Venom or Scandal?: The Magnificat and Two Visions of Catholic Politics by Gregory Fox

The French monarchist Charles Maurras (1868-1952), founder of the integral nationalist organization known as Action Français who was described by Pope St. Pius X as a “good defender of the Holy See and of the church,” once referred to the “venom of the Magnificat.” Few people, at least in the English-speaking world, know the precise context of this bilious quote. I would like to briefly explain it and contrast Maurras’s conception of Christianity and Catholicism with that of his archenemy, the devout Catholic and Christian Democrat Marc Sangnier (1894-1950), founder of Le Sillon (“The Furrow”) movement.

To those who have even a cursory understanding of French Catholic history at the turn of the 20th century, the name Maurras signifies a commitment to a sort of “cultural Christianity” of the right. While this sort of cultural Christianity, at least in the United States, is customarily associated with the left—or liberalism at the very least—there is a Christianity of the right in France which takes as its slogan Maurras’s claim that he was “an atheist, but Catholic.” One need only look at someone like Michel Onfray, a contemporary French thinker on the right, who defends the Latin Mass and Judeo-Christian civilization despite being a self-identified atheist.

For these figures, Christianity is not primarily a truth but rather a history or instinct of Western civilization. The question of truth is entirely eclipsed by the question of social utility. It is a modernism of the right—in fact, it is worse than modernism since it does not even concern itself with a reinterpretation of Christian doctrines (however poorly modernism succeeded in such a reinterpretation); it simply disregards them whenever they conflict with their civilizational project. As we will see, whatever is left of authentic Christianity is filtered through a Nietzschean critique, which subjects all truth to an aesthetic criterion.

Back to Maurras’s infamous claim regarding the Magnificat. Originally in the preface to the 1894 edition of his Chemin de Paradis, the phrase was removed in the 1920 edition. As a result, one website notes that while the quote offended many “abbés favorables au Sillon” (priests favorable to the Christian democratic movement in France at the time), these same abbés were unable to find it in newer editions of this work. Thankfully, we now have the original French text from the 1894 edition. I think that by quoting this section at length, we will perhaps be able to derive some important truths about the current state of affairs of Christianity, and specifically Catholicism, in America today. Here is a rough translation:

I anticipate that we will avoid objecting to this Christianity. The chain of ideas which I expose are sufficiently pagan and Christian to merit the title of Catholic which belongs to the religion in which we were born. It is not impossible that I may have struck, along the way, some passages from the Bible, but I hardly know which ones. Destiny has it that the civilized people of the south of Europe only barely know these turbulent Oriental scriptures in a truncated way, redesigned, transposed by the Church into the marvel of the Missal and the Breviary; it was one of the philosophical honors of the Church as well, to have put to the verses of the Magnificat a music which mitigated the venom [emphasis mine]. I myself stand by this custom, having nothing dearer, after the images of Athens, than the rigorous pomp of the Middle Ages, the servitude of her religious orders, her knights, her beautiful fraternities, the workers and artists so well organized against the moods of each one, for the salvation of the world and the reign of beauty. These two goods have been in great peril for [the past] three or four hundred years, and here we are calling upon the bizarre romantic and Saint-Simonian Jesus to help fix the disorder of 1840. I do not know of any other Jesus than that of our Catholic tradition, “the sovereign Jupiter who was on earth and crucified for us.” I will not leave this learned cortege of Fathers, of Councils, of Popes, and of all the great men of the modern elite to trust the gospels of four obscure Jews. For it would be as well to follow the interior Christ of Reformation, or the moral conscience of the Latins, these ancient Huguenots, or even the vague God who multiplies by infinity the placitas of M. Jules Simon. Good or bad, our taste is our own and it is always permitted of us to take ourselves as the sole judges and models of our life; but what a shame not to agree frankly and to gloss over his anarchism or sin with exegesis.

It’s interesting to note that, in later editions of Chemin de Paradis, Maurras cites this infamous “venom” phrase again. He argues that those who were scandalized by this attack on the Magnificat misunderstand him entirely. The goal, according to Maurras, was to show how the church had prevented any “bad thoughts” from arising in the hearts of believers as a result of reading the Magnificat, and that only the “esprits délibérément corrompus” (“deliberately corrupted minds”) of the likes of Marc Sangnier failed to understand this.

Against Maurras’s vision of Christianity, which completely strips it of any supernatural content, let us look at Sangnier. Earlier on in Chemin de Paradis, Maurras quotes an excerpt from a speech that Sangnier delivered at the General Assembly of the Marian Congress of Rome on December 2, 1904. In this section of the speech, Sangnier reflects briefly on Mary’s Magnificat:

And you found, Royal Virgin, oblivious of the ancient privileges of your race, while your soul was magnified by the egalitarian vision of universal redemption, the sublime words that will forever make regenerated humanity tremble and whose boldness will frighten the most audacious reformers: Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles. Esurientes implevit bonis et divites dimisit inanes (“He has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty”).

O strong Virgin, prudent Virgin, let others be scandalized by the words that fell from your inspired lips! We, we will repeat them with love and we will say them again to the poor ignorant ones . . . who try to stammer before the deceived crowds dead phrases that they stole from the Gospel of your Son when they denied his faith, bad shepherds, unworthy pastors of peoples who want the harvests to germinate without seeds, that democracy be born without Christ, who only utter vain words because they are not the disciples of Him who said: I am the way, the truth and the life.

For Sangnier, the error is that Christian phrases (from the Magnificat, for example) are used in a way entirely devoid of Christian content and Christian faith—that is, without Christ. The error, of course, is not the phrase or the Magnificat itself; rather, the error is duplicity, it is any attempt to found or establish human fraternity on any basis other than Jesus Christ. Indeed, Sangnier refuses to insult or disparage anything in the Magnificat; on the contrary, he speaks of “those sublime words” that “have fallen from [Our Lady’s] inspired lips.” There is no attempt by Sangnier to sugarcoat the noble words that Our Lady spoke to Elizabeth. They simply stand before us in all their glory.

On the other hand, for Maurras, the error is not simply a misuse of the Magnificat, which by itself would be an understandable objection. Rather, the error is the words of the Magnificat itself—words which, for Maurras, need to be cloaked and neutralized by a “music which mitigated the venom.” Of course, Maurras does not attempt to throw the Magnificat out completely, but what he retains is a Magnificat which is no longer a scandal to those who do not profess Christ. It is a Magnificat entirely compatible with the ideology of the religious aesthete. The Magnificat merely becomes one insignificant but perhaps aesthetically beautiful “piece” in the grand ideological edifice of the pagan-Catholic synthesis which seeks to construct a superficially Christian world without Christ: a Christian world with a counterfeit Christ, or, at least, a Christian world without the authentic Christ, the true Christ of the true Catholic tradition.

If the urgent tone of this article causes any confusion, then perhaps this will clear some things up: the reader should know that we are in a crisis. The supernatural content of Christianity is being gutted before our very eyes and replaced with idols: nationalism and (to use the words of Fr. John Hugo) pious naturalism. Perhaps the beliefs of certain Catholic politicians in our current day are closer to Maurras’s views than Sangnier’s. The very notion that Christianity has something to do with supernatural charity towards others—that is, charity done out of love of God and love of neighbor—is falling by the wayside. The scope of the word “neighbor” is becoming smaller and smaller each day, as our new Maurrasians redefine Christian charity out of existence. The fact that this is happening ought to cause us to reflect on this crisis very seriously. And then, after reflecting, we should act. ♦

Gregory Fox is an independent researcher based in Virginia whose primary focus is the history of social, democratic, and liberal Catholicism in 19th- and 20th-century France. 

Image: Charles Maurras (L) and Marc Sangnier (R).