Pilgrim of the Absolute

Pilgrim of the Absolute by Leon Bloy, edited by Raissa Maritain, translated by John Coleman and Harry Lorin Binsse, 351 pages

This is a selection from the writings, letters, and diaries of Leon Bloy, best known as the author of The Woman Who Was Poor, but self-described, at various times in his life, as the Thankless Beggar, the Hurler of Curses, and the Pilgrim of the Absolute.  As assembled by Raissa Maritain, these fragments combine to form an intoxicating "flower from the abyss".  Bloy lived a life without compromises, and he and his family suffered for it - his daughters complaining of hunger is a recurring theme - but they accepted it as the price of worshiping a Poor Man.  "God wants everything, he requires everything, and one cannot escape Him.  'We are sold to God,' my wife said to me, 'we are caught in His net, and we know this net cannot be broken.'"

Bloy sought the Absolute as the enemy of the Relative - the "springboard with which to escape" the empty despair of materialism.  His pilgrimage to the Absolute makes demands that are equally absolute, for it is "an ascension ever more lively, more impetuous, more thunderous, not toward God, but in God, in the very Essence of the Unbounded."  There is no group that he attacks with more fervor than those bourgeois Catholics who manage to get more than thirty pieces of silver for their Lord, unless it is their priests who preach sentimentality rather than sacrifice.  For Bloy, they are nothing but a rotting, gangrenous limb on the Body of Christ, and if they are not to be cured they must be cut off, either here or in the world to come.  Again and again, Bloy announces the universal call to sanctity - not respectability, not niceness, but holiness - "There is no man who is not potentially a saint."  Charity is not something one gives but something one begs for, the very Name of the Third Divine Person, and He is a Fire that burns away all that is not needful.