aware of the
eternal and spiritual universe in which we really live.
Such an attitude to Eternity was a marked characteristic of
Lucie-Christine’s mysticism. Often, it produced in her the complete
mono-ideism of ecstasy; and she describes the oncoming, content, and
passing of these states with a minuteness which makes her journal a
valuable document for the psychologist. Constantly, the intense
awareness of the Divine Presence persisted through the many duties and
activities of the day; “like a grave and tender note, dominating all the
modulations of the keyboard of my exterior life.” She is not afraid to
use the most violent metaphors, the most concrete images, in her efforts
to express the intensity and reality of this spiritual life that she
leads, this divine companionship that she enjoys. “I am nourished by
God’s substance.” “I breathe the divine essence.” “The presence of God
is so clear that faith is not faith—it is sight.” “The soul plays within
God, as within a limitless universe.” “The Divine action penetrates and
transforms my adoration. It is the Divine Being who thinks, loves, and
lives within me.” None of the mystics have gone further than this in
their claims; but it is significant that nearly all the greatest go as
far.
Yet in all this, Lucie-Christine is strictly Evangelical. She was a
Christian first, and a mystic afterwards. Though her expressions may
seem startling, her mysticism never goes beyond that of St. John and St.
Paul; and her most Platonic utterances can be justified by the New
Testament. But the Pauline and Johannine teachings on the soul’s union
with Christ are not for her merely doctrinal statements. They are vivid
descriptions of states she has personally known, when her consciousness
truly penetrated to that “région d’amour, région unique, où l’âme trouve
un autre jour, une autre vie, un autre air respirable, où du moins tous
ces éléments latents se trouvent manifestés, où Dieu seul apparaît, et
tout le reste rentre dans l’ombre.”
Such a personal and overwhelming consciousness of “the greatness, power,
and simplicity of God”—an all-inclusive unity which the unity of her
spirit could comprehend—was the central interest of her life. She
certainly tended to that which Baron von Hügel has called “the vertical
relation” with the Divine. Nevertheless, this theocentric existence did
not involve either the limp passivity or the spiritual selfishness with
which it is sometimes charged. On the ethical side it committed her to a
constant moral discipline; for her ardent and impulsive temperament
reacted too easily to every external stimulus. “I must give up
pleasure—never work for my own enjoyment.” “My one prayer is, that I may
not feel joy and grief so vividly: that I may feel only Thee.” This
deliberate unselfing and concentration on God so strengthened the fibres
of character that she was able to bear with quietness her many personal
sorrows, and the long years of blindness—a bitter cross for that keen
lover of beauty—which closed her life. Yet it did not muffle her in the
unattractive folds of “holy indifference.” She loved her family
devotedly, and felt without mitigation the anxieties and griefs of human
life. Her attitude to others was generous and sympathetic. God, she
says, gives Himself to us that we may give Him again. His unique light
must pass through the soul as through a prism; breaking up into the many
colours of word and deed, forgiveness and good counsel, prayer and alms,
self-forgetfulness and self-giving. Though exceedingly reserved about
her spiritual experiences, which were only known to her confessor, the
influence of these experiences was felt by those among whom she lived;
and her house was known by them as “the house of peace.”
Moreover, her love for the institutional and sacramental side of
religion saved her from many of the dangers and extravagances of
individualism. It gave her a framework within which her own intuitions
could find their place; and a valid symbolism through which she could
interpret to herself the most rarefied experiences of her soul. She is
an example of the way in which the mystic seems able to achieve the
universal without losing or rejecting its particular expression:
assimilating symbols of an amazing crudity without in any way impairing
her vision of truth. The conflict between that vision and the concrete
objectives of popular devotion was ignored by her; as it is generally
ignored by practical mystics of the institutional type. She, who had
touched the Absolute in her contemplations, was yet deeply impressed by
the drama of the Church; by its ceremonies, holy places, festivals,
consecrations. Her inner life was nourished by its sacraments. She
displayed the power—so characteristic of Christian mysticism at its
best—of transcending without rejecting the formulæ of belief as commonly
understood; of remaining within, and drawing life from, the organism,
without any diminution in the proper liberty of the soul.
Thus, seen as a whole, Lucie-Christine’s spiritual life has a richness
and balance which reflects the richness and balance of her own nature;
for an impoverished or one-sided character was never yet found capable
of a fully developed and fruitful mysticism. We see her from girlhood
seeking to satisfy her innate longing for reality; urged on the one hand
by the artist’s craving for perfect loveliness, on the other by the
philosopher’s instinct for Eternity. When the veil was lifted, and the
inner voice said, “God only!” she found at once the reconciliation and
the fulfilment of these two desires. The long and varied experience
which followed was no more than an unfolding of the content of those
words. They revealed to her the Substance of all beauty and truth;
shining in that world of appearance which she loved to the last with an
artist’s passion, yet ever abiding unchanged in that world of pure being
which she touched in her contemplations “above all feeling, image, and
idea.” Because of this double outlook on reality, her mysticism was both
transcendental and sacramental. It irradiated the natural world, and
also the symbols of religion, with that simple light of Eternity wherein
she found “all beauties known and unknown, all harmonies natural and
supernatural.” Lucie-Christine makes clear to us, as few mystics have
done, the immense transfiguration of ordinary life which comes from such
an extension of consciousness; when “the veil suddenly drops, God
reveals Himself, and the soul _knows_ experimentally that which she knew
not before.” Her journal is full of passages in which its joy and
splendour are described. I take one written in a time of great mental
and physical suffering, when the cruel deprivations of blindness were
already closing in on her, and the two beings she loved best—her husband
and her youngest daughter—had lately been taken from her by death.
“Figurez-vous un pauvre prisonnier au fond d’un cachot renfermé et
obscur, voyant tout à coup s’entr’ouvrir la voûte de ce cachot, et par
là recevant la lumière du soleil, et aspirant avec force l’air du dehors
qui lui arrive embaumé des senteurs de la vie et de la chaleur de
l’atmosphère resplendissante. Ainsi mon âme s’ouvrait, et buvait Dieu!
... mon âme aspirait et buvait la vie même de la Trinité Sainte, et se
sentait revivre, et n’avait plus aucun mal.”
III
CHARLES PÉGUY
In the turmoil and anxieties of the first weeks of the war, few people
observed that France had lost upon the battle-field one of the greatest
of her modern poets; a fearless and original thinker, a constructive
mystic, who exercised a unique influence over the young writers and
thinkers of his world. Yet the death in action of Charles Péguy, who was
killed on September 5, 1914, at the age of forty-one, removed a striking
figure from contemporary literature, and was among the chief
intellectual losses sustained by France in the war.
Born in Orleans in 1873, of peasant stock, Péguy had many of the
fundamental qualities of the French peasant; the sturdy independence,
the frugal tastes, the untiring industry, the close kinship with the
soil. His father was a cabinet-maker; his mother that familiar figure of
the cathedrals, the woman who lets the chairs. The great friend of his
boyhood was an old republican carpenter with whom he used to talk, and
to whose conversation he owed his first political ideas. This heredity
and these influences gave to his thought and attitude a character which
he never lost. In his mature work we see side by side the result of
those two compensating elements in his childish environment; the mingled
mystery and homeliness of that mediæval and intensely national
Catholicism which finds in the French cathedrals its living symbols, the
keen sense of social justice, of the need for social salvation, which
inspired the popular republicanism of the years following the
Franco-German war. These characteristics, which afterwards, in a
sublimated form, came to dominate his mysticism and gave to it its
special colour, its mingling of antique tradition with forward-looking
hope, can be traced back to the blend of Christian and of democratic
impressions which he received as a child. Perhaps only the son of French
peasants could understand and reinterpret as he had done the figure of
St. Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who saved France; and whose longing to
mend and redeem, at once so practical and so transcendental, linked up
the objectives of social endeavour and of faith.
Brought up within the atmosphere of provincial piety, Péguy rose from
the elementary school to the lycée; and at nineteen, through his own
efforts and his mother’s sacrifices, passed from Orleans to the
University of Paris. There his vigorous mind and positive character soon
made him the centre of a group of students, over whom he quickly
obtained influence. There, too, he made the transition—almost inevitable
for an ardent young man of his world—from Catholic orthodoxy to
humanitarian socialism: the first stage in his spiritual pilgrimage, and
the first attempt to answer that question which underlies all his
thought and act, his poetry and controversy—“Comment faut-il sauver?”
These words, which Péguy puts into the mouth of St. Joan of Arc, and
shows to us as the mainspring of her actions, define too the secret
impulse of his own career. His mysticism was not that of the
contemplative, the solitary and God-intoxicated devotee: it was that of
a strong-willed man of action, who sees far off the “mighty beauty” and
longs to actualize it within the common life. He saw that common life
with the eyes of a poet who was also a child of the people; discerning
beneath its surface the dignity and the beauty of its antique and simple
types—the spinner and the tiller, the housewife, the mother and the
child.
“Les armes de Jésus, c’est la pauvre famille,
Les frères et la sœur, les garçons et la fille,
Le fuseau lourd de laine et la savante aiguille.”
But he found in the French socialism of the ’nineties a dry and
materialistic spirit; which could not satisfy his passionate idealism,
his instinct for a completed life, a universal redemption, that should
harmonize soul and body and fulfil their needs. Hence, by a process too
gradual to be called a conversion, he grew from humanitarianism into a
somewhat anti-clerical, original, yet mediæval and mystical Catholicism;
in which those ideals and demands which had dominated his humanitarian
period—the sense of the rights and dignity of mankind, the longing to
save, “de porter remède au mal universel humain”—reappear in a
spiritualized form. In Christianity he saw condensed the saving power of
Spirit; never letting man alone, but redeeming him even in defiance of
his own will, contriving its victories by or in spite of the evils and
disharmonies of life. The belief which he achieved—doubtless fed by
childish memories—was absolute and literal, and most easily expressed
itself in mediæval forms. Modernism filled him with horror; he desired
no attenuation of the supernatural, no reinterpretation of dogma. The
faith which fought the crusades and built the Cathedrals was that in
which he felt at home, and which he believed himself destined to bring
back to the soul of France: “Au fond, c’est une renaissance Catholique
qui se fait par moi.”
Yet his inner life was full of difficulty and unhappiness. There were in
him two strains, two warring impulses, to which we must attribute many
of the griefs and disappointments of his life: for his great
accomplishment both as poet and as founder of the _Cahiers de la
Quinzaine_ brought him little personal joy. On one side of his nature he
was proud, vehement, combative; full of a destructive energy, an
obstinate fanaticism, which found vent in his violent political
pamphlets, often expressing with the uncouth vigour of the peasant his
uncompromising hates and loves. Though so ardent a Christian, he was
neither meek nor gentle. He could never resist giving blow for blow, and
by his impatience and intolerance alienated by turns his socialist and
Catholic friends. About 1910, having thus quarrelled with most of his
associates, he withdrew into a voluntary retirement, in which the
spiritual side of his divided temperament seems at last to have had some
opportunity of growth. His mystical poems—all composed between 1910 and
1913—show to us the love and exaltation of which he now became capable;
the purity of that vision which had inspired his vigorous guerilla
warfare against the shams and sordidness of modern life, and which now
became the chief factor in his consciousness. Writing in 1912 to his old
friend Joseph Lotte, he says, “Mon vieux, j’ai beaucoup changé depuis
deux ans; je suis devenu un homme nouveau. J’ai tant souffert et tant
prié. Tu ne peux pas savoir.” The secret of this inner conflict, of the
terrible months during which, as he afterwards confessed, he was unable
to say “Thy will be done,” he revealed to none; but hints of the way by
which he had passed may be found in his poems. The mystical certitude
which inspires their most beautiful passages seems never to have
obtained complete control of his psychic being. The life of prayer and
the life of personal struggle persisted side by side, not fully
harmonized; and it is doubtful whether he ever achieved that complete
surrender to the divine action “in which alone we do not surrender our
true selves,” which is characteristic of the developed mystic life.
“Celui qui s’abandonne ne s’abandonne pas, et il est le seul qui ne
s’abandonne pas.” It was surely to himself that Péguy addressed this
observation, and it represents his own central need. Those profound
readjustments of character, that unselfing of the moral nature, which
must precede spiritual unification, and so are the only foundations of
inner peace, had never been accomplished in him. Like his patroness and
heroine St. Joan, he combined the temperaments of fighter and dreamer,
but he never succeeded in fusing them in one.
We know, too, something of the outward circumstances which added to his
difficulties. Married during his agnostic period to a freethinker, his
intense respect for human freedom forbade him to force on his wife his
own convictions, or even to bring his adored children to baptism against
their mother’s will. For this refusal he was himself denied access to
the sacraments; and hence this impassioned Catholic, for conscience’
sake, lived and died out of communion with the official Church. No one
will really understand Péguy’s position or the meaning of his poems,
unless this paradoxical situation, and this constant element of
frustration and incompleteness in his experience, be kept in mind. He
was in one sense an exile, ever gazing at the beloved country which he
knew and understood so much better than many of its citizens. Deeply
religious, he lived at odds with his religious world. Capable of the
strangest inconsistencies and refusals, though sparing himself nothing
of the anguish they involved, he could make on foot a pilgrimage to
Chartres to pray for the life of his sick child; yet would not face the
struggle necessary to make those children members of the Church in which
he believed. “Je ne peux pas m’occuper de tout. Je n’ai pas une vie
ordinaire. Nul n’est prophète en son pays. Mes petits ne sont pas
baptisés. A la sainte Vierge de s’en occuper!”
Himself, he felt called upon to devote his powers, without distraction,
to that missionary propaganda in which the mystical and combative sides
of his nature found creative expression, and to which his poetry and
much of his prose is consecrated. “Il y a tant de manque. Il y a tant à
demander,” says St. Joan to the patient nun who seeks to teach her
resignation: and here she expresses Péguy’s deepest conviction. There is
so much lacking that men might obtain of joy and peace and love. Action
no less than prayer is needed; every soul must take its share in meeting
the world’s need, for we are the accomplices of ill if we do nothing to
prevent it. There was never any place in Péguy’s eager and restless
heart for that “other-worldly” mysticism which achieves the love of God
at the expense of love of home and fellow-men; for religion in his view
was an affair of flesh and blood, not of pure spirit—not merely
transcendental, but concrete, national, fraternal, even revolutionary.
On this side his mysticism represents the spiritualization of that
activist philosophy which was coming into prominence in the formative
years of his life, and could not fail to exert a powerful influence on
him.
Both as mystic and as patriot, he had the reformer’s passion: a measure,
too, of the reformer’s violence and intolerant zeal. He worked for a
sweeter and a saner world, a restoration to man of his lost inheritance.
The modern France, he felt, was wrong. It had lost its hold upon
realities; mistaken its professors and scientists for apostles, its
codes and systems for truth, its political institutions for liberty, the
“triumphs of civilization” for perdurable goods. It had lost freshness,
naïveté, hope: had sacrificed beauty and joy for an imaginary progress
and comfort. In the place of the ancient types of human worth, the
primitive yet august figures of parent and child, craftsman and tiller
of the soil, it had produced the bemused victim of modern education
“avec sa tête de carton et son cœur de bazar.” In this perversion of
life and cultivation of the second-best he saw the “universal evil,”
which poisons the sources of human happiness. Yet behind and within it
Péguy, visionary and optimist, discerned the possible restoration of
good; mankind brought back into contact with the real and eternal world.
He saw his beloved France ceasing to be “un peuple qui dit non,” and
becoming, by intensity and harmony of action and vision, “une race
affirmative.” He looked past shams, pretences, and bad workmanship to a
heaven that should contain not only people but things: “Dans le paradis
tel que je le montrerai, il n’y aura pas seulement des âmes; il y aura
des choses. Tout ce qui existe et qui est réussi. Les cathédrales, par
exemple. Notre Dame, Chartres, je les y mettrai.”
It was such a restoration of humanity to the wholesome and beautiful
life for which it was made, that he had at first sought in socialism;
and the earlier numbers of the _Cahiers de la Quinzaine_, of which he
was the founder and editor, reflect this faith. He saw socialism then in
its ideal aspect, as a triumph of justice and love: a reasonable career
offered to the whole race. For this triumph, this reordering of the
common life, he never ceased to work; but a deeper experience taught him
that it could not be effected by any change imposed on society from
without, or any readjustment between man and man. The readjustment
needed was that between man and God; a change of heart, a rearrangement
of the values of life effected from within, which should make possible
the complete spiritualization of existence. Therefore it was that Péguy
became, in his last and most creative period, a Christian mystic of an
original type; an ardent missionary, who opposed the intellectualism,
materialism, and individualism which France of the early twentieth
century mistook for progress, by a propaganda which was
anti-intellectual, nationalist, and profoundly Catholic. It is to this
period that his poetry and much of his most vehement prose belongs. All
is didactic in intention; but is saved by its author’s wit, sincerity,
and remarkable imaginative genius from the usual fate of those who try
to turn art to the purposes of edification. The prose is largely
controversial, and inevitably suffers to some extent from this: for
Péguy was violent and sometimes unjust when attacking the errors and
follies of the time, and had at his disposal an astonishing power of
mockery, irony, and scorn. Yet even here, his instinct for beauty
constantly asserted itself: and in the midst of some biting attack upon
“progressive” politics or modernist theology, we get an abrupt invasion
of loveliness which transports us to the atmosphere of his poems. These
poems fall into two groups: first, the three _Mystères_ which he wrote
for the 500th anniversary of the birth of Jeanne d’Arc, “la sainte la
plus grande après Sainte Marie,” and which deal with her spiritual
preparation for the saving of France; _La Charité de Jeanne d’Arc_
(1910), _Le Porche du Mystère de la Deuxième Vertu_ (1911), _Les Saints
Innocents_ (1912). These are all written in unrhymed irregular verse; a
verse so indefinite in construction that it is often indistinguishable
from rhythmic prose. They consist chiefly in long meditative discourses,
alternating between the extremes of homeliness and sublimity, and put
into the mouths of Jeanne and of Madame Gervaise, a Franciscan nun to
whom she tells her problems and her dreams—an apt device for the
conveyance of Péguy’s own religious and patriotic gospel. They were
followed by three volumes in rhymed duodecasyllabic verse, which he
called _Tapisseries: Sainte Geneviève et Jeanne d’Arc_ (1912), _Notre
Dame_ (1913), and _Eve_ (1914), perhaps his finest and most sustained
single work.
When we examine these poems in order, we find that we can trace in them
the development of a consistent philosophy of life: for, like most of
the convinced opponents of intellectualism, Péguy was a profound
thinker, relying to a far greater extent than he would ever have
confessed on the ungodly processes of a singularly acute mind. The
deliberate simplicity of diction, the assumed ingenuousness of attitude
are deceptive, and conceal a deeply reasoned view of the universe.
“Je n’aime pas, dit Dieu, celui qui pense
Et qui se tourmente, et qui se soucie
Et qui roule une migraine perpétuelle.”
This is not the doctrine of the charcoal-burner; it is the doctrine of
the experienced philosopher, bitterly conscious of the limitations of
the brain.