The Work In Progress

I view my life with the eyes of a true romantic artist; therefore, I deem it such an ugly, sordid, lop-sided thing that the only way to make of it something beautiful, something lofty and symmetrical, would be to cut it short; whether by martyrdom or simple self-slaughter. I can see no better way to finish the piece, nor am I zealous to belabour it and, ultimately, render it more monstrous than it is now. Nonetheless, I lack the resolution to stop.

I don't know whether it is a problem of having too much, or too little will. I can go on, but cannot lay down.

And that is, after all, what it means to partake of the authentic reality of God. In a certain sense, one must lay down one's life. Suicide,  of a kind, is the manner of sacrifice required. "Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it."

All the professions of belief, all the prayers mouthed, every ritual blindly endured, must amount to little, if anything, apart from this. To enter the pure, eucharistic silence, the liturgy of the soundless Word, it is necessary to relinquish one's will. It is not man, animated by his own flesh and blood, who takes the sacrament to his lips; -- but God who, by the power of His grace, makes all things new. His flesh, His blood, must become active in us. But there is nothing within us capable of effecting that miracle save Christ Himself, who dwells within. We have only to be still and wait, in order to know that He is the Lord, our God.

Still, we wish to be hospitable, and to make preparations for the arrival of the one who has, in fact, never left us. We fuss with many things, creating such an uproar that we cannot hear His gentle voice. "Surely," we must think, "His knock will rouse us like a clap of thunder when the time comes." Alas, the time is now, and has always been. Who can unlatch the door to one who dwells already in the innermost chambers of the place? Yet, by some charitable effort, we wish to invite Him in, as though He were not already the Master of the house! And, what's more, to serve Him, as if He were not already the Servant of all!

Man is like an impatient apprentice who seeks his Master's approval by attempting to complete the masterpiece which was intended purely for his edification, and to which he was meant only to bear silent, respectful witness. Or, more aptly, a toddler who has wandered into the studio of his artist-father, with the same misguided desire for approval. Imagine DaVinci returning to find his "Last Supper" converted into a child's finger-painting. Imagine his expression of mingled horror and indulgence as he discovers the child, all covered in red paint and irrepressibly proud of it.

Léon Bloy

"Bloy is one of the greatest creators of images who ever walked the earth... Bloy's genius is neither religious, nor philosophical, nor human, nor mystical; his genius is theological and Rabelaisian. His work seems to have been written by Saint Thomas Aquinas in collaboration with Gargantua. His books are scholastic and gigantic, eucharistic and scatological, idyllic and blasphemous. No Christian can accept them, but no atheist can take comfort in them."
-- Remy de Gourmont

"Léon Bloy possesses a fire that brings to mind the ardour of the prophets -- an even greater ardour, I should say. Of course that is easily explained: his fire is nurtured by the dung-heap of modern times."
-- Franz Kafka

"The vehemence, bitterness, and scorn so often condemned in his work are, in fact, the outcry of a man of sorrow overwhelmed by the spectacle of a society indifferent to its spiritual destiny.... By nature a poet, totally oriented toward absolute values and intolerant of mediocrity, he sought through verbal violence to awaken his contemporaries to the reality of the supernatural combat in which their lives were involved. In his intemperate attacks on his fellow creatures, Bloy so antagonized both Catholics and non-Catholics that his work suffered from a conspiracy of silence. Yet many of his pages, for sheer power of language and poetic beauty, will always rank among the finest in French literature. Today, he has his admirers and might be considered to be the object of a cult."
-- The Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literaure

"[Léon Bloy] believed himself a rigorous Catholic and he was a continuer of the Cabalists, a secret brother of Swedenborg and Blake: heresiarchs."
-- Jorge Luis Borges

One of the most intriguing, as well as overlooked, cultural figures of Belle Epoque France, Léon Bloy was a thwarted mystic, raging social reformer, and literary anarchist whose personal hardships were sublimated in dozens of novels, biographical studies, short stories, and poems, and in hundreds of articles, essays, and rants often circulated on the streets of Paris as scathing tracts and pamphlets. As a writer he was formed by many hatreds and humiliations. He spent his life in squalid poverty, waiting for a beatific vision which God denied him. His own suffering, and that of those around him, spawned in him a Hugoesque compassion for the downtrodden and the poor, and he became a savage critic of the prevailing order, the warts on whose epidermis he pointed out with a maniacal single-mindedness and a passionate intensity. Describing himself as a "grandiloquent wretch," Bloy was an outlandish medieval anachronism in the era of the newly erected Eiffel Tower, and managed to offend nearly everyone who was anyone in the Paris of his day. Behind his vilifications and vituperations, however, was not only an authentic genius fueled, like Juvenal's, like Swift's, by righteous indignation, but a genuine martyr, who wept in sympathy for the plight of "fallen humanity," and who felt himself the haunted conscience of all mankind. A great moral ironist in an age of negations, Bloy "called down the wrath of God upon the paltry convictions and the precarious equilibrium of a complacent society which put its trust in science and bourgeois virtues, while seeking the kind of tranquility that comes from silencing one's soul and forgetting God."

http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/2008/12/musings-and-thunderings-of-leon-bloy.html 

From the writings of Léon Bloy:

"Any Christian who is not a hero is a pig."

"I pray like a robber asking alms at the door of a farmhouse to which he is ready to set fire."

"There is but one sadness and that is for us not to be saints."

"Woe to him who has not begged! There is nothing more exalted than to beg. God begs. The Angels beg. Kings, Prophets, and Saints beg. The Dead beg. Everything that dwells in Glory and in Light begs. Why should anybody want me not to be proud of having been a beggar, and, especially, a thankless beggar?"

"I have always seen myself as being lower than the animals every time I have presumed to act otherwise than through love or the workings of love... Philosophy bores me, theology overwhelms me, words without love are meaningless to me, the reasonings of the wise seem to me a shadowy sewer, and the pride of the human mind makes me vomit."

"I live in a kind of heavy and stupid drunkenness, caused by the fumes of misery. I am sad by nature as one is by nature slight or fairhaired. I was born sad, deeply, horribly sad, and if I am possessed with the most violent desire for joy, it is by virtue of the mysterious law which attracts contraries... My nature alone was acting, obscurely. I instinctively loved unhappiness; I wanted to be unhappy. The very word 'unhappiness' carried me away with enthusiasm. I think I inherited this from my mother, whose Spanish soul was at the same time so flaming and so shadowed, and Christianity's main attraction for me has been the vastness of Christ's sorrows, the magnificent, the transcendent horror of His Passion... Who could believe that the very same man who sees so clearly the glory of God, who says things able to reawaken the courage of his brothers in despair, and who cannot speak of the Holy Trinity without weeping with love -- who could suppose that this same man is every day given over to the most violent temptations, and that he is not for a single instant master of his own heart?"

"I have meditated often and much upon suffering. I have come to the conclusion that only suffering, here below, is supernatural. The rest is human... When you die, that is what you take with you: the tears you have shed and the tears you have caused to be shed -- your capital of bliss or of terror. It is on these tears that we shall be judged, for the Spirit of God is always borne upon the waters..."

"It is always a good thing to see death, and I am happy this thought has filled you with the presence of God. Christians should constantly be leaning over the abyss."