"The Modern World Degrades Everything"

Charles Péguy

Cahiers de la Quinzaine (IX)

October 6, 1907

We often forget that the modern world, under a different look, is the bourgeois world, the capitalist world. It is quite an amusing display to see the way our Socialists, anti-Christian, and particularly anti-Catholic, oblivious to the contradiction, praise the same world under the name of 'modern', and demean it, the same one, under the name of 'bourgeois'.

A Sonnet in Memory of Charles Péguy

IN MEMORIAM: CHARLES PEGUY (JAN. 7, 1873 – SEPT. 5, 1914)

And Have You Heard?

Athena in reverse, the bullet hits
The pate and pierces deep within the folds
Of reason, music, memory. In bits
And pieces, death releases what it holds
And faith is stopped in mid-stride. While the war
Continues counting on, a mournful muse
Has come to mark her dear lieutenant’s hour:
“He came to speak his mind on flesh, accuse
His blood for God, indict the empty thrones
And cast his songs like crowns.” The western world
Now spills more blood across his heap of stones.
Long after Mars had scattered, banners furled,
His tongue, unflagging, speaks this dying word:
O mon Dieu! Mes enfants! And have you heard?


(Our thanks to a reader who submitted this poem to Rorate.)

September 5, 1914: Péguy at 100 - II - Modernity, Eternity, and the Traditional Liturgical Year (a text by Dom Gérard Calvet)

"As the Christian prepares himself for death, the modern man prepares himself for retirement." 

Already in 1902, years still before his own admission that he had returned to the Catholic faith of his roots and childhood, Charles Péguy was already deeply aware of the failures of Modernity, as shown above. It is indeed the ultimate obsession of modernity: a long life, a safe retirement, security above everything else... But ultimately, death will come to us all, should not we rather prepare for Eternity above all?

In his final years, as someone who finally began to understand the Catholic faith abandoned at youth, Péguy could not but be immersed in the beauty of the liturgical year, which is eternity brought to the present life. And the liturgical year in its traditional understanding, adapted to the real, tangible, circumstances of man -- circumstances which, as seasons and birthdays, are naturally annual, not biennial or triennial.

In 2010, our contributor Fr. Demets posted the translation of a deep text by the founder of the Abbey of Saint Madeleine of Le Barroux, Dom Gérard Calvet (a great expert on the writings of the poet), on Péguy and his discovery of the Liturgical Year.

[cf. also Péguy at 100 - Part I, War and Death]

___________________________

The Prayer of the Day

by Dom Gérard Calvet, O.S.B.

September 5, 1914: Péguy at 100 - I - The Mystery of Charity in War and Death