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Léon Bloy

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Léon Bloy
Bloy in 1887
Bloy in 1887
Born(1846-07-11)11 July 1846
Notre-Dame-de-Sanilhac,Kingdom of France
Died3 November 1917(1917-11-03)(aged 71)
Bourg-la-Reine,French Republic
Occupation
  • Novelist
  • essayist
  • poet
Signature

Léon Bloy(French pronunciation:[leɔ̃blwa];11 July 1846 – 3 November 1917) was a French Catholicnovelist,essayist,pamphleteer(or lampoonist), and satirist, known additionally for his eventual (and passionate) defense ofCatholicismand for his influence withinFrench Catholiccircles.

Biography

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Bloy was born on 11 July 1846 inNotre-Dame-de-Sanilhac,in thearondissementofPérigueux,Dordogne.He was the second of six sons of Jean-Baptiste Bloy, aVoltaireanfreethinker,and Anne-Marie Carreau, a stern disciplinarian and pious Spanish-Catholic daughter of a Napoleonic soldier.[1]After anagnosticand unhappy youth[2]in which he cultivated an intense hatred for theCatholic Churchand its teaching,[1]his father found him a job in Paris, where he went in 1864. In December 1868, he met the aging Catholic authorBarbey d'Aurevilly,who lived opposite him in rue Rousselet and who became his mentor. Shortly afterwards, he underwent a dramatic religious conversion.

Bloy was a friend of the authorJoris-Karl Huysmans,the painterGeorges Rouault,the philosophersJacquesandRaïssa Maritain[3]and was instrumental in reconciling these intellectuals with Catholicism.[4]However, he acquired a reputation forbigotrybecause of his frequent outbursts of temper. For example, in 1885, after the death ofVictor Hugo,whom Bloy believed to be anatheist,Bloy decried Hugo's "senility," "avarice," and "hypocrisy," identifying Hugo among "contemplatives of biological scum."[5][6]Bloy's first novel,Le Désespéré,a fierce attack onrationalismand those he believed to be in league with it, made him fall out with the literary community of his time and even many of his old friends. Soon, Bloy could count such prestigious authors asÉmile Zola,Guy de Maupassant,Ernest Renan,andAnatole Franceas his enemies.[3]

In addition to his published works, he left a large body of correspondence with public and literary figures. He died on 3 November 1917 inBourg-la-Reine.

Criticisms

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Bloy was noted for personal attacks, but he saw them as the mercy or indignation of God. According to Jacques Maritain, he used to say: "My anger is the effervescence of my pity."[7]

Among the many targets of Bloy's attacks were people of business. In an essay inPilgrim of the Absolute,he compared the businessmen ofChicagounfavourably to the cultured people of Paris:

"In Paris you have theSaint Chapelleand theLouvre,true enough, but we in Chicago kill eighty thousand hogs a day!... "The man who says that is in truth a business man.

— Léon Bloy, "Les Affaires Sont Les Affaires" ( "Business Is Business" ) in "The Wisdom of theBourgeois",part ofPilgrim of the Absolute.[8]

Our Lady of La Salette

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Inspired by both the millennialist visionaryEugène Vintras[fr;ru]and the reports of an apparition at La Salette—Our Lady of La Salette—Bloy was convinced that the Virgin's message was that if people did not reform, the end time was imminent.[9]He was particularly critical of the attention paid to the shrine at Lourdes and resented the fact that it distracted people from what he saw as the less sentimental message of La Salette.[10]

Influence

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Bloy is quoted in the epigraph at the beginning ofGraham Greene's novelThe End of the Affair(1951), though Greene claimed that "this irate man lacked creative instinct" in reference to Bloy.[11]He is further quoted in the essay "The Mirror of Enigmas" by the writerJorge Luis Borges,who acknowledged his debt to him by naming him in the foreword to his short story collectionArtificesas one of seven authors who were in "the heterogeneous list of the writers I am continually re-reading. In the christological fantasy titled"Three Versions of Judas"I think I perceive the remote influence of the last (Bloy)". In his novelThe Harp and the Shadow(1979),Alejo Carpentierexcoriates Bloy as a raving,Columbus-defending lunatic during Vatican deliberations over the explorer's canonization. Bloy is also quoted at the beginning ofJohn Irving'sA Prayer for Owen Meany,and there are several quotations from hisLetters to my FiancéeinCharles Williams's anthologyThe New Christian Year.[12]Le Désespéréwas republished in 2005 byÉditions Underbahnwith a preface byMaurice G. Dantec.[13]The historianJaime Eyzaguirrecame to be influenced by Bloy's writings.[14]

According to the historianJohn Connelly,Bloy'sLe Salut par les Juifs,with its apocalyptically radical interpretation of chapters 9 to 11 ofPaul's Letter to the Romans,had a major influence on the Catholic theologians of theSecond Vatican Councilresponsible for section 4 of the council's declarationNostra aetate(1965), the doctrinal basis for a revolutionary change in the Catholic Church's attitude toJudaism.[15]

In 2013,Pope Francissurprised many by quoting Bloy during his first homily as pope: “When one does not confess Jesus Christ, I am reminded of the expression of Léon Bloy: ‘He who does not pray to the Lord prays to the devil.’ When one does not confess Jesus Christ, one confesses the worldliness of the devil.”[3]

Bloy and his effect on 21st-century French scholars make a significant appearance inMichel Houellebecq's novelSubmission(2015).

Works

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Novels

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  • Le Désespéré(1887) (The Desperate Mantranslated into English by Richard Robinson. Sunny Lou Publishing,ISBN978-1-95539-237-2,2023)

Essays

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  • "Le Révélateur du Globe: Christophe Colomb & Sa Béatification Future" (1884) (In English translation: "The Revealer of the Globe: Christopher Columbus and His Future Beatification" (Part One). Sunny Lou Publishing,ISBN978-1-95539-205-1,2021)
  • "Propos d'un entrepreneur de démolitions" (1884) ( "Words of a Demolitions Contractor" translated into English by Richard Robinson. Sunny Lou Publishing Company,ISBN978-1-73547-763-3,2020)
  • "Le Salut par les Juifs" (1892) ( "Salvation through the Jews" translated into English by Richard Robinson. Sunny Lou Publishing Company,ISBN978-1-73547-762-6,2020)
  • "Léon Bloy devant les cochons" (1894)
  • "Je m'accuse" (1900) ( "I accuse myself" ), in response to Émile Zola's 1898 open letterJ'Accuse…!(Je M'Accuse...translated into English by Richard Robinson. Sunny Lou Publishing Company,ISBN978-0-57872-982-4,2020)
  • "Le Fils de Louis XVI" (1900) ( "The Son of Louis XVI", in English translation. Sunny Lou PublishingISBN978-1-95539-222-8,2022)
  • "Exégèse des lieux communs" (1902–12) ( "Exegesis of the Commonplaces", translated into English by Louis Cancelmi. Wiseblood BooksISBN978-1-95131-991-5,2021)
  • "Belluaires et porchers" (1905) ( "Gladiators and swineherds" )
  • "Le Résurrection de Villiers de lʼIsle-Adam" (1906) ( "The Resurrection of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam", in English translation. Sunny Lou Publishing,ISBN978-1-95539-224-2,2022)
  • "L'épopée byzantine et Gustave Schlumberger" (1906)
  • "Celle qui pleure" (1908) ( "She Who Weeps", in English translation and published by Sunny Lou Publishing,ISBN978-1-95539-212-9,2021)
  • "Le Sang du Pauvre" (1909) ( "Blood of the Poor", translated into English, and published by Sunny Lou Publishing,ISBN978-1-95539-201-3,2021)
  • "L'Ame de Napoléon" (1912) ( "The Soul of Napoleon." In English translation: Sunny Lou Publishing Company,ISBN978-1-95539-200-6,2021)
  • "Sur la Tombe de Huysmans" (1913)[16](In English translation:On Huysmans' Tomb: Critical reviews of J.-K. Huysmans and À Rebours, En Rade, and Là-Bas.Sunny Lou Publishing Company, 2021)
  • "Jeanne d'Arc et l'Allemagne" (1915) ( "Joan of Arc and Germany." In English translation: Sunny Lou Publishing Company,ISBN978-1-95539-206-8,2021)
  • "Constantinople et Byzance" (1917) ( "Constantinople and Byzantium." In English translation: Sunny Lou Publishing Company,ISBN978-1-95539-231-0,2022)

Short stories

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Diaries

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  • Le Mendiant ingrat(1898) ( "The Ungrateful Beggar" )
  • Mon Journal(1904) ( "My diary" )
  • Quatre ans de captivité à Cochons-sur-Marne(1905) ( "Four Years of Captivity in Cochons-sur-Marne: 1900-1904," Sunny Lou Publishing Company,ISBN978-1-95539-234-1,2022.)
  • L'Invendable(1909) ( "The Unsaleable" )
  • Le Vieux de la montagne(1911) ( "The Old Man from the Mountain" )
  • Le Pèlerin de l'Absolu(1914) ( "The Pilgrim of the Absolute", edited by David Bentley Hart. Cluny Media, LLC,ISBN978-1-94441-847-2,2017)
  • Au seuil de l'Apocalypse(1916) ( "On the Threshold of the Apocalypse." In English translation: Sunny Lou Publishing Company,ISBN978-1-95539-211-2,2021.)
  • Méditations d'un solitaire en 1916(1917) ( "Meditations of a Solitary in 1916," Sunny Lou Publishing Company,ISBN978-1-95539-238-9,2023.)
  • La Porte des humbles(posth., 1920) ( "The Door of the Lowly" )

A study in English isLéon BloybyRayner Heppenstall(Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1953).

Quotations

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  • "Love does not make you weak, because it is the source of all strength, but it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it."[17]
  • "There is only one tragedy in the end, not to have been a saint."[18]
  • "But I love Paris, which is the place of intelligence, and I feel Paris threatened by thistruly tragic lampstandsprouting from its belly, which will be visible at night from twenty leagues away... "[19]
  • “The rich man is an inexorable brute whom one is forced to stop with a pitchfork or a round of grapeshot in the belly...”[20]
  • “And they [rich Catholics] dare to speak of charity, to pronounce the word Caritas which is the very Name of the divine Third Person! Prostitution of words enough to put fear in the devil! That beautiful lady, who does not have the honesty even to surrender her body to the poor souls whom she arouses, will go, this very evening, to show all that she can of her white, sepulchral flesh where jewels like worms quiver, and make herself worshipped by imbeciles, on supposed feast days of charity, on the occasion of some disaster, to fatten the sharks or shipwreckers a little more. The so-called Christian riches ejaculating on misery!”[20]

References

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  1. ^ab Alter-Gilbert, Gilbert (9 December 2008)."Léon Bloy: Pilgrim of the Absolute".
  2. ^ Sheed, F.J.(1940).Sidelights on the Catholic Revival.New York: Sheed and Ward. p. 181.
  3. ^abc Bermudez, Alejandro (15 March 2013)."A Pope Who Quotes Bloy".Catholic News Agency.
  4. ^Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Jacques Maritain
  5. ^ Robb, Graham (1997).Victor Hugo.London: Picador. p. 533.ISBN9780393318999.
  6. ^Bloy 1947,p. 82.
  7. ^Bloy 1947,pp. 11, 13.
  8. ^Bloy 1947,p. 132.
  9. ^ Ziegler, Robert (October 2013). "The Palimpsest of Suffering: Léon Bloy'sLe Désespéré".Neophilologus.97(4): 653–662.doi:10.1007/s11061-012-9337-x.S2CID170245435.
  10. ^ Kaufmann, Suzanne K. (2005).Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine.Cornell University Press. p. 86.ISBN9780801442483.
  11. ^Reinhardt, Kurt F.The Theological Novel of Modern Europe.New York, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1969, p. 86
  12. ^ "Quotations from Léon Bloy in" Charles Williams: The New Christian Year "".1 November 2007.Retrieved21 July2014.
  13. ^Bloy, Léon (2005).Le désespéré: roman.Maurice G. Dantec. Wilmington, Del.: Éditions Underbahn.ISBN978-0-9774224-0-1.OCLC166583047.
  14. ^ "Jaime Eyzaguirre (1908–1968)".Memoria Chilena(in Spanish).Biblioteca Nacional de Chile.Retrieved30 December2015.
  15. ^ Connelly, John(2012).From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965.Harvard University Press.
  16. ^"Sur la Tombe de Huysmans" is available viaBibliothèque nationale de France.
  17. ^ Auden, W.H.; Kronenberger, Louis (1966).The Viking Book of Aphorisms.New York: Viking Press.
  18. ^Kreeft, Peter (2001).Catholic Christianity: A Complete Catechism of Catholic Beliefs Based on the Catechism of the Catholic Church.Ignatius Press.ISBN9780898707984.
  19. ^"La Tour Eiffel".
  20. ^abBloy, Léon (2021).Blood of the Poor.Sunny Lou Publishing.

Sources

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Rayner Heppenstall'Léon Bloy', (1953) Bowes & Bowes, Cambridge. (1954) Yale University Press, New Haven.

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Also See

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Three Versions of JudasbyJorge Luis Borges.

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