Last week I wrote about the French Catholic 20th century writer Charles Péguy and “mystical politics.” The occasion was a favorable review concerning a new book about Péguy by Matthew Maguire. I puzzled over a famous line of Péguy’s: “Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” I said that I understand the idea that politics must be rooted in fealty to transcendent truths, and I think I understand Péguy’s idea that that mysticism has to lead one to embrace sacrificial love. More:

Even so, I don’t really understand what Péguy is getting at here. If it’s a mysticism ultimately grounded in sacrificial love, how do you discern the good kind of mysticism from the bad kind? After all, to the Nazis, Horst Wessel was a martyr. The totalitarian Left has its martyrs too, those who gave it all up for the Sacred Cause. I suppose I’ll need to buy the book if I want to know — or maybe we have Péguy readers in this blog’s audience, and they can enlighten me.

Well, whaddaya know, Matthew Maguire himself wrote me to explain. Here is his letter:

Rod’s question is important. What prevents Charles Péguy’s “mysticism” from justifying Nazism?

For Péguy, the claim that “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics” does not express a fascist’s enthusiasm for the irrational and for the “strong gods” of tribe or nation. It means that the ultimate source of legitimate political authority is a transcendent love of truth and universal justice that is understood only with honesty, humility, and sacrifice— often quotidian sacrifice. A mystical “love of the truth” is of enormous importance for Péguy, and sustains what he calls “the most legitimate rights of peoples” and the need to protest even a single “insult” to “humanity” as a whole, regardless of race or ethnicity. The authenticity of that mysticism is demonstrated by the specific ways in which it acts in the world and relates to others.

Yet what is truth? Péguy recognizes the importance of discrete empirical truths (of criminal guilt and innocence, for example). But the love of justice and truth that inspires us to find them and act rightly with what we know ultimately seeks and participates in God’s infinite love, justice, and truth. For all that, our human love does not possess the beloved, and the continuous vision of God cannot be enjoyed by human beings in this world. For that reason, different groups of people, of different beliefs, can move toward empirical truths from diverse angles of approach, and participate in the transcendent love that animates their devotion to truth and justice in different ways and to various degrees of fullness.

Péguy turns to his own experience to explain what he means. In those two or three decades before the First World War when French society was viciously divided— as America is today— the conflict between religious skeptics and Christians was especially bitter, and waged amidst pervasive anti-Semitism. It was then that Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish officer, was falsely accused of working as a German spy and convicted of treason.

In the early years of what became the Dreyfus Affair, Péguy saw that there were Jews, and Christians, and secular French republicans truly devoted to liberty, equality, and fraternity who, few as they then were, all dared to speak and act upon their recognition that one man (heretofore unknown to most of them) had been wrongly accused and punished. They made that commitment when the case was apparently closed, and when most of their fellow citizens considered further controversy pointless in an already polarized nation. Their cause afforded them no opportunities. It would have been expedient to say and do nothing.

Each of these religious and secular groups brought something of their own distinctive character and historical experiences to the struggle, said Péguy, and tested one another’s commitment. Yet they shared a willingness to reject arguments on behalf of personal advantage and “pragmatism.” They began to live out a pluralistic contrapuntal solidarity through their mystical love of truth and justice. In time, their mystique brought about an astonishing result: a single wrongly decided case was not forgotten, but became an event in national and global history.

Péguy said that as each group worked for truth and justice, they did not set aside their distinctive convictions in order to preserve a superficial comity, but followed their mystical commitments without apology. This sets his thought apart from a powerful tendency in Anglo-American liberalism from Hobbes to Rawls, in which deeply-held religious and metaphysical beliefs are generally undermined or attenuated in the name of preserving social peace. For Péguy, distinctive mystical loves of truth and justice ultimately create political legitimacy; it is the politicized corruption of mysticism that is that legitimacy’s undoing.

If the differences among them remained, what did those Christians, and secular French republicans, and Jews share that made them authentically mystical? For Péguy, they devote themselves to what he calls a “perfect horizontality of justice,” regardless of their own collective identities. They fight the inevitable betrayals of the mystical by their own groups as well as against their own groups— avoiding culpable indifference and chauvinism on the one hand, and a refusal of communal responsibility on the other. They must also be vigilant. A mystique easily becomes a political movement that lives off its initial source, yet has become a cynical strategy for exercising power.

Péguy’s foremost example of authentic mystical action was his great friend Bernard-Lazare. He was Jewish, and he drew tirelessly upon his literary talent to defend Dreyfus when he had few defenders. But after the Affair, Bernard-Lazare broke ranks with many supporters of Dreyfus (the overwhelming majority of them secularists of Christian heritage) who had begun a campaign of administrative and legal vengeance upon French Catholics, a campaign that he recognized was immoral. Similarly, Bernard-Lazare understood that the conflicts of his time among Christians, Jews, and Muslims had to be seen on the same level, regardless of which group was victim or perpetrator. He saw that many Catholics were right to be angry about the persecution of Armenian Christians by Ottoman Muslims, but wrongly went silent when Jews were persecuted by Romanian Christians. A truly mystical “horizontality” did not make such distinctions.

In this way, Nazism had nothing of Péguy’s mysticism. Racist and contemptuous of the very notion of a universal humanity, obsessed with violent political domination, Nazis performed no sacrifice out of transcendent love for others in the name of truth, justice, and the rights and dignity of everyone. They opposed that love no less than they opposed pluralist solidarity, and were without any mystically effective “horizontality.”

Péguy had real flaws, intellectually and personally. But he lived out this mystical love of justice and truth. Often he did so by avoiding membership in a ready-made political collective, refusing to be either “progressive” or “reactionary.” Throughout his work, both words are used pejoratively.

His ardent French patriotism could turn into nationalism, especially as he sensed the approach of war with Germany. Nonetheless he said that if France were to invade Germany as a would-be hegemon instead of the other way around, he and others would be the first to give “the example not only of desertion, but of insurrection and revolt” against his own government. When Germany indeed invaded France in 1914, he fought as a French officer and died in battle just north of Paris.

Péguy practiced a kind of mystical horizontality within Catholicism as well. Few Catholics were more willing than he to argue against jettisoning parts of their faith (especially its bold supernatural claims) to make it more respectable in modern, secular, bourgeois culture. He was convinced that was the way to a complacent semi-skepticism if not unbelief, covered over with sentiment and self-congratulation.

Yet while he trusted the teaching of the Church, he was unsparingly critical of the ways in which many clergy and Catholic lay people ignored the suffering of the materially precarious and the destitute, while an increasingly inescapable capitalism took what little they had. He was no less critical of those Christians who maintained a morally and spiritually poisonous rapport with anti-Semites, or who were themselves anti-Semitic. For him, both prominent Catholic “progressives” and “reactionaries” had betrayed Christian mysticism.

It must be thus, since to be first of all a “progressive” or “reactionary” is to conceive linear historical time as the supreme dimension of time. Progressives and reactionaries alike too easily set aside the cyclical qualities of our individual and historical experience. But above all, the linear time with which they are obsessed has no living relationship to eternity, which for Péguy gives our lives patience, humility, and depth. If a linear “march of history” is the only sort of time that counts, the temptation to be an ideologue— idealizing the past or the future, and wanting one’s favored abstractions to be vindicated with demonstrable success and coercive power over enemies— becomes very strong indeed.

Today, some Christians, disoriented by the decline of Christianity in the West, move toward the wan approach that Péguy decried, hoping to refashion Christianity as a sort of easy bourgeois civil religion. Among Catholics who reject that accommodation, others have recently sought to rehabilitate the politique offered variously by Charles Maurras and Carl Schmitt, whose catastrophic failures of judgment in the last century are entwined with its worst horrors.

Péguy is one of those thinkers who can inspire us to move more nimbly and forcefully through the time given to us. Like him, we can act in relation to different pasts and more diverse possible futures, set free to be neither progressive nor reactionary. A continuous, mystical relation to eternity offers an infinite richness, and makes it possible to act faithfully, truly, justly, and creatively— within and beyond the deeply entrenched political positions around us.

Thanks to Rod for giving me the chance to respond.

Thanks, Prof. Maguire, for writing. The book is Carnal Spirit: The Revolutions of Charles Péguy. It’s from a university press, and therefore expensive. But if you are moved by what you read here, then it won’t be too much.