The Pilgrim of the Absolute

The Pilgrim of the Absolute is a collection of Léon Bloy’s writings, selected and edited by Raissa Maritain. The volume shows Bloy at the heights of his implacable fury toward the rich and haughty and at the depths of his seemingly inescapable poverty. Bloy spared no one with the excoriations that poured from his pen—a fact from which the selections of Maritain do not shy away, allowing the reader to experience firsthand the frustrating paradox of the Pilgrim of the Absolute. As David Bentley Hart writes in his Introduction to this new edition, the key words to reading and understanding Bloy are “and yet”:“Bloy was bellicose and choleric, splenetic and vicious…. He was not merely irascible—he was cruel.And yet...This is the infuriating and baffling mystery of Bloy. All of this is true, and all of it truly deplorable—and yet Bloy was a man of extraordinarily sensitive and fierce conscience…even underneath the unabated ferocity and malice [of his prose] lay a bottomless reservoir of sincere compassion and incorruptible integrity.”