Part 20

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.