Revisiting Dante's Promised End: Eschatological Implications of Péguy's Jeanne d'Arc Mysteries:

In three poems written on the eve of World War I, French poet Charles Peguy (1873-1914) employed the character of Jeanne d'Arc to express dissatisfaction with doctrines of judgment and damnation, exemplified for Peguy in Dante's Divine Comedy. Peguy believed Christianity's dominant eschatological traditions promoted bourgeois individualism and apathy in the face of suffering. Peguy's rejection of these doctrines illustrates a paradoxical strategy of using Jeanne as an advocate in this struggle against expectation of a wrathful divine judgment. With help from theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), I explain how contemporary Christians can appropriate Peguy's eschatological alternative. We come back empty-handed from Jerusalem counting our blessings, honestly admire the wrath of the peacemakers, for example Christ driving the money-changers from the temple, applaud the Roman steadiness under tire. --Geoffrey Hill, "The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy" (191) (1) The life of French poet Charles Peguy (1873-1914) came to a violent end nearly a century ago at the first battle of la Marne, one of the opening conflicts in a global war promoted to end all future wars. Judged by the fervently nationalist outlook that marked Peguy's last writings, he would at first glance appear to be an unlikely theological ally for a Christian reimagining of the Last Judgment. Yet over the course of his literary career, Peguy used the figure of Jeanne d'Arc both to criticize and to reconstruct Christian doctrines about judgment and damnation. In three long poems written on the eve of World War I, Mystere de la Charite de la Jeanne d'Arc (1910), Le Porche de Mystere de la Deuxieme Vertu (1911), and Le Mystere des Saints Innocents (1912), Jeanne d'Arc and her companion, the nun Madame Gervaise, give voice to Peguy's dissatisfaction with traditional Christian doctrines of eternal damnation, teachings that Peguy believed promoted bourgeois individualism and social apathy in the face of human suffering. Both the author and his medieval literary mouthpieces encumber Peguy's theological revisions with what would seem to be fatal contradictions. He was a sometime socialist whose early rejection of Christianity was followed by a private reconciliation with the Catholic Church, unaccompanied by any visible participation in the Church's official liturgies due to religious differences with his wife. Peguy blazed a political trajectory that careened between utopian non-Marxist socialism and a military ideology of enracinement. Not one to mince words or judgments, Peguy's militant rhetoric in his last years has been implicated as a proximate source of inspiration in the 1914 assassination of his former friend, socialist leader and pacifist Jean Jaures. (2) While nationalistic appropriation of Jeanne d'Arc increased in the first two decades of the twentieth century prior to her canonization in 1920, Peguy's attempt to use Jeanne as an advocate for the universal salvation of the human race was without any basis in medieval history or previous hagiographical tradition. (3) In this essay, I will explicate Peguy's indictment against the doctrine of hell and damnation, illustrate his paradoxical strategy of using the warrior Jeanne d'Arc as an advocate in the struggle against the expectation of a wrathful divine judgment, and, with help from Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), offer a concluding commentary on how critics and theologians can appropriate Peguy's eschatological alternative in an age in which religious eschatologies have been linked to politically motivated violence and indifference to social injustice. (4) I do not claim that either the poems of Peguy or his political-religious convictions are a failsafe solution to the problems that many religious believers have with Christian understandings of hell and judgment. I do claim, however, that the Jeanne d'Arc that Peguy created encapsulates a serious theological response to classical Christian eschatology, an example of what Geoffrey Hill called "the wrath of the peacemakers," which Christians must take seriously in a contemporary world marked by religiously incommensurate ideologies. …