The Presence of God in Proust’s Masterpiece
I stopped reading Mauriac's book on Proust, when he said that God is absent from A la Recherche. Unless he meant "God" as a mere signifier, instead of what is signified by “God” as a dogmatic concept, I find his position rather blind. In my opinion, if one doesn’t experience the divine dimension, if for just a hint of it, in Proust’s masterpiece, one misses the best and deepest significance of it.
Before vowing for the absence of God in that novel, it should be considered that by often placing the truth of the heart over that of facts, ie. the intensity of a subjective state over that of objective reality, the Proustian text asserts authenticity over objectivity; individual essence, or soul, over factuality, which means, the divine element over what we take to be the real.
Metaphors, which are often used in Proustian descriptions, assert nothing directly, and by thus escaping the one- sidedness of concepts, they are transmitted to the heart and not to the rational mind. For the basic rule of logic, which rules the rational mind, is either A or non A; the very rule of one sidedness.
It is also transmitted from heart to heart, Proust's departing from the most personal and concrete element, his individual experience, in a confessional style that is an offer of the very best of himself as well as the effort and search of "his" truth, in a poetic exuberance of thought, that makes it as individual as universal. Beyond universal, his sentences, and the whole of his text, are mystical, for they have the cosmic circularity that makes them self-sufficient.
The use of metaphor, as well as the intimate report of the narrator's personal life, are equally fundamental traits of Proust's style, and equally point to his faithfulness to the physical dimension of reality, as he goes from the small and the apparent simple, to the great; from brief facts to the endlessness of essence, from amorality to sanctity, from sensations of the body to spirit.
Here are examples of his evocation of the religions dimension, through the poetic depth of his words:
In Le Côte de Guermantes, after a long, descriptive passage about the pear trees the narrator contemplates around Easter, he compares their white flowers to angels: Gardiens des souvenirs de l'age d'or, garants de la promesse que la realité n'est pas ce qu'on croit, que la splendeur de la poésie, que l'eclat merveilleux de l'innocence peuvent y resplendir et pourront être la recompense que nous nous efforcerons de mériter, les grandes créatures blanches....... n'était-ce pas plutôt des anges?
The miracle of beauty, in this case, poetic beauty, is to express a reality so high and intense that its wholeness dims everything that is not part of it. Thus self-sufficient, it speaks for God. By sharing his awareness that the beauty of the pear trees’ flowers were garants de la promesse que la realité n'est pas ce qu'on croit, (guarantors of the promise that reality is not what we believe) Proust's words share his certainty of the divine presence.
This presence is also expressed in Proust's talking, through Swann, about music. The musical phrase he calls la petite phrase (the little phrase) leads him to the breath- taking conclusion: Peut-être est-ce le néant qui est le vrai et tout notre rêve est-il inexistant, mais alors nous sentons qu'il faudra que ces phrases musicales, ces notions qui existent par rapport `a lui, ne soient rien non plus. Nous périrons, mais nous avons pour otages ces captives divines qui suivront notre chance. Et la mort avec elles a quelque chose de moins amer, de moins inglorieux, peut-être de moins probable. (Perhaps it is nothingness which is true and our whole dream is non-existent, but then we feel that these musical phrases, these notions which exist in relation to it, will have to be nothing either. We will perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow our luck. And death with them has something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps less probable.)
By not asserting directly, or theorizing about, the existence of an afterlife, Proust, yet again, leaves the evocation of it to be experienced by the reader himself: the conviction that death cannot put an end to ces captives divines (these divine captives), which are like messengers of God and point to a spiritual reality that is above finitude: Swann n'avait donc pas tort de croire que la phrase de la sonate existat réellement. And, "...elle appartenait pourtant `a une order de créatures surnaturelles...(Swann was therefore not wrong to believe that the phrase from the sonata really existed.
And: ...it nevertheless belonged to an order of supernatural creatures...
Identifying, as mentioned again, artistic creativity to the truth of the essential order, the timelessness of the divine, Proust doesn't make of it an indoctrination. With the same humbleness and generosity, he offers the reader, instead, the experience of such identification, when eloquently saying, about the musician he calls Vinteuil:
... au fond the quelles douleurs avait-il puisé cette force de Dieu, cette puissance illimitée de créer? (deep down what pains had he drawn this strength of God, this unlimited power to create?
The poignancy of what Proust generously transmits is, much beyond a proof, or a mere assertion of the divine presence, the indication of its reality.
Another definitive instance of the presence of God in A la Recherche lies in the argumentation through which he brings to light his final and most conclusive epiphanies (Le Temps Retrouvé- Time Regained) when he, again, gives the reader the opportunity of experiencing the divine presence for him/herself, instead of indoctrinating the latter with conceptualizations of it. He doesn't spell out the word “God” because it would distance him from God. Words, when objectively used, are distance from what they mean. They are used by the spectator who is split from the object he talks about, instead of at one with it. Therefore, Proust is all words and, at the same time, the overcoming of words.
In his text, he takes the readers by the hand through his deepest spiritual experience, allowing them to make this experience their own and soar high above, with him. But if he'd asserted his faith directly, he would have committed, to use his words, a grand indélicatesse (a great indelicacy) for he would have written a book that would be like an object with a price tag on, which is his metaphor about books with theories, or objective and assertive positions that have a theoretical posture, a separation between spectator, who is like a scientist examining his object of research in a laboratory, instead of someone that, with no distance whatsoever, is at one with this “object”. It is this communion between subject and object that upgrades the split between mere “knowledge” -which is distanced and objective- to an at oneness between the two- which is artistic, subjective, and yet universally reaching.
Believing that there is a transcendent, individual truth to each of us (some are lucky to discover the hour of truth before that of death- Time Regained) Proust identifies this truth to the book that has already been written inside each of us, that is, to a work of art that transcends us (which was his vision of art following Ruskin) and to an essence that is our essence and equally transcendent.
What we must do to bring this book to light is to decipher what is deep inside and preexists the possibility of this deciphering, in a few words, of this fulfilling that which can only belong to the order of spirit, the timeless and divine. Since the deciphering of it, as much as Proust considers it a work of art, is also taken to be the discovery of our essence, or soul, he gives such accomplishment a religious value: By saying that only if one is an artist (a genuine, creative writer in this case) one will be able to do it, he concludes that: Art is the real final judgment.
By narrating the experience that led him to identify individual truth to essence and to artistic creation, Proust does transmit the divine presence, that which is sublime and above factuality, much more than the word "God" would, as an assertion of belief in a transcendent being. Since nothing of this is an “object of knowledge” to Proust but something he communes with through his personal experience, he passes it on, like passing the possibility of this same communion to his readers. Divine presence and that which is the source of creativity, our highest self, are at one in Proust’s thought, giving us the precious clue to fulfill God's ways to all and each of us.
To sum it up, through the Proustian living text, the reader also lives, in his own self, depths that he would never have been able to before; the depths of his own soul.
