Max Jacob: a liberal gay Jewish artist converts to Catholicism (1909)

Summary:

Max Jacob Alexandre was born on July 12, 1876, in Quimper (Brittany) into a non-practising Ashkenazi Jewish family. He received an excellent education, winning many scholarly prizes, before moving to Paris to study administration at the École Coloniale and law at the Sorbonne.

He gradually got pulled into the whirlwind of Parisian parties and became involved in the artistic world. In 1907, he stayed at the Bateau-Lavoir, which housed several penniless artists. For several years, Max Jacob led a bohemian life of sexual adventures, drug-taking, astrology and mysticism. He was part of a group that included Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Marie Laurencin and Juan Gris. Disagreements over love and art regularly caused dissension within the group.

At the age of thirty-three, the first turning point came. On the evening of September 22, 1909, on his way home, Jacob saw someone he would later call "the Host" on the wall of his bedroom. "I came back from the Bibliothèque Nationale, put down my briefcase, looked for my slippers and when I looked up, there was Someone. My flesh fell to the floor! The heavenly body is on the wall of my poor room. Why, Lord? Oh, Lord! Forgive me! It is in a landscape that I once drew. But Him! What beauty, elegance and gentleness! His shoulders, his walk! He's wearing a yellow silk robe with blue trimmings. He has turned round and I see that peaceful, radiant face" (Max Jacob, Récit de ma conversion, 1939). For two years Jacob immersed himself passionately in the study of the Gospel, the Old Testament and the Fathers of the Church.

In a letter to his cousin Richard Bloch, he recounted a second vision of Christ "on December 17 at 10:30 pm on a Pathé cinematograph screen in the rue de Douai." Max Jacob no longer put off his baptism, which he received in the chapel of the Sisters of Notre-Dame de Sion (Paris) on February 18, 1915 - "Any further hesitation would be ingratitude", he explained. Pablo Picasso, his godfather, gave him a copy of the Imitation of Jesus Christ (a work published around 1400, attributed to Thomas A. Kempis).

This was the beginning of a difficult period during which Max Jacob defined himself as "a mystic and a sinner [...] tossed back and forth between the world that had taken him back and God who was not yet helping him, between remorse and debauchery" (La Défense de Tartuffe). This journey took the form of a relentless search - "Sinning, sinning, then finding myself again." In particular, his homosexual tendencies were the source of acute moral suffering, which he did not hide.

The death of Guillaume Apollinaire in 1918 led Max Jacob to a second conversion. At the Sacré-Cœur, the day after his friend's death, he heard the words: "Do not be afraid" (Mt 17:7; words of the transfigured Christ); and he drew the vision he had of the deceased becoming an angel "like a bird with a man's head above it. Was he dead?" ("If Guillaume died a Christian", Last Poems).

Max Jacob firmly renounced those aspects of his life that were at odds with his faith. To get away from temptations, he retired into semimonastic seclusion at Saint Benoît-sur-Loire, a small village 160 kilometres from Paris, known for its beautiful Notre-Dame-de-Fleury abbey. Abbot Albert Fleureau took him in as a guest in the presbytery. He stayed there for seven years, adopting an almost monastic lifestyle, punctuated by prayer and daily Mass. Monsieur Max's exemplary devotion was noticed in the village and even led to conversions. The strict timetables he imposed on himself helped his creativity: the long religious meditations he wrote during this period attest to a vibrant faith. In Catholicism, he found "what he couldn't find in mysticism: peace!"

He was convinced that "an ordinary man cannot save himself alone [...] he needs God and the Church" (letter to Yvon Belaval, 1941). "The Church is not repelling: it is the devil who inspires such disgust. The Church that counts is your own soul, cleansed and purified: there is no other Church. We're not asking you to associate with priests, but to go to Mass, which pours out the Blood of God, who is Spirit, and to go to confession, because that's the only way to examine your conscience" (letter to Yvon Belaval, September 1927).

The increase in anti-Semitism during the Occupation made his life difficult (house arrest, wearing of the yellow star, mockery, etc.). However, Jacob refused the escapes offered to him by the Christian Resistance network "La France continue". He wrote: "I will die a martyr." He was arrested in February 1944 by the Gestapo, barely six months before the liberation of Paris. On the way to the Drancy camp, he wrote a last letter to Canon Fleureau, his parish priest at Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire: "I trust in God and thank him for the martyrdom that is beginning [...] I am forgetting no one in my constant prayers." Before dying of pneumonia, Jacob took care to ask his Jewish companions, imprisoned with him, to forgive him for "dying a Christian".

Beyond reasons to believe:

Distraught by his sinful life, Max Jabob clearly understood the significance of sacramental confession. He was deeply convinced of the forgiveness obtained for humanity through the sacrifice of Christ the Redeemer, and of the Father's mercy. "When you take one step towards God, he takes a hundred steps towards you."

Going further:

Angelus News Article "A saint for sinners? The messy conversion story of Max Jacob" by Msgr. Richard Antall

More information:

• Max Jacob, La Défense de Tartufe: Extases, remords, visions, prières, poèmes et méditations d'un Juif converti , 1919.

• Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters by Rosanna Warren, W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition (October 20, 2020)

• Article "Mary Gordon on Max Jacob, a (tormented) lover of God" In America, the Jesuit Review

• Article "Max Jacob, a Saintly Sinner" in Crisis Magazine