Such an attitude to Eternity was a marked characteristic of Lucie-Christine’s mysticism. Often, it produced in her the complete mono-ideism of ecstasy; and she describes the oncoming, content, and passing of these states with a minuteness which makes her journal a valuable document for the psychologist. Constantly, the intense awareness of the Divine Presence persisted through the many duties and activities of the day; “like a grave and tender note, dominating all the modulations of the keyboard of my exterior life.” She is not afraid to use the most violent metaphors, the most concrete images, in her efforts to express the intensity and reality of this spiritual life that she leads, this divine companionship that she enjoys. “I am nourished by God’s substance.” “I breathe the divine essence.” “The presence of God is so clear that faith is not faith—it is sight.” “The soul plays within God, as within a limitless universe.” “The Divine action penetrates and transforms my adoration. It is the Divine Being who thinks, loves, and lives within me.” None of the mystics have gone further than this in their claims; but it is significant that nearly all the greatest go as far.
Yet in all this, Lucie-Christine is strictly Evangelical. She was a Christian first, and a mystic afterwards. Though her expressions may seem startling, her mysticism never goes beyond that of St. John and St. Paul; and her most Platonic utterances can be justified by the New Testament. But the Pauline and Johannine teachings on the soul’s union with Christ are not for her merely doctrinal statements. They are vivid descriptions of states she has personally known, when her consciousness truly penetrated to that “région d’amour, région unique, où l’âme trouve un autre jour, une autre vie, un autre air respirable, où du moins tous ces éléments latents se trouvent manifestés, où Dieu seul apparaît, et tout le reste rentre dans l’ombre.”
Such a personal and overwhelming consciousness of “the greatness, power, and simplicity of God”—an all-inclusive unity which the unity of her spirit could comprehend—was the central interest of her life. She certainly tended to that which Baron von Hügel has called “the vertical relation” with the Divine. Nevertheless, this theocentric existence did not involve either the limp passivity or the spiritual selfishness with which it is sometimes charged. On the ethical side it committed her to a constant moral discipline; for her ardent and impulsive temperament reacted too easily to every external stimulus. “I must give up pleasure—never work for my own enjoyment.” “My one prayer is, that I may not feel joy and grief so vividly: that I may feel only Thee.” This deliberate unselfing and concentration on God so strengthened the fibres of character that she was able to bear with quietness her many personal sorrows, and the long years of blindness—a bitter cross for that keen lover of beauty—which closed her life. Yet it did not muffle her in the unattractive folds of “holy indifference.” She loved her family devotedly, and felt without mitigation the anxieties and griefs of human life. Her attitude to others was generous and sympathetic. God, she says, gives Himself to us that we may give Him again. His unique light must pass through the soul as through a prism; breaking up into the many colours of word and deed, forgiveness and good counsel, prayer and alms, self-forgetfulness and self-giving. Though exceedingly reserved about her spiritual experiences, which were only known to her confessor, the influence of these experiences was felt by those among whom she lived; and her house was known by them as “the house of peace.”
Moreover, her love for the institutional and sacramental side of religion saved her from many of the dangers and extravagances of individualism. It gave her a framework within which her own intuitions could find their place; and a valid symbolism through which she could interpret to herself the most rarefied experiences of her soul. She is an example of the way in which the mystic seems able to achieve the universal without losing or rejecting its particular expression: assimilating symbols of an amazing crudity without in any way impairing her vision of truth. The conflict between that vision and the concrete objectives of popular devotion was ignored by her; as it is generally ignored by practical mystics of the institutional type. She, who had touched the Absolute in her contemplations, was yet deeply impressed by the drama of the Church; by its ceremonies, holy places, festivals, consecrations. Her inner life was nourished by its sacraments. She displayed the power—so characteristic of Christian mysticism at its best—of transcending without rejecting the formulæ of belief as commonly understood; of remaining within, and drawing life from, the organism, without any diminution in the proper liberty of the soul.
Thus, seen as a whole, Lucie-Christine’s spiritual life has a richness and balance which reflects the richness and balance of her own nature; for an impoverished or one-sided character was never yet found capable of a fully developed and fruitful mysticism. We see her from girlhood seeking to satisfy her innate longing for reality; urged on the one hand by the artist’s craving for perfect loveliness, on the other by the philosopher’s instinct for Eternity. When the veil was lifted, and the inner voice said, “God only!” she found at once the reconciliation and the fulfilment of these two desires. The long and varied experience which followed was no more than an unfolding of the content of those words. They revealed to her the Substance of all beauty and truth; shining in that world of appearance which she loved to the last with an artist’s passion, yet ever abiding unchanged in that world of pure being which she touched in her contemplations “above all feeling, image, and idea.” Because of this double outlook on reality, her mysticism was both transcendental and sacramental. It irradiated the natural world, and also the symbols of religion, with that simple light of Eternity wherein she found “all beauties known and unknown, all harmonies natural and supernatural.” Lucie-Christine makes clear to us, as few mystics have done, the immense transfiguration of ordinary life which comes from such an extension of consciousness; when “the veil suddenly drops, God reveals Himself, and the soul knows experimentally that which she knew not before.” Her journal is full of passages in which its joy and splendour are described. I take one written in a time of great mental and physical suffering, when the cruel deprivations of blindness were already closing in on her, and the two beings she loved best—her husband and her youngest daughter—had lately been taken from her by death. “Figurez-vous un pauvre prisonnier au fond d’un cachot renfermé et obscur, voyant tout à coup s’entr’ouvrir la voûte de ce cachot, et par là recevant la lumière du soleil, et aspirant avec force l’air du dehors qui lui arrive embaumé des senteurs de la vie et de la chaleur de l’atmosphère resplendissante. Ainsi mon âme s’ouvrait, et buvait Dieu! ... mon âme aspirait et buvait la vie même de la Trinité Sainte, et se sentait revivre, et n’avait plus aucun mal.”
III
CHARLES PÉGUY
In the turmoil and anxieties of the first weeks of the war, few people observed that France had lost upon the battle-field one of the greatest of her modern poets; a fearless and original thinker, a constructive mystic, who exercised a unique influence over the young writers and thinkers of his world. Yet the death in action of Charles Péguy, who was killed on September 5, 1914, at the age of forty-one, removed a striking figure from contemporary literature, and was among the chief intellectual losses sustained by France in the war.
Born in Orleans in 1873, of peasant stock, Péguy had many of the fundamental qualities of the French peasant; the sturdy independence, the frugal tastes, the untiring industry, the close kinship with the soil. His father was a cabinet-maker; his mother that familiar figure of the cathedrals, the woman who lets the chairs. The great friend of his boyhood was an old republican carpenter with whom he used to talk, and to whose conversation he owed his first political ideas. This heredity and these influences gave to his thought and attitude a character which he never lost. In his mature work we see side by side the result of those two compensating elements in his childish environment; the mingled mystery and homeliness of that mediæval and intensely national Catholicism which finds in the French cathedrals its living symbols, the keen sense of social justice, of the need for social salvation, which inspired the popular republicanism of the years following the Franco-German war. These characteristics, which afterwards, in a sublimated form, came to dominate his mysticism and gave to it its special colour, its mingling of antique tradition with forward-looking hope, can be traced back to the blend of Christian and of democratic impressions which he received as a child. Perhaps only the son of French peasants could understand and reinterpret as he had done the figure of St. Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who saved France; and whose longing to mend and redeem, at once so practical and so transcendental, linked up the objectives of social endeavour and of faith.
Brought up within the atmosphere of provincial piety, Péguy rose from the elementary school to the lycée; and at nineteen, through his own efforts and his mother’s sacrifices, passed from Orleans to the University of Paris. There his vigorous mind and positive character soon made him the centre of a group of students, over whom he quickly obtained influence. There, too, he made the transition—almost inevitable for an ardent young man of his world—from Catholic orthodoxy to humanitarian socialism: the first stage in his spiritual pilgrimage, and the first attempt to answer that question which underlies all his thought and act, his poetry and controversy—“Comment faut-il sauver?” These words, which Péguy puts into the mouth of St. Joan of Arc, and shows to us as the mainspring of her actions, define too the secret impulse of his own career. His mysticism was not that of the contemplative, the solitary and God-intoxicated devotee: it was that of a strong-willed man of action, who sees far off the “mighty beauty” and longs to actualize it within the common life. He saw that common life with the eyes of a poet who was also a child of the people; discerning beneath its surface the dignity and the beauty of its antique and simple types—the spinner and the tiller, the housewife, the mother and the child.
“Les armes de Jésus, c’est la pauvre famille,