posted April 17, 2013 10:00 AM            

He should be more well known.

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"Léon Bloy possesses a fire that brings to mind the ardour of the prophets -- an even greater ardour, I should say. Of course that is easily explained: his fire is nurtured by the dung-heap of modern times."
-- Franz Kafka

"[Léon Bloy] believed himself a rigorous Catholic and he was a continuer of the Cabalists, a secret brother of Swedenborg and Blake: heresiarchs."
-- Jorge Luis Borges

"Bloy is one of the greatest creators of images who ever walked the earth... Bloy's genius is neither religious, nor philosophical, nor human, nor mystical; his genius is theological and Rabelaisian. His work seems to have been written by Saint Thomas Aquinas in collaboration with Gargantua. His books are scholastic and gigantic, eucharistic and scatological, idyllic and blasphemous. No Christian can accept them, but no atheist can take comfort in them."
-- Remy de Gourmont

"The vehemence, bitterness, and scorn so often condemned in his work are, in fact, the outcry of a man of sorrow overwhelmed by the spectacle of a society indifferent to its spiritual destiny.... By nature a poet, totally oriented toward absolute values and intolerant of mediocrity, he sought through verbal violence to awaken his contemporaries to the reality of the supernatural combat in which their lives were involved. In his intemperate attacks on his fellow creatures, Bloy so antagonized both Catholics and non-Catholics that his work suffered from a conspiracy of silence. Yet many of his pages, for sheer power of language and poetic beauty, will always rank among the finest in French literature. Today, he has his admirers and might be considered to be the object of a cult."
-- The Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literaure

One of the most intriguing, as well as overlooked, cultural figures of Belle Epoque France, Léon Bloy was a thwarted mystic, raging social reformer, and literary anarchist whose personal hardships were sublimated in dozens of novels, biographical studies, short stories, and poems, and in hundreds of articles, essays, and rants often circulated on the streets of Paris as scathing tracts and pamphlets. As a writer he was formed by many hatreds and humiliations. He spent his life in squalid poverty, waiting for a beatific vision which God denied him. His own suffering, and that of those around him, spawned in him a Hugoesque compassion for the downtrodden and the poor, and he became a savage critic of the prevailing order, the warts on whose epidermis he pointed out with a maniacal single-mindedness and a passionate intensity. Describing himself as a "grandiloquent wretch," Bloy was an outlandish medieval anachronism in the era of the newly erected Eiffel Tower, and managed to offend nearly everyone who was anyone in the Paris of his day. Behind his vilifications and vituperations, however, was not only an authentic genius fueled, like Juvenal's, like Swift's, by righteous indignation, but a genuine martyr, who wept in sympathy for the plight of "fallen humanity," and who felt himself the haunted conscience of all mankind. A great moral ironist in an age of negations, Bloy "called down the wrath of God upon the paltry convictions and the precarious equilibrium of a complacent society which put its trust in science and bourgeois virtues, while seeking the kind of tranquility that comes from silencing one's soul and forgetting God."
http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/2008/12/musings-and-thunderings-of-leon-blo y.html

posted April 17, 2013 10:13 AM            

"Any Christian who is not a hero is a pig."

"I pray like a robber asking alms at the door of a farmhouse to which he is ready to set fire."

"There is but one sadness and that is for us not to be saints."

"Woe to him who has not begged! There is nothing more exalted than to beg. God begs. The Angels beg. Kings, Prophets, and Saints beg. The Dead beg. Everything that dwells in Glory and in Light begs. Why should anybody want me not to be proud of having been a beggar, and, especially, a thankless beggar?"

"I have always seen myself as being lower than the animals every time I have presumed to act otherwise than through love or the workings of love... Philosophy bores me, theology overwhelms me, words without love are meaningless to me, the reasonings of the wise seem to me a shadowy sewer, and the pride of the human mind makes me vomit."

"I live in a kind of heavy and stupid drunkenness, caused by the fumes of misery. I am sad by nature as one is by nature slight or fairhaired. I was born sad, deeply, horribly sad, and if I am possessed with the most violent desire for joy, it is by virtue of the mysterious law which attracts contraries... My nature alone was acting, obscurely. I instinctively loved unhappiness; I wanted to be unhappy. The very word 'unhappiness' carried me away with enthusiasm. I think I inherited this from my mother, whose Spanish soul was at the same time so flaming and so shadowed, and Christianity's main attraction for me has been the vastness of Christ's sorrows, the magnificent, the transcendent horror of His Passion... Who could believe that the very same man who sees so clearly the glory of God, who says things able to reawaken the courage of his brothers in despair, and who cannot speak of the Holy Trinity without weeping with love -- who could suppose that this same man is every day given over to the most violent temptations, and that he is not for a single instant master of his own heart?"

"I have meditated often and much upon suffering. I have come to the conclusion that only suffering, here below, is supernatural. The rest is human... When you die, that is what you take with you: the tears you have shed and the tears you have caused to be shed -- your capital of bliss or of terror. It is on these tears that we shall be judged, for the Spirit of God is always borne upon the waters..."