Atheist writer Jean-Paul Sartre once composed a beautiful Christmas meditation (II)

The year was 1940; the place, a prison camp for French prisoners in Germany.

Some prisoner priests asked their fellow prisoner Jean-Paul Sartre (1), the famous existentialist philosopher, to write a short meditation for Christmas Eve. Sartre, an atheist, accepted and wrote these beautiful lines. Did grace visit him at that moment, even if the philosopher later denied it?

"No woman has ever had a God all to herself. A tiny God whom you can take in your arms and cover with kisses, a warm God who smiles and breathes, a God whom you can touch and who lives, and it's in these moments that I would paint Mary if I were a painter. I would try to render the air of tender boldness and shyness with which she caresses with her finger the soft skin of this child God whose warm weight she feels on her lap, and who smiles at her. That’s for Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

What about Joseph? I wouldn't paint him. I'd only show him as a shadow in the stable with shining eyes, because I don't know what to say about Joseph. And Joseph doesn't know what to say about himself. He adores and is happy to adore. He feels a little exiled. I think he's suffering without admitting it to himself. He suffers because he sees how much the woman he loves resembles God. How she is already on God's side. For God has come into the intimacy of this family. Joseph and Mary are separated forever by this clear blaze, and all Joseph's life, I imagine, will be learning to accept it. Joseph doesn't know what to say about himself: he adores and is happy to adore”.

As proof that this text bothered Sartre's supporters, his partner Simone de Beauvoir tried to refute its origin. But Sartre confirmed its authorship in 1962, in the following note: “If I borrowed my topic from the mythology of Christianity, this does not mean that the direction of my thinking changed, even for a moment, during imprisonment. It was simply, in agreement with the prison priests, about finding a topic that could achieve, on Christmas Eve, the greatest possible unity between Christians and unbelievers”.

Excerpt from “Bariona ou le Fils du tonnerre”. The complete text can be found in Les Écrits de Sartre by M. Contat and M. Rybalka, NRF, 1970.

(1) Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was a French existentialist philosopher (1905–1980)