JACQUES RIVIERE: THE HEART'S REASONS REVISITED

...He is wearing that flat little fatigue-cap of the 220th regiment...

...The supernatural, however, was paradoxically mingled with the banality of the everyday world...

...In his essay "The Christian mentality seen from within," he describes this attitude toward God: "You have to encounter all these various kinds of resistance, learn to rely on things that you can't very clearly explain, not even to yourself, find yourself dealing with the dark regions of the soul, and take into account all the possible reactions the soul can have...

...This silence suggested to some that Riviere had lost his faith, to others that he had become satisfied with a certain religious mediocrity while he turned his attention to other, more practical concerns, such as writing, studying, making a living...

...I feel that I can't make any progress in the love of God except through the love of his creatures...

...He wrote that he was convinced the poverty of the Gospels must resemble "something in the kind of life that we are leading here-or rather that we should be leading here: getting packages, and sharing with those who don't have any...

...But he went one giant step further: God was indeed an obstacle but he was also, and undeniably, a person...

...Rationalists felt he had betrayed them by his conver-'sion...

...Through his lectures, articles and editorial policy at the NRF he helped both modern writers and modern readers acquire a new understanding of the power of the word...

...But he shares with many of the Christian mystics their insistence on the spiritual life as personal experience...

...But the reader of the notebooks that he kept during the war cannot help but think that the apparently routine life was only the surface of an unending search...

...He demanded of himself-and of art-a two-fold attention, both to things and to the beyond...

...But he was a good man, one who acquired love, patience and a vision of things unseen as a result of a four-yea...

...And they were acutely aware of this same unrest in their friend and colleague...

...What did not necessarily appear on the surface, but is quite clear in the notebooks, is that the prison situation gave a very definite direction to Riviere's inner life...

...Jacques Riviere was a convert, and as a convert he proved to be something of an embarrassment to many people...

...At any rate, not in the traditional sense of one whose virtue is exercised under heroic conditions...

...His career as a novelist and literary critic had been interrupted by four long years of war spent for the most part as a prisoner of war in Germany...

...The book was called A la Trace de Dieu- something like "Tracking down God" or "Hunting for the signs of His presence...

...When Riviere died, Andre Gide wrote of him: "He has left us, left behind his unfinished work, his unrest, to seek beyond the grave an answer to his countless questions...

...God was the object of man's desire, the reason for his humiliation as well as for his faith...

...A word is matter, sound, articulation...

...It created a need, a thirst, an openness that cried for satisfaction...

...Shortly before the war, Riviere had finished a series of articles (later expanded into a book) on the poet Arthur Rimbaud...

...As a person, God has preferences, desires, even disappointments...

...Augustine, he asks God to spare him the call to abandon the world...

...This is' especially true of the second half of the work, consisting of journal-like entries recording, over a period of about three -years, the spiritual joys, longings and discouragements of a man plunged into an extended period of solitude...

...Riviere shares this conviction...

...As with most exchanges between persons it was a question of psychology...

...We are not surprised to find that during his captivity he read and reread the Imitation of Christ...

...And I possess perhaps some of those qualities it takes to make that world become apparent...

...Shortly after his death Riviere's wife, Isabelle, published selections from her husband's notebooks, a collection of remarks, meditations, prayers, written during the four years Riviere had spent as a prisoner of war...

...Don't force things, don't stubbornly plunge ahead, but step back a bit until the right path reveals itself...

...Perhaps it was precisely this difficulty of communicating the truth which fanned the flames of Jacques Riviere's literary interests...

...In addition there was what he called his "temptation"-a hopeless, strangely intellectual love affair with the wife of his publisher...

...When he was punished by short rations or by solitary confinement he suffered the humiliation of the helpless victim manipulated by an all-powerful authority...

...But at the same time it is "charged" with meaning...

...Even the day-to-day existence in the camp generated the kind of humility Riviere associated with real evangelical poverty...

...Riviere was well aware that the philosopher and the theologian would smile indulgently at what they considered a faith too simple and too concrete...

...For Riviere faith and humility were synonymous: they were both a sort of anguish...

...period of trial and separation...

...Familiarity with God was, of course, for Jacques Riviere, a very experiential thing...

...What he accomplished is basically what I would like to do: the experience of God, the direct testimony of God's habits and preferences, of His methods, in short of all God's ways in the world...

...warren r. carlin is an assistant professor of French at Lake Forest College in Illinois...

...His was an adventure of the soul...

...I have a tremendous love for his creatures...

...It shows us that, of all the doctrines of Christian belief, the one that has contributed most to Jacques Riviere's inner vision is the mystery of the Incarnation...

...That is not my kind of work...

...The poem was witness to its existence...

...An entry in one of the notebooks for 1915 makes it quite clear...

...Whereas metaphysics deals with theory, psychology deals with experience...

...It was a path Riviere knew he could not follow...

...His conversion had occurred in 1913, not long before his mobilization...

...to bring everything down to earth, so that we can see right on the ground, and touch right on the ground the mystical adventure...

...Unhappiness occurs," he wrote in a letter dealing with the apparent opposition between earth and heaven, "because people devote themselves to the one and completely neglect the other...

...It was a project, of course, which never materialized...

...At first glance his face appears expressionless, tight-lipped, perhaps even a bit surly...

...He goes on to add that he is not the kind of person it takes to make a saint...

...The large brass buttons of his coat seem very prominent...

...But this passion continued to plague him and he felt he needed time to analyze it and, through analysis, to purge himself completely of it...

...he loved people...

...Make it your instrument for something good, whatever it might be...

...He adds that this effort on the part of the artist to concretize the spiritual implies a great sense of love...

...He even intended using some of these outlines as the framework for an apology of Christianity to be written sometime after the war...

...This obviously raises problems of communications since much of experience lies beyond the grasp of logical discourse...

...Truth corresponds to experience-not simple experience of the physical senses, but experience of the heart as well, experience of the soul...

...A notebook entry for November, 1914, affirms that Pascal "is really one of those I'm fondest of...

...According to Pascal, man became sensitive to God's presence in the world through the operations of "the heart," a faculty he characterized as being "the instinct for the true...

...His emotional reaction to captivity was a deep sense of humiliation...

...And yet, for Riviere, it was a productive humiliation...

...men, moreover, for whom some form of spiritual unrest was a daily and pressing reality...

...Morale, he felt, would be a problem...

...One thing must be clearly understood," he wrote, "the Christian believes in God, not as you would believe in an idea, in Justice, for instance, or in Freedom or in Reason...

...One fully understands only what one suffers for," he wrote...

...And why did he remain so silent about questions of faith and religion for the last six or seven years of his life...

...But there was perhaps something else...

...In the notion of God becoming man in a context of love we can see, as it were, the dogmatic justification for that vision of a universe where the supernatural is made manifest in the concrete, the spiritual in the material...

...He considered himself therefore a believer, although he was distressingly uneasy with the traditional orthodoxy of Christian belief...

...Be satisfied with a life that is pure, that is patient, and I will do everything in my power to give you that...

...It was not a cerebral activity, nor did it have much to do with metaphysics...

...Words betray experience, deform it, empty it of its "felt" value...

...Into this wound, then, came God...

...In August, 1914, he was led away in a long line of prisoners taken in the woods around Verdun, and it marked for him the beginning of a four-year retreat...

...But the whole of human awareness-of "experience"-testifies to its authenticity...

...But why shouldn't God be somehow like man, if man was created in the image of God...

...Of even greater interest is the recent publication, fifty years after the author's death, of the complete "prison notebooks," with valuable notes and comments by Riviere's son as well as by his late wife...

...During the last seven years of his life he neither wrote nor spoke publicly of his spiritual adventure...

...Fellow believers often wondered why he seemed so obviously and constantly uncomfortable in his belief...

...His four years of withdrawal spent in prison convinced him that to turn from the world, even for love of God, would be to deny the very intimate and personal nature God had given him...

...In this he resembles the symbolists whom he idolized in his youth, and for whom God was the great defect in the universe...

...Withdrawal," he wrote, "that is perhaps the most important movement we can make in the search for truth...

...But it is nonetheless real, and if we are intellectually honest, says Riviere, we will recognize it...

...In another letter Riviere tells his friend, "I love that effort...

...And like all born seekers-like Augustine or Pascal, whom he cherished, or even like his fellow countryman from Bordeaux, Michel de Montaigne-Riviere could never be comfortable or at ease...

...This is what attracted him so powerfully to writers like Peguy and Claudel, and led in great measure to his "discovery" of Proust...

...Claudel called it "a great book, one destined for a long career of doing good...

...He especially urged this kind of attention on his close friend, Alain-Fournier, at a time when the latter was hard at work on his novel The Wanderer...

...The work of the editor and critic generally takes place behind the scenes...

...knowing that your whole life is in someone else's hands...

...This is at once the power and the mystery of poetry...

...Riviere did not share the religious attitudes of a Paul Claudel for whom God was the final cause in whom mankind finds its rest...

...All right...

...Riviere loved the world...

...being totally dependent on others...

...Sounding like the young St...

...Even his meditations were painful in this sense, because they made him increasingly aware of the distance separating his actions from his aspirations, what he was from what he felt he ought to be...

...Both the earlier work and these recent notebooks reveal how intimately Riviere's search for God was tied to his never-ending, often painful, search for self...

...God, for the Christian, is Someone...

...His prayer was generous: "Dear God," he asked, "make use of your innocent creature, use this heart which is perhaps blameworthy but without malice...

...And with that publication, his spiritual unrest, his search for a personal faith, became as it were a matter of public record...

...What he needed, actually, was some sort of retreat...

...And then we notice the eyes...

...The heart must be opened, the way you would open a fruit, so that the mind in turn will be able to open up ideas...

...He was not a saint...

...We must be careful not to make Jacques Riviere into something he was not...

...Whether the book has actually enjoyed that long career seems questionable, but it is undeniably a fascinating document...

...It was the necessary wound through which the truth could enter...

...By the time he left for the front, he had given up any intention of pursuing this affair and left in writing a full explanation for his wife to be read in the event he did not return...

...It is a thing like any other thing...

...This is the face of the restless seeker, whose one overriding passion was for truth, and for whom the war and his long internment seemed to come as if from the hand of Providence...

...Orthodox sanctity involved renunciation of the world...

...His spiritual vision never goes beyond the concrete, the temporal, the contingent...

...It can evoke a psychological state, entire moments of the past, a whole universe other than itself...

...Philosophy and theology dealt with ideas, not with people...

...JACQUES RIVIERE: THE HEART'S REASONS REVISITED WARREN R. CARLIN like all born seekers, he could never be comfortable or at ease When Jacques Riviere died, fifty years ago last February, he was only thirty-eight years old...

...What they all generally tended to overlook was that Riviere was, by his very nature, a seeker...

...But as you believe in a person you know...

...Politics, psychology and religion were among the subjects discussed, and a number of Riviere's own outlines for these discussions appear in the first part of A la Trace de Dieu...

...They give an over-all impression of restlessness, of searching that seems somehow at odds with his otherwise youthful and stolid appearance...

...O my God, deliver me from the temptation to be a saint...

...In addition, he claimed, "the whole of Christian morality boils down to this: imitation of a particular being, of a clearly defined person whose habits and tastes you are familiar with...

...Among the many remarkable insights he drew from the work of this difficult poet was that, for Rimbaud, the supernatural existed...

...That remark about the need for love is actually quite revealing...

...The tension thus created gives to Rimbaud's life and work that tragic sense of exile and frustration...

...Riviere's position on the staff of the Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, first as secretary and later as editor-in-chief, brought him into close association with many of the outstanding literary figures of the early twenties: men like Proust, Gide and Claudel...

...Humiliation was a door to understanding...

...He was vitally concerned with symbols, and particularly with verbal symbols...

...And Riviere, to be sure, felt this tension in his own life, but he steadfastly refused to resolve it...

...It is a sort of knowledge of people acquired by direct contact, and it necessarily leaves room for the unexplainable...

...It may involve apparent contradictions, difficulties which reason can not dispel...

...In this latest edition we have a photograph of Jacques Riviere as a prisoner taken in 1915...

...Only his innate respect for the workings of the intellect and his rigorously honest self-reflection kept him from the excesses of voluntarism and religious sentimentality...

...God is concerned...

...But true conversion, according to Riviere, was not a simple case of intellectual adherence to a collection of doctrines and rites, it was a meeting, an encounter with Someone...

...He emerged from the camp with a deep sense of vocation, of having a job to do before he died...

...Once the daily routine was established within the camp at Koenigsbruck, Jacques Riviere allowed himself to assume an increasingly important role in the life of his fellow prisoners...

...In addition to organizing the discussion group, Riviere acted as interpreter between the Germans and his fellow prisoners and created a weekly news service consisting of translations from German newspapers...

...As a soldier he felt humiliated by having been taken prisoner...

...In this he was quite like Pascal, and he knew it...

...and I simply cannot in any way believe that, by it, I'm offending him...

...The burning desire to do good, to be of some positive use to the world was, he said, something "gnawing at my heart," that made him flush with enthusiasm even as he prayed...

...His dynamic sense of curiosity about life and the world, coupled with his unremitting and painfully lucid faculty for self-analysis, would never let him rest...

...And since man's thirst for the absolute remains necessarily unsatisfied in this life, God assumes for Riviere the status of a vast cosmic obstacle-obstacle to peace, to satisfaction, in short to mediocrity and repose...

...collar is a little too large...

...It's what I call the psychological state of mind...

...They are looking off into some vague distance, slightly to the right, as if impatient to see, to recognize something not quite visible...

...Twice he was punished for serious breaches of camp discipline: once when he helped a Russian prisoner to escape, and once when he himself succeeded in escaping from the camp but was recaptured before reaching friendly territory...

...Things like the nature of sanctity, the direction of Christian social thought, Providence, and the role played by the person of Jesus in the life of the believer were among the problems he felt required more serious study . . . if he were ever to find the time...

...His life was spent between his family and his job...

...If he has never received much recognition outside of France, it may just possibly be because his influence on French letters was never that of a model to be followed, never that of a stylistic or psychological innovator, but rather that of a discoverer, of one who focused the light of his own intelligence on the works of the great writers of his time and, through his encouragement and remarkable insights, succeeded in bringing these works before a wider public...

...And this is why the real adventures of Jacques Riviere's life took place within him, where the curious gaze of others could not pierce...

...He sees the truth as possessing a mysterious power which, very much like electricity, makes us aware of its presence while it escapes our powers of definition...

...He was increasingly given to meditation and self-scrutiny...

...Anthropomorphism, you say...

...The passing of fifty years has simply allowed us to appreciate with an increasing sense of gratitude that small self-portrait he gives us toward the end of his captivity: "I am one for whom the inner world exists...

...Riviere experienced God not so much as a comforting presence but rather as the absence of comfort and of certainty...

...Riviere was not a mystic...

...For Riviere, God is present in his creatures, not only by reason of an incomprehensible act of love on his part, but also in such a way as to solicit an act of loving responsibility from man...

...Consequently he organized a regular discussion group to counteract the danger of intellectual stagnation...

...Human truth must take into account the totality of human experience...

...The saint, however, at least in certain traditional circles, was one for whom the world and creatures ceased to be important...