I continue my excavations of writers from the historic past most of whom are 19th and 20th century European or Anglophone writers. I have been endlessly drawn to the French. Leon Bloy is my most recent encounter and appeals very strongly for his strong beliefs and many contradictions. His vocation indeed was that of a “Hurler of Curses” and in the tag end of the 2nd year of Our Covid his ideas and feelings about the world of the Bourgeois are beyond contemporary time.
The Tragedy is he speaks to Western man before the Great War.
You have been told, I suppose, that my violent writings offend charity. I have only one thing to reply to those theologians of yours. It is that Justice and Mercy are identical and consubstantial in their absolutes.”— “Marchenoir” (100)
“What is one to think of an admiration which would extend only to the outer form of my thought, while rejecting my thought itself? That would be to put me on the level of cheap phrase makers.”—“Art and the Pilgrim of the Holy Sepulchre” (119)
“To say something worth while, as well as to give an impression of the beautiful, it is essential to seem to exaggerate, that is, to carry one’s scrutiny beyond the object, and then one arrives at exactness itself devoid of exaggeration, something which can be verified in the Prophets, who all were accused of exaggerating.”—“Art and the Pilgrim of the Holy Sepulchre” (121)
“The Prophet is above all a Voice to call down Justice. If one is absolutely determined, with or without irony, to bestow this magnificent name upon such a hurler of curses as I am, one must at once accept the consequence, drawn from the very nature of things, that my shouts will have the power to accelerate devastation. In this sense shall I be a prophet, as much as it is possible to be one without divine inspiration, precisely as a man of prayer is a worker of miracles.”—“The Hurler of Curses” (201-02)
The gathered materials in “The Hurler of Curses” opens with a fascinating personification of Fury as a kind of spiritual force in the world. There are also meditations on being the one hunted by others, on a famous fire at a charity event (196-201), as well as prophetic calls for justice and the story of a mad gypsy. “Modern Christians” focuses on the hypocrisy of both laity and priesthood, especially in regard to the problem of poverty. Pages 221-225 contain Bloy’s meditations on the infinite nature of the supernatural Church and the meaning of sainthood, though these must be weighed against other reflections in later sections.
“She Who Weeps” contains material focused on the apparition of Mary at La Salette to two children and her message to the modern world, in particular France. Bloy believed in their visions, and the popular piety surrounding La Sallete form the basis for his meditations on Mary’s Immaculate Conception and on the honor due her. Pages 242-244 reflect on her tears and their meaning in Bloy’s life. “The Mystery of Israel” is a section that shows Bloy not only as a defender of the Jewish people, but as a Catholic arguing for their continued place in the salvation of the world. Pages 262-269 set out a vision of the Elder People suffering for the world and as still held by God’s promise to them, and Bloy also stresses the Jewishness of Jesus, Mary, the apostles, and the early church.
“Suffering, Faith, Sanctity” is an important section that gives us a window into some of Bloy’s general spirituality. These three themes operate as nexus points for much of his life’s mission and writing. They also reveal Bloy’s ability to wildly proclaim seemingly opposites. He holds human freedom to be “the respect God has for us” (274), yet he also declares that “all that happens is divine” (284). Suffering is a sign of love, even divine beauty, yet it is also profound injustice and horror. Sanctity and sorrow are essential to spiritual growth, to knowing Christ fully. Prayer and suffering are deeply intertwined, too. Bloy also embraces an eschatological vision of all the saints in union with God (cf. 274-278, 284-291, 302-303). https://www3.dbu.edu/mitchell/documents/ShowingCharityandLeonBloy.pdf
And he speaks in such a way as to call us to arms against the Titanic impulse. TITANISM, HUMANISM, AND EXISTENTIALISM
Excerpted from N. F. Gier, Spiritual Titanism: Indian, Chinese, and Western Perspectives (SUNY Press, 2000). See the book itself for endnote references.
Heinrich Zimmer has called the preemption of divine prerogatives and confusion of human and divine attributes the "heresy of Titanism," and it could be that the deification of Gautama, Krishna, Mahavira, Jesus, and other religious figures may constitute a form of spiritual Titanism. Zimmer observes that Titans are not only superhuman, but they, as we have seen above, are superdivine; and as such, they are involved in a supergodly task. Even the gods accrue karma, so the human savior will also become the redeemer of the gods. To my knowledge, no one has ever worked out the details of Zimmer's thesis with regard to Indian forms of Titanism. Standing in the shadow of a giant in his own right, I presume to take up that task in this book.
Titanism is an extreme form of humanism that does not recognize that there are limits to what humans can become and what they should do. The Greek Titans were known for their boundless pride (hubris) and for their violence. Titanism is humanism gone berserk; it is anthropocentricism and anthropomorphism taken to their limits. The Titan insists that human experience is the norm. Titans deliberately reverse the positions of humanity and divinity; they take over divine prerogatives, and as a result of their hubris, they lose sight of their proper place in the universe. This book will define a deity as any being who is omniscient, omnipotent, infinite, and omnipresent. We maintain that a human being is a spiritual Titan by claiming any or all of these attributes. Even if there is no God, humans obviously delude themselves if they believe they can become divine in the sense of these attributes.
Fauci has no other God than Fauci. Klaus Schwab only Mammon. And the Bourgeoise 3 headed Satan upside down in the ice State Street, Vanguard, Blackrock busy Resetting and Looting.
The tits on the bull march in Washington and the hearing today in D.C are safety valves for Tyranny. You know this as do I. You are not ANGRY and that is mass formation indeed. Taking Satanism as a way of life for granted you sigh and say “'tis only greed, once satiated by blood it too shall pass” and politely obtain Real I.D. and a Vaccination Chip.
I like Bloy because he was Absolute. He felt first. Anger was one of his strong emotions and Compassion another. In Front Porch Republic Joshua Hren writes -Bloy reads the bourgeois mind as having a deviated spiritual depth. A precept such as “put your money to work” is, he says, “far more theological, at bottom, than economic.” In a manner that continues Max Weber’s assertion that the bourgeois world is invented and expanded not through material alterations so much as metamorphoses in the “spirit,” Dawson (citing Der Bourgeoisie, written by Weber’s friend Sombart) argues that “the bourgeois type corresponds to certain definite psychological predispositions. In other words there is such a thing as a bourgeois soul and it is in this rather than in economic circumstance that the whole development of the bourgeois culture finds its ultimate root.” What Bloy gives us in Exégèse des Lieux Communs is an “exegesis” of the sacred scriptures on which the bourgeois mind is fed and the bourgeois soul is bred. After chewing them thoroughly, instead of digesting them the wild ass of a man spits them out complete with little commentaries that serve as literal apocalypses (unveilings) of the conventional wisdom that guides the bourgeois and beckons all souls with its invisible hand.
In one of his first expositions, Bloy countenances the maxim “Nothing is absolute—there are no absolutes.” Bloy reveals the bourgeois, who is typically rendered as middling and small-minded, as a godlike creature, “armed with this thunderbolt [there are no absolutes].” When these “bibbers of a foul nectar” turn toward the “profitably Relative” with utter nonchalance, do they not know that “nothing is so bold as countermanding the unalterable, and that to do so implies the obligation of being oneself something like the Creator of a new earth and a new heavens?” Although it is typically the conservative who critiques the utopic ambitions of left-wing projects as hopelessly bent on making the eschaton immanent on this earth, Bloy’s second sight shows him that the “conservative” bourgeois also strives to create a new cosmos. As Bloy notes, the revolutionary character of “there are no absolutes,” seems unnoticed to the bourgeois, who defer to this saying when faced with inconvenient moral dilemmas. But, Bloy demonstrates, under the regime of “Nothing is absolute”:
At once we are entitled to wonder whether it is better to slit or not slit one’s father’s throat; better to possess twenty–five centimes or seventy-four million francs; better to be kicked in the ass or found a dynasty . . . in a word, all identities go by the board. It would be rash to maintain that a bedbug is wholly a bedbug, and must not aspire to having a coat of arms.
Yes, he concludes, this maxim makes “the duty of reshaping the world . . . imperative.” Here Bloy echoes Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s contention that the bourgeois world is both conditioned by relativism and is the conditions of its flourishing. When the “model of the free market imposes its implacable laws on every aspect of life,” Benedict XVI writes, “authentic Catholic ethics now appears to many like an alien body from times long past . . . Economic liberalism creates its exact counterpart, permissivism, in the moral plane.” Of course, in Bloy’s hands, the same exegesis assumes a comedic height; it crawls—like a slumlord’s top-floor tenement—with bedbugs.