Letters to a Doubter
Paul Claudel (1868–1955) is not read much today in the English-speaking world, and that is unfortunate. The Catholic playwright, poet, and man of letters is perhaps best known as the author of the play The Satin Slipper (1929), which was quite popular in the United States. The Frenchman was an exquisite writer and a keen thinker. In The Catholic Literary Revival, a survey of Catholic writing from 1845 to the 1930s, the Jesuit Calvert Alexander wrote, “If one must select the poet who realizes most completely in his work the ideal of the French renaissance, that man would be Paul Claudel.”
Claudel was also something of a mystic—Louis Chaigne’s biography of Claudel was subtitled The Man and the Mystic—and a masterful apologist for Catholicism. These two facets were woven together intimately in his personality and thought. On the cusp of adulthood, Claudel experienced a private revelation while attending vespers on Christmas Day in Notre Dame Cathedral. He later wrote that in a single moment he realized, “God exists; he is there. He is someone; he is a being as personal as I am!—He loves me; he calls me.” His conversion to Catholicism, though, was not immediate or simple; he struggled mightily with doubts and fears.
Claudel eventually entered the Church. He later embarked upon a distinguished career in the French diplomatic service, spending most of forty years (1893–1934) outside of France. Deeply influenced by Thomas Aquinas, Dante, John Henry Cardinal Newman, and Blaise Pascal, he dedicated himself to writing about the drama of salvation, the struggle of faith in a faithless world, and the intimate love God has for his creatures. By the turn of the century he had established himself as a talented literary light.
In February 1907 he received a letter from another man of letters, the spiritually and emotionally tortured Jacques Rivière. Just twenty years old, Rivière was on the threshold of a brilliant career as a literary critic for the influential La Nouvelle Revue Française, a career that tragically was cut short by a fatal illness in 1925. Raised as a Catholic, Rivière was in the midst of a great crisis of faith.
In this first letter to Claudel, Rivière described this crisis as “my disease” but admitted that he had an attachment to it: “This struggle, this spasm, this revolt, this desire, this restlessness are tearing me to pieces—yet I adore them! Never to be satisfied, to find an answer in nothing—it is these very things that I hug to my soul. Nothing else, in the first place, tore me away from Catholicism. I turned from its spiritual nourishment. I preferred my miserable hunger, my throes of anguish. Now you know my disease. And yet I must seek a cure.”
What followed was a remarkable correspondence, originally published in 1927 as Letters to a Doubter and newly released by Roman Catholic Books. This volume is as timely and poignant today as it was when it transpired nearly a century ago. The correspondence, which covered seven years (1907–14), still resonates for many reasons. There is Rivière’s remarkable vulnerability: He pours out his fears, anguish, and distress with erudite but brutal honesty. Moreover, the skepticism and materialism of early twentieth-century French culture bears a striking resemblance to early twenty-first century American culture. Finally, the responses by Claudel are empathetic, poetic, incisive, wise, and commanding.
Nearly twice the age of the young doubter, Claudel understood Rivière’s struggle—a struggle he had fought himself as a younger man. He writes that reading Rivière’s letters “took me back to the days of my own spiritual combat—that great ferment of ‘the twenties,’ upon which the wine of our whole life depends.”
Claudel certainly engaged in apologetics in responding to Rivière’s cry to “save me from all this nothingness.” What his efforts masterfully demonstrate, though, is that the apologist is first of all a fellow human being and child of God and that he cannot push away a soul in order to gain a victory in argument. He recognized that Rivière’s crisis was one not so much of doubt but of a crushing awareness of his own unworthiness before God. He remarked, “Many people write to me, but few have courage enough to put their salvation before their pride.” He then added, “Do not expect from me an exact reply to all of your misgivings. There will always remain a part of your warfare that you must wage alone; there will always be thorns that only perseverance wears down.”
Throughout the correspondence, Claudel drew upon Scripture, Aquinas, Newman, G. K. Chesterton, and Pascal. In recommending books, he said, “Pascal above all. He is the veritable apostle ad exteros for us Frenchmen.” He made mention of “the admirable revelations of Anne Catherine Emmerich” and instructed Rivière: “Read Dante. And as much as you can find of Newman.”
As Catholic World stated well in its review of the first English translation of Letters to a Doubter, this is a book that “in its spiritual values and implications is undoubtedly one of the most important of the year. . . . So moving is the story beneath these letters, so stimulating their discussion of contemporary art and science as well as of faith, that the temptation is to quote intemperately.”
So what about Rivière? Seven years after he first wrote to Claudel, he received Holy Communion on Christmas Day, 1913. His wife, Isabelle, wrote (contained in the introduction) that twelve years later, her dying husband cried out, “Look! The gates are opening. I am going to find the divine light.” The disease had finally met its cure, and the doubter had met his Master.
—Carl E. Olson
Letters to a Doubter
By Paul Claudel
Translated from the French by Henry Longan Stuart
5 stars
Roman Catholic Books
288 pages
$22.95
ISBN: 1929291671
A Tale of Right Turns
In his memoir, Right Turns: Unconventional Lessons from a Controversial Life, radio talk show host and film critic Michael Medved assembles thirty-five lessons from a life that often reads like Forrest Gump, whose hero unwittingly drops in on famous moments and personages in modern American history. Wherever one is on the political or religious spectrum, Medved’s book is enjoyable for the breezy, self-deprecating wit with which he tells his story.
Perhaps the most memorable moment was when the young campaign volunteer Medved shouted, “We love you, Bobby!” His exuberant outburst has been preserved in tapes of Senator Robert Kennedy’s last speech following his win in California’s 1968 Democratic primary election, moments before his murder by Sirhan Sirhan. In various capacities as student, political activist, film critic, and talk show host, Medved has entered the orbits of such luminaries as Senators John Kerry and Hillary Rodham Clinton, former President Bill Clinton, the late President Ronald Reagan, and entertainers from Barbra Streisand to Mel Gibson.
While the reminiscences of shoulder-brushes with the famous and powerful are entertaining, the soul of the book is Medved’s journey of faith and family, instigated in his youth by his uncle. Over the course of the lessons, we track Medved’s growing disenchantment with religious and political liberalism, many times in response to his Uncle Moish’s lessons.
In Medved’s series of right turns from religious and political liberalism to religious and political conservatism, perhaps the primary pivot was his uncle. A refugee to America from war-torn and pogrom-plagued Ukraine, the self-taught philosopher and religious scholar took care to instill the seeds of Jewish orthodoxy and political conservatism that eventually displaced his nephew’s youthful infatuation with agnosticism and liberalism.
Growing up in an unobservant Jewish family that later would be fractured by divorce, Medved remembers Uncle Moish as the force that pulled the family together. It was at his knee that Medved soaked in the rock-solid American patriotism that held strong even during his years as a Vietnam War protester. Seeking to honor his late uncle’s desire that he take his Jewish commitments more seriously was the beginning of Medved’s journey back to Orthodox Judaism, a commitment he maintains to this day.
Medved has gained notoriety for his work critiquing Hollywood. A longtime film critic for the television show Sneak Previews and author of such titles as The Hollywood Hall of Shame (1984) and Hollywood vs. America (1992), Medved has defended traditional Judeo-Christian values in Hollywood controversies spanning the films The Last Temptation of Christ to The Passion of the Christ. His involvement in the controversy surrounding Mel Gibson’s film is of particular interest to the Christian community.
“At times,” Medved recalls, “it seemed that my entire career had served as specific preparation for my role in the raging national debate over Mel Gibson’s movie. . . . For nearly twenty years I’d been writing and talking about the intersection of Hollywood and religion, and my commitment as an observant Jew (and former synagogue president) gave me some standing.”
Although Medved found the movie “heartfelt,” “lyrical,” and filled with “devastating immediacy,” and although he fiercely defended the film against “poisonous charges of anti-Semitic intent,” he was not an uncritical viewer. At an invitational pre-screening, he and his brother Harry offered suggestions for improvement, some of which Gibson incorporated into the film. One was the modification of a Roman official’s contemptuous reference to “this stinking temple,” which became in the final cut “this stinking outpost.”
Right before the movie was released, Medved discovered that Gibson was planning to re-insert the line from Matthew 27:25 (“His blood be on us and on our children!”), a line not in the version he previewed. Upon Medved’s personal impassioned e-mail plea, Gibson did a last-minute edit and removed the subtitle from the film, although he could not at that point remove the line entirely. This incident certainly undercuts the accusation that Gibson was unresponsive to constructive criticism.
—Michelle Arnold
Right Turns: Unconventional Lessons from a Controversial Life
By Michael Medved
4 stars
Crown Forum
435 pages
$26.95
ISBN: 1400051878
Get Him behind You
The other day a Protestant friend said, “You know, our pastor hasn’t preached about the devil in years.” Is this surprising in our hedonistic post-Christian culture? Influenced by the wishful thinking of those who no longer acknowledge sin, many Christians of all denominations—including Catholics—no longer believe that the devil exists. Why preach about a fantasy figure in a hokey red suit?
Each of us must choose whether to conform to the culture or to believe the fearful truth about Satan taught by Scripture, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II, and the experience of the saints and other devout believers.
The story of the devil’s efforts to ruin lives and souls begins in Genesis. Jesus taught that the devil “was a murderer from the beginning” and “there is no truth in him” (John 8:44).
In The Deceiver: Our Daily Struggle with Satan, Fr. Livio Fanzaga offers those engaged in this “hard yet hopeful” struggle a practical manual of suggestions taken from the saints, the ascetic teachings of the Church, and his personal experience. Fanzaga, the director of Radio Maria, Europe’s largest Catholic radio program, writes with clarity and love. Both riveting and readable (although I longed for an index), The Deceiver was the number-one religious best-seller in Italy in 2000. The translation of this powerful aid to holiness is a blessing.
The introduction reminds readers that writing a book about Satan runs the risk of overestimating his importance and that “the victory of Christ over Satan is the very heart of the gospel.” Confident that our Lord’s decisive victory enables his followers to renounce Satan, Fanzaga approaches his subject from the origin of evil to the accelerating chaos of our day, explaining the source and history of temptation as well as its necessity. He writes, “Divine Wisdom did not exclude Jesus or Mary from temptation. God’s loving design has decreed that every soul has to face the holy battle, giving to each one all the force and the weapons necessary for winning, so that eternal salvation is both a gift of grace and of our collaborating merit.”
In discussing divine help in waging spiritual warfare, Fr. Fanzaga quotes the Catechism’s blessed assurance of “the mysterious and powerful” help of angels: “From infancy until death, human life is surrounded by their watchful care and intercession.”
But regarding overconfidence, he warns, “Perhaps you think that you are now outside of the evil one’s grasp because, after many victorious battles you have become stronger in good, and you think that you have become invulnerable? Beware of this dangerous illusion, dear friend, since Satan and his entire army concentrate their assaults on good and holy souls.”
The Deceiver concludes with the ultimate comfort: “At the end of this ample meditation on the mystery of evil, it is necessary to widen our gaze to the infinite beauty and dazzling splendor of the divine plan of creation and redemption . . . being wonderfully realized in Christ Jesus through the Church. At the end of time, the entire universe will be transfigured, and God will be all in all.”
—Ann Applegarth
The Deceiver: Our Daily Struggle with Satan
By Fr. Livio Fanzaga
5 stars
Roman Catholic Books
233 pages
$22.95
ISBN: 1929291639