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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
But let a noise or scent, once heard or once smelt, be heard or smelt again in the present and at the same time in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, and immediately the permanent and habitually concealed essence of things is liberated and our true self which seemed—had perhaps for long years seemed—to be dead but was not altogether dead, is awakened and reanimated as it receives the celestial nourishment that is brought to it. A minute freed from the order of time has re-created in us, to feel it, the man freed from the order of time. And one can understand that this man should have confidence in his joy, even if the simple taste of a madeleine does not seem logically to contain within it the reasons for this joy, one can understand that the word ‘death’ should have no meaning for him; situated outside time, why should he fear the future?
These words written by Marcel Proust, and proceeding from the mouth of the narrator, Marcel, in Time Regained, the final volume of Remembrance of Things Past, may appear somewhat foreign to the proper concerns of Christian theology. The language as such is hardly alien, deploying as it does the imagery of Christian liturgy and mysticism: the awakening of what seems dead, the transcending of time, the overcoming of the fear of death—and all this through a form of ‘celestial nourishment’ first introduced into the narrative through the memory of the madeleine once tasted on Sunday mornings by the young Marcel before attending Mass.
1 Time Regained, HI. 906. All references to Proust's text are to the three–volume version of the translation by Moncrieff, C. K. Scott, Kilmanin, Terence and Mayor, Andreas, Remembrance of Things Past (Penguin 1983)Google Scholar.
2 Cf Meyendorff, John Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (Fordham University Press 1979), pp. 201 –211Google Scholar.
3 See, for instance, the summary in Crichton, J. D., ‘A Theology of Worship,’ in The Study of Liturgy, ed. Jones, Cheslyn, Wainwright, Geoffrey, Yarnold, Edward and Bradshaw, Paul, rev. ed. (SPCK 1992), pp. 17–20Google Scholar. For an evaluation of the recovery of the eschatological dimension in twentieth–century theology from one of the writers who has been most involved in this attempt, see Moltmann, Jü;rgen, The Coming of God.Christian Eschatology, trans. Kohl, Margaret (SCM 1996)Google Scholar, especially the opening chapter.
4 Cf chapter 1, ‘La béatitude,’ in Etienne Gilson, Introduction àľétude de saint Augustin (J. Vrin 1943), and also Augustine's argument that the desire for happiness requires immortality for its fulfilment in De trinitate XIII.iii.6–viii– 11.
5 Within a Budding Grove, 1.721.
6 Cities of the Plain, II.888.
7 The Fugitive. III.660.
8 Time Regained, III.908.
9 Time Regained. III.903.
10 Zizioulas, John D., Being as Communion. Studies in Personhood and the Church (DLT 1985), p.19Google Scholar.
11 Poulet, Georges, Studies in Human Time, trans. Coleman, Elliott (Johns Hopkins Press 1956), p.297Google Scholar.
12 Quoted in Poulet, Studies in Human Time, p.298, from Proust's Pastiches at mélanges. In the opening chapter of the book, Poulet traces the idea of the overcoming of time as succession through the phenomenon of memory back into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; see especially pp.23–29.
13 Koernke, Theresa F., art. ‘Mystery Theology,’ in The New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship, ed. Fink, Peter F. (Gill and Macmillan 1990), pp.883–891Google Scholar; the passage cited is from page 889.
14 Casel, Odo, The Mystery of Christian Worship and Other Writings, ed. Neunheuser, Burkhard (ET Darton, Longman and Todd 1962), p.54Google Scholar.
15 Quoted in Maurois, André, The Quest for Proust, trans. Hopkins, Gerard (Constable 1984), p.178Google Scholar.
16 The Guermantes Way, 11.86.
17 Mein, Margaret, Proust's Challenge to Time (Manchester University Press 1962), p. 127Google Scholar, discussing the views of Lester Mansfield.
18 Casel, Mystery of Christian Worship, p.67.
19 Time Regained III. 908
20 On the relationship between the notion of the extratemporal and the production of literary fiction in Remembrance of Things Past, see the discussion of Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative vol. II, trans. McLaughlin, Kathleen and Pellauer, David (University of Chicago Press 1985), pp.130–152Google Scholar.
21 Time Regained, III. 1106.
22 The Captive, III. 186. It has been claimed that the death–scene of Bergotte, which closes with these words, was revised by Proust as his own death approached; see Mein, Proust's Challenge to Time, pp.100–102.
23 Time Regained, III. 1094.
24 On the origins and subsequent reception of this concept, see Deseille, Placide, art. ‘Epectase,’ in Dictionnaire de spiritualité IV. 1 (Beauchesne 1960)Google Scholar, cols 785–788.
25 Cited in Wolin, Richard, Walter Benjamin:An Aesthetic of Redemption (University of California Press 1994), p.56CrossRefGoogle Scholar, from Benjamin's essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities.
