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Claudel and Dante on Trial

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2024

Kenelm Foster O.P.
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Dr Ernest Beaumont in his new book examines the ways in which two major Christian poets relate human love to the salvation of the soul, so that the former appears as a means, under divine grace, to the latter. Of such interrelating Dr Beaumont is rather suspicious; he smells heresy in it. He finds excuses however for Dante, reserving most of his disapproval for Paul Claudel, who is blamed both for misrepresenting (in his Ode Jubilaire for the Dante centenary, 1921) the role of Beatrice in Dante’s work, and for adding, in his own dramas, a series of more or less explicit expressions of a false idea of human love. The falsehood seems to consist chiefly in Claudel’s thinking (a) that if human (erotic) love could be ‘satisfied’ with its object, God would be ‘excluded’; (b) that since it cannot be so satisfied, this love implies a longing which only God can satisfy; and (c) that, this being so, lovers who refrain from carnal satisfaction may become, providentially, grace-bearers to one another and so, in a sense, mutually ‘necessary’ in a process of producing, reciprocally, ‘the child of God in each other’. This last ‘error’ is the more glaring in that the love in question is made to contrast with married love to the disadvantage of the latter.

Since I am far less acquainted than Dr Beaumont with the dramatic work of Claudel, my feeling that his critique of the French poet is somewhat partial is not in itself of much interest.

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 36 , Issue 423 , June 1955 , pp. 222 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © 1955 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 The Theme of Beatrice in the Plays of Claudel,. By Ernest Beaumont. (Rockliff; 12s. 6d.)

2 One of the few details Dante tells us concerning Beatrice is that she had a particular devotion to the Blessed Virgin, ‘the queen of glory’ (VN, xxviii and v).

3 An Essay on the ‘Vita Nuova’. By C. S. Singleton. (Harvard Univ. Press, 1949); pp. 3‐5.

4 On this matter of the difference between the medieval and post‐medieval points of view, Erich Auerbach (Speculum, vol. 21, 1946, pp.474‐89CrossRefGoogle Scholar) has some interesting remarks especially with regard to the figurative interpretation of the Bible, which, he says, ‘created a world of interrelations … in which medieval theologians moved quite naturally and which was familiar even to laymen through sermons, religious representations and art; from this material a poet like Bernard of Clairvaux produced his most beautiful creations. During the fourteenth century this world began to decay; the eighteenth century destroyed it almost completely, and for us it has vanished ….’ And again: ‘it is only to us that the figurative system seems laborious, complicated and sometimes absurd; for the Christians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was daily bread …’ I do not suggest that Dante's use of the Beatrice‐symbol was not daring even in his age; but only that it was in line with the representation through natural symbols of the supernatural, to which the Christian tradition had accustomed that age.