Claudel’s Way to the Inexhaustible

Stephen E. Lewis

Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, Volume 19, Number 2,

Spring 2016, pp. 168-176 (Article)

Published by Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/612905

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 R e-
c on s i d e r at i on s
Historical (and often neglected) texts in the Catholic intellectual
tradition with contemporary comment and reflection

Stephen E. Lewis

Claudel’s Way
to the Inexhaustible

Over several months in 1951 and 1952, the 83 year-old Paul Clau-
del engaged in a series of wide-ranging radio interviews with the
poet and literary personality Jean Amrouche. At one point, discussion
turned to a short sentence from Claudel’s prose poem “La Dériva-
tion,” a piece first published in 1897 and later collected into the mas-
terly 1907 volume entitled Connaissance de l’Est [Knowing the East]. The
sentence reads, “To enjoy is to understand, and to understand is to
number / Jouir, c’est comprendre, et comprendre, c’est c­ ompter.”1
Amrouche, zeroing in on the association between understanding
and numbering or counting, asks Claudel if this way of understand-
ing something, whether Thomist or Cartesian in its inspiration, still
satisfies him today?2 Amrouche’s implication is that it certainly could

l o g o s 19 : 2   s p r i ng 2016
 reconsiderations 169
not be very satisfying, at least not for a poet, especially a religious
poet like Claudel (or Amrouche himself, for that matter). Poets of
that sort, it is assumed, prefer a mystical way of knowing, an ecstatic
contemplation that melts away the separation between subject and
object, a “direct participation” that dispels the “feeling of exile.”3 Am-
rouche even finds a passage from another poem in the same collection
with which to confront Claudel, a passage that concludes, “Goodly
elixir, where and by what mystic path shall I be allowed to partake
of your rare waters? / Désirable élixir, par quelle route mystique,
où? me sera-t-il donné de participer à ton flot avare” (“Novembre”:
Lawler, 35; OP 54). Claudel seems to have been caught red-handed in
self-contradiction. Amrouche pushes forward, respectfully but pur-
posefully, to clinch the point: Perhaps I had misread this passage, he
says, but it seemed to signal an abandonment and even a renunciation
on your part of “this mode of understanding through counting, of
this mode of purely intellectual conquest of the world, and this feel-
ing that after all there was perhaps a direct way to reach the center,
and that this direct way is the mystical way properly termed, the true
way that nullified and outstripped all the others.”4 Despite the appar-
ent evidence, however, Claudel is adamant: contemplation in no way
requires the renunciation of the faculties of knowing and understand-
ing; indeed, “the intellect is always there, even when it seems that the
senses have pride of place,” for “the senses do not work completely
if the intellect is not behind them, and in the same way the intellect
cannot operate if it forgets such elements as the memory, the will, the
sensibility, etc.” Claudel concludes the discussion with a summative
judgment: “Man cannot be torn apart, that’s all! and it is precisely the
lesson of Connaissance de l’Est that there is never an abandonment of
any of the faculties, especially the will. I am not a Hindu ascetic, I am
not ready to dissolve myself, as the Hindu mystics would say, like a salt
figurine in a sea of delights or an ocean of joys. That is not at all my
feeling. I never lose the sense of my personality, you know?”5
This exchange on the privilege of measurement, number, and
distinction in poetic knowing is worth mulling over when reading
170 logos
Claudel’s poem sequence, “The Way of the Cross,” translated here,
because the poem shows how Claudel’s attention to measure and
correspondence—the fit of things—is perfectly suited to the disclo-
sure of mystery, especially when the thing he wants to understand
is the mystery of the Incarnate God. The work was written in 1911,
and in 1915 added by Claudel as a kind of epilogue to his collection
Corona Benignitatis Anni Dei (the title refers to the eleventh verse of
Psalm 65: “Thou Crownest the Year with Thy Bounty”), one of Clau-
del’s most important books of poems. “The Way of the Cross” de-
votes a poem to each of the traditional fourteen stations of the Cross,
and each poem is written in rhyming couplets composed of lines of
varying length. Although Claudel’s poems and verse dramas usually
do not rhyme, virtually all of the poems included in the liturgical
calendar-themed Corona do. The reader will notice, too, that most
of the poems in the sequence employ multiple points of view—one
student of “The Way of the Cross” has identified no fewer than eight
perspectival functions assumed by the lyrical speaker in the course
of the poetic sequence.6 Thus the formal aspects of the poetic se-
quence involve countable patterns, rhythmic as well as narrative, that
subtly supplement explicit images, similes, and even outright state-
ments in the poem, which, taken all together, lead the reader to view
the events held up for meditation along Christ’s Way of the Cross as
involving both the measurement of a man who is God, and God’s
measurement of man. For Claudel, the properly mysterious qualities
of the Passion and Death of Christ the God-man are disclosed most
powerfully when we use our finite senses to attempt to know the
events in their details, and then find our expectations exceeded in
every way. As he stated in 1921, ten years after composing “The Way
of the Cross,” “The goal of poetry is not, as Baudelaire put it, to dive
‘to the bottom of the Infinite in order to find the new,’ but to go to
the bottom of the definite in order to find there the inexhaustible.”7
Let me then, by way of introduction, consider just a few of the
places in the work that exemplify Claudel’s efforts to convey the
inexhaustibility of the definite.
 reconsiderations 171

In a sense, all trials involve the measurement of the accused. Claudel
makes us immediately aware of the difficulties involved in Christ’s
trial with the first words of the poem, which alert us to the fact that
our measures applied to God do not add up. “We” find ourselves say-
ing: “It’s all over. We have judged God and we have condemned Him
to death.” There is irony here, and it lies in the mismatch between
what “we” wish were the case, and what actually is. The point of view
conveyed certainly expresses the desire that it all be over with: there
is nothing more to see here and nothing to discuss—an eccentric
character said and even did some alarming things, but now the mess
is on track to be cleaned up. And yet of course the whole “Way of the
Cross” is just beginning! Indeed, the judgment that Pilate delivered,
the poem goes on to reveal, did not finish things with justice, but
rather with the attempted expulsion of an irritant: Christ bothers
us (“He is getting in the way” / “il nous gêne”), He is an irritant that
needs to be gotten rid of (“Crucify Him if you wish, but get Him
off our hands! Take Him away!” / “Crucifiez-le, si vous le voulez,
mais débarrassez-nous de lui! qu’on l’emmène!”). He is a surd that
mars the equation (“a scandal for the Jews” / “un scandale pour les
Juifs” that is “to us [. . .] a nonsense”/ “parmi nous un non-sens”). In
speaking the third line, “We no longer want any king but Caesar! No
other law but blood and gold!” / “Nous n’avons plus d’autre roi que
César! d’autre loi que le sang et l’or!,” we are implicated in cling-
ing to “roi” et “loi” despite the fact that this figure, clothed in royal
purple and crowned (“la couronne en tête et la pourpre sur le dos”),
is found by Pilate to be no outlaw. Jesus’s regal status, spelled out in
what the poem calls a tri-lingual “sentence,” amplifies the dispropor-
tion, regardless of the attempt to wrap it up by proclamation (and
rhyme): “The sentence, moreover, is rendered, with nothing missing,
in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. / And we see the crowd yelling and the
judge washing his hands.”/ “La sentence d’ailleurs est rendue, rien
n’y manque, en langages hébraïque, grec et latin. / Et l’on voit la
foule qui crie et le juge qui se lave les mains.”
172 logos
Later in the poem, Christ is described being measured bodily and
made to fit the Cross (the Eleventh Station). In describing the brutal
manipulation of the Lord’s body, Claudel takes the opportunity to
awaken the reader to the exorbitant gift God offers in becoming Incar-
nate, making himself finite so that he could become intimate with us.

Eternal Son, whose boundary is your Infinity alone,

Here it is, then, with us, this narrow place that you have
coveted!
[. . .]
Here is the bed of our love with You, powerful and hard!
It is difficult for a God to make himself fit our scale.

You are caught, Lord, and can no longer escape.

You are nailed on the cross by the hands and by the feet.
I have nothing more to seek in heaven with the heretic and
the madman.
This God is enough for me, held between four spikes.

Much is communicated here by the word enough in the final line.

Claudel shows us how God had to become enough, forcing himself
to stay within our chalk lines, his “Omnipresent” reality tied down
in a body “held between four spikes,” before men and women could
recognize that he alone is worthy of worship. He had to make him-
self available to our comprehension—to our violent numbering—
before we could know him as unknowable.
In contrast to the measuring of the Eleventh Station, Claudel de-
scribes Mary, especially in the Thirteenth Station, as the most adept,
because the most accepting, at the proper way of taking in the details
of the events so as to contemplate the mystery within them. She
thus appears in the poem as the best at understanding Christ. We see
this especially in the line that tells us that by accepting everything
(Fourth Station) promised to her son, she was made able to receive
his consummation: “As she accepted him as promised, she receives
him, consummated.”
 reconsiderations 173
The word consummation is of great importance in Claudel’s efforts
to communicate what the Cross reveals to us about the Incarnation:
he uses the verb “consommer” to translate Christ’s final word on the
Cross—“Tout est consommé” / “All is consummated”—and intends
it to sum up the salvific act accomplished there. In his later prose
meditation on the Cross, Un Poète regarde la Croix, published in 1938
and structured by the Seven Last Words of Christ, Claudel describes
this consummation in the following terms, terms that allow us to
identify Mary as she is presented in the poem as, indeed, the seat of
human wisdom about the incarnate God:
The cross is that Act in the midst of the world through which
everything is consummated in the Word. The word consum-
mated unites, calls together two ideas. The first is the idea of a
peak, a summit: God, in this visible man made of flesh and a
soul and in whom He has hypostasized Himself, furnishes the
world with His end. It is the flame for which all surround-
ing matter is fuel, drawing it right up to this tongue, right
up to this eloquent and luminous manifestation. God needs
the whole world, all the words of this vast vocabulary that
He has constituted, in order to explain Himself fully to the
Father and in order to tell Him that He loves Him. […] And
the second idea is that of not only a co-existence, but of a co-
operation of everything with everything, toward a common
end and in a common desire. […] Everything on the cross
is consummated, not in the constitution of an inert figure,
but in desire, in cooperation, and in a unitive and organic
activity. What was broken is restored. Communication is re-
established with God, something beats beneath the seventh
rib of the new Adam through which we are fitted to Him,
the whole world through the mouth of Jesus Christ breathes
in the Spirit from the lips of the Father, and speaks the Word
to Him.8

Loving to the point of death, the Son of God “consummates” all of

creation in summative union with the Father, but not in a fusional
174 logos
manner. “Cooperation” between creation and Creator is restored as a
“unitive and organic activity” that respects the distinctness of the par-
ticipants. The Thirteenth Station states, “What is of God, and what
is of the Mother, and what the man has done, / All this under her
mantle is with her forever.” Mary knows distinctly and intimately the
elements of the hypostasis, and, like the Tabernacle, shelters for us
the union between God and man consummated on the Cross.
The poem concludes with a glimpse of the Risen Christ, who
in rising out of the tomb has restored a deep openness to men and
women, an openness to communion with God that is at the same time
a renewed compassion for their fellow suffering men and w ­ omen.

Now that His heart is open and now that His hands are
pierced,
There is no longer a cross among us that His body could
not fit,
There is no longer any sin in us to which the wound would
not correspond!
Come then from the altar where you are hidden, come
­toward us, Savior of the world!
Lord, how open is your creature and how profound!

Here the poem recalls us to the human suffering evoked in the sec-
ond half of the Tenth Station, where all was stripped from Christ, and
yet “there remains the bursting wound,” “there remains the man of
pain,” “There remains my brother, crying!” The wounded Christ, or
“all those who are torn and rent.” The final line of the poem, in refer-
ring back to suffering human beings, places an “open” and “profound”
creature precisely where we would expect to read the word wound.9
In following him along his way, down to the bottom of the definite,
down into death itself, we are surprised by the Risen Christ, who
from now on will fit himself to any cross and allow his wounds to
correspond to any sin. Claudel’s poem has led us to rediscover God’s
inexhaustible mercy.
 reconsiderations 175

Notes
1. Paul Claudel, Knowing the East, trans. James Lawler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2004), 42; Paul Claudel, Œuvre poétique (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque
de la Pléiade, 1957), 60. Subsequent citations of this edition of Claudel’s Œuvre
p­ oétique and this translation will be noted parenthetically in the text by the abbrevia-
tion OP and Lawler, followed by the respective page numbers.
2. Paul Claudel, Mémoires improvisés, assembled by Jean Amrouche (Paris: Gallimard,
1954), 129: Amrouche asks, “cette espèce d’ivresse de comprendre par le dénom-
brement, de comprendre par le moyen de saint Thomas sans doute, mais aussi par
le moyen d’un principe tout cartésien qui est celui du dénombrement et de la dis-
tinction des choses, est-ce que cette façon de comprendre vous satisfait pleinement
aujourd’hui?” The discussion continues through page 132. (Unless otherwise indi-
cated, translations are my own.)
3. Ibid., 130: “vous parlez de comprendre comme d’une pure opération de l’intelligence
et des sens qui la servent.Vous pensez que comprendre, c’est seulement prendre avec
soi, et que ce n’est pas en même temps, et dans le même mouvement, être soi-
même compris, se confondre à, sans être pour autant confondu, bref que la véritable
compréhension serait celle de la contemplation et de l’extase où cesse la séparation,
le sentiment de l’exil.” [You speak of understanding as of a pure operation of the
intellect and of the senses that serve it.You think that understanding is merely taking
something to oneself, and that it isn’t at the same time, and in the same movement, a
being understood, a merging with (yet without becoming identical)—in short, that
true understanding would consist in contemplation and ecstasy, where separation,
the feeling of exile, ceases.]
4. Ibid., 132: “J’avais peut-être mal lu, mais il m’avait semblé trouver ici, dans ce texte,
comme un mouvement d’abandon et aussi comme un mouvement de renoncement,
de renoncement à ce mode de connaissance par le dénombrement, à ce mode de
conquête purement intellectuel du monde, et ce sentiment qu’après tout il y avait
peut-être une voie directe pour atteindre le centre, et que cette voie directe, c’est la
voie mystique proprement dite, était la vraie voie qui rendait nulles et non avenues
toutes les autres.”
5. Ibid.; the original reads: “Au point de vue thomiste, comme je l’ai toujours cru, la
contemplation n’exige aucune espèce de renoncement. L’homme n’a jamais trop
d’aucune des ses facultés. L’intelligence est toujours là, même là où il semble que
les sens aient la première place. Mais jamais les sens ne travaillent complètement
si l’intelligence n’est pas derrière, et de même l’intelligence n’a pas son jeu si elle
oublie des éléments comme la mémoire, comme la volonté, comme la sensibilité,
etc. L’homme est indéchirable, somme toute, et c’est justement la leçon de Connais-
sance de l’Est que jamais il n’y a abandon d’aucune des facultés, et en particulier de la
volonté. Je ne suis pas un ascète hindou, je ne suis pas prêt à me liquéfier comme une
poupée de sel, comme disent les mystiques hindous, dans une mer de délices ou une
176 logos
mer de joies. Ce n’est pas du tout mon sentiment. Je ne perds jamais le sentiment de
ma personnalité, n’est-ce pas.”
6. Ramón Suárez, “Perspectivismo en ‘El Camino de la Cruz’ de Paul Claudel,” Revista
Chilena de Literatura 46 (April 1995): 85. The points of view, respectively, are those
of the accuser, the witness, the victim, Mary, a mother, the hopeless person, the
preacher, and the supplicant.
7. “Le but de la poésie n’est pas, comme dit Baudelaire, de plonger ‘au fond de l’Infini
pour trouver du nouveau,’ mais au fond du défini pour y trouver de l’inépuisable”;
from Claudel’s “Introduction à un poème sur Dante,” in Paul Claudel, Œuvres en prose,
ed. Jacques Petit and Charles Galpérine (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,
1965), 424.
8. Paul Claudel, Un Poète regarde la Croix, in Paul Claudel, Le Poëte et la Bible, I: 1910–1946,
ed. Michel Malicet, with Dominique Millet and Xavier Tilliette (Paris: Gallimard,
1998), 547–48, 550. The original reads: “La croix est cet Acte au milieu du monde
par quoi tout est consommé dans le Verbe. Le mot consommé réunit, appelle ensemble
deux idées: la première est celle d’une pointe, d’un sommet: Dieu fournit au monde
en cet homme visible fait d’une chair et d’une âme en qui Il S’est hypostasié Sa fin.
C’est la flamme à qui toute matière alentour est aliment et qui l’attire jusqu’à cette
langue, jusqu’à cette manifestation éloquente et lumineuse. Dieu a besoin de tout le
monde, de tous les mots de ce vaste vocabulaire qu’Il a constitué, pour S’expliciter
pleinement au Père et pour Lui dire qu’Il L’aime. [. . .] Et la seconde idée est celle
non seulement d’une coexistence, mais d’une coopération de tout avec tout à une
même fin et dans un même désir. […] Tout sur la croix est consommé, non pas dans
la constitution d’une figure inerte, mais dans le désir, dans la coopération et dans une
activité unitive et organique. Ce qui était rompu est restauré. La communication est
rétablie avec Dieu, quelque chose bat sous la septième côte du nouvel Adam en quoi
nous Lui sommes adaptés, le monde entier par la bouche de Jésus-Christ aspire aux
lèvres du Père l’Esprit et Lui parle le Verbe.”
9. This is Suárez’s beautiful insight—see “Perspectivismo en ‘El Camino de la Cruz’ de
Paul Claudel,” ibid., 84.