Gene Kellogg notes, in The Vital Tradition, that the development of the Catholic Novel involved "the appearance of an entirely new kind of fiction in French, English and American literature":
"... metaphysics, ontology, and particularly the power of the historic Roman Catholic apocalyptic "matrix" of heaven, hell, and purgatory as deeper realities framing, enclosing, and terminating ostensible "reality" were never the touchstone of novels until the time of Bernanos and Greene. And all the long complex development from the time of Barbey d'Aurevilly was required before the work of Greene and Bernanos became possible. The work in aesthetics of Maritain, Claudel, and Mauriac was necessary to establish the critical premises of such a radically new form. Maritain made his distinction between an "individual," a human being as a social or political unit, and a "person," a man or woman with a soul to save or lose. Claudel asserted the possibility of dramas concerned with ontological problems and developmas for the stage. Meanwhile Mauriac claimed that the "romanticism" of stories about "individuals" was exhausted and declared that writers should examine the "eternal Tartuffe" or the "eternal Harpagon" to create a gallery of spiritual "types," as in his own fiction he proceeded to do."
Marian E. Crowe notes, in Aiming At Heaven, Getting The Earth, that the critical literature on the Modern Catholic Novel suggests:
"... the highest achievements in the genre of the Catholic novel were possible only because a window of opportunity appeared as Catholicism was venturing out from its defensive posture and entering into conversation with the secular world yet still maintained a clear and robust sense of its own identity. If this thesis is correct, we are unlikely to see again Catholic novels of the quality of the best of Mauriac, Bernanos, Greene, and Waugh or other European Catholic novelists in the years preceding Vatican II.
The Catholic writers who produced the flowering of the Catholic novel faced the perennial challenges of all Christian novelists: how to show the workings of grace and allow for the miraculous and supernatural without violating psychological credibility or the canons of realism, how to make salvation or damnation seem important to a secular reader, and how to convey a worldview based on a deeply held personal faith without appearing to engage in underhanded apologetics and evangelization ... not all critics agree that they met all these challenges successfully, yet some novelists found ways to navigate these difficulties and produce fiction of exceptionally high quality and wide appeal for secular as well as Christian readers. To what extent these extraordinary achievements in Catholic fiction were the result of the uncommon situation of the Church - an unprecedented openness to secularity while still retaining a clear and strong sense of its own identity - and to what extent they were the result of the appearance of several extraordinarily gifted Catholic writers must remain a matter for speculation."
Many of those discussed as Catholic novelists in this series of posts have, in the words of Theodore P. Fraser
from The
Modern Catholic Novel In Europe, "adamantly shunned for themselves the nomenclature of "Catholic novelist" and have insisted that as artists they possess their own angle of vision and unique literary universe":
"Ultimately they view themselves not as writers consciously writing novels with specific "Catholic" content but as Catholics who happen to be novelists. François Mauriac has perhaps best explained the intention and intellectual disposition of Catholic novelists who are creative creative artists in their own right: "Being a Christian," he says, "my Christian beliefs dominate my novels, not because I want to make propaganda for Christianity, but because it is the deepest part of my nature ... I am a christian first and last, which means a man responsible to God and to his conscience for the epoch he lives in ... he has been put here to play a certain role among his fellow men. He is engaged; it isn't a question of deliberately engaging himself.""
David Lodge, in The Novelist at the Crossroads, insists that:
"in their appraisal of Catholic novelists critics would do well to follow the wise dictum of Henry James: that artists must be granted the right to use their ideas, their artistic vision, their donnée as their inspiration directs them, and that the proper role of critics is to comment on the use that authors have made of their donnée through an evaluation of the craft of their work (Lodge 1971, 88) ...
Using James's sensible critical principal as his point of departure, Lodge grants that Greene indeed makes frequent use of Catholic symbolism to create his "metapoesis." Yet in doing so his intention, Lodge insists, is not to proselytize or to present "a body of belief requiring exposition and demanding categorical assent or dissent" but to see his fiction as "a system of concepts, source of situation, and reservoir of symbols ... to dramatize intuition about the nature of human experience" (Lodge 1971, 89). Hence, Lodge contends, Catholicism as a system of dogma and laws is not in or by itself an adequate key to understanding and interpreting the meaning of Greene's works, and these are, Lodge argues, as accessible to most readers as any other works of art that possess a unique vision and aesthetic patterns. These Catholic novels can therefore be appreciated as authentic pieces of literature above and beyond the doctrinal or confessional elements of faith contained therein."
Fraser believes that what Lodge says of Greene can be applied to other novelists considered as "Catholic".
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bruce Cockburn - Understanding Nothing.
Showing posts with label kellogg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kellogg. Show all posts
Thursday, 5 January 2012
The modern and contemporary Catholic novel (4)
Theodore P. Fraser
writes, in The
Modern Catholic Novel In Europe, that:
"Heinrich Böll was born of a Catholic family of craftsmen whose ancestors had left England to settle in the Rhineland during the reign of Henry VIII. The Catholic identity of the family was strong, and Böll was brought up in close-knit, supportive Catholic environment of working class people living in tenements ... Böll's early works, which use the war as living metaphor of universal evil, also have deep religious themes of guilt and the need for repentance - for both individual and collective sins of aggression and cruelty ... Böll's later novels are much broader in scope and more morally explicit and engaged in regard to social, political, and religious problems ... Böll became increasingly outspoken in his criticism of the Catholic Church in Germany in the 1960s ... Despite his sharp attack against the German Church, Böll never denied being spiritually Catholic and insisted that he should receive a Church burial at his death. Like Péguy, whom he much admired, Böll was always careful to distinguish between the mystical body of the Church extending above and beyond the human institution and the essentially worldly and political corporation for the wealthy social classes that he judged the Church in West Germany to be."
Gene Kellogg, writing in 1970 in The Vital Tradition, commends the development of Japanese and Indian Catholic literary movements:
"Natsume Soseki's Kokoro (1914) compares favorably with the work of most Japanese writers working today. Similarly, in India the best work of M. R. Anand can be read quite comfortably even in such company as R. K. Narayan's masterpiece, The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1962), particularly if one turns to Anand's zestful and humane short stories such as "The Barbers' Trade Union" (1936)."
Doug Cummings, in his essay accompanying the film Silence, writes that, during the period that the Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo studied at the University of Lyon, "Catholic thought in postwar France was in the midst of intellectual revival and reform" - "Philosophers like Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier grappled with theology and modernity" while Endo "focused on writers he called the "grande écrivaines of French literature" ... François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Julien Green ... Catholic novelists who specialized in vivid descriptions of personal struggles, religious doubts, and dark nights of the soul. (Their novels were later direct influences on Graham Greene and Flannery O'Connor.)"
Endo was born inTokyo Keio University and in Lyons , his novels established him the leading writer of his day in Japan Japan
Steve Scott notes, in Crying for a Vision and Other Essays, that:
"Endo's characters, both eastern and western, are haunted by a specific Christ - a paternal, Judicial figure in the West and a maternal, forgiving figure in the East. In this haunting they bear some resemblance to the "fundamentalists" of Flannery O'Connor's fiction. Endo has repeatedly registered his conviction that a gospel centered on the forgiving, nurturing Christ is far more appropriate for his homeland than the stern, judgemental model imported from the West."
Endo writes in his Preface to the American Edition of A Life of Christ that the "religious mentality of the Japanese ... has little tolerance for any kind of transcendent being who judges humans harshly, then punishes them ... the Japanese tend to seek in their gods and buddhas a warm-hearted mother rather than a stern father." In Endo's classic novel Silence, for example, as Adrian Pinnington notes in his interesting paper on Endo, "Rodrigues, the priest who finally betrays the Church and apostasizes, actually first learns true humility through this action." It is only, Pinnington notes, "after he has abandoned the false absolutes of European culture that he can recognize the action of Christ in his own life, and begin to hear the voice of Christ."
Other novelists considered within the critical literature on the Modern Catholic novel include: Mary Gordon, Carmen Laforet, Elisabeth Langgässer, Gertrude von Lefort, Giovani Papini, and Sigrid Undset. The popular novels of Morris West can also be considered in this context.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tōru Takemitsu ~ Itinerant.
"Heinrich Böll was born of a Catholic family of craftsmen whose ancestors had left England to settle in the Rhineland during the reign of Henry VIII. The Catholic identity of the family was strong, and Böll was brought up in close-knit, supportive Catholic environment of working class people living in tenements ... Böll's early works, which use the war as living metaphor of universal evil, also have deep religious themes of guilt and the need for repentance - for both individual and collective sins of aggression and cruelty ... Böll's later novels are much broader in scope and more morally explicit and engaged in regard to social, political, and religious problems ... Böll became increasingly outspoken in his criticism of the Catholic Church in Germany in the 1960s ... Despite his sharp attack against the German Church, Böll never denied being spiritually Catholic and insisted that he should receive a Church burial at his death. Like Péguy, whom he much admired, Böll was always careful to distinguish between the mystical body of the Church extending above and beyond the human institution and the essentially worldly and political corporation for the wealthy social classes that he judged the Church in West Germany to be."
Gene Kellogg, writing in 1970 in The Vital Tradition, commends the development of Japanese and Indian Catholic literary movements:
"Natsume Soseki's Kokoro (1914) compares favorably with the work of most Japanese writers working today. Similarly, in India the best work of M. R. Anand can be read quite comfortably even in such company as R. K. Narayan's masterpiece, The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1962), particularly if one turns to Anand's zestful and humane short stories such as "The Barbers' Trade Union" (1936)."
Doug Cummings, in his essay accompanying the film Silence, writes that, during the period that the Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo studied at the University of Lyon, "Catholic thought in postwar France was in the midst of intellectual revival and reform" - "Philosophers like Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier grappled with theology and modernity" while Endo "focused on writers he called the "grande écrivaines of French literature" ... François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Julien Green ... Catholic novelists who specialized in vivid descriptions of personal struggles, religious doubts, and dark nights of the soul. (Their novels were later direct influences on Graham Greene and Flannery O'Connor.)"
Endo was born in
Steve Scott notes, in Crying for a Vision and Other Essays, that:
"Endo's characters, both eastern and western, are haunted by a specific Christ - a paternal, Judicial figure in the West and a maternal, forgiving figure in the East. In this haunting they bear some resemblance to the "fundamentalists" of Flannery O'Connor's fiction. Endo has repeatedly registered his conviction that a gospel centered on the forgiving, nurturing Christ is far more appropriate for his homeland than the stern, judgemental model imported from the West."
Endo writes in his Preface to the American Edition of A Life of Christ that the "religious mentality of the Japanese ... has little tolerance for any kind of transcendent being who judges humans harshly, then punishes them ... the Japanese tend to seek in their gods and buddhas a warm-hearted mother rather than a stern father." In Endo's classic novel Silence, for example, as Adrian Pinnington notes in his interesting paper on Endo, "Rodrigues, the priest who finally betrays the Church and apostasizes, actually first learns true humility through this action." It is only, Pinnington notes, "after he has abandoned the false absolutes of European culture that he can recognize the action of Christ in his own life, and begin to hear the voice of Christ."
Other novelists considered within the critical literature on the Modern Catholic novel include: Mary Gordon, Carmen Laforet, Elisabeth Langgässer, Gertrude von Lefort, Giovani Papini, and Sigrid Undset. The popular novels of Morris West can also be considered in this context.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tōru Takemitsu ~ Itinerant.
The modern and contemporary Catholic novel (3)
Gene Kellogg notes, in The Vital Tradition, that:
"... in the United States, the tendency of American Catholics to adopt the secular community's values of social meliorism without spiritual reservations gave rise rise to Flannery O'Connor's brilliant satires, in which social meliorists were depicted as blind victims of illusion, who did not understand that without spiritual dedication social meliorism was powerless to reach even those it sought to help. J. F. Powers had already exposed the spiritual bankruptcy of the "golfing priests" and the "regular fellows," who had abandoned spiritual values to go over to secularism on secularism's most superficial terms."
Kellogg also suggests that:
"Flannery O'Connor and J. F. Powers ... represented the two tendencies we had seen in the work of the European Catholic novelists, criticism of the secular environment and criticism of "religious" people, but in criticism of the environment the approach was milder than the European. When Powers or Flannery O'Connor criticized non-Catholics, or nonreligious people, the criticism had nothing to non-Catholicism or anti-Catholicism. Powers tended to attack some general characteristic inhumanity as in "The Old Bird" or racial prejudice as in "The Trouble." Flannery O'Connor tended to attack broadly prevalent patterns of human behaviour, such as meliorism (Rayber in The Violent Bear It Away) or the need to dominate (Mr Head in "The Artificial Nigger")."
O'Connor and Walker Percy introduced ideas on ways of communicating Christianity in popular culture. O’Connor wrote that:
“When you can assume your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of taking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
The problem as O’Connor saw it is that non-Christians do not recognise as sin those things that Christians view as sin. The whole concept of sin itself may be anathema to those who are not Christians and they may accept as completely normal things that Christians view as sinful. So she wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” In order to make things which seem normal to many appear as sinful to your audience you need to use the shock tactics of distortion and exaggeration, crisis and catastrophe.
Percy wrote about there being two stages in non-Christian audiences becoming aware of grace. First, there is an experience of awakening in which a character in a novel (and through that character, the audience) sees the inadequacy of the life that he or she has been leading. This is a moment of epiphany or revelation about themselves; a moment in which they either realise their depravity or their potential for grace. This is what O’Connor was talking about when she said that the job of the Christian novelist is to help the audience see activity that they regard as normal as a distortion. Such an experience may then lead on to the second stage of hearing and responding to the grace of God in Christ. What O’Connor and Percy both seemed to suggest is that their characters and their audience cannot see the grace of God without the first stage of becoming aware of the inadequacy of the current lives.
Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God deliver a central Catholic priest who is wonderfully himself despite the extremities of situation and suffering into which he is placed. They are a brilliant demonstration of the difficulties of communicating the Gospel in another culture and, as such, are on a par with Endo's Silence and The Samurai. Emilio Sanchez, its Jesuit central character, is an engaging central character who is honest about the deficiencies and the inspirations of his faith. The split narrative works well before meshing at the conclusion to bring together the events of the central crisis and the response to it. This central crisis is genuinely shocking although its resolution is probably a little too easy and dealt with too briefly but the novel, as a whole, provides an engaging and challenging exploration of God's presence and guidance in human exploration and suffering.
Ann Rice was brought up a cradle Catholic but exchanged her belief in God for the belief that there is no God while at University in response to her imperative need to read authors that were banned by the Roman Catholic Church. She married a convinced atheist and became famous as the author of popular Vampire novels. Her novels, however, reflected her search for meaning within a personal life touched by tragedy. The combination of her personal search and the research for her novels returned her to the history of Rome and beyond this to the mystery of the survival of the Jews. In 1998 she returned to the Catholic Church. Eventually this led to her own search for the historical Jesus as she read extensively on the subject with the result being the first two novels in her Christ the Lord trilogy.
The first of these, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, is written in simple, sparse prose with the story told in the first person. The storyline incorporates some of the miracles found in the apocryphal infancy gospels but these are mainly restricted to the period in Egypt. The remainder is an imaginative fleshing out of the minimal Gospel stories of Jesus' childhood. Very little happens in terms of action but Rice's dramatisation of Jesus' growing understanding of who he is and what he has to do is effective and moving. In Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, Rice creates a pre-history for Christ which seems consistent both with the Gospel narratives and with the character and personality of Christ which emerges from those narratives. The fictional pre-history of The Road to Cana is also dramatic and engaging; which is itself a considerable achievement. Rice is clearly a novelist who is well read in Biblical Criticism with a real understanding of the Gospel narratives.
"The American Catholic Ron Hansen ... has effectively transposed the story of the Prodigal Son to our own day in Atticus," writes Crowe. His novel, Mariette in Ecstasy, is the senstively told story of a young postulant given the stigmata and the varied reactions to her from her convent. Elmore Leonard's Bandits and Pagan Babies both have a focus on issues of Catholicism and organized religion with more invested in their questions of doctrine and faith. Touch provides a wry take on fame and the miraculous when Juvenal, a former brother of a Catholic order in Brazil who now helps alcoholics in a Detroit rehabilitation centre, performs a miracle cure on a woman who has been beaten by her husband. The story contrasts the love Juvenal finds with the business and church zealots who seek to exploit his gift.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
M Ward - Epistemology.
"... in the United States, the tendency of American Catholics to adopt the secular community's values of social meliorism without spiritual reservations gave rise rise to Flannery O'Connor's brilliant satires, in which social meliorists were depicted as blind victims of illusion, who did not understand that without spiritual dedication social meliorism was powerless to reach even those it sought to help. J. F. Powers had already exposed the spiritual bankruptcy of the "golfing priests" and the "regular fellows," who had abandoned spiritual values to go over to secularism on secularism's most superficial terms."
Kellogg also suggests that:
"Flannery O'Connor and J. F. Powers ... represented the two tendencies we had seen in the work of the European Catholic novelists, criticism of the secular environment and criticism of "religious" people, but in criticism of the environment the approach was milder than the European. When Powers or Flannery O'Connor criticized non-Catholics, or nonreligious people, the criticism had nothing to non-Catholicism or anti-Catholicism. Powers tended to attack some general characteristic inhumanity as in "The Old Bird" or racial prejudice as in "The Trouble." Flannery O'Connor tended to attack broadly prevalent patterns of human behaviour, such as meliorism (Rayber in The Violent Bear It Away) or the need to dominate (Mr Head in "The Artificial Nigger")."
O'Connor and Walker Percy introduced ideas on ways of communicating Christianity in popular culture. O’Connor wrote that:
“When you can assume your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of taking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
The problem as O’Connor saw it is that non-Christians do not recognise as sin those things that Christians view as sin. The whole concept of sin itself may be anathema to those who are not Christians and they may accept as completely normal things that Christians view as sinful. So she wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” In order to make things which seem normal to many appear as sinful to your audience you need to use the shock tactics of distortion and exaggeration, crisis and catastrophe.
Percy wrote about there being two stages in non-Christian audiences becoming aware of grace. First, there is an experience of awakening in which a character in a novel (and through that character, the audience) sees the inadequacy of the life that he or she has been leading. This is a moment of epiphany or revelation about themselves; a moment in which they either realise their depravity or their potential for grace. This is what O’Connor was talking about when she said that the job of the Christian novelist is to help the audience see activity that they regard as normal as a distortion. Such an experience may then lead on to the second stage of hearing and responding to the grace of God in Christ. What O’Connor and Percy both seemed to suggest is that their characters and their audience cannot see the grace of God without the first stage of becoming aware of the inadequacy of the current lives.
Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God deliver a central Catholic priest who is wonderfully himself despite the extremities of situation and suffering into which he is placed. They are a brilliant demonstration of the difficulties of communicating the Gospel in another culture and, as such, are on a par with Endo's Silence and The Samurai. Emilio Sanchez, its Jesuit central character, is an engaging central character who is honest about the deficiencies and the inspirations of his faith. The split narrative works well before meshing at the conclusion to bring together the events of the central crisis and the response to it. This central crisis is genuinely shocking although its resolution is probably a little too easy and dealt with too briefly but the novel, as a whole, provides an engaging and challenging exploration of God's presence and guidance in human exploration and suffering.
Ann Rice was brought up a cradle Catholic but exchanged her belief in God for the belief that there is no God while at University in response to her imperative need to read authors that were banned by the Roman Catholic Church. She married a convinced atheist and became famous as the author of popular Vampire novels. Her novels, however, reflected her search for meaning within a personal life touched by tragedy. The combination of her personal search and the research for her novels returned her to the history of Rome and beyond this to the mystery of the survival of the Jews. In 1998 she returned to the Catholic Church. Eventually this led to her own search for the historical Jesus as she read extensively on the subject with the result being the first two novels in her Christ the Lord trilogy.
The first of these, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, is written in simple, sparse prose with the story told in the first person. The storyline incorporates some of the miracles found in the apocryphal infancy gospels but these are mainly restricted to the period in Egypt. The remainder is an imaginative fleshing out of the minimal Gospel stories of Jesus' childhood. Very little happens in terms of action but Rice's dramatisation of Jesus' growing understanding of who he is and what he has to do is effective and moving. In Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, Rice creates a pre-history for Christ which seems consistent both with the Gospel narratives and with the character and personality of Christ which emerges from those narratives. The fictional pre-history of The Road to Cana is also dramatic and engaging; which is itself a considerable achievement. Rice is clearly a novelist who is well read in Biblical Criticism with a real understanding of the Gospel narratives.
"The American Catholic Ron Hansen ... has effectively transposed the story of the Prodigal Son to our own day in Atticus," writes Crowe. His novel, Mariette in Ecstasy, is the senstively told story of a young postulant given the stigmata and the varied reactions to her from her convent. Elmore Leonard's Bandits and Pagan Babies both have a focus on issues of Catholicism and organized religion with more invested in their questions of doctrine and faith. Touch provides a wry take on fame and the miraculous when Juvenal, a former brother of a Catholic order in Brazil who now helps alcoholics in a Detroit rehabilitation centre, performs a miracle cure on a woman who has been beaten by her husband. The story contrasts the love Juvenal finds with the business and church zealots who seek to exploit his gift.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
M Ward - Epistemology.
Tuesday, 12 May 2009
Airbrushed from Art History? (4)
Michael Gibson argues, in Symbolism, that the movement was a product of Catholic and of industrial Europe. A significant part of Symbolist art, he notes, “is tinged with a religiosity of a Catholic, syncretic or esoteric kind.”
The Catholic influence on Symbolism was itself part of a wider revival of Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, known as the French Catholic Revival. Marian E. Crowe has written in Aiming At Heaven, Getting The Earth that the militantly secularists ideals of the Third Republic - materialism, naturalism, scientism, and determinism - were perceived by many to be “choking off vitality and beauty” and “actually made people feel less free and less in control of their own lives.” The result, Gene Kellogg has argued in The Vital Tradition, “was the “decadence” of the period eventually to be known as the “fin de siècle,” a period which by curiously convoluted processes ended by giving way to a revival of Catholicism in France.”
John House writes in Post-Impressionism that the suitability of a return to Roman Catholicism had been outlined in two books published in 1889, Charles Morice's La Littérature de toute á l'heure and Georges Vanor's L'Art symboliste:
"Morice made the equation between the Idea and God when he declared that 'Souls which are the externalization of God, seek to return, through a book, Art, a musical phrase, a pure thought, to the metaphysical realm of Ideas, to God. Truth resides in the harmonious laws of Beauty.' Vanor pursued this equation further. There was a specific and logical link to be made between Ideas, God, Symbols and Christian Symbolism, and, since France was Roman Catholic, it was to Catholic art that all Art should return. The impact of this programme during the 1890s was extensive and profound. Books were published on religious topics, plays about religious subjects proliferated in the theatres of Paris, fringe religions such as Theosophy, Occultism and Satanism were highly popular, conversions of prominent writers and artists to Roman Catholicism multiplied and the walls of the Salons and the avant-garde exhibitions blossomed with religious paintings."
Crowe notes that “an impressive number of intellectuals and cultural figures ... having abandoned their childhood faith and become atheists in their youth, ... 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 saints called attention to the poor as an integral part of that communion and depicted poverty as both a social evil and source of sanctification; 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 many 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.”
William S. Rubin writes, in Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy, that:
“Léon Bloy attacked the complacency of French bourgeois life with the fury of an Old Testament prophet; Charles Péguy, a Republican, tried to reconcile the struggle for social liberty with the French medieval heritage. Paul Claudel, François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Jacques Maritain all broadened what had become a lay Catholic revival.”
This revival, although it encountered significant opposition, was both creative and fruitful resulting in the development of the Catholic Novel, the revival of Sacred Art, and the beginnings of the worker-priest movement.
In the visual arts, fervent young Catholics like Émile Bernard, Paul Sérusier, Maurice Denis and Georges Rouault played key roles in the development of Post-Impressionism, the Nabi’s, and Fauvism. Denis founded the Ateliers de l’Art Sacré or Studios of Sacred Art and went on to exert a particular influence on the development of religious and symbolist art in Belgium, Italy, Russia and Switzerland.
A later recruit to the Nabis, Jan Verkade, linked both Denis and Sérusier with the Beuron monastery in Southern Germany where Father Desiderius Lenz was the Benedictine theorist anticipating ideas associated with twentieth-century art. Sérusier and Denis were joined by Alexei von Jawlensky and Alphonse Mucha in admiring the theories of the Beuron School, while Verkade became an artist-monk at Beuron.
Rouault helped theologian Jacques Maritain with the formulation of the ideas published in 1920 as Art and Scholasticism and, at their home in Meudon, Jacques and Raissa Maritain created a Thomistic study circle that influenced an increasing number of artists, writers, philosophers and theologians. Maritain played a significant role in the conversion to Catholicism of the futurist Gino Severini, the Dadaist Otto Van Rees and abstract art promoter Michel Seuphor.
Through Severini’s contact with the Futurist Fillia, Maritain’s movement for a renewal of sacred art influenced the development of Futurist Sacred Art while Severini, himself, left a legacy of sacred art in Swiss churches. In England, those involved with the establishment at Ditchling of the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, a Catholic community of work, faith and domestic life which included Desmond Chute, Eric Gill, David Jones and Hilary Pepler, were strongly influenced by Maritain.A further Catholic artistic community formed around the cubist artist Albert Gleizes who tutored an international selection of artists and was hailed by some as having laid out the principles for a renewal of religious art. Two of Gleizes’ pupils, Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett, played a significant role in introducing Modern Art to Ireland and in produced a major body of Irish sacred art.
From the Ateliers d’Art Sacré came the Dominican, Father Marie-Alan Couturier, with a mission to revive Christian art by appealing to the independent masters of his time. Churches, he argued, should commission the very best artists available, and not quibble over the artists' beliefs.
Couturier put this belief into practice by attracting major artists such as Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz and others for the decoration of a new church of Assy in the south of France before going on to work with Matisse on the chapel for the Dominican nuns at Vence. In the years which followed, with Father Pie Régamey in the pages of the journal Art Sacré, he explained and further encouraged the breakthrough of twentieth century art that had been initiated in the decoration of Assy and Vence.
The influence of the French Catholic Revival on modern art is often entirely overlooked or described as a nostalgic reaction to militant secularism; the expression of what was felt to be absent in industrialised Europe i.e. the ‘transcendent’ or ‘otherworldly’. As such, it is seen as reactive and nostalgic; “the negative imprint of a bygone age rich in symbols and the expression of yearning and grief at the loss of an increasingly idealised past.” Symbolism, for example, has been viewed as the refuge of the decadent who chose to stay behind and reject the modernist idea of progress. The argument then goes that those who were symbolists were confronted with the paradox that, while the “underlying Symbolism of culture” which they wished to preserve had “constituted the common ground on which the cohesion of society as a whole was built,” now, in clinging to it, they themselves became lonely, isolated souls.
However, when the achievements of the French Catholic Revival are seen in full and its influence around the world understood, it becomes much more difficult to characterise it in terms of reaction and nostalgia. Instead, there is a need to understand what it was about the Catholicism of this period that influenced and inspired so many artists and intellectuals and which empowered them to be at the forefront of developments in their chosen fields.
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Olivier Messiaen - Turangalîla Symphony.
The Catholic influence on Symbolism was itself part of a wider revival of Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, known as the French Catholic Revival. Marian E. Crowe has written in Aiming At Heaven, Getting The Earth that the militantly secularists ideals of the Third Republic - materialism, naturalism, scientism, and determinism - were perceived by many to be “choking off vitality and beauty” and “actually made people feel less free and less in control of their own lives.” The result, Gene Kellogg has argued in The Vital Tradition, “was the “decadence” of the period eventually to be known as the “fin de siècle,” a period which by curiously convoluted processes ended by giving way to a revival of Catholicism in France.”
John House writes in Post-Impressionism that the suitability of a return to Roman Catholicism had been outlined in two books published in 1889, Charles Morice's La Littérature de toute á l'heure and Georges Vanor's L'Art symboliste:
"Morice made the equation between the Idea and God when he declared that 'Souls which are the externalization of God, seek to return, through a book, Art, a musical phrase, a pure thought, to the metaphysical realm of Ideas, to God. Truth resides in the harmonious laws of Beauty.' Vanor pursued this equation further. There was a specific and logical link to be made between Ideas, God, Symbols and Christian Symbolism, and, since France was Roman Catholic, it was to Catholic art that all Art should return. The impact of this programme during the 1890s was extensive and profound. Books were published on religious topics, plays about religious subjects proliferated in the theatres of Paris, fringe religions such as Theosophy, Occultism and Satanism were highly popular, conversions of prominent writers and artists to Roman Catholicism multiplied and the walls of the Salons and the avant-garde exhibitions blossomed with religious paintings."
Crowe notes that “an impressive number of intellectuals and cultural figures ... having abandoned their childhood faith and become atheists in their youth, ... 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 saints called attention to the poor as an integral part of that communion and depicted poverty as both a social evil and source of sanctification; 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 many 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.”
William S. Rubin writes, in Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy, that:
“Léon Bloy attacked the complacency of French bourgeois life with the fury of an Old Testament prophet; Charles Péguy, a Republican, tried to reconcile the struggle for social liberty with the French medieval heritage. Paul Claudel, François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Jacques Maritain all broadened what had become a lay Catholic revival.”
This revival, although it encountered significant opposition, was both creative and fruitful resulting in the development of the Catholic Novel, the revival of Sacred Art, and the beginnings of the worker-priest movement.
In the visual arts, fervent young Catholics like Émile Bernard, Paul Sérusier, Maurice Denis and Georges Rouault played key roles in the development of Post-Impressionism, the Nabi’s, and Fauvism. Denis founded the Ateliers de l’Art Sacré or Studios of Sacred Art and went on to exert a particular influence on the development of religious and symbolist art in Belgium, Italy, Russia and Switzerland.
A later recruit to the Nabis, Jan Verkade, linked both Denis and Sérusier with the Beuron monastery in Southern Germany where Father Desiderius Lenz was the Benedictine theorist anticipating ideas associated with twentieth-century art. Sérusier and Denis were joined by Alexei von Jawlensky and Alphonse Mucha in admiring the theories of the Beuron School, while Verkade became an artist-monk at Beuron.
Rouault helped theologian Jacques Maritain with the formulation of the ideas published in 1920 as Art and Scholasticism and, at their home in Meudon, Jacques and Raissa Maritain created a Thomistic study circle that influenced an increasing number of artists, writers, philosophers and theologians. Maritain played a significant role in the conversion to Catholicism of the futurist Gino Severini, the Dadaist Otto Van Rees and abstract art promoter Michel Seuphor.
Through Severini’s contact with the Futurist Fillia, Maritain’s movement for a renewal of sacred art influenced the development of Futurist Sacred Art while Severini, himself, left a legacy of sacred art in Swiss churches. In England, those involved with the establishment at Ditchling of the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, a Catholic community of work, faith and domestic life which included Desmond Chute, Eric Gill, David Jones and Hilary Pepler, were strongly influenced by Maritain.A further Catholic artistic community formed around the cubist artist Albert Gleizes who tutored an international selection of artists and was hailed by some as having laid out the principles for a renewal of religious art. Two of Gleizes’ pupils, Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett, played a significant role in introducing Modern Art to Ireland and in produced a major body of Irish sacred art.
From the Ateliers d’Art Sacré came the Dominican, Father Marie-Alan Couturier, with a mission to revive Christian art by appealing to the independent masters of his time. Churches, he argued, should commission the very best artists available, and not quibble over the artists' beliefs.
Couturier put this belief into practice by attracting major artists such as Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz and others for the decoration of a new church of Assy in the south of France before going on to work with Matisse on the chapel for the Dominican nuns at Vence. In the years which followed, with Father Pie Régamey in the pages of the journal Art Sacré, he explained and further encouraged the breakthrough of twentieth century art that had been initiated in the decoration of Assy and Vence.
The influence of the French Catholic Revival on modern art is often entirely overlooked or described as a nostalgic reaction to militant secularism; the expression of what was felt to be absent in industrialised Europe i.e. the ‘transcendent’ or ‘otherworldly’. As such, it is seen as reactive and nostalgic; “the negative imprint of a bygone age rich in symbols and the expression of yearning and grief at the loss of an increasingly idealised past.” Symbolism, for example, has been viewed as the refuge of the decadent who chose to stay behind and reject the modernist idea of progress. The argument then goes that those who were symbolists were confronted with the paradox that, while the “underlying Symbolism of culture” which they wished to preserve had “constituted the common ground on which the cohesion of society as a whole was built,” now, in clinging to it, they themselves became lonely, isolated souls.
However, when the achievements of the French Catholic Revival are seen in full and its influence around the world understood, it becomes much more difficult to characterise it in terms of reaction and nostalgia. Instead, there is a need to understand what it was about the Catholicism of this period that influenced and inspired so many artists and intellectuals and which empowered them to be at the forefront of developments in their chosen fields.
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Olivier Messiaen - Turangalîla Symphony.
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