Paul Claudel by Michael Donley, Gracewing, £12.99
The author subtitles his book “Poet of the Sacred Cosmos and Prophet of a Christian Ecology”, and it is from this perspective that he analyses the writing of the great French poet. Paul Claudel (1868-1955) is not well known in the English-speaking world, which is a pity. Like the later poetry of TS Eliot, Claudel’s verse was “simply the outcome of his profoundly orthodox understanding of Christianity”, in his case the Catholic faith. Claudel is too wide-ranging and complex a thinker to be pigeonholed simply as a “religious poet”. His large output, including plays, essays, diaries and letters, shows him to have been at the forefront of an early 20th-century renaissance in Christian artistic endeavour.
Claudel wrote a revealing letter to fellow writer André Gide, in which he asked rhetorically if religion is “an impoverishment, a restriction, for the creative artist”. He answered with clarity and firmness: “It is, on the contrary, the unbeliever who lives in a shrivelled and diminished world and who has nothing above him but the smoke-blackened ceiling of his study.”
Claudel abandoned his faith as a teenager and then, on a whim and looking for aesthetic inspiration, he decided, aged 18, to attend Midnight Mass at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. He was “seized with the reality of the presence of God”. The place where he stood now has an inscription.
It took four more years for him to absorb this “revelation” within his poetic consciousness. Choosing to enter the diplomatic corps and serving largely in the Far East, he became known as the “poet-diplomat”, influenced by Chinese culture as well as Japanese calligraphy and haiku. He particularly admired the Japanese “attitude of pious reverence for, and feeling of communion with, the totality of creation in a spirit of tender benevolence.”
Donley emphasises the links between Claudel’s awareness of the “sacredness of creation and the cosmic dimension of the Incarnation” – another connection between the poet and a renewed understanding of ecology today.
He took his vocation with extreme seriousness: poetry was not merely concerned with versifying, a virtuoso vocabulary, or limited to feelings, clever constructions or self-expressive therapy. He had a hieratic view of the poet as someone less concerned with “realism” than with Reality, as “an interpreter of the divine”. The poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins might not have agreed with Claudel that the priesthood is incompatible with the “profound devotion that a real poet owes to his art”.
Donley has done an excellent job in this introduction to a poet of vision and depth who showed prophetic understanding of the impoverished world of the arts today. Rejecting the self-serving individualism of the modern world, Claudel understood that other people were “the custodians of a part of our own destiny”, that they were “our brothers and sisters”, and that “Jesus died for them too”.
Guadalupe Mysteries: Deciphering the Code by Grzegorz Gorny and Janusz Rosikon, Ignatius Press, £26
The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which appeared on the cheap tilma (cloak) of a Mexican Indian, Juan Diego, on December 12, 1531, has inspired devotion and scientific puzzlement throughout succeeding centuries. What is undisputed is that the image, presented in the dress of an Aztec princess, brought about the conversion of nine million Indians to Christianity within eight years.
Although the conquistadores under Hernán Cortés had released the indigenous population of the land, later Mexico, from the fear and terror of their native gods and the appalling human sacrifice that those gods demanded, the Spanish in turn had exploited the Indians. The conquest of 1519 was a military one. The spiritual conquest only came about through the supernatural intervention of Our Lady, whose image proclaimed the Gospel “in a manner that was rooted in Indian culture”.
The tilma itself was used by the peasantry to wrap newborn children, to be worn at marriage ceremonies, to carry food and to offer protection from the elements. That Our Lady chose this garment for her image to be displayed carried enormous significance. What has been revealed by the later research of scholars, carefully summarised by the authors of this book, who have included many illustrations alongside the text, is that the Aztec features of the image, such as the bluish-green colour of her mantle (the colour reserved for rulers), her loose hair (the sign of virginity), the sash (signifying a pregnant woman), also provided a powerful visual language to illiterate people.
Further research reveals that a quincunx flower – in five parts – symbolised the encounter between man and God. Scholars have understood that the native Indians used pictograms on a daily basis, so that the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe “was a perfectly intelligible code”. Its message was unambiguous: a new era in human history “had begun in Our Lady’s womb”.
Perhaps the most extraordinary discovery, requiring modern optical technology, was that the eyes of Our Lady in the image are “like human eyes”, reflecting the group of people who were facing her in the bishop’s house on December 12.
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