Ernest Hello (1828-1885)

A hailed genius and an unknown — the Hello paradox

No other French Catholic writer of the nineteenth century concentrates to this degree the contrast between the admiration of the best judges and the indifference of the public. Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, the Catholic dandy feared for the harshness of his literary judgments, made an exception for Hello: the echo of the press of the time relays his admiration for the writer's mystic loftiness, and Barbey undertook the praise of his Contes.^[10][11] Joris-Karl Huysmans, in his novel Là-bas (1891), has his character Durtal say, in the midst of reflecting on the mediocrity of contemporary letters:

"The true psychologist of the century, Durtal said to himself, is not their Stendhal, but this astonishing Hello, whose impregnable lack of success borders on the miraculous!" — Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-bas, chapter I, 1891^[12]

This sentence sums up, better than any commentary, Hello's status in French letters: a "lack of success" which his most demanding contemporaries themselves judged inexplicable, almost miraculous in reverse. In his lifetime, his books sold little, his contributions to Catholic newspapers brought him neither fortune nor lasting renown, and he died in near-poverty.^[13] Only after his death — the first complete biography, by Joseph Serre, appeared in 1894, the very year L'Homme was reissued — did a wider circle begin to discover him.^[14][15]

Léon Bloy's forgotten master

The most important biographical fact for understanding Hello's place in French Catholicism remains his relationship with Léon Bloy. The young Bloy — who met Barbey d'Aurevilly in December 1868 and returned to the Catholic faith shortly afterwards^[16] — quickly found in Hello, eighteen years his senior, a model and an intellectual guide: Bloy read and reread Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, Blanc de Saint-Bonnet and Hello as the masters orienting him towards an uncompromising, burning Catholicism. According to Raïssa Maritain, Bloy's conversion owes much to Hello^[17]. Bloy would pay tribute to him on several occasions, notably in his study collected in 1889 in Un Brelan d'excommuniés, where he compares Hello to Pascal: "I can hardly see any analogue to this writer knocked out of orbit except the solitary Pascal"^[18]. For the article devoted to Léon Bloy, see Léon Bloy (1846-1917).

A mysticism of wonder

A third reason to read Hello today: his spirituality lies almost entirely in a single intellectual and supernatural virtue, wonder, which he sets against the systematic spirit and rationalist self-sufficiency of his century. In Paroles de Dieu, he wrote a formula that has remained famous among his readers:

"Be astonished, and keep your astonishment long." — Ernest Hello, Paroles de Dieu, 1877^[19]

This sentence is not a mere aphorism: it condenses Hello's entire project, which is to teach again to a century enamoured with scientific certainties and self-satisfied mediocrity the virtue of a fresh gaze before the mystery of God, of man and of creation.

A Breton childhood between the magistracy and free thought

Ernest Hello is born on 4 November 1828 in Lorient. His father belongs to the French magistracy and will become, at the end of his career, a counsellor at the Cour de cassation in Paris; certain sources describe him as a liberal little inclined to religious practice, from whom Hello will nevertheless inherit, says the biographical tradition, "an invincible veneration" for the truth.^[20][21] Of frail constitution since childhood — some biographers mention a bone or spinal ailment — the young Hello develops very early an uncommon intelligence, but also that vein of melancholy which will run through all his work.^[22]

Sent to study first in Rennes, then at the prestigious collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris, he distinguishes himself there by his academic results.^[23] It is in these formative years that the double movement structuring his whole life takes shape: a keen intelligence, trained in the classical and legal disciplines, placed entirely at the service of a spiritual quest that surpasses it.

The Bar refused out of conscience

Passed in his law examinations with a brilliance his biographers emphasize, Hello could have embraced a promising career as a barrister. He renounces it, for a motive of conscience that has remained famous among those who recounted his life: discovering that his colleagues voted to accept the defence of cases he judged morally indefensible, he declares he will never wear the barrister's gown under such conditions.^[24][25] This refusal, seemingly anecdotal, says everything about the man: Hello will never compromise between moral rigour and social advancement, even at the cost of lifelong impoverishment.

Saint-Sulpice, Lacordaire and Gratry

Turned away from the Bar, Hello turns to theology. His admiration for Père Lacordaire, whose sermons he goes to hear, and for Père Gratry, philosopher and Oratorian engaged in the dialogue between faith and reason, orients him towards theological studies, which he pursues at Saint-Sulpice under the direction of Abbé Baudry.^[26] This formation, never crowned by a priestly ministry, will durably mark his style and his concerns: all his lay work will remain haunted by the great questions of mystical theology, the nature of evil, the meaning of suffering, the presence of the supernatural in history.

Zoé Berthier, "Jean Lander"

On 12 November 1857, Hello marries Zoé Berthier, daughter of an officer, herself a writer under the pseudonym "Jean Lander".^[27] Far from being a self-effacing wife, she becomes her husband's closest collaborator, sharing his intellectual and spiritual battles until his death. The couple settles at the manor of Kéroman, near Lorient, where Hello sets up his study in a round tower adjoining a pavilion — the discreet setting of a life entirely turned towards writing and prayer.^[28]

Le Croisé: the first great disappointment

In 1859, Hello founds with Georges Seigneur the daily Catholic newspaper Le Croisé, copies of which — notably that of 14 January 1860 — are kept today at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.^[29] The venture is short-lived: the newspaper ceases publication after two or three years, following a break with Seigneur, whom Hello accuses of esoteric deviations incompatible with the Catholic orthodoxy he intended to defend.^[30] This failure, the first in a long series of editorial disillusions, will remain for him one of the hardest trials of his career as a man of letters — a foretaste of the solitude accompanying all his work.

The Veuillot years: polemicist at L'Univers

From 1867 to 1871, Hello finds in Louis Veuillot, editor-in-chief of the great Catholic daily L'Univers, an employer and a faithful reader. There he publishes a series of polemical articles, often fierce, devoted to Voltaire, Shakespeare, George Sand and Victor Hugo — so many great figures of the century whom he submits to his critique of intransigent Christianity.^[31] These years of regular collaboration secure him, for the first time, a stable platform, without bringing him recognition or material comfort.

Kéroman: solitude and death

Hello's last years unfold in growing poverty, at the manor of Kéroman, whose condition deteriorates along with his own strength. According to testimony reported by the press of the time, shortly before his death he refuses the material help offered him by the journalist Félix Platel, faithful to that demand of dignity which governed his whole life.^[32] He dies on 14 July 1885, aged 56, and rests in the cemetery of his native town, Lorient.^[33][34] His death provokes, in part of the press, ambiguous, sometimes mocking articles, questioning his mental health and his sincerity — a sign, once more, of the incomprehension surrounding his work in his lifetime.^[35]

Ernest Hello's work, scattered among essays, translations, press articles and posthumous compilations, fits into no simple academic category. It is nevertheless organized around a few summits worth distinguishing.

Against Renan and the atheism of the century

Hello's first great book, published in Paris by C. Douniol in 1859, is entitled M. Renan, l'Allemagne et l'athéisme au XIXe siècle.^[36] It is a frontal refutation of the rationalism of Ernest Renan and of the influence, judged corrosive to the faith, of post-Hegelian German philosophy on French letters.^[37] This first essay already sets the tone of all the work to come: a militant Christianity, refusing all conciliation with the triumphant scientistic scepticism of the Second Empire.

Le Style: a theory of expression as truth

In 1861 appears Le Style (théorie et histoire), in which Hello develops a demanding conception of writing: style is not a rhetorical ornament, but the most faithful possible expression of an inner truth. This conception explains the density, sometimes disconcerting, of his own prose — a prose seeking less to convince by demonstration than to make the reader see through image and aphorism.

L'Homme (1872): the masterpiece

L'Homme, published in 1872 by Victor Palmé in Paris, is unanimously considered the summit of Hello's work.^[38] Neither systematic treatise nor collection of detached thoughts, the book advances through large sections devoted to life, science and art, in a prose aiming less to convince the reader than to provoke in him a shock of recognition before mystery. From this book comes one of Hello's most often quoted formulas, on the paradoxical relationship between light and mystery:

"The more light grows for man, the more mystery grows with it. Each truth that appears hides itself even as it appears: for it does not appear totally, and the more man sees it, the more he sees that he does not see it. The further he advances on the road, the longer the road stretches before him." — Ernest Hello, L'Homme, 1872, book II (La Science), section "Du mystère", p. 88^[39]

One editorial fact deserves notice: after Hello's death, the posthumous editions of L'Homme published by Perrin, under the added subtitle La Vie — La Science — L'Art, were expurgated of certain passages deemed shocking to the Catholic public of the time, without these cuts being signalled to readers.^[40] Only in the twentieth century did reissues restore the integrity of the original 1872 text — a further sign of the difficulty the French literary Church always had in receiving Hello without smoothing him down.

Translator of the mystics: Ruysbroeck and Angela of Foligno

One of Hello's most lasting contributions to French spiritual culture is his work as a translator. In 1869, he publishes Rusbrock l'Admirable, a French translation of selected pieces by the great Flemish mystic Jan van Ruysbroeck (fourteenth century); in 1873 follows Le Livre des visions et instructions, a translation of the writings of the Italian mystic Angela of Foligno.^[41] Through these two translations, Hello introduces into France, well before the great wave of scholarly interest in the medieval mystics in the twentieth century, two major voices of medieval mysticism, until then largely reserved for specialists in Latin or Middle Dutch. J.-K. Huysmans will share with him this veneration for Ruysbroeck, whom he will himself introduce to his own readers in En route.^[42]

Physionomies de saints (1875)

In 1875 appears Physionomies de saints, a collection of spiritual portraits in which Hello attends less to the factual biography of the saints than to seizing, in each figure, a unique trait of Christian holiness — a method announcing, in its own way, the attention later paid by certain twentieth-century Catholic authors to the irreducible singularity of each vocation to holiness. The work will be translated into English under the title Studies in Saintship (London, 1903), a sign of a posthumous diffusion reaching beyond French borders.^[43]

Les Plateaux de la balance (1880)

In the preface to Les Plateaux de la balance (1880), Hello formulates with particular force the exigency governing all his literary and moral criticism:

"I hungered and thirsted for Justice; I wanted to do it, I wanted to think it; I wanted to speak it. I wanted to put men and things in their place, I wanted to take their measure, and to give it." — Ernest Hello, Les Plateaux de la balance, preface, 1880^[44]

The title itself — the balance, the instrument that weighs justly — sums up the project: a criticism seeking neither complacency nor gratuitous polemic, but exactness of judgment, rendered in the name of a justice transcending the literary fashions of the moment.

Paroles de Dieu (1877) and the posthumous compilations

Paroles de Dieu, réflexions sur quelques textes sacrés appears in 1877; a new edition follows in 1899.^[45] After Hello's death, several volumes gather his articles scattered through the Catholic press: Le Siècle, les hommes et les idées thus appears in 1896 from Perrin, with a preface-letter by Henri Lasserre, while Le Jour du Seigneur will not be published until 1921, more than thirty-five years after his death.^[46] This long posthumous editorial labour, spread over nearly half a century, illustrates in its own way the Hello paradox: a body of work too dense, too demanding, to be immediately assimilated by its century, but which never ceased to be patiently gathered by readers convinced of its value.

Here, in summary, are Ernest Hello's principal publications:

Hello is not a theologian by trade; he was never ordained, and his work remains, strictly speaking, that of a layman. But he left, through his essays and aphorisms, a few spiritual intuitions of rare force, deeply rooted in the Christian mystical tradition he himself helped make known through his translations.

Wonder as a virtue of intelligence

Hello's entire spiritual pedagogy lies in the exhortation already quoted: "Be astonished, and keep your astonishment long."^[47] Against the systematic spirit of his century — whether scientistic rationalism or the bourgeois comfort of a religion without rigour — Hello defends an intelligence remaining open to the excess of the real, capable of perceiving in creation and in Revelation a depth no complete explanation ever exhausts.

The mystery that grows with light

This same intuition is found, formulated more amply, in the passage already quoted from L'Homme on light and mystery: each discovered truth, far from closing the question it illuminates, reveals a vaster one still.^[48] This conception stands frontally opposed to the positivist ideal of a knowledge which, accumulated indefinitely, would end by dissipating all mystery: for Hello, authentic knowledge of God and of man is by nature a march without term, not a problem solved once for all.

The critique of mediocrity

A third axis runs through all his work, notably the posthumous collection Le Siècle, les hommes et les idées: the denunciation of mediocrity as the spiritual sin of the century. A striking formula, drawn from this collection, sums up this critique:

"Mediocrity has a passion for the level. It runs the same knife over every head, at the same height." — Ernest Hello, Le Siècle, les hommes et les idées, Paris, Perrin, 1896, part I, ch. XIII "La Folie", p. 99^[49]

This image of the knife levelling every head announces, almost word for word, the charge Léon Bloy will himself lead, a few years later, against what he will call "the bourgeoisie" — a further sign of the direct filiation between the two writers. For Hello, mediocrity is not a mere defect of taste: it is a refusal of the greatness to which God calls each soul, a way of cutting all spiritual life down to the height of common comfort.

Truth as the Sabbath of the mind

Finally, in Philosophie et athéisme, Hello formulates his conception of truth in a sentence of wholly Pascalian density:

"Truth is the Sabbath of the mind." — Ernest Hello, Philosophie et athéisme (posthumous works), Paris, Ch. Poussielgue, 1888, pp. 46-47^[50]

As the biblical Sabbath is rest in God after the work of creation, truth, for Hello, is not only an object of knowledge to be conquered by intellectual effort: it is the very place where the mind, at last, ceases its agitation to rest in what surpasses it. This conception, the antipodes of the conquering rationalism of his century, makes every authentic intellectual quest a preparation for adoration.

Léon Bloy: debt and fidelity

Léon Bloy's debt to Hello has already been mentioned: it is he, with Barbey d'Aurevilly, who forms the Catholic intelligence of the young Bloy in the years following his conversion.^[51] All his life, Bloy will keep for Hello a veneration mingled with gratitude, and will return to his work several times in his own writings, notably in his study collected in Un Brelan d'excommuniés (1889)^[52]. For the complete biography of Léon Bloy, his own work and his own posterity, see the article Léon Bloy (1846-1917).

Huysmans: "this astonishing Hello"

Huysmans's recognition, already quoted through Là-bas, does not stand alone: the author of En route shares with Hello the same veneration for Ruysbroeck, and his own trajectory of conversion, marked by the frequentation of the great mystics, owes much to readings Hello, first of all, had made accessible in French.^[53]

Posthumous rediscovery and twentieth-century oblivion

After Joseph Serre's first biography (1894) and the late-nineteenth-century reissues, Hello experiences a beginning of recognition. The Mercure de France devotes to him, in December 1894, some thirty pages — a sign that the literary world, ten years after his death, is beginning to take the measure of what it long ignored.^[54] But this rediscovery remains fragile: over the course of the twentieth century, Hello largely falls back into oblivion for the general public, saved from complete disappearance by a small circle of faithful readers — often linked to the world of Catholic publishing — who regularly reissue his great texts.

Bernanos, Claudel, Michaux: an underground influence

Hello's influence extends beyond Bloy's circle alone. A reading by Georges Bernanos (Journal d'un curé de campagne) or by Paul Claudel (biblical exegesis) is sometimes mentioned, without being solidly documented; and reaching even the poet Henri Michaux, who would claim Hello alongside Lautréamont in his contribution to the special issue "Le Cas Lautréamont" of Le Disque Vert (1925)^[55]. This last filiation, unexpected as it may seem — a poet of the twentieth-century avant-garde claiming a forgotten nineteenth-century Catholic mystic — says much about the nature of the imprint Hello left: less a school than a radical way of demanding of literature that it confront mystery rather than sidestep it.

Why Hello remains relevant

More than a century after his death, Ernest Hello continues to put to his readers a question that has lost none of its relevance: that of the price to be paid for refusing the spiritual mediocrity of an age. His very life — the Bar refused out of conscience, the newspaper lost through intransigence, poverty accepted to the end — illustrates, in its austere way, the conviction running through all his work: truth is not negotiated against comfort. This radicality, which largely explains his lack of success in his lifetime, is also what continues to draw to him, generation after generation, a small number of demanding readers — the same, at bottom, as those of whom Barbey d'Aurevilly, Huysmans and Bloy had been the first representatives.

• Léon Bloy, his disciple and second spiritual son, who owes a decisive part of his own conversion to him — Léon Bloy (1846-1917).
• Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Bloy's godchildren and thus indirect heirs of Hello's influence — Jacques Maritain, Raïssa Maritain.
• Charles Péguy and Paul Claudel, other figures of the literary "Catholic revival" at the turn of the twentieth century — Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel.
• Georges Bernanos, whose reading of Hello is sometimes mentioned, a hypothesis not solidly documented — Georges Bernanos.