ABSTRACT
Of Péguy’s contemporaries, perhaps the most perceptive commentator on his work was the novelist André Gide. Though he did not share Péguy’s faith, Gide saw clearly the anamnetic quality of Péguy’s prose and poetry alike. Anamnesis (making present) is, as the previous chapter sought to show, at the heart of Christian faith and practice, and it is this quality that Gide clearly discerned: ‘Représenter c’est bien le mot; […] Péguy n’explique rien; il re-présente; c’est à dire, il remet au présent ce passé. Nul archaïsme’ [‘Re-presentation is precisely the word; […] Péguy explains nothing; he re-presents; that is to say, he relocates the past in the present. There is no trace of archaism’].1 Gide’s comments here are made with specific reference to the sanctity of l’ancienne France as portrayed in Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc. What Gide does not develop, however, is the sense in which Péguy’s writing as a whole is an anamnetic performance, unveiling the centrality of the incarnation not simply as a historical datum, but as a gift continually repeated sacramentally in the present. Perhaps because of his Protestant inheritance, Gide tends to see ‘re-présentation’ principally in terms of the re-enactment of the past in the present. For Péguy, by contrast, in the light of Christ’s incarnation, anamnesis expresses the heart of the Christian life.2 This is the gift of the ‘ministère du présent’, discussed in the previous chapter, the incarnation as ‘le centre et l’agent même et le point de passée du temps’,3 in which the child, ‘la petite espérance’, plays an exemplary role.
