VIII

SCOUTS AND GUIDES

My dear Pierre Schaeffer,

 

Your novel Les Enfants de coeur affected me, but certainly not as a novel; nothing in it appeals to my imagination. I even doubt that a man who has grown up and lived outside the Catholic atmosphere, no matter how cultured, would be able to grasp what it’s all about. When I first knew you, you were just leaving one of our larger schools, the 10th, if memory serves me. But you were, above everything else, a Scout; you were pursuing, under the name of routier, the dream that had its roots in your childhood. The Route was a childhood miracle pursued beyond adolescence. At twenty, you still wore your little boy’s disguise. You led the same rondo around the same bonfire and the same cassock. You managed the team of the Magian Kings, and invented farces and mysteries for the edification of the fake peasants of the big suburb. In the Magian Kings, the spirit of the scouts and the spirit of the 10th formed a precipitate of odd taste which is well described by the remark you report from one of your comrades: “Just the same, the Lord is a remarkable fellow!”

Am I wrong in recognizing in the Father who stirred up this beautiful fire, and whom you call Father Diamant, the illustrious priest whose apostolic career, by a detour of Providence, has just wound up in Hollywood? We shall come back to that. What your book describes is a “flight itinerary.” You don’t definitely say so, but we see you from page to page tearing yourself away from the enchantment of prolonged childhood. You suddenly discover that you are an adult, and that life is there before you, not simple and tranquil, but harsh and criminal. Indeed, it seems that for you everything that the Church puts at the disposal of the faithful has been a party to this vanished enchantment. God keep me from suggesting that you have turned away from the Faith. It doesn’t help matters any that along with your book I received another which seems to have become your Bible, and which you say you want to discuss with me, the Fragments d’un enseignement inconnu. Its author, P. D. Ouspensky, was the spiritual heir of that mysterious Gurdjeff who gathered together some fanatical followers at the Chateau of Prieure, near Fontainebleau; it was there that Catherine Mansfield came to die, like a mortally wounded doe in the mud of a pool.

The almost physical aversion I feel for anything that closely or remotely resembles theosophy, the mistrust that the tenets of gnosis and esoteric Christianity arouse within me, would suffice to keep me from having any discussion with you about this “unknown instruction” without deep previous study. Besides, that is not my intention. In your case, the only thing that arouses my attention is that a young Catholic, subjected to certain methods of apostleship in vogue among young students, is led astray at the age of forty, lured by another wisdom. Once again, it matters little that this new wisdom does not bar any particular religion. Catholicism alone is no longer enough for you. That is the fact that concerns us both, because it opposes a defiance and a negation to the promise that a woman of Samaria, and through her all of us, received from the Lord at Jacob’s Well: “Whosoever shall drink of this water shall still thirst, but he who drinks of the water I shall give him shall nevermore thirst.”

You have drunk, and still you thirst, and lean your disillusioned face over another fountain. A story that has been repeated a thousand times, you will tell me. No indeed! Most of the people who fall away from Christianity have not lived it as you have; they give up something they never really had. You, on the contrary, whether you like or not, are the embodiment of a failure: the failure of a certain method? I realize that each case of this sort should be studied by itself, and that secrecy is required. Rest assured: I do not wish to discuss in public your private life, about which I know nothing. We do not need to know whether you have failed Grace, or whether Grace has failed you. I am merely searching for what there is that is artificial in the picture that your novel gives us of this little world of scouts and guides in which you grew up.

In one chapter of Enfants de coeur, you recall that one night, when I went camping with you, I rather displeased your comrades. I remember how they themselves cut me, who am completely impulsive and discipline my moods so little that people can say anything about me save that I am not natural. But what made their atmosphere so unbreathable to me was precisely their lack of naturalness, a behavior which seemed to me at all times to be mechanical. They were Catholic scouts, but they were also boys who wanted to be free and were straining at their leash. Your chaplain, who was at the same time comradely and a little aloof, watched me with a smile on the corner of his mouth, while keeping his distance. The certainty of belonging to the elite of elites (being from the 10th) was oddly blended in you with the fear of not being quite “up to snuff.” The school spirit of the polytechnician, the team spirit of the guides, the practice of virtue and apostleship, kept alive in all of you a visible and quite understandable satisfaction. Yet I felt that you were full of distrust. You prowled gropingly around certain books. Literature seemed to you to be a possible meeting place with spirits of another race, with “the ends which are only the ends” of which Pascal speaks. But one was struck with the fact that you were not at your ease. Entangled in your complexes, you resembled guinea-pigs designed for spiritual experimenters like your famous Father Diamant.

God forbid, my dear Pierre Schaeffer, that I should pass judgment on this priest who has devoted the best part of his life to young people. I do not doubt that he has started a great many of them toward the light, which is enough to assure his glory in this world and the next. The fact remains, however, that you were being “prepared” for a certain experiment, which might succeed or miss fire, as the case might be. I recall a book of this Father (the story of a scout pilgrimage to Rome) where one sees him in the final pages seizing a boy around the waist and throwing him alive into the brazier of God. As I read this, I could not help conjuring up the bull of Phalaris. The visible delights of the sacrificing high priest, which every word betrayed, aroused in me an anxiety that has not been dispelled over the years.

This anxiety does not touch the fundamental truth. The Son of Man still continues to be for me the Son of God. It is the method that was applied to you that I question. Taken back to its basic foundation, the problem I place before myself is this: from the point of view of Faith, there exist from the outset, between Grace and each chosen soul, certain exchanges of which the soul is the only witness and the sole object. It is the “I and my Creator” of Newman. Things that come from the outside, like collective exercises and group rites, are supposed to aid what goes on within. But in what measure is the inner experience served, and to what extent is it perverted, by these activities? I realize that they have as their aim the reviving of sentiments that may no longer exist, that it is a matter of stirring up discussion between the creature and his Creator, of making the heart sensitive to God.

It is in this sense that Pascal invites us to bow to the automaton: “Because we must not fail to recognize ourselves,” he writes, “We are as much automaton as mind.” Here I rebel against Pascal. There comes a moment, and you are an example of it, when the mind finally exerts judgment over the automaton to which we have tied it. Scout automatism did not overcome your anguish. You challenged your religious life as soon as it seemed to you to be bound to a mechanism set in motion by specialists who knew how to manipulate it, and all the more so because they were dealing with a young quarry who had no defense or tricks.

We must therefore go back to the source, far beyond all induced fervors. We must hold fast to the unique authenticity of Faith, Faith in the shadows, the crucifying happiness that Christ announced to Thomas: “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed” … who have not seen, have not heard, have not touched, have not been enlightened. Everything that is perceptible to the senses comes from the periphery and concerns it. What role does God play in what is externally induced? Least authentic, according to Pascal’s story, are perhaps his tears of joy. What you have broken away from, dear Pierre Schaeffer, is not Christ, but a system of emotions aroused about Christ; in short, a technique. I admit that with some boys who are frustrated for satisfactions of the flesh, it may seem necessary to provide some appeasements which, in order to be spiritual, must appeal to the heart as well. I do not deny that they may sometimes come from God. But how can we be sure of it, since they are the result of a certain mode of life, of automatism? Perhaps in our declining years we are better prepared to understand, in man, the greatness of a love that expects from God no exchange perceptible to the senses and requires no answer. Indeed, at the moment when the old man realizes that in human love, if he still experiences it, there is nothing to expect, nothing to hope for, he also realizes that if he turns to God he retains his faith in the infinite Love of which he knows himself to be the object, even though nothing comes to him from that side that the senses can discern.

I fear that all we have in our religion that is of an effusive nature ought to be erased. Our greatness comes from this love of adoration which is aroused in us by the Deus absconditus, the hidden God, the inaccessible God, the God Who is imperceptible to the heart. At the boundary are the astonishing words of Dostoievsky in a letter written when he left prison, words which he was to put, twenty years later, into the mouth of one of his “Possessed”: “If someone were to prove to me that Christ is without truth, and that it is true that truth is without Christ, then I should prefer to stay with Christ rather than with the truth.” We know that no power on earth will be able to produce this proof, since Christ is truth. But we are determined in advance not to be separated from Christ by anything, no matter what; neither by His apparent absence, nor by His silence. We are determined to have recourse to no subterfuge that might lead us astray. It is the cry of Saint Paul, that the lowliest Christian has the right to take up again in the shadows of his faith without consolation: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Will it be tribulation, or anguish, or persecution, or hunger, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? But in all these trials we are more than conquerors, through the One Who has loved us. For I have the assurance that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor kingdoms, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.” And we might add: “Nor silence, nor night.”

Dear Pierre Schaeffer, to the poor lark, once the mirror is broken, there is left only the sunshine of Christ, which our human eyes do not see, the sunshine of the shadows. And the poor lark continues to yield to the call of the first charmer to come along; still dangling from his foot Father Diamant’s broken strings, it flutters around an initiating high-priest. But our story with Christ can admit of only two characters: Christ and each one of us; and between the two, of only one interpreter, the Church of Simon Peter, the Church of the laying on of hands, the holder of the master-words that bless and absolve.

These, my dear enfant de coeur, are the thoughts which the reading of your book inspired in the old enfant de coeur that I still am.