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Bibliotherapy

A Little Albert Jounet Sampler – Part 1 – Contextual Introduction

Albert Jounet, a.k.a. Alber Jhouney,

Picture from the 1977 Belisane edition

of Victor Emile Michelet’s ‘Les Compagnons de la Hiérophanie‘.

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Today’s sharing from the Blue House of Via-HYGEIA is part 1 of a planned few devoted to French poet and esotericist Albert Jounet, ak.a. Alber Jhouney. Part 1 is a contextual introduction in three part with the voices of Jean-Pierre Laurant, Victor-Emile Michelet and Etienne Bellot for their accounts locating Albert Jounet in his time and space.

As as an omnipresent actor in the different intellectual and esoteric ‘milieux’, Albert Jounet was an integral part of the great occultist and esoteric revival that swept France at the end of the nineteen century up to the early twenty.

He was a member of the ‘Ordre Martiniste‘ and was familiar with Dr. Gérard Encausse, a.k.a. Papus and Johanny Bricaud, of the ‘Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose+Croix‘ with Stanislas de Guaita who had great esteem for him, and also among the original members of the ‘Eglise Gnostique‘ founded by Jules Doinel, as Tau Théodote, bishop of Avignon-and of many others spontaneously surging during his time; he eventually remained more of an independent figure and was true to his own spiritual quest as he went from being an esoteric and kabbalistic socialist to being a fervent and inspired Roman catholic with the founding of his own organization, the ‘Société de l’Etoile‘ who witnessed first-hand his metamorphic spiritual journey.

Sampler Part 2 will offer a choice of his poetry and Sampler Part 3 will give a taste of his wide works of hermeneutic and exegesis, all in our Via-Hygeia English translations from their original French.

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A Contextual Introduction

in 3  Sections

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Section 1

From Jean-Pierre Laurant’s

‘L’Esotérisme Chrétien en France au XIXe siècle’.

…Lady Caithness’s salon was breeding ground for mystical socialists and mystical feminists. Emilie de Morsier, Edouard Schuré, independent priests such as the abbés Petit, Roca and Alta. Victor Charbonel, Theosophers and scientists attracted by the world of the spirits such as Camille Flammarion, Charles Richet, writers like Maxime Du Camp, trade-unionists such as Benoit Malon, and the archivist Jules Doinel, who after a spirit seance ‘re-awakened’ the Gnostic Church….Among the familiar figures often seen in the private hotel avenue de Wagram, Albert Jounet exemplifies a place of choice.

Of a old Provencal family, he finished his studies at the college Rollin in Paris, and from an early time turned himself to literature and spiritualism alike Stanislas de Guaia or Joséphin Péladan; the poet Victor-Emile Michelet saw in him one of the ‘Companions of the Hierophany’ of the new literary generation. (A Via-Hyggeia note: it is very obvious while reading through the ‘La Jeune France‘ periodical).

The publishing of his first poetic work, ‘Les Lys Noirs (The Black Lilies), earned him a certain notoriety and the admiration of Charles Le Goffic. He later turned toward mysticism, with ‘Le Livre du Jugement‘ (The Book of Judgement), which drew upon the Apocalypse and the Kabbalah. These early publications were followed by ‘L’Etoile Sainte‘ (The Holy Star) and ‘Le Royaume de Dieu‘ (The Kingdom of Heaven); both been very well received by the critics, however, Jounet-after being a regular visitor to many secret societies- disappointed by the Parisian deleterious atmosphere went back to live in the family cradle of Saint-Raphael and became associated with René Caillé and together launched the periodical, ‘L’Etoile‘ (the Star), soon under-titled as : ‘Messianic Kabbalah, Christian Socialism, Experimental Socialism.’ This journal of messianic Kabbalah explored major themes of occultism, including the secret tradition, the dual meaning of the Scriptures, and the aspiration to absolute knowledge.  ( See link in the source section below).

Jounet’s goal was to transform the Church by integrating esotericism and science into it. The columns of his journal were open to Christian socialists, spiritualists, and all politico-religious synthesis movements, which ultimately led to the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893.

This new venture was doubled by the creation of a group, the ‘Fraternité de l’Etoile’ (Fraternity of the Star); its manifesto was published in issue number 4 in June 1889. Four degree of knowledge, from the simple good will and study of morality or sociology to the acknowledgment that: ‘Through prayer and intuition and the spiritual science of the religions we can arrive to the certitude that God exists.’ The brothers practiced a communion of the souls at fixed dates and hours for the ‘elevation towards God, the invocation of the superior spirits and union through fluidic channels.’ (A Via-Hygeia note: The fraternity was Christian in its orientation but found a place in its pages for translations of the ‘Siphra Dzenioutha’, by ‘Alber Jhouney’  (as we will see in Sampler Part 3) and of the ‘Yoga of Patanjali’ (also in Sampler Part 3), as well as for regular communications from the spirits of the deceased)

Jounet’s conceptions were above all of a moral and historical nature; history is divided into four ages, crowned by the arrival of the Holy Ghost, coming from crisis after crisis towards the final revelation. Esotericism represented the yeast of truth, only felt through ‘lightnings’, ‘the purest gift’ of the eastern traditions, present in certain Christian mystiques, hermetists such as Heinrich Khunrath and the Hebrew Kabbalists; this yeast was always asphyxiated by petty interests, and in particular by Cesarian Christianity, the Fourierist (A Via-Hygeia note: followers of Charles Fourier’s ideas) Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant has written extensively against in ‘La Phalange‘ and later in ‘La Démocracie Pacifique‘.

One of Albert Jounet’s enduring themes was the feminine Messiah in the 19th century, which was consistently linked to the ideas of universal progress and the reconciliation of science and religion within an eschatology of happiness. Father Enfantin developed this idea through the concept of the hierophantic couple, which led to a journey to the East in search of the female Messiah. Parraz, a disciple of Pierre-Michel Vintras and a theologian, emphasized the revelation of Mary as a way of restoring religion’s esoteric dimension—an idea that also interested Eliphas Levi.

This theme found its definitive expression in the works of Anna Kingsford and in Lady Caithness’s journal ‘L’Aurore d’un jour nouveau‘. Madame S. Bernard, in ‘La Vierge-Esprit ou la Révélation‘, provided a fully feminist interpretation of the Scriptures, particularly regarding the Fall, the concept of “Wisdom” (always feminine and identifiable with the Word), and the great myths of Greek religion, such as the Promethean myth.

In all these troubled and fermenting epochs, the esoteric Doctrine always resurrects: from the origins of Christianity, first with the Alexandrian Neo-Platonism and the Gnostics; at the time of the Italian Renaissance with figures like Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa and Guillaume Postel-all adventurers of science; Postel especially who announced the rule of the Holy Ghost; then Saint-Martin and Swedenborg at the time of the (French) Revolution. Neither the Roman authoritarianism nor the fathers of the Council listened to Postel and the Reformation happened, leading to the Counter-reform and the birth of the Jesuit Order with Saint Ignatius of Loyola; A far  cry from the epoch’s Illuminists, the Terror crushed everything and led to Bonaparte, and today the Socialists big mistake was to condone the use of violence, when on the opposite they should recognize the law of spiritual harmony and the existence of a spiritual Power.

Benoit Malon elevates socialism up to a morality, science impregnates itself with hypnosis, illuminates itself with apparitions, chills itself with breathing the invisible…Religion goes directly to the masses through priests, freed from their crushing hierarchy and poor like the Apostles.’ Jounet declared himself always ready to unite with diverse Churches and philosophical and political doctrines into larges federations.

The esoterism of Fabre d’Olivet, Hoene Wronski, Louis Lucas (A Via-Hygeia note: the musician and hermetic doctor, author of the ‘New Acoustics) and Eliphas Levi was the visible and connecting thread throughout the nineteenth century. Besides a ’48tish’ spirit (as embodied by abbé Roca) the 1848 generation was Christian, very Christian. Jounet called those involved in the ‘1851 December Second Coup d’Etat(A Via-Hygeia note: leading Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte to become ‘Napoleon the Third’), ‘perpetrators of a true satanic coup’ and he further writes: ‘and it compromised EVERYTHING!’

In 1895, Albert Jounet converts to Roman Catholicism and close down his periodical, although the activities of the ‘Fraternity of the Star‘ continued well into the early twentieth century. It is interesting to note that it is  the same period that of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ own conversion and also of Jules Doinel’s (A Via-Hygeia note: Though Doinel reverted-after an chaotic anti-masonic phase-to his Gnostic Church activities under the leadership of Léonce-Eugène-Joseph Fabre des Essarts, a.k.a. Tau Synesius. But that’s another story).

Albert Jounet also contributed to other periodicals such as ‘L’Initiation‘, ‘Le Voile d’Isis‘, ‘La Voie‘ and ‘La Synthèse‘. After World War I, he reappeared in ‘La Revue Contemporaine‘, as the hopes inspired by the League of Nations had revived interest in his idea of universal harmony; an optimism short-lived leaving him in a resigned and disgruntled state. He died in 1923.

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Section 2

From Victor Emile Michelet’s

‘Les Compagnons de la Hiérophanie’.

Albert Jounet was certainly one of the most interesting minds of our time. Among the generation known as the Symbolists, his youth bore the brightest promises. Did he fulfill them? We are too close to him to be able to judge. When the years have inevitably completed their work of clearing away adventitious excrescences and distributing shadows and light, an elite that will emerge shall pronounce on the value of his work. Which of the three aspects under which Albert Jounet presents himself will they favor? Will they choose the poet, the Kabbalist, or the sociologist? All three intertwine and give his personality a definite character.

He died on December 23, at the time of the winter solstice, when part of humanity places the incarnation of a god amid planetary effervescence. His last days were afflicted. He was losing his sight. The last letters I received from him were sorrowful. But he had a noble and gentle soul that accepted its fate. He passed away in silent peace. His disappearance did not stir the literary world. He had kept himself away from that noisy and superficial sphere. The clarity of his mind, like the loftiness of his aspirations, would have been out of place there.

He remains, however, among the poets of his time, one of the very few who had an understanding of the symbol and who tested their words in the secret fire of essential principles. While still young, he produced two volumes filled with the highest hopes, Les Lys noirs and Le Livre du Jugement, after which the poet fell silent. When I reproached him for this silence, he replied that although he published no poems, he was still writing them. I know that his last wishes required that all the manuscripts he left behind be burned.

Le Livre du Jugement’, which was supposed to comprise four parts—’Creation, the Fall, Redemption, Judgment‘—is a sort of cosmic and mystagogical epic. In such works, the domain embraced by the visionary is of such vastness that human interest can no longer sustain it. The subject, no longer within the reach of the heart and the human spirit, unfolds in nebulousness and vagueness. To bear the weight of it, the author would need, beyond an extraordinary genius of expression, a precious gift for enclosing these immense visions within frames accessible to human understanding. However great they may be, such attempts are, perhaps, too grand and doomed to failure.

Thus, the epic endeavors of either a master of vast knowledge like Saint-Yves d’Alveydre or a remarkable philosopher like Strada have fallen into oblivion. And yet, more fortunately executed, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’s ‘Hymne à la Lune‘, still ignored by critics, remains one of the most beautiful poems of the 20th century.

It is in ‘Les Lys noirs‘ that one must follow the poetry of Albert Jounet. There, the signs of remarkable gifts were already appearing.

There, the richness of art equaled the generous breadth of conception. There, a song with opulent sonorities rose from the depths of a fervent spirit. These pages were animated by an ardor that was perhaps too exclusively spiritual. It is necessary for art to attune itself to the passions and desires of the earth, to sink its roots into the psychic world. Thomas Moore, the poet of angelic loves, could not move us. Albert Jounet seemed to leap beyond the realm of passion. Yet, his spirituality did not breathe coldness. It burned with enthusiasm, in the true sense of the word. An artist’s hand arranged the resonant words, calling not for frozen abstractions but for the ardent breaths of having traversed the mysterious lands of our hopes.

Let us listen, for proof of this, to the following quatrain, which creates a moving landscape:

Thus, from the heights of my lofty will,
Amid the vapors of a hymn that enflames,
Burst forth the first great dream of my soul,
Bloody with superb love and burning with beauty.

This melancholic and sumptuous bouquet of black lilies thus announced:

Deep, dark lilies, you are the symbol
Of sacred Kabbalah and of my sorrowful heart.
Your perfume pervades me, O lilies, and your heart
Spreads forth, united with my breath, in my word.

The science of the mage is as black as you,
Like you, it is ideal and jealously pure.
And in its purity of dream beyond nature,
My spirit still resembles you—dark and jealous.

Thus, the volume begins with an apostrophe of tranquil bitterness to the blackened flowers. Yet, it is not that the monotony of black obscures Albert Jounet’s verses. One perceives colors of singular intensity, reminiscent of those worlds described by Swedenborg, where colors generate marvelous music, where gemstones, through variations of light, impart celestial truths to those who seek them.

I like ‘Le Livre du Jugement‘ much less. There, the great cosmic problems are evoked, so difficult to present that, as in Milton, their allegorical exposition is often arduous, and, in a master craftsman like Victor Hugo, their formulation becomes unbearable. Here, the poet has not descended from the frozen altitudes of abstraction to drink from the fountain of Hippocrene, nestled halfway up the sacred mountain. He has not succeeded in bringing back the vision of distant expanses to the scale of the human heart, from which the living sources of art flow. And in this ambitious poem, interest fades and vanishes.

I fully understand the deep antipathy Maurice Barrès once expressed to me about Jounet’s verses at the time of their publication:

I loathe this kind of rambling style,” he told me; “I don’t understand how Guaita and you could like it.”

Indeed, Barrès, an extremely skillful literary craftsman but one who deliberately limited his horizon to grasp its details with acute precision—a mind whose fervor never extended beyond the cycle of curiosity—could not comprehend Jounet’s enthusiasm for the vastness of concepts and the boundless impulses of the spirit.

To bring forth the image of a person, especially if that person is no longer of this world, it is the moment of our first encounter with them that we must recall. In this way, we can revive the most penetrating and truest impression we ever had of them.

When I first saw Albert Jounet, he had just successively published ‘Le Royaume de Dieu‘ and ‘Les Lys noirs‘. A native of Marseille, he had reunited in Paris with one of his compatriots, a few years his senior, who displayed, above a garnet velvet waistcoat adorned with two hundred small buttons, a very soft smile whose charm time had not diminished. This was Élémir Bourges, who was not yet the great navigator of ‘la Nef‘ but had already absorbed all that had been printed since Gutenberg.

The young Albert Jounet appeared to me slender and refined; his curly hair seemed to encircle his head like the crown that fills with its majesty the twenty-second card of the Tarot. His round eyes heralded the power of insight granted to innocent beings, eyes that in his last days abandoned life to the sorrow of an unending night…

But what struck me most was the character of his hands: long and delicate, they were made to receive, through their slender phalanges, spiritual influences, but not to build. These were not the hands of a craftsman; they lacked the vigor of a laborer. Those hands never wrote a line that could wound anyone. And never did I hear from his lips a malicious word, even though he had the gift of wit, as almost all the beings of high spirituality have. These are spiritual in every way.

For a man with such hands, it was a mistake to want to engage in immediate action. Though animated by the most complete selflessness, he wasted his strength organizing societies meant to spread generous ideas, to cast into the vulgar mass the leaven of just and fruitful insights. Should the work of stirring the masses be abandoned to petty publicists, ignorant agitators, or opportunistic politicians? Jounet did not think so. But perhaps he was under an illusion regarding the need for apparent action.

He, who breathed in the high spiritual regions, nevertheless knew through what mysterious processes the distant forces of the spirit act upon human beings. He knew that a solitary meditator who never leaves his cell, who does not write a single line, who pronounces no public words, can have on people and events an influence a thousand times greater than a famous orator.

Accustomed to weighing the imponderable, he knew that the unnoticed prayer of a saint, in the obscure realm of forces, would be far more effective than the ephemeral effort of an orator or the reckless zeal of a statesman. Was he not among those who see beyond appearances?

For he had quenched his thirst for knowledge at the living water of the immemorial source. Because he wrote a book on the Zohar and another on Kabbalah, should he be considered a Kabbalist? There are so many ways of being one. The spontaneous intuition of an Albert Jounet, the deep and silent meditation of a Marc Haven, the critical method of the tenaciously erudite Paul Vulliaud, belongs to very dissimilar minds, which, almost like parallels, seem destined to meet at the edge of infinity—in Ain Soph, as a Kabbalist would say. And if we go back to the masters of old, what a distance there is between the subtle exegesis of a Knorr von Rosenroth and the penetrating vision of a Guillaume Postel, between the strict observance of a Molitor and the luminous transposition of a Khunrath!

There exists a universal Kabbalah, of which the Hebrew Kabbalah is but a memory—this Kabbalah of the twenty-two letters, each representing a hierogrammatic being, an idea, and a number, the study of which requires a long human life.

This immemorial Kabbalah, which among the Celts was mastered by the Druids, is commonly thought to be lost. Yet everything that is lost can be recovered by those who know how to search well. Jounet would have been capable of demonstrating what no French author has yet established: that there exists a French Kabbalah just as much as a Devangari Kabbalah.

To handle its keys, it would be enough to bring our language into alignment with the twenty-two schematic equivalents, and these with their exact cosmological positions. But in doing so, we would enter a domain surrounded on all sides by dense, formidable thickets. Albert Jounet, to penetrate it, cleared away the brambles. He always lived in the highest regions of the spirit, with the generous innocence of the heart.

Albert Jounet, a.k.a. Alber Jhouney, Picture from the 1905 reprint of the ‘l’Etoile Sainte‘ & ‘Les Lys Noirs‘, by Bibliothèque Charcornac.

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Section 3

From Etienne Bellot’s

‘Synthese Messianique, Albert Jounet’.

To reconcile faith with reason, to ‘scientify‘ religion and ‘sanctify‘ science: such was the aim Albert Jounet gave to himself. To synthesize all beliefs into a primordial belief, is it not the mission he pursued? If we guess that the modern esoterists took their inspiration in the Gnostics, who summarized the religious knowledge of all peoples, we have to admit they have executed the perfect anatomy of the sacred science of those already distant communities.

To reach this elevated concept, way above the vulgar world, Albert Jounet, the initiator of the new doctrine, had to go through all the phases of doubt, before believing. And this because he went back from the effects to the cause, rather than descending from the cause to the effects. He reviewed and questioned all the myths and all the religious systems to try to understand their exclusive pride. He finally found the ONE religion within the multiple ones, being the altered versions and products of this original revelation. To journey the circumference of the human spirit, to go back to the center of the circle by following all of the rays that converge towards it: Such is the summing up of the career of Jounet-the Hierophant.

Albert Jounet has resolved the aporia that our existence is manifesting through an inspired spirit and also through the witnessing of matter in a scientific development. We can say that the history of all beliefs is but the history of one belief, modified according to time and environment, manifested through diverse aspects, but the core is universally the same: one hypothetical cause and effects. Faith had the same definition of a law of physics, of which religion had the formula. Albert Jounet, with his eagle eyes had pierced the dense darkness of confusion, and with a mathematical precision, gave the exact formula of unitive cause in his research and many works. As we have noticed his superiority in many of the debates of his time he eagerly participated in through his many publications and public conferences, we are impressed by the delicacy he brings to making himself forgiven! This humanist is but a continuous hand offered to his fellow humans, eager he is to bring healing without hurt.

To love one’s neighbor like he did, is a very difficult achievement to find in the world of occultism, where the darkest moral tragedies often occur. To love one another is in reality to love one’s self. He developed this notable theorem like this:

Humanity is like a body of which every individuality is an exactly animated limb: The arm, the legs, etc., of man are intimately part of his body. If the arm, the leg, etc., are suffering from a harmful and cruel disease to the point of compromising the collective existence of the body, would someone be so unwise to harm the sick limb, to burden it, to seek revenge from the suffering it has brought? No, definitely. The first desire of this man would be to provide to the ailing limb all the necessary care it asks for and heal it. This is why we must watch over the well-being of any other person, as an integral part within the great body of humanity, like we watches over our own personal limbs because they are an integral part of our individuality.’

From this quite elevated point of view, we can see Albert Jounet beaming in the purest and the largest socialism; the periodical ‘the Star‘, being his word and the word of his brothers in faith, preached this love that was overflowing from their hearts and lips. It still shine through the ages as a sun of Justice. What better Socialism than his ! What magnitude does he not cover in the midst of the other sectarian socialists! It is to a great fraternal banquet that he seems to invite the whole of humanity, in the crumbling down of borders. In deed, does love belong to one nation alone?

In this Albert Jounet is delineating himself within the most traditional Christianity, within the purest literal Catholicism…The core of the Christian religion always had been fraternity among  all people and not that trail of blood a masquerading Church has left alongside the history of Humanity: Jesus, the socialist & iconoclast of his time, said: ‘Love one another‘.

Catholicism through the propaganda of its Greek etymology, ‘καθολικός‘ (katolikos), had the intention alone to become a universal religion, which ironically made her to become dogmatic to the greatest excess. To make all human being  proper Christians, it is to fuse out the races, it is to preach a kind of internationalism and not what is did, petty material and moral inquisitions.

It is extraordinary and absolutely incomprehensible to see dignitaries of the Church, ordained and anointed to preach a sacred union, and against the spirit of their faith behave with a revolting chauvinism, putting war where they had the mission to bring peace and empathy. Did a neighboring Christian country not judge with the outmost arbitrary severity the international utopian socialists in a shameful trial? What do these contradictions mean? Why do all these visible & invisible borders divide all nations while everything should be done to UNITE the people?

Can you comprehend Christians, bound by the most powerful moral feelings, armed against each other and killing each other for the sake of some heartless royalties that spare no effort convincing that God is on their side of the slaughter? This God ought to be of unconditional Love and they masquerade Him in their blind petty hate! If all the despots are an obstacle to the fraternity of the people, to peaceful human expansion, the Christians ought to forfeit their alliance with them and stop supporting them and push for their fall and removal. Only then after advancing an encompassing Republic, can socialism and religion-separated by a slim nuance-will meet again and will unite for ever. This exact slim nuance Albert Jounet just made it disappear. He does not want any equivoque to still persist and, thus, do harm.

Hail then to all of these reformers, to these true evangelical missionaries, to these true apostles of the Truth!    While the dark leagues obsess in separating everything & everyone and preach nothing but a poisonous discord, these true paragons of unity push towards a long lasting concord; they are the beacons of the future!

According to Albert Jounet’s ‘Messianic Harmony‘, faith is the first norm of our thoughts, independent research is the second; and independent research consists not in accepting in advance truth, but to control it, to verify it, as much as possible. He writes: ‘Most of the philosophers are separated in two tendencies; the first one, with the likes of Aristotle lean upon formal logic and upon the external being; while the second with the likes of Kant, seek certitude in subjectivity, in the inner, because it cannot be denied. I admit both tendencies and I estimate that we ought to first seek  certitude in the inner and subjective thought, because such certitude is in principle undeniable; but then we ought, within this inner certitude, discover-thanks to the idea of being and of the impossibility of void- the existence, objective and positive, of the infinite being. Then we ought to prove the objective within the subjective. This is how we escape all together to the baseless affirmation of the objectivists and to the sterile and imprisoned subjectivity of the Kantians.’

Being proven, what comes next is the existence of God. Here is how Albert Jounet defines God: ‘…In fact, the faculties that are met in particular beings are also met at the general and infinite level of existence. A thing that does not exist, first within the global and universal being, does even less exist in a particular one. And what do we notice in us, particular beings? the faculties of love, intelligence and will. Therefore they also do not lack at the universal and infinite level of existence. And the universal existence, endowed with will, intelligence and love, is God.’

Therefore, independent research and reason achieve to establish, to prove, through rigorous reasonings, some of the postulates of faith: the existence of God, human fraternity, virtue, the immortality of the soul, the hope into the salvation of all souls and God’s Vision, the almighty power of grace, are now accepted, proven by reason while being described by faith. But this description is leaning upon proven facts. This state of the soul, where the independent research has achieved to prove some of the facts of faith while  dogmatic Christianity only admits through faith only, is called by Albert Jounet: the ‘A-dierese’ (A Via-Hygeia note: a state of concord, of non-separation, the opposite of ‘dierese’, a figure of style cutting in two what is normally in one piece), because within this very state, the number of facts of faith proven through independent research is sufficient to foster concord between reason & faith.

Albert Jounet’s intimate and idiomatic ideas can be delineated in this following order: 1. God; 2. Fraternity; 3. Virtue; 4. The immortality of the Soul, universal redemption and God’s vision; 5. the almighty power of grace. It is possible to modify the order of the first three concepts, in a drive of universal tolerance and put them in this way: 1. Fraternity; 2.Virtue; 3. God. Albert Jounet prefers to put in the first setting where God is in first position, but when collaborating with others-especially non-believers-he can propose them the second setting. This is the very principle of ‘Universal Alliance‘, second aspect of Albert Jounet’s synthesis, ‘Messianic Harmony‘ being the first aspect, seeking to gather all truths and place them in their natural setting.

To sum-up, Albert Jounet’s synthesis is an impressive endeavor, in its two pillars: ‘Messianic Harmony‘ & ‘Universal Alliance‘. Its aim of to try to unite all truths and all people, to renovate religion and to bring back faith; it suppresses the basis of the inquisition; it demonstrate the unquestionable nature of collective salvation which makes its very human; it verifies God, Virtue, the immortality of the soul & the hope of collective salvation rationally; it open a vast doctrine where believers and rationalists can enter together and that does not repel any person, as long he admits the unquestionable nature of fraternity.

This synthesis, uniting religion, science, the arts and social redemption through organic harmony, Albert Jounet believes it is superior to a mere positivist evolution; it grounds its esthetic upon the beauty of this harmony and proposes religious, philosophical, esthetic, social, political, international associations & institutions of a great freedom and flexibility. In one word, we call in all the struggling elements of the world to gather them in a co-operation, at the same time divine and therefore, infinitely human.

I do not entirely share all of Albert Jounet’s ideas, but I must admit that we are forced to applaud his work, beautiful & great, and to envy him his will & his faith. Truly, Albert Jounet is a modern herald!

Albert Jounet, a.k.a. Alber Jhouney, a frontispiece portrait in Etienne Bellot’s ‘Synthese Messianique, Albert Jounet’, Bibliothèque Charcornac-1905.

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Coming Soon,

A Little Albert Jounet Sampler

– Part 2: The Poet 

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About Albert Jounet, a lecture by Jean-Pierre Laurant: https://www.persee.fr/doc/ephe_0000-0002_1974_num_87_83_17000 🌿 About the periodical ‘La Jeune France’: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb34482935w/date🌿 About the periodical ‘l’Etoile’: http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/etoile
A Little Albert Jounet Sampler – Part 1 – Contextual Introduction

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