Jean Guitton

Jean Guitton (1901 - 1999), French philosopher.

Quotes

• Atheism is not only complicated and rare, it is also a recent phenomenon, a peculiarity supported by few and only recently in certain Western intellectual circles.
  • L'ateismo non è soltanto macchinoso e raro, è anche un fenomeno recente, una bizzarria sostenuta da pochi e da poco tempo nel solo ambiente di certa intelligentia occidentale.
    • As quoted in Vittorio Messori, Inchiesta sul Cristianesimo

• (Referring to Marthe Robin) was simple.... What prevailed in Marthe was her capacity for sacrifice, in imitation of Christ.... With simple words, she aroused in us one of those rare, sudden, sweet, somewhat melancholic and yet radiant emotions that make you aware of your destiny.
  • Marthe [Marta Robin] era semplice.... Quello che prevaleva in Marthe era la sua capacità di sacrificio, a imitazione di Cristo.... Con parole semplici suscitava in noi una di quelle emozioni rare, improvvise, dolci, un po' malinconiche e tuttavia radiose, che vi rendono consapevoli del vostro destino.
    • As quoted in Jean-Jacques Antier, Marthe Robin – Il viaggio immobile, Edizioni Paoline, 1993.

• Paul VI's intention regarding the liturgy, regarding the vulgarisation of the Mass, was to reform the Catholic liturgy so that it would coincide more or less with the Protestant liturgy... with the Protestant Supper. And further on: "... I repeat that Paul VI did everything in his power to bring the Catholic Mass – beyond the Council of Trent – closer to the Protestant Supper. He was particularly helped by Monsignor Bugnini, who did not always enjoy his confidence on this point. [...] Of course, I did not attend the Calvinist Supper, but I did attend Paul VI's Mass. And Paul VI's Mass presents itself first and foremost as a banquet, does it not? It insists very much on the aspect of participation in a banquet, and much less on the notion of sacrifice, of ritual sacrifice, in the face of God, while the priest shows only his back. So I do not think I am mistaken in saying that the intention of Paul VI and of the new liturgy that bears his name is to ask the faithful for greater participation in the Mass, to give a greater place to Sacred Scripture and a lesser place to everything else in it, some say “magical”, others “consubstantial consecration”, [correcting himself] transubstantiation, which is the Catholic faith. In other words, Paul VI had the ecumenical intention of removing – or at least correcting, attenuating – what was too “Catholic”, in the traditional sense, in the Mass, and of bringing the Catholic Mass – I repeat – closer to the Calvinist Mass.
  • L’intenzione di Paolo VI a riguardo della liturgia, a riguardo della volgarizzazione della messa, era di riformare la liturgia cattolica così che coincidesse pressappoco con la liturgia protestante … con la Cena protestante». E più avanti: « … ripeto che Paolo VI ha fatto tutto ciò che era in suo potere per avvicinare la messa cattolica – al di là del Concilio di Trento ­- alla Cena protestante. Aiutato particolarmente da mons. Bugnini, che non ha goduto sempre della sua fiducia su questo punto. [...] Naturalmente io non ho assistito alla Cena calvinista, ma ho assistito alla messa di Paolo VI. E la messa di Paolo VI si presenta per prima cosa come un banchetto, non è vero? e insiste molto sull’aspetto della partecipazione ad un banchetto, e molto meno sulla nozione di sacrificio, di sacrificio rituale, in faccia a Dio, mentre il sacerdote mostra solo le spalle. Allora non credo di ingannarmi dicendo che l’intenzione di Paolo VI e della nuova liturgia che porta il suo nome, è di chiedere ai fedeli una più grande partecipazione alla messa, è di dare un posto più grande alla Sacra Scrittura e un posto meno grande a tutto ciò che in essa vi è, alcuni dicono “di magico”, altri “di consacrazione consustanziale”, [correggendosi] transustanziale, e che è la fede cattolica. In altre parole, c’è in Paolo VI l’intenzione ecumenica di cancellare – o almeno di correggere, di attenuare – ciò che c’è di troppo “cattolico”, in senso tradizionale, nella Messa, e di avvicinare la Messa cattolica – lo ripeto – alla messa calvinista.
    • From Si si No no, Year XX, n. 13,July 1994, p. 5. As reported in Yves Chiron, Paul VI, le pape écartelé, and in La Messe a-t-elle une histoire?, in Savoir et Servir, n.55, Montrouge 1994, p.94. Sources are quoted in Jean Guitton e la messa ecumenica … di Paolo VI (July 28, 2019)

Il genio di Giovanna d'Arco

Jean Guitton, Il genio di Giovanna d'Arco (La génie de Jeanne d'Arc), Italian translation by Gloria Romagnoli, Massimo, Milano, 2001, ISBN 88-7030-082-X

• Joan of Arc possesses more genius than talent, more heroism than courage, more intuition than intelligence, more immediacy than endurance and, if we may say so, more glory than grace. That is why she seems more angelic than human, a traveller from another world, parachuted into this one. (p. 7)
• Joan is not a theologian; in fact, she cannot tell A from B. However, listening to her answers during her trial, we sense in her a theological intelligence, a ready ability to resolve cases brought before her conscience, which, if developed, would have made her equal to the greatest minds. (p. 9)
• In Giovanna, purity was more than a virtue. It was her mark, her reason for existing and her implicit glory, her resemblance to the mother of Christ. Being a country girl, accustomed to seeing life in all its gestures, she probably had very accurate knowledge of purity in the physical sense. In the countryside, ignorance is never what the 19th-century bourgeoisie falsely calls innocence. And when, at the age of thirteen, Joan gave her virginity to God during the angel's first visit, she knew clearly what it meant. (p. 30)
• Joan puts God's will above her virginity. She says that she “has offered her virginity as a vow for as long as God pleases”. This concern for the hierarchy of values, this idea of “God first”, is always evident in her. Joan is a virgin because God inspired her to be so; she is not a virgin of her own free will or choice. (pp. 34-35)

Il genio di Teresa di Lisieux

Jean Guitton, Il genio di Teresa di Lisieux, Italian translation by Lorenzo Bacchiarello, Sei, 1995. ISBN 978-8805055234

• Unlike Calvino, you bring the soul into the designs of merciful predestination without any element of anguish.
• After about forty centuries of oral civilisation, the Word is an inflated currency.
• Ordinary people have more confidence in those who have suddenly arrived at that state and are naturally honest than in those who have had to make a painful and painful effort to get there.
• I have always made it a rule to speak in a timeless manner, true today, tomorrow and always.
• Generals do not fight with the fear of the troops, they prefer to keep them busy.
• The real way to resist temptation is to turn away and walk away.
• What is the charm of a person? It is difficult to say, because charm is indefinable. It is a certain presence of the person beyond their limits, like the radiance of certain pure faces.
• Love always envelops us: it is we, with our attitude towards it, who transform it into fire or light.
• Beauty is a splendour that must detach itself from those who possess it without them noticing and without returning to them.
• Beauty is a kind of supplement to being, a radiance that is added to being.
• The most enviable situation is not to be the subject of beauty and to know oneself to be beautiful, but to be the object of beauty and such that only the other enjoys what emanates from us.
• In the spiritual life, to grow means to simplify and simplify oneself, to become closer to uncreated and ineffable simplicity.
• For Teresa, the way of Mary is a way of faith, without ecstasy, without miracles, even without words.
• Teresa of Lisieux will give new splendour to the word. What she says, she does. And her words are oracles. I said “words”; I distinguish them from “phrases”. Teresa's phrases, in truth, are imperfect. Imperfect because of the weakness of men, who have given her a very mediocre language.

La Vergine Maria

Jean Guitton, La Vergine Maria, Italian translation by Lorenzo Fenoglio, Rusconi, 1987. ISBN 978-8818010183

• Jewish thought was oriented towards the future. In the history of the past, it sought the image of what did not yet exist.
• It is not enough for the past to be past. It must also be truly overcome – it must have lost all causal connection with the present – so that only the spiritual connection remains, which is the connection between image and reality, between figure and fulfilment.
• Every segment of time shines, even if it is finite. It takes death, conversion, or interruption for us to understand any fragment of our lives.
• Discovering herself as the end of history, the Madonna now had the light to interpret the time that had gone before.

Quello che credeva al cielo e quello che non ci credeva

Jean Guitton, Quello che credeva al cielo e quello che non ci credeva, Italian translation by Piero Gribaudi, Gribaudi, 1995. ISBN 978-8871523811

• Believing in God means believing in an incomprehensible being whose ability to listen is known. That is what kneeling means.
• I believe in God because of encounters. All explanations are useless; I believe in encounters.
• The Pope is unique. A man who, because of his position, is obliged to remain attached to “the ceiling”, to see things “from the ceiling's point of view”.
• The atheist confirms faith. And like a guinea pig that confirms my thesis or my faith in God.
• Paul VI told me that the prayer he recited every morning was: “My God, call me back to You, call me back to You, I can't take it anymore”. I believe that all popes recite this prayer, even John Paul II.
• For a Christian, what we call life is a preparation for what we call the “afterlife”, the other life.
• If the Church has sometimes been against science, the cause lies in its misreading of the Bible.
• I find that at twent it is easy to be a hero, a saint, an extraordinary man. I believe, however, that at ninety it is very difficult to live up to the moment.

L’infinito in fondo al cuore

J. Guitton interviewed by Francesca Pini, L'infinito in fondo al cuore, Ed. Mondadori, Milano, 1998

• Before the Council, Mass was Mass. Obviously, in Latin, we didn't understand anything, but we had the impression (impression???) that it was Mass. Now, however, we have the feeling that it is the translation of a Protestant service. From my point of view, the liturgical reform as desired by the Council (Vatican II) was good; certainly it did not want the Mass, the Eucharist, to be sacrificed, nor above all reduced to what Protestants do during their ceremony, which we call supper. For example, when it was decided that the priest should not say Mass facing the altar, with his back to the faithful, but facing them, a decisive reform was carried out that truly disturbed many Christians. With good reason (With good reason???) — so that the faithful could understand — it was decided to celebrate the liturgy in the common language, but without any desire to abolish the sacred. Today, in practice, the Eucharist no longer has the sacred, serious and divine character it had in the past. (p. 103)
• So today Mass risks resembling a liturgy of the word? A:

Q: Protestants do not have this idea of the sacrament, of transubstantiation: they repeat what Jesus Christ did, but in a symbolic way. Their supper is a liturgy of the word, it is not an act that transforms (transforms or transubstantiates???) bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ in the fundamental sense of the gesture, as Catholics believe (?). The Catholic Church is right to want to make its liturgy more accessible and understandable to Protestants, but it cannot abandon the essence of Catholicism: that in the consecrated bread and wine there are the body and blood of Christ in a substantial, true and profound sense!" (p. 104)

See also

• Jacques Maritain