LITMIR.BIZ

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This way of thinking about election can be harsh in Péguy, but is neither racial nor dehistoricizing. For example, Péguy thought that the mystical-historical role of Dreyfus in the Dreyfus affair was to refuse his pardon and insist on his being declared innocent no matter what the cost, on behalf of all the mysticisms that sought his vindication. A judgment like this one would be a much more promising basis upon which to criticize Péguy’s thinking.

      The Dreyfus affair in Péguy’s account was also not simply an affair of national honor. As Péguy wrote explicitly in Notre Jeunesse, it is precisely the universality of injustices that must be fought against, wherever they appear, and in that universal moral rigor, honor may be found. Péguy directs his readers’ attention to Bernard-Lazare’s willingness to castigate both Muslims and Christians for their anti-Semitism and persecution of other minorities whenever it appears around the world, rather than (as many did) speaking of Ottoman “tyranny” and expediently ignoring Christian anti-Semitism.⁴²

      Another recent history testifies to a similar tendency to assume inescapable, tightly bounded social and linguistic fields in the past. Given the abundant citations of Péguy in a host of twentieth-century Catholic theologians, and specifically his appreciation of Judaism, one would assume that a recent historical account of changing attitudes toward Judaism among Catholics would include Péguy. This would be all the more true given the appreciative comments by Jewish thinkers about Péguy (for example, by Scholem and others). Péguy’s close friend Jules Isaac—who later wrote Jesus et Israël, in part a thorough accounting of the ways in which Christian anti-Semitism ignored and contradicted Christianity’s own Scripture⁴³—participated in many organizations and meetings for interreligious dialogue between Christians and Jews, including the Seelisburg conference of 1947. These efforts helped to open the way for the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate and other affirmative statements about Judaism in twentieth-century Catholicism. In John Connel ly’s From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, this history is swept aside.

      Of course, it is both legitimate and important to research, as Connelly does, Catholic thinking about Judaism in German-speaking Europe, especially in the middle decades of the twentieth century. But Connelly hopes that this partial history of a dense, interconnected contextual network of thinkers, in a very specific and recent historical context, can serve as a complete history. Péguy is a sacrifice to this commitment.

      Péguy first appears just short of the book’s halfway point, where he is mentioned very briefly as a “figure from an earlier generation who might be counted” among those who engaged in respectful, substantive dialogue with Jews and Judaism. But this was not a true and fully articulated commitment on Péguy’s part; like Hammerschlag, Connelly assumes that Péguy could not partially yet meaningfully and creatively reconfigure an ambient matrix of discourse. While he was opposed to anti-Semitism, his opposition was prompted by his “personal affection for the Jewish writer Bernard-Lazare.” It expressed itself in a statement “written in private to a friend” that Jews were not responsible for the suffering of Jesus, but rather all of human sin was so responsible.⁴⁴

      In fact, Péguy wrote at length against anti-Semitism in a host of very public and widely published writings, writings that were read extensively during the interwar years and afterward. It is untrue that a single statement in a letter represents Péguy’s full authorial protest against anti-Semitism, or his protests against Jews being unjustly blamed by Christians for things they did not do. It is also not true that the notion that Christian sin as the true cause of the Passion does not appear in any formal writings by Péguy. It can be found in his posthumously published Clio, Dialogue of History with the Carnal Soul, in which, among other things, the Christian sinner Péguy is told that through the evil he has done, it is “Jesus that you crucify.”⁴⁵ Additional remarks to that effect were published by Romain Rolland—a Nobel Prize–winning author and then a figure of international renown—in his memoir of Péguy, published in 1944.⁴⁶

      Similar and still more forceful objections to anti-Semitism, and of an ongoing positive relation between Christianity and Judaism, can be found in Notre Jeunesse (Péguy’s best-known prose writing) and The Mystery of Jeanne d’Arc’s Love (one of his most famous poems), among others.

      Under the heading “The Troubling Origins of the New Vision,” Connelly appears to make a major argumentative concession. He acknowledges that a convert to Catholicism at the center of his history—Ottilie Schwarz—attributed the origins of her and others’ work for a change in Catholic attitudes toward Judaism to the work of “Catholic Dreyfusards” like “Jacques Maritain [and] Charles Péguy” at the turn of the century. According to Connelly, “other pioneers from the anti-Nazi struggle concurred.”⁴⁷

      In this way, his own historical protagonists appear to contradict Connelly. But he adds to the names of Maritain and Péguy that of “their teacher, the antimodern apocalyptist Léon Bloy.”⁴⁸ It may well be that some of his sources conflate these authors; but Connelly endorses that conflation, joining the “Catholic Dreyfusards” with the “dark and troubling sources”⁴⁹ of their “teacher” Bloy’s profound anti-Semitism.

      Yet Péguy was not in any way Bloy’s student. In fact, Péguy intensely disliked Bloy, took no instruction from him, formally or informally, did not know him personally, refused to answer letters from him when the anti-Semitic writer tried to establish a connection with Péguy,⁵⁰ and did not cite his work in thousands of pages of published and unpublished writing. Further, in an unmistakably dismissive reference to Bloy in conversation, Péguy told his friend Joseph Lotte in 1912 that Bloy was one of several apocalyptic “idiots.”⁵¹

      For Connelly, Bloy opens up distant possibilities for Jewish-Christian reconciliation despite his own ugly anti-Semitism; but those possibilities are only given their full life, free of poisonous hatred, by the network of interconnected figures at the center of his own, later history. That Péguy had done so in less “networked” circumstances decades before has been ruled out, above all by posthumously enrolling him into a “network” to which he clearly did not belong. To call him Bloy’s “student” is a description accurate neither as a fact nor even—given Péguy’s direct and sustained rejection of Bloy and his work—as a cavernous metaphor.

      One might imagine going further than Connelly or Hammerschlag, “situating” Péguy in a still more conceptually ambitious contextual matrix. One could argue that his writing is one symptom of subtly shared conceptual commitments manifest in, say, thinking about temporality, alterity, and ethics, at work in apparently diverse and opposed figures, for example, Péguy, Marcel Mauss, Paul Claudel, Henri Bergson, Henri Poincaré, and Émile Durkheim. One could traverse disciplinary boundaries to show, for example, how certain ideas associated with their different bodies of work were connected to a certain phenomenology of time, simultaneously working through different status networks (say, in universities as opposed to the world of independent writers in Paris).

      It is certainly a possible if radically incomplete and partial project. Among these diverse and often opposed philosophers, scholars, and artists—as we shall see—there is a common fascination with the repetition or the singularity of events in accounts of historical time, in which an “ultimate” knowledge reveals itself by variously affirming either repetition or singularity. There is also a related ethical engagement with two apparent disruptions of modern self-fashioning, generally oriented toward acquisition and self-advancement: sacrifice and the gift.

      One might offer some sort of “deft” inversion at the argument’s end: for example, Mauss’s account of the gift as entrapped by cyclical, interminably immanent repetition could be initially contrasted with Péguy’s account of the gift as a primal event, an eruption of eternity into the present, and then both could be referred to the presence of their opposite in one another, so that there is a concluding indeterminacy about the gift as eternally recurring reciprocity in time (Mauss) and the recurrent event of eternity entering time as an infinitely gratuitous gift that can never be reciprocated (Péguy). The distinction between Mauss and Péguy could then be described as one of subtle emphasis within the phenomenological architecture of early twentieth-century European culture—rather

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