MAETERLINCK, MAURICE. - Poet, born in Ghent to a wealthy Flemish family on 29 August 1862, died in Nice on 6 May 1949. Initially directed toward a legal career, a brief stay in Paris (1886) was enough to turn his literary aspirations—already shared with friends G. Le Roy, C. Van Leberghe, and E. Verhaeren—toward the symbolism represented by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911.
A volume of verse, *Serres chaudes*, and a dramatic fairy tale, *La princesse Maleine*, published in 1889, marked his definitive consecration to literary activity. This was initially focused especially on the theater with *L'intruso* (1890), *Les aveugles* (1890), *Les sept principes* (1890), *Pelléas et Mélisande* (1892; later set to music by Debussy and premiered at the Opéra-Comique in 1902), *Aglavaine et Sélysette* (1896), and “little dramas for marionettes” such as *Alladines et Palomides*, *Intérieur*, *La mort d’Intailles* (1894), and *Ariane et Barbe Bleue* (published in 1899 in German translation and set to music by Dukas in 1907). His theater explored the life of the inner self, drawing on the vitality of symbolism as well as fatalism and pessimism. He sought to understand—or at least reflect—the secret, elusive soul at the heart of the world and of things, as in contemporary essays such as *Le trésor des humbles* (1896), *La sagesse et la destinée* (1898), and *La vie des abeilles* (1901), which was more a celebration and presentation, “as of an object known and loved,” of “the spirit of the world” as manifested in a humble beehive than a scientific-popular monograph.
Other books of the same kind followed (*L’intelligence des fleurs*, 1907; *La vie des termites*, 1927; *La vie des fourmis*, 1930), almost to underscore a return to love for nature and, more generally, to a more optimistic view of life, of the tremulous and vague mysticism of the early M., upon which the influence of J. Ruysbroeck (“the Admirable”) had been felt (in 1891 he had translated *L’ornement des noces spirituelles*). To this final phase of his thought and art belong his most successful plays and fairy tales: *Monna Vanna* (1902), *Joyzelle* (1903), *Le miracle de saint Antoine* (1904), *L’Oiseau bleu* (1908), and *Marie Magdeleine* (1909), marked by a rather equivocal religiosity.
M. AND RELIGION. - All of M.’s works are permeated by a sophisticated and inconsistent philosophy, yet firm and constant in its atheism, irreligion, and contempt for all morality. Supernatural revelation does not exist; “it has never existed.” God is a creation of human reason: “Why would man fear the God he himself has created?” The teaching of Christ is nothing more than a mutilated branch of the great mother religion, Buddhism. Morality is a kind of ill-defined superior instinct, a “mystical reason,” that is, one without obligations or sanctions. The immortality of the soul is merely its fusion with universal consciousness. Men bear no responsibility for their actions, desires, or thoughts, for otherwise they would cease to be men and become as many divinities. There is no purpose in life, because purpose negates being, life, and everything. Hence a heavy fatalism, a stifled pessimism: “One fears and despairs only when one truly believes.” This is why the Church condemned all his works with a decree of 26 January 1914 (cf. M. Lecat, *Le Maeterlinckianisme*, 2 vols., Brussels 1937–41; G. Casati, *L’Indice dei libri proibiti*, II, Milan 1936, pp. 159–80).