Recently, when I taught Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law to my freshmen, I asked them what they made of his twofold claim that law serves the common good and that this common good consists in “universal happiness.” Is that how you tend to think of law, I asked, does it exist to make us happy? Most shook their heads. I agreed. When I asked what the end of law might be instead, I got a consistent answer: a mix of “safety” and “security.” Even when students seemed to begin to take a different route—peace was thrown out, for instance—we seemed to wind back up, there, in the quiet kingdom of security. This peace was only the absence of turbulence.
Their answer didn’t exactly surprise me—I had even bet on it. One of the things that has become strikingly clear to me in the last number of years is how imperious the prioritization of safety has become in our culture. What we seem to seek from law and political order, more generally, is a structure to insulate us from the vicissitudes of life that would otherwise threaten to swallow us up. And anything that upsets this sense of safety is intolerable, an assault on order itself. With every national disaster we scramble, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly, to heap blame on the ineptitude of some government agency that should have rendered this tragedy impossible, and could have done so if only it had followed proper procedure. On these terms order becomes more and more synonymous with those measures we take to free us from the possibilities of “bad outcomes.” Order simply is security—or, perhaps insurance.
I would argue this conception of order represents in some sense a counter-tradition to the tradition that Aquinas represents. And to measure the distance between the two I would like to turn, not to Aquinas, but a more contemporary figure, someone who experienced the modern “kingdom of anxiety”: the great French writer Charles Péguy.
Throughout Péguy's work, one point of ever-recurring concern is the genuine meaning of order and its distinction from the counterfeit that we tend to embrace. For Péguy the real threat to order was not outright disorder; disorder is free for all to see and it always has a limited appeal and an expiration date. Debauchery is not so subtle even if it has certain charms; the most iconoclastic revolutionaries always move to consolidate. More dangerous, Péguy thought, is the apparent order that entangles us with the weight of imperatives—moral or otherwise.
The real battle, he thought, was between two orders—one true, the other merely apparent and so ultimately false. And, for Péguy the fault line of the distinction runs, somewhat surprisingly, through freedom. The authentic order will be the free one, the false one the system in which it has been excluded or falsely interpreted. This is the dividing line between so many of the oppositions he draws: between the mystique and the politique, between Christianity and the monde moderne.
For Péguy, freedom is the engagement of the self in an act of fidelity to an organic order within which one finds oneself. But this commitment is, inescapably, for reasons we shall consider, a risk, rendering the paradoxical conclusion that real order presupposes and is only sustained by this venturing of the self. On the other hand, the unfreedom of merely apparent order is manifested in the essentialization of security, which requires the reinterpretation of order as a buttress to one’s own self-preservation. All of which is why, for Péguy, “The entire question is to know if one works within the venture or outside the venture, in the order of the venture or in the order of security.”[1]
The place to get a sense of the difference between these two orders is undoubtedly Notre Jeunesse, where Péguy makes another, more famous distinction between the mystique and politique. In one sense, both extend to communities or “social wholes” and each can be applied to a host of communal realities. Péguy will speak of the French mystique, but also of the Christian one, and it can clearly refer to a nation or ecclesial body. But it may also refer to popular movements within these bodies, which is why French Republicanism and Dreyfusism can also be rightly named mystiques of their own. However, wherever we find a mystique we can also find its deformation into a politique, which is always a betrayal of a given mystique’s raison d’être.
For Péguy the authentic order is thus unquestionably the mystique and the politique is always a bastardization of it. But having said this, I have to acknowledge he never gives a tidy definition of either. Rather than give us generalized concepts, Péguy introduces both the mystique and politique as a summation of a discourse. In the case of the mystique, we first encounter it in a passage where he is at pains to insist that French Republicanism was not, at its origin, an idea—a specific form of political ideology. Rather, Republicanism was a kind of spontaneous and organic unity of shared life—at once given and suffused with a deep aspiration—within which its participants simply found themselves.
Our “mystique” life is realized within the seemingly narrow confines of our particular moment; so that movement of freedom is one in which we make the mystique present in our little corner of the cosmos.
When Péguy ponders how we might know this reality, he suggests turning to the letters of those who lived from it—not the notables of the period, but “the admirable troops that they had behind them.” For these letters would reveal “...how an ordinary, average republican family, taken at random, as it were,…lived… how they married…how they raised their children.”[2] This would constitute not a “history endimanchée,” but one of life in its “quotidian existence” or even “in the labor of its daily bread—panem quotidianum.”[3] And it’s from this history that, Péguy concludes, one would find the history of the Republican mystique. What mystique indicates, then, is the substance of a people’s ordinary shared life. Something humble and suffusive, common in both senses of the word.
This means that to know a mystique, one must find oneself rooted in a people—or, at least, sympathetically enter into its life (as Péguy suggests we might do with those letters). It is not enough to intellectually grasp that humans inevitably tend towards each other and circle around a common good. One has to experience this shared life within the suffusive rhythm of everyday life—only then do we make contact with our originary intuition of this “thing” within which we find ourselves.
If there is something undeniably arresting about Péguy's meditations here it is because we sense that order and belonging are really only known in this existential mode. But also (I wager I am not alone on this score) because we feel the sting of how elusive this more visceral sense of belonging can be. But, as it happens, Péguy also knew this absence quite well.
Only some months before he published Notre Jeunesse, Péguy had written The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc in which we find the young Jeannette pleading, “Oh, my Lord, if we only saw the beginning of your reign. If we only saw the rising of the sun of your reign. But nothing, never anything.”[4] And if he saw this sorrow before the apparent absence of order in the young Joan, it was because he experienced it in himself and those around him.[5] Thus, in Notre Jeunesse, after he presents the vitality of the Republican mystique, he immediately describes the crisis of French culture as lying in the fact that, “Our youth have become…strangers to the mystique.”[6]
What did he mean by this? He decidedly did not mean that the younger generation tended to take a negative view of the Republic mystique. The problem is that, for them, the mystique is no longer a mystique. They simply do not see it, and so it has become, as Péguy puts it in one of his more memorable passages, a “thesis.”[7] That is, it has become just another idea, a “proposition” that has ceased to shape concrete life. And on these terms, he thought, it does not matter so much whether we defend or attack the thesis in question. For when we go to do either, we only work with a thesis, with a position one might hold and that we might choose from among others.
Reduced to an abstraction, the mystique becomes possibilized. It is no longer that inescapable, suffusive reality which shelters us and in which our lives and all possibility unfolds but another option among many, a position we might hold. This “possibilization” can only be a de-actualization. The presence of the mystique thus becomes attenuated; and this thinning out of presence makes us become strangers to it. For Péguy, this is perfectly compatible with the most vehement defense of Republicanism as an institution. Because it’s precisely once the mystique has become effaced that there arises a need to “prove it.” Yet, the proofs always remain intellectual, and all the debates seem to tacitly presuppose that the mystique is somehow absent. And thus Péguy quips that the regime reformulated as “thesis” is already “in the ground”: no longer, we might say, living and active.
I always find this passage remarkable. I don’t know of a better description of our contemporary situation and it comes from a man dead a century. What Péguy describes we know. If some of us are lucky enough not to know this alienation firsthand, they will at least come across the streams of contemporary social or political criticism that continues to gesture to it in some way.
Readers of this article likely know of “thesisfication” of their concrete rootedness first and second hand; and they are also likely familiar with those genealogies that implicate (with good reason, to my mind) political liberalism in the generation of this situation, and with the attempts to recover the classical tradition’s conception of political order and its structures of belonging—as much metaphysical as social. But even those of us who rebel against the hegemony of liberalism, critique it intellectually, and seek a sounder alternative, still suffer a difficulty. We intellectually assent to the priority of the common good, and the reality of our embeddedness; and we, perhaps more often, denounce the distortions of modernity. But, still, the wound remains. For after all the arguments, our social fabric, our identity as a people, our seat in the choir before God—well, it all can feel hauntingly absent. It all remains a thesis.
And it is in the shadow of this absence that Péguy sees the politique creeping in. We could name it as what happens to order when it becomes a means of covering over a wound that we cannot face. And we do know this order, don’t we? In our civic life, but perhaps, more viscerally in the life of the Church. How often our prayers seem to be said under the shadow of absence that makes us feel as if we are making it up, or, at least, praying to ourselves. And the problem is not only one of “private devotion.” The renewal in liturgical enthusiasm, in so many ways a great good, can also sometimes seem like a compensation. Because Christ is not present as the form of our life, because the Word has now become thesis—we need to find somewhere to put him back in, and the space carved out between the ambo and apse seems about the right size to manage it. And so we say our prayer and wonder if we might should say another; cling to our breviaries as if to flotsam; listen as if the whole matter hinged on the enumeration of names in the canon. All the “structures” become paste over a wound that won’t quite heal, the buttresses to keep us up while the Good feels absent. And this is really what has happened. All these realities that should help draw us to the object of our longing and root us further in it become, instead, fences to stave off what we fear: we need to make Christ be present when we fear he is not.
In this sense, the politique is the manifestation of the wound, but the sort of order it represents can also be engendered by those who do not immediately appear to feel this lack as a great pain. For the politiques—the professional peddlers of the politique—are essentially despoilers. They find the mystique simply insufficient, and this brute fact introduces an opportunity. Why not build something stronger and surer and also totally in our hands?
If the mystique began with givenness that was not our making, the politique is a construction or, as Péguy puts it, a “substitution”:
By the game, by the history of events, by the baseness and the sin of man, the mystique has become politique, or rather the mystical action has become political, or rather the politique has substituted itself for the mystique, the politique has devoured the mystique…the material which belonged to the mystique has become material for the politique.[8]
The original integrity is lost even if the “material” remains. In the concrete case of the French Republic, the politique represents a reduction of the organic unity of the mystique to the mechanisms of the state’s bureaucracy and the whole virtue of the regime comes to hang simply on the particular (and supposedly unique) virtues of the Republican form of government. Whatever the state of our communal belonging, we will always have the insurance of the state’s procedures. And for the politique this will ensure what we have always really wanted, what Péguy will elsewhere describe as the Summum Bonum of the modern world: “repose,” “tranquility,” “quiétude.” That state in which all possibility of turbulence will be banished from the world, when we will be finally and forever secure.
The remarkable feature of Péguy’s analysis is that it sees an implicit unity in the aspirations of both the cynical despoilers and those suffering the absence of the mystique: in both cases the horizon of their aspiration has been reduced down to security, to either an insurance against a felt lack or a shield against a feared evil. Of course, Péguy speaks of “tranquility” and “rest” but neither is a real repose. Each represents the will’s thirst to find a fixed point of security which nothing will upset. But Péguy dwells more, in fury, on the despoilers. In the academic realm, the politique professor is determined to be permanently “seated” in his chair, while the politicians proper wish to be immovably inscribed in their offices. But this drive for a settled position is not only an expression of lust for power: “a temporal domination of spirits” he calls it. It is, perhaps more ultimately, a desperate longing for a respite from the risks that attend their existence.
At this point we might well ask: if the mystique seems desirable but absent, and the politique tempting but asphyxiating—how might we find our way back into that more primordial mystique? It seems to me that we can only begin by forsaking what the politique has made its ultimate object. For the security it seeks is something that the mystique does not offer, in fact Péguy even speaks of it as being characterized by a profound “in-quiétude.” The failure to accept this was, for Péguy, what characterized the bourgeois Catholicism of Paris and led to a complacent settledness, which he could not bear: “The Catholics are insufferable in their mystical security.” But this is precisely because they do not know what spirit they are of: “The mark of the mystique is, au contraire, an invincible inquiétude.”[9]
This may seem willfully paradoxical. For isn’t anxious restlessness (one possible translation of the word) precisely what characterized the felt alienation from a mystique? However, Péguy means something else. When Péguy speaks of entering “into the incurable kingdom of inquiétude,” he speaks of the rite of passage into every mystique. But this is not stultifying anxiety, but a release into a freer if more fraught realm. He clearly does mean partakers of the mystique are fretful and anxious. Rather this, inquiétude is best understood as a proper “dis-quiet”—that is, a state in which one throws off not the quiet of true peace, but the “quiet” of final security that lies at the heart of the politique. And this wholesome inquiétude is not only a refusal to place security at the heart of our sense of order; it also describes the mystique’s own positive orientation.
Again, the mystique in one sense represents a given unity and order that is already there. Yet Péguy is clear that our participation does not take place through a kind of mechanical operation which would give us rigid certainty of our place. For if the mystique is given, it, nevertheless, needs to be continually accepted. Put better, it needs to be received by a freedom that recognizes and participates in it. This yields a paradox: the mystique is, at once, already actual, and in need of continual realization by those who comprise it. And without this participation it fails to be embodied. This is also why if a mystique shapes the entire life of a people and is even coincident with its culture, it is not the summation of all the empirical facts of a period and place, or identical with whatever happens to happen within those bounds. It is the deeper reality that we may really fail to adhere, but, which cannot for all that, be made to disappear altogether.
We can put the paradox in stronger terms: if we can miss it and so fail to work for its realization, this is actually because its presence is so suffusive. What Péguy says of the “event,” we can also say of the mystique: “It’s a mystery that we do not see, like all the great mysteries, precisely because we are bathed in it.”[10] And this brings us both to the real essence of the paradox and to freedom’s place in the order of the mystique.
In the end, we only find the mystique by a “movement” into its depths; but this self-same movement is also a return to what is manifest. And this movement is in large part what Péguy understands freedom to be. These turns of phrase may seem opaque; but let me say what I mean. If we wish to overcome our sense of alienation, we must cast out into the depths, to rediscover a life that is not defined by continually guarding its own security. Yet we can only do this by a real risk of freedom, by lovingly adhering to a reality that asks for our participation in it. And yet Péguy’s genius was to see that this “mystical” venturing of ourselves will always be realized in the place where he always told us it was to be found: quotidian life. Our fidelity is not a flight into “another world”: the mystique is not “mysticism” (at least in the sense we tend to understand this word). Rather our “mystique” life is realized within the seemingly narrow confines of our particular moment; so that movement of freedom is one in which we make the mystique present in our little corner of the cosmos: “Blessed are those,” Péguy will say in lines that would become famous after his death in battle, “who have died for four corners of earth.”[11] He spoke of the soldier—but the passage has a much more expansive resonance.
If the soldier is not subdued by the fear of death and the promise of a false peace, the everyday mystique does something analogous. For, according to Péguy, the great false prudence of the modern world is “avoir la paix”: let us have peace, let us be secure.[12] Let us be left safely our citadel of security, of unperturbed expectation, in the order, as Auden put it, of “darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry and Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience, And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.” This, we could say, is the kingdom of “quiétude.” Here our work is drudgery and we work for the day when we will finally be done working; the modern world is also the one in which we think “only of retirement” of the day when our work is over and we will have amassed enough to be secure. But the moment of realization is always delayed—our “peace” is always both deferred and under siege.
The realm emblem of the mystique thus becomes for Péguy the man who throws off these conditions and risks living for the humble order that suffuses our life. The revolutionary and real defender of order is thus less the soldier, than the father. Readers of The Mystery of the Portal of Hope will remember Péguy’s woodcutter, braving the cold and finding the strength to pick up his axe when he thinks of his children by the hearth and so knows the reason for his swings, when his heart is touched by the promise of their lives. This man also dies for his “plot of earth,” for the life that passes between the four corners of his home. He, as Péguy says elsewhere, is the only real adventurer of the modern world; and he is one without security: “Only the father risks the venture. Because all the rest, at most, put their heads into the game, and this is nothing…He, au contraire, has every limb in play.”[13] Thus, Péguy gives us the image of a ship, in which the man is exposed to every wind by the large sail that is his family, nailed to the mast by his love. And this rootedness that coincides with risk is how the father becomes the one “wagers, risks, engages, infinitely more in the destiny of the world…in the destiny of a people.”[14]
It is this risk, this self-offering that Péguy sees at the heart of all order. And so it is perhaps not surprising that we find it once again when Péguy turns to the Mystery at the root of every mystique and all creation. For the “meta-mystique” is the Word who takes flesh and does not disdain the fragile human frame. Forsaking security—"not considering equality with God as something to be grasped”—Jesus enters into the precarities of time and by his risk “introduced a disorder” (to our “peace”) that is really “the only order there has ever been in the world.”[15] All our entries into the venture of order are only imitations of his original, founding act:
So true it is, so real it is that he became one of them
And that he came to know their mortal condition
And that he became one of them—at random, so to speak.
And that he was made one of them without any limitation or measure.
Because before that perpetual, that imperfect,
That perpetually imperfect imitation of Jesus Christ, of which they speak so often,
There was that most perfect imitation of man by
Jesus Christ.
That inexorable imitation, by Jesus Christ,
Of mortal misery and of the condition of man.[16]
[1] Charles Péguy, "Nous sommes des vaincus," in Charles Péguy, Oeuvres en prose complètes vol. I, ed. Robert Burac (Paris: Gallimard/Bibliotèque de la Pléiade, 1988), 1317.
[2] Péguy, "Notre Jeunesse," Oeuvres en prose complètes vol. III, ed. Robert Burac (Paris: Gallimard/Bibliotèque de la Pléiade, 1992), 7.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Charles Péguy, The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc trans. Julian Green (Providence: Cluny, 2019), 5.
[5] So much so that a young Jacques Maritain accused him of foisting his questions and anguish onto Joan.
[6] OCIII, "Notre Jeunesse," 12.
[7] OCIII, "Notre Jeunesse," 14.
[8] OCIII, "Notre Jeunesse,"28.
[9]Charles Péguy, Lettres et Entretiens (Paris: Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 1927), 59.
[10] OCIII, "Notre Jeunesse," 39.
[11] Charles Péguy, "L'Ève," in Oeuvres poétiques et dramatiques, ed. Claire Daudin (Paris: Gallimard/Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2014), 1263.
[12] OCIII, “Note conjointe sur M. Descartes et la philosophie cartésienne,” 1423. See also OCIII, L’argent suite, 938–39 on the “system of peace.”
[13] OCIII, Véronique, dialogue de l’histoire et l’âme charnelle, 656.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Péguy, The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc, 125.
[16] OCP, Le mystère des saints innocents, 789.
