The Poet as Believer

A Theological Study of Paul Claudel

Aidan Nichols, O.P.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409426851
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317021124
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire en poésie

This is the first comprehensive study of the theological significance of Paul Claudel, a poet frequently cited by literary-minded theologians in Europe and theologically-minded poets (such as von Balthasar, de Lubac and Eliot). His writing combines cosmology and history, Bible and metaphysics, liturgy and the drama of human personality. His work, which continues to arouse discussion in France, was acclaimed in his lifetime as the 'summa poetica' of a new Dante. Aidan Nichols' study demonstrates how Claudel's oeuvre, which is not only poetry but theatre and prose including biblical commentaries, constitutes a rich resource for constructive doctrine, liturgical preaching, and theological reflection. As the comparable example of Geoffrey Hill, Professor of Poetry at Oxford suggests, Aidan Nichols illuminates how Claudel's synthesis of many dimensions remains an important way of practising poetry in the Christian tradition today.

Chapter 1 Claudel's Way

DOI: 10.4324/9781315554600-1

Rural Beginnings

Paul Claudel was born on 6 August 1868. That was, and is, the feast of the Transfiguration, a Gospel episode he would celebrate in his verse and return to in his prose. His natal place was the village of Villeneuve-sur-Fère, a dot on the landscape of France in the département of Aisne which reaches from the Ardennes to the valley of the Marne. Villeneuve was comparatively isolated, though typical of its region, the Tardenois, a land of fields, forests and modest hills. Farming country, chiefly dairy, it would suffer terribly in the First World War. Claudel only lived there for a couple of years but he went back as often as he could for vacations, at any rate until his first diplomatic posting abroad in 1893. The place remained a lode-star for him till his marriage in 1906. The special attraction was the house his mother had inherited from her uncle, the erstwhile parish priest of the place, the year after Paul’s birth. He would retain the local accent – surprising for an ambassador, one biographer comments. ¹

1 M.-J. Guers, Paul Claudel. Biographie (Arles, Actes du Sud, 1987), p. 20. The author is basing her judgment on surviving sound recordings.

In ‘Mon Pays’, Claudel set out to describe the village atmosphere and in so doing revealed his own profound sense of rooting in the history of France (as well as the attraction to him of wider horizons). He noted the proximity of a Gallo-Roman fortress in Merovingian times, putting him in mind of St Geneviève; feudal connexions with the knight who protected St Louis at the battle of Mansoura, and how, during the Hundred Years’ War, St Joan must have passed close by on her way to the sacring of the Dauphin at Rheims. ² (In more secular mode, the family of the seventeenth-century lords of the manor included Seneca’s French translator, the teacher of the fabulist Jean de La Fontaine.) The family home lay in the shadow of a bell-tower. From the Vespers chant to which the bells summoned the faithful – Sunday Vespers was quite common in French parishes till driven out by evening Masses in the mid-twentieth century – he took, so he claimed, the psalm-like feeling for prosody which led him to abandon the classical French verse structure, the rhyming hexameter or ‘Alexandrine’. ³ It was in this house, or the adjacent church, that he was, he tells us, ‘consecrated to the Virgin’, following a family tradition stemming from a pious forbear who had sheltered a priest during the worst excesses of the Revolution. ⁴ Looking back from the late 1930s, Claudel remembered an austere place, wet and windy. If he had devoured Butler’s Lives of the Saints (presumably in translation), he had also found satisfaction in anticipating the Last Judgment, on All Saints’ Night, the Eve of All Souls, as the bells tolled tirelessly ‘amid torrents of an icy rain’. ⁵ As child or youth he had strange presentiments of a ‘latent tragedy’ in this landscape, which entered into the plots and language of his first plays, Tête d’or and La Ville. The First World War, he thought, more than fulfilled them. ⁶ Claudel’s biographer Louis Chaigne, whose study Vie de Paul Claudel et genèse de son oeuvre is based on interview and observation as well as written sources, held that ‘landscape and nature represented the great resource of this boy’. ⁷ A habit of long solitary walks persisted till late in life, though Chaigne is careful to note how the desire for solitude alternated in Claudel’s temperament with the wish for ‘participation in universal life’ to which his professional career bears witness. ⁸

2 ‘Mon Pays’, Oeuvres en prose (Paris, Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1965), pp. 1004–5. 3 Ibid., p. 1005. 4 Ibid., p. 1006. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., p. 1007. 7 L. Chaigne, Vie de Paul Claudel et genèse de son oeuvre (Tours, Mame, 1961), p. 25. 8 Ibid., p. 26.

Of Claudel’s mother and father, responsible but not especially affectionate parents who lacked the secret of harmonious home-making for Paul and his two sisters, he seems to have been somewhat closer to his mother, Louise Cerveaux, six generations of whose ancestors were buried in the village graveyard. The Vosges, the home country of his father, Louis-Prosper, made less impression on him, and it might be considered a cause of surprise that the future poet, for whom the appreciation of personality was so singularly bound up with locale and tradition, chose to follow a father only moderately loved by imitating his career as a civil servant. Needless to say, as French ambassador to Denmark, Japan, the United States, and Belgium, Paul would be in a different league from a small-time comptroller of mortgages. Claudel’s father was a deist and hostile to the Second Empire that had accepted him as a public servant. Curiously, this prophesied, in inverted fashion, his son’s own situation as a fervent Catholic in the service of a strongly anti-clerical regime, the Third French Republic. By and large, the biographers have considered Claudel’s almost total silence about his parents to be itself eloquent. ⁹ The family circle was tense, and the parents were not his models. Claudel would later insist that the family unit be regarded not as an end in itself but as a means to serve God and neighbour. This was a true lesson, theologically speaking, and it was learned in a hard school.

9 M.-J. Guers, Paul Claudel, p. 28.

Education and Conversion

Louise Claudel was by no means dévote, but when for reasons of Louis-Prosper’s work the family moved to Bar-le-Duc, in Lorraine, in 1870, Paul was sent for schooling to the Sisters of Christian Doctrine – to whom he later ascribed his knowledge of the essentials of Catholicism and, especially, a reservoir of Bible stories. Six years later, the family moved again, to Nogent-sur-Seine, this time to be near Paris. Louis-Prosper had his eye on the Parisian art world, since his elder daughter Camille was beginning to show exceptional prowess as a sculptress. (Her life would be ruined by an unhappy affair with the sculptor Auguste Rodin, as evoked in Bruno Nuytten’s acclaimed film, from 1988, Camille Claudel.) ¹⁰ Several more moves supervened in this ‘nomadic childhood’. ¹¹ The first, in 1876, was to Wassy-sur-Blaise in the Haute-Marne. Here Paul made his first Communion of which he was to note sadly, it was ‘the crown and termination’ of his religious practice as a boy. ¹² The educational needs of all three children motivated the final move of the family to Paris: in 1882, to the boulevard Montparnasse, in 1883 to the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, in 1885 to the boulevard Port-Royal. From these various addresses in what struck him as an octopus-like and formless city Paul attended the prestigious Collège Louis-le-Grand, the continuation of the once celebrated Jesuit Collège de Clermont. Writing in 1913, he recorded how he lost his faith there almost immediately. A particular difficulty was the ‘plurality of worlds’, i.e. inhabited planets. ¹³

10 See G. Bouté, Camille Claudel: le miroir et la nuit. Essai sur l’art de Camille Claudel (Paris, Amateur, 1995). 11 M.-J. Guers, Paul Claudel, p. 32. 12 ‘Ma Conversion’, in Oeuvres en prose, p. 1008. 13 Ibid. In his 1910 ‘Lettre sur Coventry Patmore’, he wrote that ‘there is no conception more foolishly dizzy-making, more deleterious for the imagination and more completely lowering for our dignity’, ibid., p. 531, appealing for support to A.R. Wallace’s The Place of Man in the Universe: A Study of the Results of Scientific Research in Relation to the Unity or Plurality of Worlds (London, Chapman and Hall, 1903) for his counter-claim that the conditions permitting the emergence of rational life are so complex and delicately balanced that it is improbable they could be met at more than one point in the universe. More recent writers have termed this the ‘anthropic cosmological principle’.

At his school, as on the French (and notably the Parisian) intellectual scene generally, agnosticism, generally of a materialist variety, was in the ascendant. The agnostic historian of religion Ernest Renan and the Positivist historian of ideas Hippolyte Taine were the names to conjure with. Camille Claudel announced her formal apostasy from Catholicism to a not especially scandalized family circle after reading the former. Paul identified his own reading of Renan’s Vie de Jésus as one of numerous pretexts for abandoning the Christian faith. More widely:

The robust idea of the individual and the concrete had become obscure in me. I accepted the monist and mechanist hypothesis in all its rigour; I believed that all was subject to ‘laws’ and that this world was a rigid concatenation of effects and causes that science would succeed in disentangling perfectly the day after tomorrow. ¹⁴

14 Oeuvres en prose, p. 1009. A nuanced if impressionistic account of the Parisian scene in the 1880s is offered by G. Antoine, Paul Claudel, ou l’enfer du genie, 2nd edition (Paris, Robert Laffont, 2004), pp. 36–41.

The mechanistic monism of a speculative Positivism was subversive of meaning. Its existential consequences could be poisonous. Claudel could not take seriously the claims of his Kantian philosopher teacher to have found an adequate antidote. In 1885 he considered suicide. What was the point of life in a materialist universe where morals could only be a farce? That may sound extreme, but it was also the reaction, slightly later, of the young Jacques and Raïssa Maritain. ¹⁵

15 R. McInerny, The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain. A Spiritual Life (Notre Dame, Ind., University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), pp. 14–18.

In fact, however, a sea change was occurring. The cosmology and ethics of Henri Bergson, the aesthetics and religion of Joris-Karl Huysmans, the success of the – religiously, deeply engaged – Russian novel introduced into France by Eugène Melchior de Vogüé, were some of the factors that played a part in the fading of a fashionable Positivism, indeed the de-centring of the mid-nineteenth-century natural scientific paradigm for the knowledge of reality. Claudel himself traced the first breach in his own much regretted but, as it seemed, inevitable materialism to his reading of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, a mélange of poetry and prose into which this violently passionate figure poured his own exotic and revolutionary visions of the real. Along with Rimbaud’s Une saison en Enfer, the work of a ‘mystic in the savage state’, these books, wrote Claudel in ‘Ma Conversion’, ‘opened a fissure in my materialist penal servitude and gave me the living and almost physical impression of the supernatural’. ¹⁶ This was an opening to religion, but not as yet to the orthodox faith. As the Anglo-Irish critic Enid Starkie put it, Rimbaud was a ‘mystical unbeliever … who at the end of Une Saison en Enfer refused belief for himself’, yet paradoxically provided for others ‘the fullest expression of their need for God and their final belief’. ¹⁷ When Claudel began to write poetry, Rimbaud’s influence would soon show itself not only as a metaphysical urge but stylistically too – in the audacious metaphors, striking shifts of linguistic register, and quasi-magical sonority almost beyond analysis that they have in common.

16 ‘Ma Conversion’, in Oeuvres en prose, p. 1009. 17 E. Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud (2nd edition, London, Faber and Faber, 1961), p. 444. It is not clear to me how Starkie understood her own phrase ‘final belief’.

Desultorily visiting Parisian churches in the winter of 1886, Claudel was in Notre Dame de Paris for Christmas Vespers, standing by a pillar near to the cathedral’s celebrated fourteenth-century statue of the Mother and Child, when at the singing of the Magnificat he was overwhelmed by a sense of the ‘eternal childhood of God’, as revealed in the Incarnation of the Word as a babe in Bethlehem. ¹⁸ ‘God exists. He is there. He is someone, a being as personal as I am myself. He loves me, he is calling me.’ ¹⁹ His brief account of this conversion experience, which was, by his own account, crucial though inchoate, has been compared with the conversion stories of Augustine, Pascal, and Newman – which might be thought excessive, yet in 1930 the German metaphysician Peter Wust, visiting Paris for the first time, would go on pilgrimage to the exact spot. The conversion was only beginning. But at least Claudel had, in Louis Chaigne’s words, the ‘required dispositions to be converted’, as four further years of struggle, both intellectual and moral, would demonstrate. ²⁰ In categories that came readily to Claudel’s hand, ‘Anima’ was persuaded; ‘Animus’ had still to judge.

18 ‘Ma Conversion’, in Oeuvres en prose, p. 1010. 19 Ibid. 20 L. Chaigne, Vie de Paul Claudel et genèse de son oeuvre, pp. 47–8.

Reading Scripture, Dante, Bossuet and Pascal, Newman, and Newman’s near contemporary the curious Westphalian mystic Anna Catherina Emmerich, would all help, while Aristot...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Claudel's Way
• 2 The Five Great Odes
• 3 The Treatises
• 4 The Mass
• 5 The Temporal Cycle, from Christmas to Good Friday
• 6 The Temporal Cycle, from Easter to Christ the King
• 7 The Sanctoral Cycle
• 8 The Mother of the Lord
• 9 The Bible Commented
• 10 A Glimpse of the Theatre
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index