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André Frossard’s Personal Testimony
[David Hume famously said, “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.” Thus evidence is a matter of degree: the more evidence you have the more you believe and the less you have the less you believe. Evidence only becomes proof when the evidence is felt to be overwhelmingly strong by the vast majority. But just because the evidence for some proposition doesn’t convince us (and the people who think like us) doesn’t automatically mean that it’s not evidence. It merely means that it’s not conclusive evidence. Keeping all this in mind, does personal testimony of the kind below qualify as evidence for everyone, irrespective of one’s world view?]
“Now by an amazing chance it so happens that, with respect to the most stubborn of disputes, the most ancient of controversies, I know the truth. God exists. I have met Him.
“The meeting was unexpected—I could say it happened by chance were it not that chance plays no part in events of this kind. It created the sort of astonishment a man might feel if he went round the corner of a road in Paris and saw before him, not the familiar square or crossroads but a boundless ocean lapping at the doorsteps of the houses. It was a moment of utter astonishment which is still with me. I have never got used to the existence of God.”
[That was written in 1969, 34 years after the event. Here’s a very brief summary of what happened:]
At ten past five André Frossard went into a chapel in the Latin Quarter, looking for a friend. He went in there as a sceptic and atheist of the extreme left, and with something more than scepticism, something more than atheism, namely, an indifference and an immersion in so much that had so little to do with God that he no longer even bothered to deny His existence. It seemed to him absolutely one of those things that had long since been relegated to man’s insecurity and ignorance. He came out a few minutes later carried, uplifted, caught and borne forward on a tidal wave of inexhaustible joy.
Frossard’s father was one of the founders of the French Communist Party of which he was the first General Secretary. On 8th July 1935 his twenty-year-old son went out to dine with a friend who stopped on the way for a brief visit to a chapel, leaving André outside.
A few words about this friend: he was a fellow journalist and a medical student. His name was Willemin and he was from an academically gifted and rather accomplished family. In spite of their philosophical and political differences—Frossard was a radical socialist and Willemin was an anarcho-royalist (a political category that Frossard suspected had only one member)—these two friends loved nothing better than to walk along the banks of the Seine under the bridges having long conversations that went nowhere, everlastingly harking back to the left, the right, the monarchy, the republic, without moving a single step towards each other. “In his eyes,” said Frossard, “my status was that of donkey, and a donkey of a particularly wretched species, that of republican donkeys, godless donkeys, painted red and full of braying propaganda. He hadn’t the least respect for my opinions, nor I for his.”
In spite of this Frossard found his friend charming. “I delighted in his company, his quickness of mind, his gift for excellence, whether in playing the flute, in medicine, journalism, country cooking or mimicry, and even if I didn’t share his views, I was happy to be with him laughing at the same time and at the same things. I think it was in the hope of dealing a mortal blow to my obstinate socialism that my friend lent me a book one day by the Russian religious writer Nicholas Berdyaev entitled The New Middle Ages. This book, which completely failed to do what it was intended to do, was the cause of the misunderstanding that is at the origin of my conversion.”
“Berdyaev had, so far as I was concerned, a critical defect; he believed in God and spoke of Him not as a scientific hypothesis, which would have been permissible, but as truly existing, which so far as I was concerned still had to be proved. Having recourse to a God in order to make sense of the world and of history was in my view a subterfuge unworthy of a philosopher. What would be the point of a detective story in which the classic puzzle of a murder within an enclosed space was artificially solved by the intervention of a supernatural being capable of going through walls?
“That was my reasoning at the time and that’s why the reading of A New Middle Ages didn’t make the slightest impression on me. The conclusions Berdyaev drew from his faith with respect to Marxism, the Russian Revolution or the French Revolution were irrelevant to me, couldn’t reach me. This was the spirit in which I answered Willemin when he asked me how I felt about the book; I said the book ‘was not open to argument,’ by which I meant, once granted the premise of God’s existence, the rest followed logically. No discussion was possible.
“Willemin understood my position completely backwards, namely, that Berdyaev had convinced me. This made him so happy that he wanted us to celebrate the occasion by having dinner together, something I was always ready for. It may have been my distaste for having things too clear cut or the fear of spoiling his joyful mood, but I didn’t have the courage to disabuse him and I left him to his happiness. Since we were going to dine together, I thought, there would be time enough to point out his mistake when we got to the dessert.
“The newspaper was put to bed shortly before five o’clock in the afternoon and we set off in his old car, one of whose doors had to be kept shut with an elbow—still, a luxury unheard of at the time for young people like us. We crossed the Seine, a long way from the Ile Saint Louis; so we were not heading for his place. I presumed we were going to the Rue Mouffetard where we got the printed chips [the ink from the newspaper in which they were wrapped came off on the fries]. That meant dinner under the bridges. However, when we had roared through the crossroads at the end of the Rue Mouffetard, I gave up speculating. Perhaps we were going to have dinner at the restaurant after all, though it did seem a bit early for that. I am giving a lot of detail which may seem insignificant. My reader must allow for the fact that one is very inclined to go into detail when one has had the extraordinary good fortune to be present at one’s own birth.
“I asked no questions. I let myself be carried on by this friendship, careless of the direction it had chosen. The route he’d taken became less and less intelligible; we circled round the Latin Quarter and retraced our steps up the Rue Claude-Bernard, then up the Rue d’Ulm. We stopped in front of my old Ecole des Arts Decoratifs. My companion got out and addressed me through the car window: I could either follow him or wait for him a few minutes. I would wait. Presumably he had some little errand or visit to make. I saw him cross the road, push open a little door near a large wrought iron portal above which one could make out the roof of a chapel. Fair enough, he was going to pray, to go to confession, to perform one or other of those activities that took up a lot of time for Christians. That was one more reason for staying where I was.
“It’s the 8th July, a marvelous summer’s day. In front of me the Rue d’Ulm lies open like a sun-filled channel stretching up to the Pantheon. What were my thoughts? I don’t remember. Doubtless vague as usual. My inner state? Judging by the account one’s conscious mind can give of itself, my inner state was perfect, by which I mean it showed none of those disturbances which are assumed to predispose one to mysticism.
“My love life is trouble-free. That very evening I have an arrangement to meet a young German girl, a student at the Beaux Arts. She’s given me to understand that she wouldn’t be mounting too vigorous a defense of her frontiers. In a moment she’ll be so completely forgotten that it won’t even occur to me to call off our meeting.
“I’m free from metaphysical anxieties. My last such experience had been when I was around fifteen; it took the form of feeling that the universe, besieging and deafening me with what I can only call its unexplained torrent of information, will any moment now reveal to me the secret of its existence, the key to its codes. The universe had in fact revealed nothing to me at all and I’ve given up further questioning. In company with our socialist friends I believed that the world consists of politics and history and that nothing is more a waste of time than metaphysics.
“My new job as a journalist has done nothing to diminish my skepticism but a lot to alleviate the fears of my parents over my worrying adolescence. I am too young and have been at it too short a time for journalism to have brought me disappointments of the kind that create a void, a feeling of solitude such as might favour the emergence of religious feeling. I have no worries and create none for other people; my friendship with Willemin has freed me from the bad company I had kept for a while [the bad company were older journalists who took him along with them to their favourite brothels]. Generally speaking, the year is calm, the nation without disturbances within or threats from without and I have no corresponding anxieties.
“My health is good; I’m happy, so far as one can be and know that one is. The evening promises to be pleasant and I’m waiting. To sum up, I feel absolutely no curiosity whatsoever about anything to do with religion, all of which is simply out of date. It is ten past five. In two minutes I’ll be a Christian.
“As a contented atheist, I obviously hadn’t the faintest idea of this when, tired of waiting for the end of the incomprehensible devotions that were holding up my friend, I in my turn push open the little wrought iron door to take a closer look, for the sake of art or idle curiosity, at the building in which I am tempted to say he is dawdling (in actual fact I’ve been waiting for him at the most for three or four minutes).
“The chapel stands at the end of a short yard, one of those buildings in the English gothic style of the end of the nineteenth century, an art form whose reputation needs no comment. I don’t write this for the pleasure of criticizing but simply to make clear that artistic emotion had nothing to do with what follows.
“The interior was no more uplifting than the exterior. The nave is sharply divided into three parts. The first, starting at the entrance, is reserved for the faithful who say their prayers in semi-darkness. The second part is occupied by nuns, their heads hidden in black veils, like rows of patient birds settled in their varnished wooden benches. They belonged to an order founded as a pious response to certain excesses of the revolutionary spring of 1848.
“The far end of the chapel is quite brightly lit. Above the high altar draped in white, a vast arrangement of plants, candlesticks and ornaments is dominated by a large ornate metal cross with, at its centre, a dull white disc. I have before now been inside churches out of artistic interest but I have never seen a monstrance with a host in it, and I have no idea that I’m in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, towards which rise up two ranks of burning candles.
“All this has a significance that escapes me, the more so in that I am paying it hardly any attention. Standing near the door, I am looking around to find my friend but I cannot make him out among the kneeling forms in front of me. My gaze moves from shadow to light, returns to the congregation without inspiring any particular thought, goes from the faithful to the motionless nuns, from the nuns to the altar and then, I don’t know why, concentrates on the second candle burning to the left of the cross. And that’s the moment which without warning sets off the series of wonders that are going to demolish instantaneously and with inexorable violence the being that I am and bring to birth the child that I had never been.
“First of all, I hear the words: ‘spiritual life.’ I hear them as if they were spoken near me in a low voice by a person who is seeing something that I haven’t yet seen myself. The last murmured syllable has no sooner entered my consciousness than the avalanche begins. I can’t say that heaven opens; it doesn’t open, it’s hurled at me, it arises like a sudden silent thunderbolt from out of this chapel in which one would never have dreamed that it was mysteriously hidden. How can I describe it in these reductive words that threaten to intercept my thoughts and consign them to the realm of fantasy? The painter who was granted a glimpse of unknown colours, how would he paint them?
“It is like a crystal, indestructible, infinite in its transparency, almost unbearable in its brightness (a fraction more would annihilate me), another world of a brilliance and density that reduces ours to the faint shadows of unfinished dreams. It is reality, it is truth, I see it from the dark bank on which I am still held back. There is an order of being and, at its summit, the evidence of God, evidence become presence and presence become the person of the One whom a moment ago I would have denied.
“The flood that breaks over me brings with it a joy that is like the exultation of a man brought off from a shipwreck just in time, but with this difference, that it’s only at the moment when I’m rescued that I become aware of the mire in which, without realizing it, I’m buried and I can’t understand, seeing myself still half caught in it, how I have ever been able to live and breathe there.
“All these sensations that I am labouring to express in the defective medium of ideas and images come simultaneously, enfolded one within the other, and after many years I have not exhausted their content.
“Outside it was still a fine day. The world that once had been made of stone and asphalt was a garden in which I was to be allowed to play for as long as God was pleased to leave me there.
[Playing in that garden, by the way, involved seeing a psychiatrist at his parents insistence, going into the seminary to see if he had a vocation, going into the Navy, joining the French resistance after being demobilized, being arrested by the Gestapo in December of 1943, being tortured by Klaus Barbie, known as the butcher of Lyon—Frossard was a witness at Barbie’s trial 40 years later. The Gestapo had established their headquarters in a luxury, art-deco hotel in Lyon, the Hotel Terminus, and the arrangements were worthy of absurdist theatre. Apparently, as prisoners were being tortured a normal office operated in the same space. Frossard testified at the trial:
“I was strung up by the hands and feet, then suspended by a pole and immersed in cold water. Here you were hanging naked over an elaborately decorated bath while a secretary typed, people told jokes, someone smoked, someone munched on a sandwich, someone else looked out the window.”
On August 17 of 1944, two months after the D-Day invasion and a week before Lyon fell to the allies, he was taken from the Mount Luc Prison to the Bron airfield with the other 78 inmates of the “Jew Shed”—one of his grandparents was Jewish—where they were machine gunned. He was one of the seven that survived the massacre. He went on to write more than 15,000 articles for L’Aurore, Le Figaro and Le Monde, as well as a few dozen books. He was the first journalist to interview a pope, John Paul II; they hit it off and became phone pals. In 1987 he was elected to the Académie Francaise. Frossard died at Versailles in 1995. In short, a life full of incident and accomplishment.]
“Willemin was walking beside me and seemed to have noticed something unusual in my face; he gazed at me with medical thoroughness. ‘What is going on with you? You’re goggle-eyed!’
“God exists, it is all true.
“Five minutes later, on the terrace of a café, I was telling my friend everything, that is to say, everything that I could say as I struggled with what was inexpressible, about that world suddenly revealed, that blazing reality which had soundlessly demolished the house of my childhood and reduced it to a drift of mist. The ruined structures of my inner life lay all around me. I watched the passers-by and I thought of the amazement they would feel when they in their turn experienced the encounter that had just been granted to me. Certain that one day it would come to them as it had to me, I was smiling at the thought of the surprise awaiting unbelievers, half believers and nominal believers. One of us recalled the posturing dictator [they meant Mussolini] who on several occasions tried to shock an audience by giving Heaven two minutes in which to strike him dead, failing which he would consider himself entitled to make a public declaration that Heaven was empty. The absurdity of this challenge to the Infinite by a grain of dust left us helpless with laughter.
“I can see well enough just how exorbitant all these assertions must seem but I cannot help it if Christianity is true, if truth exists, if that truth is a person, a person who wills not to be unknowable.
“The miracle lasted for a month. Every morning I encountered with joy a light which made the sun seem dark, a sweetness that I will never forget and it didn’t seem at all clear to me why it was necessary to continue my stay on this planet when all that heaven was close enough to touch. Nevertheless every day that light and sweetness lost a little of their intensity and finally disappeared altogether. From then on, truth was to be communicated to me differently. I would have to seek after having found.”
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