Paul Claudel, Defensor fidei & 'Evil Genius'

In my post on St Romanus the Melodist last week (here), I relied primarily on three sources: Egon Wellesz’s A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford U, 1971), the Introduction by Fr Ephrem (Lash) to his translation of St Romanus, ‘St Romanos and the Kontakion’, in Kontakia on the Life of Christ, by St Romanus the Melodist, trans. Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash) (SF: HarperCollins, n.d.), pp. xxiii-xxxii, and Fr Andrew Louth’s Foreword to the same volume, ‘An Invitation to the Christian Mystery’, St Romanus, pp. xv-xii. Wellesz, in a note on ‘the polemic spirit on the poems of Romanus’, writes:

We may, however, understand the attitude of Romanus better by comparing his passages against the Greeks [in the Kontakion on Pentecost, which I excerpted in my post] with those of a great contemporary poet, Paul Claudel, when the author speaks in his ‘Magnificat’ as defensor fidei in an age filled with the spirit of religious indifference: ‘Restez avec moi, Seigneur, parce que le soir approche et ne m’abandonnez pas!—Ne me perdez point avec les Voltaire, et les Renan, et les Michelet, et les Hugo, et tous les autres infâmes!’ Cinq Grandes Odes (1907), p. 108. (p. 190, n.1)

Unfortunately, je ne parle pas français, but one can see that Claudel refers to Voltaire, Renan, and the others as ‘infamous authors’.

Anyway, what was interesting to me was that when I skimmed through Fr Louth’s Foreword to the book of Kontakia for more material, I encountered a now-familiar name:

The Scriptures are used not so much as a collection of proof-texts (as became increasingly the case in the West in the wake of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation), but as a hoard of imagery (not so much an ‘arsenal as a treasury’, as the French poet, Paul Claudel, put it). . . . But, as Claudel also says, the faith of the Church acts like a ‘magnetic field’, in which the biblical and liturgical images find their true orientation and yield their profoundest meaning. (pp. xviii-xix)

Now although Fr Louth’s Foreword was certainly written later than Wellesz’s book, the former mentioned the same passages as in the Foreword to the Kontakia, taken from Claudel’s Du sens figuré de l’Écriture, in Fr Louth's 1983 book, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology (reprinted 2007 by Eighth Day Press, Wichita, KS), which I reviewed Saturday. Indeed, in this book he gives more of the context of the ‘magnetic field’ comment:

As Paul Claudel put it, ‘thus around the imperative and literal sense we learn that there exists a field of figures (one could say a magnetic field), that is to say of resemblances and analogies oriented in a manner more or less direct and organic towards revealed and confirmed fact.’ (p. 121)

So, it seems to me that the references to Claudel in the context of two very different discussions of St Romanus the Melodist may simply be coincidence.

I’m fairly certain that I had never heard, or at least taken notice, of Claudel until encountering his name in that note by Wellesz (I'm afraid my familiarity with French literature is unusually slim). But a quick Internet search yielded an article on him here by a Fr John Saward called ‘Regaining Paradise: Paul Claudel and the Renewal of Exegesis’ that looks quite interesting, and makes perfectly clear why Fr Louth would have mentioned his name in Discerning the Mystery. Another article, ‘Evil Genius’ by Tim Ashley, here at The Guardian, lobs the unfortunate accusations of ‘misogynist, anti-semite, and Islamophobe’ at the old Frenchman (I fail to see what’s wrong with being afraid of Islam or Muslims, particularly if one is French!), but also mentions that George Steiner considered him, along with Berthold Brecht, one of the two greatest dramatists of the twentieth century.