{"id":19090,"date":"2015-11-16T00:35:21","date_gmt":"2015-11-16T06:35:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/?p=19090"},"modified":"2015-11-16T08:23:42","modified_gmt":"2015-11-16T14:23:42","slug":"jean-ousset-the-wit-and-wisdom-of-a-wingnut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2015\/11\/jean-ousset-the-wit-and-wisdom-of-a-wingnut\/","title":{"rendered":"Jean Ousset: The Wit and Wisdom of A Wingnut"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

In the days before e-mail, dashing off a few words to a friend or a newspaper editor could mean receiving a classic in return. In the theological realm, the New York Sun editor\u2019s assurance to Virginia O\u2019Hanlon that, yes, there is a Santa Claus, ranks just below St. Paul\u2019s epistles. Imagine Charles-Jean- Fran\u00e7ois Depont\u2019s surprise at writing Edmund Burke for his take on current events and getting back Reflections on the Revolution in France.<\/em> In Bosie Douglas\u2019 case, it was his not<\/em> writing to Oscar Wilde that produced De Profundis.<\/em><\/p>\n

We don\u2019t know the name of the Frenchman who wrote the editorial offices of the Catholic magazine Permanences<\/em> in February of 1973, in order to cancel his subscription and announce his departure from the Church. But we should be able to recognize his mood at once. With no combox to fill, he seized this occasion to vent years of disgruntlement.<\/a> The \u201cincoherence of the religious situation,\u201d including \u201cthe attitude and statement of certain clerics\u201d and \u201cthe views expressed in the Catholic press\u201d were more than the man could bear. \u201cI have completely lost my Faith,\u201d he wrote, warning the editor that corrupt clergy \u201cwill get you immediately when the opportunity presents itself, and your efforts will have been in vain; they will finally crush you.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Jean Ousset, the addressee, was not a man so easily crushed. A political theorist with views somewhere to the right of Louis XIV\u2019s, he had begun with the dream of converting France\u2019s Third Republic into a Catholic confessional state and hitched that dream to dark stars. After the d\u00e9bacle<\/em> of 1940, he transferred his allegiance to Vichy, following the lead of Action fran\u00e7aise<\/em> founder Charles Maurras, whose secretary he was. With France liberated and Maurras imprisoned for collaborating with the Germans, Ousset refined his tactics. Rising to the leadership of Cit\u00e9 catholique,<\/em> he set about trying to convert \u2014 or, to employ the term he himself preferred, subvert \u2014 the Fourth Republic from the inside. <\/p>\n

For a time, Ousset\u2019s principles of subversion made him the Saul Alinsky of France\u2019s far right, including many of the army officers who formed Organisation de l\u2019arm\u00e9e secr\u00e8te,<\/em> a terrorist group dedicated to keeping Algeria under French control. By the time he received the subscriber\u2019s complaint, he\u2019d seen Algeria gain its independence, and some of his admirers, having failed to overthrow De Gaulle in a putsch, cashiered and jailed. <\/p>\n

Proving that disappointment had made him into a first-rate philosopher, Ousset responded to the subscriber\u2019s complaint as though speaking for the ages. He begins by chastising the man for his \u201cbrutal anger,\u201d which he calls a sin against hope \u2014 not the \u201cfoolish optimism\u201d of the world, but the theological virtue that only \u201can adequate knowledge of Church history\u201d can sustain.<\/p>\n

Much of this history, warns Ousset, is pretty damn bleak. Listing heresies in chronological order, from gnosticism to \u201cneo-modernism,\u201d he observes that the lines between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, who was on and off the bus, were rarely so clear. \u201cActually,\u201d he writes:<\/p>\n

\u2026for those who experienced [doctrinal controversy], it was a \u201cdark disorder\u201d, with nobody knowing which side to take. The parish priest was on one side, his curate on the other. There was disagreement among the bishops. Saints like Athanasius and Hilary were a tiny minority. And, as always, it was the \u201cothers\u201d who claimed to have \u201ca sense of history\u201d to understand their world and to be witnesses for their generation. The passage of time distorts what was, in fact, a dark and bloody disorder not really unlike what we see now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Most apologists treat emotional experience as something beneath their attention, but Ousset tackles it head-on:<\/p>\n

Let us now try to imagine how we would have felt had we been obliged to witness the side effects of these errors \u2013 suspicions, betrayal, polemics, insults, riots, tortures, murders, apostasies, cowardice \u2013 side effects which are no longer considered worth mentioning because history is full of them. And since you bear such a grudge against the clergy, think for a moment of the state of the Church in the 10th century, one of the worst centuries of all \u2013 no schools, no teaching. The general ignorance was such that a Church Council (in 909) was actually obliged to insist on education for the clergy, an education so elementary that the mind boggles!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like Joan of Arc, Ousset understands that Christ and the Church are one. When the Church appears to be suffering, it\u2019s time to make like Veronica. \u201cWe must,\u201d he insists, \u201cby gentle, kindly actions, restore to this cherished Face its pristine purity,\u201d adding, \u201cLet us not cause further suffering by our anger or impatience; let us not reopen the wounds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ousset\u2019s letter reads like a masterpiece of a homily. Opening with a rebuke, proceeding into a lecture, and building up into an exhortation, it displays the full range of tones, each perfectly chosen for its purpose. Every priest \u2014 and, probably, every pundit \u2014 should read it.<\/p>\n

Normally, when we use the word \u201cfascist\u201d to describe a personality type, we mean someone overbearing and over-critical, a control freak and grudge-holder \u2014 someone like Seinfeld\u2019s Soup Nazi. Hard-nosed as real-life fascists could be with anyone unlucky enough to end up in one of their jail cells, they also had a genius for pumping people up by dressing the mundane in heroic trappings. (In fairness, it must be said that they shared this quality with communists.) When the trappings were tawdry \u2014 empty slogans and the like \u2014 and the reality inhumane or futile, the distance between them became obvious and absurd.<\/p>\n

To call Ousset a fascist would be to stretch the label\u2019s meaning, but not by much. How he talked or wrote during his Vichy days, when he moonlighted under Xavier Vallat, the bureaucrat responsible for imposing France\u2019s version of the Nuremberg Laws, I have no idea. But here he demonstrates that thundering fit for a parade ground can work quite nicely when tempered by something as subtle and resistant to compromise as Catholic theology. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s a paradox in firing someone up to be gentle and patient. Maybe Ousset pulled it off because he was a failed<\/em> fascist. That\u2019s a kind of paradox in itself \u2014 a paradox that only a Catholic, trained to heroic humility, could live with.<\/p>\n

Blame the movies, but belief in heroism has always been my soul\u2019s chicken soup. A couple of nights ago, with the body count from the Paris massacres still mounting, I found it in images that recalled a nobler past \u2014 Joan of Arc for my Facebook newsfeed, Charlemagne for my profile pic. Today I came upon Ousset\u2019s reminder that the past had actually been pretty rotten a lot of the time \u2014 that Joan had met her end, after all, not at the point of a glaive, but from a miscarriage of canon justice:<\/p>\n

How the mother of Joan, and all the good Christians of Domremy must have been tempted either to revolt or to fall into despair\u2026when news arrived of the pyre at Rouen! Joan, it is true, was rehabilitated, but not before the King of France had triumphed \u2013 diplomacy being the first consideration even when it was a question of proclaiming the truth and defending the innocent! <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Two years ago, having resolved to register his opposition to gay marriage and Muslim immigration in a memorable way, Dominique Venner, another far-right French ideologist (and also a former OAS member), walked into Notre-Dame cathedral and blew his brains out. It was an act worth of a Viking or a samurai. Ousset would have known it was an act unworthy of a Christian, that heroic witness is not the same thing as being a drama queen.<\/p>\n

Now, I am not overly bothered about the two issues that pushed Venner over the edge. Thanks be to God, I\u2019m not nearly as frustrated as Ousset\u2019s correspondent. But reading his letter served to remind me that I might be just a little bit impatient. Last night, as I wished aloud for \u201ca resolution among Christians to renew our own culture in such a way that no force can prevail against it,\u201d I seem to have let it slip my mind that this culture already exists.<\/em> If the next Bernanos doesn\u2019t happen to be on my Facebook friends list, well, renaissances take time.<\/p>\n

Those of Ousset\u2019s acolytes who escaped De Gaulle\u2019s justice by fleeing to Argentina, are widely credited with training the Argentine armed forces to fight the same dirty war Pope Francis lived through. How he might have reacted to the threat posed by ISIS is an interesting question. But he doesn\u2019t seem to have nursed any illusions about the Church or Western Civilization not<\/em> teetering on the brink of disaster. <\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know when I\u2019ll next get the chance to wipe Christ\u2019s face, but thanks to Ousset, I now feel emboldened to try, very heroically, not to spazz out over the next 10 minutes. I won\u2019t pretend to like his politics, but when it comes to spiritual works of mercy, beggars can\u2019t be choosers.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the days before e-mail, dashing off a few words to a friend or a newspaper editor could mean receiving a classic in return. In the theological realm, the New York Sun editor\u2019s assurance to Virginia O\u2019Hanlon that, yes, there is a Santa Claus, ranks just below St. Paul\u2019s epistles. Imagine Charles-Jean- Fran\u00e7ois Depont\u2019s surprise […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1614,1610,1007,49,576,51,1615,1611,607,105,119,1041,1609,1613,1601,1612,208],"class_list":["post-19090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-action-francaise","tag-algeria","tag-algerian-war","tag-catholicism","tag-charles-de-gaulle","tag-charles-maurras","tag-cite-catholique","tag-dominique-venner","tag-france","tag-gay-marriage","tag-islam","tag-islamic-state","tag-jean-ousset","tag-organiisation-de-larmee-secrete","tag-paris","tag-paris-massacre","tag-saints"],"yoast_head":"\nJean Ousset: The Wit and Wisdom of A Wingnut<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In the days before e-mail, dashing off a few words to a friend or a newspaper editor could mean receiving a classic in return. 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