Pilgrim of the Stars

Of the three men who contributed most to the groundbreaking study of John Calvin's aesthetics, shattering the myth that Calvin was not concerned with, or opposed, the cultivation of the arts -- Abraham Kuyper and Émile Doumergue being the first two -- Léon Wencelius (1900-1971) is credited with authoring "[t]he most extended secondary discussion of Calvin's view on art," that is, L'Esthétique de Calvin (Paris, 1937) (Paul Corby Finney, Seeing Beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition, p. 28).

He was a French soldier-turned-philosophy professor who left the land of his nativity to teach at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. He is known to Calviniana as the author of Calvin et Rembrandt. Etude comparative de la philosophie de l'art de Rembrandt et de l'esthetique de Calvin (1937); "L'Idee de Moderation dans la Pensee de Calvin," The Evangelical Quarterly 7.1 (Jan. 1935): 87-94; Le Classicisme du Calvin Humanisme et Renaissance (1938), v. 231-246; "L'Idee de joie dans la pensee de Calvin," Revue d'Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses (1935) 70-109; "L'Idee de moderation dans la pensee de Calvin," Evangelical Quarterly, VII (1935), 87-94; VIII (1936), 75-93; and "The Word of God and Culture" in The Word of God and the Reformed Faith: The Addresses of the Second American Calvinistic Conference of 1942; among other works. But he may be known to readers outside the Reformed tradition as the close friend and sometime editor of works by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the world-famous pilot, adventurer, and writer, author of that most famous of children's stories, The Little Prince, known for poetic and vivid descriptions of the night sky (at least three asteroids are named for him or his works) and as "the pilgrim of the stars."

They met in New York City in 1940, while World War II was raging, where Wencelius had been sent to help influence America to join the French fight against the Nazis. The two men took an instant liking to one another, and became fast friends. Saint-Ex, as he is often called, is one of the great adventurers of the 20th century but -- an admirer of Bach and Pascal -- he sometimes said that he wished he had lived in the 16th century.

Curtis Cate, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: His Life and Times, pp. 553-554:

To feel, like Hamlet, that one's time is "out of joint" and to regret that one was not born in an earlier and "brighter" age is not simply the mark of an incurable romantic. Saint-Exupery's upbringing, in effect that of a monarchist, made him prone to a nostalgia that was tempered, but only momentarily, by the giddy enthusiasm with which he embraced the bright future of aviation. Unlike [Charles] Baudelaire, he was not ready to condemn steam-engines and railway stations out of hand, but like Baudelaire, he was oppressed by the feeling that the poetry was being squeezed out of modern life by the implacable advance of an ever more soulless and utilitarian technology. His ideal was pre-revolutionary -- in the industrial as well as the political sense -- and this even though, as he once wrote to his mother (during his term of Air Force service in Strasbourg) "the eighteenth century, all pink and rosy, fills me with horror". The age of silk stockings and powdered wigs was too soft and effeminate for his robust taste, and the century which had his preference, the one he would have liked to live in, as he one day confided to Dr. Pelissier, was the sixteenth -- the age of Elizabeth and Henri IV, of Francois Premier and the Chevalier Bayard, the century of Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Rabelais, when France, its mind as yet unravished by the eloquence of Rene Descartes, was readier to heed the sceptical voice of Michel de Montaigne.

He wrote of wisdom, childlike simplicity in a world of adults, and of man's striving to live, to truly live, by overcoming the obstacles -- man-made and otherwise -- in one's path, and his writing reflected his life. It is difficult for me to find a label for his religious views. There is an existentialist flavor in his writings and he seemed to waver somewhere between Pascal and Nietzsche, somewhere between faith and reason. His life was cut short in 1944, when his plane mysteriously disappeared on a reconnaissance flight over the Mediterranean, presumably shot down by Germans. His identity bracelet was recovered in 1998, and his plane finally found in 2000.

Wencelius edited a 1943 edition of Pilot de Guerre (English title: Flight to Arras) with a preface, "Le message d'Antoine de Saint-Exupéry," along with annotations and a glossary. In 1963, he co-edited Citadelle, a massive book that was in rough form at his death, and is difficult to characterize, being the unfinished magnum opus of a man trying to reconcile the unreconcilable.

Léon Wencelius has distinguished no less than one hundred different themes in this book of 213 chapters and 985 typescript pages (reduced to 531 in the printed text). (ibid, 557)

In the friendship of Wencelius and Saint-Exupéry, we find an intersection of life and art, religion and warrior heroics, faith and reason, that co-exists somehow, the sum of which is greater than the parts. To what extent each influenced other I cannot say. But it is certain that they did so, and the aesthetic appreciation of both military men resonates in their writings long after both men are gone. As Saint-Exupéry the pilot-poet himself put it: "J'admire la Science, bien sur. Mais j'admire aussi la Sagesse." ("I admire Science, to be sure. But I admire Wisdom as well.")