Abstract

SummaryThe literary criticism of the 1940s and contemporary theological criticism of the Second Vatican Council (1962) have presented Charles Péguy as an exemplary figure of the ‘word inhabited’ in the twentieth century. Charles Péguy himself never said nor wrote that he was a prophet. It seems, however, that this term with which literary criticism had tagged him is the most effective in capturing the sense of his work, in which a new poetic mode, a new political position, and a new theological knowledge of God go together to interrogate people from God's lofty perspective—which is the definition of prophetism. The prophet, a man whose word is ‘inhabited’, is indeed a man who speaks God, not a man who speaks about God. Péguy seems to have written with that vision in mind, both to make an appeal to people of his time and to testify to the sense of being alive in the world. In this respect, Péguy's work seems to be the perfect material with which to analyse Christian-inspired prophetism in the secularised world of the beginning of the twentieth century.