Léon Bloy—Pilgrim of the Absolute ed. by Raissa Maritain

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS ~59 of history as the great spiritual drama of fall and redemption stamp him as an artist astoundingly perceptive of the truths his own age had denied. This is not to minimize in any way the grave errors into which Blake fell. In addition to those already mentioned, there must be added countless flaws, stemming largely from the unreasoned, intuitive character of his approach to things and the very violence of his reaction against a false reasoning, an inhuman concept of order and justice. Because he craved consideration for the human person, he cursed all governments, all churches, all law human and divine. Because he knew that sex is spiritual as well as physical, he glorified it to an absurd and antinomian degree. Because he realized that art was a God-given, creative power, he considered the artist superior to the mystic and saint, and believed the artistic imagination (by which he obviously meant the intellectual aspects of the creative faculty and not simply the physical power) to be the only valid means of attaining truth and goodness. It is the chief failure of Mr. Frye's work that he does not discriminate between these excesses and the very real good that there is to be found in Blake for those strong and mature enough not to be carried away by him. We can be grateful, then, only up to a point for Mr. Frye's penetrating, comprehensive, but overenthusiastic and often uncritical study. Riggs Memorial Library, Georgetown University. JosEPHINE NicHOLLs HuGHES Leon Bloy-Pilgrim of the Absolute. Edited by RAissA MARITAIN, with an introduction by Jacques Maritain. New York: Pantheon Books, 1947. Pp. 458, with index of sources. $3.50. In her autobiography, Raissa Maritain has already recounted the story of Leon Bloy's profound influence upon her husband and herself. She here presents the life and thought of this extraordinary and uncompromising spirit in extracts from his own voluminous works. Well-chosen selections describe his moral and physical self-portrait, his views on art, poverty, the bourgeois spirit, sanctification and suffering, history and the sense of mystery. Jacques Maritain's introductory essay, adapted from Quelques pages sur Leon Bloy, 19~7, sets forth Bloy's significance as a man and as a thinker. Estimates of Bloy vary considerably. People great and small, of all walks of life, have acclaimed him as their spiritual father. Some critics, like Fr. Fulbert Cayre, A. A. (Patrologie et histoire de la theologie, III, 588) , regard him as a powerful genius who manifesfed signs of exalted illuminism but gratuitously attributed to himself a mission of reformation in the name of the Holy Ghost. Karl Pfleger, in Wrestlers with Christ, 260 BOOK REVIEWS confesses that he was alternately attracted and repelled by Bloy, and then came, in maturity, to revere him more and more. Those who witnessed Bloy in life and at the hour of death, says Maritain, know that he was a truly humble Christian. Maritain provides perhaps the best explanation for Bloy's alleged uncharitableness, and for his antiintellectualism . According to Maritain, Bloy dwelt in a sort of fourth dimension of the spirit and envisaged human beings as pure symbols of devouring spiritual realities. Attacking Mr. Jones by name as he did, he really saw through Jones to Pride or Avarice. This explanation does not seem completely satisfactory. I cannot recall or conceive of any of the Church's canonized Saints (I do not say that Bloy was not a saintly man) , who would heap such fearful invectives upon actual individuals (who would call Benedict XV "Pilate XV," or rejoice when "bourgeois Catholics " were burned to death at the charity bazaar). Much more satisfactory is Maritain's explanation of the wisdom of Bloy. The Pilgrim of the Absolute had no taste for rational discursus; using reason according to an experimental rather than a demonstrative mode, his powerful gifts of intuition were reenforced by the theological virtues and the organism of the infused gifts. Steeped, not in systematic theology or philosophy, but in Sacred Scripture, Bloy gave utterance to doctrines which should be understood mystically and not literally in a scholastic sense. His true place, then, is more with writers like...