Julian Green inKlagenfurt

MAY 18, 2017 / EDMUND WALDSTEIN, O.CIST.

In a moving essay on the great American-French novelist Julien (Julian)

Green,Rick Yoder quotes many passages from Greens autobiographical writings
and diaries expressing his deep longing for God, and the insight that it gives him
into the beauty and sadness of human life.

I had only read a little Green up to

now. A friend of mine (who has had a
struggle similar to Greens) gave me
an autographed copy of a German
translation of Greens late novel Les
toiles du Sud(The Stars of the
South).I found it strange and
entrancing; a story of the antebellum
South, which Green knew from the
stories of his Southern mother, full of
nostalgia for a time that never was.
But I never nished it partly
because I wanted to read the prequel
rst, and partly because it seemed to
me that German translation isnot
the best medium for reading
historical novels about the American
South. And, until now, I had not German translation of Les toiles du Sud
followed through with my intention
of beginning Green again. But
Yoders essay hasgiven me a new stimulus.

By a strange coincidence I was reading Yoders essay on Tuesday on a train to

Klagenfurt, where Iam preaching May Devotions at the Cathedral. The same
friend who originally introduced me to Green sent me a text message telling me
that I must visit Greens grave in theSt. Egid Church.And so of course I went to
St. Egid, and lit a candle for Green.
Why was Green buried in Klagenfurt? Apart from a few years in America, the
countryof his parents, Green lived his whole life in Paris. In fact, he rst visited
Klagenfurt at the ripe old age of 90, only eight years before his death. So why
Klagenfurt? The question puzzled many at the time of his funeral.Die
Zeitexpressed that puzzlement brilliantly in a paragraph that is a classic of
German contempt for Austria:

He who has once been in Klagenfurt, will not really want to return there.
Too small, too Habsburg yellow, too few shops. The people are too
friendly, the lake is too beautiful, the hearts and minds of the city
counselors are too conservative. Ingeborg Bachmann was brought home
there by force after her death, and buried there without her permission.
Now Julien Green, born 1900 in Paris, died 1998 in Paris, a Parisian down
to thesilver knob on his cane, has found his last rest in Klagenfurt.
Bishop Egon Kapellari buried the French poet in the city Church of St.
Giles. Apparently, no tting graveyard could be found in France. We do
not knowwhat drove Julien Green, who dreamed all his life of America, to
make his last journey to the capital city of Carinthia.From Klagenfurt we
have only the statement that the city senate decided in a unanimous vote
to pay half of the funeral expenses.Oh you generous city counselors!

Die Zeit would have only needed to read the excerpts from Greens diary
published in an article in theBerliner Zeitunga year before Greens death to
solve the puzzle:

We will be buried in Austria, the land of Mary; or rather, we will be

entombed there in stone Why not France? For one reason, because I do
not want our bodies to be exhumed later on, as happens at the Pre
Lachaise and other places in France la Douce. Austria, by contrast, has
generously offered us a whole chapel.
 Greens funeral in Klagenfurt (source)

President Mitterand had offered Green a grave in front of the cathedral of Notre
Dame, but Green did not want pigeons making a mess on his grave. He himself
hadwanted to be buried in the Church ofAndrsy, but the French Church had
refused his request to have his adopted son and quondam lover Jean-Eric buried
with him, for fear of scandal. Green had been moved by a statue of our lady in St.
Egid, and thethen bishop of Klagenfurt, Egon Kapellari, a man of deep
appreciation for the arts, was only too happy to have both Greens entombedin a
side chapel there. In an apparent jab at France, Green had his name spelled in its
original American form Julian rather than the French Julien under which his
books had appeared.

The cathedral in Klagenfurt has continued to cultivate the Austrian tradition

(abandoned in so many places) of having May Devotions every evening in the
month of May. They have a different choir sing each day. And they have a series
of guest preachers, who preach two or three May sermons on successive days.
I preached yesterday and the day before, and will preach again tonight. I have
been preaching on the theological virtues, taking titles of our Lady from the
Litany of Loretto: Virgo Fidelis (faith), Stella Matutina (hope), and tonight,Mater
Pulchrae Dilectionis (love). Now I have decided to use the sermon of the Mother
of Beautiful Love to talk about Green. Heres an a sketch of what I mean to say:

I am the mother of fair love, and of fear, and of knowledge, and of holy
hope. In me is all grace of the way and of the truth, in me is all hope of
life and of virtue.Come over to me, all ye that desire me, and be lled
with my fruits. For my spirit is sweet above honey, and my inheritance
above honey and the honeycomb. (Ecclesiasticus [Sirach] 24:24-
27;Douai-Rheims)

Yesterday I took a walk through Klagenfurt, andvisited the tomb of the great
American-French novelist Julian Green. It was very moving for me to pray at his
tomb. As it happens I had just been reading some passages from Greens diaries,
collected by a friend of mine. Perhaps you will forgive me for speaking a little of
Green here in Klagenfurt, even it seems like bringing coals to Newcastle.

Green was a writer who had a deep insight in to the longing of the human heart
for love.Human hearts yearn for the joy of true love, of beautiful love, a love that
ennobles, a love that gives us a home. Love is the conformity of the heart to a
lovable object the hearts receiving the impressionof a lovable form, like wax
receiving the impression of a seal an impression that makes the heart yearn for
unity with the beloved.And Greenknew that our hearts were made to receive
the impression of one who isin nitely lovable and beautiful.And he deeply felt
the mystery that we are somehow banished from the happiness of suchlove,
that we are yearning for something hoped for and remembered that just eludes
us:

That deep longing for happiness, that longing I have in me, as we all have,
so much so, for instance, that I cant listen without melancholy to a bird
singing on a too ne summer day in Paris, where does it come from? It is
not merely the longing to possess everything, formerly so strong in me; it
is a painful and sometimes pleasant nostalgic longing for a happiness too
far away in time for our brief memory to retrace it, something like a
recollection of the Garden of Eden, but a memory adapted to our
weakness. Too much joy would kill us. (Diary: 1928-1957 81)

And Green felt deeply the great fear of our hearts that we will lose that
happiness of receiving beautiful love, that we will be alone, cast out. And he
understood the danger of a false love, an impure love; a love that is bent into the
wrong direction, whichloves in the wrong way abusing the beloved for sel sh
pleasure, or for a perverse, sterile simulation of the fruitful love of marriage. As
beautiful as pure love is, so sad and sordid is love bent awry. How sad it is to see
the innocence of young hope in love destroyed by such impure love.

Green was born in Paris toAmerican parents. After growing up there, he went to
his parents country for the rst time as a young man to study at the University
of Virginia. Duringa Latin class at UVA, his professor, commenting on a passage
of Virgil said:Gentlemen, it seems pointless for me to disguise the meaning of
this passage: we are dealing here with the shame of Antiquity, by which I mean
boy-love. In a moment Green realized that this shame was his. He had deep
homosexual inclinations. And they became for him a great source of struggle and
suffering: a cross. He realized that they were a perverse bending of his natural
desire for love:

Vice begins where beauty ends. If one analyzed the impression produced
by a beautiful body, something approaching religious emotion would be
found in it. The work of the Creator is so beautiful that the wish to turn it
into an instrument of pleasure comes only after a confused feeling of
adoration and wonder. (Diary: 1928-1957 93).
And so he struggled. His struggle had ups and downs, now he succumbed to
temptation, now he roseto new heights.He experienced the sorrow of falling
into sin, the way that sin destroys the beauty of life; and he experienced the joy
of forgiveness, the way new found grace trans gures everything:

One loses all in losing grace. Many a time have I heard this said, but it is
curious to observe that a single sin disenchants the whole of the spiritual
world and restores all its power to the carnal world. The atrocious chaos
immediately reorganizes itselfA veil stretches over the page. The book
is the same, the readers soul has grown darka single act of contrition is
enough for this wretched phantasmagoria to vanish and for the
marvelous presence of the invisible to return. A man who has not felt
such things does not know one of the greatest happinesses to be had on
earth. (Diary: 1928-1957 300).

Those of you have been to the May Devotions the past few days will perhaps
have seena pattern in my sermons. The Faithful Virgin, who givesus faith, the
Star of the Morning, who grounds our hope: faith and hope, the rst two of the
three theological virtues. And now there remain faith, hope, and love, these
three: but the greatest of these is love (1 Cor 13:13). Today I want to speak of
theMater Pulchrae Dilectionis, the Mother of Beautiful Love: the mother who
loves us, and helps us to love with a pure and beautiful love. For her whole life
she loved God above all things; her whole heart was deeply impressed and
formed by his in nite goodness and beauty, and everything that she did, she did
out of pure love of him. And because she loved God,she loved all his creatures
with a chaste and noble love. And for this reason her life isincomparably
beautiful and noble:Tota pulchra es, amica mea, et macula non est in te:Thou art
all beautiful, O my love, and there is not a spot in thee. (Song of Songs 4:7). And
now she is united with God in the in nite happiness of love, and from that
in nite happiness she reaches down to us, to help us receive the joy of the
in nite love of God, the love that receives us and promises us a true home. And
she helps us to love in return to stretch outwith a pure and noble love for
God, and to love all His children for His sake.

Oh Mother of BeautifulLove, look down on your children today, help us to escape

the sadness of disordered love, and to love God with all our hearts and souls. Form
our hearts with His impression. Make us yours that we might be entirely His.
Amen.

The Opalescent Parrot

JULIAN GREEN , LITERATURE , SERMON NOTES