Jean-Paul Sartre and the Nativity

We are in 1940, in Germany, in a camp of French prisoners. Among them, some priests asked Jean-Paul Sartre, who had been a prisoner with them for a few months, to write down a short meditation for Christmas’ Eve. Sartre, the atheist writer, accepted. And he offered to his companions those beautiful lines.

“You have the right to demand and see the Manger. Here it is. Here is the Virgin, here is Joseph, and here is the Child Jesus. The artist poured all his love in this drawing, maybe you will think he is naïve, but listen. You only need to close your eyes and listen to me, and I will share how I see them from inside me.

The Virgin is pale as she looks at the child. Worried wonderment is what should be painted on her face, a wonderment that only appeared once on a human face, because Christ is her child, the flesh of her flesh and the fruit of her womb. She carried him for nine months. She gave him her breast and her milk will become the blood of God. She holds him, and she says, “my baby”!

But sometimes she is taken aback, and she thinks “God is here” and she feels a religious fear growing for this mute God, for this child, because all mothers have been taken aback in such moments, by this fragment of their flesh that is their child, and they feel exiled as they face this new life that has been done with their lives and that is inhabited with foreign thoughts.

But none has been more cruelly and more quickly teared away than from this mother because He is God and He exceeds on all sides what she can imagine. And that’s a heavy trial for a mother to fear herself and her human condition in presence of her son. But I think there are other quick and smooth times where she feels that Christ is her son, her own baby, and he is God. She looks at him and she thinks “This God is my child! This divine flesh is my flesh, He was made from me, He has my eyes and his mouth is shaped like mine. He looks like me, He is God and He looks like me.”

And no woman ever had God for herself. A God very small that you can hold in your arms, a God you can cover with kisses, a warm God who smiles and breath, a God one can touch and who lives, and I would paint Marie in those moments if I was an artist, and I would try to convey the tender audacity and the shyness in her as she moves her finger to touch the soft small skin of this child God, as she feels his warm weight on her lap and as he smiles to her. So that’s for Jesus and for the Virgin Marie.

And Joseph. Joseph? I would not paint him. I would show a shadow in the back of the barn and bright eyes, because I don’t know what to say about Joseph. And Joseph himself is not sure what to say. He adores and is happy to adore. He feels in exile, a little. I think he grieves without admitting it. He grieves because he can see how much the woman he loves looks like God. How much she is already on God’s side. Because God came into the intimacy of this family. Joseph and Marie are separated forever by this fire of clarity, and all his life, I imagine, Joseph will be about learning to accept. Joseph himself does not know what to say about himself : he adores and is happy to adore.”

(From « Baronia or the Son of Thunder” a play written by Sartre about his time as a prisoner of war. This text is also included in « the Writings of Sartres” by M. Contat and M. Rybalka, NRF 1970)