On the other hand, Maritain didn’t miss a single major homosexual figure of his time. What a remarkable ‘gaydar’ he must have had, as we would say today. It’s a fact that Maritain specialized in homophilic friendships on the pretext of trying to bring some of the greatest ‘invert’ writers of the twentieth century back to faith and chastity. And to keep these writers from sin and possibly hell – because in those days the homosexual condition still had a whiff of sulphur about it – Maritain set about watching over them, ‘sorting out their problem’, as he put it, which required him to spend an enormous amount of time with them! So it was that André Gide, Julien Green, Jean Cocteau, François Mauriac, Raymond Radiguet and Maurice Sachs engaged in dialogue with him, like almost all the great homosexuals of the day. In passing, he tried to convert them and make them chaste; and we know that conversion and continence, as a bid to repress inclinations of this kind, remained a classical attitude until the late 1960s.
The implications of this debate for our subject are considerable. We cannot understand Popes John XXIII, Paul VI or Benedict XVI, or most of the cardinals in the Roman Curia, if we do not decipher ‘Maritainism’ as a sublimated intimate precept. In Italy, where Maritain, as well as Catholic and homosexual literatures, have had considerable influence, the whole of the Vatican hierarchy knows the subject by heart.
One of the most important historians of gay literature in Italy, Professor Francesco Gnerre, who has published important texts about writers including Dante, Leopardi and Pasolini, explained this curious state of affairs to me during several discussions in Rome.
‘Unlike France, which had Rimbaud and Verlaine, Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet, and many others, homosexual literature barely existed in Italy until 1968. The first time homosexuality appeared on the front page of the newspapers there was in the 1970s, with Pasolini, let’s say. Until then, Italian homosexuals had to content themselves with reading French publications. It was a bit the same for Italian Catholics, who for a long time read the French Catholics, so influential here. But what is absolutely extraordinary is that they are exactly the same writers!’
Let’s go into detail here. We have to, because the secret of The Closet is based on this ‘Maritain code’ and the battles that set Jacques Maritain against four major French writers: André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Julien Green and Maurice Sachs.
With Gide, to begin with, the debate fizzled out. Maritain’s correspondence with the Protestant Gide, Gide’s Diaries, and a long meeting between the two men late in 1923, attest that Maritain wanted to keep the great writer from publishing Corydon, a brave treatise in which Gide revealed himself and expounded militant views over four dialogues about homosexuality. So Maritain went to his house to beg him in the name of Christ not to publish. He was also worried about the salvation of his soul after the publication of the book, which amounted to a confession of his homosexuality. Gide saw it coming from a long way off. And since his rule for life, which was at the heart of the morality of his Fruits of the Earth, was to cease to resist temptation, he had no intention of losing his freedom to yield to the pleadings of this grumpy preacher.
‘I hate lying,’ Gide replied to him. ‘That’s probably where my Protestantism takes refuge. Catholics don’t like the truth.’
Maritain made numerous attempts to prevent the writer from publishing his little treatise. To no avail. A few months after their encounter, André Gide, who had long accepted his homosexuality in private, published Corydon under his real name. Jacques Maritain, like François Mauriac, was terrified. They would never forgive Gide for ‘coming out’.
The second battle was fought against Jean Cocteau, on the same subject. Maritain had been friends with Cocteau for a long time, and his grip was tighter on the young convert writer than it was on the great Protestant one. Besides, in Meudon, Cocteau still seemed well behaved and a conscientious Catholic. But when he was far from Maritain, he had many lovers, including the young Raymond Radiguet, whom he finally introduced to Maritain. Strangely, the man from Meudon, rather than rejecting this viscerally unnatural homosexual relationship, attempted to tame Cocteau’s young lover. Radiguet, a literary prodigy who had written his novella The Devil in the Flesh at the age of 20, and would die shortly afterwards of typhoid fever, would say of this period, in a lovely phrase: ‘When you didn’t marry, you converted.’
But Maritain failed again. Jean Cocteau took the big step of publishing, first anonymously and then under his real name, his White Book, in which he confessed his homosexuality.
‘This plan is diabolical,’ Maritain wrote to him. ‘It’s the first time you have publicly declared your adherence to Evil. Remember Wilde and the degradation that lasted until his death. Jean, it’s your salvation that is at stake, it’s your soul that I have to defend. Between the devil and me, choose whom you love. If you love me, you will not publish this book and you will let me look after the manuscript.’
‘I need love, and to make love with souls,’ was Cocteau’s brazen reply.
The White Book would indeed be published. The incomprehension between the two men would deepen further, but their relationship of ‘loving friendship’, suspended for a moment, continued in spite of everything, as their correspondence attests. During a recent visit to the Dominican monastery in Toulouse, where Jacques Maritain spent the last years of his life, Brother Jean-Miguel Garrigues confirmed to me that Jean Cocteau had continued to visit Maritain until his death, and that he had come to see him in Toulouse.
The third battle went better for Maritain, although it too ended with his defeat by Julien Green. For almost forty-five years the two men engaged in a regular correspondence. Mystical and deeply religious, their dialogue played out at sublime heights. But here again its dynamic was based on a ‘wound’: that of homosexuality. Julien Green was haunted by his male desire, which he had experienced since his youth as a hazard that was difficult to reconcile with the love of God. Maritain guessed Green’s secret even though he never explicitly mentioned it during the first few decades of their correspondence. Neither of them named the ‘inclination’, which ate away at them even as they beat diligently around the bush.
Maritain, himself a convert, admired Julien Green for his conversion in 1939, which was the result of the ‘campaign’ of a Dominican who believed that the priesthood was the solution to homosexuality (we have since discovered that this priest was also gay). Maritain admired the writer for his continence, which was all the more admirable in that he used faith to resist his inclination.
Over the years, however, Julien Green evolved, and in the end he took the crucial step: he began by revealing himself in his work, which became openly homosexual (I’m thinking of South, his greatest book), and also started living out his romances in broad daylight, as is attested by his Diaries, and by accounts given by his known lovers. (The complete and uncensored correspondence of Julien Green is yet to be published. According to my information, it testifies not only to Green’s active homosexuality, but to a real obsession with gay sex.)
The fourth battle, which he also lost – and what a defeat! – was fought with his true friend, the shady writer of the inter-war years, Maurice Sachs. A Jewish convert to Catholicism, Sachs was close to Maritain, whom he called ‘darling Jacques’. But he was also an enthusiastic young homosexual. He prayed, but he couldn’t help being a scandalous seminarian because of his poisonous special friendships. In his novel Le Sabbat the narrator, who tells his friends that he has gone to the ‘Seminary’, is asked whether this is a new gay club! The literary critic Angelo Rinaldi would write of Maurice Sachs: ‘An abbot by turn in a cassock and pink underwear … takes refuge in a sauna cabin where he spends happy days as a gluttonous fellating baby.’ Sachs would soon be drawn into every available moral abyss; after 1940 this protégé of Jacques Maritain would become a collaborator and pétainiste, and, even though he was Jewish, he would end up as a Nazi informer before dying, probably shot at the edge of a ditch with a bullet to the back of the neck
, by an SS man in 1944 – an unthinkable way of life, all in all.
Those four battles lost by Jacques Maritain reveal, among other facts, the philosopher’s obsession with homosexuality. Maritain’s relationship with the gay question is, in my eyes, more than a confession.
Here I am using the word ‘gay’ on purpose, as a deliberate anachronism. If we must always prefer the words specific to their own time – and for that reason I use the concepts of ‘loving friendship’, ‘homophilia’ or ‘inclinations’ when necessary – we must also sometimes call things by their names. For too long it was written in school textbooks that Rimbaud and Verlaine were ‘friends’ or ‘companions’, and even today I read in the Vatican museums signs describing Antinous as Emperor Hadrian’s ‘favourite’, when in fact he was his lover. Here the anachronistic use of the word ‘gay’ is politically fruitful.
Apart from Christ or St Thomas Aquinas, the other great preoccupation of Jacques Maritain’s life was therefore the gay question. If he probably didn’t practise homosexuality, or did so very little, he experienced it with the same frantic anxiety as his Catholic faith. And that’s Maritain’s secret, and one of the most hidden secrets of the Catholic priesthood: the choice of celibacy and chastity as the product of sublimation or repression.
Because how did Maritain socialize with all the gay writers of his era, those ‘sublime national queens’ of literature (to quote another phrase of Angelo Rinaldi), when he hated homosexuality so much? Was he a homophobe? Was he a voyeur? Was he fascinated by his opposite, as has been suggested? I don’t believe that these hypotheses are genuinely convincing. The truth is much more tangible in turns of his actual sensibility.
Maritain’s confession is found in a letter to Julien Green from 1927. Here the terms of the dialogue appear to be reversed: while Julien Green was still tormented by the sin of homosexuality, it was Jacques Maritain who, in their correspondence, seems to have found the solution for what he called ‘this mysterious evil’.
And what does he suggest to Green? Chastity. Faced with the ‘sterile love’ of homosexuality, ‘which will always remain an evil, a profound rejection of the cross’, Maritain defends the ‘only solution’ in his eyes, ‘the love of God above all’, that is: abstinence. The remedy he offered Green, already prescribed for Gide, Cocteau and Maurice Sachs, who rejected it, was the one that he and Raïssa had chosen: the sublimation of the sexual act by faith and chastity.
‘Nowhere does the gospel tell us to mutilate our heart, but it advises us to make ourselves eunuchs for the kingdom of God. That is how the question appears in my eyes,’ he wrote to Julien Green.
Settling the question of homosexuality through chastity, this form of castration, to give pleasure to God: Maritain’s idea, with its hint of masochism, is a powerful one. It would find acceptance among a majority of post-war cardinals and bishops. ‘Remaining king of one’s griefs,’ Louis Aragon would have said, another brilliant writer who noisily sang in public of ‘the eyes’ of his wife Elsa, so that he could then, in private, pursue boys.
In a letter to Cocteau, Maritain makes another clear confession: the love of God is the only one that can make us forget the earthly loves that he has known and, ‘although it is hard for me to say this, I know it otherwise than through books’.
‘Otherwise than through books’? We guess that the question of homosexuality was a burning one in the youth of Jacques Maritain, a man who was in any case effeminate and sensitive, devoted to his mother to the point of caricature, and that he preferred to destroy his private notebooks to ensure that his biographers ‘didn’t venture too far’ or discover some ‘old personal affair’ (in the words of his biographer Jean-Luc Barré).
‘I didn’t want to put that word, that label of “homosexuality”, in my biography of Maritain, because everyone would have boiled my book down to that,’ Barré tells me over lunch in Paris. ‘But I should have done. If I wrote it today, I would say things more clearly about this. With regard to Maritain one can probably speak of homosexuality that is latent if not quite real.’
The great love of Jacques Maritain’s youth was called Ernest Psichari. The two young men were still teenagers when they met at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris in 1899 (Jacques was 16). It was love at first sight. A ‘loving friendship’ of unimaginable power blossomed between them. Unique and indestructible, their bond was a ‘great wonder’, as Maritain put it to his mother. To his father, Ernest confided: ‘I could no longer conceive of life without Jacques’ friendship; it would be to conceive of me without myself.’ This passion was ‘fatal’, Maritain wrote in another letter.
Their passionate relationship is quite well known today. Recently published, the correspondence between the two young boys – 175 love letters – even creates a sense of vertigo: ‘I feel that our two unknowns penetrate each other gently, timidly, slowly,’ Maritain writes. ‘Ernest, you are my friend. You alone’; ‘Your eyes are resplendent beams. Your hair is a virgin forest, full of whispering and kisses’; ‘I love you, I live, I think of you’; ‘It is in you, in you only that I live’; ‘You are Apollo. (…) Will you leave with me for the Orient, all the way to India? We will be alone in the desert’; ‘I love you, I kiss you’; ‘Your letters, my jewel, give me infinite pleasure and I reread them ceaselessly. I am in love with all of your letters, your a’s, your d’s, your n’s and your r’s.’ And like Rimbaud and Verlaine, these two lovers signed their poems by uniting their initials.
Was this total fusion with the loved one consummated, or did it remain chaste? We don’t know. Yves Floucat, a Thomist philosopher and specialist in the work of Maritain and Julien Green and co-founder of the Centre Jacques Maritain, whom I interviewed at his house in Toulouse, thinks it was probably a ‘passionate but chaste friendship’. He adds, although of course he has no proof either of their having a physical relationship or of the opposite, that it was a ‘true love between people of the same sex’.
Brother Jean-Miguel Garrigues of the Dominican monastery where Maritain ended his days, and whom I also interviewed in Toulouse, explains: ‘The relationship between Jacques and Ernest was deeper than simple companionship. I would say that it was loving rather than amorous, in the sense that it was led more by the heart’s wish to help the other be happy than by emotional or carnal desire. For Jacques, it was more of the order of “loving friendship” than homophilia, if we see it as a more or less sublimated desire of the libido. Ernest, on the other hand, had an active homosexual life over the years.’
Today, in fact, there is no longer any doubt about Psichari’s practising homosexuality: it is confirmed by a recent biography, by the publication of his ‘travel diaries’ and by the appearance of new witness statements. His homosexuality was even very active: he had countless intimate liaisons in Africa – à la Gide – and resorted to male prostitutes until his death.
In a correspondence that remained unpublished for a long time, between Jacques Maritain and the Catholic writer Henri Massis, Ernest Psichari’s two best friends explicitly acknowledge his homosexuality. Massis was even worried that ‘the terrible truth [would be] revealed one day’.
We would have to say that André Gide had no hesitation in ‘outing’ Psichari in an article in the Nouvelle Revue Française in September 1932. The Catholic writer Paul Claudel, who was very saddened by this revelation, proposed a counter-attack that he had already used in relation to Arthur Rimbaud: if Ernest converted when he was homosexual, it was a marvellous victory for God. And Claudel summed up the argument: ‘God’s work is all the more admirable in such a soul.’
Still, Ernest Psichari died in combat at the age of 31, killed by a German bullet to the temple on 22 August 1914. Jacques learned the news several weeks later. According to his biographer, the news of Ernest’s death left him in a state of shock, stupor and grief. Jacques Maritain never got over the death of his loved one, and never managed to forget the great love of his youth – before Christ, and before Raïssa. Years later he would set off on his travels al
l the way to Africa, following his lover’s path; he went on seeing Ernest’s sister and during the Second World War he wanted to fight so that he could ‘die like Psichari’. All his life, Jacques would constantly mention his love and, having lost his Eurydice, he would speak of the ‘desert of life’ after Ernest’s death. A sorrow that he felt, in fact, ‘otherwise than through books’.
In order to understand the very particular sociology of Catholicism, and particularly that of the Vatican on my subject, we must therefore rely on what I choose here to call the ‘Maritain code’. Sublimated, if not repressed, homosexuality is often translated into the choice of celibacy and chastity, and, even more often, into an internalized homophobia. And yet most popes, cardinals and bishops who are over the age of 60 today grew up in the atmosphere and the way of thinking of the ‘Maritain code’.
If the Vatican is a theocracy, it is also a gerontocracy. One cannot understand the Church from Paul VI to Benedict XVI, indeed even that of Francis, their cardinals, their morals or their intrigues in terms of contemporary gay lifestyles. In order to grasp their complexity, we must therefore return to old templates, even if they seem to us to be those of another age. An age in which one was not homosexual but ‘homophilic’; in which homosexual identity was distinguished from the practices to which it could give rise; a time when bisexuality was commonplace; a secret world in which marriages of convenience were the rule and gay couples the exception. A time when continence and the heterosexual celibacy of priests were embraced with joy by the young homosexuals of the Vatican.
It is certain that the priesthood was a natural choice for men who imagined they had unnatural morals. But careers and lifestyles vary greatly between mystical chastity, spiritual crises, double lives, sometimes sublimation, fanaticism or perversions. In all cases, a general feeling of insecurity remains, well described by homosexual French Catholic writers and their ‘perpetual balance between the boys whose beauty damns them, and God whose goodness absolves them’ (another phrase from Angelo Rinaldi).
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 21
