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Religion and Literary Scholarship in France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Henri Peyre
Henri Peyre*
Affiliation:
Yale UniversityNew Haven, Conn.
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Extract

It is doubtful whether there is any modern literature, even that of Spain or of Russia, to which the many questions concerning religion are so central as they are in France. The oft-quoted saying of Nietzsche, in The Dawn of Day, is not a paradoxical assertion put forward by a German admirer of French culture: “It cannot be denied that the French have been the most Christian nation in the world, not because the devotion of masses in France has been greater than elsewhere, but because those Christian ideals which are most difficult to realize have become incarnated there, instead of merely remaining fancies, intentions or imperfect beginnings.” Nietzsche adduced as examples not only Pascal or Fénelon, and French Protestants, but free thinkers as well, and he praised the latter “because they had to fight against truly great men and not, like the free thinkers of other nations, merely against dogmas and sublime abortions.” A student of French literature who had no familiarity with the religious background and traditions, no interest in the many controversies which have opposed one sect of Catholics to another, Catholics to Protestants, believers to unbelievers, clericals to anti-clericals, would be crippled at every stage.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 77 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1962 , pp. 345 - 363
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962

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References

∗ Essay presented in substance to the second Conference of the Frank L. Weil Institute (Cincinnati) for Studies in Religion and the Humanities. The purpose of the author was to survey recent work in that vast area and to suggest further research.

1 E. M. Forster remarks in Abinger Harvest: “It is not that the Englishman can't feel—it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks—his pipe might fall out if he did.”

2 Augustin Renaudet's finest books are Préréforme et Humanisme à Paris, 1916, new edition, 1953, and Humanisme el Renaissance, 1958. Father Walter Ong has given us the best study by far on Ramus (Harvard Univ. Press, 1958).—The names of those remarkable commentators of the Scriptures in France between 1600 and 1625 were Casaubon, Turnèbe, Saumaise, Louis Cappelle. They anticipated Richard Simon and Spinoza and modern exegesis.

3 Luden Febvre's volumes alluded to here are: Le Problème de l'incroyance au XVIe siècle. La Religion de Rabelais, Albin Michel, 1942; Autour de l'Heptaméron. Amour sacré, amour profane, Gallimard, 1944. To them must be added a challenging interpretation of the one genuine negator of religion in the first half of the same century, Bonaventure des Périers, whom Febvre explains through the influence of Celsus as preserved in Origen's refutation: Origène et Des Périers ou l'Enigme du Cymbalum Mundi, Droz, 1942, and a rich collection of essays. Au Cæur religieux du XVIe siècle, Sevpen, 1957. See also “La Sensibilité et l'histoire” in Annales d'Histoire Sociale, iii (1941), 1–20. The best studies in English on the religion of Rabelais are those of M. A. Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage (1958); and on Montaigne, the wise and discerning chapter on a much debated subject (to what extent and in what manner was Montaigne religious?) is that of Donald M. Frame in Montaigne's Discovery of Man, Columbia Univ. Press, 1955. See also Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes, Van Gorcum, Assen, the Netherlands, 1960.

4 Not necessarily an anti-religious attitude, and often a moral one! Walt Whitman, in his famous lines in the “Song of Myself,” voiced his desire to turn and live with animals: “They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.” The philosopher Max Scheler advised his disciples: “Learn to know animals, so as to see how difficult it is to be a man.”—Mensch und Geschichte, Zurich, 1929.

5 Besides the volumes by Hermann Janssen, Montaigne fidéiste and by another cleric, Maturin Dréano, La Pensée religieuse de Montaigne, see Marc Citoleux, Le Vrai Montaigne, théologien et soldat (1937); Gustave Lanson, Les Essais de Montaigne (1930); Jean Plattard, Etat présent des études sur Montaigne (1935); Marcel Raymond, Génies de France (Neuchatel, 1942); Jean Guiton, Romanic Review (April 1944), pp. 98–115.

6 I have attempted such a fragmentary survey twice, very imperfectly, in “Pascal et la critique contemporaine,” Romanic Review, xxi, 4 (1930), 325–341; and “Friends and Foes of Pascal in France Today,” Yale French Studies, no. 12 (God and the Writer), 1953, pp. 8–18.

7 See Ed. Benzécri, L'Esprit humain selon Pascal (Alcon, 1939); Jeanne Russier, La Foi selon Pascal (P.U.F. 1949); J. Prigent, “La Conception pascalienne de l'ordre,” in Ordre, Désordre, Lumière (Vrin, 1952); Jacques Morel, “Réflexions sur le ‘sentiment’ pascalien,” Revue des Sciences humaines, no. 97, January-March 1960; and the excellent recent volume by an English critic, Blaise Pascal, by Ernest Mortimer (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1959). In 1962 appeared Pascal et l'ordre du cæur by Ch. Baudoin, in the collection “Recherche de l'absolu.”

8 J. Maritain, “Pascal apologiste,” Revue Universelle, 1 August 1923, pp. 184–200. See also H. Bremond, “Pascal et les mystiques,” Revue de Paris, 15 June 1923, pp. 739–753, and “Pascal et le mystère de Jésus.” Revue de France, 15 June 1928, pp. 673–683.

9 F. T. H. Fletcher, in Pascal and the Mystical Tradition (Oxford, Blackwell, 1954), does not differ essentially from his French predecessors in his analysis of the Memorial.

10 The soundest and broadest specialist of the French seventeenth century today, Antoine Adam, is also a former Catholic priest, now teaching at the Sorbonne.

11 Rousseau himself opposed the two adjectives in a sentence of his ninth Rêverie d'un Promeneur solitaire: “I became a Catholic, but I always stayed a Christian.”

12 Bernard Groethuysen, J. J. Rousseau, 1949: Pierre Burgelin. La Philosophie de l'existence de J. J. Rousseau, 1952; Jean Starobinski, J. J. Rousseau, Plon, 1957; Léon Emery, Rousseau l'annonciateur, Lyon, n.d.

13 See Robert Mauzi, L'Idée du Bonheur au XVIIIe siècle, A. Colin, 1960.

14 For examples of that sympathy, tinged with admiring gratitude, evinced by leading religious figures for unbelievers, see Henri de Lubac, S.J., The Drama of Atheistic Humanism, New York, 1949; Raymond Régamey, O.P., Art sacré au XXe siècle, Paris, 1952; Jean Lacroix, Le Sens de l'athéisme, moderne, P. & Tournai, 1958; Adrien Dansette, Destin du Catholicisme français, 1926–1956, Paris, 1957; and Walter J. Ong, S.J., Frontiers in American Catholicism, New York, 1957.

15 Consult Christian Maréchal, Lamennais et Lamartine (Paris, 1907), Henri Guillemin, Le Jocelyn de Lamartine (Paris, 1936) and “Lamartine et le Catholicisme,” Revue de France, 1 May 1934; Denis Saurat, La Religion de Victor Hugo (Paris, 1929), expanded and modified as Victor Hugo et les Dieux du peuple (Paris, 1948), Auguste Viatte, Victor Hugo et les Illuminés de son temps (Montreal, 1942) and Paul Zumthor, Victor Hugo, poète de Satan (Paris, 1946); Henri Peyre, Connaissance de Baudelaire (Paris, 1951), chapter vi on Baudelaire and religion.

16 André Joussain's Romantisme et Religion (Paris, 1910), satisfactory and intelligently Bergsonian in its age, is now out of date. Auguste Viatte's Les Sources occultes du romantisme (1770–1820) is by far the author's most solid work. Pierre Moreau provided useful hints in an article, “Romantisme français et syncrétisme religieux,” Symposium (Syracuse, N. Y.), viii, i, (1954) 1–17. See also Marcel Ruff, L'Esprit du mal et l'esthétique baudelairienne (Paris, 1955), Milner, Le Diable dans la littérature française de Cazotte à Baudelaire (Paris, 1960), and a big volume on Satan, Etudes Carmélitaines (Bruges, 1948). Ernest Dubedout's Le Sentiment chrétien dans la poésie romantique (Paris, 1901) need be mentioned only as a volume not worth consulting today.

17 See, among many books by scholars which praise Renan's scholarship: James G. Fraser, Renan et la méthode de l'histoire des religions (P, 1921), René Dussaud, L'Œuvre scientifique de Renan (P, 1951), Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus (London, 1911), chapter xiii on Renan. Other references are to Jean Guitton, Renan et Newman (P, 1938), Jean Baruzi, Problèmes d'histoire des religions (P, 1935). André Gide, Henry de Montherlant have obviously read and reread Renan. A little known and curious writer, a history teacher, born in 1911 and killed during World War II in Italy in 1944, Jean-Berthold Mahn, expressed his admiration for Renan in Témoignages et lettres (P, 1950). He wrote several historical works on the Cistercians.

18 The religious writers who have studied Claudel from a religious point of view and with sympathy are Jacques Madaule in two big volumes. Klara Maurer in German (on Claudel's Biblical symbolism, Zurich, 1941), Raymond Malter, then J. J. Kim, in La Table Ronde (November 1956 and September 1958). Rayner Heppenstall and Joseph Chiari in English, in The Double Image (1947) and The Poetic Drama of Claudel (1954). Jacques Andrieu, La Foi dans l‘æuvre de Claudel (1955). Most important is Pascal Rywalski's La Bible dans l‘æuvre littéraire de Claudel (Fribourg).

19 “Le Monde cassé” (1932) is the title of a play by the dramatist and Christian philosopher Gabriel Marcel, the chief exponent of Catholic Existentialism today. Among the Protestant theological philosophers, Paul Ricœur is the one whose appeal to men of letters is today the most potent. His meditations have centered around the problem of Evil. On the soteriological obsession of contemporary French writers, even, or perhaps chiefly of agnostic ones like Anouilh, Giraudoux, Malraux, Camus, see a youthful but ardent work of criticism by René M. Albérès, La Révolte des écrivains d'aujourd'hui (Paris, 1949).

20 Henri de Lubac is more of a theologian or of an historian of religions (including Buddhism), keenly aware of the social duties of a Catholic today as redefined in Pope Pius XI's oft-quoted appeal to heal the greatest scandal of the modern world, the alienation of the working classes from the Church. See his Catholicisme. Les aspects sociaux du dogme (Paris, 1937; new ed., 1941).

21 A somewhat similar attitude appears in Michel Polanyi's Beyond Nihilism (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1900) and in Father P. R. Régamey, a Benedictine, in Art sacré au vingtième siècle (P, 1952). On this and allied subjects, see God and the Writer, Yale French Studies, xii, 1953, and by this writer, “Albert Camus, an anti-Christian Moralist,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, (vol. 102, October 1958). To the works mentioned in the preceding pages, the following should be added which might provide the literary scholar with a broader context: L'Encyclopédie Française: Vol. xix: Philosophie—Religion, Larousse, 1957; Adrien Dansette, Destin du Catholicisme français, P. Flammarion, 1957; William Bosworth, Catholicism and Crisis in Modern France, Princeton Univ. Press, 1961; Martin Turnell, Modern Literature and Christian Faith, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1961.