Thankless Beggar, Hurler of Curses

The Writings of Léon Bloy

There is such a thing as holy, violent impatience. There is a selfless anger, a prophetic frustration. Charity lit on fire.

The Old Tower at Dusk, Vincent Van Gogh

We know about the field containing the pearl of great price, and the man that impatiently pulled his money out of the bank teller’s hand, rushing to buy it. We know about the blind man, impertinently shouting right in the ears of the people standing beside him, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” The violent take the Kingdom of Heaven by force.

And we know about our Lord, making a whip of cords, and driving out money changers as if they were the cattle they were selling.

But most of us don’t know about Léon Bloy.

Prophet, Beggar, Novelist

Léon Bloy was an inquisitor in the form of a French academic and novelist. He reminds me of Pascal, but more wild. An ‘indignant medieval peasant’ like Nicolás Gómez Dávila. An Old testament prophet that ended up in a Parisian cafe, sometimes begging for bread, sometimes shouting about the apocalyptic visions of La Salette. A man “lost in the modern world.”

“My anger is the effervescence of my pity,” he would say.

Bloy was read and re-read by Jorge Luis Borges. He influenced Charles Williams. He is referenced by Dr. Peter Kreeft. He was quoted by Pope Francis in the first sermon of his pontificate.

After growing up an agnostic, Léon Bloy underwent a dramatic conversion to Christ in the late 1860’s. He was instrumental in reconciling many French intellectuals in the late 19th century with Catholicism, although he had a reputation for dogmatism, strange outbursts, and unexpected personal attacks on public and private figures.

He left a few dark, Dostoevsky-esque novels, short stories, and essays, a few of which have been translated into English. So far I have only read his work contained in the collection The Pilgrim of the Absolute. If you enjoy the Prophet Jeremiah, the book of Ecclesiastes, Blaise Pascal, Dostoevsky, Davila, Lewis, Chresterton, or Belloc, give Bloy a read.

For Publicans and Scoundrels

One of his more distinctive attributes was his vitriolic hatred for wealth. He was always very poor, yet his hatred for wealth seems to come from a real place of faith in the transience of this life and in the glories of Heaven, and not from some personal bitterness. As an author, he saw his lack of wealth to be connected to his refusal to compromise or flatter people in his writing. His hatred for wealth and love of poverty was a sort of mystical disdain for all that was not the Cross.

His friend and biographer, the Thomistic scholar and French political thinker Jacques Maritain, says:

Bloy was a fearful beggar who would not put up with mediocrity in men, and whom God was to satisfy only with the vision of His Glory. It seemed at times that in his desire for the beatific vision he voluntarily closed his eyes to ordinary lights, and preferred to grope his way toward the pure Effulgence. This mystical impatience is, to my mind, at the very source of his art.

Enjoy the following selections from the writings of Léon Bloy. Many of them are short, genius half-thoughts in the tradition of Blaise Pascal’s Pensees. Some are fragments of letters to clergy or friends (or enemies, the distinction can be blurry). The few longer selections that I have included are well worth the time. According to Maritain,

Bloy liked to repeat that he wrote not for the righteous—neither for the perfect, nor for those who are progressing, nor for those who are beginning—but for the sleeping ones who needed his suffering and his outbursts, for publicans and for scoundrels.

Let us read on, and wake up.

Selections

“My child, what do you know of God?” a priest asked a little girl at catechism. “I don’t know, Father, I have always seen Him suffering.”

There are days when one would think God was burning with fury against those who love Him. Our God is a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29).

Why does the bloody persecution not yet burst forth? Because the Devil cannot make up his mind. He knows that out of ten or twenty thousand apostates of whom he is sure, there will be one martyr, and this frightens him.

Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.

The Words of the Holy Book nourish the soul, and even the intellect, in the way the Eucharist does, without it being necessary to understand them.

When one speaks lovingly of God, all human words are like lions become blind, seeking to find a watering place in the Desert.

It is always a good thing to see death, and I am happy this thought has filled you with the presence of God. Christians should constantly be leaning over the abyss.

Sanctity is a sure return to the primal Integrity which preceded the Fall, but with the colossal supplementary Beauty which Suffering added to it.

Jeanne, coming home from church: “Reminding Christ of our extreme poverty, I was saying to Him: ‘Give me what is in Your hand, open Your Hand.’ Then He opened His Hand, and I saw it was pierced!”

[Sermons.] Full of good will, I wanted to pay full attention to a homily. The preacher, who after all is not dean of the cathedral, started to talk about “the business of salvation,” a phrase that smells of the sacristy and of trade, to which he seemed to cling. I fell asleep. Had he spoken of Sanctity, I should have been awakened as is a horse by the trumpet.

November 24, 1907. Léon Bloy, for what do you hope? I hope for that which it is reasonable to hope, namely, that God will resurrect France which is the kingdom of His Mother and of which He has need, but only after a horrible death she can no longer avoid.

[Faith.] To Jacques Maritain: You are seeking, you say. O professor of philosophy, O Cartesian, you believe, with Malebranche, that truth is something one seeks! You believe that the human mind is capable of something! You believe—in other words—that with a certain degree of effort a person with black eyes could manage to acquire green eyes spangled with gold! You eventually understand that one finds what he desires only on that day when he has most humbly renounced seeking what lay under his hand, unbeknown to him. For my part, I declare that I never sought or found anything, unless one wishes to describe as a discovery the fact of tripping blindly over a threshold and being thrown flat on one’s stomach into the House of Light.

A perfectly true thought, expressed in very sound terms, can satisfy the reason without giving any impression of the Beautiful; but in that case certainly there is something false in its statement. It is essential that Truth be in Glory. Splendor of style is not a luxury, it is a necessity.

Answer to my unknown correspondent. I told him I am not exactly the friend of the poor, as he names me, but the friend of the Poor Man who is Our Lord Jesus Christ. Utter poverty was not thrust upon me; I espoused it out of love, though I could have chosen a different companion. Today, old and worn out, I am getting ready for death. I am announcing my new book.

[The Century of Carrion.] Beati mortui (blessed are the dead) was said at Patmos by a Voice crying from heaven. The selfsame Holy Spirit who asserts the Blessedness of the Dead would also that we pray for them, and this is enjoined in the awe-inspiring Liturgy. Is there, for a human being, anything as momentous as being dead? Does there exist a state more lovable, more enviable, more desirable, more exquisite, more spiritual, more divine, more fearsome, than the state of a man who is dead, a man truly dead, who is lowered into the earth and has already appeared before God to be judged? There is an end, then, to trivial contingencies, worldly obligations and the wisdom of fools. The only thing to know is whether one has died in the Lord. One is swallowed up in the Absolute. One is absolutely happy or absolutely unhappy, and one knows it absolutely. What is there in common between such a state of being, in which all is great, and the miserable sickliness of modern dodges aimed at making oneself kin with that which is not?

“Behold thy son,” Christ said to her, singling us out from high on His Cross. Whatever His anger, He says it still and forever. He says it in such fashion that the terrifying Consummatum has not yet, for almost two thousand years, had time to come about, and that these supreme Words of the dying Christ resemble, in the Gospel, a prophecy from the Psalms which has not yet been fulfilled. This Motherhood of Mary is as sorrowful, as universal, as unending as the Redemption.

I am going to communion. The priest has uttered the fearful words which a fleshly piety calls consoling: Domine non sum dignus … Jesus is about to come, and I have only a moment in which to prepare myself to receive Him…In a moment He will be under my roof. I do not recall having swept clean this dwelling wherein He will enter as a king or us a thief, for I do not know what to think of this visit. Indeed, have I ever swept it clean, my dwelling place of unchasteness and carnage? I give it a glance, a poor glance of terror, and I see it full of dust and full of filth. Everywhere there seems to be an odor of dirt and decay. I dare not look into the dark corners. In the last shadowy places, I behold awful spots, old or new, which remind me that I have slaughtered innocents, and in what numbers, with what cruelty! My walls are alive with vermin and trickling with cold droplets that recall to me the tears of so many unfortunates who implored me in vain, yesterday, the day before yesterday, ten, twenty, forty years ago…. And look! There, before that ghastly door, who is that squatting monster whom I had not noticed until now, and who resembles the creature I have sometimes glimpsed in my mirror? He seems to be asleep on that trap door of bronze, sealed by me and padlocked with such care, in order that I might not hear the clamors of the dead and their pitiful Miserere. Ah! truly it takes God not to fear entering such a house! And here He is! How shall I greet Him, and what shall I say or do? Absolutely nothing. Even before He may have crossed my threshold, I shall have ceased thinking about Him, I shall no longer be there, I shall have disappeared, I know not how, I shall be infinitely far away, among the images of creatures. He will be alone and will Himself clean the house, helped by His Mother whose slave I claim to be, and who is, in fact, my humble serving-maid.

[The Invisible Companion.] We are taught that every man is accompanied, from his birth to his death, by an Invisible Being charged with watching carefully over his soul and over his body. That Invisible One is called the Guardian Angel, the protector God willed for us, who may belong to any one of the Nine Choirs of Angels. Here is the universal belief of Christians. This perpetual companion is at once an inspirer and a judge. Exalted thoughts come through him, and what are called qualms of conscience he dins into our ears. He knows what we do not know, he sees what we do not see, he is ever present within us and around us, unspeakably respectful of our freedom, aware of the true greatness of our souls and the ineffable dignity of our bodies of clay, called upon as they are to shine in splendor when we shall have ceased to be asleep. When a man does wrong, his angel silently retires into the deep places of his criminal soul, whither the sinner himself does not penetrate, and there he weeps as Angels are able to weep.

Vast sadness. Sadness, without murmur, of those condemned to death. Hodie mecum eris in Paradise (this day thou shalt be with me in paradise). That is the word which both consoles and fills with despair: Hodie. Today. To understand what this outcry of one crucified means, it is needful to have known utter destitution.

…you believe that with me religious feeling is a special form of rebellion. It is precisely the opposite. However mad this may seem to you, I am in reality an obedient and soft-hearted person. That is why I write implacably, having to defend Truth and bear witness to the God of the poor. That is all. My most vehement pages were written out of love and often with tears of love during hours of unutterable peace.

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