Passionate Pilgrim

Said French Novelist Barbey d'Aurevilly: "Leon Bloy is a cathedral gargoyle who pours the waters of heaven down on the good and on the wicked."

Said Belgian Author Maurice Maeterlinck: Leon Bloy wrote "the only work of [his] day in which there are evident marks of genius, if by genius one means certain flashes 'in depth.' "

Said the late Irish Critic Ernest Boyd: Bloy was "an abusive, ungrateful parasite, a past master of vituperation. . . ."

Wrote Leon Bloy of himself: "I am simply a poor man who seeks his God, sobbing and calling Him along all roads. . . ."

He was certainly a poor man. Bulb-eyed, walrus-mustached Parisian Leon Bloy published eight volumes of his journal, two autobiographical novels and many other works* during his 71-year lifetime that ended in 1917. But none sold enough copies to relieve him of the necessity of begging from his friends, from tradesmen, from strangers, to keep his wife and two daughters alive. Yet Beggar Bloy said no polite thank-yous to society. His writings alternated perfervid religious devotion with savage, four-letter-word vituperation against solid bourgeois values.

The life of this strange mystic was said to have been filled with "former friends." But though he estranged many, Bloy brought into the Roman Catholic fold many an apostate or proselyte to whom the church's more official voices had sounded too worldly and well-fed. One convert was the Thomist philosopher, Jacques Maritain. In 1905, Maritain, then a God-seeking philosophy student, and his young wife, Raissa, visited Leon Bloy for the first time. They found in him the spiritual inspiration they had been looking for.

Just published is a collection of Bloy's writings (Pilgrim of the Absolute, Pantheon, $3.50), edited by Raissa Maritain, with an introduction by her husband, now France's Ambassador to the Vatican. The loving and loathing in these fragments might well prove a shock treatment for some torpid Christians. Excerpts:

On Charity: "A wise old man with whom I was taking counsel once said these profound words to me, which I recommend to thinkers: 'The Saints give Alms, the Bourgeois alone give to Charity.' "

On Modern Christians: "The damned in the abyss of their torments have no other refreshment than the spectacle of the devils' hideous faces. The friends of Jesus see all around them the modern Christians, and thus it is that they are able to picture hell."

On Anti-Semitism: "People forget, or rather do not want to know, that our God made man is a Jew . . . that His Mother is a Jewess, the flower of the Jewish Race; that all His Ancestors were Jews; that the Apostles were Jews, as well as all the Prophets; finally that our holy Liturgy is entirely drawn from Jewish books. . . . Anti-Semitism ... is the most horrible blow yet suffered by Our Lord in His ever continuous Passion. . . ."

* So far translated into English: The Woman Who was Poor (Sheed & Ward, 1939, $2.50); Letters to His Fiancee (Sheed & Ward, 1937, $2)

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