What counts is the wonder

What counts is the wonder
Articles and interviews on
CHARLES PéGUY
with a Foreword by
Cardinal Roger Etchegaray



FOREWORD

With Charles Péguy


Do you know him? Does your memory hold the cadenced pounding of his great verses? They tell of simple and profound things that accompany you for ever in life, to the step of a tireless infantryman.
If you have never had the joy of encountering him, here is a book giving you the opportunity ... but it will not be enough. Go quickly, afterwards, and immerse yourselves in the ocean of his writings. They are works with no shores. They are unclassifiable works, but still fresh and pertinent today. They are complex works, seen in different exegetical lights, but their furrows are clear, their foundations solid.
Péguy cannot be reduced to suit this or that hackneyed sum of his life, to this or that verse of his work. One must take all of him, take the time to make the great journey into him. Péguy. You will never come to the end of him! But what he teaches could be condensed into one evangelical truth: the more God there is, the more man. The mystery of the Incarnation is the leitmotiv of his entire work, as it was of his whole life as a Christian. "A God man, a man God". The faith is this bond between the eternal and the temporal.
_either of the Church’s two temptations – to favor the eternal over the temporal and to have the former swallow up the latter – could ever find reason to exist in Péguy’s writings. For they reflect a wondrous equilibrium. I like his genuine "anti-clericalism": "We are certainly sailing between two fleets of curates: the lay curates who deny the eternal in the temporal and the ecclesiastical curates who deny the temporal in the eternal".
"A Christian of the parish" – this, definitively, is all Péguy wanted to be. And tirelessly he contemplates the wonders of God in the history of men. His poetic genius lies in letting this prayer unfold in layer upon layer of beauty. Hans Urs von Balthasar was right when he said of him: "Péguy is indivisible. He is so because he is rooted in the depths, in the place where world and Church, world and grace meet and penetrate each other so that they become inseparable".

ROGER CARDINAL ETCHEGARAY



Péguy, Poet of the Wonder

by
GIANNI VALENTE



"A Christian child", writes Charles Péguy in one of his most controversial and still pertinent works (Un nouveau théologien, M. Fernand Laudet), "is just a child to whose eyes the infancy of Jesus has been presented a thousand times". When the infant Charles opened his eyes for the first time on January 7, 1873 in Orléans – at Number 50, Faubourg Bourgogne - the doings and the days of men were still being watered by the trickling springs of Christian France. In conversations and the daily round, there would still be sudden random flashes of a Christian people, poor folk "who went about and sang about" and who "repaired the straw on their chairs in the same spirit with which they sculpted their cathedrals". But the boy Charles cannot be said to have matched the description of the Christian child so dear to Péguy the adult. For, in his home and school environment, there were no people around him who lived that way, people who would familiarly turn a fond gaze to Jesus.
His father dead – Désiré Péguy, a carpenter, died when Charles was just 11 months old – his mother a spirited woman but so fatigued by her job repairing straw chairs that she could not find the time to go to Mass on Sundays, Péguy as a child would nevertheless have said his prayers every morning and evening. With the dedication typical of him, he attended his catechism lessons first at elementary school and then at the parish of Saint-Aignan where, in 1882, the teaching of Christian doctrine began to be restrained by the secular laws of Jules Ferry. The religious teaching that was imparted to him became in him an ethic of duty, work and sacrifice which was what this sensitive boy saw in his mother every day and in her ceaseless chores.
These were the days when Republican France was celebrating its secular glories, the ideology of work and nation, Joan of Arc and Michelet, Saint Louis and Victor Hugo. Even the Christian symbols, the stories and the images of sacred Judaeo-Christian history were enlisted to illustrate the moral principles of this civic religion. As early as elementary school, Charles’ teachers and others who left their mark were drawing their inspiration from an aggressive secularism suspicious of Catholicism. This secularism was also pushing Catholic doctrine out of public education in those years. Péguy studied Lavisse’s history textbooks, which depicted Church and monarchy as fossils of the Ancien Régime swept away by the Revolution. And, in the meantime, a report of the time warned that the parish of Saint-Aignan, Péguy’s own, was "badly attended and failed to reach the working classes, the people". Except for a few special holidays, the church was "empty", it said. But, independently of the different sides they were on, priests and secular educators alike seemed to have the same horizons in view in expending their energies; both propagated the same pedagogy of duty: "Both one and the other - and our parents before them - taught us that stupid moral sense which had been the making of France, which still stands today as a barrier to France’s undoing ... one side paternally, maternally, the other scholastically, intellectually, secularly; one side still devoutly, piously; but all ... taught, believed, made a point of that stupid moral sense".
Even before adolescence for this sensitive, studious boy who took everything so seriously, for this pet of the secular teachers so mystically committed to Ferry’s program of civil republican reconstruction, Christianity seemed to become a yoke of the past to be shaken off almost casually. Péguy writes to one of his teachers: "I made my First Communion yesterday. You can imagine the upheaval for Mama and me. This thing has taken me away from my school work. I haven’t been able to study since Sunday for any lesson ... thank goodness it’s over". In his junior years at the Orléans high school, which he was able to attend because of a municipal scholarship, he was an ecstatically enthusiastic student of the Greek and Latin classics and their maze of declinations. When he was 16, the high school abolished its voluntary classes of religious instruction. And, at 17 in his first year at the École normale supérieure, he felt no excessive inner torment when he stopped going to Mass on Sundays.
Then in August 1894, having failed two attempts and fulfilled his military service with the 131st Foot, Péguy was at last given a place at the École supérieure.
Péguy, the university student, was "bold, sullen and stupid", as he was to say of himself nearly 20 years later. The expressions of utopian, revolutionary socialism, the words of Proudhon de Leroux, were what enflamed his heart. In May 1895, he officially joined the Socialist Party, writing to a friend: "This conversion stands, perhaps, as the greatest event in my moral life". That same year, he asked for sabbatical leave from the École during which time he learned the printing trade and, with a group of like-minded militants, founded the Groupe d’études sociales d’Orléans, a social study center of Socialist inspiration. Two years later, he wrote to another friend: "Socialism is a new way of living and a by no means simple form of politics".
The revolutionary activism that Péguy embraced like a religion on the threshold of his young adulthood was entirely fuelled by the wrath that injustice provoked in him and empowered by the potential that all the oppressed had for redemption. "We do not accept that there are men being pushed out of the gates of any city", he would write in a Socialist manifesto of 1900.
Péguy’s socialism was the expression of a visceral need for real salvation, temporal salvation, the sort that lies, as desire, in the heart of every man. It was the expression of the struggle against what he would call "universal evil", of the hope for liberation from the state of alienation that capitalistic, bourgeois modernity had ordained as the essential one for millions of people. Years later, in his unsurpassed encyclical Quadragesimo anno, Pius XI would call this "the international imperialism of money" by which "home is where the profit is". "This economic strait", Péguy wrote in his work, L’argent, in 1913, "was unknown, this scientific strangulation, cold, rectangular, regular, decent, clean, smudge-free, implacable, considerate ... a strait in which one is held as if there could be no possible objections to it and whereby the person being strangled has every appearance of being so blatantly in the wrong".
In the eyes of Péguy, the young Socialist, two scars appeared on the face of the Catholic Church. On the temporal plane, it forged an alliance with the capitalistic bourgeoisie, prop of the new middle-class order, and bestowed its blessing on the tide of oppression and crime within it. On the spiritual plane, it manifested a clear conscience, was mathematically resigned to the probability that both temporal and eternal perdition – hell – would be the destiny of many. But when in 1897 he had finished his first play, it was discovered that he had chosen a Christian character to symbolize the desire for radical salvation animating his brand of socialism. He chose Joan of Arc, the peasant of Domrémy. On its opening pages, he dedicates this work "to all those men and women who will die their human death for the cause of a Universal Socialist Republic".
In October that same year, the 23-year-old Péguy married Charlotte Baudouin in a civil ceremony. She was the sister of Charles’ friend and comrade, Marcel, who had died in 1896 and who had co-written with him Marcel, premier dialogue de la cité harmonieuse, published using a pseudonym the next year. This was a marriage of militants. Charlotte came from a family of free thinkers dedicated to mystical socialism and who were Communard sympathizers. In November 1897, Péguy left the École with permission to attend Georges Lyon’s courses as a non-faculty student and, starting from February 1898, the lectures of Henri Bergson. In May, he opened the "George Bellais" Socialist Library in Paris and, investing all his wife’s considerable dowry in the venture, turned it into an editorial workshop. In September that year, the couple’s first child, Marcel, was born.
The years to come were difficult, tempestuous. He found it hard to make ends meet. He was depressed and disenchanted with his socialist ideals. The "city of harmony", that land of redemption he had so dreamed of in his youth, crashed to dust on the limitations, meanness and sheer badness of its builders.
A turning point was the Dreyfus affair, which had split France down the middle. With all the zeal of which he was capable, Péguy threw himself on the side of this Jewish soldier, unjustly accused of spying and condemned for treason. Péguy also signed petitions for a re-trial for Dreyfus that the French Army was striving to prevent. First, he clashed with socialists who, in the name of the class struggle, were boycotting the initiatives in defence of the "bourgeois" Dreyfus. He thus found himself in the same ranks as the reactionary clergy and went headlong towards collision with official, parliamentary and intellectual socialism. For, once in power, the Drefusards formed a majority "of republican guarantee" which soon became, under the minister Combes, a regime of religious persecution backed by Jaurès’ Socialists. For his part Jaurès, in the name of re-uniting Socialist forces, agreed in 1899 to the institution of censorship of his Party’s publications. Péguy rebelled against this diktat and, in January 1900, founded Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine, the journal he managed to keep going – by device and in an increasingly precarious fashion – until his death.
Until the end, the Cahiers would be the editorial and literary workshop in which Péguy’s experience as man and writer would be laid out. Its standard was freedom of opinion and the workshop housing the editorial office, transferred in autumn 1901 to Number 8 Rue de la Sorbonne, would come to represent a lively, permanent round table. It was a forum where Péguy’s motley crew of friends, who included labor union anarchists, agnostic Jews, socialists and free thinkers with literary ambitions, felt free to write with passion on the state and fate of socialism. In the course of time, the journal’s profile would change becoming more of a literary and critical review. This editorial enterprise of the Cahiers was sustained by subscriptions though it was mainly subsidized by the few faithful friends who shared Péguy’s same spirit or who felt a bond with this publisher sui generis.
Péguy anticipated all his works in Cahiers and, in Cahiers, he fought all his lone battles against the bloc that he would later identify as "the intellectual party". The primary targets of his invective were the opportunistic Dreyfusards who, in power, proved to be the bourgeoisie in disguise more intent on moulding a democracy out of middle-class vices than generating any "new way of living". Péguy wrote: "All of these great demagogues have done nothing to encourage a single additional bourgeois to work. On the contrary and with admirable success, they have obtained that the vast majority of producers have lost their taste for work, their work ethic, their sense and savor of work". And wherever the socialist dream does not flow back into the bourgeois power system, it decays to become totalitarian nightmare. As early as 1901, Péguy wrote: "Associating socialism with a system, linking socialism, even perhaps in the name of reason, with a scientific system, or an artistic or philosophical system means the betrayal proper of humanity ... Far from being definitive, socialism is a preliminary, a necessary condition but not sufficient". Between 1904 and 1905, he was prophetic in his description of this totalitarian drift. He called it a "socialist, governmental republic" where doctors in psychiatric hospitals would "take the place of the bloodletters of old".
Years later in thinking back on the time when he lived and struggled for an ideal of justice, Péguy would write with unsurpassed realism of the ultimately inevitable dynamics of every ideal born of man, including the religious variety. He wrote that whoever lived and struggled for an ideal – of truth, beauty, justice – would, through time, once the first flush had gone, inevitably don "a type of mask", a type of "stage deformation". Inevitably at a certain point, however still in good faith, we discover we are play-acting.
Péguy, however, abstains from acting the part which, at that time, would have been more convenient for him - the part of the deluded, embittered militant, of the repentant who spits a moralistic "I told you so" in the direction of his former comrades. He continued to believe his Cahiers to be "the last bulwark of freedom". He waged ceaseless war with the socialist neo-bourgeoisie who added their hostility to that of their reactionary counterparts in denigrating and ostracizing all that Péguy’s small publishing house produced on the Rue de la Sorbonne. In those years, he lived under the constant threat of professional failure as a publisher, not helped by the increasing difficulties of a growing family. In September 1901 his favorite child, Germaine, was born followed by Pierre in June 1903, his third. Moreover, the Péguy family’s precarious finances also had to keep Charles’ mother-in-law and brother-in-law. And at that very time of difficulty, Péguy felt that even the bond of "mystical secularism" that he had had with his wife, Charlotte, was unravelling; this, even as inadmissible feelings of tenderness crept into his weary days for Blanche Raphaël, a young Jewess who frequented the Cahiers workshop.
This was just the latest anguish in a long series given Péguy’s unyielding will to resist passion and keep faith with his marital obligations.
The man, then, who arrived at 1907-1908 prostrate, his health compromised, was a father of three fatigued by the thousand and one worries of a ceaselessly demanding life. In September 1908, a liver disease kept him bedridden for four weeks and he felt he was dying. He seemed to be on the verge of total collapse, emotional and material, and notions of suicide crept into his head. He wrote to his friend Pesloüan in November 1908: "If you were to hear that we had committed suicide all seven of us you would be eternally sorry. However, this is the temptation I am striving to defend myself against but with ever weaker results with every passing day".
But something new was beginning to happen, too, in Péguy’s life. It was a small thing, barely perceptible in the midst of all the stress, a weakly spring that began to trickle, on the sidelines at first, noiselessly and intimately. It nevertheless began to swell, then flow through his very desert of everydayness so airless and so modernly brittle. It was precisely at that time of manifest weakness that Péguy perceived this new beginning in his life. All the biographies mention his confidences to his friend, Jacques Maritain, and the story told by his other friend, Joseph Lotte, as Péguy’s first open admissions of this new fact. Lotte writes this in recalling a September 1908 visit to Péguy’s sickbed: "I found him prostrate, exhausted, sick. The doctor had diagnosed a disease of the liver. It must have been the great weight he had been sustaining for 12 years without let-up that brought him to this point of collapse ... He spoke to me of his distress, of his yearning for rest; some small school in which to teach philosophy, some high school far away, near me, in the provinces where he could give expression to everything he had inside without conflict, without hardship, without anguish ... At one point, he raised himself on one elbow and said, his eyes full of tears: ‘I haven’t told you everything ... I’ve got my faith back ... I am Catholic’."
And in addressing this change, it was Péguy himself in his writings who wrathfully, almost, denied that he could ever fit the hackneyed notion of convert. This was no "operation of return and regret". It was not the result of tormented reflection on his personal existential failures that led him to be "persuaded" by the eternal truths of Christian France. In discovering himself Catholic, Péguy attributes nothing to himself or to his intense explorations of the heart. Instead, he charges everything to the "action of grace" that works on hearts in a mysterious, effective way, intimate and real.
It was this experience, real and physical, of the action of grace as the sole source of the Christian life ("Without me you can do nothing") that made Péguy a Christian who would be foreign to the Christendom constituted by his time and ours.
His contemporaries would never read his first work on discovering himself Catholic that he had started to write in the summer of 1909. It was Véronique. Dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme charnelle, published incomplete and posthumously in 1955. The distance between the editor of the Cahiers and the system of thought that reigned in the official Catholic world is already perceptible in this first text. His intuition about the nature and dimensions of de-Christianization is light years away from the pulsations of the Catholic reactionaries combating modernity by striving to restore the Christian order. And it is equally far removed from the analyses typical of intellectuals who see it as a question of contriving new ways to arouse a cultural interest in Christianity in the minds of their contemporaries. What Péguy glimpsed from his observation point over the years at Cahiers was "the renunciation by the whole world of the whole of Christianity". Even if they were anti-clerical, his secular teachers in his elementary schooldays still lived out their good citizen ethic to the feeble beat of the Christian drum. But what was emerging now on modernity’s horizon was a radical absence of relationship, a total extraneousness, a complete cancellation ("We have the pain of seeing entire worlds, entire humanities living and prospering after Jesus. Without Jesus one and the other").
Péguy does not blame the free thinkers for this state of affairs, or the militant atheists or the relativists. He writes: "It is no secret, can no longer be a secret, except perhaps in the seminaries, that de-Christianization has come totally from the clergy. It does not come from the laity. It comes from the priests. ‘Procedit a clericis’." In describing this disaster, Péguy the Christian does not put away the realization which had previously dawned on Péguy the Socialist that their political crime by virtue of their alliance with the constituted order was having made Christianity "a religion of the middle classes, a religion of the rich, a sort of upper-crust religion for the upper crust". Deeper down, rather, the disaster of de-Christianization is rooted in an "error of mystics", which consists in stripping away "the mystery and the workings of grace", ignoring, denying, failing to recognize the befalling of grace in time, all that the Lord effectively brings to pass and, therefore, visibly too in the here and now. There is thus a denial of "the very mechanism of Christianity", which is that grace can only come upon and move the human heart if it shines forth in the flesh, if the effect of its befalling can be seen temporally, in the time and space of the human condition.
Why was this mystical sin committed? Ultimately, Péguy suggests, it was a question of control, a desire not to be prone to that dizzying insecuritas, to that feature, precariousness, which is the mark of everyone who, with the heart and the eyes of a child, stands humbly dependent on the continuous starting over of the action of grace. Such a condition is intolerable to the ecclesiastics and the religious intellectuals: "They are always losing sight of the precariousness which, for the Christian, is man’s most innate condition. They lose sight of that profound wretchedness. And they are mindless to the constant need to start over again and again". For this reason, they have expended all their energies in making Christianity slither into a state of religious idealism, a state of system of eternal ideas (the idea of the Creation, the idea of the Incarnation, the idea of Grace, the idea of Christ). And so they themselves, in their capacity as experts and "taking particular professional pride", may keep their control over it, may assert their power over the people who remain faithful, may stake their claim to temporal hegemony in the name of the Eternal, as Péguy suggests in his last work, Note conjointe sur M. Descartes et la philosophie cartesienne (begun in the spring of 1914, but published only ten years later incomplete and posthumously). "Since they do not have the strength (or the grace) to be ‘of nature’, they believe to be ‘of grace’ ... Since they do not have the courage to be ‘of the world’, they believe to be ‘of God’. Since they do not have the courage to be ‘of one of the human parties’, they believe to be ‘of the party of God’. Since they are not ‘of man’, they believe to be ‘of God’. Since they love no one, they believe to love God".
_hus, by claiming to control and change the world in a religious sense, they do not pray to ask the Lord to save it. Instead, "the effectiveness of so many prayers generally well-prayed has been cancelled, of so many Sacraments generally well-conferred, well-administered, generally well-received". The priests "strive to demolish the little that remains ... The in-born element of their interventions is always to contradict the workings of grace, always to run counter and with terrifying patience".
Even this prophetic vision in describing Christianity’s collapse into modernity, however, is possible because of something that preceeds all else, something that could not ever be confused with the anathemas of the clerical prophets of doom. Already in Véronique, Péguy was indicating that this same age of desert and demolition was also the most exalting. For, it is in precisely this desert full of ruins run through with "infamous parodies" of Christianity that the wonder of the beginning can strike again. And if under such conditions the Christian life as vulnerable seed takes root, then it is even clearer that this new beginning does not just happen but is the fruit of a miracle, of all that the living Lord can bring to pass today. Just as he did at the beginning when he came and "did not incriminate, did not accuse anyone. He saved. He did not incriminate the world. He saved the world. And yet there were evils of the time. Of his time. The modern world had come. And he cut things short. In a very simple way. By making Christianity".
The thread of gold running through all of Péguy’s Christian works is this possibility that Christianity can be a new, vulnerable beginning of grace, as he himself experienced when Christian hope gratuitously flowered in the bitterest days of his life. The thread is particularly evident in his Three Mysteries and, deep down, it also traverses the battles he fought in his writing and the polemics he entered into.
In January 1910, Le mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc appeared in Cahiers. It reproduces the literary structure of the drama Péguy the Socialist wrote in 1897. He intended it to be the first in a series of Mysteries to be staged in a celebration of Joan of Arc in Orléans. In this new work, Péguy added notes and inserted passages but did not cancel a line of the previous version confirming that Péguy the Christian denied nothing of his past. This first Christian work of Péguy’s became the topic of public debate. The "Péguy Affair" was born with Catholic reactionaries trying to link the former Dreyfusard anarchist with the monarchist right-wing. They claimed he had repented and, at the same time, they generated suspicion about the writer’s Catholic orthodoxy. The letter written by Georges Dumesnil, Catholic intellectual and editor of L’Amitié de France, to Lotte is a case in point: "It seems to me that your Péguy is a very suspicious character from this point of view. It seems gross to me that Jesus, who is the Logos incarnate, could be disconcerted. If the mind divine can be disconcerted, then ... it’s goodnight!". On the other front his comrades of old including Daniel Halévy, a Jew, sustained that their friend had gone back "to the religious and patriotic myths of old which had been the milk of his childhood". Péguy reacted in Cahiers with Notre jeunesse, proud vindication of his past: "Our socialism was a religion of temporal salvation. It was positively so, was nothing less ... Christianity itself, which is the religion of eternal salvation, is bogged in the bog, very bog of corruption both economic and industrial; there is no way out without an economic, industrial revolution... in short, there is no better-made place of perdition, or better-ordered, or better-equipped, no instrument of perdition better-construed than the modern factory".
In his Christian adventure, the passion for temporal redemption, the real redemption of men that was the heart of his socialism, found its fulfilment. He lived out this faith as thankful wonder and beseeching in the presence of grace that unfolds in the here and now. It did not herald having plenty to do, or any kind of premise or any kind of effect for later development. The editor of Cahiers did not devise any new thing or any new Christianity. The action of grace as it is perceived in one’s life is primarily a help to abide by the Tradition, to rediscover it and savor its inexhaustible treasures and their cogent consolation of deliverance. In 1911, Péguy wrote his polemical work, Un nouveau théologien, M. Fernand Laudet, to counter the "new theologian", representative of the more obtuse brand of modernity which had panned the Mystère de la charité. In this work in which he names the sources keeping his generic Christianity alive, Péguy makes his confession as a sinner who "goes to Mass on Sundays in his parish church" and who enjoys the "treasures of grace divine" – the Mass and the Offices, the catechism and the sacred liturgy, the Gospel, devotion for the Virgin and the saints, passion for Joan of Arc and French Christendom. The Christian training he had been given as a child, at school and at his local church and which he then seemed to have forgotten was blossoming again in his memory. It was like a pleasant surprise, a precious gift he had never realized he had. Deep down his faith, Péguy says, lies totally within the catechism of the diocese of Orléans, "the catechism of the parish one was born into, that of small children".
But Péguy was unable to draw deeply from this longed-for condition of Christian ordinariness because he would always be devoid of the comfort of the Eucharist and Confession as a result of the irregularity of his particular personal situation.
When Péguy discovered himself Christian, his atheist wife and her communard family clan greeted this news with rigid coldness. Charlotte would not hear of marrying in church or having the children baptized. And so, under Church law, Péguy was living in sin, a public sinner who could not be given the Sacraments. Because of this condition, he had to live on the fringes of the Church, on the threshold, in the space reserved in the first Christian churches for catechumenates. This was a constant source of pain for him. But, even as he suffered, it was also a paradoxical summons to humility, a mysteriously propitious opportunity, a conditioning, to remain in the precarious state of the beginner, in the apparent fragility of the first germination of Christian hope.
Besides the pain in his heart at being unable to partake of the Sacraments, Péguy also had to endure in the last years of his life the permanent "siege" laid by his "devoted" friends – priests and intellectuals of the official Catholic world. They accused him of moral laxity in his dithering about "normalizing" his family situation to bring it within the confines of Catholic morality. Some suggested he have his children baptized secretly, to use force with his wife. Some even advised him to leave her if she would not agree. Repeatedly in his works, Péguy was to rail against these intemperate priestly outpourings. Already in Véronique, he described the dizzying condition of a father whose bonds of flesh with his wife and children could become a source of concern, a means of blackmail by priests and intellectuals, by people who had no real bonds with anything. In Note conjointe sur M. Descartes he wrote: "The honest people do not let themselves be sprinkled with grace. It is a question of molecular and globular physics. What is said to be moral is a layer making man impermeable to grace. As a result, grace works on the greatest of criminals and raises up the most wretched of sinners again. For it began by penetrating them, by being able to penetrate them. The result of this is that the creatures dearest to us, if they are unfortunately layered over with morality, are unassailable by grace, impenetrable ... Therefore, nothing is more contrary to what is called (rather shamefully) religion than all that is called morality. Morality is a grace-proof layer over man".
To get through the difficulties and stresses of his final years, Péguy draws upon the comfort of prayer to which he continues to have access. He is at his most moving in his exaltation of the comforting force of grace accessible to every Christian through the simplest of prayers. He is like a child excited by the simplest and therefore dearest gift from his mother. Thus Péguy is testifying that the crumbs of grace are enough as a comfort in life, by the will of God. He writes: "Since the parish priests are in charge of the administration of the Sacraments, they let people believe that there is nothing beyond the Sacraments. But they forget to say that there is also prayer. They are the holders of the former but we are the ones who always have the latter". These are what he calls "prayer reserves": "In the mechanism of salvation, the Ave Maria is the extreme succor. You cannot lose with that". And Péguy asks Mary for everything he holds most dear. When his children are sick, he goes on a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Chartres seeking the grace of healing. His devotion for Notre Dame de la Beauce was to be a precious source of comfort for the poet in his final years.
Also in crescendo in the last five years of his life was his literary output, still being published in the Cahiers series. In October 1910, he published Victor-Marie, comte Hugo. The next year came Un nouveau théologien, M. Fernand Laudet and Le porche du mystère de la deuxième vertu. In 1912, there followed Le mystère des saints Innocents and La tapisserie de sainte Geneviève et de Jeanne d’Arc. In 1913, L’argent, L’argent suite and La tapisserie de Notre-Dame appeared (collating all the poetry and prayers born in him on the road during his pilgrimages to Our Lady of Chartres). In December that same year, he published his imposing poem, Ève, followed in April 1914 by the Note sur M. Bergson et la philosophie bergsonienne. In August he was forced to suspend work on Note conjointe sur M. Descartes and to leave the Cahiers premises. For, in the very midst of his turbulent life so charged with things to say and do there came a hurricane in the form of the Great War. Lieutenant Péguy left for the front on August 1 with the 276th Foot fighting the Lorraine campaign and later, in early September, engaged in the Paris retreat. On September 5 just as the Battle of the Marne near Villeroy had begun rifle fire caught him full in the forehead. Five months later, on February 4 1915, Charles Pierre, his fourth son was born.
He had written once in one of his regular letters to his friend, Lotte, of his exhaustion during one of his summer pilgrimages to Chartres: "I might have died. It was so hot. It would be wonderful to die on a roadside and go to heaven in the wink of an eye".

30DAYS No. 1 - 2001





Prière de Résidence

from
La tapisserie de Notre-Dame




O Regina, here, after the long road,
Before taking to that path again,
The only asylum in the hollow of your hand
And the garden where the soul opens up.

Here the pillar and the vault rising up;
And the oblivion of yesterday, and the oblivion of tomorrow
And the futility of human calculations;
And more so than sin, wisdom in ruins.

Here the place in the world where everything becomes easy,
The regret, the start and also the event,
And the temporary farewell and the separation,
The one corner of the earth where everything is made docile.
...
Here the place in the world where temptation
Is overturned and set the other way,
Because here what is tempting is submission;
And it is the darkening of the immense universe.
...
It is rebellion that becomes impossible
And what comes is abandonment.
And it is modesty that becomes invincible
And all of this is but greeting and reverence.
...
And all that everywhere else is oppression
Here is but the effect of a noble self-annulment,

All that everywhere else is great activity
Here is but legacy and succession.
...
All that everywhere else is old age
Seated by the fireside, hands on knees
Here is but tenderness and concern
And two maternal arms stretched out to us.
...
We have travelled such distant roads
We have no further taste for foreign lands.
Queen of the confessors, of the virgins and of the angels
Here we are come back to our first villages.

So much has been said, O Queen of the Apostles,
We have lost the taste for discourse
We have no more altars but yours
We know nothing but a simple prayer.
...
All that everywhere else demands an examination
Here is but the effect of a defenceless youthfulness.
All that everywhere else requires postponement
Here is but a present fragility.

All that everywhere else demands certification
Here is but the fruit of a poor tenderness.
All that everywhere else requires a touch of skill
Here is but the fruit of a humble ineptitude.

All that everywhere else is imbalance
Here is but measure and grading,
All that everywhere else is a hut
Here is but a solid and lasting dwelling-place.
...
All that everywhere else is constriction by the rule
Here is but an impetus and abandonment;

All that everywhere else is a harsh penalty
Here is but a weakness that is relieved.
...
All that everywhere else would be a great effort
Here is but simplicity and quiet;
All that everywhere else is the wrinkled rind
Here is but the lymph and the tears of the vine.
...
All that everywhere else is a twisting
Here is but a release and defencelessness;
All that everywhere else is a contraction
Here is but calm and silent involvement.

All that everywhere else is a degradable good
Here is but quiet and rapid disengagement;
All that everywhere else is a rigidity
Here is but a rose and a footprint in the sand.
...
All that everywhere else is questioned and taken up
Here is but a clear river near the source;
O Queen, it is here that every soul comes
Like a young warrior fallen by the wayside.

All that everywhere else is a steep road,
O Queen reigning in your royal court,
Star of the morning, Queen of the last day,
All that everywhere else is the table laid,

All that everywhere else is the sense of the road travelled
Here is but a serene and firm detachment,
And in a temple of calm, far from the flat anxiety
The expectation of a death more alive than life.


30DAYS No. 11 -










An invitation to read Péguy

by
LUCIO BRUNELLI



The truly blasphemous thing about the modern world is its suspicion in regard to Jesus Christ, the suspicion that he is not man’s true and lasting happiness but, deep down, an additional burden, his enslavement. Charles Péguy suggests the answer to this modern curse.
He died in the first battle of the 1914-1918 war. His life, as he himself liked to put it, was a wager. He said: "I am not a saint, because saints are immediately visible; I am a sinner, a good sinner, a sinner who goes to Mass on Sunday in the parish; I am a sinner with the treasures of grace divine".
Péguy lived an unusual life, just as his membership of the Church was unusual. For, he shared his existence with a woman who was atheist, who never agreed to have their children baptised. And so, though Catholic, profoundly Catholic, he was unable to partake of the Sacraments of the Church. He was always on the fringes of the Church, in the "portico", which is also the source, the place where the pagan becomes Christian. When he re-discovered Catholicism, Péguy said: "I deny nothing of my past life: all I did was travel to the very end of the road".
He sang of the drama of the modern man – the man who suspects that Jesus Christ is not the Redeemer – in his three Mystères. The first is Le mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc. He wrote it when he was still a socialist (and, once converted, he never changed the structure of it). This poem rests on his perception of a drama – that, in the presence of today’s suspicion, the true response, the dogmatic, traditional one of the Church is not enough. The response is certainly true and the teacher of the novices re-affirms it: "He is here as on the first day …". But, for Joan the protagonist, this is not enough. As Father Luigi Giussani told the 1987 Synod of Bishops: "What is lacking is not the literal repetition of the message". The message is there, the dogma is being re-affirmed (and this is the only thing asked of us and which, by grace, is always possible – to dwell in the truth). But, for Joan of Arc, the affirmed dogma is not enough. It’s as if it is not replying to the question, to the blasphemy that we carry inside us unconsciously. It is certainly true that He came. It is certainly true that He is present but "modern perdition both temporal and eternal" is stronger. Today’s suspicion is stronger than all the dogmatic truth. And there seems to be no real answer to this perdition and this suspicion in the here and now.
In the second of the Mystères, Le porche du mystère de la deuxième vertu, Péguy glimpses the response – the possibility that the beginning will happen again, as it happened 2,000 years ago. The second Mystère does not speak to us of "hope" but of the "portico of the second virtue", or the beginning of hope. That the initial wonder might strike again is what dispels the modern man’s suspicion, that an encounter identical to the one described in the Gospels might happen again. In this encounter, it is not the truth about Jesus Christ that is recognized as the true response to the more or less conscious expectation of the heart, but His bodily reality in the here and now.
Péguy sings of the encounter as the budding of hope, an initially fragile thing like the first leaf of spring, like a shoot tiny enough to be snapped off in the fingers of the next passing stranger. But that’s how the beginning of the Christian life is in today’s world.
In the opening lines of his third Mystère, Le mystère des Saints Innocents, Péguy summarizes the previous two:

"Faith is a church, a cathedral rooted in the soil of France.
Charity is a hospital, a refuge taking in all the wretchednesses of the world.
But without Hope all of this would be but a cemetery".
And later on:

"Because it is easier, God says, to ruin than to build;
And to let die than to allow birth;
And to give death than to give life;
And the shoot has no resistance;
This is also because it is not made for resistance,
not commissioned to resist.
It is the trunk, the branch and the root that are made for resistance, that are commissioned to resist.
And it is the rough rind that is made to be durable
And commissioned to be rough.
But the tender shoot is made only for birth
And is commissioned only to allow birth.
(And to allow durability).
(And to let itself be loved)".

This Catholicity, the eye focused on reality, is the most remarkable thing in Péguy, because it is not true that that shoot is not made to be durable. Indeed, there can be no durability at all except for that bud of hope, unless the beginning happens again and again, in wonder, without ceasing. "Now I tell you, God says, without this end-of-April hope … all of my Creation would just be one immense cemetery".
In his third Mystère, Péguy sings of what happens to a man when the beginning befalls him again. The first human proof is that the whole crescendo of wonder, not just the beginning, is grace. The Mystère sings of the Innocent Saints killed by Herod out of hatred for Jesus Christ, saints though none has contributed anything in terms of conscience of liberty. It was pure gift. Péguy lists the seven reasons why God favors these children. Everything here is grace. And it is grace that arouses man’s liberty, his perception of gift. If it were not for grace, man’s response would not be true liberty. The trace of a claim would always be there. It would not be authentically free. So, man’s "yes" would not be happiness. "In tua devotione gaudere", is the prayer of the liturgy.
The second human proof is that we can experience this event of grace in real time, just as it is, within the current framework of worldly power, therefore. In fact, the example Péguy cites is not Saint Francis but Saint Louis, the holy king, the king of the Franks killed in a crusade. When the wonder is so real, when grace encounters the heart of a man drawing him to it in total liberty, pure and simple, freely, then it transfigures the everyday of life, the most compromised of life’s circumstances.
One is reminded again of Fr. Giussani’s address to the 1987 Synod: "What is lacking is not so much the verbal repetition of the message as the experience of an encounter. Today’s man is waiting, perhaps unconsciously, for the experience of an encounter with individuals for whom the fact of Christ is such an actively present thing that their lives changed".
It is the human impact that will stir the man of today, an event that echoes the initial fact, when Jesus looked up and said: "Zaccheus, come down, I am coming to your house". And this encounter is always accompanied by deliverance from things human: "Whoever follows me will have eternal life and a hundred times more on earth".
The grace of an encounter, which truly and freely corresponds to the heart, makes us start to follow and sets us in a dwelling-place ("Come and see! And so they went and saw where he lived and they stayed with him that day. It was about four in the afternoon").
The grace of this dwelling-place, made of faces and things, keeps intact and ever new the wonder of the encounter. Dwelling in this place makes all that seems impossible outside easy (as Péguy says in the first of his Five Prayers in the Cathedral of Chartres). "Here the place where everything becomes easy… also the event".
Father Giussani wrote in The Religious Conscience of the Modern Man: "Man becomes himself, journeys towards his fulfilment by grace. How does this grace act? Nature provides us with an illustration of it. Let us ask ourselves how a child becomes a man. He acquires his physical features, his bodily form, grows up with his own unmistakable personality by virtue of a continuous osmosis owing to his belonging to a fact that has its own structure and face: the family. The more marked the features of the family, the more conscious and rich in humanity it is, the more the child will develop his own personality.
"Christianity, through the objective postulation of the fact that leads man to his destiny, proposes salvation to us as grace, that is, as something given that is immanent to and perseveres within a living reality. Thus also the adult is ‘saved’, or grows, finds himself changed through time, matures, discovers himself increasingly immanent to Him for whom he is made and to whom his whole nature cries out".

30Giorni, No. 8/9, August-September 1992


An invitation to read Péguy

by
LUCIO BRUNELLI



The truly blasphemous thing about the modern world is its suspicion in regard to Jesus Christ, the suspicion that he is not man’s true and lasting happiness but, deep down, an additional burden, his enslavement. Charles Péguy suggests the answer to this modern curse.
He died in the first battle of the 1914-1918 war. His life, as he himself liked to put it, was a wager. He said: "I am not a saint, because saints are immediately visible; I am a sinner, a good sinner, a sinner who goes to Mass on Sunday in the parish; I am a sinner with the treasures of grace divine".
Péguy lived an unusual life, just as his membership of the Church was unusual. For, he shared his existence with a woman who was atheist, who never agreed to have their children baptised. And so, though Catholic, profoundly Catholic, he was unable to partake of the Sacraments of the Church. He was always on the fringes of the Church, in the "portico", which is also the source, the place where the pagan becomes Christian. When he re-discovered Catholicism, Péguy said: "I deny nothing of my past life: all I did was travel to the very end of the road".
He sang of the drama of the modern man – the man who suspects that Jesus Christ is not the Redeemer – in his three Mystères. The first is Le mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc. He wrote it when he was still a socialist (and, once converted, he never changed the structure of it). This poem rests on his perception of a drama – that, in the presence of today’s suspicion, the true response, the dogmatic, traditional one of the Church is not enough. The response is certainly true and the teacher of the novices re-affirms it: "He is here as on the first day …". But, for Joan the protagonist, this is not enough. As Father Luigi Giussani told the 1987 Synod of Bishops: "What is lacking is not the literal repetition of the message". The message is there, the dogma is being re-affirmed (and this is the only thing asked of us and which, by grace, is always possible – to dwell in the truth). But, for Joan of Arc, the affirmed dogma is not enough. It’s as if it is not replying to the question, to the blasphemy that we carry inside us unconsciously. It is certainly true that He came. It is certainly true that He is present but "modern perdition both temporal and eternal" is stronger. Today’s suspicion is stronger than all the dogmatic truth. And there seems to be no real answer to this perdition and this suspicion in the here and now.
In the second of the Mystères, Le porche du mystère de la deuxième vertu, Péguy glimpses the response – the possibility that the beginning will happen again, as it happened 2,000 years ago. The second Mystère does not speak to us of "hope" but of the "portico of the second virtue", or the beginning of hope. That the initial wonder might strike again is what dispels the modern man’s suspicion, that an encounter identical to the one described in the Gospels might happen again. In this encounter, it is not the truth about Jesus Christ that is recognized as the true response to the more or less conscious expectation of the heart, but His bodily reality in the here and now.
Péguy sings of the encounter as the budding of hope, an initially fragile thing like the first leaf of spring, like a shoot tiny enough to be snapped off in the fingers of the next passing stranger. But that’s how the beginning of the Christian life is in today’s world.
In the opening lines of his third Mystère, Le mystère des Saints Innocents, Péguy summarizes the previous two:

"Faith is a church, a cathedral rooted in the soil of France.
Charity is a hospital, a refuge taking in all the wretchednesses of the world.
But without Hope all of this would be but a cemetery".
And later on:

"Because it is easier, God says, to ruin than to build;
And to let die than to allow birth;
And to give death than to give life;
And the shoot has no resistance;
This is also because it is not made for resistance,
not commissioned to resist.
It is the trunk, the branch and the root that are made for resistance, that are commissioned to resist.
And it is the rough rind that is made to be durable
And commissioned to be rough.
But the tender shoot is made only for birth
And is commissioned only to allow birth.
(And to allow durability).
(And to let itself be loved)".

This Catholicity, the eye focused on reality, is the most remarkable thing in Péguy, because it is not true that that shoot is not made to be durable. Indeed, there can be no durability at all except for that bud of hope, unless the beginning happens again and again, in wonder, without ceasing. "Now I tell you, God says, without this end-of-April hope … all of my Creation would just be one immense cemetery".
In his third Mystère, Péguy sings of what happens to a man when the beginning befalls him again. The first human proof is that the whole crescendo of wonder, not just the beginning, is grace. The Mystère sings of the Innocent Saints killed by Herod out of hatred for Jesus Christ, saints though none has contributed anything in terms of conscience of liberty. It was pure gift. Péguy lists the seven reasons why God favors these children