Chapter IX: Part 9

Although the whole of her short adult life had been passed behind the high garden walls of the convent, and after she took the veil only the members of her family had seen her—and this under the most restricted conditions—yet at the time of her death Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus was already known and valued by the whole town. That death was an event of importance, evoking an extraordinary demonstration of affection and reverence. The events which followed it are of deep interest. Here, in our own day, we have the swift rise and diffusion of a _cultus_ exactly similar to those which followed the deaths of the great popular saints of the Middle Ages. Every element is present; the prompt setting up of a pilgrimage, the veneration of the tomb, the distribution of relics—at the Lisieux convent cards are sold, bearing splinters and bits of straw from the cell of Thérèse—countless reports of visions, conversions, “supernatural perfumes,” and miraculous answers to prayer. The literature of the subject is already considerable, and a journal is published giving details of “graces” obtained by her help. The causes which lie behind such religious movements as this are still obscure; but we have in the cult of Thérèse Martin a valuable clue by which to interpret those reported from the past. Her “miracles,” in which students of psychic phenomena will find much to interest them, range from the cure of cancer to the multiplication of bank-notes, and even include the restoration of dead geranium-cuttings. Many are obviously explained by coincidence or hallucination, some are admirable examples of faith-healing. But a few, apparently supported by good evidence, seem to defy rationalistic explanation.

The cult quickly lost its local and ultimately its national character. Though French Catholicism rightly claims Thérèse as its peculiar possession, and devotion to her is probably more general in France than elsewhere, yet she is now venerated in every country in the world, and distributes her favours without regard to nationality. Scotland and America in particular have numerous stories of her benevolent intervention, at least as evidential as much that is offered to us by the exponents of spiritualism. Her legend is in active formation, and many picturesque incidents were added to it during the war. She is even said to have appeared at the British Headquarters, and given advice at a critical moment of the campaign. A large proportion of the Catholic soldiers who fought for France probably placed themselves under her protection, and attribute their safety to her care.

A little time before her death, she said to her sister Pauline, “Une seule attente fait battre mon cœur; c’est l’amour que je recevrai et celui que je pourrai donner.... Je veux passer mon ciel à faire du bien sur la terre,” and again, “Je compte bien ne pas rester inactive au ciel, mon désir est de travailler encore.” In these sayings, so unlike in their vigorous activism the conventional aspirations of the devout, we have probably the germinal point of her _cultus_. It has come to be believed that this simple and loving spirit, who passed from the body with so many generous longings unfulfilled, is indeed spending her heaven in doing good; and the deeds attributed to her are just those practical and friendly acts of kindness, through which during life she expressed and perfected her spirit of love.

II
LUCIE-CHRISTINE

Those students of mysticism who feel that the purely cloistered type of spirituality, as seen in Thérèse Martin and Elizabeth Catez, is too remote from the common experience to be actual to us, may find something with which they can sympathize and from which they can learn, in the self-revelations of the remarkable contemplative who is known under the pseudonym of Lucie-Christine.

This lady, whose spiritual journal was published in 1912, was a married woman of the leisured class, leading the ordinary life of a person of her type and position. She was born in 1844 and married in 1865. She had five children. At forty-three she became a widow, and in 1908, after nineteen years of blindness, she died at the age of sixty-four. Nothing could have been more commonplace than her external circumstances. On the religious side she was an exact and fervent Roman Catholic, accepting without question the dogmas and discipline of the Church, and diligent in all the outward observances of conventional French piety. Her time was spent in family and social duties, sometimes in Paris, sometimes in her country home; and she appeared to her neighbours remarkable only for her goodness, gentleness, and love of religion. Yet her inward life—unsuspected by any but her parish priest, for whom her journal was written—had a richness and originality which entitle her to a place among the Catholic mystics, and often help us to understand the meaning and character of the parallel experiences which those mystics describe. The value for study of a contemplative who is at once so modern and so classic is obvious. This value is increased by the fact that for many years Lucie-Christine knew nothing of mystical literature, and was ignorant even of the names of the spiritual states which her journal so faithfully describes. Therefore in her case unconscious imitation, which accounts for much so-called mystical experience, appears to be excluded.

Her journal—at present our only source of information—covers thirty-eight years: from 1870 to 1908. The first twelve years, however, are only represented by fragmentary notes, put together in 1882; when Lucie-Christine, at the suggestion of her confessor, began to keep a detailed record of her religious life. Whatever view we may take of its theological value, this record is certainly a psychological document of the first class. It is the work of a woman of marked intelligence; temperamentally philosophic, and with great intuitional gifts. The short memoir prefixed to the French edition tells us that even as a child she showed unusual qualities; was grave, thoughtful, and to some extent “psychic,” being subject to flashes of clairvoyance, and premonitions of important and tragic events. This peculiarity, which she disliked and never spoke of, persisted through life; and its presence in her helps us to understand how the many stories of abnormal power possessed by the mystics first arose.

Her character was by no means of that detached and inhuman type which is supposed to be proper to religious exaltation. She was ardent and impressionable, gave love and craved for it; her qualities and faults were essentially of a lovable kind. She reveals herself in her journal as sensitive, idealistic, and affectionate; somewhat unpractical, very easily wounded, tempted to irritability, and inclined to worry. “The excessive wish to be loved, appreciated, admired by those whom I love,” was one of the temptations against which, as a young woman, she felt it necessary to pray: another was the longing for enjoyment, for personal happiness. It was only after eight years of intermittent mystical experience that she learned the secret of inward peace: to “lose her own interests in those of God, and receive a share in His interests in exchange.” Though the “activity and practical capacity of Martha” never came naturally to her, she was yet a splendid wife and mother. Even in the years when her inner life was passed in almost continuous contemplation, she never neglected human duties for superhuman joys; but planned and shared the amusements of her boys and girls, wrote and rehearsed the plays which they acted, and watched with care over every detail of their lives.

Her spiritual life developed gradually and evenly. There is no trace in it of any psychic storm or dramatic conversion. She grew up in a religious home, and even in childhood seems to have been attracted to silent devotion or “mental prayer.” As a girl she was a vital, impulsive creature, full of eager enthusiasms. That deep, instinctive longing for Perfection which makes one man an artist, another a philosopher, and another a saint, showed itself early in a passionate worship of all beautiful things. “Tout ce que je connaissais de beau me passionnait et entraînait toute mon âme. La première vue de la mer et des falaises m’arracha des larmes.... Je ne pouvais trouver l’expression qui traduisît assez l’ardeur dont le beau enflammait mon imagination, et je ne voyais pas d’inconvénients à ces entraînements excessifs; au contraire, je m’y livrais de toute la force de ma volonté. Infortunée, mon âme en revenait cependant avec le sentiment du vide et de l’insuffisance, et c’est alors qu’elle rejetait son activité dévorante sur l’idéal qui lui réservait tant de dangers! Moins altérée du beau, je me fusse peut-être contentée des choses réelles, mais comme le coureur, lancé dans un fol élan, dépasse le but, ainsi mon âme s’élançait vers le beau à peine aperçu et cherchait encore au delà.”

In this important passage we see the true source of Lucie’s mysticism. It was the craving for an absolute and unchanging loveliness on which to expend her large-hearted powers of adoration and self-giving, which led her like the Platonists through visible beauty to its invisible source. She had, as she says of herself in a sudden flash of ironic wit, “le cœur assez mal placé pour trouver Dieu plus aimable que le monde, et l’esprit assez étroit pour se contenter de l’Infini”; but it was not until youth was nearly over, and she had been married for eight years, that she found what she sought. One day, when she was meditating as usual on a passage in the _Imitation of Christ_, she saw and heard within her mind the words “Dieu seul!”—summing up and answering in one phrase the vague efforts and questions of her growing mystical sense, and offering to the hungry psyche the only satisfaction of desire. As Fox was released from his conflict by the inner voice which cried, “There is one only who can speak to thy condition,” so this inner voice, says Lucie (whom it greatly astonished), “fut à la fois une lumière, un attrait, et une force. Une lumière qui me fit voir comment je pouvais être complètement à Dieu seul dans le monde, et je vis que jusque-là je ne l’avais pas bien comprit. Un attrait par lequel mon cœur fut subjugué et ravi. Une force qui m’inspira une résolution généreuse et me mit en quelque sorte dans les mains les moyens de l’exécuter, car le propre de ces paroles divines est d’opérer ce qu’elles disent.”

We see at once the complete and practical character of her reaction to the divine; the promptitude with which she makes the vital connection between intuition and act. St. Teresa said that the object of the spiritual marriage was “the incessant production of work.” So for Lucie-Christine that sure consciousness of the Presence of God which now became frequent, “clothing and inundating” her as she sat alone at her sewing or took part in some social activity, called her above all to “faire les petites choses du dévouement journalier avec amour”; conquering her natural irritability and dislike for the boredoms and unrealities of a prosperous existence. “N’avoir jamais l’air ennuyé des autres. Que de fois je manque à ceci avec les pauvres enfants. Vous êtes ennuyeux! C’est bien vite dit! Est-ce une amabilité divine?”

More and more, as her mystical consciousness grew, the life of contemplation became her delight; and it was plainly a real trial to be distracted from it for trivial purposes. In company, or busied with household duties, she went for hours with “her soul absorbed, its better part rapt in God.” She “tried to appear ordinary,” and made excuses if her abstraction was observed; but there are a few entries in her journal which will give pleasure to those who condemn mysticism as an “anti-social type of religion.” “Nous avons été nous promener, quatorze. Je remarque que d’aller ainsi avec plusieurs ‘Marthes’ hommes ou femmes, cela ne fait rien. On laisse discourir, on met un mot de temps en temps, mais, en définitive, on demeure bien libre et l’oraison va toute seule. Mais avec une seule Marthe, que c’est terrible! La tête-à-tête oblige à causer presque tout le temps.”

When Lucie wrote this, ten years after her first illuminative experience, she was far advanced in contemplation. She had known that direct and ineffable vision of God “Himself the True, the Good, the Beautiful; all things being nothing save by Him” which is characteristic—though she knew it not—of the unitive way: known too the corresponding experience of dereliction, when the door which had opened on Eternity seemed tightly closed. It would be tedious to analyze in detail the rich profusion of mystic states which she had already exhibited: the degrees of contemplation, ecstasies, visions and voices, all the forms taken by her growing intuition of the Transcendent. Many of these can be matched in the writings of the great mystics. Again and again as we read her, we are reminded of Angela of Foligno, Ruysbroeck, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Genoa, even of Plotinus: yet Lucie-Christine was at this time ignorant of mystical literature, and only in later life found with amazement descriptions of her own experiences in the works of the great contemplatives.

These experiences had a wide range. Some we are justified in regarding as invasions from her deeper self; coming to the rescue of the often distracted surface personality, and correcting the impressions of the outer world by its own intimations of Eternity. Thus, in 1875, she confesses that being particularly worried by a number of people, the Divine voice said to her, “Ma fille, il n’y a que toi et moi.” She replied: “Seigneur, et les autres?” The voice said: “Pour chaque âme en ce monde il n’y a que moi et elle, toutes les autres âmes et toutes choses ne sont rien pour elle que par moi et pour moi,” and by this timely reminder of the one Reality in whose life she lived, and by and in whom alone all other lives are real, she was recalled to her inner poise.

In assessing the value of this, and many other of her revelations, we have to remember that Lucie-Christine was a fervent and exact Churchwoman. Her belief was literal. She felt no discord between traditional Christianity of the most concrete kind and the freedom of her own communion with God. The fruits of that communion were often expressed by her in theological terms, and the special atmosphere and tendencies of French Catholicism certainly affected the form of many of her contemplations. Thus at one end of the scale her passionate devotion to the Person of Christ, and the fact that her religious practice centred in the Eucharist, sometimes resulted in visions of a distinctly anthropomorphic type. In these, her intuition of God’s presence translated themselves into hallucinatory images of the Face of Christ, or of His eyes looking at her; or photisms, which she explained to herself as the radiance emanating from His person. As we all know, such dramatizations of mystical emotion are comparatively commonplace. The elements from which the self constructs them are by no means all of a spiritual kind; and experienced mystics agree in regarding them with much suspicion. A careful study of Lucie-Christine’s journal forces us to admit, that the deliberate passivity which she cultivated often placed her at the mercy of her instinctive nature; and that its hidden wishes sometimes took a devotional form. To this source, too, we must refer those “obsessions and temptations”—in other words, uprushes from the lower centres—by which she was often attacked during contemplation, and also the occasionally sentimental and emotional character of her reactions to the Divine.

These objections, however, do not apply to the remarkable “metaphysical visions”—sharp onsets of real transcendental consciousness—in which her innate passion for the Absolute found satisfaction. Then, as she says, God seemed to “put aside all intermediaries between Himself and the soul;” and “bathed and irradiated by the Divine substance” she became “aware of the Divine Abyss,” or perceived, as Julian of Norwich did, “the Universe in a point,” swallowed up in the simple yet overwhelming sight of God. Here lie, for us, the real interest and value of Lucie-Christine’s confessions. She shares with Angela of Foligno and a few other historical mystics the double apprehension of the Divine Nature under its personal and impersonal forms; and as both utterly transcendent to, yet completely immanent in, the human soul. In her descriptions of these visions, this woman unread in philosophy displays a grasp of the philosophic basis of religion which would do credit to a trained theologian. Thus she says, “Il n’y a pas, ce me semble, de vue intérieure qui égale celle de l’essence divine. Mon âme était comme environnée de la substance divine en laquelle elle voyait ce caractère essentiel qui nous est révelé par le mystère de la Sainte Trinité, c’est-à-dire qu’il y a en Dieu l’unité et la distinction, le tout et le particulier, et je sentais combien c’est folie de chercher quelque chose en dehors de lui.” Again, “Étant profondément unie à lui dans la Sainte Communion, je vis Dieu en tant qu’il est le souverain bien, et je compris en même temps que le mal n’est que la négation du bien, un pur _néant_.... Dans cette vue intellectuelle, je compris aussi combien sera grande la confusion des pécheurs quand ils seront jugés, et qu’ils verront que tout le mal qu’ils ont aimé, préconisé, adoré, se réduit au néant! Avoir aimé le néant, avoir vécu pour lui, et perdre pour lui l’Etre éternel!” Here Lucie’s view of sin is that characteristic of all mystics; who can seldom be persuaded, however orthodox they may be in other respects, that anything which is not good is real. We remember how Julian of Norwich, also a natural contemplative of philosophic temperament, says, “I saw not sin; for I believe it has no manner of substance nor part of being.”

As an analyzer of her own psychological states, Lucie-Christine had something of that genius which St. Teresa possessed in a supreme degree; and she has, perhaps, an added value for us because she speaks not from the past nor from the cloister, but out of the Paris of our own day. We owe to her one of our most vivid descriptions of that apprehension of Eternal Life—the immersion of our durational existence in the Absolute Life of God—which Von Hügel regards as the fundamental religious experience. “J’ai observé,” she says, “que pendant l’oraison passive et surtout dans l’état d’union, l’âme perd le sentiment de la durée. Il n’y a plus pour elle de succession de moments, mais un moment unique, et j’ai cru comprendre qu’étant élevée à cet état, l’âme y vit selon le mode de vivre de l’éternité, où il n’y a point de durée, point de passé ni d’avenir, mais un moment unique, infini.” We have again to remember that the woman who wrote this had then no acquaintance with the classics of mysticism. It is her own impression which she is trying to register.

Again, consider this account of the state of divine union as she had known it: “L’âme va prier, elle s’élance pour franchir la distance qui la sépare de l’Infini, et cette distance elle ne la trouve plus! Elle veut aller à vous, mon Dieu, et vous êtes en elle!... Perdue en vous, elle oublie ellemême et tout le reste, elle ne sait plus comment elle vit, ni comment elle aime; elle ne voit plus que Vous seul. Encore ne peut elle pas _penser_ qu’elle vous voit et vous adore; car ce serait se voir elle-même, et en de tels moments elle ne se voit pas, elle ne voit que Vous. Elle connaît et aime par un mode nouveau et incompréhensible, qui est en dehors et infiniment au-dessus de l’exercice ordinaire de ses facultés. Elle sent que l’opération de Dieu a pris la place de la sienne et que c’est Dieu même qui opère en elle la connaissance et l’amour.”

This sense of complete surrender to a larger life and greater power, of 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.

The foundation of his creed is the essentially mystical belief, so beautifully expressed in _Eve_, in the solidarity of the Universe. As humanity is one and indivisible, so too the human and the divine cannot be separated. “Nous sommes solidaires des damnés éternels,” he said when he was twenty: and in his posthumous work _Clio_, he reiterates the same truth. “Jésus est du même monde que le dernier des pécheurs; et le dernier des pécheurs est du même monde que Jésus. C’est une communion. C’est même proprement cela qui est une communion. Et à parler vrai ou plutôt à parler réel il n’y a point d’autre communion que d’être du même monde.” The spiritual and eternal world, then, is not something set over against the natural order; but is closely entwined with it, the neglected element of reality, which alone can make human existence dignified and sweet.

“Car le surnaturel est lui-même charnel
Et l’arbre de la grâce est raciné profond
Et plonge dans le sol et cherche jusqu’au fond,
Et l’arbre de la race est lui-même éternel.

Et l’éternité même est dans le temporel
Et l’arbre de la grâce est raciné profond
Et plonge dans le sol et touche jusqu’au fond
Et le temps est lui-même un temps intemporel.“

What he realizes and points out, therefore, is not some distant transcendental life and reality, divorced from our normal, flowing, changing life and reality. Rather he insists on the beauty and nobility, the deep spiritual quality of this immediate life; the supernatural character of nature itself, when seen from the angle of Christian idealism. The Blessed Virgin is herself:

“Infiniment céleste
Parce qu’aussi elle est infiniment terrestre.”

In Christianity, with its incarnational philosophy, its balanced cultivation of the active and the mystic life, its sacramental touch upon all common things, he sees the only perfect expression of this principle; the only power capable of embracing and spiritualizing the whole of the rich complex of existence. Determined to bring home to his fellow-countrymen, on the one hand, the concrete and objective nature of this Christian life, on the other, the simplicity of soul necessary to those who would understand it, he rejects all attempts at religious philosophizing or symbolic interpretation. His treatment of theology is characterized by a deliberate homely literalness, a naïve use of tradition, which was intensely exasperating to his agnostic and Modernist critics; and which may be found distasteful by some religious minds, unable to realize the intimate connection between gaiety and faith. To others it will seem that, alone amongst modern writers, he has recaptured the mediæval secret of familiarity combined with adoration: of a love, awe, and vision, a profound earnestness, which yet leave room for laughter. His picture of God is shamelessly anthropomorphic. (“Je suis honnête homme, dit Dieu; droit comme un Français.”) Yet it is full of grave beauty, of the sense of fatherhood, the mystical consciousness of the Divine desire. Revealed religion is God’s Word, and therefore means what it says. “Jésus n’est pas venu pour nous dire des amusettes,” says Madame Gervaise to Joan of Arc.

The faith which Péguy wished to restore to France was not the religious rationalism of the modernist: still less the morbid, æsthetic fervour of Huysmans. It was the homely everyday faith of the past, the humble yet assured relation with the supernatural order, the courage and hope which is rooted in tradition and is wholly independent of intellectual subtleties. “La foi est toute naturelle, toute allante, tout simple, toute venante”—the great and simple affirmation. The perfect type of this faith is not the world-weary convert, but the healthy unselfconscious child; and the child, for Péguy, is the most holy and most significant figure in the human group. “C’est l’enfant qui est plein et l’homme qui est vide.” Only in the child and in those untarnished human beings who retain their childlike simplicity of heart do we see unspoilt humanity: only in the child do we see incarnate hope. “J’éclate tellement dans ma création,” says God, “et surtout dans les enfants.”

“On envoie les enfants à l’école, dit Dieu.
Je pense que c’est pour oublier le peu qu’ils savent.
On ferait mieux d’envoyer les parents à l’école.
C’est eux qui en ont besoin
Mais naturellement il faudrait une école de moi
Et non pas une école d’hommes.”

The tenderness and charm of those passages in which he celebrates the importance and sanctity of childhood, its innocence, its capacity for growth, its virginal outlook, its freshness and power of response, place him in the front rank of the poets who have treated this most difficult subject, and constantly remind us of Blake:

“Comme leur jeune regard a une promesse, une secrète assurance
intérieure, et leur front, et toute leur personne.
Leur petite, leur auguste, leur si révérente et révérende
personne....
Heureuse enfance. Tout leur petit corps, toute leur petite personne,
tous leurs petits gestes, est pleine, ruisselle, regorge d’une
espérance.
Resplendit, regorge d’une innocence
Qui est l’innocence même de l’espérance.”

This hope, the childhood of the heart, is to Péguy the most precious of human qualities, and the one in which man draws nearest to an understanding of the Divine Idea. Jesus is “the man who has hoped,” and the Christian assault, which is the assault of hope, can alone make a breach in the defences of eternity. It is “the faith that God loves best”; the beginning of liberty, the growing point of the eager spirit of life. Faith beholds that which is: Charity loves that which is: Hope alone beholds and loves that which shall be. Faith is static; hope dynamic. Faith is a great tree; hope is the rising sap, the little, swelling bud upon the spray.

“La petite espérance
Est celle qui toujours commence”—

the persistent element in all effort and all change. She deceives us twenty times running; yet she is the only one of our leaders who never deceives us in the end. She gives significance to human toil, beauty and meaning to human suffering, reality to human joy. In one of his most beautiful verses, he describes the crowning of humanity with this living, budding diadem of hope.

“Comme une mère fait un diadème de ses doigts allongés, des doigts
conjoints et affrontés de ses deux mains fraîches
Autour du front brûlant de son enfant
Pour apaiser ce front brûlant, cette fièvre,
Ainsi une couronne éternelle a été tressée pour apaiser le front
brûlant.
Et c’était une couronne de verdure.
Une couronne de feuillage.”

Moreover, “cette curieuse enfant Espérance” is the motive-power of the spiritual order too. God Himself hopes for and in man: has placed His eternal hope in man’s hands, and given to him, along with the gift of liberty, the terrible power of frustrating or achieving the purposes of Divine Love.

“Le plus infirme des pécheurs peut découronner, peut couronner
Une espérance de Dieu.”

Such a freedom is the very condition of spirituality; for faith, hope, and charity are not servile virtues, but heavenward-tending impulses of the free soul, activities of the will. Here lies their value; since only in true love, voluntary service, deliberate choice, can the possibilities of human nature be fulfilled:

“Toutes les soumissions d’esclaves du monde, ne valent pas un beau
regard d’homme libre.”

Therefore, for the author of this gospel of freedom and hope, the course of salvation takes an exactly opposite course to that described by Huysmans and his school. The typical soul for Péguy is not the “twice-born” exhausted and fastidious sensualist Durtal, driven at last to seek reconciliation by his overwhelming sense of sin. It is the “once-born” simple and ardent peasant child, Joan of Arc; brought straight from the sheepfold to serve the heroic purposes of God.

“Tenant tout un royaume en sa ténacité
Vivant en plein mystère avec sagacité
Mourant en plein martyre avec vivacité
La fille de Lorraine à nulle autre pareille.”

The typical experience is an experience of growth, freshness, novelty; action rightly directed, and a vision which perceives beauty and dignity in the antique and homely labours of the race. The cultivator of the earth and the rearer of children, the faithful priest, the strong and loyal soldier—of these is the kingdom of heaven. Of these and by these the old France was built up; and through these ideals and virtues, and the national saints in whom they are expressed, the new France may be saved. With Huysmans in our mystical moments we are usually inside a church, assisted by incense and plain-chant of the best quality: with Péguy, we are in the open air, in the market garden, or in the nursery. There his poetry, in Francis Thompson’s beautiful image, “plays at the foot of the Cross.” Even the Holy Innocents in heaven are playing at bowling hoops with their palms and crowns. “At least, I think so,” says God, “for they never asked _My_ permission.”

“Tel est mon paradis.... Mon paradis est tout ce qu’il y a de plus
simple.”

Side by side with Péguy’s spiritual gospel, or rather entwined with it, goes his practical and patriotic gospel. Since for him the whole of life was crammed with spiritual significance, he saw in the patriotic passion a sacrament of heavenly love, and in earthly cities symbols of the City of God. Hence nationalism was to him, as to Dostoevsky, essentially religious, and Joan of Arc—

“Une humble enfant perdue en deux amours,
L’amour de son pays parmi l’amour de Dieu”—

was the perfect saint, fusing the two halves of human experience in one whole. These two aspects of love he could not separate, for they seemed to him equally the flowers of a completed life. Even God, he thought, would find it difficult to decide between them.

“Dans une belle vie, il n’est que de beaux jours,
Dans une belle vie il fait toujours beau temps.
Dieu la déroule toute et regarde longtemps
Quel amour est plus cher entre tous les amours.

Ainsi Dieu ne sait pas, ainsi le divin Maître
Ne sait quel retenir et placer hors du lieu
Et pour lequel tenir, et s’il faut vraiment mettre
L’amour de la patrie après l’amour de Dieu.“