Skip to main contentAccessibility feedback

In the Grip of God

I was born August 6, 1868. My conversion took place December 25, 1886. I was then eighteen years old, but in spite of my youth my character had already assumed a definite bent. 

Although my ancestors on both sides were God-fearing people and had even given a number of priests to the Church, my family was religiously indifferent. In fact, after we moved to Paris, the family finally abandoned the faith of its fathers. I received my First Holy Communion with fervor and devotion; however, the event was, as for most of us youngsters, the crowning and the end of the religion of my childhood. 

To begin with, my education or rather instruction was placed in the hands of a private tutor; later on I attended one of the “lay” or atheistic schools of the Province, until I finally landed at the Lycée Louis le Grand where any lingering survival of belief was gradually extinguished. The multitude of worlds seemed incompatible with revelation. The reading of Renan’s Life of Christ furnished still more pretexts for changing one’s convictions, and this was facilitated by everything one saw and heard. 

Let us only recall the deplorable time in the eighties when the output of naturalistic literature reached its peak. Never did the yoke of the merely material weigh so heavily on mankind. The bearers of every prominent name in art, science, and literature professed themselves to be irreligious. All the so-called distinguished persons of this declining century were anticlerical. Renan was omnipotent. In person he presided at the last prize giving which I attended at the Lycée Louis le Grand, and my impression is that I received the prize from his hands. Victor Hugo had just disappeared in a blaze of glory. 

A boy of eighteen, I believed what most of the so-called educated class of that period believed. The vivid conception of the individual and the concrete had become for me a vague matter. I accepted the monistic and mechanistic hypothesis in its entirety. It was my belief that everything was governed by a natural order of things, that this world of ours was a strangely knotted network of cause and effect, whose complexity science would unravel in due time. Moreover all this caused me to be bored and to lose heart. The Kantian Imperative, which Mr. Burdeau, our professor of philosophy, tried to make presentable, I somehow or other failed to digest. 

It is not surprising, then, that I lived without a moral code and that a somber despair was already my familiar companion. The death of my grandfather proved dreadfully shocking to me. The final stage of his prolonged illness, due to cancer of the stomach, caused me to be haunted by a continuous fear of death. I had completely forgotten any religious teaching I had ever had, and my ignorance in religion could only be compared to that of a pagan. 

The first glimpse of truth came to me from the works of a great poet, to whom I am eternally grateful, and who played an overwhelming part in the forming of my mind: Arthur Rimbaud. His Illuminations and then later A Season in Hell were for me an extraordinary event. For the first time my material conception of life was being shaken; for a moment these books gave me a living and almost physical impression of the supernatural. Still my habitual state of.asphyxia and despair remained the same. 

It was this unhappy youth, who on Christmas day, 1886, made his way to Notre Dame, the great cathedral of Paris on the banks of the Seine, to attend the Christmas service. I had just begun to write, and with the superior air of the amateur that I was, I hoped to draw from the Catholic ceremonial an inspiration for some decadent exercise in prose. 

In such a frame of mind, jostled and shoved about by the crowd, I attended high Mass with moderate gratification. Having nothing better to do I returned again in the afternoon for Vespers. The boys of the cathedral choir, robed in white cassocks, and the pupils of the minor seminary of Saint Nicolas du Chardonnet, who were assisting, had just begun to sing a hymn which I later recognized to be the Magnificat. I myself was standing in the crowd near the second pillar at the entrance to the choir, to the right. 

It was then that occurred the happening which is dominant in my life. Suddenly, in an instant, in a fraction of time, the current of my life was altered and I believed. I believed with such force and adherence, with such an uprising of my whole being, with a conviction so powerful, with such certainty leaving no sort of doubt, that since then all books, all reasoning, all the hazards of a constantly changing life have not been able to shake my imaginings. Ah! that was no longer the trivial once I felt the heart-rending touch of innocence, of being a child of God, of partaking in an unspeakable revelation. 

In trying, as I have often done, to reconstruct the moments which followed upon this extraordinary instant, I find the following element which yet formed but one lightning flash, one identical arm of which divine providence made use to reach and open the heart of one poor, desperate child: “How happy those who believe—but if it were true? It is true God exists. He is present. He is Someone, he is a Being as personal as myself! He loves me, he calls me!” Tears came to the relief of this overwhelming moment, the lovely strains of the Adeste Fideles added to its profound poignancy. 

A tender touch of emotion, which, however, was still mingled with a feeling of dismay and even of horror! For the false philosophies by which I lived could not easily be cast aside. God had left them disdainfully where they were, and I could find no reason for changing them. Catholicism still seemed to me a storehouse of absurd anecdotes: its priests and faithful inspired in me the same aversion as before, which went so far as hatred, so far as disgust. 

The edifice of my opinions and of my knowledge remained standing and I saw no defect in it. I had only stepped out of it. Yet a new and formidable Being, with demands terrible for the youth and artist that I was had revealed Itself and in such a way that I knew not how to reconcile It with anything in my surroundings. 

The only comparison I can find to express my utter confusion is the plight of a man who by one single grip has been forcibly peeled out of his skin and transposed somewhere into a strange body. All that was most repugnant to my opinions and tastes was nevertheless true, and with it, willy-nilly, I had to come to terms. Ah! I was not willing to surrender without having first tried all possible means of resistance. 

It was a terrific struggle that lasted four years. I dare say it was a brave defense, and the fight was honest and radical. Nothing was left undone. I used all means of resistance at my command. One by one I had to surrender my weapons. The great crisis of my life had come, a mental agony, which Arthur Rimbaud characterizes with the words: “The spiritual battle is as brutal as any battle among men. O dark night! My face reeks with blood!” 

The young people who so readily abandon their faith do not realize what painful efforts are required to regain the same! The thought of hell as well as the thought of beauty and all the joys, which to my uninstructed belief I had to sacrifice upon my return to the truth, caused me to postpone my decision.

At last I opened a Bible; it was a Protestant edition, the gift of a German friend to my sister Camille. The event occurred on the evening of that memorable day I spent in Notre Dame, after I had returned home through a drizzling rain over streets which now seemed so strangely unfamiliar. For the first time I heard the has never since ceased to echo in my heart. 

I knew the history of Christ only through Renan and, by giving implicit credence to this impostor, I did not even know that Jesus Christ had ever claimed to be the Son of God. Every word, every line refuted with a majestic simplicity the impudent assertions of the apostate and unsealed my eyes. 

The truth prevailed. With the centurion I owned it, Jesus was the Son of God. Me, Paul, He singled out above all others and assured me of His love. But at the same time, if I did not follow him, he left me no alternative but damnation. Ah, I had no need to have hell explained to me: I had done my “season” there. Those few hours had sufficed to show me that Hell is everywhere where Jesus Christ is not. And what mattered to me the rest of the world in comparison to this new and prodigious Being who had just been revealed to me? 

Thus spoke the new man within me. But the old one still resisted with all the strength of a strong nature and would not abandon anything of the life just opening before him. Shall I admit that the thought of announcing my conversion to everyone, of telling my parents that I wished to abstain on Fridays, of proclaiming myself one of those much derided Catholics, threw me into fits of cold perspiration, and that at times I grew indignant at the powers that captivated me? Still there was no escape from the firm grip of God. 

I knew no priest, neither had I a single Catholic friend.

Yet the study of religion henceforth became my chief interest. Strange to relate, the awakening of my soul and the unfolding of my poetic talents went hand in hand, and dispelled my prejudice and my childish apprehensions. At this time I wrote the first version of my dramas The Golden Head and The City. Although I could not, of course, receive the sacraments; nevertheless I shared in the life of the Church. At last I began to breathe and life entered through all my pores. 

The books which proved very helpful during that period were first of all the Meditations of Pascal, a veritable mine of wealth for all those who are in quest of the true faith, even if his influence has been rather destructive at some time. Then The Uplifting of the Soul by the Divine Mysteries and the Meditations on the Gospel by Bossuet, as well as his other philosophical essays; Dante’s Divine Comedy; not to forget the marvelous private revelations of Catherine Emmerich. The metaphysic of Aristotle had purged my mind and helped me to find my way in the purely intellectual domains of science. The Imitation of Christ belonged to a world quite incomprehensible to me and seemed to be the voice of a most austere master, in the first two books. 

But the book, which opened itself to me and in which I studied, was the Church. Eternally blessed be this great majestic Mother on whose knees I learned everything! I spent my Sundays at Notre Dame and went there as often as possible on weekdays. I was still profoundly ignorant of the doctrine of the Church as anybody could be of Buddhism. But now the sacred drama unrolled itself before me with a magnificence that surpassed all my belief, nor indeed, to speak truly, to touch it. All at language of the prayer books. 

It was the most profound and grandiose poetry, enhanced by the most august gestures ever confided to human beings. I could not sufficiently satiate myself with the spectacle of the Mass and every movement of the priest inscribed itself profoundly on my mind and soul. The reading of the office of the dead, the liturgy of Christmas, the drama of Holy Week, the celestial Exultet, compared with which the enchanting songs of Pindar and Sophocles seemed dull, filled me with gratitude and joy, contrition and devotion. 

Little by little, slowly and painfully, the conviction grew within me that art and poetry are likewise divine things and that the pleasures of the flesh, far from being indispensable, are on the contrary actually detrimental to them. How I envied those happy Christians whom I saw receiving Holy Communion! Hardly did I venture to mingle among those faithful who came every Friday in Lent to venerate with a devout kiss the Crown of Thorns. 

Meanwhile the years passed by and my situation became unbearable. Amid tears I entreated God, and yet I did not dare to divulge my misery. Day by day my arguments grew weaker and the voice within me became more demanding. Oh, how well I recall this moment and how firmly God held my soul in the grip of his hand! How did I ever muster enough courage to resist him? In the third year I read the posthumous works of Baudelaire. And I saw that the poet, whom I preferred to all other French writers, had in his declining years turned again to the faith of his fathers, and that he had grappled with the same fear and suffered the same qualms of conscience as I. So summoning all my courage I one evening entered the confessional of St. Médard, my parish church. 

The moments I had to wait for the priest were the most bitter of my life. I found an old man who seemed very little impressed by what I had to say, although the story of my soul should have aroused, as I fancied, a deep concern. To my profound regret, he recalled to my mind the day of my First Holy Communion. He commanded me to reveal my conversion to my family; which I now would not have disproved of. Humiliated and chagrined, I left the confessional and returned only the following year. 

At last I found myself completely conquered and defeated. I had come to a dead stop when, in the same church of St. Médard, I found a sympathetic and compassionate young priest, the Abbé Ménard, who reconciled me with the Church. Later on I became acquainted with the saintly and venerable Abbé Villaume. I chose him as my spiritual father and guide. I received my second Holy Communion, like the first, on Christmas day, December 25, 1890, in the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

Did you like this content? Please help keep us ad-free
Enjoying this content?  Please support our mission!Donatewww.catholic.com/support-us