“Louis Massignon. The Vow and Destiny”, a fascinating dive into the life of the mystic attracted to Islam

Mystic, great intellectual fascinated by Muslim spirituality, but also Melkite priest, unbeliever then believer, in love and overcome with passion… It is under these multiple faces, elusive and sometimes paradoxical but intertwined, that the director Grzegorz Tomczak shows Louis Massignon In The Vow and Destiny.

Son of a Christian mother and an atheist father, Louis Massignon says he lost faith in “a double assault, intellectual and carnal”. In 1906, his meeting with Luis de Cuadra, on a boat which took him to Cairo, gave him a first homosexual love, which would haunt him. The latter will also introduce him to the Muslim mystic Mansour Al-Hallaj, a source of inspiration for his research in whom he sees a Christ-like figure.

The other “as he is and as he wants to be”

In Mesopotamia in 1908, Louis Massignon nevertheless had a mystical vision: the one he called “the Stranger” visited him one night. He returned to France converted to the Christian faith. Transformed, he will then be torn between the choice of a hermit’s life – to join his great friend, Charles de Foucauld – and knowledge of Islam.

Professor at the Collège de France for years, it is ultimately this path that he devotes himself to. Taking the opposite view of an overarching vision of Islam, current at the time, Louis Massignon will try to understand the Muslim, from within his faith. “It’s about joining the other where they are, as they are and as they want to be,” he wrote. The richness of this documentary lies in the links it makes between all these dimensions – spiritual, intellectual, intimate, political – without dismissing its contradictions and tensions, to capture the finesse of the character, a precursor of today’s questions.