God woos a poet's heart: the story of Paul Claudel's conversion

Paul Claudel (1868 -1955), the famous French poet, playwright and ambassador, experienced a dramatic religious conversion at Christmas 1886. Like all true conversions, Claudel's life is divided by a "before", marked by indifference and even hostility towards religion, and an "after", lived in a joy and peace that he had never known before, making his conversion the central point of his entire life. This event happened on 25 December 1886, during midnight mass at Notre-Dame Cathedral.

Interior of Notre-Dame de Paris / © Unsplash, Jianxiang Wu.

Reasons to believe:

As a child, Paul Claudel was brought up in a traditional Catholic environment. But in 1886, he wasn't practicing his faith at all, had no Catholic friends, knew no priests, had never been involved in a Catholic youth movement, and knew very little about Christianity. What's more, he was openly agnostic, knowing about Jesus mostly through the writing of historian of religion Ernest Renan whom he enjoyed reading at the time, and who reinforced his agnosticism (Renan's Life of Jesus caused an uproar when it was published as he introduced the proposition that Christianity had been created by the popular imagination, based on messianic expectations).

In the space of a few minutes inside Notre-Dame, Claudel went from a professed agnostic ("I didn't even know that he [Jesus] had ever called himself the Son of God " and "I was then as ignorant of my religion as one can be of Buddhism") to confessing Christ ("Like the centurion, I confessed that he, Jesus, is the Son of God. It was to me, Paul [Claudel], of all people, that he talked to and promised his love"). Psychology alone cannot account for this fact.

After his conversion, Claudel's life changed in every way: he immersed himself in the Bible, devoured previously unknown Christian authors, read Bossuet, Pascal and even the visions of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich. He practised his faith ("I spent every Sunday at Notre-Dame") and loved the liturgy ("Every movement of the priest was deeply engraved in my mind and heart").

Claudel's conversion was not only sudden and unpredictable, but also definitive: he remained a fervent Catholic for the rest of his life.

Although he had no visions or locutions, the account he gives of his conversion is in every way similar to that of other famous converts (Ratisbonne, Frossard, etc.): it was not an idea, pure intellectual reasoning, or even less the reliving of a distant past, but an extraordinary and very real encounter with the person of Jesus.

The fruits of his conversion were extremely abundant and varied: he devoted the 4,000 pages of his literary work to Jesus, Mary and the spiritual quest of mankind. Xavier Tilliette called him "the greatest Catholic poet since Dante".

In his own words, his conversion was also a philosophical upheaval that enabled him to escape from the " materialistic prison " in which he was carelessly living at the time: he suddenly distanced himself from atheism, naturalism and positivism. Until 25 December 1886, his vision of the world was based on Neo-Kantian epistemology, a mechanistic, chains of cause and effect materialism. In a matter of seconds, Claudel's mind opened up, against all expectations and not from his own idea, to the transcendent.

Paul Claudel was never one to tell jokes, and even less a gullible person: he held top diplomatic positions (he was a three time French ambassador), was elected to the prestigious French Academy (the principal French council for matters pertaining to the French language) and made an honorary doctor of the University of Laval. Claudel was in full possession of his mental faculties and was a balanced person, as evidenced by his successful artistic and diplomatic careers.

Throughout his literary career, and after his conversion, he strived to convert those around him, particularly a number of intellectuals such as André Suarès and André Gide.

With a genuine desire to serve God, he thought about becoming a priest, and even tried his hand at monastic life, eventually becoming an oblate of the Benedictine abbey of Ligugé.

Objectively, given his milieu, Paul Claudel had no reason to convert. His whole community of intellectuals was composed of atheists; his literary milieu was downright positivist and ignorant of the faith, and his professional milieu was marked by the anti-clericalism of the early Third Republic.

Summary:

Paul Claudel was born in 1868 in the village of Villeneuve-sur-Fère (France, Aisne). His family was well-known in the region and reputable. Although the Claudels' financial income was not large, it enabled them to live very well. The siblings were cradle Catholics, but did not practise much. As a teenager, Claudel hardly remembered his catechism and even less the Church's teaching, because he had never really learned it. After his First Communion, and especially after his family moved to Paris, Paul slowly slipped from religious indifference to outspoken atheism.

His years as a pupil at the famous Louis-le-Grand high school in Paris did not help. His classmates and teachers were mostly focused on science and materialism. Paul developed a passion for Aristotle, read Zola, and passed the competitive examination for the diplomatic corps at the École libre des sciences politiques in Paris, leading to his career as a diplomat. The eighteen-year-old thought like the times: science would soon explain everything. His family was "clearly alienated from religion" and the intellectual society which was his before December 1886 was openly suspicious of the clergy.

On 25 December 1886, Claudel went to midnight mass at Notre-Dame Cathedral. He was not looking for anything in particular: he didn't go there to pray, but in his own words, to receive "an appropriate stimulant and material for some decadent exercises". He was bored and going through a period of questioning about his diplomatic vocation, as he had started to write and was thinking of devoting his life to literature. The ceremony seemed long and he wondered what he was doing there. Standing "near the second pillar on the right, on the sacristy side", he bided his time until the end of the service. He distractedly listened the children's choir sing the Magnificat, which up until then, he knew nothing about and didn't mean anything to him.

Then, suddenly,time was suspended. His past, his vision of the world, his ideas, his assumptions, his concept of life and death, his materialism and his doubts - everything, absolutely everything, disappeared, like a nightmare when one wakes up. Jesus had just transformed his being: "In an instant my heart was touched and I believed. I believed with such a force that, since then, all the readings, all the reasoning, all the happenings of a busy life have not been able to shake my faith, nor affect it."

Paul Claudel, 2 000 years after the apostle St Thomas, had just experienced something similar. "A new and formidable Being (...) had revealed himself to me, something I had no way to explain." There is no scientific explanation for this conversion. Psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have attempted to explain his change, but none of them captured the power and scope of Claudel's experience: in the space of a few minutes, Claudel became one of the greatest Christian authors in the making, with no background preparation and learning.

Elected to chair no. 13 of the Académie française, Paul Claudel's career was immensely successful, and he reached the highest honors. Right up to the end, he proclaimed his faith, even in difficult circumstances. In particular, during the occupation of France by the Nazis, his Christian conscience made him shift from a conciliatory attitude towards Marshal Pétain to a feeling of dread and revolt that he voiced publicly after the first anti-Semitic attacks in December 1941. A man of faith and a man of letters, Paul Claudel was also a servant of charity, which, in his writing and in the words of the Church, is the other name for Jesus.

Patrick Sbalchiero

Beyond reasons to believe:

Claudel's literary works are all infused with his Christian faith, and he put his talent as a writer at the service of Jesus, believing that art is a gift from God.