Grand Cru Classé

The French literati approach religion like they approach (French) wine. You'll find pearls of extremely good christianity in French books, and you'll find these books on a saturday afternoon, in the dusty racks of a second hand bookshop. Furtively, you make your way to the "religion and philosophy" corner, pretending that you're casually browsing it as part of your broad, broad curiosity about the world.

You're left thinking: do people really read this? And hell, they do! The shopkeeper will have read it, the grey-haired professor type will have read it, the chic boho lady and the eighteen year old grungy student will have read it. Lots of Frenchmen are conversant with Meister Eckart, it's the talk of the town! It gets passed around between friends. They're also reading all the thoughts of a good handful of our French true pillars of fire.

The only issue I've got with it is that the French seem to enjoy such books the way they would enjoy a good bottle of wine. Here, the Kingdom is not spiritualised, it is "culturised". You can become a fine connoisseur of beautiful souls and enjoy their faithful brilliance like you'd enjoy a French Grand Cru, it's a subtle form of hedonistic escapism. In fact, my countrymen probably enjoy these books together with a glass of wine!!!


PS: This post was prompted by my frustration this morning when trying to search for a phrase that a friend had once told me. She had found it in one of these obscure French books. Google knew nothing about it. The sentence reads: "la reponse, c'est de demeurer dans la question*" and prompted some of my thinking on the topic of Christian calling, which I don't think is a one-off event.



* The answer is to dwell in the question