In these columns, there was often talk of the works of Henry Corbin, the man of “light,” a specialist in mystical Islam and the Persian theosopher Sohravardî ([link](https://www.nicepremium.fr/article/du-temple-celeste-au-temple-interieur-tout-passe-par-jerusalem….2745.html) and [link](https://www.nicepremium.fr/article/psychanalyse-du-coran-et-«-imagination-creatrice-»-les-lumieres-d-ibn-arabi-en-islam..1922.html)). In 1928, Henry Corbin was a student at the Religious Sciences Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes under another renowned orientalist, Louis Massignon, described as a “man of fire,” from whom he claimed it was impossible to escape the influence of his “brilliant insights into mystical Islam.” Often drawn from transfigured suffering, which sometimes complicated relationships with those around him, Louis Massignon deployed extraordinary energy throughout his life to accomplish his work on knowledge, coupled with an exceptional commitment to a Christian mysticism situated at the limits, if we dare say, of ecclesiastical blessing.
This underscores the importance of the work by Jean-François Six, a priest and theologian, “The Great Dream of Charles de Foucauld and Louis Massignon,” recently published by Albin Michel: it illuminates the extraordinary journey of the two figures by tracing the intricacies of the mystical lineage between Louis Massignon and his spiritual master, Charles de Foucauld. Charles de Foucauld, a young scientist 25 years his senior, was already traversing the paths of the ‘West’ and had published as early as 1884 his experience of “three thousand kilometers of routes” under the title “Reconnaissance in Morocco.” When Louis Massignon, following in his footsteps, published his own surveys in 1906 in Algiers, which confirmed the work of his predecessor, the meeting became inevitable. But what should have been just an exchange between two scientists profoundly altered Massignon’s personal life. In a disturbing parallel: Charles de Foucauld, who had left the faith of his childhood to become agnostic, converted to Catholicism in 1886, became a Trappist in 1890 in a “very poor little convent” in Syria, and was ordained a priest four years later before returning to Morocco – in fact, the Algerian-Moroccan border – which for him had become a land of evangelization. A generation later, Louis Massignon would undertake the same Copernican revolution on another Eastern land: his thesis on the Mesopotamian Muslim mystic Mansûr el-Hallâj, executed in 922 for blasphemy and with whom he would identify, his decisive encounter on October 27, 1900, with the writer Huysmans, also converted in 1890 and leading him to adopt the notion of “substitution” dear to the French author – one can suffer in someone else’s place and save them – allow us to better understand his “rage to comprehend and conquer Islam at any cost.” These two events also shed light on the scope of his mystical crisis in May 1908 in Baghdad, the moment of his Christian conversion during which he “feels the presence of Hallâj” within him: “If I became a believer again after five years of disbelief, it is to my Muslim friends in Baghdad that I owe it,” he would explain during his convalescence.
Between Foucauld and Massignon, a work undertaken by the former that would never be abandoned by the latter until his death in 1962. Between the two, as the author who has taken up the torch tells us, a heritage devoid of “materiality,” with a bond united by prayer on a freezing February night in 1909 and the assassination of Foucauld a few days after writing, on January 1, 1916, a letter to Massignon in which he expresses his “joyful approval” of seeing him join the “trenches of the front line” rather than stay behind. A letter that Massignon would interpret as a sign committing him from now on to combat.
This work? A project developed around Easter 1908 by Charles de Foucauld: the creation of a fraternity comprising priests and laypeople, men and women, married or single, who would commit to being “living gospels” in the Eastern land and which would take the name “The Union of the Brothers and Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.”
Jean-François Six’s account of this mission, seemingly as simple as a “revealed truth,” instead shows its troubled destiny, amidst the evocation of the great names of the time: General Lyautey, the new Resident-General of France in Morocco, Paul Claudel advising the young Massignon to abandon “his books and go throw himself at the feet of Father de Foucauld,” Joris-Karl Huysmans, the autobiographer in “The Oblate,” the story of a convert, Father Huvelin, Charles de Foucauld’s spiritual director who supported the project of the Union. A support in contradiction with a Catholic hierarchy that curtailed and was concerned about the installation of a human community quite removed from the canonical rules of priestly life. Perhaps Vatican hesitations were inspired by the convoluted path of Louis Massignon, deeply imbued with pathological guilt for his uncertain sexual orientation and torn between marriage and the priesthood: a conflict the young explorer would attempt to resolve by making contradictory commitments: he solemnly joined Foucauld’s “Union” the very day after his engagement and completed his thesis on Hallâj just days before his marriage.
This “Union,” whose founding text, the “Directory,” is intended more as a spiritual rule rather than a formal description of function, would encounter many vicissitudes. Its drafter accompanies it with reflections that, in hindsight, have a certain political significance. As early as 1907, Charles de Foucauld warned leaders in the métropole: by continuing their manner of colonization, he said, the peoples of North Africa would “drive them out in fifty years.” After the First World War, he would remind “Catholics” of their “imperious duty towards Muslims who had shown loyalty in battles.”
After Foucauld’s death, Massignon would tirelessly fight to ensure the survival of his spiritual master’s work: he conceded the necessary minimum to representatives of the hierarchy to avoid being placed outside the official church while preventing it from becoming a tertiary order, a group situated in the orbit of a congregation, a fate foreign to the “vocation of freedom” initiated by his “evangelical pioneer.” To the point of accepting in 1919 the creation of a Charles de Foucauld Association, approved by the Archbishop of Paris, recognized as being of public utility by the State in 1924. To the point also in 1955 of seeing the “Union” and the groups founded in its wake being “topped” in a “sleight of hand” by an official Church representative. The new Canon Law of 1983 would finally grant it the status of an “Association of faithful and baptized” men and women of all kinds, religious or lay, married or single. A return to the spirit of origin and a posthumous victory for its founder.
However, a few years before his death, Louis Massignon regretted that some of Foucauld’s disciples, probably under the Church’s impulse, sought to modify the prescribed rule, the famous “Directory,” to add the clause “as much as possible.” A procedure he deemed “distressing,” recalling Gandhi’s saying: “doing as much as possible means promising to succumb to the first temptation.”
Jean-François Six, “The Great Dream of Charles de Foucauld and Louis Massignon,” Albin Michel Editions, 2008.
