Pantheism is difficult to define. I think of it as the belief that God and the natural world are one, and when the natural world dies, it follows that God dies.

God doesn’t die. God is immortal. So, if you are a pantheist, you believe that the world is God, and that the world is immortal. This is not the case for me. I think the world will die like the rest. I do not know towards what end things go. It is an enigma, but I do not want to call the enigma God. God is not the name of the enigma.

And when you write the name of God in your poetry, what are you referring to?

When I write the word “God” in my poetry, it is the Christian God. I received religious instruction, at first Protestant and then Catholic because my parents were divorced and I was converted. Then from the age of thirteen I no longer believed in God, but when I speak of God, it is the monotheistic God, the Judeo-Christian God which we learn of in Europe and in the United States. Are you Protestant or Catholic?

As with you. I was raised Catholic… Then I became Protestant… I still believe in the Judeo-Christian God, but I’d call it a non-traditional belief because I don’t believe that God is masculine.

You don’t believe God is masculine?

I suppose I subscribe to the metaphor, “God the Father,” but I also like to think about the mother goddess, Sophia. I am intrigued by Sophia.

I know about Sophia. I am very familiar with what you’re talking about. In L’Ecole Normale, someone introduced me to the story, which was a spiritual story of his country. He was an agnostic, named Alex Henri, and he wrote about Sophia and how the idea came from the old Sephardic Jewish tradition. You are Protestant as you have said, and you take part in Protestantism, but I am totally non-believing. So the idea of monotheism seems very primitive to me because the idea that we worship a God who allows everything to happen, including illness and war, seems to me absolutely horrible. When I speak of God, it is in this spirit. But to me, the Christian religion is a mythology, like any other, like Greek or Latin mythology, which appear quite often in my poems: I think about it for my writing, my work. As I don’t believe in God, as I don’t believe in incarnation, I don’t speak of Christ. I speak of Jesus, who died, and is mythological.

Mythology interests me very much because it is one of the ways people resolved their destiny, explained their destiny, and a poet cannot stay indifferent to all that has passed. Our task is to pay attention to our destiny.

Mythology interests me very much because it is one of the ways people resolved their destiny, explained their destiny, and a poet cannot stay indifferent to all that has passed. Our task is to pay attention to our destiny. This is why it interests me. But as to myself, I am closer to the thoughts of the poet Lucretius, for example. His thoughts could be called materialist, that is, believing only in matter. For me, matter is extremely important. Perhaps I am closest to this thinking. When I say “God” in my poems, it does not mean that I believe in him; it signifies that I am making the allusion to the monotheistic God in the manner of the others and sometimes, I do this angrily. For example, when I speak of illness and war. Then I speak of God who doesn’t let these things get defeated.

Joseph Campbell, an American comparative mythologist, once wrote that “Mythology is other people’s religion.” I think of Christianity as a mythology, too…

It is said that we must see things in a very large manner and you who are a believer, you think that you are in a mythology like any other mythology, where one side’s beliefs and the other’s are equally respectable. It is different from being Christian in the strict sense of the term and I do see where your thoughts are. The difference between your thoughts and mine are that I think that all these mythologies must be known and must be respected because it was the manner in which people tried to explain their destiny, but I do not participate in mythology. I look at it from the outside.

Ulysse attaché au mât de son navire,
afin de ne pas succomber au chant
des sirènes, mosaïque romaine.
(Roman mosaic: Ulysses attached to the mast
of his ship in order not to succumb
to the mermaids’ singing)
(Scanné de Coureurs des mers, Poivre d’Arvor)
Wikimedia Commons

Mythology interests me because we can learn from philosophers of antiquity such as Lucretius or the ancient Latin philosophers, above all the Saracens and Epicureans. There have been relatively few people who have not sought to relate to mythology, in terms of posing the essential questions about where we come from. For me, it is not something that truly exists, but as the history of man, the history of the spirit of man, it is very interesting. It appears often enough in my poems, coming to me as Orpheus or Oedipus or Jesus, but I don’t believe in one or the other. Often I speak of Ulysses, but Ulysses is something else: Ulysses was a seeker. In antiquity, they thought of Ulysses as an initiate who hadn’t made a voyage, and then goes on a voyage. This portrayal pleases me because it is also a concrete thing and I like concrete things. Ulysses goes on a voyage which is recounted in Ulysses, where he has all sorts of adventures. He didn’t want to go on this voyage, however. It was the gods who obliged him to go on it after the Trojan War. He was therefore thrown into this voyage without knowing the reason. At first he doesn’t stop at Ithaca, then he arrives at Ithaca, finds his wife among the suitors, and then he leaves again, because he descends into the underworld. There, he finds Teiresias, the seer Teiresias who is never mistaken, and tells him, “You will return to Ithaca with your oar on your shoulder and you will stop when you meet a wayfarer who will ask what is that fan you have on your shoulder.” This is something that the Greeks couldn’t imagine because they were a people who knew the ocean and certainly knew what oars were. Therefore, he arrives unknown, the wayfarer asks him this question, and at this moment he plants his oar in the ground and the gods send him a gentle death. Thus, he is someone who is obliged to return, you don’t know towards what end, and who will die. And it is the idea of Ulysses’ obligation to leave, and to leave two times, not knowing where he is going, that makes him a sort of double of man for me.