Word: gide
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Little Paws? Gide was far from being a religious skeptic: he scorned freethinkers, and was passionately devoted to the example of Christ. Some of his friends were won over by Claudel's appeals, and at times it seemed as if Gide too would become a convert. One issue that kept them apart was the relation of art to religion. For Claudel, art must bear witness to Christ; he described the whole tribe of modern literary introspectionists as "horrible little terriers who put their paws on one and make one feel the convulsive shivering which animates their wretched bodies...
More important was the problem of religious individuality. Claudel gloried in Catholicism as a "closed system," and frankly stated that because "departures from [Catholic] doctrine involve the soul in terrible risk of eternal damnation, [the church] cannot admit what people call liberty of thought . . ." Gide, bred in a tradition of Huguenot Protestantism, could never accept this view. In one of his rare offensives, he wrote Claudel that he could not abide those Catholics who "use the crucifix as if it were a bludgeon...
Neither, Nor? The inevitable blow-up came in 1914 when Gide published The Vatican Cellars, in which he made his homosexuality explicit for the first time. The book brought a wrathful letter from Claudel: "If you are not a pederast, why have you so strange a predilection for this sort of subject? And if you are one, cure yourself, you unhappy man, and do not make a show of these abominations...
...Gide answered defensively: "What right have you to issue this summons? In what name do you put these questions?" But then his voice fell to pathos: "I am speaking now to a friend, as I should speak to a priest, whose binding duty it is to keep my secret before God . . . I cannot believe that religion leaves on one side all those who are like myself...
From then on, the bond of intimacy was broken. Claudel wrote to a friend that Gide seemed to him "simply an over-nervous person who has let himself go . . . and poisoned himself with medicine, philosophy and literature." Not without arrogance, he added: "We others, we Catholics, are built to walk dry-shod through the Red Sea." Today, at 84, Claudel has never changed his mind on that. Gide remained uncommitted until his death, declaring himself "neither Protestant nor Catholic but quite simply a Christian...