I Know Next to Nothing of Paul Claudel

This is going to be a brief and inconsequential post, useful perhaps only as a forgotten note scribbled and found in a book years later, or as a purposely-bent tree branch growing askant the forgotten path to the door of a forgotten mine. Perhaps I'll see it later and remember, go down that path, explore what once seemed to betoken riches, if only I had the time to seek them.

I know next to nothing of Paul Claudel. I have heard the name. I can tell he's French, just from the name, probably not from memory. But having once again renewed my subscription to The Chesterton Review, I have in its pages come across an article reprinting a reprinting of a translation of an excerpt of his works. First is cited Job: "For he wounds, but he binds up; he smites, but his hands heal" (5:18): the paradox of God in that most imperious and pitiful of books. Then comes another paradox, a startling image, I suppose of Claudel's: "We meet again those wise and gentle hands that not so long ago were thrust into us through the gaping cleft in our being ...." Thomas's hands nearly did this to Him for their loss of faith; what does it mean that His hands have done it to us? It is not for a lack of faith, for we are not believed in, but known. Thomas sought faith as knowledge; he wanted to know instead of, or at least before, believing. (As it was, he chose the lesser form - he knew far more than I or any of us have known, but he finally refused the opportunity to touch, to make more sure of what he saw and heard.) God has knowledge, knows us inside and out, has no need to believe because he knows us, having made us.

"The left hand sustains, presents, and adjusts, and the right hand creates."

"How can we resist the hands that molded us and that know more than one way to resume their potter's work?"

The comparison for me, an American who's taught American Literature, is inescapable: how much greater is this God than Jonathan Edwards's God? I don't know Edwards as deeply as I should; and I have been at pains to make sure my students understand that his sinners in the hands of a famously irate God are at the center of a paradox, being held up and sustained above the flames by His mercy; and I have at times taught parts of his "Divine and Supernatural Light" to show that Edwards is not a cartoon (sometimes I even think he is a proto-Romantic, out there in the woods in his booth, praying); but these lines from Claudel seem so much more true. God is not reluctant to keep us, constrained by His better nature, or in keeping with a tacked on and capricious quality called mercy, to act against His wisdom in condemning us. He positively wants us. He desires our love. Does He weep for our love as He did in the Garden?

I wish I knew my theology better. I might know whether I could even consider answering that last question.