The Poet as Believer (Routledge Studies in Theology, Imagination and the Arts) by Aidan Nichols & O.P

Author:Aidan Nichols & O.P. [Nichols, Aidan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

The Martyrs

After the Blessed Virgin Mary and the apostles, the martyrs rank before all other saints. The martyrs are those who have shared fully in Christ’s Passion, and not only mystagogically – ritually – in the baptismal dying with Christ. Theirs was the maximal witness to Christ it is possible to conceive. From earliest times, accordingly, they attracted veneration and were sought after as intercessors.37 The general category of the martyrs lent its name to the ‘martyrologies’, lists of saints preserved in the churches and used as a resource for prayerful remembrance.38

As already indicated, Claudel’s martyrology (in the strict sense of that word) falls readily into martyrs of three epochs: ancient, mediaeval, and modern. On the ancient martyrs, Feuilles de saints and Visages radieux divide the honours between them – though tiny poems on St Agnes appear a number of times among the additional verse published in a variety of places and collected together by Jacques Petit in the Pléiade Oeuvre poétique. For the mediaevals, the Bohemians – fêted during Claudel’s years in Prague – figure in Corona benignitatis anni Dei while the celebration of Joan of Arc, begun in Tokyo and completed at Brangues at the start of Claudel’s last decade, belongs to Visages radieux.

The typically Claudelian contrast yet inter-relation between the visible and the invisible is one of the more striking recurrent motifs of the martyr poems. In ‘Saint Georges’, this is comparatively straightforward: the physical contest of the saint with the ‘dragon’ (originally, perhaps, an animal personification of the Roman empire) has its counterpart in an inner struggle with paganism in his soul.39 Claudel’s George is outwardly cocky (‘It was only a dirty dragon, says St George, a sort of disgusting big slug’). He was, we are told, ‘proud of his body’ and while George presents himself to the rescued maiden as – both literally and metaphorically – a knight in shining armour, he also implies she might well feel for him a physical attraction. But his fine horse and armour will help him not at all in the inner struggle with the temptations offered by a non-Christian civilization at the height of its powers: ‘All this combination of Greece and Asia with Rome, so well done, and this line of columns in front of him that frame the Lebanon [mountains] two by two’. If his martyrdom required only physical bravery, it would be different. ‘George sees that he can pass from this world, but the world cannot pass from him’. His ‘instincts’ and ‘faculties’ are tested – but they are not found wanting in the end. (Claudel’s own love of women is displayed in a coda where he imagines the girl George saved asking God to be ‘lost with him [George] in his heart’. And so in the ‘sheer movement of intelligent and affective substance’ that is the life of the soul separated from its body, George is ‘like a splendid flame’ with which something ‘mysterious and sweet’ is mingled’.)

With ‘Sainte Cécile’, we are dealing not

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