Loving the Lawgiver
- PAUL CLAUDEL
A Catholic does not go walking on the glaciers.
Paul Claudel1865-1955
He lives in a world of hard realities, in which he finds himself bound to unceasing effort. What he thinks, what he believes, is not a greenhorn's fancy. He knows that life is at stake, and here and now. He is not looking at the Alps on a waiting-room poster: he knows that all he has before him is a kind of wall, sometimes very hard and very ugly, and that he must scale it or die.
In less stately terms, he must absolutely put pressure on himself to subdue what is inferior in his nature to what is superior. He lives according to principles, which is the very definition of a rational life. These principles are not laid down by his personal whim; that would deprive them of every authority and gravity, but by God himself, of whom it is not at all absurd to think that, being Creator, he is equally Law-Giver, and that, having gifted us with this great estate of existence, he can endow us with that still greater estate of a perfect existence where our ends shall come perfectly attained....
If the unbeliever, urged by that grace of God of which not vainly was it written that it is hard to resist, against all his inmost inclinations still makes up his mind to take the step, it is not because the Faith "is winsome" (what a word!). It is because he can no more do without it than without bread.
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Acknowledgement
Paul Claudel. "Loving the Lawgiver." Ways and Crossways (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1993).
Reproduced by kind permission of Bloomsbury.
The Author
Paul Claudel (1868-1955) was a French poet, dramatist and diplomat, and the younger brother of the sculptress Camille Claudel. He was most famous for his verse dramas, which often convey his devout Catholicism. Claudel was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in six different years.
