Tournier: Christian Writer? a Response to Susan Petit. (Dialogue)

I wish, first of all, to thank Susan Petit for her sensitive and intelligent response to my article on Michel Tournier. Often when one publishes an essay in a scholarly journal, it is as if there were no audience. It is invigorating and instructive to have one's work greeted by constructive criticisms, and I welcome the opportunity to respond to those of Petit in hopes not of winning a debate but of helping us all get closer to the truth that makes us free. It seems to me that there are a number of points on which Petit and I are basically in agreement. She endorses, as do I, Tournier's statement that everyone's beliefs are a mixture of faith and doubt. Doubt is but the flip side of faith, and as long as we are on this earthly pilgrimage it is never totally divorced from its positive concomitant. Otherwise, faith would not be faith. In my view, however, Tournier betrays a troubling evasiveness when he says, in a 1996 interview, that he finds questions such as whether he has faith "effrayantes" or frightening ("Entretien" 36). Tournier's faith is of his own making and does not conform to the creedal essentials of traditional orthodoxy. Likewise, I find Petit's definition of the Christian novel to be quite sane and useful. I, too, prefer to focus on that term rather than "Christian writer," which is less helpful, fraught as it is with its focus on the author rather than the text. (1) She proposes that "a novel is Christian if, as a whole, it reflects Christian beliefs more or less explicitly and in a fashion that presents those beliefs as true. The beliefs need not be those of a particular church, but they must conform to the central doctrines of Christian churches generally or derive clearly from the Gospels and Christian tradition" (320). Finally, I believe that Petit may well be right in her assessment of Taor as experiencing a humbling transformation during his thirty-three years of service in the salt mines of Sodom, and she points out quite accurately that it is the humility of the Incarnation that makes it meaningful to the other three Magi. Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar is a novel that I still use with my students, and I find every time I teach it that some are quite convinced it deserves the label of Christian novel. However, its focus on the Incarnation strikes me as being too much like that of the Death-of-God theologians of the 1960s (e.g., Thomas J. J. Altizer), who took their cue not only from Friedrich Nietzsche and William Blake but also from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Borrowing from Teilhard's mystic Christology, Altizer taught that the Incarnation of God in Jesus wrought, through his death, an irrevocable and radical immanence in the Godhead: "The radical Christian proclaims that God has actually died in Christ, that this death is both a historical and a cosmic event, which cannot be reversed by a subsequent religious or cosmic movement." The doctrine of the Ascension of Christ is rejected as a "religious reversal of the death of God [that] cannot reverse or bring to an end the progressive descent of Spirit into flesh" (103). The progressive identification of the cosmos with Christ in this continuing radical extension of the Incarnation produces a "Panchristized" universe, and Teilhard answers in the affirmative the following rhetorical question posed in Science and Christ: "Can biology, taken to its extreme limit, enable us to emerge into the transcendent?" (212). Tournier's fiction seems a logical extension of the incarnational theology of such writers as Altizer and Teilhard. My quarrel is less with Petit's contention that Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar is a Christian novel than with Tournier's own claim to the title of Christian writer. Even on the former issue, however, and granting Petit's definition of the genre, I find that the novel fails to qualify. Let me briefly reconsider the grounds on which in my article I rejected Tournier's claim. First, regarding the excessive emphasis on scatology and blasphemy, it is quite obvious that the presence of such elements in the fiction of writers such as Dante, Flannery O'Connor, and Graham Greene, among others, hardly keeps them from being widely acknowledged as Christian writers. …