The Spirit and the Water: Paul Claudel, Pneumatology, and the Sacralization of Finitude

Although the influence of Paul Claudel upon twentieth-century theology is well known, little attention has been given to the way that Claudel’s oeuvre can help us not only to rethink a kind of sacramental cosmology but also the ways in which pneumatology is bound up with this project and reveals it as something more than just a retrieval of the premodern sacred.

In order to open such reflections, we might start with a closer look at the second of the Five Great Odes. In this second Ode, ‘Spirit and Water,’ Claudel draws upon the motif of water in order to express the presence of the Spirit in, through, and beyond all things. Where many twentieth and twenty-first century pneumatologies invoke the Spirt as the source of freedom, liberation, and novelty — an invocation that often coincides with suspicion towards limits and a valorization of the infinite — Claudel’s pneumatological re-enchantment operates quite differently. For Claudel, the presence of the Spirit reveals a sacramental cosmos precisely through the way in which the Spirit reveals creaturely finitude. The inescapable presence of God  (Ps 139.7)  renders the world sacred precisely by closing or enclosing it.  As the poet writes:

You are here and I can be nowhere save with you.

But what is happening to me now? – As if this old world

had closed itself to me.

As once before when, brought from heaven,

the capstone was placed and now, complete, the new

temple tamed the pagan forest.…

The indefinite magnitudes of the antique sacred are ordered and rendered beautiful because they are now shown to shine in their own finitude, perforated with the Spirit who lures them beyond themselves. Ordering, or what Claudel calls taming, is a kind of gathering and orienting. The Spirit’s presence and activity discloses a vector within the world towards God, but this pneumatological vector is less Bergson’s élan vital, a kind of blind nisus towards creativity dissolving all boundaries, than what Claudel calls traction spirituelle, a Spirit-guided pull, tug, or dynamic lure.

So hail world new to my eyes, world now total!

Entire creed of things visible and invisible,

            I accept you with a catholic heart….

….

The ocean is contained within its shores,

the world within its limits,

so nothing is lost in this closed place.

And freedom is bound within love….

I do not see you, but I am contained along with

these beings whom you see.

The principle of limitation through which the goodness of creation is realized — good because each creature is a finite participation in the infinite goodness and being of God from whom all things come and to whom all return — this principle of limitation is analogically repeated in the poet’s own pneumatologically inflected work. The Spirit that brooded over the waters of creation and overshadowed the Virgin in Nazareth, this same Spirit works analogously through the poet’s own work of sub-creation.

God who breathed upon the chaos, divided dry from waters

who divided the Red Sea before Moses and Aaron,

on the moist earth, here you fashioned man;

you command my waters likewise, you have breathed

into my nostrils the same spirit of creation and form.

The entire second Ode, like so much of Claudel’s subsequent work, gestures towards an integral realization of sacramentality as the nuptial relationship of form and matter, the universal and the particular, identity and differentiation, or in the more theologically resonant terms of the Bible: Spirit and water. We find this same wedding of contraries in human creativity, as expressed most poignantly in the poet’s voice:

Intelligible word, speech expressed, voice that is

            spirit and water!

The sacerdotal vocation of the human being is a recurrent theme in the Odes. In the First Ode, for instance, Claudel writes:

I will not say, O Poet, that you receive from

nature no lesson; but it is you who impose on

her your order.

The point is not that the poet projects his subjectivity onto the blank canvas of nature, but rather that the poet — or better, the human being — in his or her creative, ordering gaze elicits from the animal deliverances of the senses the supplement of meaning. Outside a robust pneumatology, such an account inevitably issues in projectionist critiques in both theology (Feuerbach et al.) and cosmology (the pathetic fallacy, etc.). But Claudel’s pneumatology presses in a different direction. Projection is, at best, penultimate, for the Spirit precedes even our capacity to project and so invites a more primordial comportment of creative attention. The poet’s task is, accordingly, more than mimetic; it is genuinely creative. But our creativity is not Promethean but Marian, which is to say, it is always the response to a prior divine call. As he writes in the First Ode:

But, Muse of the poet, your song

is not the buzzing of bees, the babbling spring,

or the bird of paradise among the cloves.

As holy God has invented each thing, your joy

lies in the possession of its name,

and as God says in his silence for each thing, Let it be,

so you, full of love, repeat the word,

as he calls you to do, like a child learning to spell, ‘That it is.’

You servant of God, full of grace:

the substance of each thing you ratify, contemplate

in your heart, for each thing asking

How do I speak it?

Claudel’s pneumatology points towards a theological resacralization of the finite that includes human subjectivity and creativity, indeed, one that gives a central place to the body, creaturely finitude, and to the shaping work of the human imagination. In this way, Claudel points us to a robustly theological account of human subjectivity in a sacramental cosmos, an account that takes us decisively beyond the aporetic modern theological shuttle between the epistemological turn-to-the-subject and reactionary reassertions of premodern metaphysics.