Theodore P. Fraser writes, in
The Modern Catholic Novel In Europe, that:
"The Catholic novel in Europe as we know it today originated in French literature of the nineteenth century. Originally part of the neo-romantic reaction against Enlightenment philosophy and the anti-religious doctrines of the Revolution, the Catholic novel attained fruition and became an accomplished literary form spearheading the
renouveau catholique, or Catholic literary revival. This literary movement contained in its ranks a number of brilliant writers (
Bloy,
Péguy,
Huysmans,
Bernanos,
Mauriac,
Claudel,
Jacques Maritain, and
Jacques Rivière, to name the most important) who reached maturity at the century's end or during the decade of World War I, and it essentially took the form of a strong, even violent, reaction of these French Catholic writers against the doctrine of positivism that had gained preeminence in French political and cultural circles in the last third at least of the nineteenth century."
Marian E. Crowe has written in
Aiming At Heaven, Getting The Earth that:
"An impressive number of intellectuals and cultural figures followed the same pattern as
Barbey d'Aurevilly. Having abandoned their childhood faith and become atheists in their youth, they reconverted to Catholicism in their adulthood. Among them were
Paul Claudel, who wrote poetry and plays stressing sacrifice, chivalry and nobility;
Léon Bloy, whose novels expressing the doctrine of the communion of the saints called attention to the poor as an integral part of that communion and depicted poverty as both a social evil and source of santification; and
Charles Péguy, an early socialist, who, like Bloy, stressed the importance of the poor and seemed to embody the best ideals of both the republican and religious traditions of France. Bloy's novels made a strong critique of the hypocrisy and materialism of many nominal Catholics, a theme that would be repeated in future Catholic novels.
Jacques Maritain, who was raised as a liberal Protestant, converted to Catholicism under the influence of Bloy and interpreted the philosophy and theology of
St Thomas Aquinas for the modern world. These converts were leading figures in the revitalized Catholicism of the early twentieth century ..."
Jean-Luc Barré writes in
Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven of how poets, painters and musicians began gravitating around the Maritains, “most of whom they met in the company of
Léon Bloy.” There was firstly their discovery of
Georges Rouault, “then of
Pierre van der Meer de Valcheren, a Dutch novelist who was presented to them in 1911, two days after his own conversion … Then, during the war, they met the young seventeen-year-old composer,
Georges Auric, soon a frequent visitor at Versailles …”
Barré goes on to describe how these friendships led to the formation of
Thomistic study circles at the Maritain’s home in Meuden “where close friends of the couple came together – Abbé Lallement, Roland Dalbiez, Doctor Pichet, Noële Denis, the eldest daughter of the painter
Maurice Denis, Vitia Rosenblum, the brother-in-law of
Stanislas Fumet.” Barré continues, “The year 1921 would see the first circle grow larger: a Romanian prince converted to Catholicism, Vladimir Ghika, a young orientalist eager to bring together the Muslim and Christian worlds,
Louis Massignon, the philosopher
Henri Gouhier, the writer
Henri Ghéon, the future Abbé Altermann, among others, joined the study group.
In
The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism Rajesh Heynickx and
Jan De Maeyer note that:
“the French poet, writer, and
surrealist filmmaker
Jean Cocteau converted under the influence of Maritain. For the painters
Gino Severini, a pioneer of
Futurism, and
Otto Van Rees, one of the first
Dadaists-both converts - Maritain played the role of spiritual counselor. And when the promoter of abstract art
Michel Seuphor embraced Catholic faith in the 1930s, he, too, had extensive contact with Maritain. For all of them, the dictum of the Irish poet
Brian Coffey, once a doctoral student under Maritain, applied: modern art needs a Thomist conceptual framework.”
This journey of significant influence began for the Maritain’s with Léon Bloy. The reading of Bloy’s novel
Le Femme pauvre led on to their meeting with the man himself. A period of examination by the Maritains of “the life, the doctrines, and the sources of Catholicism” ensued before, on 5th April 1906, “the couple, at the end of “long conversations” confided to Bloy their desire to become Catholics.” Rouault made a similar journey to that of the Maritains, first reading
Le Femme pauvre before meeting Bloy. Barré writes that Rouault “seems to have come to the home of this prophet of malediction seeking for other reasons, and always more painful ones, to question himself and to set out towards the unknown.”
Crowe writes that:
"Mauriac and Bernanos ... clearly demonstrated that the spiritual world could have a dynamic presence even in that most secular of literary forms, the novel, and ... also introduced into it a new kind of interiority that was completely different from the stream of consciousness technique used by James Joyce, Virginia Wolff and others. They ... developed and expanded on several themes already introduced by earlier Catholic novelists - the pursuit of the sinner by God, the criticism of materialism and hypocrisy, the futility of life without God, regenerative suffering, and the motifs of sacrificial substitution and intercessory prayer - to which they added a critique of the Catholic community, especially its superficial pieties, its materialism, its arrogance and its neglect of the poor. Yet even in this critique, they disclosed sources of spiritual vitality within the Church - the sanctity of some of its most humble priests, and of the poor, the unchurched, and even the sinners. For the sinner in their works is not simply someone to be corrected and saved. Rather, Mauriac and Bernanos both show how the sinner is at the very heart of Christianity ... This concept would be dramatized in English Catholic novels, where sinners like Sebastian in
Brideshead Revisited or Sarah in
The End of the Affair not only are enmeshed in a web of grace that draws them in, but also help the larger community of the "saints." This and many other themes explored by these French novelists would animate the imaginations of some very talented Catholic writers on the other side of the English channel ..."
Fraser wrote in 1994 that:
"Born one generation after Bernanos and Waugh of American parents,
Julien Green is today one of France's foremost novelists and the first American ever to be elected to the French Academy. (Jacques Maritain wrote of him several decades ago, "I find it marvelous that an American should be the greatest French writer of our times"[quoted in Dunaway, 15].) A prolific writer (and still writing today at a very advanced age), he had attained a certain recognition as novelist in the United States during the 1950s. Since then, though his works continue to be enthusiastically received by a small but fervent group of Francophile Catholics, earlier translations of his novels into English have long gone out of circulation and are virtually unavailable for the larger reading audience. He has, however, recently become the subject of renewed critical attention ... through the publication of what he calls his "Civil War novels." The first of these,
Les Pays lointains (1991;
The Distant Lands), has in fact been compared favorably in plot, length, and scope with
Gone with the Wind, which is not surprising given Green's roots in the American South ...
Green has always refused, even bristled, at his possible designation as a Catholic novelist ("The very idea, he says, "appalls me! [
Diary, 219]). Yet when he considers Jacques Maritain's judgement "that my books were those of a man living on the mystical plane," he concedes that "there lies in all my books a deep uneasiness that an irreligious man would never have felt." And he admits that all of his fiction, though written not to advance or support religious dogma, is nonetheless "essentially religious." And in the most succinct definition he will give of what he means by this appelation, he writes, "The anguish and loneliness of my characters can almost always be reduced to what I think I called a manifold dread of living in the world" (
Diary, 219)."
David O'Connell, in his study on
Michel de Saint Pierre, noted that the generation born in the decade before World War I produced a number of important authors forwarding the tradition of the French Catholic Novel. These included
Jacques de Bourbon Busser,
Gilbert Cesbron,
Pierre Emmanuel, Saint Pierre, and
Jean Sulivan. Fraser contrasts the careers of Saint Pierre and Sulivan as representatives for this generation of writers:
"Saint Pierre ... began his career as a novelist in 1948, a decade before Sulivan's tardy entry at the age of 45. At Saint Pierre's death in 1987 his literary production was far more extensive than that of Sulivan (who had died seven years earlier), and one of his novels,
Les Nouveaux Prêtres (1964) - which deals with the struggle for control of the French Church between the conservative
"intégristes" and the liberal
"progressistes" just after the Second Vatican Council - had even been a best-seller in France.
Saint Michel's novels have continuously been reprinted and are in great demand. In contrast, though all of Sulivan's novels have been published by prominent French publishing houses ... he has so far not been regarded in his own country as a leading writer of his time, nor, for that matter, have his works been published in translation to any major extent abroad ...
Yet in any study of the Catholic novel Sulivan is an important and representative figure in regard to the change in form, emphasis, and themes the genre has undergone in the contemporary period, arguably as much so as the far better known Michel de Saint Pierre. From the start of his career Sulivan has been recognised as a direct literary descendent of the French giants of the Catholic novel's Golden Age - Bloy and Mauriac, but especially Bernanos, whose influence on Sulivan is both immediately obvious and commanding."
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Scott Walker -
My Death.
