The religious thought of Leon Bloy (1846-1917)

Abstract

In order to give Léon Bloy his rightful place among his religious peers a certain literary setting is required, so that his true greatness may become apparent in the light of comparisons with other thinkers who have contributed to the religious life of mankind. To this end the bibliography had to be extended to make room for writers who do not have an obvious bearing on the specific study of Bloy. One cannot help remarking that if this spacious treatment had been meeted out to him by certain writers, we might have been spared the unfortunate result of regarding Bloy as an ill-natured and unbalanced Catholic, who can therefore be lightly dismissed. The method of understanding the French author here employed, however, is a good deal more laborious than the rather light introduction he has so far been offered to the English-speaking public. We are not, of course, thinking now of Edith Riley's translation of Béguin's Leon Bloy. l'Impatient. nor of Pfleger's chapter on Bloy in his Wrestlers with Christ, both of which are admirable. But Halévy's reference to Bloy as "an eccentric believer given to much violence and abuse", gives a completely misleading impression of the man, and is fair neither to the author of the famous diaries nor to one who obviously has an intimate sympathy with Charles Péguy. For it must be remembered that the poet's spiritual kinship with Bloy is not to be despised. Then again, Heppenstall's handling of Bloy's novels is much too superficial for students who are earnestly desirous of understanding his religious stature. Far more painstaking patience is required in absorbing the religious thinker's great message, and even more humility in attempting to impart that message to others

The present study of The Religious Thought of Léon Bloy is divided into three parts. The first chapter of Part I is taken up with outlining the scheme of work and marshalling of material. It also tries to investigate Bloy's claim as a modern prophet. The second chapter of this part seeks to draw a picture of the life and times of our author, and to show how he adapted himself to his contemporary society.

The present study of The Religious Thought of Léon Bloy is divided into three parts. The first chapter of Part I is taken up with outlining the scheme of work and marshalling of material. It also tries to investigate Bloy's claim as a modern prophet. The second chapter of this part seeks to draw a picture of the life and times of our author, and to show how he adapted himself to his contemporary society.

Part II Landmarks in Bloy's Pilgrimage, does not set itself out to be even a rough biography of Bloy. A mere casual reader of the author's books cannot fail to realise how closely life and thought are knit together in this remarkable man. The dynamic personality of lean Bloy's turbulent and refractory son comes out in all his works. An attempt is made, therefore, to bring out this interplay of life and thought by seizing on a few phases of Bloy's life which seem to us to be rather more important than others, and using them to show how they developed his thought and religious experience. Though the last chapter of Part II only takes us as far as Bloy's marriage with Jeanne Molbeck, this in no way interferes with our writer's prerogative of ranging over the whole territory of Bloy's thought, right up to its closing stages. In this way we are often helped to catch a synoptic view of his later developments both in living and thinking.

The fifth chapter of Part II, La Salette. is followed immediately with a translation of The Deliverance which is reputed to have been given by the Virgin to the peasant children Melanie Calvat and Maximin Giraud, as it was written by the former (the more spiritually minded of the two) and recorded in Celle qui Pleure. This appendix falls into its proper place, for it is altogether essential to have some knowledge of the Apparition of the Holy Virgin on La Salette and the substance of her alleged message, before we can understand the reaction of Bloy and those other fellow-Catholics who believed so implicitly in the warnings of Celle qui Pleure.

In the last part of the work, we endeavour to get to grips with the fundamental, all-encompassing thought which dominates Bloy's whole being with compelling power, bringing all his faculties of body, mind and spirit into subjection to it. We have deemed it fitting to name Part III Bloy's Message for To-day. For, if Karl Berth's Theology of Crisis is a salutary corrective to the liberal Christianity which tends to absorb uncritically the benefits of scientific humanism without exposing them to the Judgement of God, Léon Bloy's Religion of the Absolute is an even more salutary corrective to the secularised mentality of the bourgeois whose soul has been emasculated by an atmosphere denuded of the transcendent sovereignty of Almighty God. This dimension of the Eternal, the true home of the soul, has been displayed again in all its august severity and beauty, in the life and work of a prophet who wrote books so that posterity might live. This he persisted in doing with the doggedness of a divine Hope which continued to support him, though he might have died for all the material good any of his books did him. His compositions were designed to "strike like a mighty lightning-flash minds emancipated from the gospel of sport and machinery." These words, comments Pfleger:

"express not the resentment of a wounded vanity, but a calm knowledge of spiritual laws. Spiritual meteors with a core of flame such as Bloy possessed, do not penetrate the atmosphere of our planet without setting it on fire, sooner or later. Nor are they extinguished so quickly as corporeal meteors. For they come from the depths not of space, but of spirit, of the Absolute."

An effort has been made, then, in Part III to examine this meteor, wrought in the arsenal of Bloy's despair, in the hope that it may yet again exercise its dynamic power in a world which may otherwise perish by a missile, wrought too, in the arsenal of man's despair. May the dynamic of the spirit prevail over the dynamic of matter: and may Bloy, being dead, yet speak the life-giving word!

As an Appendix to the entire work, it has been thought advisable to add a complete translation of Le Salut par les Juifs.