No Other Eyes

The good man rejoices in his awareness of the world…

- Stephen R. L. Clark

A good friend of mine once remarked that he thought Aristotle’s assumption that “All men by nature desire to know” was a ludicrous one. People, he suggested, desire many other things rather than knowledge. They desire, for instance, to love and be loved, to delight in the world, and to act in it. In fact, knowledge is something many people flee from, rather than embrace. My friend quite properly rejected the idea that happiness is to be found in a syllogism, as if the joy of man’s desiring was to be found in a well-executed game of sudoku. I believe I replied that Aristotle does not, in my reading, take such a stance; but I am not sure how convincing my assertion was. However, if one wished, outside of Aristotle, to give an example of how the act of knowing might be reconciled with the whole activity of man, and how such a knowing might, in fact, be his completion, we need look no farther than the Five Great Odes of Paul Claudel, in the translation by Jonathan Geltner. A close reading of the Odes, and in particular the second, entitled The Spirit and the Water, discloses a vision of faith as gnosis1, not merely of faith, but of the entire created order; and thus, of the creator.

All that sounds rather abstract. But Claudel is far from abstract. Sometimes, he seems relentlessly brim-full of the beauties and delicacies of the world:

Eternity is present always, and all present things
pass only into Eternity.
It is not the naked text beneath cold light: look,
everything is written from margin to margin:
you could list every little detail, not one syllable lacks.
The land, the fair sky, the river with its boats,
cluster of three trees poised over the bank,
leaf and insect upon the leaf, this stone I toss in my hand,
village full of people who all speak at once,
weave and haggle and strike fires, carry their burden,
complete like an orchestra.

A Hamlet might recognize the beauty of this scene, and declare it a mere congregation of vapors. By contrast, for Claudel, the world of nature, his own personal history, and the history of other people are themselves part of eternity. He concludes: “All that is eternity, and the freedom not to be / is all they are deprived of. / I see them with my bodily eyes, produce them in my heart. / My bodily eyes— / In Paradise I should be served by no other eyes!”

But why is all this to be considered eternal? Surely, all these things are finite? Surely, as Claudel says himself, they too “pass only into eternity?” In fact, these finite things are made immortal in his poetic work. Through sense experience, the poet discerns the things of this world in all the splendor of their particularity. As he puts it: “I see them with my bodily eyes.” He then, in the essential core of his soul, which is the soul of a knowing being, re-creates them: “I . . . produce them in my heart;” there, they are represented to him. Here is the beginning of the poet’s work of co-creation; in the ability of man to know things, and re-present them to himself in memory. But this is not, of course, the end of his task. He represents the things he has seen to others, and thus brings them to a new birth.: “My voice, my breath, is water, such pure water / as nourishes all things, and so all things / fold themselves into my voice.” Here, water is the “liquid and lusty spirit;” a medium for creative action.

We must turn our attention to the water. Water does a great number of things in this poem. First, most obviously in the title of the Ode, it is the Spirit of God in the second verse of the book of Genesis: “darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters.” But water is not only present at the creation. It is present at the destruction of the world in the flood, and at its renewal. It is present in the River Jordan of the Baptist. Most critically for Claudel, it is present in his own baptism, and in the baptism of his fellow Christians as it is performed, recalled, and renewed at the Easter Vigil.

We might here recall the significance of the rite of baptism according to St. Thomas Aquinas, which is to represent the “sepulturae Christi;” the burial of Christ. This burial, which is but the prelude to a rebirth, is echoed in the cyclic growth and decay of the material world, which is still, for Claudel, a valid participation of the eternal. He raises the question: “Watching succeeding waves collapse—or triumph—in foam, / do we say that the ocean has perished?” The answer is no. Neither, the poet would remind us, does the church perish: “So hail! World new to my eyes, world now total! / Entire creed of things visible and invisible, / I accept you with a catholic heart.” As it happens, the world itself, the cosmos, is the church, because it is creation. But most significantly for Claudel’s poetics, not only the act of creation, nor only the act of redemption in baptism, but poetic co-creation itself is symbolized by water.

Water then has three symbolic levels at which interpretation may rest: First: the level of natural flux, which is, in its cyclical repetition, an analogous participation in the eternal. Second: the creation and redemption of the world in the gratuity of God’s amorous grace. Third: participation in both the first and second sense by the poet, whose work is at once merely analogous to God’s eternity, and yet, not least because it is also prayer, directly participatory in it, as co-creation.

Although God the Father is the addressee of the poet’s prayers, the Odes are also presided over by a great number of female figures. In the second Ode, water itself is a maternal figure. For Claudel, she is “the element itself. . . prime material. . . The Mother.” But if water is symbolically the substance of the created and creating soul, the soul is still amorous for its creator, and longs to return to Him, as a river descends into the infinite sea. “Water,” he tells us, “adores water.” Yet immediately after a passage in which Claudel affirms once more that human imagination eternalizes the thing it imagines, he breaks off into something that seems to utterly contradict his full-hearted desire for God’s beauty as it is instantiated in Creation. He cries out, “Clarify me! Strip me of miserable shadows . . . ” as earlier in the poem he has decried the burden of dust and earth that running water must bear. “I want,” he says, “no convenient water, harvested by the sun, / filtered and distributed according to the lay and network of mountains, / flowing, yes— and corruptible.” This bears comparison with a passage in the first Ode, where Claudel rejects (seemingly) the epic tradition of the past, with an impudent cry of boredom, suggesting that he must strike out on his own. His poetical and spiritual desires are equally ambitious. As a wandering and rather Odyssean sailor, a pilgrim on the sea, (which he describes in Dantesque language as “a great rose of grey,”) Claudel has asserted his immortality. But how does the world of finitude, of mere humanity, sit with him?

In part, it is his sexual union with a particular woman (in life, one Rosalie Vetch) that draws his thirst towards one possible source of satiation, one possible “escape from time.” As he puns it, “I, too, have found at last the death / I needed.” Here the poem becomes, for a moment, a confession, after the manner of St. Augustine, who, like another sea-farer named Aeneas, came to Carthage, “where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves.2”

But Rosalie leaves Claudel, and the speaker must quickly take consolation in desiring nothing but the “perfect privation” of God. The poem then begins its coda, after the speaker has seen both the intensity and fleeting nature of earthly life. This is the climax of the poem in more ways than one: throughout, Claudel has asserted and asserted the inner divinity of his spirit, in communion with the symbol of water, over and against the weight and contamination of earth. This tension must, perforce, be resolved.

Thus we encounter the poet “in an unknown country,” knowing “that the storm and struggle are ended.” He has, it seems, been reduced. The pride and pomp of the spirit has amassed, urged forward on its gigantic crest, and fallen again into the flattened salt-water of the illimitable ocean. These are, to use a line of Eliot’s, the gifts reserved for age. Yet, the poet finds himself unaccountably “delivered,” as he prayed for perhaps, but not as he expected. The delivered man “beholds all things and laughs.” And it is here, at the end of the ode, that we meet its final character.

. . . The Wisdom of God is before you,
Like a pillar of fire, or like a crowned queen.
Oh beloved, says Wisdom, I am neither man nor woman,
I am the love that is beyond all speech.

This image is not simply, I would argue, an image of Christ, whom St. Paul calls the Wisdom of God. Nor is it simply the biblical figure of Wisdom in the Old Testament. Rather, it is both at once, and neither. It would be the work of another essay to prove that this figure bears more of a resemblance to the Virgin Mary, not only as Theotokos or Co-Redemptrix, but as she who has first fulfilled the words of St. Athanasius: God became man, that man might become God. Nevertheless, I assert it here: Wisdom here is an image of both human and divine nature (specifically that of Mary) as it is unified in Christ. It is under Wisdom’s auspices, I would suggest, that the third Ode, entitled “Magnificat” begins.

What makes Claudel capable of such a vision? The only real answer is the obvious one: faith. This is no secret. The poet says so himself, speaking to God (as he is for most of the poem):

Why do you listen alone? —
Because only alone do I submit to a divine measure,
the perfect measure, holy, free, all powerful, creative!
I feel it; the spirit does not cease
to be carried upon the waters.

Indeed, vision is the correct word to apply to Claudel’s experience. The same eyes that survey the world of men will survey paradise itself.

1 By “gnosis,” I do not mean the “secret” knowledge of the heretic Christian sect, which St. Paul rejects as “philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world,” but rather what is meant by St. Luke in his gospel at 1:77, St. Paul in 1 Cor. 12:8, 2 Cor. 2:14, 4:6, and St. Peter in his second letter at 1:5-6, 3:18. By using this word I mean to emphasize that for Claudel, faith in Christ is not simply “right opinion” about something unknowable, but a true knowledge of the first principle of the cosmos, that transforms by its very nature, natural knowledge.

2 Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. Edward B. Pusey, The Franklin Library, 1982. The whole passage is worth quotation in this context: “To Carthage then I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves. I loved not yet, yet I wanted to love, and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not. I sought what I might love, in love with loving, and safety I hated, and a way without snares. For within me was a famine of that inward food, Thyself, my God. . .”