Anniversaries
The Year of Masterpieces

1912 Three
Mysteries of love
One hundred years ago, Paris saw the publication of three great works: Miguel Mañara, The Mystery of the Holy Innocents, and The Tidings Brought to Mary. They had different styles, rhythms, and accents, but the same beginning: the evidence of a desire. And the same ending: an unexpected response, that happens.

by Pigi Colognesi

What an extraordinary year in Paris! In the 12th issue of the 13th series of his literary magazine Cahiers de la quinzaine, Charles Péguy published The Mystery of the Holy Innocents. In the first-semester volume of another literary magazine, the Nouvelle Revue Française, Paul Claudel’s The Tidings Brought to Mary appeared, and in the following volume we find Oscar Milosz’s Miguel Mañara. Not bad, eh?
Paul Claudel, born in 1868, was the oldest of the three, and certainly the best-known in the literary circles of the French capital. He had a secular background, but converted suddenly to Catholicism after listening to the singing of vespers in Notre Dame Cathedral. A career diplomat, he spent long periods abroad, meticulously tending to his extensive theatrical and poetic production. He died an academic in France in 1955.
Charles Péguy, born in 1873, spent his existence in the workshop of the magazine that he founded, and that he tried, with difficulty, to keep alive, despite the indifference and contempt that surrounded him. He, too, began to adhere to the Christian faith after a Socialist youth. For him, however, it was not a sudden illumination, but rather a long path accompanied by meditation on the heroine of his own Orléans, Joan of Arc, to whom he dedicated the Mysteries. He was killed on the battlefield in September 1914.
Oscar Milosz, born in 1877, came from a noble Lithuanian family. Having moved to Paris as a youth, he assumed French as his literary language. After World War I, he became an ambassador of Lithuania, which was independent once more. He preferred to live in isolation, and in 1939 he died in seclusion, at his home in Fontainebleau.
The three 1912 works were completely independent, and we cannot find any direct influences of one on another. There is one thing, however, that explicitly unites them, and it is that they all define themselves as “mystery.” The intention of the authors is evident: to hearken back to medieval culture, when theatrical works dealt with subjects that are in some way sacred, with liturgical solemnity. And these three pieces are united–despite the differences of style, accents, setting, and rhythms–by the mystery that they examine, that of love.

“How to fill this abyss?” The point of departure of all three is the evidence of a desire. The young Miguel Mañara is idolized by his guests in wealthy 17th-century Seville because he can boast an enviable series of amorous conquests. He admits to having seduced women of every age and rank, and yet he is devoured by dissatisfaction. “How to fill this abyss of life?” He who has dragged along dozens of young girls at his feet and served Venus, the goddess of love, with great devotion, now “wrings his neck with yawning”–all of the pleasures that he has allowed himself have not satisfied his anxious desire.
In the prologue of the Tidings, we meet the two figures who are at the apex of the drama. Young Violaine is happy with her existence; God has given her all that a girl like her can desire: a good family, a faithful fiancé, the certainty of a positive future. “Everything is perfectly clear. Everything is predictable. And I am very happy.” She doesn’t know that the mystery of love has reserved a much more profound and painful journey for her. Pierre de Craon is a cathedral builder; his vocation is to sow immense prayers made of stone in the soil of France. But he balks at his task, dreaming instead of building his “small house among the trees” and settling in with a wife and children–he would like love in a measure more accessible to him. Because of this, he has dared to force himself on Violaine, who is so pure that she has resisted his attacks and, above all, shows him her compassion with a kiss. With this gesture of mercy, she contracts the leprosy with which Pierre was infected as punishment for his attempted violence. In this prologue, desire has the form of a love without limits because of its purity and its universality.
There is not a story of human love in the Innocents, but we can very well say that God’s entire monologue is a declaration of His love toward man–a man marked by the need to be saved. He doesn’t admit it; on the contrary, he hides it under the presumption of those who believe that they can get by on their own strength. So God makes fun of “the man who doesn’t sleep,” that is, he who meticulously calculates and carefully plans for tomorrow, who continually thinks back on his errors and sets out to never commit them again, who analyzes his need instead of abandoning its fulfillment to the hands of the Father: “The man who abandons himself, I love. The man who doesn’t abandon himself, I do not love; it is surely very simple. [...] But I know you, you are always the same. You want to make great sacrifices for me, provided that you can choose them. You would rather make great sacrifices for me, provided that they are not those I ask of you, than to make small ones for me which I do ask of you.”

The best troops. The answer to this desire is the happening of an unforeseen event. For Miguel, it is the radiant simplicity of Girolama; in staying with her, the inveterate playboy discovers the face of the love that he had sought in all the wrong places: “Yes, you speak truly, Girolama; I am not as I was. [...] You have lit a lamp in my heart: and lo! I am as a sick man who falls asleep in the shadows, with the dew of fever on his brow and the chill of destitution in his heart, and then awakes with a start in a beautiful chamber where all things bathe in the shining music of light [...]. See what a place of peace you have made in my heart, Girolama.”
For Violaine, it is the discovery that her marriage to Jacques Hury must be radically reexamined in order to base itself on foundations much more solid than the correspondence of affections. She contracted leprosy by kissing Pierre, and she doesn’t want to hide it from her future husband. She offers to him, and asks of him, a love that is infinitely different: “There can be no justice between us. Only faith and charity.” But Jacques does not accept: “You mustn’t ask me to understand what’s beyond me.”
For the man who goes to a great deal of trouble instead of abandoning himself, it is the discovery that God really is like that father who waited for the prodigal son to come home; a father whose severity of justice is shattered by a simple prayer, a father who does not ask perfection of his children, but only a free trust: “Oh, I know very well they are not perfect. They are as they are. They are my best troops. You must love these creatures as they are. When you love someone you love him as he is.”

Liberty and salvation. The event encountered is not a mechanical response to the need of the person, but rather it unleashes the drama of freedom in all of its magnitude. Miguel sees his beloved wife Girolama torn from him by death, and he must face head-on the evil spirits who insinuate that that love was only a dream, a parenthesis, and that it would be better now to return to the more limited, earthly level. Miguel has to find a new human context that preserves the beauty of what he has glimpsed and experienced–it is the monastery, where he will spend the rest of his life in deepening, in making universal, in purifying the love of Girolama that has already penetrated him.
Violaine accepts her destiny as a leper. “The love in my heart will never be cured as long as there is an immortal soul in me to nourish it.” Thus she, who lives isolated from everything, participates without barriers in the great edification: “That is why my body is suffering in the place of Christendom as it disintegrates. Suffering is powerful when it is willed as sin is.” Her father, who had gone to the Holy Land as a pilgrim in order to implore God for the good of the Church, recognizes that Violaine’s simple acceptance is the best path: “Why be tormented when it is so simple to obey and the order is clear? That is how Violaine immediately follows the hand which takes hers.” In the Innocents, it is God who finds Himself facing the difficulties of freedom: “And how many times when they struggle so hard among temptations, I long, I am tempted to put a hand under their belly; to support them with my broad hand, like a father teaching his son to swim in the current of the river, and who is divided between two feelings. For on the one side, if he supports him forever and if he supports him too much, the boy will rely on him and will never learn to swim. But on the other, if he does not support him just at the right moment, the boy will swallow a nasty mouthful. Such is the difficulty, it is great. [...] On the one hand, they must achieve salvation themselves. [...] Otherwise it would not be interesting. [...] On the other hand, they must not be allowed to swallow a nasty mouthful, having dived into the thanklessness of sin. This is the mystery of the liberty of man, God says, and of my management of him and his liberty. If I support him too much, he is not free. And if I do not support him enough, he will fall. If I support him too much, I endanger his liberty. If I do not support him enough, I endanger his salvation: two goods, in a sense, almost equally precious. For this salvation has an infinite price. But what would salvation be if it were not free? [...] Such is the price we put on the liberty of man. Because I, myself, am free, God says, and because I have created man in my image and in my likeness. This liberty of the creature is the most beautiful reflection that exists in the world of the Liberty of the Creator.”

Supreme paradox. Authentic love is always fruitful, with an overflowing fecundity that is not measurable by the minute accounting of immediate results. It is the miracle of Miguel that heals the cripple Johannes while all the others at the doors of the church jeer at him. Miguel can heal him because the invalid, moved by the words of the preaching friar, does not curse his condition, but gives to the Author of his destiny of suffering–supreme paradox–the name of “love.”
It is the miracle of Violaine that restores life to the daughter of her sister Mara, who has become Jacques’s wife. Mara then kills Violaine because the little girl’s eyes have changed color, taking on that of the one who saved her–not even in front of a miracle is freedom forced to say yes; it can still object, to the point of violence.
It is the miracle of innocence with which Péguy’s mystery concludes. The children who suffered in Jesus’ stead, without even knowing Him, “have no lines at the corners of their mouths, lines of disappointment and of bitterness, injuries of Time.” They are the only ones in the vast paradise of God who sing a “new song” and, like lively imps, play at hoops with their halos.

Ask a father...
Notes from the writings of Fr. Luigi Giussani

“Our Movement was born on [Claudel’s] text: I used it often when I taught in high school. [...] For me, it represents the greatest poem of this century. The theme of The Tidings Brought to Mary can be defined thus: love is the generator of the human according to its total dimension; that is, love is the generator of the history of the person, inasmuch as it is a generation of a people.”
(From Le mie letture [My Readings])

“Morality, therefore, not as a capacity of ours. Not as I see myself with my false examination of conscience. Not as an intention of mine, of my melancholy voluntarism. Not self-criticism that must end up, if it is sincere, in desperation, because it never gets to the bottom of things, because ‘no one can do over what he did badly,’ as Girolama observes to Miguel Mañara in Milosz’s play. Morality, we have said, as the possibility of Christ in us. The energy that enacts our life is Christ.” 
 (From the Fraternity Exercises, 1987)

“It is one of Péguy’s most beautiful descriptions, when he talks about the father [...] [‘Ask a father if there is not a chosen time above all, and if it is not precisely when submission ceases and when his sons become men; love him (treat him) so to speak from knowledge, as man to man, freely, gratuitously. Esteem him thus. Ask a father if he does not know that nothing is equal to the glance of a man meeting the glance of a man’ (from The Mystery of the Holy Innocents).] In fact, at one time I launched the slogan: ‘Not disciples, but sons.’ The disciple is one who repeats words or modalities. The son is one who has learned, who has received the root, the seed; and the more it stays in the earth in which it was placed, whatever the conditions may be, the more it develops into a plant, that is, it matures.”
(From L’autocoscienza del cosmo
[The Self-Awareness of the Cosmos])