Charles Péguy
The French daily Le Figaro published this moving meditation on Hope yesterday. I have translated it, and am pleased to publish it here.
EASTER: “HOPE IS NOT THE FORGETTING OF DEATH”
Fr Luc de Bellescize, vicar of St-Germain-des-Prés, Paris.
In the film Ordet by Dreyer, a young married man sees his wife die. He stops the drawing-room clock. Time stops its flight. The old father speaks the words from the Book of Job, the act of faith in the dark night: “The Lord hath given, the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the Name of the Lord.” Silence falls, the household falls still in its grief, in its pain, in its love. The shamefastness of silence is the needful frame for the memory of the dead. “Thou tellest my flittings, put my tears into thy bottle,” says the Psalm (56). “One must obtain a proper silence,” said Maria Callas, speaking of her singing. Death requires a proper silence for proper words, for if we have nothing to say in the face of death we have nothing to say in the face of human life.
In Dreyer’s film, the pastor speaks, the man of God who is called in the morning of one’s life, in the evening of one’s days, in the unforeseen of the good and the evil that weave the inconstant heart of man. “O heart woven of joy on a ground of pain,” wrote Péguy. The old father dares a word that dwells in the silence without breaking its mystery. “Her soul is with God.” But the husband replies, “It was her body I loved.” How true those words are….. For what we love in others is not only their insubstantial soul, it is their fleshly presence, their scent that lives on in their memory, the sound of their voice that echoes in silence, the shining of their eyes after their eyes have closed. Death is goodbye to the face. Such a painful mystery……
We waste too much time fleeing it. It would be better to learn to live it in order to be fully human. “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,” says the Book of Ecclesiastes (VII:4) We have lost too much of wisdom….. What is typical of our time is the loss of the “memory of death,” said the Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément, and with it the forgetting of man’s call to life eternal. Today’s atheism, though, is no longer the fight of the philosophers of suspicion against the hope of Christians, but the idolatry of well-being claimed as a right and pleasure raised up as the supreme idol of happiness. It is TV football, healthy-living.com, a decent retirement plan and the organic guarantee of one’s steak. “One has one’s little joy by day and one’s little joy by night,” wrote Nietzsche, “but one takes care of one’s health.”
Modern man “feels” a lot, like an apartment Labrador on thick carpet. What counts is “feeling good”. The dictatorship of well-being has replaced the City of Joy. We refuse to “sow in tears” (Ps 126) But what will happen when the drunken boat of my days brings me to the house of mourning? Will I remain on the threshold of my life, stop in the porch of the mystery(1)? Death is the Great Forgotten of men, yet it will always come and jog their memory.
We are not primarily consumers, but beings who thirst for genuine life. We taste earthly food, not in the feverish greed of the moment before the coming of unforeseeable Death, but in the eternal flavour hidden within it, which calls us to a life ever higher. “Deep calleth unto deep.”(Ps 42). Through life, love, death we are born into the hope of Heaven. He who has never felt his love to be eternal has never truly loved.
We do not want a life that forgets death, nor a joy that knows nothing of pain, nor a facile happiness that closes its eyes to the suffering of children, to the death of innocents. It would not be worthy of man. “I would believe in their God if they appeared a little more saved,” said Nietzsche. But Christian joy is not the same as worldly excitement. It is not that unbearable lightness of being that reduces life to the nothingness of youthism pushed to the limit. What we want is a full joy that is everywhere in the richness of man’s life, the great cloak of his night, which accepts all his history and tears for man the veil of the Eternal. Such is the joy of Christ. He has not closed his eyes to Evil, he has let Evil close his eyes in order to fill everything with the joy of Easter. No other religion claims the “death” of God: only the Christian faith. God has entered inito the great silence, the Word made flesh has made his Presence resound in the bowels of the earth. “We proclaim a Messiah crucified, a scandal to the Jews and a nonsense to the pagans,” says the apostle, “ but for us the wisdom of God and the power of God.” (1 Cor. I:23).
Let me ask you this question. What is your hope? Is it to forget death, the Promethean myth of the transhuman? For us who bear the fine name of Christians, it is a well hidden in the desert and which radiates in silence; the empty tomb from which arose, alive, the Resurrected, seen, heard, touched by the apostles; Péguy’s little girl who travels through the shadows, who “shines in the darkness and whom the darkness has not overcome.” (Jn I:5)
(1) This and “Peguy’s little girl”, below, are references to a moving poetic text published by Charles Péguy in 1916, “The Porch of the Mystery of the Second Virtue”, where Faith and Charity are pictured as grown women, and Hope as a little girl walking between them.
