The Spirit and the Water: Paul Claudel, Pneumatology, and the Sacralization of Finitude

Although the influence of Paul Claudel upon twentieth-century theology is well known, little attention has been given to the way that Claudel’s oeuvre can help us not only to rethink a kind of sacramental cosmology but also the ways in which pneumatology is bound up with this project and reveals it as something more than just a retrieval of the premodern sacred. Through a reading of Claudel's second Great Ode, 'Spirit and Water', I argue that Claudel’s pneumatology points towards a theological resacralization of the finite that includes human subjectivity and creativity, indeed, one that gives a central place to the body, creaturely finitude, and to the shaping work of the human imagination. In this way, Claudel points us to a robustly theological account of human subjectivity in a sacramental cosmos, an account that escapes the aporetic modern theological shuttle between the epistemological turn-to-the-subject and reactionary reassertions of premodern metaphysics.