Max Jacob - Mystique et Martyr - Manuscrit autographe - Notes sur la méditation - 22 Décembre - 1939

Remarkable autograph spiritual meditation drafted on December 22, 1939 in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, sent to the front to Brigadier Pierre Lagarde, with its stamped and postmarked dispatch envelope. Written in brown ink on a sheet of laid paper.

“Notes of the meditation
- It must be an instrument of progress. For progress is the normal state of the Christian, and one who does not advance regresses.
- It must give us the horror of what is animal in us. Humility, the key to progress
Humility: perfect knowledge of ourselves.
- The Christian at the human level (but not at the animal level). The meditation achieves it; that is its purpose. The aim is to attain the strictly human level in goodness; understanding of humanity. It is the Christian intelligence to be obtained.
- The communion with Our Lord Jesus Christ through thought. What resembles each other tends to come together. The aim is to resemble Our Lord Jesus Christ. That is why meditation on His words is best: it is not a matter of speaking about them, but of making them one’s own, emulating His spirit, His countenance, His tone, His conduct. “It is not I who live, but God who lives in me!” says St. Paul or someone else.
[...]”

Dimensions: 20.6 x 26.7 cm.
State: Small tears at the envelope folds. Good condition. See photos for more details.
Number of pages: 2 pages

These documents come from an exceptional collection of correspondences, manuscripts and notes dating from 1939-1940 by Max Jacob, a major figure of symbolism and French modernism, who was at once a poet, novelist, painter and mystic, and Pierre Lagarde, author of Max Jacob: mystic or martyr (Éditions Universitaires, 1959). They testify to a close intellectual and spiritual relationship between the two men. Pierre Lagarde, a careful reader and faithful friend, drew from the meditations, inventions and letters that Jacob entrusted to him the very material of his work. These pieces, of a mystical and poetic reach, illustrate the direct transmission between Max Jacob’s spiritual experience and the critical interpretation Lagarde gave it.

These documents are essential to understanding Jacob’s last creative period and the work undertaken by Pierre Lagarde to preserve its depth and religious dimension.

- Max Jacob, born Max Jacob Alexandre on July 12, 1876 in Quimper and died March 5, 1944 in Drancy, is a modernist poet and novelist but also a French painter. Wikipedia

Carefully packaged in a rigid and watertight enclosure.