Pilgrim of the Absolute

by Léon Bloy

The Pilgrim of the Absolute is a collection of Léon Bloy’s writings, selected and edited by Raissa Maritain. The volume shows Bloy at the heights of his implacable fury toward the rich and haughty and at the depths of his seemingly inescapable poverty. Bloy spared no one with the excoriations that poured from his pen—a fact from which the selections of Maritain do not shy away, allowing the reader to experience firsthand the frustrating paradox of the Pilgrim of the Absolute. As David Bentley Hart writes in his Introduction to this new edition, the key words to reading and understanding Bloy are “and yet”: “Bloy was bellicose and choleric, splenetic and vicious…. He was not merely irascible—he was cruel. And yet... This is the infuriating and baffling mystery of Bloy. All of this is true, and all of it truly deplorable—and yet Bloy was a man of extraordinarily sensitive and fierce conscience…even underneath the unabated ferocity and malice [of his prose] lay a bottomless reservoir of sincere compassion and incorruptible integrity.”

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Christianity, Christian, Literature, Nonfiction

351 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1947

About the author

Bloy was born in Notre-Dame-de-Sanilhac, in the arondissement of Périgueux, Dordogne. He was the second of six sons of Voltairean freethinker and stern disciplinarian Jean Baptiste Bloy and his wife Anne-Marie Carreau, pious Spanish-Catholic daughter of a Napoleonic soldier. After an agnostic and unhappy youth in which he cultivated an intense hatred for the Roman Catholic Church and its teaching, his father found him a job in Paris, where he went in 1864. In December 1868, he met the aging Catholic author Barbey d'Aurevilly, who lived opposite him in rue Rousselet and became his mentor. Shortly afterwards, he underwent a dramatic religious conversion.

Bloy's works reflect a deepening devotion to the Catholic Church and most generally a tremendous craving for the Absolute. His devotion to religion resulted in a complete dependence on charity; he acquired his nickname ("the ungrateful beggar") as a result of the many letters requesting financial aid from friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers, all the while carrying on with his literary work, in which his eight-volume Diary takes an important place.

Bloy was a friend of the author Joris-Karl Huysmans, the painter Georges Rouault, and the philosopher Jacques Maritain, and was instrumental in reconciling these intellectuals with Roman Catholicism. However, he acquired a reputation for bigotry because of his frequent outbursts of temper; and his first novel, Le Désespéré, a fierce attack on rationalism and 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 as Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Ernest Renan, Alphonse Daudet, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Bourget and Anatole France as his enemies.

In addition to his published works, he left a large body of correspondence with public and literary figures. He died in Bourg-la-Reine.

Reviews

[Hollisch · Rating 5 out of 5]

The two introductions by David Bentley Hart and Jacques Maritain alone make this book a worthy read. My first acquaintance with Léon Bloy, and I expected a more violent man than the one I encountered in these pages; not this gentle man overflowing with love and affection for the poor, and who endured a life of great suffering in order to wholly fulfill a divine call to obedience to what he names the “Absolute”.

[Daniel Klawitter · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Every man who begets a free act projects his personality into the infinite. If he gives a poor man a penny grudgingly, that penny pierces the poor man's hand, falls, pierces the earth, bores holes in suns, crosses the firmament and compromises the universe."

[John Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Heavyweight Catholic Contender of Symbolism

[Chris Rohlev · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Every man who begets a free act projects his personality into the infinite. If he gives a poor man a penny grudgingly, that penny pierces the poor man's hands, falls, pierces the earth, bores holes in suns, crosses the firmament and compromises the universe. If he begets an impure act, he perhaps darkens thousands of hearts who he does not know, who are mysteriously linked to him, and who need this man to be pure as a traveller dying of thirst needs the Gospel's draught of water. A charitable act, an impulse of real pity sings for him the divine praises, from the time of Adam to the end of the ages; it cures the sick, consoles those in despair, calms storms, ransoms prisoners, converts the infidel and protects mankind."

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars. I wanted to like this a lot more and there are great parts, but as it’s a compilation I found myself confused by the context. Will
Definitely read more Bloy.

[Καιρὸς · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Léon Bloy is a cathedral gargoyle who pours the waters of heaven down.on the good and on the wicked."

- Barbey d'Aurevilly

[Shawn Halstead]

This edition of the book comes with an excellent introduction by David Bentley Hart (in addition to the one by Jacques Maritian). The book itself is an excellent cross section of Bloy's works. His novels, however brilliant, often tended to get bogged down when discussing topics of relatively little interest compared to his main characters and big themes (did you want detailed and violently negative portraits of mostly forgotten French writers from the late 1800's? I would imagine not). Here the core of some of these novels are put alongside his letters, journal entries, and parts of his non-fiction to give a better sense of the ungrateful beggar's contribution to literature and his odd and intense brand of French Catholicism.

This edition is a welcome one, being a relatively inexpensive soft cover version of a once out of print book (its release seems to have had the unexpected and positive side effect of lowering the prices of used versions of the older out of print editions). There are a number of typos spread through the book, though they are not frequent enough to ruin it.