Carnal Spirit - Matthew W. Maguire

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writings placed on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books.

      Even this short list of affinities and commitments shows that Péguy does not neatly fit our received categories. That these distinctive commitments existed in the same, at times defiantly anti-institutional person—and above all in a person who was at pains to affirm the essential continuity of his thinking60—makes him an intriguing and remarkably revealing historical case.

      Finally, his writing took its shape from what was a favorite term; that is, from “revolution,” understood comprehensively and with its full range of meaning in French. In this way, Péguy’s revolutions of thought are at once an attempt to achieve radical and thoroughgoing change, an act of revolving around an orienting center that repeats a cyclical action in linear time with intimations of constancy and eternity, a return to an origin through perpetual motion, and the process of organic regeneration that allows a forest or field to regain its full depth and vitality, extending itself deep into the soil in order to grow.61 This organic, earthy fecundity leads naturally to Péguy’s affirmation of the “carnal” (charnel), and with it the blessings of a spiritually embodied and carnally spiritual life.

      Above all, through Péguy’s work, it is possible to understand the cultural and intellectual life of Europe’s late modernity with fresh eyes, and to understand our own cultural and intellectual world differently.

      We shall begin by surveying the range of prominent forms of assumption and inquiry into knowledge, time, truth, the self, and meaning available to him in the Belle Époque. These will be variously adopted, refashioned, and recreated in Péguy’s revolutions. Since contexts are porous and multidimensional, a wide variety of conversations are possible, in which the boundaries of different contexts can be opened for exploration.

      To sound the fullness of Péguy’s thought we shall also have to be God botherers, and there are those who will find that very bothersome indeed. But for those tempted to lament a “troubling nostalgia for the Big Other,” or a “dangerous return to the metaphysics of presence,” I can offer only a friendly greeting, and be on my way.

      A century after his death, Péguy’s contrarian life opens our understanding of intellectual and cultural worlds in Europe before the onset of horrifying violence. Those years must never be set aside. Yet it must not also be assumed that absolutely all historical alternatives other than immanent becoming are, after a rapid survey of sources, to be condemned as subtly or overtly responsible for those catastrophes. Still less must we conclude that only an ever more immanent becoming can serve simultaneously as prosecutor, jury, and judge for all alternatives to itself.

      Through a historical reading of Péguy—through this singular test case—we can ask different questions of the past, not to enforce the answers of the currently prevailing metaphysics (whose supporters, like their forebears among Péguy’s contemporaries, claim with rather touching presumption to stand “after” or “beyond” metaphysics),62 nor to indulge in the vandalism and malice of their reactionary adversaries. We should free ourselves to wonder whether there are possibilities available to neither of them, an originality disclosed through origins recently obscured that await us still.63

      CHAPTER 1

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      Modernity, Antimodernity, and Beyond

      The standard model of historical explanation for turn of the last-century European culture proposes an amalgam of traditions and long-standing hierarchies, sunk in crisis, defensive, beset by anxiety, forced to fit within an emerging and very different order of things, in which those hierarchies and traditions had become dangerous. At the least, this amalgam left late modern Europe vulnerable to the catastrophes of the twentieth century.

      A technocratic historicism has long sought for lattices of social and institutional practices, linguistic patterns, and phenomenological and conceptual structures that decisively shape and often determine thinking and its reception. We have already seen that contemporary scholars assume Péguy cannot partially and meaningfully break free from constrictive notions of identity and cultural “discourses” (often prejudices) that saturate his historical moment, despite his attempt to think beyond them.

      To venture out toward this history without the usual assumptions requires us to alight upon popular understanding and rarefied learning and, not least, their attempted reconciliation; to traverse something of politics, culture, philosophy, and science, and sound some tensions in their depths. A few longstanding tendencies will allow us to orient ourselves as we embark.

      France had long been considered a or even the preeminent culture for certain kinds of “high” or refined expression in the arts and in learned enquiry—not least by the French themselves. It was often assumed that France’s intellectual and political culture led the world, or served as a prophetic example for others.

      Given the ongoing prominence of intellectual life at the center of French culture, and never far from politics, France’s humiliation by Prussia in 1870–1871 was a comprehensive shock, affecting the world of learning, education, and ideas no less than that of military strategy and ministerial politics. The young republic that followed immediately upon that shock was obliged to secure its legitimacy by negotiating the terms of defeat rather than victory, and to rule in the name of stability rather than revolution. That this same republic, in May 1871, brutally crushed a revolutionary insurrection in its own capital immediately after negotiating an end to the war with Germany severely complicated its relationship to France’s revolutionary past.

      Yet the disorienting defeat to Prussia would not have had the cultural, social, and intellectual power it had in France—even accounting for the longstanding entanglement of political power, intellectual life, and elite culture in France, and especially in Paris—were it not for unsettled questions in the life of the nation and its educated citizens in particular. What is modernity? How modern ought France to be? Was France a revolutionary nation or not? Did France stand for a tradition of cultivated learning and a traditional and integral humanism, or was it dedicated to science and, in the achievement of beauty, an aesthetic of transgression? Was France the secular nation par excellence, or was it at heart Christian, even Catholic?

      The answers to these questions in France since the Revolution had swung back and forth, and in recent decades had settled upon an unyielding commitment to ambiguity. The Revolution of 1848 drew inspiration both from the insurrectionary journées of the French Revolution and a Christian commitment to the least of these and the life of Jesus;1 Napoleon III was an advocate of modern technology and industry, the practitioner of a conventional, accommodating piety, and yet by force of arms the defender of the Vatican under Pope Pius IX.

      In only partial contrast to that partial piety, Auguste Comte’s “scientific” positivism had begun to exert considerable influence on French intellectual life, but Comte’s “religion of humanity” struck many of its sympathetic readers as too close to a substitute Catholicism, even as actual Catholicism had a vital ongoing presence in French life.

      Within the world of letters, a reader of Charles Baudelaire’s great succès de scandale, Fleurs du mal—or of his The Painter of Modern Life—could be forgiven for thinking that modern art must transgress to say something powerful to its audience. Yet France was also an international capital of traditional artistic techniques and methods, in the visual arts and in monumental architecture, most notably at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. That in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the dominant philosophical movement in the French educational system was Victor Cousin’s revealingly named “eclecticism”—itself freely drawing upon Immanuel Kant and German idealism, English and Scottish empiricism, and Cartesian philosophy—expresses a willingness in speculative thought to affirm a combination of philosophies rather than to develop a rigorously unified philosophy, or in Cousin’s case, to open the way to a genuine pluralism of diverse and distinct commitments.

      Many intellectuals whose careers took shape in the final decades of the nineteenth century believed that under the Third Republic the long-established tendency toward carefully maintained

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