The Miracle of Jacques Rivière

...But the curtain had fallen again...

...He refuses the Divine assistance, and it will not be given him in his own despite...

...Now, since he is giving himself less, God receives him no longer, withdraws from him His presence and His ear...

...The stresses and fervors of youth, disgust for the smugness of bourgeois Christianity, the pride of a great intellect, had conspired to conceal God's image from his eyes...

...The gush of love which had produced A la Trace de Dieu seemed sunk in its socket, the flame which still glowed under the ashes, to be quenched...

...I do not understand why It Is," he would say suddenly, "but 1 feel barely alive...

...Certainly, outside evidence lent color to this belief...

...because he never lied, did not even know how to set about invention...

...He could not, even though he would, have liberated himself from its control...

...First, a free access to that "unencumbered and Intact" Intelligence for which he had prayed...

...It is his kindly interest that procures a professorate at the college Stanislas for the gallant youth...

...During this period the task of gaining a livelihood for himself and those dear to him, together with his work upon the Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, to which he gave new life, absorbed all his energies...

...Do you think I shall have time to finish all I want to do...

...Grant that I may never seek to substitute for these any ideas of my own, save those only which Thou shalt prescribe me for their good...

...Henceforth he would neither intervene nor judge...

...Look...

...Or was it because God judged that the effort had been enough and the recompense earned that the decree went forth which removed him so untimely from among the number of the living...

...He would advance, discover, fill in blank spaces upon the incomplete chart—he would gain for human knowledge new territories of the Divine...

...Earthly hope there was none...

...He wants to push his investigation beyond any limits hitherto traced...

...He was incapable of giving himself by halves...

...Full of insight where the world of thought was in question, he was a myopic face to face with human action...

...Moreover, by one of those marvelous dispensations of God at which Jacques, throughout his writings, has never ceased to marvel, that very penance and privation which he inflicts upon himself Is destined to redouble the force of his influence in the future, and to become, one might say, the very medium of his message...

...But not of faith...

...I am a Christian now...

...JACQUES RIVIERE was twenty years old when he made up his mind to write to Paul Claudel, whom for a year he had admired passionately, and to ask from him some remedy for his disquiet, an answer to the greatest of all questions—in short, to beseech his help in finding God again...

...At last the sombre struggle, so bravely borne, was over...

...I am going to find the Divine Light...

...Like an entomologist who holds his breath for fear of disturbing the frail insect he is studying, he imposed silence upon himself...

...Even within (the fact must be faced) there reigned silence and reserve...

...Others are to be sought in the nature of the man, perhaps—if we may dare speculate upon what necessarily surpasses our feeble understanding— in the very designs of God on his behalf...

...He regarded them more as limitations of character than as sources of power...

...This God was naCstranger to him...

...Upon what authority could he have relied to impose his Ideals...

...Upon grace a long sleep descends...

...There was no trace of revolt when death came...

...The ensuing article is the introduction, slightly abridged, which was written by Madame Riviere for the Correspondence between her husband, Jacques Riviere, late editor of La Nouvelle Revue Franqaise, and Paul Claudel, recently appointed French Ambassador to the United States of America...

...That tepidity toward God which began to disturb me," he tells us, "also meant that I was losing the habit of attention...

...Hardly had he escaped from the hell of imprisonment when he found himself gripped, fettered and stifled by material necessity...

...Stricken to the heart, I would ask him what he was trying to tell me...

...God will suffer him to fight alone...

...He will reject (and with how infaUible a gesture...

...all that is false or counterfeit...

...Was his task beginning so utterly to absorb him that there was danger of his forgetting Its purpose and walking unarmed into danger...

...Looking back toward his point of departure he never told himself complacently: "See how far I have come...

...He has to become "the man at the helm," the pilot who "knows what he Is doing and whither he is bound," before some, at least, surrender themselves so completely to his direction that, on the day the message which he kept hidden for them In his heart strikes them with its full force, they will be unable to restrain their fervor and will be precipitated "into the bosom of truth itself...

...The reasons for this silence, for this aridity, for the undeniable subsidence of love for God in Jacques, are of a twofold order...

...I feel," he had once written, "that if I gave myself more I should be better received...

...To this second task he gave himself up with such fervor that one might be excused for believing he found it all-sufficient and that in neglecting the first he had forgotten the Master Who assigned him both one and the other...

...It is also true that he refused to own himself a Catholic publicly, to enroll himself under any banner —to march in any processional ranks...

...But the need of God persists...

...Rather he looked toward the goal and cried: "My God, how shall I ever reach You...

...Everything he did was done conscientiously...

...To all this ardor and commotion Claudel responds with a direct and tireless force, that seems impatient at times only by reason of its confidence, reiterating the unanswerable arguments that Jacques at first refuses to accept...

...Little by little, the authority which he used so modestly, and whose full force was not felt until after his death, has to be acquired...

...But everything that bears the mark of authenticity, good and evil ahke, is to have a right to his patient investigation...

...He accepted his sentence...

...It was something stronger even than he...

...Perhaps his strongest objection to Catholicism had lain in the fear that, by facilitating his life and showing him its every problem illumined in advance, it might very well deprive him of his favorite task of investigation, for which the term "taking to pieces" is hardly too strong, and of that reconstruction from its own elements to which he subjected every work, every event, and every creature, and which was the passion of his life...

...A review of the book by one of the editors will appear in a forthcoming issue of The Commonweal.—The Editors...

...Herein indeed lay the punishment of his pride...

...As the Holy Oils anointed those eyes, closed already to the world, with what overwhelming and all-merciful splendor must that light have steeped his soul to draw from a Christian who had ever deemed himself an unworthy and unprofitable servant, the great cry of triumph and thanksgiving which he has left behind him as the key to the heavenly dwelling where he waits our coming: "Now I am saved—by a miracle...

...Who would have followed this young man, undecided and unsettled as he then appeared...

...At every step he takes, Claudel extends a helping hand...

...The anxiety no longer oppressed him which, for years, had led him continually to repeat: "I have five years, perhaps ten, to live...

...Necessarily, he must have, since he complains of being "abandoned...

...If he neither could nor would condemn, it was because he had never had an adequate vision of human malice...

...Then the knowledge, gained by seeing him at his steadfast work, that his judgment was to be trusted, precisely because he weighed every element, kept nothing back, and showed only what he himself had seen...

...Who, in the case of the most heartfelt affections, has not experienced these sudden silences, wherein everything seems to die away, except the need of loving...

...Like a father with a loved child, he scolds and encourages him by turns, not hesitating to oppose him violently when he perceives him entering upon that perilous path of literature, along which Jacques felt that his invincible honesty, the transparent sincerity of the man who could write, "I never lie," authorized him to advance fearlessly...

...He fought for life bravely, just as in every other eventuality he had done whatever there was to do, and as well as it might be done...

...Freed little by little of this extraordinary terror he had of over-ease, and finding no obstacle worthy his consideration still before him, Jacques yields...

...How, it might well be asked here, could Jacques ever disown a faith so firmly held—reject a God Whom he had seen at his side for three years—voluntarily avert his eyes from a light that was so compassionate...

...The very desperation of his appeals, whose youthful extravagance reminds us that he was only twenty years old at the time they were made, is a burning proof how unable was Jacques to support this deprivation...

...Here are certitude and light after so much doubt and so much darkness, here is the presence of God, here is His visible hand, supporting, invigorating Jacques, defending him, keeping him, as it were, afloat on this ocean of sombre suffering, and choosing the moment of bodily and mental misery, when the very soul seemed exhausted from its dreary oscillations in the void, to instill that joy which none may taste save through deprivation and the surrender of everything that is not itself...

...Little by little, insensibly almost, Jacques advances toward God...

...In either case, Jacques knew that his hour had come...

...Before the habit of confidence in his judgment could be acquired by these disciples, certain things were indispensable...

...He refuses to stay his voyage of discovery or to cast anchor in some sheltered port with all these arrives, so sure of themselves and of their accomplished virtue...

...The love of God grows numb...

...He could never conceive of salvation as easy...

...Knowledge, for him, meant love...

...If he did not fear evil it was because he was sceptical of its power...

...Read A la Trace de Dieu and you will find an answer to all the questions posed in the Correspondence...

...He was honest as some men are dark-haired or snub-nosed, by birth and without the remotest prospect of change...

...He thought that everyone possessed an armor like his, against which evil blunted its barb and wasted its poison...

...Since his task absorbs him to such a degree that he is no longer able to raise his eyes to God—since he gives himself to it so thoroughly that he has no longer time to give God anything, God will leave him the task as sole recompense...

...He had been brought up in the closest intimacy with Him: he had been taught to rely upon Him in every conjuncture of life, to pray to Him, to follow His counsels, to welcome His inspirations...

...Suppose that he had, from the date of his return to France, proclaimed himself a Christian...

...He believed that when others spoke of their sins, they, like himself, were referring to their temptations...

...In the midst of the daily projects with which his brain still swarmed, he knew the task was over...

...With him, there can be no question of sudden conversion...

...Even if Jacques remained faithful to the former, did he keep his faith in the latter...

...You have thrown me among my brethren, perhaps in order that, in returning to You I may not return alone, but bring You those of whom I am a fellow-captive...

...As he himself has put it, "Conversion means simply turning oneself in the right direction...

...Were it not for you and the children, I could die without a pang...

...At other times, instead of surprise, there was resignation...

...The era of doubts and contentions was at an end and the realm of light attained...

...Nevertheless, even at the period when he most obstinately refused to call himself a Christian, he has always been, in the full force and beauty of the term, the "man of good will," by whom no burden was shirked, whom no danger ever frightened, who always did his best with the means given him, who accepted happiness and suffering, success and frustration, with the same docile and loving heart, and with whom whatever God did was always for the best...

...He is unwilling to accept any God circumscribed, fashioned or delimited by the measure of our petty hemisphere...

...The problem was one of daily bread...

...Had he waited overlong to deliver that message...

...It was during the three years spent as a prisoner of war that the good seed sown by Claudel took root, swelled and bore fruit a hundredfold...

...He could not recall what had been In his mind to say...

...He was fully conscious that he was reopening a route long abandoned and that it was for others to march behind...

...Some were exterior and even material...

...That extraordinary prayer, in which all the apparent obscurities of his conduct arc made clear, came from his heart in all sincerity and in all simplicity: "My God, create within me an intelligence that is unencumbered, pure and candid, wherein I may receive the ideas of others...

...And yet this very morality, rejected as an instrument for his work, was never once repudiated by him as a guide, nor offended by the slightest gesture of his life...

...In "an abyss of sadness, resignation and courage," he took up the last and supreme effort where he had laid it down...

...I have been dead," he told us, "for several months...

...He knew that if he were on the road it was to get somewhere...

...So long as a thousand preoccupations, a thousand duties, demanded this attention, how could he undertake a task which he desired final and triumphal, how dare to place at the service of God a being so dispersed...

...I assure you, I am no longer attached to hfe...

...But his mother had died when he was only ten years old...

...His pride...

...And he has never left the road of Christianity...

...Using the gift of penetration which he has received, it is his intention, he tells us with a naive assurance, "to explore the psychology of God...

...Both as an intellectual and as a human document, its appearance in France a year ago created an interest almost amounting to a sensation, and its publication in English by Albert and Charles Boni is one of the events of the spring publishing season...

...For consider a moment the circle by which Jacques Is surrounded, those "brothers" of whom he Is, In his own words, "the fellow-captive...

...From now on he had no care save how to "despoil himself, becoming dry and bare and poor, as death should find a man...

...the gates are opening," he cried...

...At Christmas, 1913, without great enthusiasm or any strong assurance that his darkness has been dispersed —in short, "by an act with which a noble deliberation of judgment had much more to do than the demands of sentiment," he asks from heaven the spiritual food whose benefit he is not to feel until a few months later when the hazard of disaster has really "cast him upon God...

...Morality, however, is not God...

...There was no time now to speak of his heart or feelings...

...Through the sheer necessity of explaining himself to himself and to no other, he had lost the taste, and perhaps the faculty, for showing the inwardness of his beliefs to anyone on earth, save indeed to a single soul, whose place was at the core of his own and of which he has written: "It is one with me...

...and because his honesty was flawless...

...Through humility—but also through pride...

...Conscious that he is living in an hour, not so much of correction, as of fuller understanding, he has all the air of setting morality aside...

...Never has anything passed before me without affecting me strongly, or left me without taking away with it as it went something of my love and of my life...

...There were times when a flash of lightning seemed to pierce the darkness that covered the unknown road, and when he realized whither he was being led...

...My God," he cries...

...Humility 1 With his mind always fixed on what remained to be done, and oblivious of what he had accomplished— comparing himself always with the Creator and never with the creature, Jacques remained conscious of his faults and imperfections, but never of his virtues...

...To lie, to deceive, were for him such sheer impossibilities that the contempt in which he held them was almost childish in its naivete...

...Just as we defer writing to some best-beloved indefinitely, because we feel the letter is too vital a one to be written amid distractions, so Jacques put off speaking of God...

...He had "never succeeded in living without God, nor even at a distance from Him...

...As a result there is a sensible diminution of succor and of joy...

...Soon his mind was absorbed entirely by the other world...

...It told him that, in the daily progress toward God, he was not of those who follow, but of those who are followed...

...Because he did not speak of God after the war, it has been too readily concluded that God was forgotten...

...Resistance was at an end...

...For months, behind the joy in sheer living which never shone from him so radiantly, a hand that was hidden but very powerful was detaching him little by little from life...

...For a long time, he may have walked along it with closed eyes...

...For the very reason that, in the interminable solitude of his prison, a habit of silence had grown upon him, which he was never able to break...