Catholic renewal
The Catholic renewal (French: Renouveau catholique) was a philosophical, socially critical and mainly literary Catholic movement that began in France and spread to other European countries.
Contents
History
Prepared by the writings of François-René de Chateaubriand, Louis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, Honoré de Balzac, Félicité Robert de Lamennais, Frédéric Ozanam, Charles de Montalembert, Louis Veuillot, Jean-Joseph Gaume, Pierre-Sébastien Laurentie, Barbey d'Aurevilly and Blanc de Saint-Bonnet, a number of intellectuals despaired at the emptiness of the unsatisfactory promises of a continuation of the Enlightenment, libertinism, positivism and naturalism.
During the 1880s the movement became involved in French domestic politics, criticising the secular politicians of the Third Republic. The programme, which was not fully formulated, allowed for a wide-ranging influence in French intellectual life. Ernest Hello, who influenced many of the following, much better-known writers, developed the theological and philosophical foundations in dialogue with the French Enlightenment and German idealism. Positions of the Catholic renewal can be found in the aestheticising Catholicism of Joris-Karl Huysmans as well as in the traditionalism and nationalism of Action française and the Christian socialism of Charles Péguy,[1] but also in the universal perspective of Paul Claudel. The First World War narrowed the differences between Catholics and those opposed to the influence of the Church.
One of the aims of the Catholic renewal, due to its active circle of people, was a renewal of literature and society by turning to the values of an original Catholicism. Favoured genres were novels, lives of saints, books of miracles, mystery plays and dramatic oratorios. In addition to Catholicism, the Catholic renewal was characterised by a rejection of both positivism and determinism, while at the same time taking an extremely differentiated view of the standards set by Catholic dogma. In Paris, there were connections to Russian emigrants,[2] and from there to the literary resistance in Germany.
French authors sometimes grouped in a Catholic literary revival include Léon Bloy, Paul Bourget, Julien Green, Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac,[3] as well as the philosophers Jacques Maritain and Gabriel Marcel.[4]
The main figures who have been seen as constituting a revival of a leading Catholic presence in national literary life in England include John Henry Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Alfred Noyes, Robert Hugh Benson, Ronald Knox, Muriel Spark, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh.[5] Of these, Belloc was the only writer raised a Catholic; the others were adult converts.
J. R. R. Tolkien, although a convinced Catholic, "is not generally perceived to be one of the key protagonists of the Catholic literary revival".[6] In his writing, his own Catholic convictions and his use of Catholic themes are far less explicit than was the case for the other writers mentioned. There is, however, a growing tendency to look at Tolkien within the English Catholic literary tradition of his time.[7]
Although distinct, a movement towards explicit religious loyalty and themes in Anglican and Anglo-Catholic writers such as George MacDonald, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers is sometimes linked to the Catholic literary revival as a broader phenomenon.[8]
Due to the influence of Catholic literature from England in the United States,[9] the concept of Catholic renewal is sometimes extended to include American authors such as Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, William Thomas Walsh, Warren Carroll, Fulton Sheen, Walker Percy, J. F. Powers and Flannery O'Connor. One of the early leaders of the revival in the United States was the editor and publisher Francis X. Talbot.[10]
The Catholic Poetry Society was founded in 1931 to further a tradition of Catholic poetry. They published Spirit: A Magazine of Poetry.[11]
Notable authors
France
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- Émile Baumann
- René Bazin
- Georges Bernanos
- Louis Bertrand
- Roger Bésus
- Léon Bloy
- Henry Bordeaux
- Charles de Bordeu
- Paul Bourget
- Jean Cayrol
- Gilbert Cesbron
- Alphonse de Châteaubriant
- Paul Claudel
- Léon Daudet
- Emmanuel Delbousquet
- Luc Estang
- George Fonsegrive
- Henri Ghéon
- Julien Green
- Joris-Karl Huysmans
- Francis Jammes
- Marcel Jouhandeau
- Jean de La Varende
- Paul-André Lesort
- Joseph Malègue
- Gabriel Marcel
- François Mauriac
- Maxence Van der Meersch
- Emmanuel Mounier
- Charles Péguy
- Alfred Poizat
- Charles de Pomairols
- Ernest Psichari
- Henri Queffélec
- Pierre Reverdy
- Georges Rouault
- Michel de Saint Pierre
Germany
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- Stefan Andres
- Hugo Ball
- Werner Bergengruen
- Conrad von Bolanden
- Michael Brink
- Theodor Haecker
- Dietrich von Hildebrand
- Friedrich Ritter von Lama
- Elisabeth Langgässer
- Gertrud von Le Fort
- Heinrich Lützeler
- Friedrich Muckermann
- Carl Muth
- Edzard Schaper
- Ruth Schaumann
- Reinhold Schneider
- Konrad Weiß
- Peter Wust
Austria
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Great Britain
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Belgium
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Brazil
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Argentina
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Other
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Notes
- ↑ Brian Sudlow, Catholic Literature and Secularization in France and England, 1880–1914 (Manchester University Press, 2011).
- ↑ Zwahlen, Regula M. (2010). Das revolutionäre Ebenbild Gottes. Anthropologien der Menschenwürde bei Nikolaj A. Berdjaev und Sergej N. Bulgakov (= Syneidos. Band 5). Wien/Berlin/Münster: Lit, p. 87.
- ↑ Martin Turnell, "A Catholic Literary Revival", The Spectator, 14 January 1966.
- ↑ The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism, edited by Rajesh Heynickx and Jan De Maeyer (Leuven University Press, 2010).
- ↑ Ian Ker, The Catholic Revival in English Literature (1845–1961): Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003).
- ↑ Joseph Pearce, Catholic Literary Giants: A Field Guide to the Catholic Literary Landscape (Ignatius Press, 2014), digital edition (pages unnumbered), chapter 38.
- ↑ E.g., Owen Dudley Edwards, "Gollum, Frodo and the Catholic Novel", in A Hidden Presence: The Catholic Imagination of J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Ian Boyd and Stratford Caldecott (2003).
- ↑ Joseph Pearce, Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief (Ignatius Press, 2006).
- ↑ Arnold Sparr, To Promote, Defend, and Redeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920–1960 (Greenwood Press, 1990).
- ↑ Sparr, To Promote, Defend, and Redeem (1990), p. 17.
- ↑ Sparr, To Promote, Defend, and Redeem (1990), p. 27.
References
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- Anon. (1902). "The Catholic Reaction in France," The Church Quarterly Review, Vol. LIV, pp. 296–322.
- Bloching, Karl Heinz (1966). Die Autoren des literarischen Renouveau catholique Frankreichs. Bonn: Verlag des Borromäusvereins.
- Griffiths, Richard (2018). "Claudel et le Renouveau Catholique Anglais," Bulletin de la Société Paul Claudel, No. 226, pp. 45–54.
- Klein, Félix (1893). "Le Mouvement néo-chrétien dans la littérature contemporaine." In: Nouvelles tendances en religion et en littérature. Paris: Victor Lecoffre, pp. 3–73.
- Kühlmann, Wilhelm; Roman Luckscheiter (2006). Moderne und Antimoderne. Der Renouveau catholique und die deutsche Literatur. Beiträge des Heidelberger Colloquiums vom 12. bis 16. September 2006. Freiburg: Rombach.
- Levaux, Léopold (1946). Religion et littérature. Tournai/Paris: Casterman.
- Lindhorst, Elke (1995). Die Dialektik von Geistesgeschichte und Theologie in der modernen Literatur Frankreichs. Dichtung in der Tradition des Renouveau Catholique von 1890–1990. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
- Longhaye, Georges (1900). Dix-neuvième siècle; esquisses littéraires et morales. Paris: Victor Retaux.
- Neumann, Veit (2007). Die Theologie des Renouveau catholique. Glaubensreflexion französischer Schriftsteller in der Moderne am Beispiel von Georges Bernanos und François Mauriac. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.
- Sageret, Jules (1906). Les Grands Convertis. M. Paul Bourget, M. J. K. Huysmans, M. Brunetière, M. Coppée. Paris: Société du Mercure de France.
- Mainage, Thomas (1919). Les Témoins du renouveau catholique. Paris Gabriel Beauchesne.
- Weinert, Hermann (1948). Dichtung aus dem Glauben. Einführung in die geistige Welt des Renouveau catholique in der modernen französischen Literatur. Hamburg: Hansischer Gildenverlag.
- Whibley, Charles (1899). "The Catholic Reaction in France," The Quarterly Review, Vol. CLXXXIX, No. 378, pp. 453–71.
