SPIRITUALITY

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a spirituality without God?

July 31, 2024 marks 80 years since the death of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Although he claimed to have no faith, his works are impregnated with Christian culture and references. What was the spirituality of the “mystical aviator”?

80 years ago, on July 31, 1944, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry disappeared off the coast of Marseille while flying a reconnaissance mission for the Allies from Corsica. Despite the discovery of the wreckage of the plane in 2003, we still do not know why or how the aviator died.

But if his death remains a mystery, his life and his writings raise others, especially his relationship with faith. Although he said he did not believe in God, for many he was a decisive spiritual teacher. “For seventy-two years, I have been asking myself questions,” confesses Father Stan Rougier (author of First 15 days with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry). “Why did God use Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s prose to knock on my door?”

The historian Michel Faucheux writes: “Since my earliest childhood, I have had a relationship with Saint-Exupéry, who introduced me to the search for an inner truth” (Michel Faucheux, Saint-Exupéry, the spirituality in desert). Can a spirituality without God lead to God?

The magic of childhood

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyon into a noble family. Despite the death of his father when he was only four years old, he had a happy childhood. His mother was very religious and had an artistic temperament. She passed on her faith to her five children, whom she raised alone, playing music with them and reading them stories. “He gave the young Saint-Exupéry a truly magical childhood,” says Michel Faucheux. Antoine was educated by the Brothers of the Christian Schools, then by the Jesuits and, in Switzerland, by the Marianists. In 1917, when he had just passed high school, his 15-year-old brother died. At the age of 18 he falls in love, but his engagement breaks off five years later. Little by little he distances himself from faith and religious practice. He struggled to find his way. A fan of aviation since childhood and a pilot since military service, he enlisted in 1926 to transport mail between France and Senegal, and then South America. He published his first novels: Southern Mail in 1929 and Night flight in 1931. In 1939, he flew in the French Air Force and, after the armistice, he went to New York, where he wrote The Little Prince. In 1943 he joined the Allies.

An insatiable thirst in a materialistic world? Since his first novels, although he declares himself agnostic, his work is impregnated with references to Christianity and spiritual, even mystical, issues. He has kept very close to his heart the Christian values ​​transmitted to him by his mother, and deplores a civilization without God, in which man is on the same level as the machines he has created: “I hate my time with all my might. Man he is dying of thirst (…) Two billion men now only hear robots, only understand robots and become robots themselves” (“Lettre au général X”, 1943)

This thirst that Saint-Exupéry speaks of is at the heart of his spirituality. “He lived a profound intellectual and spiritual loneliness in the silence of a desert of men,” writes Michel Faucheux. “To not have faith is to experience doubt and despair more often than the believer. It is to experience the horror of a materialized and mechanized civilization that disintegrates the human being.”

And yet, if there is despair, it does not translate into nihilism or inaction. On the contrary, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry “sang the praises of the commitments that unite us to the world,” writes Father Stan Rougier. The writer had “an undying desire to build souls,” he wrote in Citadelhis unfinished spiritual testament. “We must always keep awake what is great in man and convert it to its own greatness.”

Return to the spirit of childhood

This demand, which will never abandon, implies a return to the spirit of childhood, in the face of the vanity and emptiness of adults: “Poetry is the expression of the spirit of childhood and is inseparable from all spirituality,” summarizes Michel Faucheux ( …) “Restoring the poetry of childhood means perpetuating the spirit of Christmas, which satisfies the soul and allows us to be reborn.”

In land of menSaint-Exupéry wrote: “Mozart as a child will be marked like the others by the stamping machine (…). What torments me is the gardener’s point of view (…). What torments me are neither these gaps, nor these lumps, nor this ugliness. It is a bit of Mozart murdered in each of these men.”

“Return to men their spiritual sense”, as he says in his Écrits de guerre (War writings)is the meaning of all of Saint-Exupéry’s work. Even if he no longer had faith, “he would continue to claim a Christian culture that shaped his conscience,” says Michel Faucheux. “The religious reference is inescapable: ‘Once again, I have no other vocabulary than the religious one to express myself.'”

But this reference and this vocabulary have a different nuance than that of the catechism, which, Father Stan Rougier admits, “left me insensitive and indifferent.” On the contrary, “Antoine de Saint-Exupéry gave to the message of Christ words that speak to the heart of every human being, words that unite people. Words that put them on their feet.”

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