Modernism and Theology: Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Czesław Miłosz (Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature) 3030615294, 9783030615291

Table of contents :
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
The Religious Roots of Modernism
Theology in a State of Crisis: Critical, Literary, and Poetic Responses
Rethinking Modernism(s) and Religion
Bibliography
Part I: Reconciling Christianity and Modernity in the Early Twentieth Century
Chapter 2: A Theological History of Modernism
The ‘New Wine’ of Modernism and the ‘Old Scholastic Bottles’
William James, Henri Bergson, and the Twentieth-Century Mystical Revival
Transnational Modernism and Global Ecumenism
‘To be a heretic to-day is almost a human obligation’
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Spiritualising the War: Religion, Conflict, and Politics
World War 1 and Religion: Reimagining the Real
Fighting for Christianity: Religion, Politics, and Propaganda in the 1910s–1940s
‘A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question’
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Spaces of Encounter: Theological Modernism and Neo-scholasticism in Literature and Literary Criticism
‘A cause which finds living expression in a great novel […] cannot fail’
Orthodoxy and Heresy in Literary Criticism
‘Rancid’ Theology and ‘Pure Poetry’
Conclusion
Bibliography
Part II: Poetry, Aesthetics, and Theology (c. 1900–1950)
Chapter 5: The Ripening Dark God of Modernity: Religion and Creativity in Rainer Maria Rilke’s and Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Writings
The Misrepresented God of Dogmatic Christianity
Russia and Its Vocation: From the Third Rome to the Universal Church
The Orthodox Icon and the Creative Act
Divinity and Gender: Mary, Sophia, and Androgyne
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 6: A ‘Raid on the Absolute’: Dogmatic Tradition and Mystical Experience in  T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Criticism
The Varieties of Mysticism: Interpreting Religious Experience
Eliot’s Early Encounters with Neo-scholasticism and Theological Modernism
Dogma in the Modern World: Rewriting the Incarnation
The Inner Voice and Tradition: The Eliot–Murry Debate
Between Religious and Aesthetic Experience: Neo-Thomist Aesthetics and the ‘Pure Poetry’ Debate
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 7: ‘A Passionate Pursuit of the Real’: Theology and Poetics in Czesław Miłosz’s Writings
Apocalyptic Visions and the Question of Evil: Marian Zdziechowski’s Christian Pessimism
Society, Language, and Creativity: Stanisław Brzozowski’s Philosophy of Labour
‘[D]efence against irrationalism’: Wartime Reckoning with Theological Modernism and Neo-Thomism
‘I criticise Pure Form out of love’: Miłosz Reads Henri Bremond and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 8: Epilogue
Russia, America, and the End of Europe
Reading the Signs of the Times: Religion and Modernity in the 1950s–1960s
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MODERN EUROPEAN LITERATURE

Modernism and Theology Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Czesław Miłosz

Joanna Rzepa

Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature

Series Editors Ben Hutchinson Centre for Modern European Literature University of Kent Canterbury, UK Shane Weller School of European Culture and Languages University of Kent Canterbury, UK

Many of the most significant European writers and literary movements of the modern period have traversed national, linguistic and disciplinary borders. The principal aim of the Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature book series is to create a forum for work that problematizes these borders, and that seeks to question, through comparative methodologies, the very nature of the modern, the European, and the literary. Specific areas of research that the series supports include European romanticism, realism, the avant-garde, modernism and postmodernism, literary theory, the international reception of European writers, the relations between modern European literature and the other arts, and the impact of other discourses (philosophical, political, psychoanalytic, and scientific) upon that literature. In addition to studies of works written in the major modern European languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish), the series also includes volumes on the literature of Central and Eastern Europe, and on the relation between European and other literatures. Editorial Board Rachel Bowlby (University College London) Karen Leeder (University of Oxford) William Marx (Collège de France) Marjorie Perloff (Stanford University) Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania) Dirk Van Hulle (University of Oxford) More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14610

Joanna Rzepa

Modernism and Theology Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Czesław Miłosz

Joanna Rzepa University of Essex Colchester, UK

ISSN 2634-6478     ISSN 2634-6486 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature ISBN 978-3-030-61529-1    ISBN 978-3-030-61530-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61530-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Mosaic The Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas by Gino Severini and René Antonietti, University of Fribourg. Photo by Benedikt Rast. Fonds Benedikt Rast © Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire Fribourg. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Máté

Series Editors’ Preface

Many of the most significant European writers and literary movements in the modern period have traversed national, linguistic and disciplinary borders. The principal aim of the Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature series is to create a forum for work that takes account of these border crossings and that engages with individual writers, genres, topoi and literary movements in a manner that does justice to their location within European artistic, political and philosophical contexts. Of course, the title of this series immediately raises a number of questions, at once historical, geo-political and literary-philosophical: What are the parameters of the modern? What is to be understood as European, both politically and culturally? And what distinguishes literature within these historical and geo-political limits from other forms of discourse? These three questions are interrelated. Not only does the very idea of the modern vary depending on the European national tradition within which its definition is attempted, but the concept of literature in the modern sense is also intimately connected to the emergence and consolidation of the European nation-states, to increasing secularization, urbanization, industrialization and bureaucratization, to the Enlightenment project and its promise of emancipation from nature through reason and science, to capitalism and imperialism, to the liberal-democratic model of government, to the separation of the private and public spheres, to the new form taken by the university and to changing conceptions of both space and time as a result of technological innovations in the fields of travel and communication. vii

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Taking first the question of when the modern may be said to commence within a European context, if one looks to a certain Germanic tradition shaped by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), then it might be said to commence with the first ‘theoretical man’, namely Socrates. According to this view, the modern would include everything that comes after the pre-Socratics and the first two great Attic tragedians, Aeschylus and Sophocles, with Euripides being the first modern writer. A rather more limited sense of the modern, also derived from the Germanic world, sees the Neuzeit as originating in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Jakob Burckhardt, Nietzsche’s colleague at the University of Basel, identified the states of Renaissance Italy as prototypes for both modern European politics and modern European cultural production. However, Italian literary modernity might also be seen as having commenced two hundred years earlier, with the programmatic adoption of the vernacular by its foremost representatives, Dante and Petrarch. In France, the modern might either be seen as beginning at the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, with the so-called Querelle des anciens et des modernes in the 1690s, or later still, with the French Revolution of 1789, while the Romantic generation of the 1830s might equally be identified as an origin, given that Chateaubriand is often credited with having coined the term modernité, in 1833. Across the Channel, meanwhile, the origins of literary modernity might seem different again. With the Renaissance being seen as ‘Early Modern’, everything thereafter might seem to fall within the category of the modern, although in fact the term ‘modern’ within a literary context is generally reserved for the literature that comes after mid-nineteenth-century European realism. This latter sense of the modern is also present in the early work of Roland Barthes, who in Writing Degree Zero (1953) asserts that modern literature commences in the 1850s, when the literary becomes explicitly self-reflexive, not only addressing its own status as literature but also concerning itself with the nature of language and the possibilities of representation. In adopting a view of the modern as it pertains to literature that is more or less in line with Barthes’s periodization, while also acknowledging that this periodization is liable to exceptions and limitations, this series does not wish to conflate the modern with, nor to limit it to, modernism and postmodernism. Rather, the aim is to encourage work that highlights differences in the conception of the modern—differences that emerge out of distinct linguistic, national and cultural spheres within Europe—and to

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prompt further reflection on why it should be that the very concept of the modern has become such a critical issue in ‘modern’ European culture, be it aligned with Enlightenment progress, with the critique of Enlightenment thinking, with decadence, with radical renewal, or with a sense of belatedness. Turning to the question of the European, the very idea of modern literature arises in conjunction with the establishment of the European nation-states. When European literatures are studied at university, they are generally taught within national and linguistic parameters: English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Slavic and Eastern European, and Spanish literature. Even if such disciplinary distinctions have their pedagogical justifications, they render more difficult an appreciation of the ways in which modern European literature is shaped in no small part by intellectual and artistic traffic across national and linguistic borders: to grasp the nature of the European avant-gardes or of high modernism, for instance, one has to consider the relationship between distinct national or linguistic traditions. While not limiting itself to one methodological approach, this series is designed precisely to encourage the study of individual writers and literary movements within their European context. Furthermore, it seeks to promote research that engages with the very definition of the European in its relation to literature, including changing conceptions of centre and periphery, of Eastern and Western Europe and how these might bear upon questions of literary translation, dissemination and reception. As for the third key term in the series title—literature—the formation of this concept is intimately related both to the European and to the modern. While Sir Philip Sidney in the late sixteenth century, Martin Opitz in the seventeenth and Shelley in the early nineteenth produce their apologies for, or defences of, ‘poetry’, it is within the general category of ‘literature’ that the genres of poetry, drama and prose fiction have come to be contained in the modern period. Since the Humboldtian reconfiguration of the university in the nineteenth century, the fate of literature has been closely bound up with that particular institution, as well as with emerging ideas of the canon and tradition. However one defines it, modernity has both propagated and problematized the historical legacy of the Western literary tradition. While, as Jacques Derrida argues, it may be that in all European languages the history and theorization of the literary necessarily emerges out of a common Latinate legacy—the very word ‘literature’

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deriving from the Latin littera (letter)—it is nonetheless the case that within a modern European context the literary has taken on an extraordinarily diverse range of forms. Traditional modes of representation have been subverted through parody and pastiche, or abandoned altogether; genres have been mixed; the limits of language have been tested; indeed, the concept of literature itself has been placed in question. With all of the above in mind, this series wishes to promote work that engages with any aspect of modern European literature (be it a literary movement, an individual writer, a genre, a particular topos) within its European context, that addresses questions of translation, dissemination and reception (both within Europe and beyond), that considers the relations between modern European literature and the other arts, that analyses the impact of other discourses (philosophical, political, scientific) upon that literature and, above all, that takes each of those three terms— modern, European and literature—not as givens, but as invitations, even provocations, to further reflection. Ben Hutchinson Shane Weller

Acknowledgements

The idea for this book was formed about ten years ago. The research began during my doctoral studies in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Emma Mason supervised and Michael Bell and Jason Harding examined the thesis that contained early versions of some of the material included here. I am grateful for their insightful feedback, helpful advice, and generous support. I would also like to thank scholars who have read my work and offered valuable comments, including Ronald Schuchard, Scott Freer, Matthew Rumbold, Máté Vince, and two anonymous reviewers for Palgrave Macmillan. I have been lucky to receive financial support from several institutions. I am grateful to the University of Warwick for sponsoring the Warwick Postgraduate Research Scholarship in 2011–2014 and the Early Career Fellowship that I held at the Institute of Advanced Study in 2015–2016. The Polish Research Centre in London funded a research grant that allowed me to conduct extensive archival research in 2013–2014, and the T. S. Eliot Estate sponsored my participation in the T. S. Eliot International Summer School in 2013. The Irish Research Council funded my GOI Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin in 2016–2017. I am very grateful for their generous support. The Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute, the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies at Trinity College Dublin, and the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex have encouraged and supported my research. xi

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to numerous archivists and librarians who have helped me during my research. I extend my thanks to the staff of the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Faber Archive in London, the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum Archive in London, the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków, the Museum of Literature in Warsaw, the Manuscripts & Archives Research Library and the Early Printed Books & Special Collections at Trinity College Dublin, the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick, and the Biola University Library & Archives. I have presented various parts of my research in a number of forums, including the biennial conference of the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture at the University of Copenhagen, the Power of the Word International Conference at the University of Gdańsk, the Religion, Myth and Philosophy in the Poetry of T. S.  Eliot Colloquium at the University of Leicester, the Other Eliots: Contemporary Trends in T.  S. Eliot Studies conference at the University of Birmingham, the Unorthodox Orthodoxy: Catholicism, Modernisms and the Avant-Garde conference at the University of Notre Dame in London, and the T. S. Eliot International Summer School at the University of London. I am grateful for the insightful feedback and comments by those who were there, and the stimulating conversations that these talks have generated. Chapter 6 incorporates and expands on the topic that I first discussed in ‘Tradition and Individual Experience: T.  S. Eliot’s Encounters with Modernist Theology’, in Religion and Myth in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry, edited by Scott Freer and Michael Bell (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). It is published with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. I am grateful to the Biola University Library & Archives for their permission to reprint images from the Digital Commons @ Biola repository, and to Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire de Fribourg (BCU) for their permission to use Benedikt Rast’s photograph of the mosaic The Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas by Gino Severini and René Antonietti as the cover image. I would like to extend my thanks to colleagues and friends who have provided support and encouragement. I am grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies at Trinity College Dublin, and the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts &

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Humanities Research Institute. I owe special thanks to scholars who have been my intellectual mentors, offering generous support and invaluable advice: Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand, Władysław Miodunka, Ronald and Keith Schuchard, Jason Harding, and Sarah Smyth. I am grateful for the friendship of many brilliant thinkers whose intelligence and good humour have been a constant source of inspiration. This includes Michael Tsang, Marta Ruda, Santiago Oyarzabal, Felicita Tramontana, Maria Cohut, Cherry Ann Knott, Alex Russell, Dianne Mitchell, Sophie Rudland, Caterina Sinibaldi, Andrea Selleri, Ana Paula Magalhães, Waiyee Loh, Nazry Bahrawi, Gurpreet Kaur, Iman Sheeha, Vladimir Brljak, Carina Hart, Joseph Jackson, Bryan Brazeau, Emily Streeter, Stefano Rosignoli, Alex Nica, Justyna Przyszlakowska, Aneta Stępień, Andrew Pringle, Radek Przedpełski, Ewa Barron, Balázs Apor, Feargus Denman, and Jay Williams. Finally, I would like to thank my parents Ewa and Włodzimierz, my grandparents Marianna and Antoni, Beata and Rafał, Edit and Péter, Stefania, Piotr and Jakub, and Máté whose love and support made this book possible.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 The Religious Roots of Modernism   1 Theology in a State of Crisis: Critical, Literary, and Poetic Responses   5 Rethinking Modernism(s) and Religion   9 Bibliography  22 Part I Reconciling Christianity and Modernity in the Early Twentieth Century  25 2 A Theological History of Modernism 27 The ‘New Wine’ of Modernism and the ‘Old Scholastic Bottles’  27 William James, Henri Bergson, and the Twentieth-­Century Mystical Revival  39 Transnational Modernism and Global Ecumenism  48 ‘To be a heretic to-day is almost a human obligation’  59 Conclusion  66 Bibliography  80 3 Spiritualising the War: Religion, Conflict, and Politics 89 World War 1 and Religion: Reimagining the Real  89 Fighting for Christianity: Religion, Politics, and Propaganda in the 1910s–1940s  97 xv

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Contents

‘A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question’ 109 Conclusion 121 Bibliography 131 4 Spaces of Encounter: Theological Modernism and Neo-­scholasticism in Literature and Literary Criticism137 ‘A cause which finds living expression in a great novel […] cannot fail’ 139 Orthodoxy and Heresy in Literary Criticism 153 ‘Rancid’ Theology and ‘Pure Poetry’ 165 Conclusion 178 Bibliography 189 Part II Poetry, Aesthetics, and Theology (c. 1900–1950) 195 5 The Ripening Dark God of Modernity: Religion and Creativity in Rainer Maria Rilke’s and Lou Andreas-­ Salomé’s Writings197 The Misrepresented God of Dogmatic Christianity 199 Russia and Its Vocation: From the Third Rome to the Universal Church 206 The Orthodox Icon and the Creative Act 219 Divinity and Gender: Mary, Sophia, and Androgyne 232 Conclusion 247 Bibliography 260 6 A ‘Raid on the Absolute’: Dogmatic Tradition and Mystical Experience in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Criticism267 The Varieties of Mysticism: Interpreting Religious Experience 269 Eliot’s Early Encounters with Neo-scholasticism and Theological Modernism 278 Dogma in the Modern World: Rewriting the Incarnation 286 The Inner Voice and Tradition: The Eliot–Murry Debate 291 Between Religious and Aesthetic Experience: Neo-­Thomist Aesthetics and the ‘Pure Poetry’ Debate 302 Conclusion 317 Bibliography 332

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7 ‘A Passionate Pursuit of the Real’: Theology and Poetics in Czesław Miłosz’s Writings337 Apocalyptic Visions and the Question of Evil: Marian Zdziechowski’s Christian Pessimism 338 Society, Language, and Creativity: Stanisław Brzozowski’s Philosophy of Labour 352 ‘[D]efence against irrationalism’: Wartime Reckoning with Theological Modernism and Neo-Thomism 360 ‘I criticise Pure Form out of love’: Miłosz Reads Henri Bremond and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz 374 Conclusion 388 Bibliography 402 8 Epilogue407 Russia, America, and the End of Europe 407 Reading the Signs of the Times: Religion and Modernity in the 1950s–1960s 413 Bibliography 425 Index429

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1

Grover Martin, Modernism destroying Christian civilisation, King’s Business, 13 (July 1922), 642. Digital Commons @ Biola, Biola University Library and Archives Ernest James Pace, Cartoon ‘The J(udas) 2’, 1918, from the E. J. Pace Christian Cartoons Collection, Digital Commons @ Biola, Biola University Library and Archives

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The Religious Roots of Modernism In 1908, the anonymous pamphlet Modernism: What It Is and Why It Was Condemned posed a question: What is ‘Modernism’? A few months ago the word was scarcely known in England. To-day it has assumed huge proportions. Within the past few weeks it has formed one of the staples of conversation in club smoking-­ rooms and drawing-rooms. It has left the semi-obscurity of the theological study, and wandered out into street and market-place. It has broken through the bonds of terms and technicalities, and clothed itself, to some extent at least, in ordinary words and phrases.1

Indeed, in 1907 the term ‘modernism’ ‘wandered out’ into the streets of not only England, but the whole of Europe. The encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (Feeding the Lord’s Flock), issued by Pope Pius X on 8 September 1907, vividly described and condemned the movement of modernism, arousing a controversy that would engage the minds of Europe for another fifty years.2 Countless pamphlets, brochures, and newspaper and journal articles were published in many European languages by those who were dubbed ‘modernists’ and their opponents, ‘anti-modernists’, who endorsed neo-scholastic (or neo-Thomist) theology. The most influential of the anti-modernist pamphlets, Jean Baptiste © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Rzepa, Modernism and Theology, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61530-7_1

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Lemius’s Catechism on Modernism (Catéchisme sur le Modernisme, 1907), was translated into English, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Polish within just five years after its publication.3 Thus, after 1907 it was hardly possible to use the word ‘modernism’ without evoking the theological controversy. Writing in 1908, the literary critic R.  A. Scott-James complained of this semantic shift, accusing theologians of ‘appropriating words and destroying their value for all other purposes than their own’.4 Twenty years later, T. S. Eliot recorded his ‘disgust with the foul word modernist’, which, according to him, was ‘unhappily, necessary in theology; but it could be easily avoided in poetry.’5 Historically, theological modernism provides an important though largely overlooked context for discussing cultural, aesthetic, and literary modernisms. Defining this context unequivocally, however, is by no means an easy task. The term was employed as a pejorative label by the Vatican, and subsequently reclaimed by reform-minded Roman Catholic thinkers who accepted the gauntlet and redefined modernism in accordance with their own agendas. After World War 1, when the Roman Catholic crisis was defused and the Vatican’s anti-modernist stance prevailed, the term modernism was re-appropriated and recast as a positive label by a party of the Church of England that formed the Modern Churchmen’s Union, as well as a number of Protestant groups in the United States. Any discussion of the relationship between theological and cultural modernisms needs to begin with a recognition that at the beginning of the twentieth century the term ‘modernism’—which today is used primarily with reference to a cultural and aesthetic movement—had a multiplicity of religious meanings that were constantly disputed. In the British context, as Finn Fordham points out, ‘[b]etween 1907 and 1930 there were over 350 references to the term in the Times: ninety per cent of these refer to the theological context of Modernism.’ 6 Despite the contemporary prominence of those debates, present-day scholarship in the field of modernist studies and twentieth-century literature very rarely mentions or discusses their cultural and historical relevance. As the historian Ernestine van der Wall has aptly observed, ‘[o]ne gets the impression that there is a kind of amnesia among intellectuals today concerning the history of the conflicts over modernism, whether the subject is Catholic, Anglican or Protestant modernism.’7 Despite the extensive exchanges between early-twentieth-century writers and critics with theologians and religious thinkers associated with the so-called theological modernism—with some of them, including George Tyrrell,

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Friedrich von Hügel, and Maude Petre, explicitly named or implicitly alluded to in contemporary literary works, such as Mary Ward’s novel The Case of Richard Meynell, G. B. Shaw’s play Saint Joan, or the poems ‘The Smell of Heresy’ by Eugenio Montale and ‘Vacillation’ by W. B. Yeats, as well as numerous essays by T. S. Eliot, John Middleton Murry, T. E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, Ernst Robert Curtius, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Marian Zdziechowski, Stanisław Brzozowski, and Nicolas Berdyaev—the relevance of theological debates surrounding the modernist crisis for our understanding of early-twentieth-century culture remains underestimated. Even scholars who acknowledge the importance of theology continue to ignore the significance of the movement of theological modernism. Anthony Domestico’s study Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period devotes only one footnote to it, and applies the term ‘theological modernism’ to the work of authors such as T. S. Eliot, who explicitly registered his strong opposition to this term and to the theological movement in which it originated.8 Such ahistorical and decontextualised use of the term ‘theological modernism’ is misleading, since Eliot closely followed the theological debates of the period, and his understanding of the issues at stake ought to be situated within the religious landscape of the modernist crisis in theology. Misunderstandings such as this abound in the field of modernist studies, and the aim of this book is to clarify the definitional confusion by recovering the forgotten theological dimension of the very term ‘modernism’. The period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is frequently presented as the age of rapid secularisation. Within the grand narrative of the classic secularisation thesis, which for many years was widely accepted by literary scholars and cultural critics, modernisation can be equated with secularisation. According to this theory, the period of modernism was the time when institutional religion fell into decline and humankind could celebrate the new freedom of thought born at the moment. Offering a seemingly unbiased account of the decline of religion, the secularisation narrative poses an inverse relationship between the modern and the religious. It claims that the inevitable advance of the former and the social processes it consists in (including the rise of individualism, rationalism, and relativism) is in a causal relationship with the disappearance of the latter.9 The theory has been increasingly questioned by sociologists and historians since the 1990s. Thanks to extensive historical research that sheds light on those aspects of modernism that have been marginalised by scholars who, consciously or not, have endorsed the

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secularist perspective, the grand narrative that equates modernisation with secularisation has slowly been turned into a more nuanced and complex approach. The extent to which new research challenges the secularisation thesis and our interpretations of the modernist movement has been illustrated by Peter J.  Bowler’s Reconciling Science and Religion.10 Bowler’s research contests the view that since the time when scientific naturalism (endorsing empiricism and promoting a mechanical view of the world that was governed by comprehensible natural laws) became a paradigm of scholarly inquiry in the nineteenth century, science gradually led to the demise of religion. As the nineteenth-century scientific naturalism ‘denied the existence of a spiritual world apart from the universe revealed by the senses’, as Bowler asserts, proponents of secularisation theory have assumed it to be yet another significant milestone in the linear process of secularisation, leading to the twentieth-century ‘death of God’. However, as Bowler proves in his analysis of scientific and religious debates of the period, the early twentieth century brought about a resurgent enthusiasm for radically different accounts of reality—‘an explosion of interest in the nonmaterialistic ways of thinking, many of which impinged on what can legitimately be called religious ideas.’11 Idealist philosophy, psychic research, spiritualism, astrology, theosophy, and revivalist religious movements were all expressions of the need to reimagine the world so as to make it more open to what could be called the supernatural or the transcendent.12 These ways of comprehending the world, Bowler argues, were not necessarily considered incompatible with advances in science, and a number of scientists hospitable to non-materialistic thinking and religious intellectuals open to science engaged in lively discussions. ‘Religious feelings, especially those of a mystical character, were increasingly taken as valid guides to reality, guides that coexisted with the rational and empirical faculties used by science.’13 Similar views were expressed by early-twentieth-century writers. In 1917, the author and critic May Sinclair, who was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, argued that ‘the belief in the supernatural […] has never died. All the philosophy and all the science of the nineteenth century have been powerless against it. So far from being near its death in this century, it seems to be approaching a rather serious revival.’14 In a similar vein, in 1927, the writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley pointed out that the ‘fact that religions have decayed during the past few generations does not mean that they are definitively dead’,

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observing that ‘the scientific men […] are rapidly abandoning the materialistic position.’15 Like Bowler, Sinclair and Huxley draw attention to the return of interest in phenomena inexplicable by means of empiricism and social determinism that scientific naturalism advocated. This interest could be seen in the popularity of various forms of spiritualism and increasing interest in the mystical, the unconscious, and the insane, as well as in the Catholic revival of the interwar years. As Stephen Schloesser asserts, ‘the largely forgotten story of the renouveau catholique offers a case study of one place and time in which modernity tried to recover the wondrous—the “mystical”—that it had once eclipsed.’16 He argues that Catholic writers and intellectuals such as Georges Bernanos and Jacques Maritain hoped that Catholicism could be reimagined ‘not only as being thoroughly compatible with “modernity,” but even more emphatically, as constituting the truest expression of “modernity”’.17 As emerging historical research suggests, modernist culture was a scene of lively and rich intellectual exchanges in which some forms of belief in the transcendent and the supernatural were by no means as exceptional or eccentric as secularisation theory would maintain. The application of the secularisation thesis to literary modernism creates an artificially homogenous image of the movement, and produces a skewed perspective on the relationship between religion and culture of the early twentieth century. If complex tensions and interactions between modernity and religion that were an important part of the cultural landscape of modernism are to be brought to light, more nuanced frameworks need to be developed.

Theology in a State of Crisis: Critical, Literary, and Poetic Responses The theological crisis brought about by the so-called modernist controversy had profound and far-reaching implications for contemporary philosophy, culture, and literature. The entire methodological framework and language of theology and post-Enlightenment philosophy were put into question. Drawing on the work of the Tübingen School and John Henry Newman, modernist theologians emphasised the historical nature of Christian dogmas and doctrines, presenting them not solely as received wisdom, but as products of certain cultural and historical conditions. Thus, the very core of Christian theology (including such basic concepts as ‘revelation’, ‘dogma’, ‘tradition’, and ‘religious experience’) was

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considered in need of re-evaluation and reconceptualisation. A number of thinkers across Europe, including Maurice Blondel, Alfred Loisy, George Tyrrell, Friedrich von Hügel, Romolo Murri, Albert Ehrhard, and Marian Zdziechowski, aimed to develop a radically new apologetics that would be capable of responding to the modern experience. They emphasised the role of creative theological hermeneutics, and some, like Henri Bremond in France and Carl Conte Scapinelli in Germany, went so far as to suggest that the new language of theology ought to be akin to poetry. Their propositions were disseminated throughout Europe by means of translations and epistolary networks that reveal the significance of theological modernism as a movement of a truly international scale. The idea that literature and poetry can offer a substantial contribution to the ongoing debates and possibly provide a solution to the religious crisis was debated throughout Europe. Thinkers who focused on the question of the affinity between the aesthetic and the religious approached the issue from various, often opposing angles. They all, in one way or another, began with the premise that the existing representations of reality—built on materialist and positivist frameworks—had proved insufficient and had to be revised so as to allow for the presence of supernatural or metaphysical elements. How those elements were to be conceptualised in the wake of the modernist crisis remained an open question. For instance, the Russian philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev and the French theologian and critic Henri Bremond elevated the meaning of a creative act by emphasising the proximity of poetic and mystical experiences, while the British philosopher T. E. Hulme and the French religious thinker Jacques Maritain insisted that there existed an unbridgeable gap between the mystical and the poetic and, thus, art remained subordinate to religion. Critics such as Ramon Fernandez in France or John Middleton Murry in Britain argued that literature and art had much in common with religion, while others, such as the English author and critic G. K. Chesterton or the Swiss cultural historian Caspar Decurtins, rejected the idea by drawing a clear line between the fields of theology and literature. Debates on the relationship of art and religion as well as the meaning of the terms such as ‘religious experience’ and ‘heresy’ continued to rage until the 1940s. The topic attracted large audiences across Europe, as key position papers were published in prominent journals, such as Nouvelle Revue Française in France, the Criterion and Adelphi in Britain, and Hochland in Germany. The key questions relating to the debates on religion and aesthetics engaged poets, literary critics, and religious intellectuals, including Rainer Maria Rilke

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and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Henri Bremond and Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry, and Czesław Miłosz and Jerzy Andrzejewski. Closer attention to these debates reveals an urgency with which the subject of the relation between aesthetics and metaphysics was approached. The relationship between theological and literary modernisms was by no means limited to theoretical considerations. The range of literary responses to the theological crisis is broad and spans many languages. Authors of novels and plays explored the questions of a long-overdue religious reform and the possible shapes it could take. Plots of novels and plays were conceived around a conflict between a reform-minded devout believer who is convinced of the experiential and evolutionary character of Christianity, the conservative religious environment in which he or she lives and works, and, optionally, secular materialist culture. Two significant examples of such novels that proved extremely popular among contemporary readers are Antonio Fogazzaro’s The Saint (Il Santo) and Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti’s Jesse and Maria (Jesse und Maria). Fogazzaro, a Catholic writer who firmly supported the reform of the church, corresponded with numerous Catholic modernists across Europe. His novel, published in Italian in 1906, was condemned by the Vatican as heretical and placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, thereby attracting an astonishing amount of attention. English, French, German, and Dutch translations appeared in the same year, followed by Hungarian, Spanish, and Portuguese in 1907, and Czech in 1911. Thus, the book became ‘the storm centre of religious and literary debate’ across Europe.18 Similarly, Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti’s novel became the battleground between reform-minded and conservative critics and intellectuals, prompting the Swiss critic Caspar Decurtins to publish a full treatise on the spiritual threats brought about by the movement of literary modernism. Decurtins went so far as to argue that ‘modern literature […] has left the soil of Christianity’, promoting ‘wild subjectivism’ and creating ‘a new religion for the new people’.19 Among those who opposed Decurtins were thinkers who looked to literature in general, and poetry in specific, as a source of renewal for the theological discourse. While prose could serve as a platform for popularisation and accessible exposition of the points debated by the modernist reformers and anti-modernist conservatives, poetry seemed to offer a different mode of engagement with the ideas disputed by both sides of the debate. For modernist theologians, poetry appeared to have the capacity to open up the discourse of theology that had become devoid of creative potential

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due to an excessive emphasis on neo-scholastic rationalist mode of thought and writing. They argued, to quote Carl Conte Scapinelli, that Catholic modernism ‘creates [a new idea of] religion with the help of poetry’ opening up a space for dialogue between the creative artist and the religious intellectual.20 For literary critics, such as A. C. Bradley, Professor of Poetry at Oxford University in 1901–1906, poetry was clearly ‘trying to express something beyond itself [which is] also what the other arts, and religion, and philosophy are trying to express’.21 The idea that poetry could become a mode of religious inquiry gained much traction in the 1920s and 1930s, as Henri Bremond’s work on ‘pure poetry’ attracted attention of literary critics and religious intellectuals in France and on both sides of the Atlantic.22 Bremond, a well-respected historian of religion and member of the Académie Française, conceived of ‘pure poetry’ as ‘a special knowledge’ that leads to the ‘apprehension of the real’ in a similar way to religious experience. He argued against understanding poetry as a didactic tool and emphasised that it belongs on the same continuum as varieties of religious experience, such as prayer or mystical visions. These ideas caused intense reaction from the church authorities (some of his works were placed on the Index of Prohibited books), other religious intellectuals and literary critics, such as Jacques Maritain or Ramon Fernandez, and many poets who followed and responded to the debates, including T. S. Eliot and Czesław Miłosz. For many intellectuals, the apparent crisis in theology seemed inextricably linked to a wider ideological malaise. They became disillusioned with early-twentieth-century political theory and sensed that the coming years might bring an end to an ‘entire epoch of civilization which was materially progressing while spiritually regressing’.23 The idea that politics and theology could work hand in hand to bring about social and ideological regeneration and enact what Roger Griffin dubbed ‘an alternative modernity’ attracted much attention from both left- and rightwing intellectuals. A number of politico-religious movements sprang up across Europe. Many of them, such as the socialist Le Sillon and the rightwing Action française in France, enjoyed considerable initial support of the institutional church, to be subsequently condemned by the Vatican.24 The interwar period saw a growing disillusionment with democracy as a form of government—a condition that Eliot described as ‘a general sickness of politics’ and a ‘spiritual anaemia’.25 Many thinkers and writers, including Rainer Maria  Rilke, Eliot, and Miłosz, emphasised that any

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discussion of new alternative political systems should not neglect the pressing need for a simultaneous revitalisation of the spirit. All three poets recorded their reflections on contemporary politics, including the rise of communism and fascism, in their letters, essays, and commentaries. However, they came to politics from very different backgrounds. At the beginning of World War 1 Rilke supported German nationalists, by the end of the war he showed socialist sympathies, and in the 1920s espoused the cause of Italian fascism. In the early 1920s Eliot was a sympathiser of Charles Maurras and Action française, but by the outbreak of World War 2 he became critical of fascism, which he considered a ‘political religion’. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Miłosz was close to left-wing student groups, but World War 2 and the subsequent Soviet occupation of East-Central Europe made him extremely sceptical of communism, which he referred to as the ‘New Faith’. Rilke did not live to see fascism and communism in their full-blown form, but Eliot and Miłosz gradually came to view them as movements that presented a serious challenge to religion since they channelled religious emotions and enthusiasm into a political cause. What the political thinking of the three poets had in common was a conviction that the spiritual crisis was a key yet unacknowledged cause of the political malaise. Indeed, the view that the political turmoil could be resolved only on the spiritual plane gained much traction among Christian intellectuals throughout Europe. The ‘great heresy of the twentieth century is political’, the editor of a leading Catholic journal in Britain argued, since ‘[w]here men have no religious doctrine as a framework, there is a vacuum into which political ideas expand, swelling to monstrous sizes’.26 The loss of a universal religious frame of reference was of key concern to Rilke, Eliot, and Miłosz, and a recurring theme in their poetry. As the following chapters demonstrate, their thinking about politics, religion, and aesthetics was dominated by the dynamic tension between the concepts of order and authority on the one hand, and freedom and individualism on the other.

Rethinking Modernism(s) and Religion Recent years have seen a number of works bringing new critical perspectives to the study of modernist literature. Unprecedented attention has been devoted to the approaches that promised to shed light on the so far neglected aspects of modernism and to become correctives to the earlier narratives of the period. The reconfigurations that have recently become

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particularly popular with critics include global, cosmopolitan, and transnational modernisms, feminist and queer modernisms, mass culture modernisms, postcolonial modernisms, and green modernisms. Such an impressive scope of interdisciplinary research has considerably nuanced our understanding of modernism as a cultural and aesthetic movement and directed renewed critical attention to the ‘sociocultural matrix’ in which modernism emerged.27 Furthermore, while traditionally modernism has been understood to signal ‘a dialectical opposition to what is not functionally “modern”, namely “tradition”’,28 recently this understanding of the movement has been contested by a number of scholars who emphasised modernism’s nuanced engagement with history and tradition.29 These recent developments in the field of modernist studies have led to challenging definitional issues. New research in the field has increasingly questioned the understanding of modernism as an aesthetic project characterised by an internal integrity and coherence, and instead opted for the plurality of the term ‘modernisms’, which is better suited to embrace the heterogeneity of diverse responses to modernity. This has resulted in a major shift in the way modernism and its relationship with modernity, understood as a critical project constituting a response to the condition of modernisation, are conceptualised. Thus, Peter Brooker and others propose to understand modernism ‘in terms of overlapping, criss-crossing, and labile networks’.30 Susan Stanford Friedman has rightly observed that ‘in an evolving scholarly discourse, modern, modernity, and modernism constitute a critical Tower of Babel.’31 While Friedman acknowledges the numerous problems that this definitional crisis causes, she also, and more importantly, points out: As contradictory terms resisting consensual definition, modern, modernism, and modernity form a fertile terrain for interrogation, providing ever more sites for examination with each new meaning spawned. […] their contradictions highlight the production of meaning possible by attention to what will not be tamed, by what refuses consistency and homogenization.32

The differences and contradictions that are foregrounded by new research in modernist studies demonstrate, Friedman argues, that ‘definitional dissonance matters’ and the interrogation of the meanings of the terms ‘modern’, ‘modernity’, and ‘modernism’ ought to ‘begin and end in reading the specificities of these contradictions’.33

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One aspect of the modernist movement that in a very conspicuous way ‘refuses consistency and homogenization’ is the issue of its relationship to religion, which is the topic of this book. It is a question that has until now been largely evaded and has not received much critical attention. The study that set the precedent was Pericles Lewis’s Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (2010).34 It called into question the way in which scholars’ uncritical embrace of the secularisation thesis created a blind spot in modernist studies, and precluded comprehensive research into the interaction between religious sensibility of the modernists and their literary responses to the modern condition. As Lewis argues, the relationship between modernity and secularisation is by no means unequivocal, and many modernist authors seemed to be acutely aware of this. Contrary to the popular opinion, modernists ‘did not accept secularization as inevitable or embrace a world emptied of the sacred’, but they ‘sought instead to understand religious experience anew, in the light of their own experience of modernity and of the theories of their contemporaries’.35 Lewis contends that secularisation, when applied to literary scholarship in general and modernist studies in particular, is a misleading term since ‘modernists were not the devout secularists that most critics portray’.36 Instead of celebrating the liberating secularisation of the world, many of them began exploring and imagining new ways in which the sacred could be approached in what Lewis calls an ‘age of continued religious crisis’.37 Lewis’s pioneering research on the relationship between modernism and religion came at a point when several other scholars began questioning the unconditional endorsement of the alleged secularism of modernism. Roger Luckhurst has contested the claim that ‘one central way of defining modernity is to emphasize its rejection of religion’, agreeing with Marina Warner’s thesis that ‘modernity did not by any means put an end to the quest for spirit’.38 He pointed to the ways in which ‘the spirit leaked back into the grid of secular knowledge’ in the early twentieth century, and enthusiasm for scientific naturalism gradually faded away with the increased interest in spiritualism, theosophy, occultism, and revival of orthodox religion. More recently, Erik Tonning has argued for more research into the ‘formative and continuing impact’ of Christianity on the modernist movement. Tonning proposes that ‘any theoretical, historical or critical discussion of Modernism that neglects or minimizes that impact is inevitably flawed’.39 Just like Lewis, Tonning underscores the necessity to adopt a critical approach towards secularisation theory as well as the importance of paying closer attention to the ‘dense historical context,

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archival research and biographical and textual details’.40 Himself focusing on Anglophone authors, Tonning envisions a broader perspective of future research projects that would move beyond the confines of English-­ language literatures and include insights from a variety of other disciplines, such as ‘intellectual, cultural, political and scientific history, […] theology, philosophy, psychology, anthropology and sociology’.41 He argues that such interdisciplinary work, informed by ‘dense contextualization, biographical information and archival study’, will lead us to a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities of the ‘formative tensions’ between Christianity and modernity that can be found at the heart of the modernist movement.42 My monograph is the first book-length study to examine the complex interface between literary and theological modernisms. It takes inspiration from articles by Malcolm Bull, Lawrence Gamache, Una M. Cadegan, and Finn Fordham, who have all underlined the significance of theological modernism for the study of the literary and cultural production of the period.43 This book contributes to research on modernism and religion by providing a comprehensive account of literary responses to the religious crisis from a wide European perspective. It offers a new historical context for the study of modernist literature and reclaims the vital importance of modernist authors’ deep engagement with the religious debates raging across early-twentieth-century Europe. It approaches the period of modernism through the lens of cultural history and considers a range of literary and extraliterary sources. Apart from poetry and novels, it draws on a wealth of historical material, such as contributions to national and local newspapers and literary and religious periodicals, theological books and pamphlets, encyclicals, heterodox religious tracts, published and unpublished correspondence, literary and philosophical manifestos, and nonfiction prose. By contextualising literary modernism within the cultural and religious history of the period, this book opens up new paths of research and reveals deep yet so far under-studied connections between literary and theological modernisms. It interrogates the long-forgotten yet intricate connections between the so-called modernist controversy in Christian theology and the literary production of the early twentieth century, and it challenges the common perception of modernism as a period of vigorous secularisation, significantly reorienting the fields of modernist studies and comparative literature. This book is divided into two parts. The first part, ‘Reconciling Christianity and Modernity in the Early Twentieth Century’, provides a

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theological history of modernism, uncovering and interrogating the forgotten theological roots of cultural and aesthetic modernism. It traces the connections between the theological crisis and the cultural and literary production in the period as well as the literary critical debates on the relationship between religion and art. The second chapter foregrounds the tensions present in the religious landscape of the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, when the meaning of the term ‘modernism’ was primarily theological. The encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, issued by Pope Pius X in September 1907, condemned the theological movement of modernism as the ‘synthesis of all heresies’. This resulted in some of the leading Catholic thinkers being dismissed from teaching posts, forbidden to publish, or even excommunicated. In 1910, an ‘anti-modernist oath’ was imposed on all priests and candidates for the priesthood; it remained in force until the Second Vatican Council in 1962–1965. In the following years, similar disputes took place in the Church of England, the Russian Orthodox Church, and Protestant Churches across Europe. In this chapter, I consider the main arguments of the controversy, focusing on how the key figures of the debate—Alfred Loisy, George Tyrrell, and Friedrich von Hügel—conceptualised the new role and language of theology in the modern world. I show how the circulation of letters, publications, and translations contributed to a vigorous exchange of ideas among clergy, lay theologians, philosophers, and authors living and writing in different places in Europe. An example that demonstrates the scale of such exchanges is the unprecedented international reception of John Henry Newman, who came to be considered a proto-­ modernist thinker and in the wake of the modernist controversy was translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Polish, and Russian. His works were discussed in key theological periodicals as well as literary journals (including Jacques Rivière’s Nouvelle Revue Française and T.  S. Eliot’s Criterion). These public exchanges were accompanied by extensive private correspondence between key participants in the debates. A critical examination of these exchanges serves as a historical and theoretical introduction and lays the groundwork for the literary chapters of this book. The third chapter discusses the interface of the theological crisis, the religious revival that took place in the aftermath of World War 1, the interwar political discourse, and the rise of antisemitism across Europe. It explores the ways in which the war, which became the formative experience for many writers and readers, lent a new urgency to religious

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questions, which featured prominently in the letters, diaries, memoirs, and a wider print culture of the period. The visible growth of belief in the supernatural stimulated by the war was successfully utilised by state propaganda that presented World War 1 in religious terms. Religious discourse provided a useful means to justify political and military ends. Some of the arguments that gained traction during the modernist controversy were recast to align with the discourse of politics, with Pope Benedict XV identifying modernism among the deep causes of social and political unrest, and renewing Pius X’s 1907 condemnation of ‘the monstrous errors’ of modernism that are ‘as the plague [that] is not yet entirely stamped out, but lurks here and there in hidden places’ in his encyclical Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum (1914).44 Political leaders and public intellectuals continued to interpret ideological and social developments of the interwar period within a religious framework, and on the eve of World War 2 used a religious interpretation of the impending conflict to increase the morale and justify the war effort. This had a considerable impact on how the ongoing persecution and, from 1941, systematic extermination of European Jews were understood and narrated in the public discourse. With the rise of nationalism and antisemitism across Europe, the so-called Jewish question was intensely discussed in the circles of Christian intellectuals. Some of them connected it to the ongoing debate on theological modernism, which they saw as part of the broader process of secularisation that they thought had to be contained. The trope of the ‘rootless’, ‘individualistic’, and ‘free-thinking’ Jew became a standard antisemitic stereotype in the 1920s and 1930s. As the chapter shows, the traits associated with Jewishness, including excessive subjectivity, irrationalism, and cosmopolitanism, paralleled the portrayal of modernist theologians in the polemical texts of neo-scholastic thinkers. The fourth chapter explores the scope of mutual exchanges between the fields of theology, literature, and literary criticism. These exchanges took many forms, and the aim of the chapter is to showcase and analyse a representative selection by focusing on the issues related to the modernist controversy that were readily addressed by many European authors. The content and plots of novels, such as the Italian Antonio Fogazzaro’s The Saint (Il Santo, 1906) and the Austrian Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti’s Jesse and Maria (Jesse und Maria, 1906), were structured around some of the key ideas of the religious debates. These literary texts were read, analysed, debated, and actively disseminated and censored by the theologians on both sides of the ongoing dispute. The exchanges between theology

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and literary criticism were two-directional. On the one hand, the language of literary criticism began to adopt terminology related to the theological debate and employ selected theological concepts in the analysis and interpretation of literary works, drawing in particular on neo-Thomism. Examples of literary critical works directly shaped by the modernism–neo-­ scholasticism debate include T.  E. Hulme’s essays, Wyndham Lewis’s Time and Western Man (1927), and T.  S. Eliot’s After Strange Gods (1934). On the other hand, certain theologians and religious intellectuals, especially those associated with theological modernism, having voiced their concerns about the perceived exhaustion of the theological idiom, looked to poetic language as a source of potential renewal and inspiration. Those ideas took the shape of a full-fledged poetic theory—the theory of ‘pure poetry’—put forward by the modernist Henri Bremond in his Poetry and Prayer (1925), which triggered a heated debate among literary critics, poets, and religious intellectuals across Europe. The chapter analyses the French side of the debate by considering the contributions of Bremond and his opponent, the neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain. The second part of this book, ‘Poetry, Aesthetics, and Theology (c. 1900-1950)’, showcases the literary and poetic responses that the theological debates prompted from authors and poets across Europe. For some of them, including Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Czesław Miłosz, the search for a new language that could revive and interrogate elusive theological ideas came to define their poetic oeuvre. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 focus on these three canonical poets to offer a new interpretation of their key works. They demonstrate that the three poets were acutely aware of the theological crisis that signalled the exhaustion and possible collapse of the centuries-old theological idiom, and this awareness was the driving force behind their poetic projects. I argue that their poetic explorations of the key ideas that were contested by modernist and neo-scholastic theologians, such as revelation and mysticism, transcendence and immanence, tradition and individual religious experience, form a significant literary contribution to the ongoing debates. The comparative framework within which I examine the three poets from different cultural backgrounds— Austro-Bohemian Rilke, Anglo-American Eliot, and Polish-Lithuanian-­ American Miłosz—brings to the fore the transnational scale of the modernist crisis of religion. Drawing on Rilke’s, Eliot’s, and Miłosz’s correspondence, essays, and new archival material, this book shows that these poets’ long-standing interest in the theological debates of the time informed their major works, including Rilke’s Book of Hours, Eliot’s ‘Ariel’

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poems, and Miłosz’s Rescue. At the time when theology itself was in a state of flux and poetry was viewed as its potential saviour, the idea of building a bridge between the languages of theology and poetry came to define the three poets’ aesthetic vision. In placing three poets who wrote in three different languages and literary traditions side by side, I do not obliterate the differences between various European modernisms nor the Christian traditions that inspired their writings. The following chapters emphasise the specificity and heterogeneity of each poet’s poetic project. At the same time, they also draw attention to meaningful connections and shared contexts that informed those projects. Rilke never met either Eliot or Miłosz, but the latter wrote reviews of Rilke’s poetry, while Eliot published others’ (including Samuel Beckett’s) reviews of Rilke in his Criterion. Miłosz became familiar with both Rilke’s and Eliot’s works in the 1930s, and during World War 2, he translated The Waste Land into Polish. In the summer of 1945, he established epistolary contact with Eliot via the English PEN President Margaret Storm Jameson. Both Eliot and Miłosz were fascinated and influenced by Jacques Maritain’s writings on culture and religion. Eliot’s translation of Maritain’s ‘Frontières de la Poésie’ was published in the Criterion in 1927. Miłosz translated Maritain’s A travers le désastre, which was issued as an illegal underground publication in Nazi-occupied Warsaw in 1942. Eliot and Miłosz met in December 1945 in London, where Miłosz stopped on his way to New York, where he was to take up a post at the Polish consulate. References and allusions to Rilke’s and Eliot’s oeuvres appear in Miłosz’s writings time and again. What Rilke, Eliot, and Miłosz all had in common was their sustained interest in the contemporary debates on the relation of aesthetics to religion in the modern world. All were engaged with the theological crisis that shook early-twentieth-century Europe, and preoccupied with the question of heresy as a transgression of the boundary separating religion from art. The fifth chapter examines Rainer Maria Rilke’s sustained interest in the connection between religious experience and individual subjectivity, which was a key issue for modernist theologians. It demonstrates how Rilke, through his relationship with Lou Andreas-Salomé, Russian-born philosopher, psychologist, and scholar of world religions, became familiar with contemporary German debates surrounding the core dogmas of Christianity, which became particularly heated after the publication of Adolf von Harnack’s What is Christianity? in 1900. Andreas-Salomé introduced Rilke to a number of Russian artists and philosophers, who

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inspired him to study the theology of the Orthodox icon. The chapter revisits the importance of Rilke’s intellectual exchanges with Andreas-­ Salomé by examining her under-studied essays on religious history and theology. The chapter shows that Rilke’s portrayal of the human-divine dynamic in his poetic cycles The Book of Hours and The Life of Mary and the collection of mini-parables Stories of God was informed by an understanding of spirituality that he associated with the religious landscape of Russian culture and was shaped by Andreas-Salomé’s work on psychology and philosophy of religion. By tracing Rilke’s and Andreas-Salomé’s sustained engagement with the question of religious experience, the chapter demonstrates that their interest focused on what they referred to as ‘inner life’ or ‘interior life’. The concept of ‘interiority’ lay at the centre of contemporary studies of mysticism as well as writings of early psychologists of religion, among whom Andreas-Salomé was a prominent figure. Like modernist theologians, both Rilke and Andreas-Salomé saw ‘inner life’ as the pivot of religion, though unlike Catholic modernists, they considered Western Christianity to have lost the vitality that could still be found in Russian Orthodoxy. According to them, the religiosity that the latter represented consisted in inner patience, spiritual depth, and a close connection to the land, which in their writings took the shape of an orientalised and feminised form of mysticism to be juxtaposed with the masculine rationality represented by Western Christianity. The sixth chapter provides a fresh interpretative perspective on T. S. Eliot and religion, and seeks to reorientate research into his engagement with theology. It traces Eliot’s attempt to find a hermeneutic framework that would enable a twentieth-century thinker to comprehend the meaning of religious experience in the modern world. Eliot’s interest in religion and theology is usually linked to his conversion to Anglo-­ Catholicism in 1927. However, the chapter demonstrates that he became intrigued with the notion of religious and mystical experience much earlier, during his studies at Harvard (1906–1914) and his stay in Paris (1910–1911), where he became familiar with the writings of Alfred Loisy, one of the founding fathers of modernist theology. Drawing on the primary material published in the new critical editions of Eliot’s prose and letters, the chapter argues that the influence of these ideas on Eliot’s poetry and criticism was more powerful and sustained than has been previously recognised. The chapter discusses Eliot’s debate with John Middleton Murry, who sympathised with the modernist movement in theology, Eliot’s engagement with Jacques Maritain’s neo-scholastic aesthetics in

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the late 1920s and 1930s, as well as his translation of Maritain’s Frontières de la poésie. It examines Eliot’s subsequent turn to the theory of ‘pure poetry’ developed by the modernist theologian Henri Bremond, and shows that the Maritain–Bremond debate featured prominently in Eliot’s Criterion. I argue that these religious controversies provided Eliot with a springboard for a poetic exploration of a number of theological questions in his early poetry and the ‘Ariel’ poems. I demonstrate that the manner in which these poems approach the recurring themes of transcendence, revelation, and incarnation is informed by Eliot’s investment in contemporary theological debates on the meaning of dogma, and his reflections on the relationship between poetic and religious experience. The seventh chapter proves that the modernist controversy and its aftermath had a formational influence on Czesław Miłosz as a poet and thinker. It considers his sustained interest in contemporary religious debates that led to his development of a poetic idiom that, as he thought, was capable of raising relevant questions better than the exhausted language of theology. It demonstrates that Miłosz took considerable effort to engage with both neo-scholasticism and theological modernism, and shows how this inspired the poetics of his early collections: Three Winters (1936) and Rescue (1945). In the 1930s, Miłosz attended the meetings of the Catholic community of Laski, which popularised Jacques Maritain’s work in Poland, and in 1942 he translated Maritain’s A travers le désastre. At the same time, through Stanisław Brzozowski, the first Polish translator of John Henry Newman, and Marian Zdziechowski, cultural critic and religious thinker, he became familiar with the modernist school of theology. In a 1943 essay Miłosz paid tribute to modernist theologians, calling them ‘the last religious thinkers [...] who probed the meaning of religion’.45 The chapter discusses Miłosz’s early poetry, in parallel with his essays on the relationship of religion, politics, and culture written in the 1940s and published in Legends of Modernity. It shows that while Miłosz developed a critical attitude to what he considered the political legacy of both theological modernism and neo-Thomism, he drew on them extensively in the domain of aesthetics. His reflections on the status and role of poetry in the modern world are informed by the concepts of ‘pure poetry’ put forward by Bremond and the neo-Thomist understanding of art advocated by Maritain. As this chapter demonstrates, the question of the boundary between art and religion and the social and ethical role of poetry in a war-­stricken world were at the heart of Miłosz’s writings in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He extensively engaged with Maritain’s work, and

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participated in debates about the concept of ‘pure poetry’ and its Polish equivalent, the theory of ‘Pure Form’ developed by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. These frameworks allowed him to formulate questions that he continued to explore in his later poetry. Ultimately, the book re-establishes the place of theology within modernist studies and proves that literary responses to contemporary religious and political controversies shaped the cultural landscape of the early twentieth century. A careful unravelling of the contexts in which they originated defies the conventional perception of cultural and aesthetic modernism as an exceptionally secular movement. By analysing the writings of three poets who are considered to belong to the canon of literary modernism, it shows that Rilke’s, Eliot’s, and Miłosz’s poetic responses to contemporary religious controversies are not only individual encounters, but rather examples of a wide network of interactions and exchanges between literature and theology of the period. Their writings reveal a genuine engagement with the issues lying at the heart of the theological controversies of the time and form literary responses to contemporary theologians’ attempts to reconcile religion with modernity. Thus, their poetry is a provoking attempt to reimagine modernity and its relation to religious tradition. The comparative framework that I adopt throughout underlines the fact that the forgotten theological background of modernism was not limited to any one European state nor any single Christian denomination. Furthermore, this framework challenges what Pericles Lewis has denounced as ‘an increasingly narrow “Anglo-American” view of modernism, focusing almost exclusively on literature written in English’, and responds to Mark Wollaeger’s appeal to ‘open a comparative space within Anglophone scholarship for discussion of a wide range of foreign language productions’.46 Both aesthetic and theological modernisms were inherently international movements, and since the act of crossing the boundaries—including the boundaries of languages and national literatures—defined the period, adopting a comparative research framework is the most appropriate way to respond to modernism’s challenge to rise above national boundaries.

Notes 1. C.  S. B., Modernism: What It Is and Why It Was Condemned (London: Sands & Co., 1908), 7.

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2. Pope Pius X, ‘Pascendi Dominici Gregis,’ in The Papal Encyclicals, ed. Claudia Carlen, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: McGrath, 1981), 71–98. 3. Jean Baptiste Lemius, Catéchisme sur le Modernisme: d’après l’Encyclique Pascendi Dominici Gregis de S. S. Pie X (Paris: Librairie Saint Paul, 1907). 4. R.  A. Scott-James, Modernism and Romance (London: John Lane, 1908), ix. 5. T. S. Eliot, ‘Letter to John W. Nance, 19 December 1929,’ in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 2013), 723. 6. Finn Fordham, ‘Between Theological and Cultural Modernism: The Vatican’s Oath against Modernism, September 1910,’ Literature & History 22, no. 1 (2013): 12. 7. Ernestine van der Wall, The Enemy Within: Religion, Science, and Modernism (Wassenaar: NIAS, 2007), 45. 8. Anthony Domestico, Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 5 and 128, note 20. 9. For an account of the classical secularisation thesis and its later revised versions, see Rob Warner, Secularization and Its Discontents (London: Continuum, 2010). For recent critiques of this theory, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); and John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). 10. Peter J.  Bowler, Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early-­ Twentieth-­Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 11. Bowler, 5. 12. See for example Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004); and Georgina Byrne, Modern Spiritualism and the Church of England, 1850–1939 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010). 13. Bowler, 13. 14. May Sinclair, A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 251. 15. Aldous Huxley, Stories, Essays & Poems (London: J.M. Dent, 1960), 279. 16. Stephen  Schloesser,  Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005), 17. 17. Ibid., 5. 18. Laura Wittman, ‘Omnes velut aqua dilabimur: Antonio Fogazzaro, The Saint, and Catholic Modernism,’ in Italian Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-Garde, ed. Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 130–166.

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19. Caspar Decurtins, Zweiter Brief an einen jungen Freund (Der Modernismus in den Literatur) (Basel: Volksblatt, 1909), 5. 20. Carl Conte Scapinelli, ‘Katholizismus und “Moderne,”’ Literarische Warte 4 (1900): 49-50. 21. A.  C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1963), 26. 22. Henri Bremond, Prayer and Poetry: A Contribution to Poetical Theory, trans. by Algar Thorold (London: Burns, Oats & Washbourne, 1927). Originally published as Prière et poésie (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1926). 23. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 53. 24. Le Sillon was condemned in the papal letter Notre charge apostolique (Our Apostolic Mandate) of 25 August 1910, and Action française was denounced in a decree of 29 December 1926. 25. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Literature of Fascism,’ in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 3, ed. Frances Dickey, Jennifer Formichelli, and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 546. 26. Douglas Woodruff, ‘Religion and Patriotism,’ The Sword of the Spirit Bulletin, April 16, 1942, p. 1. 27. Peter Brooker et al., ‘Introduction,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 2. 28. Ástráður Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 8. 29. See, for instance, Anne Fernald, ‘Modernism and Tradition,’ in Modernism, ed. Ástráður Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 157–171; and Daniel Moore, ‘Questions of History,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker et  al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 368–387. 30. Peter Brooker et al., ‘Introduction’, 3. 31. Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,’ Modernism/modernity 8, no. 3 (2001): 497. 32. Ibid., 497. 33. Ibid., 510. 34. Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 35. Lewis, 19. 36. Ibid., 24. 37. Ibid. 38. Roger Luckhurst, ‘Religion, Psychical Research, Spiritualism, and the Occult,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, 429–430.

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39. Erik Tonning, Modernism and Christianity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1. 40. Ibid., 4–5. 41. Ibid., 125. 42. Ibid. 43. Malcolm Bull, ‘Who Was the First to Make a Pact with the Devil?,’ London Review of Books, May 14, 1992, pp. 22–23; Lawrence Gamache, ‘Defining Modernism: A Religious and Literary Correlation,’ Studies in the Literary Imagination 22, no. 2 (1992): 63-81; Una M.  Cadegan, ‘Modernisms Literary and Theological,’ U.S.  Catholic Historian 20, no. 3 (2002): 97–110; Finn Fordham, ‘Between Theological and Cultural Modernism: The Vatican’s Oath against Modernism, September 1910,’ Literature & History 22, no. 1 (2013): 8–24. 44. Pope Benedict XV, ‘Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum,’ in The Papal Encyclicals, ed. Claudia Carlen, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: McGrath, 1981), 149. 45. Czesław Miłosz, Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942-1943, trans. Madeline G Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 105. 46. Pericles Lewis, ‘Introduction,’ in The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism, ed. Pericles Lewis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1; Mark A. Wollaeger, ‘Introduction,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3.

Bibliography Benedict XV, Pope. ‘Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum.’ In The Papal Encyclicals, edited by Claudia Carlen, vol. 3, 143-151 (Washington, DC: McGrath, 1981). Bowler, Peter J. Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early-Twentieth-­ Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Bradley, A[ndrew] C[ecil]. Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 2nd edn. London: Macmillan, 1963. Bremond, Henri. Prayer and Poetry: A Contribution to Poetical Theory. Translated by Algar Thorold. London: Burns, Oats & Washbourne, 1927. Brooker, Peter, Andrzej Ga ̨siorek, Deborah Longworth, Andrew Thacker. ‘Introduction.’ In The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, edited by Peter Brooker, Andrzej Ga ̨siorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker, 1-13. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Bull, Malcolm. ‘Who Was the First to Make a Pact with the Devil?’ London Review of Books, May 14, 1992, pp. 22–23. Byrne, Georgina. Modern Spiritualism and the Church of England, 1850–1939. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010.

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C. S. B., Modernism: What It Is and Why It Was Condemned. London: Sands & Co., 1908. Cadegan, Una M. ‘Modernisms Literary and Theological.’ U.S. Catholic Historian 20, no. 3 (2002): 97–110. Decurtins, Caspar. Zweiter Brief an einen jungen Freund (Der Modernismus in den Literatur). Basel: Volksblatt, 1909. Domestico, Anthony. Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4., edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden. London: Faber and Faber, 2013. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 3, edited by Frances Dickey, Jennifer Formichelli, and Ronald Schuchard. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Eysteinsson, Ástráður. The Concept of Modernism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Fernald, Anne. ‘Modernism and Tradition.’ In Modernism, edited by Ástráður Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, 157–171. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. Fordham, Finn. ‘Between Theological and Cultural Modernism: The Vatican’s Oath against Modernism, September 1910.’ Literature & History 22, no. 1 (2013): 8–24. Friedman, Susan Stanford. ‘Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/ Modernity/Modernism.’ Modernism/modernity 8, no. 3 (2001): 493–513. Gamache, Lawrence. ‘Defining Modernism: A Religious and Literary Correlation.’ Studies in the Literary Imagination 22, no.2 (1992): 63-81. Griffin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Huxley, Aldous. Stories, Essays & Poems. London: J. M. Dent, 1960. Lemius, Jean Baptiste. Catéchisme sur le Modernisme: d’après l’Encyclique Pascendi Dominici Gregis de S. S. Pie X. Paris: Librairie Saint Paul, 1907. Lewis, Pericles. ‘Introduction.’ In The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism, edited by Pericles Lewis, 1-9. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Lewis, Pericles. Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Luckhurst, Roger. ‘Religion, Psychical Research, Spiritualism, and the Occult.’ In The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, edited by Peter Brooker, Andrzej Ga ̨siorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker, 429–444. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.

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Miłosz, Czesław. Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942-1943. Translated by Madeline G Levine. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Moore, Daniel. ‘Questions of History.’ In The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, edited by Peter Brooker, Andrzej Ga ̨siorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker, 368–387. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Oppenheim, Janet. The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Owen, Alex. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pius X, Pope. ‘Pascendi Dominici Gregis.’ In The Papal Encyclicals, edited by Claudia Carlen, vol. 3, 71–98. Washington, DC: McGrath, 1981. Scapinelli, Carl Conte. ‘Katholizismus und “Moderne.”’ Literarische Warte 4 (1900): 49-50. Schloesser, Stephen. Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Scott-James, R[olfe] A[rnold]. Modernism and Romance. London: John Lane, 1908. Sinclair, May. A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions. New York: Macmillan, 1917. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Tonning, Erik. Modernism and Christianity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Wall, Ernestine van der. The Enemy Within: Religion, Science, and Modernism. Wassenaar: NIAS, 2007. Warner, Rob. Secularization and Its Discontents. London: Continuum, 2010. Wittman, Laura. ‘Omnes velut aqua dilabimur: Antonio Fogazzaro, The Saint, and Catholic Modernism.’ In Italian Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-Garde, edited by Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni, 130–166. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Wollaeger, Mark A. ‘Introduction.’ In The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, edited by Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough, 3–22. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Woodruff, Douglas. ‘Religion and Patriotism.’ The Sword of the Spirit Bulletin. April 16, 1942, pp. 1-2.

PART I

Reconciling Christianity and Modernity in the Early Twentieth Century

CHAPTER 2

A Theological History of Modernism

The ‘New Wine’ of Modernism and the ‘Old Scholastic Bottles’ At the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘modernism’ became an increasingly divisive term. The encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis issued by Pope Pius X in September 1907 identified it as a flawed system of thought that would lead to ‘the destruction not of the Catholic religion alone but of all religion’.1 Modernist theologians and their sympathisers, on the other hand, argued that all they aimed for was an honest attempt to rethink ways in which Christianity may be approached by modern believers.2 The spirit of this inquiry, in the modernist Jesuit George Tyrrell’s words, was like ‘the new wine that [could] eventually burst the old scholastic bottles’, triggering a spiritual renewal across Christian churches.3 ‘We do not to-day travel by coach, or wear jerkins, or speak the language of Chaucer, or believe that the earth is the centre of the solar system’, pointed out Vernon Storr, Canon of Westminster, ‘Why in matters theological should we be forced to think in terms of bygone centuries?’4 The modernist theologians’ attempts to reimagine the ways in which Christian teaching could be made more compatible with the modern way of life met with vehement opposition and, in some cases, outright condemnation, from the ecclesiastical hierarchies. What is more, since some of the questions posed by the modernist theologians may seem © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Rzepa, Modernism and Theology, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61530-7_2

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controversial even today, attempts at analysing and evaluating the debate can still elicit considerably strong and opposing ideological responses. Yet, it can be said for certain that the controversy had an overwhelming impact on the religious landscape of early-twentieth-century Europe and beyond, leading to unexpected ecumenical encounters and transnational debates between religious thinkers, literary critics, writers, and poets. The legacy of those encounters eludes a straightforward evaluation, which is illustrated by the conflicting judgements made by T.  S. Eliot and Czesław Miłosz. The former complained that modernism was ‘a mental blight which can afflict the whole of the intelligence of the time, whether within or without the Church’.5 The latter, on the contrary, hailed modernist theologians as ‘the last religious thinkers—not Catholic philosophers (because there were many of those who came after them), but truly thinkers who probed the meaning of religion’.6 These opposing responses to theological modernism show that analysing the modernist controversy is not a straightforward task. It requires a careful unravelling of the multiple layers of meaning that comprised theological modernism. As the historian and theologian Gabriel Daly asserts, ‘defining modernism is a political act, in that it commits one, if not to a position, at least to a perspective from which to launch one’s investigations: and this can have ideological implications.’7 Accepting the description of modernism put forward by the papal encyclical and other Vatican documents should be avoided since, as Daly aptly points out, ‘Rome did much to create the monster it slew’.8 Those who considered themselves modernists, or sympathised with the movement, in the wake of the Vatican condemnation proposed their own counter-definitions of the movement. Tyrrell, for example, redefined it as ‘the belief that Catholicism is reconcilable with the established results of historical criticism’, adding that ‘[a]s to the mode of reconciliation, there are as many Modernisms as there are Modernists’.9 For him, the crucial feature of modernism was its dynamic nature; he regarded it as ‘a relative term’ whose meaning ‘slides with times’.10 After the movement was officially condemned by the Vatican, the word ‘modernism’ became, as Storr observed, ‘a convenient missile to hurl at the head of someone whose opinion you do not like.’11 Thus, the beginning of the twentieth century saw the meaning of the term modernism fluctuate and acquire new dimensions. For the sake of clarity, Daly puts forward a historical definition of modernism as:

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the term employed by Pius X and his curial advisers in their attempt to describe and condemn certain liberal, anti-scholastic, and historico-critical forms of thought occurring in the Roman Catholic Church between c. 1890 and 1914. It can be reasonably said to have begun with Maurice Blondel’s doctoral thesis for the Sorbonne entitled L’Action.12

Maurice Blondel was a French philosopher who was keen to review the relationship of philosophy and religion. His doctoral thesis, which marked the beginning of his philosophical career, was submitted in 1893, and came as a shock both to his examiners from the philosophy department of École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and to neo-scholastic theologians who subsequently reviewed it.13 His key premise was that the centre of life was to be found in human action that is directed towards the transcendent, which he considered unjustifiably ignored by contemporary philosophy. The shift in methodology that Blondel proposed was not received well by the secular environment of the university, where arguing for the supernatural was considered too religious, nor by the theological circles, where it was met with strong neo-scholastic opposition that disapproved of Blondel’s dynamic and experiential understanding of faith. In 1896, to address the latter’s objections, Blondel published The Letter on Apologetics.14 He defended his position by arguing that theology should share in the dynamism of life. According to Blondel, neo-scholasticism—the principal school of theology in contemporary Catholicism—failed to do so, offering only a ‘static account’ of religion. A major problem of neo-Thomism (as neo-scholasticism came to be called after Thomas Aquinas, one of the principal exponents of medieval scholasticism) was that, as Blondel argued, it built on premises that were increasingly questioned by both modern philosophy and contemporary science: the thomist starts from principles which, for most part, are disputed in our time; […] he presupposes a host of assertions which are just those which are nowadays called in question […] We must not exhaust ourselves refurbishing old arguments and presenting an object for acceptance while the subject is not disposed to listen. It is not divine truth which is at fault but human preparation, and it is here that our effort should be concentrated.15

Blondel envisaged this concentration of effort to develop a new apologetics adequate to contemporary times as the building of bridges between modern philosophy and Christian doctrine. He argued that viewing the

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latter through the lens of the former might bring to the fore those aspects of Christian tradition that needed reconsideration. He proposed to proceed by examining recent developments in modern philosophy that seemed to make it incompatible with Christianity. ‘Perhaps, on coming to the end of this inquiry,’ he pointed out, ‘we may consider that the intensified demands of modern thought are legitimate and profitable, and in conformity both with the philosophical spirit and with the spirit of Catholicism itself.’16 Blondel’s call to engage with modern philosophy was contrary to Pope Leo XIII’s recommendation that scholastic philosophy should become the official doctrine of the Catholic Church put forward in the encyclical Aeterni Patris issued in 1879. The encyclical warned against ‘false wisdom’ of certain modern philosophers, stating that the Catholic Church’s philosophy and theology was to be based on the restored ‘solidity and excellence’ of Aquinas’s writings.17 Blondel’s appeal to broaden the scope of theological enquiry was received as an unwelcome voice of dissent.18 He was attacked by the neo-scholastic circles of the influential Revue thomiste (Thomist Review) and referred to as ‘a Kantian’, ‘an immanentist’, and ‘a subjectivist’.19 As Daly points out, these were ‘the key phrases of the anti-­ modernist campaign which would reach full orchestration’ in the Pascendi encyclical ten years later. George Tyrrell, who originally hailed from an Anglican Irish family but converted to Catholicism and in 1880 joined the Jesuit Order in Britain, presented a similarly penetrating critique of the neo-scholastic method. He denounced it for perpetuating ‘medievalism’, which accepts the medieval expression of Catholic doctrine as ‘its final expression’ and ‘denies that the work of synthesis is necessary’.20 Tyrrell, who soon became extremely influential in the circles of modernists and developed close ties with Alfred Loisy and Henri Bremond in France and Friedrich von Hügel and Maude Petre in England, insisted on differentiating between the statements of faith formed in the past and spiritual experiences that led to the formulation of those statements.21 Reacting against what he considered a neo-scholastic over-rationalisation of the Christian message, Tyrrell argued that ‘[i]t is not by Reason but by Faith that we recognize the prophet’s words as divine, as spoken by God to the ear of our own heart’, adding that ‘[a]ll Faith is response to a private and personal revelation.’22 For Tyrrell, it was important to acknowledge that ‘the inspired statement is not strictly a divine statement’ and that ‘another expression of the same experience may be better, without in any sense being deduced from the

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former statement or even agreeing with it intellectually’.23 According to him, Christian revelation cannot be regarded as being fully and definitely expressed in the scripture and tradition, as neo-scholastic theologians maintained. Emphasising the value of individual experience, he put forward what he called ‘a truer idea of revelation’: The revelation lies not in the word or statement nor in the intellectual thought that it evokes; but in the interior experience of redemption through Christ which it occasions and by which it is interpreted. […] Divine truth I still think is revealed to us, not as a statement but as a thing—just as beauty or love is revealed to us. We may utter it in statements or receive it through statements; but what we apprehend is not a statement but an experience.24

Such an understanding of revelation and experience entailed a radical departure from the official teaching of the church, according to which the true deposit of Christian faith is fully contained in the scripture and tradition transmitted from generation to generation through the apostolic succession. Tyrrell acknowledged the importance of the continuity of tradition, yet disapproved of the idea that its truth-value was absolute.25 According to him, the development of Christian doctrine through personal revelation is possible due to the work of the ‘indwelling spirit of Christ’—‘present to all men at all times’ and inspiring people to see new meanings in the old doctrines.26 The idea of an evolutionary and dynamic nature of Christian doctrine was further developed by Alfred Loisy, a Roman Catholic priest, theologian, and professor of Hebrew at the Institut Catholique in Paris, in his study The Gospel and the Church (L’Évangile et l’Église, 1902).27 The book was written as a critique of the Protestant Adolf Harnack’s What is Christianity? (Das Wesen des Christentum, 1900), yet the method that Loisy chose to refute Harnack’s argument did not meet with the approval of the Vatican’s neo-Thomists.28 Loisy disagreed with Harnack’s static account of religion and the idea that there exists an immutable ‘kernel’ of Christianity. On the contrary, he argued that ‘Christ is inseparable from His work’, and ‘the attempt to define the essence of Christianity according to the pure gospel of Jesus, apart from tradition, cannot succeed, for the mere idea of the gospel without tradition is in flagrant contradiction with the facts submitted to criticism’.29 While explicitly attacking the liberal Protestant perspective of Harnack for his rejection of the concept of the evolution of Christian tradition, Loisy implicitly criticised the

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neo-scholastic method, which—in a way similar to Harnack’s—attempted to circumscribe the pure and static core or ‘essence’ of Christianity. Loisy put such an approach in question, juxtaposing it with his dynamic vision of Christian doctrine: Why not find the essence of Christianity in the fullness and totality of its life, which shows movement and variety just because it is life, but inasmuch as it is life proceeding from an obviously powerful principle, has grown in accordance with a law which affirms at every step the initial force that may be called its physical essence revealed in all its manifestations? Why should the essence of a tree be held to be but a particle of the seed from which it has sprung, and why should it not be recognized as truly and fully in the complete tree as in the germ?30

Loisy accentuates the importance of seeing Christian tradition as constantly evolving. The metaphor of a living tree is emblematic of Loisy’s vision of the development of Christianity. By employing arboreal imagery and emphasising the changes that take place in the process of growth, Loisy was able, as C. J. T. Talar observes, ‘to admit very real historical differences in the church’s teaching while preserving an element of continuity’.31 In The Gospel and the Church, Loisy undertook a detailed historical analysis of how the core dogmas of the Catholic Church have developed over centuries, eventually to conclude that ‘revealed dogmas are not truths fallen from heaven’, but ‘the interpretation of religious facts acquired by a laborious effort of theological thought’.32 While ‘the dogmas may be Divine in origin and substance’, Loisy contended, ‘they are human in structure and composition’.33 On this premise, Loisy asserted that the reconciliation of Christian orthodoxy and modern thought would not strike at the heart of the former, but would in fact be in accordance with its inner dynamism. The most important task to be faced by contemporary Christians was to ‘recognize how necessary and useful is the immense development accomplished in the Church, to gather the fruits of it and continue it’, as the changing living conditions required constant rereading and reinterpretation of the gospel message.34 The theological movement of modernism was officially condemned by Pope Pius X in the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis issued in September 1907. Many of those who were involved in it, including Loisy and Tyrrell, were excommunicated and their works placed on the Index. The doctrinal reasons for the condemnation were complex. Towards the end of the

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nineteenth century, the Catholic Church made numerous attempts to find a manner in which its doctrine could be reconciled with contemporary scholarship. In 1879, Pope Leo XIII promulgated the encyclical Aeterni Patris, which proposed that faith and reason are not diametrically opposed faculties, but they work together in search of truth. The encyclical endorsed the ‘dignity of human science’, stating that the church doctrine does not aim to curb or diminish the achievements of natural sciences, but on the contrary, accepts them as products of the God-given reason.35 Pronouncing scholasticism to be the official church philosophy, it emphasised that the restoration of Aquinas’s system was meant to begin a new phase in the dialogue between secular scholarship and church teaching—a period when the church formally approves of the empirical method of natural sciences, and firmly reinstitutes the place of reason, following in the footsteps of medieval scholastics who believed that ‘nothing was of greater use to the philosopher than diligently to search into the mysteries of nature and to be earnest and constant in the study of physical things’.36 The terms ‘reason’ and ‘science’ feature prominently in the papal documents of the late nineteenth century, bearing witness to the rapprochement between the church and scientific modernity. These developments led to Pope Leo XIII gaining a reputation of a pope who bravely endorsed modern science, starting a new epoch in the history of the Catholic Church. As Edward Baring points out, this was a pope whose efforts ‘foregrounded the modernity of the Church: he was the first Pope to have his voice recorded on a phonograph and be filmed; […] and his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum represents the first concerted papal effort to confront the social problems caused by the industrial age’.37 The rapprochement of the church and scientific modernity informed the work of neo-scholastic philosophers, such as Désiré Mercier and Maurice De Wulf, as well as the training of the clergy in seminaries, which began to include lectures on natural science that covered up-to-date research appearing in scholarly journals.38 To neo-­ scholastic Catholics it became obvious that, in Mercier’s words, ‘if St. Thomas were alive today, he would, like us, use the test tube and the microscope.’39 Even local clerical journals and parish newsletters hailed this church-wide endorsement of science. ‘There is no division between faith and reason’, proclaimed a local journal from the diocese of Trier in Germany in 1889, ‘Deus scientiarum! Through His church God is also God of the sciences.’40 While scholasticism in its modernised version seemed to be compatible with modern science, it fared less well with contemporary philosophy,

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which by the early twentieth century began to emphasise the limits of rational enquiry and strove to move beyond them. The methodological shift that took place in contemporary philosophy led to the growing acceptance of the position that ‘[s]cience ceased to be the paradigmatic form of truth statement and became one of the possible human constructions.’41 The modernist theologians’ endorsement of Henri Bergson’s and William James’s works in particular appeared to undermine the advanced enterprise of forging a long-lasting alliance between the church and scientific modernity. The Catholic modernists were seen to pose a major challenge to empirical rationalism by turning to the subjective, the mystical, and the irrational (or suprarational) dimensions of religion. Their sustained critique of the neo-scholastic system was a blow to the Vatican’s efforts at building a bridge between the world of modernity and Christian tradition and, effectively, to the church’s attempts to avoid marginalisation and to facilitate a dialogue with modern secular society. While the neo-­ scholastic school, following Aquinas, maintained that certain ‘truths about God have been proved demonstratively by the philosophers, guided by the light of natural reason’, the modernist theologians were reluctant to concede that reason alone can give much insight into the nature of God.42 Instead, they emphasised the role of faith and experience, and spoke of believing in and experiencing God as opposed to knowing and reasoning about God. The anti-modernist Ronald Knox mocked this uneasiness of the modernists about the possibility of arriving at any definite knowledge of God in his limerick ‘The Modernist’s Prayer’: O God, forasmuch as without Thee, We are not enabled to doubt Thee, Help us all by Thy grace To convince the whole race It knows nothing whatever about Thee.43

The modernist theologians’ project of reconceptualising Catholic theology in the spirit of contemporary philosophical critique of what they perceived as a scholastic overreliance on rational thought was presented as methodologically flawed because it called into question the very possibility of ever arriving at any objective knowledge of God. In this sense, it appeared to strike at the heart of the neo-scholastic project of finding a common ground between the church doctrine and modern science.

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Ultimately, the modernist theologians’ critique of neo-scholastic rationalism was found unacceptable to the Vatican. The sixty-five propositions condemned in the decree Lamentabili Sane Exitu, the so-called syllabus of errors issued by Pope Pius X in July 1907, comprised a compilation of key ideas that the modernists had hoped would become the base of a new Christian apologetics.44 Church tradition, as presented in Lamentabili, consists in immutable and final statements. Among the condemned propositions were Loisy’s and Tyrrell’s reflections on the experiential nature of revelation and the evolutionary development of the doctrinal tradition. It was declared an error to believe that ‘Revelation, constituting the object of the Catholic faith, was not completed with the Apostles’, and that ‘[t]he dogmas the Church holds out as revealed are not truths which have fallen from heaven. They are an interpretation of religious facts which the human mind has acquired by laborious effort.’45 The modernists’ proposals to rethink not only the content of the Church doctrine, but also the methods through which that doctrine had been established turned out to be too revolutionary. Thus, the Pascendi proclaimed modernism not only an instance of erroneous thinking, but the ‘synthesis of all heresies’, adding that ‘there is no surer sign that a man is on the way to Modernism than when he begins to show his dislike for this [scholastic] system’.46 Modernists’ rejection of Aquinas’s system, their repudiation of the proposition that God can be known by reason (which was included in the decrees of the First Vatican Council), their insistence on the idea that Christian doctrine undergoes evolution, and, finally, their attempts to reconceptualise Christian revelation as an experiential event of not necessarily rational order led the authors of the encyclical to the conclusion that modernism ‘means the destruction not of the Catholic religion alone but of all religion’, as it undermines the objective truth of the Catholic faith and leads to agnosticism and then to atheism.47 As C.  J. T.  Talar points out, the ‘Vatican had not only condemned Modernism’s doctrinal errors; it had specified practical means to ensure its extermination.’48 This included excommunication of modernists who chose not to submit to the Vatican’s censure, publication bans, dismissal from teaching posts, as well as extensive institutional control of the clergy exercised by the Sodalitium Pianum (Fellowship of Pius), a group of censors whose methods included invigilation of priests suspected of modernist sympathies. These measures bred an atmosphere of suspicion that was aimed at effectively stopping further development of the movement in the Catholic Church.49 In September 1910, Pope Pius X introduced an oath

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against modernism that had to be taken by members of the clergy and seminary professors.50 He intended to reinstitute the neo-scholastic understanding of revelation as a set of definitive statements of absolute truth-­ value. The oath put special emphasis on the rational comprehensibility and static nature of Christian revelation: I declare that, by the light of natural reason, God, the beginning and end of all things, can be certainly known through those things that were made, that is to say, through the visible creation, as a cause is known by its effects, and that His existence can even be thereby demonstrated.51

The emphasis on the role of ‘the light of natural reason’, by means of which God can be ‘certainly known’, was directed against modernists’ claims that faith was born not only through a process of reasoning, but also through personal and subjective experience. The oath was officially abolished only in 1967, and as Gabriel Daly contends, its ‘historical importance lies in the fact that it was treated as a formulary of faith by the clerical Church at large and as a locus theologicus by teachers of dogmatic theology […] long after modernism ceased to be seen as an actual threat.’52 The modernists’ reaction to the papal condemnation can be encapsulated in Blondel’s words. While in the 1880s he was positive that a ‘great renewal’ was taking place in the church, in 1907 he wrote: ‘I have read the Encyclical and am still stupefied. Is it possible? What inward or outward attitude should one adopt?’53 Some modernists chose to dismiss the Vatican’s accusations. Loisy, who was excommunicated in 1908, ‘responded in 1909 by riding triumphantly in an open car, cheered on by enthusiastic supporters, to his first class at the Collège de France as professor of the “history of religions”’.54 For others, who were committed to the church, like Tyrrell, the Vatican’s anti-modernist campaign turned into a personal tragedy. He was expelled from the Jesuit Order in 1906, and excommunicated from the Catholic Church in 1908 for breaking the publication ban. Similar measures were taken against other modernists, including the Italian theologians Romolo Murri and Ernesto Buonaiuti. In France, Lucien Laberthonnière was forced to step down from the editorial board of Annales de philosophie chrétienne and was forbidden to publish any of his theological works, and Marc Sangnier was compelled to disband his Le Sillon movement. The background of the condemnation of modernism was not only doctrinal. The period when the new theological propositions were put

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forward was the time when significant political transformations took place in Europe.55 When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, the French garrison that protected the last of the Papal States on the Italian Peninsula was recalled, and the Italian army captured the city of Rome and the remains of the papal territories. The pope did not leave the Vatican, and until the Lateral Treaty of 1929, when the modern state of Vatican City was established, he was often referred to as the ‘prisoner of the Vatican’. Furthermore, the beginning of the twentieth century saw an escalation of the conflict between the Vatican and the French Republic. Émile Combes, who was elected head of the French government in 1902, held the so-­ called campaign of secularisation. Thousands of religious schools were closed, and high numbers of clergy left France to escape persecutions. As a consequence, the diplomatic relations between the Vatican and France deteriorated. In 1905, the French Parliament passed a law that separated the church from the state and brought an end to all state support of religion. When Pope Pius X condemned the law, a number of modernist thinkers and priests expressed their support of it. An anonymous open letter from a group of Italian priests to Pius X published in July 1907, and soon translated into English, stated explicitly: The democracy demands of the Church, not only an attitude less conservative and less intent upon favouring the last remnants of the privileged nobility, but also a transformation and purification of forms and persons in her own government, still as tenaciously monarchical and absolute as when she adopted it at the end of the third century and consolidated it in the Middle Ages. To this end those old coercive methods must be abandoned or relaxed; a certain measure of autonomy in their own provinces must be restored to the Bishops; a more liberal consideration shown towards the religious activity of the laity […].56

The fact that the modernists’ proposals were put forward at the time when the Vatican was losing its political power meant that not only the Roman Curia’s political existence but also its spiritual authority was being threatened. ‘As that struggle became more and more impossible,’ Gary Lease contends, ‘there occurred a retreat from all effective foreign policy and a concentration upon the inner forum: the minds, hearts, will and consciences of the institution’s members.’57 While the political influence seemed irretrievably lost, it was hoped that the concerted anti-modernist campaign, which the 1907 papal documents

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began, would help regain the Vatican’s compromised spiritual authority. A number of pamphlets and books describing the errors of modernism were published in Italian and French and immediately translated into other languages. The most influential of these was Catéchisme sur le Modernisme (Catechism on Modernism, 1907) by Jean Baptiste Lemius, who was also credited with drafting the doctrinal parts of Pascendi. His Catéchisme was translated into English, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Polish within five years after its publication.58 Furthermore, intensive study of neo-scholastic manuals that was an obligatory part of seminary education was seen as an effective way of maintaining orthodox uniformity of Catholic theology. Neo-Thomism was promoted by a transnational network of interconnected institutions that were established in the late nineteenth century. This included the Papal Academy of St. Thomas in Rome (founded in 1879), the Catholic University in Washington, D.C. (1887), the Theological Faculty in Fribourg, Switzerland (1889), and the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie in Louvain, Belgium (1889).59 These institutions, as Baring observes, ‘encouraged a flurry of publishing activity, most importantly in a host of new journals’ based all across Europe, including Belgium, France, Spain, Germany, Hungary, and Poland.60 In the aftermath of the papal condemnation of modernism, neo-Thomists’ work flourished with the support of the network of well-funded institutions and multilingual publications. Theological modernism, despite its transnational character, lacked the extensive infrastructure that was put in place to promote the development of neo-scholasticism. The network modernists created was much more volatile as it relied primarily on personal contacts, individual friendships, and epistolary exchanges. The way the modernist network functioned is illustrated by the correspondence between the Polish philosopher Marian Zdziechowski, who in the 1900s lived in Kraków, Austro-Hungary, and Friedrich von Hügel, based in London, England. Zdziechowski wrote to von Hügel at the suggestion of the German philosopher and writer Rudolf Christoph Eucken, who emphasised that von Hügel was keen to forge connections between intellectuals who shared common interest in religion. After Zdziechowski contacted von Hügel, sending him the German version of his pamphlet Pestis perniciosissima, which included a defence of Catholic modernism, von Hügel sent Zdziechowski an extensive list of thinkers whose work he considered aligned with the modernist cause.61 In a letter dated 27 April 1905, he included a directory of forty-five names and addresses, divided into five sections and arranged geographically into scholars residing in England,

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France, Germany, Italy, and America.62 Interestingly, it was not limited to Catholics, and along the names of George Tyrrell, Maude Petre, Maurice Blondel, Henri Bremond, and Alfred Loisy, it included Anglican modernists, such as Hastings Rashdall and Alfred Leslie Lilley, the Lutheran Ernst Troeltsch (Germany), the Episcopal Charles Briggs (the United States), and the Jewish Julius Goldstein (Germany). By providing Zdziechowski with this extensive list of contacts, von Hügel invited him to join the network of intellectuals whose aim was to work collaboratively towards a better understanding of the place and role of religion in the modern world. The exchanges and collaboration between these thinkers, as Lester R. Kurtz points out, were taking place ‘quietly, in libraries and studies, in letters, articles, and books’.63 In this sense, theological modernism should be seen as ‘a reform movement among scholars’ who failed partly because they lacked organisational structures.64 In the wake of the papal condemnation, many of them were forced to cease their activity or go underground. Otherwise they risked losing their university and seminary positions, ecclesiastical censure, publication bans, and excommunication.

William James, Henri Bergson, and the Twentieth-­Century Mystical Revival In Pío Baroja’s 1902 novel Road to Perfection (Camino de perfección), a sensitive young medical student turned painter, Fernando Ossorio, embarks on a journey through Spain to find answers to pressing existential and spiritual questions that seem to hold the key to his future.65 He travels from Madrid to Toledo, which, as he is disappointed to discover, is ‘no longer the mystical city he dreamed of’, and then continues to the town of Yécora where as a young boy he had attended a Piarist school.66 On his arrival, he realises that the town ‘has been left in the arms of a harsh, formalistic and arid religion’ and the school, ‘with its appearance like that of a big barracks, was a place of torture; it was the great rolling mill for brains, one that rooted out all lofty feelings from the heart’.67 Fernando pays particular attention to the many dilapidated churches that he visits on his journey, drawing an analogy between the physical condition of the buildings with their ‘walls covered over with lime and ingrained with dirt and flaking away’ and the spiritual condition of the Catholic Church.68 He gradually comes to realise that his religious sensibility is more akin to that of mystics, and it cannot be explained with recourse to Christian dogmas,

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which he feels increasingly alienated from and repelled by. In a dramatic inner monologue, he pleads: But let them not explain, let them not tell him that all that was being done in order not to go to Hell and not to burn in lakes of sulfur and cauldrons of melted pitch; let them not talk to him, let them not reason with him, because the word is the enemy of the feeling; let them not try to imbue him with dogma; let them not tell him that all that was just to be able to sit beside God in Paradise, because, in his innermost heart, he laughed at the lakes of sulfur and the cauldrons of pitch, just as much as he did at the armchairs in Paradise.69

Fernando’s predicament amounts to what he perceives as an insoluble conflict between the spiritual feelings experienced ‘in the depths of the soul; beneath our preoccupations; beneath our thoughts, beyond the realm of ideas’ and the dogmas and creeds through which religion had ‘manifested itself in the common and cold language of men’.70 He chooses to put trust in his feelings, even though this is subsequently derided by others as ‘pure mysticism’.71 Baroja’s fictional exploration of what it might mean to be a mystic in the early twentieth century proved both controversial and very timely. The turn of the century saw an unprecedented amount of scholarly attention devoted to the sensual, emotional, irrational, and supra-rational dimensions of religion, which sparked a revival of interest in mysticism and mystical experience, and led to what Leigh Eric Schmidt has called a substantial ‘remapping of mysticism’.72 While the eighth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1858, defined mysticism as a ‘form of error, […] which mistakes the operations of a merely human faculty for a Divine manifestation’, the definition included in the eleventh edition, which appeared in 1911, shows a fundamental change of attitude.73 It refers to mysticism as ‘a phase of thought, or rather perhaps of feeling, which […] appears in connexion with the endeavour of the human mind to grasp the divine essence or the ultimate reality of things, and to enjoy the blessedness of actual communion with the Highest’.74 Such an understanding of mysticism, prevalent, for instance, in William James’s influential works, tended to interpret it as a ‘global species of religious experience’ and collate together numerous types of mysticism of various historical and geographical provenance.75 This opening up of the category of the mystical and the expansion of its uses was something of which contemporary

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intellectuals were much aware and at times extremely wary. In 1929, the historian and literary critic Mario Praz complained in the pages of the Criterion: How many things that ill-starred word ‘mystic’ is forced to cover! […] If things continue at this rate, you will see very soon the word ‘mystic’ losing caste, and you will not be surprised in finding it some day hobnobbing with lemans, courtesans, banditti, and similar words debased from their original meanings. Do you not think that it would be rather wise to start a Society for Protecting Words, as somebody has suggested? A penalty not exceeding five pounds should be enforced every time the word ‘mystic’ is improperly used.76

The opening and universalisation of the category of mysticism created anxiety about its ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ use, but also, as Schmidt asserts, made it possible ‘to see it not as a threat to the solidity of Christian identity but as an opportunity for self-exploration and cross-cultural understanding’.77 Indeed, the modern construction of the category of mysticism created a meeting point not only for interreligious encounters, but also for a dialogue between religion and science. This possibility was quickly recognised and explored by Catholic modernists who were attempting to construe a new Christian apologetics. While they would not universalise mystical experience, choosing to focus specifically on the mystical tradition of Christianity (and usually trying to maintain a distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ mysticism), their monumental works, such as Friedrich von Hügel’s The Mystical Element of Religion (2 vols, 1908) and Henri Bremond’s A Literary History of Religious Thought in France (Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, 11 vols, 1916–1933), referenced contemporary developments in psychology and philosophy.78 The turn of the century saw a large number of studies of lives of mystics belonging both to Catholic and Protestant traditions, with the most popular being Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Genoa, John of the Cross, and Teresa of Avila. Texts written by mystics were translated into different languages and reprinted on a large scale. Simultaneously, more general studies of mysticism written from a theological perspective, yet incorporating psychological insights started to appear across Europe, with Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism (1911) gaining instant popularity and running into twelve editions by 1930.79 Most of these studies challenged the rationalistic understanding of religion that

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was prevalent both in the discourse of contemporary scientific materialism and in the Vatican-approved manuals of scholastic theology. Instead, they offered ‘an antipositivist, antimaterialist tool’ that could be used as ‘an intellectual shield’ not only against positivist naturalism, but also against Thomist rationalism of mainstream Catholic theology.80 The notion of mystical experience was employed to prove that certain features that are at the heart of Christianity had necessarily escaped both scientific and scholastic accounts of religion. In one of his letters, George Tyrrell described the attitude that the mystical revival tried to challenge in the following words: One hears priests and even religious speak with a superior contempt of ‘mysticism’; without any attempt to discriminate between false and true; and sweeping away as illusions every working of the Holy Ghost that does not commend itself to ‘common-sense’. It is in the face of this Philistinism that I like to maintain the thesis that no one can love God truly and well who (as I now put it) has not the elements of mysticism, if he be not a mystic.81

For many modernist thinkers mysticism formed part of the ordinary devotional life of a Christian believer. Von Hügel argued that there were three important elements of Christian religion: the historical and institutional, the philosophical and intellectual, and the intuitive and mystical.82 Bremond asserted that ‘it is not possible to ignore the mystics without disowning one’s own self’.83 Blondel called ‘mystical’ the knowledge that, ‘though it may seem nocturnal, is no less an extension of thought all the way to its subterranean source from which overflows its inexhaustible tide’.84 The majority of modernist theologians strongly opposed the interpretation of mysticism as an escape from the world, and conceptualised it as a new way of being in the world—a way in which spiritual experience is seen as significantly complementing the empirical one. Thus, William Inge, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and prominent Anglican modernist, argued that ‘the spiritual Christianity of the modern epoch is rather called to the consecration of art, science, and social life than to lonely contemplation’.85 The emphasis on the social dimension of Christianity had a strong appeal to a number of modernists who, apart from advocating a theological reform of the church, also called for a translation of Christian doctrine into political action and actively supported democratisation and social reform. Among those who sympathised with modernism were the French

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Catholic thinker and politician Marc Sangnier, founder of the Le Sillon movement and journal, the Italian priest Romolo Murri, the forefather of Christian Democracy and founder of the socialist journal Cultura Sociale, and the Polish Capuchin Izydor Wysłouch, social reformer and author of numerous pamphlets calling for the church’s more active involvement in the labour movement.86 This turn to Christian socialism was accompanied by renewed theological reflection on the ways in which religious experience informs social action and how the Christian call to unconditional charity can be put into practice in modern society. In 1901, Tyrrell wrote to Bremond: All along I have been covertly suggesting the solution that God wants to be loved in His creatures and not apart from them. […] I verily believe this is the teaching of Jesus Christ; and I don’t believe the Apostles knew of meditation, or contemplation, or the prayers of quiet or any other prayer than the Pater Noster, i.e. petition for the welfare of man.87

The increased attention paid to the social aspect of Christianity led the Methodist John Wright Buckham to put forward the notion of ‘social mysticism’, which connected individual religious awakening to social activism.88 He argued that mystical experience, even though commonly thought of as highly individual, possessed a communal dimension and gave ‘the individual fullest and freest touch with his fellows’.89 According to Buckham, an intense religious experience made the mystic more acutely aware of the bond with and responsibility towards others, which led to a growing recognition of the crucial importance of social service. Such a proliferation of reflections on various forms of mysticism was directly informed by the anti-rationalist strain in contemporary philosophy with its emphasis on the role of intuition as a corrective to reason and intelligence. The modernist theologians paid particular attention to William James’s and Henri Bergson’s studies of religious experience in their attempts to reimagine Christianity as a dynamic and living system undergoing constant development. They rejected many a priori statements endorsed by neo-scholastic metaphysics and attempted to reconsider the notion of faith in light of contemporary scholarship so as to shed more light on its inner dimension. A work that had a major influence on the modernist theologians was James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, delivered as a series of lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901–1902.90 In this seminal study, James asserted that research into

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religion should consist primarily in the investigation of individual religious experience. Keenly interested in mysticism, James put forward a theory claiming that the foundations of religious experience are located in the subconscious. He refrained, however, from defining the limits of the subconscious, leaving open the question of the ultimate origin of religious experience. He disapproved of the rationalistic and materialistic attempts to explain religion away by means of the methods of anthropology and sociology, and dismissed the contemporary practice of ‘criticising the religious emotions by showing a connection between them and the sexual life’.91 According to James, contemporary science tended to favour such a reductive view of religion because it had excluded the personal point of view and chose to study only objective realities that could be properly measured. This, to James, appeared ‘shallow’, since, as he maintained, ‘so long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term.’92 According to James, the world of experience consists both in the objective and subjective parts. In the objective dimension of experience, ‘the cosmic objects […] are but ideal pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess but only point at outwardly’, yet, as James claimed, ‘the inner state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our experience are one.’93 Individual experience, James pointed out, ‘may be sneered at as unscientific’; nevertheless, ‘it is the one thing that fills up the measure of our concrete actuality’.94 Having thus reclaimed the value of subjective experience, which included religious experience, James analysed its place in institutionalised religions. He drew attention to the ambivalence of the term ‘religion’, insisting on the distinction between religion as an ‘individual personal function’ and religion as an ‘institutional, corporate, or tribal product’.95 He considered these two aspects of religion related in a historical manner. As he explained, ‘religious geniuses attract disciples, and produce groups of sympathizers’, but when those groups are institutionalised, the ‘spirit of politics and the lust of dogmatic rule are then apt to enter and to contaminate the originally innocent thing’.96 Hence, while James re-evaluates the meaning of personal religious experience, he views institutionalised religion as derivative, and considers churches and religious communities of secondary importance. They exist to communicate and transmit knowledge of individuals’ religious experiences, which with time is likely to become petrified into doctrinal

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statements and lose its original meaning. Thus, while refuting materialistic accounts of religion, James also distances himself from its ecclesiastical interpretations. In fact, he goes on to argue that rationalistic positivism present in Roman Catholic and Protestant systematic theologies does more harm than good to religion, attempting to circumscribe it in formulae long rendered meaningless.97 The fact that theology ‘assumes to construct religious objects out of the resources of logical reason alone, or of logical reason drawing rigorous inference from non-subjective facts’, and that it excludes the subjective viewpoint meant for James that it breeds ‘a disdain for merely possible or probable truth’.98 In this manner, he argues, a ‘[f]eeling valid only for the individual is pitted against reason valid universally’.99 By following this logic, James asserts, theology undermines its own validity. If theological arguments are grounded in ‘pure reason’, they should have a universal appeal, and yet ‘idealists since Kant have felt entitled either to scout or to neglect them’.100 This, James observes, shows these arguments’ weakness and proves that ‘they are not solid enough to serve as religion’s all-sufficient foundation’.101 James was convinced that the scholastic system with its ‘abstract definitions and systems of concatenated adjectives’ cannot be accepted for the foundation of a modern Christian apologetics, and that the idea of dogmatic theology should be finally rejected as ‘an absolutely worthless invention of the scholarly mind’.102 While the modernist theologians would not endorse all of James’s arguments, they were nevertheless largely enthusiastic about his work and frequently cited him in their own papers. In 1909, von Hügel sent James a letter of appreciation in which he wrote: ‘In the Varieties I have either found the first expression for what I already thought, or have been made to see where before I had only fog.’103 In 1907, five years after The Varieties of Religious Experience was published, and the same year when the Pascendi encyclical condemning the theological movement of modernism was issued, Bergson published Creative Evolution (L’Évolution créatrice). It soon became an international success and was translated into Russian (1909), English (1911), German (1912), Spanish (1912), Polish (1913), Danish (1915), and Czech (1919). Bergson’s contribution to the new type of scholarly enquiry into religious experience and non-rational cognition proved to be of key significance for modernist theologians. Creative Evolution was Bergson’s attempt at reinterpreting Darwin’s deterministic theory of evolution so as to reclaim the value of creative, non-rational aspects of life. It greatly appealed to the modernist theologians, and effectively came to be

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considered dangerous by the Vatican; in 1914 it was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books. Bergson claimed that reason, as well as the knowledge produced by it, constitutes only one aspect of life, and there are phenomena whose experiential dimension eludes rational enquiry. Among these phenomena he placed experiences of spiritual nature. Creative Evolution begins with a premise that it is futile to ‘force the living into this or that one of our moulds. All the moulds crack. They are too narrow, above all too rigid, for what we try to put into them.’104 Human intellect works with static ideas that, according to Bergson, cannot reflect the dynamism of life. His aim was to account for moments of action and experience in which it is possible to transcend the stasis of ideas and move beyond ‘conceptual and logical thought’ towards ‘a vague nebulosity’ in which ‘reside certain powers that are complementary to understanding’, yet of which ‘we have only an indistinct feeling’.105 Bergson calls these powers instinct and intuition. He defines the former as ‘sympathy’ that is turned ‘towards life’, in contradistinction to ‘intelligence’ turned ‘towards inert matter’.106 Bergson argues for the recognition of the key importance of intuition, which ‘by the sympathetic communication which it establishes between us and the rest of the living, by the expansion of our consciousness which it brings about, […] introduces us into life’s own domain, which is reciprocal interpenetration, endlessly continued creation’.107 Bergson’s distinction between intelligence and intuition had profound implications for his interpretation of the role and method of epistemology. He argued that in Western philosophy epistemology had traditionally been centred on the faculty of intellect, and it effectively failed to address the question of knowledge acquired through intuition. He contended that while reasoning tends to ‘shut us up in the circle of the given’, action issuing from intuition ‘breaks the circle’.108 It was a new challenge to modern philosophy, Bergson maintained, to account for the work of intuition and the vital role it played in human life, particularly its spiritual dimension. Reclaiming the scholarly value of philosophical exploration of spiritual life, Bergson asserted: The great error of the doctrines on the spirit has been the idea that by isolating the spiritual life from all the rest, by suspending it in space as high as possible above the earth, they were placing it beyond attack, as if they were not thereby simply exposing it to be taken as an effect of mirage!109

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This error had been committed, Bergson claimed, not only by philosophy of religion, but also by dogmatic theology. Bergson’s critique of the latter was similar to James’s. He argued that it was grounded on a set of a priori statements and refused to take a holistic view of life. James hailed Bergson’s achievement, observing that his work ‘has killed intellectualism definitively and without hope of recovery’.110 Thus, while both Bergson and James reintroduced the question of religious experience into early-­ twentieth-­century scholarship, they simultaneously detached it from the traditional discourse of theology, which in their view was anachronistic and irrelevant to their explorations. Bergson’s and James’s emphasis on inner experience and intuition as key characteristics of religious life corresponded to a broader trend that was emerging in the scholarship of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since there was no scholarly agreement on how to define mystical experience and to what extent modern psychology with theories of the unconscious could be used to explain it, these questions continued to engage theologians, intellectuals, and writers across Europe well into the 1930s and 1940s. Georges Bataille’s Inner Experience (L’expérience intérieure), published in 1943, was one of the late contributions to the ongoing discussions of mysticism, which sparked a brief but heated debate in the French philosophical circles. As Bataille explained, he aimed to explore what ‘one usually calls mystical experience: the states of ecstasy, of rapture, at least of meditated emotion’.111 Following in the footsteps of James and Bergson, he critiqued both dogmatic theology and scientific materialism for their tendency to reduce inner experience to the level of moral values or scholarly knowledge. According to him, ‘all value and authority’ should be placed in the inner experience itself and theological discourse should be avoided because it turns the divine into an object that adapts to human expectations. ‘What, at bottom, deprives man of all possibility of speaking of God,’ Bataille writes in the middle of World War 2, ‘is that, in human thought, God necessarily conforms to man, to the extent that man is weary, famished for sleep and for peace.’112 Soon after Bataille’s book was published, Jean-Paul Sartre embarked on a scathing critique of its key premises. In the essay ‘A New Mystic’ (1943), he dubbed Bataille’s work a ‘fruitless quest for impossible escape’, arguing that ‘mystical experience must be considered as one human experience among others; it enjoys no privilege.’113 From the standpoint of atheist existentialism, Sartre contended that ‘God is dead, but man has not, for all that, become atheistic. Today, as yesterday, this silence of the transcendent, combined with

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modern man’s enduring religious need, is the great question of the age.’114 According to him, while Bataille professed to approach to subject of inner experience from an agnostic point of view, he gradually betrayed that position and turned into ‘a mystic who has seen God and rejects the all-too-­ human language of those who have not’.115 This was unacceptable to Sartre, who saw mystical experience as a concept devised by those who were unable to cope with the ‘torment of immanence’ from which there was no escape.116 The Bataille-Sartre exchange shows that the mystical revival of the early twentieth century left a significant trace in philosophical discourse. As Emoretta Yang and Jean-Michel Heimonet observe, the ‘harshness of [Sartre’s] critiques, the vehemence of tone—poorly tempered by a forced irony—[…] prove that Inner Experience had hit home, at a level unusual for intellectual polemics.’117 The set of questions formulated during the modernist crisis and the mystical revival that accompanied it continued to engage thinkers across different philosophical schools, from phenomenologists to existentialists, well into the 1940s and beyond.

Transnational Modernism and Global Ecumenism Ideas that came to be known as ‘modernist’ were developed not only in France and England, but all across Europe, crossing national, linguistic, and denominational boundaries.118 They were subsequently disseminated through prolific epistolary networks that reveal the significance of modernism as a movement of a truly transnational scale.119 Translations of key texts of the debate proliferated, with many religious thinkers being actively involved in translation projects that aimed to draw more attention to works that were deemed particularly significant. It was modernist theologians’ translatory work that brought about an unprecedented wave of interest in the thought of John Henry Newman. Modernists looked up to him as a fore-runner of the ideas that they were developing and a spiritual patron of the movement, devoting considerable effort to promote his work. While the anti-modernist campaign sought to discredit modernism as a radical departure from the Catholic tradition, modernists emphasised the organic connections between their thought and that of Newman, which may appear paradoxical given Newman’s stringent opposition to liberalism.120 However, as Tyrrell pointed out, Newman took a stance against nineteenth-century philosophy that critiqued religion from the point of view of rationalism, positivism, and materialism. The

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early-twentieth-century approach, according to Tyrrell, is radically different. ‘Now we have philosophy and science accepting Newman’s weapons and repudiating those of the scholastic method.’121 This epistemological breakthrough resulted in a situation in which, as Tyrrell argued, ‘those Catholics for whom Newman would have felt the utmost antipathy— those, namely, who, in spite of the Syllabus, entertain sanguine dreams of “coming to terms” with the modern mind—have learnt to look to him and to his methods as the sole hope of their cause.’122 Indeed, Newman’s reflections on the development of Christian doctrine and the role of individual conscience in an act of faith provided inspiration to many modernists, including Loisy and von Hügel.123 They readily acknowledged their debt to Newman, presenting him as a revolutionary thinker. Von Hügel, after first reading Newman’s works, initiated correspondence with him and visited Newman in Birmingham. He pays tribute to Newman in the preface to The Mystical Element of Religion: further back than all the living writers and friends lies the stimulation and help of him who was later on to become Cardinal Newman. It was he who first taught me to glory in my appurtenance to the Catholic and Roman Church, and to conceive this my inheritance in a large and historical manner, as a slow growth across the centuries, with an innate affinity to, and eventual incorporation of, all the good and true to be found mixed up with error and with evil in this chequered, difficult but rich world and life in which this living organism moves and expands.124

In France, Newman’s works started to enjoy increasing popularity with Alfred Loisy’s endorsement of his thought. Loisy considered Newman ‘the most open-minded theologian (le théologien le plus ouvert) who has ever existed in the Holy Church since Origen’.125 He hailed Newman’s proposition that the development of an ‘idea which is living, real, and nonabstract’ depends ‘largely on the minds that have received it and labour on it further’.126 Bremond also contributed to the dissemination of Newman’s work. Between 1905 and 1906, he published no fewer than four books devoted to Newman. Three of these, in the series ‘La Pensée chrétienne’, consisted of extracts from Newman’s writings, introduced and commented on by Bremond.127 In 1906, Bremond published what he called a psychological biography of Newman, which appeared in English translation as The Mystery of Newman the following year.128 Bremond’s focus was on Newman’s analysis of the psychological

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structures of belief, which seemed particularly relevant to the modernist thinkers’ emphasis on individual religious experience. The introduction to the English edition of Bremond’s biography was written by Tyrrell, who underlined Newman’s ‘synthetic spirit’ and his ability to question ‘the apologetic efficacy’ of the scholastic method as well as his suggestion that it may not be prudent to accept ‘direct combat with rationalistic assailants on their own terms, instead of attacking their first principles and their whole theory of assent’.129 In 1907, the year when the encyclical condemning the movement of modernism was issued, Domenico Battaini, an Italian scholar of religion, published his translation of Newman’s An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent.130 The following year, together with Romolo Murri, he translated An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.131 Finally, in 1909, he rendered into Italian the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk.132 Both Battaini and Murri were actively involved in the movement of modernism, with Murri soon to become leader of the newly founded Christian Democrats. In the notes and introductions that accompanied their translations of Newman, Battaini and Murri called him their ‘precursor and father’.133 In Germany, 1904 saw the publication of the first biography of Newman.134 It was written by Lady Charlotte Blennerhassett, student of the controversial Catholic theologian Ignaz von Döllinger, who rejected the declaration of papal infallibility as a dogma in 1870, and was subsequently excommunicated. In 1912, a German edition of A Grammar of Assent was published in a translation by Theodor Haecker, philosopher, cultural critic, and frequent contributor to the Catholic magazine Hochland, associated with the reform-oriented circles in the German Church.135 The Polish translation of An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent by the philosopher and writer Stanisław Brzozowski, who in his preface quotes extensively from Bremond’s biography of Newman, appeared in 1915.136 The same year saw the publication of the modernist philosopher Marian Zdziechowski’s study Pessimism, Romanticism and the Foundations of Christianity, which included an extensive discussion of Newman’s work, hailing him as the precursor of the new currents in Catholic thought who ‘rejected the static concept of truth as something external to man and did not hesitate to move towards a dynamic conception of truth’.137 All these translators and scholars of Newman’s thought were actively involved in the movement of modernism, and since their works explored contemporary implications of Newman’s propositions and seemed to implicate Newman in the modernist controversy, they soon came under

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ecclesiastical scrutiny. At this point the question of how to interpret his work began to be debated not only by theologians and religious thinkers, but also by a wider public. When the Pascendi encyclical was issued, Tyrrell published a long commentary in the Times, arguing that Catholicism cannot be equated with neo-scholasticism, and referring to the ‘modern and Newmanistic’ idea of development in support of his stance.138 Tyrrell’s unstated suggestion that together with modernism the encyclical implicitly condemned Newman added fuel to the fire. On 2 November 1907, after Tyrrell’s excommunication became public knowledge, the Times published an editorial arguing that: there are scores of English Roman Catholics to whom the name and example and intellectual influence of John Henry Newman means more than those of a whole curia of living Cardinals. It is idle to inquire whether the astute scholar who wrote what the Pope signed was or was not thinking of Cardinal Newman. The important thing is that many Roman Catholics in our country feel that he was so thinking.139

The question whether the encyclical was meant to implicitly target Newman’s work or not became subject of heated debates. In 1908, Edward Thomas O’Dwyer, Bishop of Limerick, published a pamphlet in defence of the orthodoxy of Newman’s thought, in which he observed that ‘some of the persons who feel the severity of the Pope’s condemnation try to shield themselves under the venerable name of Newman.’140 O’Dwyer thoroughly disapproved of such attempts, arguing that ‘[t]here is nothing in Newman to sustain, or extenuate, or suggest a particle of [the modernists’] wild and absurd theories.’141 Arguments between supporters of the modernist and neo-scholastic interpretations of Newman continued on the pages of newspapers and journals. Finally, the pope felt obliged to clarify the Vatican’s stance. In March 1908, The Tablet printed a letter from Pope Pius X to Bishop O’Dwyer in which the pope endorsed O’Dwyer’s stance and explicitly denied that Newman could be viewed as the spiritual father of modernism. The letter stated that: if in what he [Newman] wrote before he professed the Catholic faith there may perchance be found something which bears a certain resemblance to some of the formulas of the Modernists, […] the author himself, on entering the Catholic Church, submitted all his writings to the authority of the Catholic Church, assuredly to be corrected if it were necessary.142

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Thus, the Vatican’s final response suggested that the fact that many modernists pointed to Newman as their spiritual father did not mean that Newman was a modernist but rather that he might have entertained some ideas which could be considered modernist before he had entered the Catholic Church. While the letter from the Vatican officially ended the debate between theologians, Newman’s appeal to thinkers interested in the movement of modernism continued. The meaning of Newman’s work was still vigorously contested sixteen years later, when Eliot’s Criterion published a heated exchange between Ramon Fernandez and Frederic Manning.143 The Catholic Church’s firm stance on the interpretations of Newman’s thought formed an integral part of their unrelenting effort to combat modernism. The Vatican’s firm condemnation of modernism aimed to prevent the development of the movement in the Roman Catholic Church, charging those associated with it with heresy and regularly employing the term ‘modernism’ to denounce lack of officially prescribed orthodoxy. Modernist theologians’ attempt to avoid schism and aim for a movement of internal reform was presented by Pascendi as a treason. The encyclical argued that theological modernism at first sight appeared to bring no harm. On close inspection, however, it turned out to be an enemy within and, thus, modernists were much more dangerous than any external adversaries who would not disguise their true aims. In the time of crisis, ‘the partisans of error are to be sought not only among the Church’s open enemies’, the Pascendi warned, ‘they lie hid, a thing to be deeply deplored and feared, in her very bosom and heart, and are the more mischievous, the less conspicuously they appear’.144 This perceived threat of modernism was considered sufficient justification for the strict anti-modernist policies implemented by the Vatican. The measures employed by Rome, however, did not lead to the demise of theological modernism. After the Vatican’s condemnation, the term ‘modernism’ was appropriated by the reform-minded members of the Church of England, who were affiliated with the Modern Churchmen’s Union. Since 1914, the Union held annual conferences, which in the 1920s and 1930s began receiving much publicity.145 Their proceedings were published in the Modern Churchman, a monthly paper founded in 1911. The most influential among Anglican modernists were Henry D. A. Major, Hastings Rashdall, William Ralph Inge, and Percy Gardner. The pejorative connotations of the term ‘modernism’, attached to it by Catholic neo-Thomists, in the works of Anglican modernists were

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fundamentally revised. The term was employed to denote a dynamic and experiential understanding of Christianity, similar to that proposed by the Catholic modernists. It was also used in an explicitly anti-Catholic discourse as yet another proof that ‘the policy of Rome has never been concession, but repression’.146 According to Anglican modernists, the attempts to reform the Catholic Church were from the beginning completely futile, and, as Inge remarked in 1909, ‘[t]he idea that the Church would ever modify her teaching to bring it into harmony with modern science seemed utterly chimerical’.147 Catholic modernists were dubbed ‘the brave men who have withstood the thunders of the Vatican’, yet their enterprise was considered doomed to failure from the start.148 Modernism continued to develop in the Church of England after it was quenched by the Vatican; the 1920s–1940s were considered ‘the flourishing period’ of the movement, with its supporters ‘glorying in the name “Modernist”’.149 As Major wrote in his influential study, in the Church of England ‘Modernism may be said to breathe its native air and to possess that habitat which admits of its growth […]. Modernism will flourish and develop there, though it may have died in other Christian communions, or have grown up in them a sickly plant.’150 The 1920s saw a great number of books and pamphlets describing the philosophical and theological foundations of the movement, its principles, and objectives.151 The challenge was accepted by the Anglican opponents of modernism, many of them Anglo-Catholics, and a wave of anti-modernist literature followed.152 Interestingly, despite the explicitly anti-Catholic character of some Anglican modernist writings, interdenominational collaboration that crossed sectarian divisions was not uncommon. One of the forums for interfaith exchanges was the Synthetic Society (later Society for the Study of Religion), founded in London in 1896.153 It provided a forum for an open discussion of religious and philosophical topics, and included a broad range of members, from the Catholic modernists George Tyrrell, Friedrich von Hügel, and Wilfrid Ward, Anglican William Temple (future bishop of Manchester and York and archbishop of Canterbury) and Thomas B.  Strong (future bishop of Oxford), Anglican modernist Hastings Rashdall, to the Congregationalist founder of ‘New Theology’ R. J. Campbell. The topics discussed included the issues at the heart of the modernist controversy, and ranged from the role of logic and reason in religious doctrine, questions of authority and experience in religion, and the contemporary understanding of dogmas and doctrines.154 The

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Synthetic Society was one of several collaborative interdenominational discussion forums that continued to debate the issues at stake in the modernist crisis in the spirit of ecumenical dialogue on the future of Christianity. As the movement of modernism spread globally, it generated quite unexpected transnational collaborations, such as that between Charles Briggs, an American Presbyterian (later Episcopalian) theologian, and Friedrich von Hügel, a Roman Catholic modernist and scholar. Briggs was tried for heresy in 1892 and excommunicated from the Presbyterian Church a year later for his critical historical approach to the Scripture. He subsequently became a priest of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and initiated contact with the Catholic modernists in 1905. He penned several articles supportive of the movement, arguing that the ‘questions in debate between Loisy and his critics are questions in which the entire Christian world is interested’.155 Subsequently, he co-authored a book on The Papal Commission and the Pentateuch with von Hügel.156 In this volume, the two authors take turns to reflect on the necessity for a scholarly approach to the Old Testament. After the Vatican’s condemnation of modernism, Briggs continued to advocate for it, emphasising its relevance for other Christian denominations: Modernism still continues to agitate the Roman Catholic Church, and will continue its work until it accomplishes its Providential mission. It is, indeed, in some respects the most important religious movement since the great Reformation of the sixteenth century; for it is not confined to the Roman Catholic Church, but is world-wide in its sweep, influencing more or less all Christian Churches, and in a measure all the great religions of the world.157

Similar arguments were put forward by Newman Smyth, minister in the First Congregational Church of New Haven, Connecticut. He proposed to see modernism as ‘a mediating way’ between Catholicism and Protestantism that may ultimately lead to their reunion in the Universal Church. In his book Passing Protestantism and Coming Catholicism (1908), he argued that modernism ‘opens a way of mediation between Roman and Protestant Christianity, which eventually may lead to a truer Catholicism, comprehensive of us all’.158 Those who considered themselves modernists soon became aware that they were part of a larger network of intellectuals of different religious backgrounds who were all attempting to find ways of reconciling modernity with religious belief. In his 1927 book on Anglican modernism, Major

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shows links between Christian modernisms and similar movements in Egyptian and Turkish Islam, pointing out the importance of religious reforms initiated by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. He also refers to the Jewish reform movement led by Claude Montefiore, one of the founders of British Liberal Judaism, and to Hindu modernism.159 In a similar vein, the British sociologist Victor Branford in Living Religions: A Plea for the Larger Modernism (1924) argued that modernism ‘is by no means confined to the Catholic religion’, pointing to movements within Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism that all aim to ‘renew, in the light of current knowledge, yet also of contemporary aspiration, the eternal verities enshrined in ancient faiths’.160 This conceptualisation of modernism as a movement of interdenominational nature and transnational scope prompted religious thinkers of different backgrounds to join ranks in their efforts to rethink the role of religion in the modern world. What Ernestine van der Wall has called a ‘global modernist network’ was created at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.161 At the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions held in Chicago, important connections between Christian modernists and reform-minded thinkers of other denominations were established. In September 1907, the very moment when the Pascendi encyclical condemned Roman Catholic modernism, the Fourth International Congress of Religious Liberals with delegates from Germany, Austria, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Ireland, Scotland, England, as well as New Zealand, Australia, Ceylon, Guiana, India, and Japan, representing a large number of Christian denominations, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism took place in Boston (several sessions were also held in Cambridge, MA, at Harvard University).162 Charles William Eliot, T. S. Eliot’s cousin, in the closing remarks that he delivered in his capacity as president of Harvard University emphasised that ‘religion and liberty going together’ stand for ‘considerateness, tenderness towards others, not assumption of power or pride of opinion’.163 When a few years later, in 1915, Albion Small, the founder of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, turned to the study of different types of social bonds, including the denominational ones, he observed: there is in Christendom today one principal division line. It does not run between sects but as a rule it cuts through sects, leaving one portion of the same sect within the one religious stratum and the remaining portion in the

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other. It is the line which divides traditionalists from modernists. The late Pope virtually spoke, not merely for the Catholic church, but for traditionalists of all sects […]. It is needless to analyze the preposterous issue formulated by papal encyclicals of recent years. They have, however, performed the great social service of visualizing the present religious crisis.164

Small’s remark finds direct confirmation in the religious literature of the period. As early as 1907, R. J. Campbell, an influential Congregationalist minister of London and the founder of the New Theology movement, wrote that ‘the same movement exists in other Churches, even the Roman Catholic, and is rising spontaneously everywhere.’165 In a similar vein, Shailer Mathews, Dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, proposed to move away from viewing modernism as a specifically Roman Catholic movement and to consider it a more general ‘type of mind’ and ‘attitude towards culture’ that can be found across all Christian denominations.166 He argued that: Modernism has no Confession. Its theological affirmations are the formulation of results of investigation both of human needs and the Christian religion. The Dogmatist starts with doctrines, the Modernist with the religion that gave rise to doctrines. The Dogmatist relies on conformity through group authority; the Modernist upon inductive method and action in accord with group loyalty.167

In response to this wide scope and ecumenical character of the Christian reform movement, some of its opponents decided to unite forces to combat it. When the fundamentalist–modernist controversy broke out in the Presbyterian Church of America in the 1920s, George F. Washburn, a prominent fundamentalist, remarked: ‘If this battle of the ages encircles the world, it may become necessary for the Evangelical Protestants and the Roman Catholics to unite their forces in defence of the Apostles’ Creed to resist this world-wide invasion of Atheism.’168 A number of propositions made by Presbyterian modernists reflected those put forward by Anglican modernists, and earlier by Catholic modernists. The anti-­modernist opposition in each of these denominations would employ strikingly similar discourse, which—if read out of context today—would make it almost impossible to identify the specific denominational controversy in which it originated. This is also the case with other elements of the religious print culture of the period, as exemplified by anti-modernist cartoons appearing in a number of journals and magazines, including the King’s Business, a monthly paper published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (Fig. 2.1).169

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Fig. 2.1  Grover Martin, Modernism destroying Christian civilisation, King’s Business, 13 (July 1922), 642. Digital Commons @ Biola, Biola University Library and Archives

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The cartoon by Grover Martin, published in 1922, shows how modernism, personified as a giant figure, attempts to destroy the temple of Christian civilisation. The columns supporting it are threatening to collapse under the force of his muscular arms and legs, which stand for two arch-evils of modernism: the ‘denial of the Bible’ that modernists were accused of spreading through their reinterpretation of certain Christian doctrines, and ‘Darwinism’ that was considered a threat to the future of Christian education. The physical strength displayed by the giant reflects the degeneration that humankind will undergo if modernism is allowed to hold sway. The cultivated sophistication of Christian civilisation, represented by the classical architecture of the temple, will be replaced by the primitive and the physical—a return to the barbarity of paganism. Supporters of modernism employed similar strategies to discredit the views held by their opponents. A good example is a satirical short story ‘Alice in Literal-Land’ by John F. Scott, based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.170 The allegorical story, published in the Century Magazine in 1924, opens with Alice falling asleep during a dull sermon and finding herself flying on the preacher-bird’s back to a strange land where she is invited to take part in a ‘theological adventure’.171 The adventure begins in the Cave of Controversy, in which Alice sees ‘people wrangling and shouting and calling names as if their life depended on it’.172 In the end, she decides to follow the advice of the priest who bids her go to Literal-Land. There she is invited for a ‘theological tea’ and witnesses a heresy trial. The defendant, ‘with a handkerchief tied over his mouth’, is accused of asserting that there is no hell, ‘not meaning what he said’, and ‘stating that a semicolon is missing from the Bible’.173 The worst, however, is the accusation that the defendant claimed and practised ‘the right to think for himself’. It provokes a knee-jerk reaction from the judge: ‘Enough! enough!’ cried the judge, jumping up and tearing at his hair. ‘We need no more. Gentlemen of the jury,’ turning to the learned doctors, ‘consider your verdict.’ ‘But I protest, your Honor,’ cried the defendant’s lawyer. ‘The prisoner should be allowed to speak for himself, to answer the charges.’ ‘They need no answer from him,’ said the judge. ‘That handkerchief must not be removed; there’s no telling what he might say in our presence.

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Let it be thoroughly understood that a man in his position may feel for himself and hear for himself, he may eat and even die for himself, but it is forbidden him to think and speak for himself. I will therefore pronounce sentence.’174

When the lawyer protests again, the judge retorts: ‘We’ll have the sentence first, and the verdict afterward’, adding that the defendant ‘is guilty, anyway’.175 He is sentenced to a public scourging which is carried out by executioners who sing a special hymn: The Bible is infallible, which you must not deny. Adam named the animals, and Enoch did not die. Take care you do not change it, for that would surely breed Distrust of our authority! Now, won’t you say the creed? Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you say the creed? Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you say the creed?176

The degree of universality that can be discerned in the issues addressed in such polemical texts and iconography—they could be used in virtually any of the modernist controversies—testifies to the existence of ‘a host of affinities between Christian modernisms on both sides of the Atlantic’, which van der Wall has pointed to.177

‘To be a heretic to-day is almost a human obligation’ Despite the Vatican’s sustained efforts at eradicating modernist theology, its potential for instituting reform was appreciated by intellectuals outside the Catholic fold who followed the unfolding controversy. The writer and historian Mary Ward (who published under her married name, Mrs Humphry Ward) in her fictional novel The Case of Richard Meynell (1911) transplanted the modernist controversy into the Church of England.178 The plot follows the story of the fictional Richard Meynell, a ‘remote English clergyman’ who, having familiarised himself with the writings of Loisy, Tyrrell, James, and Bergson, inspires the foundation of the Reformers’ Club in the parish of Markborough and becomes the leader of the modernist movement in the Church of England. He challenges his bishop to endorse the fact that ‘half the educated men and women we gather into our churches to-day are—in our belief—Modernists already.’179 While the bishop rejects his plea, accusing Meynell of heresy, Meynell

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responds with a bitter prognosis: ‘If you deny them organised expression and outlet, you prolong the dull friction between them and the current Christianity.’180 As the bishop accuses Meynell of heresy, he responds in a defiant way: ‘Till now […] the heretic has been an excrescence to be cut away. Now you will have to make some terms with him! For the ideas behind him have invaded your inmost life. They are all about you and around you—and when you go out to fight him, you will discover that you are half on his side!’181 Ultimately, Meynell’s attempts to reform the church from within and his challenge to dogmatic orthodoxy prove unsuccessful. He is defeated and driven out of the church, becoming an exile like other modernists before him. At the same time, however, the novel gestures towards the possibility of change in the future. As Norman Vance observes, ‘[t]he novel’s incorporation (and sensible modification) of actual initiatives and the concerns of rebellious spirits in the churches over the past 40 years is strategic, a way of suggesting that Meynell is not an isolated figure’ but can be viewed as a ‘representative of the growing momentum […] not just within the Church of England but across Europe’.182 Ten years after the publication of Ward’s novel, the Church of England had to grapple with doctrinal controversies brought about by the clashes of real-life modernist theologians and their adversaries. In 1922, Henry D. A. Major, the editor of the Modern Churchman, the most influential modernist journal in England, was accused of heresy by Rev. C. E. Douglas. He was considered to be ‘openly teaching Doctrine concerning the Resurrection which is contrary to the Christian religion as set forth in the ancient Creeds […] contained in the Book of Common Prayer’.183 Major was investigated by Bishop Burge of Oxford, who eventually dismissed the charge. Nevertheless, the papers given at the controversial conference on Christ and the Creeds that Major organised in 1921 led to the appointment of the first Doctrine Commission in the Church of England in 1922.184 Five years later, another influential Anglican modernist, Bishop Barnes of Birmingham, mathematician and Fellow of the Royal Society, found himself at the centre of a similar controversy. On 16 October 1927, as Barnes was about to preach in St Paul’s Cathedral in London, Canon Bullock-Webster, the Anglo-Catholic rector of St Michael Royal, ‘robed in cassock and surplice, walked up the transept, accompanied by a number of young men, and, turning towards the congregation, denounced Dr. Barnes for alleged “false and heretical teaching”’.185 Bullock-Webster’s dramatic protest was followed by an appeal to the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury to investigate the doctrinal aspects of

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Barnes’s teachings. Barnes, in response, published an open letter to Archbishop Davidson, arguing that ‘[t]raditional formulas had withered in the mental environment created by modern knowledge’, and that his personal attitude was to share his own doubts with the faithful he preached to in an honest way.186 A heated exchanged between Barnes’s supporters and opponents followed, prompting the Anglo-Catholic Charles Gore, the former Bishop of Birmingham, to observe that Barnes ‘seems to have carried us back to the worst days of theological controversy’.187 These and similar controversies generated much debate around the very concepts of heresy and orthodoxy. The meaning of those terms, similarly to that of ‘mysticism’, was widely disputed and appropriated by religious thinkers of various denominations as well as atheist and agnostic intellectuals and writers. In 1905, the Roman Catholic G. K. Chesterton complained of the semantic shift that resulted in the redefinition of the two terms: ‘The word “heresy” not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word “orthodoxy” not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong.’188 Chesterton was correct in observing that the notion of ‘heresy’ was being recast as a dynamic principle of open-minded inquiry. This is how it was conceptualised by the members of the Cambridge Heretics Society, founded in 1909 by the philosopher and linguist C. K. Ogden.189 The society gathered a number of philosophers, religious intellectuals, and avant-garde thinkers for whom the term ‘heresy’—clearly referring to the Vatican’s condemnation of modernism—acquired a wider meaning of what Damon Franke describes as an ‘interdisciplinary discursive mode’ and ‘a rallying cry for the general critique of establishmentarian positions’.190 Being a heretic was a source of pride. Jane Harrison, a prominent archaeologist and scholar of religion and mythology, expressed it succinctly in the Society’s inaugural lecture: The word “heretic” has still about it an emotional thrill—a glow reflected, it may be, from the fires at Smithfield, the ardours of those who were burnt at the stake for love of an idea. Heresy, the Greek hairesis, was from the outset an eager, living word. […] Only in an enemy’s mouth did heresy become a negative thing—a sect, causing schism, a rending of the living robe. […] To be a heretic in the days of Latimer and Cranmer was to burn. To be a heretic in the days of our grandfathers was to be something of a social outcast. To be a heretic to-day is almost a human obligation.191

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The founding aim of the Heretics Society was to ‘promote discussion on problems of religion, philosophy, and art’, and its membership was open to Cambridge University students and academics who ‘reject traditional a priori methods of approaching religious questions’.192 The Society, which by 1913 numbered over 200 undergraduates (5–10% of the student population), held regular meetings and invited lectures by guest speakers who addressed a wide variety of topics, including the philosophy and history of religion, mysticism, hypnotism, telepathy, and religion and art.193 Invited speakers included intellectuals of various religious affiliations, such as the Protestant R.  J. Campbell, the Roman Catholic G.  K. Chesterton, the Presbyterian J. W. Oman, as well as agnostic or atheist thinkers, including George Santayana, Bertrand Russell, G.  B. Shaw, I.  A. Richards, Clive Bell, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf. The wide variety of topics addressed and viewpoints presented, as Damon Franke concludes, meant that their heresy ‘foremost implied synthesis, and the desire not so much to remain opposed to orthodoxy but to subsume it’.194 In this sense, the Heretics Society’s work paralleled the modernist theologians’ attempts to develop a synthesis out of Christian orthodoxy and modern thought.195 The increasing blurring of the line between the notions of heresy and orthodoxy is evidenced by the conflicting legacy of Joan of Arc, whose life was intensely debated within and outside the Catholic Church in the early twentieth century. In 1904, Pope Pius X designated Joan of Arc, who was burnt at the stake for heresy in 1431, Venerable, and in 1908 she was beatified. At the same time as he rehabilitated Joan, the pope took decisive steps to expose modernism as a modern-day heresy to be expunged from the Catholic Church. In 1920, Joan was made a saint. In the period surrounding her canonisation, she was recast as both a symbol of orthodox Catholicism, and a spiritual predecessor of reform-minded modernists who paid the highest price for her heterodoxy. In France, following her beatification, she became a political symbol that was employed by the right-wing monarchist movement Action française, which recast Joan as ‘a royalist, a patriot, and a Catholic’.196 Action française was inspired by the thought of Charles Maurras, whose concept of integral nationalism saw the Catholic Church as the central source of social and ideological order. Inspired by the work of Thomas Aquinas, Maurras was highly critical of the 1905 separation of the church and the state, and he and his supporters rallied to the royalist cause. His movement was endorsed by neo-scholastic theologians, such as the Jesuits Pedro Descoqs and Yves de La Brière, but viciously attacked by the modernist theologians such as Maurice Blondel

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and Lucien Laberthonnière, who considered it incompatible with Catholicism.197 As Martha Hanna points out, in the period between Joan’s beatification in 1908 and the celebration of the five-hundredth anniversary of her death in 1931, she ‘became, as a result of the conscious efforts of the Action française, the icon of integral nationalism’.198 Maurice Pujo, a co-founder of the movement, claimed that their political actions emulated Joan’s in that she did not fear to challenge established laws and conventions. ‘She had done so not capriciously but because the established order of her society was, in fact, a false order: it was imposed by the English, just as the established order of France in 1908 was, in Pujo’s opinion, imposed by Jews and Freemasons.’199 For the members of Action française, who penned numerous essays on Joan, she embodied ‘true France’, and her legacy could be used to provide historical, cultural, and religious justification for the movement’s nationalism and antisemitism.200 Neo-scholastic thinkers also recast her as a faithful and selfless Catholic who followed the voice of God and did all she could to fight off English Protestants and the heresies propagated by them. In the same way, she could currently offer guidance on how to effectively fend off the Protestant tendencies displayed by modernist theologians. In 1928, neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain argued: ‘If we want to set off against Luther’s egocentrism an example of true personality, let us think of that miracle of simplicity and uprightness, of candour and wisdom, of humility and magnanimity, of loss of self in God—Joan of Arc.’201 Thus, in the discourse of neo-­ scholastics sympathetic to the cause of Action française, Joan turned from an obstinate heretic who was burnt at the stake into a staunch defender of orthodoxy. At the same time, Joan was being recast as a socialist in Bertolt Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1929), as a feminist in Vita Sackville-West’s Saint Joan of Arc (1936), and as a spiritual predecessor of modernist theologians in G. B. Shaw’s Saint Joan (1924).202 Shaw’s play draws on the ongoing debates about conflicting interpretations of the terms ‘heresy’ and ‘orthodoxy’, which he debated with Chesterton in the Cambridge Heretics Society in the 1910s.203 The staging of his play Saint Joan in New York, where it was first performed in December 1923, and then in London in March 1924, provoked controversies that proved that the issues raised by the modernist crisis still bore much relevance in the interwar years. In the play, as Franke contends, Shaw ‘usurps the occasion of Joan’s canonization to canonize heresy in principle and in deed’.204 He looks back at the modernist crisis and argues for a re-evaluation of reforms

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proposed by modernist theologians. The play highlights the historical fluidity of the notion of heresy, and the manner in which it often verges on sainthood. In an extensive preface that he attached to the play, Shaw discusses various contemporary interpretations of Joan’s actions and their historical significance, asserting that ‘all evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct’.205 Since ‘the law of God is a law of change’, Shaw contends, it follows that ‘when the Churches set themselves against change as such, they are setting themselves against the law of God’.206 The immediate contemporary topicality of his accusation could hardly escape the attention of Shaw’s audiences. Bishop Cauchon’s comparison of past and present heresies in Scene VI could be easily taken for an ironic commentary on the papal condemnation of modernism: The crude heresies of which you have told us are horrible; but their horror is like that of the black death: they rage for a while and then die out, because sound and sensible men will not under any incitement be reconciled to nakedness and incest and polygamy and the like. But we are confronted today throughout Europe with a heresy that is spreading among men not weak in mind nor diseased in brain: nay, the stronger the mind, the more obstinate the heretic. It is neither discredited by fantastic extremes nor corrupted by the common lusts of the flesh; but it, too, sets up the private judgment of the single erring mortal against the considered wisdom and experience of the Church.207

The play’s exploration of the naivety of the Inquisition that strives to draw a clear line between mystical visions and diabolical delusions throws into relief the question of how to interpret individual religious experience. Shaw challenges here not only neo-scholastic orthodoxy, but also rationalist attempts at explaining mysticism away as a symptom of certain mental conditions. In his preface, he explicitly argues for an open-minded interpretation of Joan’s visions, emphasising that the notion of mysticism does not need to be necessarily discarded: The nineteenth century said that [the visions and voices] were delusions, but that as she was a pretty girl, and had been abominably ill-treated and finally done to death by a superstitious rabble of medieval priests hounded on by a corrupt political bishop, it must be assumed that she was the ­innocent dupe of these delusions. The twentieth century finds this explanation too vapidly commonplace, and demands something more mystic. I think the twentieth century is right, because an explanation which amounts to Joan being

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mentally defective instead of, as she obviously was, mentally excessive, will not wash.208

Shaw defended Joan’s sanity and mocked those who in their historical accounts excessively rationalised mystics’ experiences, reaching the conclusion that ‘St Teresa’s hormones had gone astray and left her incurably hyperpituitary or hyperadrenal or hysteroid or epileptoid or anything but asteroid’.209 Thus, Shaw simultaneously argued against two interpretations of Joan’s story, maintaining that, as Cauchon realises in the epilogue, ‘mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.’210 The epilogue’s suggestion that Joan would be executed in contemporary times too was not received well by more orthodox members of the audience.211 T.  S. Eliot remarked in the Criterion that Shaw’s Joan was ‘perhaps the greatest sacrilege of all Joans: for instead of the saint or the strumpet of legends to which he objects, he has turned her into a great middle-class reformer’.212 Two years later, he wrote that the play was outright dangerous. The danger lay in Shaw’s ‘deluding the numberless crowd of sentimentally religious people who are incapable of following any argument to a conclusion. Such people will be misled until they can be made to understand that […] Mr. Shaw’s “St. Joan” is one of the most superstitious of the effigies which have been erected to that remarkable woman.’213 The sense of danger that Eliot connected to Shaw’s portrayal of Joan was shared by Chesterton, who accused Shaw of turning her into a Protestant. At the same time, he saw the play as a ‘dramatic triumph’ that revived the cause of theological modernism, which—in conservative Chesterton’s view—did not have many original arguments to offer any more: how bracing a relief to find such a prodigy as a Modernist who really has a new argument! For outside this charming perversity of G.B.S., the Modernists have made the modern world a desert of dusty monotony and dull repetition. Shaw still talks a great deal of nonsense, and some of it I fear serious nonsense; but always something that awakens us with bravado and does not merely send us to sleep with familiarity.214

Shaw’s ‘bravado’ met with favourable reception and the play was performed 213 times in the United States and 244 times in England.215 Beyond the strictly theological context, Joan spoke to many contemporary concerns, including the questions of intersecting national and religious

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identities, which became particularly pertinent during and in the aftermath of World War 1.

Conclusion The modernist controversy, which culminated in the papal condemnation of the movement of theological modernism in 1907, defined the religious landscape of the period. The modernist theologians’ proposals to historicise Christian tradition, to contextualise the development of dogmas and doctrines, and to re-evaluate the meaning and role of individual religious experience chimed in with the work of contemporary philosophers such as Henri Bergson and William James. The mystical revival of the early twentieth century drew increasing attention to the ways in which religious experience escapes reason and cannot be explained by means of frameworks that rely solely on logic. The new ways of conceptualising Christianity and its relation to the modern world proposed by theologians such as Alfred Loisy, George Tyrrell, Friedrich von Hügel, and Maurice Blondel challenged the hegemony of scholasticism, which had been the dominant Catholic theology since 1879. While theological modernism originated in the Roman Catholic Church, it soon developed into a transnational and interdenominational movement, engaging religious intellectuals across sectarian divisions on both sides of the Atlantic. The aftermath of the Pascendi encyclical, which condemned theological modernism as a modern-­day heresy, saw a revival of scholastic theology in the Catholic Church. Neo-Thomism grew in popularity, popularised by an international network of church-sponsored institutions and journals, as well as lay philosophers such as Jacques Maritain, whose writings were translated into many languages. Neoscholasticism emphasised the importance of church tradition and the need for order, paying particular attention to the role of intellect and cautioning against the perceived irrationalism, subjectivity, and individualism of modernist theology. According to neo-Thomists, individual religious experience ought to be validated by the external framework provided by church doctrine and tradition. Excessive trust in one’s inner feelings or visions risked mistaking the products of one’s psyche with the voice of God. The condemnation of theological modernism as a heresy came to many as a shock that undermined the Catholic Church’s efforts of building a bridge between religion and the secular culture of modernity. In the wake of the Pascendi encyclical, the notions of orthodoxy and heresy (or heterodoxy) were put into question by contemporary intellectuals, religious thinkers,

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scholars, and writers. The fine line between heresy and saintliness was explored through the figure of Joan of Arc, whose rehabilitation, and subsequent beatification and canonisation, inspired creative rewritings of her story that emphasised the fluidity of the concepts of heresy and orthodoxy. As the following chapters demonstrate, with the outbreak of World War 1, these concepts would acquire further meanings in the language of political propaganda (Chap. 3) and literary criticism (Chap. 4), testifying to the continuing impact of the modernist controversy on the cultural landscape of the early twentieth century.

Notes 1. Pope Pius X, ‘Pascendi Dominici Gregis,’ in The Papal Encyclicals, ed. Claudia Carlen, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: McGrath, 1981), 89. 2. For accounts of the modernist controversy in the Roman Catholic Church, see Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context, ed. Darrell Jodock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); David G. Schultenover, A View from Rome: On the Eve of the Modernist Crisis (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993); Gabriel Daly, Transcendence and Immanence: A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); Lester R.  Kurtz, The Politics of Heresy: The Modernist Crisis in Roman Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Marvin R. O’Connell, Critics On Trial: An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994). 3. George Tyrrell, ‘Letter to Marian Zdziechowski, 24 June 1903,’ in George Tyrrell’s Letters, ed. Maude D.  Petre (London: Unwin, 1920), 97–98. 4. Henry D.  A. Major, English Modernism: Its Origin, Methods, Aims (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 41–42. 5. T.  S. Eliot, ‘A Commentary,’ in The Complete Prose of T.  S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 3, ed. Frances Dickey, Jennifer Formichelli, and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber, 2015), 536. 6. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Zdziechowski’s Religiosity,’ in Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942–1943, trans. Madeline D. Levine (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005), 105. 7. Gabriel Daly, ‘Newman, Divine Revelation, and the Catholic Modernists,’ in Newman and the Word, ed. Terrence Merrigan and Ian T. Ker (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 58.

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8. Daly, 59. 9. George Tyrrell, ‘“Revelation as Experience”: An Unpublished Lecture of George Tyrrell,’ ed. Thomas M.  Loome, Heythrop Journal 12, no. 2 (1971): 130. 10. George Tyrrell, Medievalism: A Reply to Cardinal Mercier (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 144. 11. Quoted in Henry D. A. Major, English Modernism: Its Origin, Methods, Aims (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 41–42. 12. Daly, 60. Maurice Blondel, L’Action: Essai d’une critique de la vie et d’une science de la pratique (Paris: Alcan, 1893). English translation: Maurice Blondel, Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, trans. Oliva Blanchette (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). 13. George H. Tavard, ‘Blondel’s Action and the Problem of the University,’ in Catholicism Contending with Modernity, 142–168; Koen Boey, ‘Blondel and the Crisis of Modernism,’ International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 79, no. 5 (2018): 459–469. 14. Maurice Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics, and History and Dogma, ed. and trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (London: Harvill Press, 1964). 15. Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics, 146. Emphasis in the original. 16. Ibid., 151. 17. Pope Leo XIII, ‘Aeterni Patris,’ in The Papal Encyclicals, ed. Claudia Carlen, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: McGrath, 1981), 25–26. 18. On the reception of Blondel’s work, see Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan, ‘Introduction,’ in Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics, 11–116; and Daly, Transcendence and Immanence, 26–50. 19. Dru and Trethowan, ‘Introduction,’ in Blondel, Letter on Apologetics, 56. 20. Tyrrell defined ‘medievalism’ as ‘the synthesis effected between the Christian faith and the culture of the late Middle Ages’ which ‘erroneously supposes itself to be of apostolic antiquity’. According to him, medievalism ‘denies that the work of synthesis is necessary and must endure as long as man’s intellectual, moral, and social evolution endures; which therefore makes the medieval expression of Catholicism its primitive and its final expression’. Medievalism, 144. 21. See David G.  Schultenover, George Tyrrell: In Search of Catholicism (Shepherdstown, VW: Patmos, 1981); George Tyrrell and Catholic Modernism, ed. Oliver R.  Rafferty (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010); and Lawrence F.  Barmann, ‘The Pope and the English Modernists,’ U.S. Catholic Historian 25, no. 1 (2007): 31–54. 22. George Tyrrell, ‘Revelation as Experience’, 131. 23. Ibid., 135–136.

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24. Ibid., 138. 25. Ibid., 146. 26. Ibid., 135. 27. Alfred Loisy, L’Évangile et l’Église (Paris: Picard, 1902). The English translation was published in 1903 as The Gospel and the Church, trans. Christopher Home (London: Isbister and Co., 1903). All quotations are from the English edition. For an account of Loisy’s role in the modernist controversy, see Harvey Hill’s ‘The Politics of Loisy’s Modernist Theology’, in Catholicism Contending with Modernity, 169–190; ‘More than a Biblical Critic: Loisy’s Reform Agenda in Light of His Autobiographies’, in Personal Faith and Institutional Commitments: Roman Catholic Modernist and Anti-­ Modernist Autobiography, ed. Lawrence F.  Barmann and Harvey Hill (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2002), 13–37; and The Politics of Modernism: Alfred Loisy and the Scientific Study of Religion (Washington, DC: Catholic University of American Press, 2002). 28. Adolf von Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1900). The English translation was published in 1901 as What is Christianity?: Sixteen Lectures Delivered in the University of Berlin during the Winter Term 1899–1900, trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (London: Williams and Norgate, 1901). For an account of contemporary debates concerning the existence and definition of the ‘essence of Christianity’, see Guglielmo Forni, The Essence of Christianity: The Hermeneutical Question in the Protestant and Modernist Debate (1897–1904) (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995). 29. Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 13. 30. Ibid., 16. 31. C.  J. T.  Talar, ‘Introduction,’ in Alfred Loisy, Prelude to the Modernist Crisis: The ‘Firmin’ Articles of Alfred Loisy, trans. Christine Thirlway, ed. C. J. T Talar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), xiv. 32. Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 210–211. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 276. 35. Pope Leo XIII, ‘Aeterni Patris,’ 17. 36. Ibid., 26. 37. Edward Baring, Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 28. 38. Jeffrey T. Zalar, Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 194–217. 39. Quoted in Baring, 31. 40. Quoted in Zalar, 198.

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41. Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15–16. 42. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, vol. 1, trans. A.  C. Pegis (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 63 (ch. 3, n. 2). 43. Ronald Knox, ‘The Modernist’s Prayer,’ quoted in Milton T.  Walsh, Ronald Knox as Apologist: Wit, Laughter, and the Popish Creed (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 28. 44. Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, ‘Lamentabili Sane Exitu,’ Acta Sanctae Sedis 40 (1907): 470–478. English translation available at: Papal Encyclicals Online http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/p10lamen. htm [accessed 20 August 2020]. 45. Ibid., propositions 21 and 22. 46. Pius X, ‘Pascendi Dominici Gregis,’ 91. 47. Ibid., 89. For a discussion of the Pascendi encyclical, see C. J. T. Talar, ‘Pascendi dominici gregis: The Vatican Condemnation of Modernism’, U.S. Catholic Historian 25, no. 1 (2007): 1–12; and Daly, Transcendence and Immanence, 190–217. 48. C.  J. T.  Talar, ‘Swearing against Modernism: Sacrorum Antistitum (September 1, 1910),’ Theological Studies 71, no. 3 (September 2010): 548. 49. Kurtz, The Politics of Heresy, 139–166. 50. Talar, ‘Swearing against Modernism’. 51. Pius X, ‘Sacrorum Antistitum’, Acta Apostolicae Sedis, 2 (1910): 655–680. Quoted after the English translation included in Maude D.  Petre, Modernism: Its Failure and Its Fruits (London: T.  C. & E.  C. Jack, 1918), 243. 52. Daly, Transcendence and Immanence, 235. 53. Quoted in Dru and Trethowan, ‘Introduction’, 62–63. 54. Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 56. For Loisy’s narrative of the events leading to his exclusion from the Church, see Alfred Loisy, My Duel with the Vatican: The Autobiography of a Catholic Modernist, trans. Richard Wilson Boynton (New York: Greenwood Press, 1924). 55. Harvey Hill, ‘The Politics of Loisy’s Modernist Theology’, in Catholicism Contending with Modernity, 169–190; and Michael J.  Kerlin, ‘Anti-­ Modernism and the Elective Affinity Between Politics and Philosophy’, in the same collection, 308–336. 56. A Pio X. ‘Quello che vogliamo’, lettera aperta di un gruppo di sacerdoti ([n.p.]: [n.pub.], [1907]). I quote from the English translation: What We

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Want: An Open Letter to Pius X from a Group of Priests, trans. Alfred Leslie Lilley (London: John Murray, 1907), 24–25. See also Jay P. Corrin, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). 57. Gary Lease, ‘Vatican Foreign Policy and the Origins of Modernism’, in Catholicism Contending with Modernity, 32. 58. Jean Baptiste Lemius, Catéchisme sur le Modernisme: d’après l’Encyclique Pascendi Dominici Gregis de S. S. Pie 10 (Paris: Librairie Saint Paul, 1907). For a discussion of Lemius’s work, see Daly, Transcendence and Immanence, 232–234. 59. Baring, 24–25. 60. Baring, 25. 61. Marian Zdziechowski, Pestis perniciosissima: Ein Beitrag zur Charakteristik der modernen Strömungen im Katholizismus (Wien: Karl Gerolds Sohn, 1905). 62. Friedrich von Hügel, ‘Letter to Marian Zdziechowski, 27 April 1905,’ The Collection of Marian Zdziechowski (Marijanas Zdziechovskis), Vilnius University Library, F33-452. 63. Kurtz, The Politics of Heresy, 128. 64. Ibid. 65. Pío Baroja, Road to Perfection: Camino de perfección, trans. Walter Borenstein (Oxford: Oxbow, 2008). 66. Ibid., 167. 67. Ibid., 223, 241. 68. Ibid., 101. 69. Ibid., 175. 70. Ibid., 181, 175. 71. Ibid., 261. 72. Leigh Eric Schmidt, ‘The Making of Modern “Mysticism,”’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 2 (2003): 282. For a cultural history of mysticism in Europe, see Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Cristina Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism, and Gender in European Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 73. Quoted in Schmidt, 282. 74. Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, ‘Mysticism’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information, ed. Hugh Chrisholm, 11th edn, vol. 19 (Cambridge: [Cambridge] University Press, 1911), vol. 19, 123. 75. Schmidt, 282–283.

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76. Mario Praz, ‘Mysticism or Advocatus Diaboli,’ Criterion 8, no. 32 (April 1929): 479. 77. Schmidt, 289–290. 78. Henri Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France depuis la fin des guerres de religion jusqu’à nos jours, 11 vols (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1916–1936). Published in English as A Literary History of Religious Thought in France: From the Wars of Religion Down to Our Times, trans. K. L. Montgomery, 3 vols (London: SPCK, 1928–1936); Friedrich von Hügel, The Mystical Element of Religion: As Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends, 2 vols (London: Dent, 1908). 79. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (London: Methuen, 1911). Other influential publications included Augustin Poulain’s Des grâces d’oraison: traité de théologie mystique (The Graces of Interior Prayer: A Treatise on Mystical Theology, 1901, Eng. trans. 1910), Auguste Saudreau’s L’État mystique, sa nature, ses phases (The Mystical State: Its Nature and Phases, 1902, Eng. trans. 1924), William Ralph Inge’s Christian Mysticism (1899) and Studies in English Mystics (1907), Evelyn Underhill’s Practical Mysticism (1915) and The Mystics of the Church (1925), and Cuthbert Butler’s Western Mysticism (1922). 80. Schmidt, 288. 81. George Tyrrell, ‘Letter to V., 25 November 1897,’ in George Tyrrell’s Letters, 40. 82. Friedrich von Hügel, The Mystical Element of Religion, vol. 1, 50–82. On von Hügel and mysticism, see Lawrence F.  Barmann, ‘Mysticism and Modernism in Baron Friedrich von Hügel’s Life and Thought’, in Modernists and Mystics, ed. C.  J. T.  Talar (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 23–38. 83. Henri Bremond, A Literary History of Religious Thought in France, vol. 2, 432. On Bremond and mysticism, see C. J. T. Talar, ‘Prayer at Twilight: Henri Bremond’s Apologie Pour Fénelon’, in Modernists and Mystics, 39–61. 84. Quoted in Michael J. Kerlin, ‘Maurice Blondel: Philosophy, Prayer, and the Mystical’, in Modernists and Mystics, 80. 85. William Ralph Inge, Christian Mysticism: Considered in Eight Lectures Delivered before the University of Oxford (London: Methuen, 1899), 244–245. 86. For a discussion of early-twentieth-century relationship between Christianity and social democracy, see Peter J. Bernardi, Maurice Blondel, Social Catholicism, and Action Française: The Clash over the Church’s Role in Society during the Modernist Era (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009); and Gary Lease, ‘Odd Fellows’ in the Politics of Religion Modernism, National Socialism, and German Judaism (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994).

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87. George Tyrrell, ‘Letter to Henri Bremond, 16 September 1901’, in George Tyrrell’s Letters, 52. Emphasis in the original. 88. John Wright Buckham, Mysticism and Modern Life (New York: Abingdon Press, 1915), 244. 89. Buckham, 166. 90. For a discussion of James’s approach to religion, see Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 261–307. 91. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), 10. 92. Ibid., 498. 93. Ibid., 499. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid., 334. 96. Ibid., 334–335. 97. The scholastic manuals that James refers to include both the Catholic companions by Albert Stöckl (Lehrbuch der Philosophie, 1881 edition) and Bernard Boedder (Natural Theology, 1891 edition) and the Protestant handbooks by Charles Hodge (Systematic Theology, 1873 edition) and A. H. Strong (Systematic Theology, 1896 edition). James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 437, n. 1. 98. Ibid., 433–434. 99. Ibid., 435. 100. Ibid., 437. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid., 447–448. 103. James Luther Adams, ‘Letter from Baron Friedrich von Hügel to William James,’ Downside Review 98 (1980): 229. 104. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911), x. 105. Ibid., xii–xiii. 106. Ibid., 176. 107. Ibid., 177–178. 108. Ibid., 192. 109. Ibid., 268. 110. William James, A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 215. James was planning to write a preface to the English translation of L’Évolution créatrice, which he did not manage to do due to his untimely death. See also Frédéric Worms, ‘James and Bergson: Reciprocal Readings’, trans. John J.  Conley, in The Reception of Pragmatism in France and the Rise of Roman Catholic Modernism,

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1890–1914, ed. David G.  Schultenover (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 76–92. 111. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), 3. Emphasis in the original. 112. Ibid., 102–103. 113. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘A New Mystic,’ in Critical Essays (Situations I), trans. Chris Turner (London: Seagull Books, 2010), 286, 283. 114. Ibid., 234–235. 115. Ibid., 276–277. 116. Ibid., 286. 117. Emoretta Yang and Jean-Michel Heimonet, ‘Bataille and Sartre: The Modernity of Mysticism,’ Diacritics 26, no. 2 (1996): 59. 118. On the development of theological modernism in Spain and contemporary writers’ engagement with it, see Juan Cózar Castañar, Modernismo teológico y modernismo literario: Cinco ejemplos españoles (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2002); on the Netherlands and Belgium, see Religious Modernism in the Low Countries, ed. by Leo Kenis and Ernestine van der Wall (Leuven: Peeters, 2013); on the modernist controversy in Switzerland, see Johannes Flury, Decurtins Kampf um die Kirche: Antimodernismus im Schweizer Katholizismus (Chur: Bündner Monatsblatt, 1997); on the development of modernism in Germany, see Otto Weiss, Der Modernismus in Deutschland: Ein Beitrag zur Theologiegeschichte (Regensburg: Pustet, 1995); on modernism in Poland, see Roman Padoł, Filozofia religii polskiego modernizmu (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1982). 119. The modernists’ correspondence published in English includes the following volumes: George Tyrrell’s Letters, ed. by Maude D. Petre (London: Unwin, 1920); Letters from a ‘Modernist’: The Letters of George Tyrrell to Wilfred Ward, 1893–1908, ed. by Mary Jo Weaver (London: Sheed and Ward, 1981); The Letters of Baron Friedrich von Hügel and Maude D.  Petre: The Modernist Movement in England, ed. by James J.  Kelly (Leuven: Peeters, 2003). The most substantial collection of unpublished letters and private papers of modernists is held at the University of St Andrews (‘Papers of the Catholic Modernists’ Collection) and includes papers of Friedrich von Hügel, George Tyrrell, Alfred Lilley, Wilfred Ward, and others. 120. On Newman and modernism, see Daly, ‘Newman, Divine Revelation, and the Catholic Modernists’; Newman and the Modernists, ed. Mary Jo Weaver (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985); John Henry Newman and Modernism, ed. Arthur Hilary Jenkins (Sigmaringendorf: Glock und Lutz, 1990).

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121. George Tyrrell, ‘Introduction’, in Henri Bremond, The Mystery of Newman, trans. by H.  C. Corrance (London: Williams & Norgate, 1907), xvi. On the relation between Tyrrell’s and Newman’s work, see Andrew Pierce, ‘Crossbows, Bludgeons and Long-Range Rifles: Tyrrell and Newman and “the Intimate Connection between Methods and their Results”’, in George Tyrrell and Catholic Modernism, 56–75; and Nicholas Sagovsky, ‘“Frustration, disillusion, and enduring filial respect”: George Tyrrell’s Debt to John Henry Newman’, in Newman and the Modernists, 97–118. 122. Ibid., xvii. 123. On the relationship between Loisy’s and Newman’s thought, see Nicholas Lash, ‘Newman and “A. Firmin”’, in John Henry Newman and Modernism, 56–73; Ronald Burke, ‘Was Loisy Newman’s Modern Disciple?’ in Newman and the Modernists, 139–160. For a discussion of von Hügel’s engagement with Newman’s work, see Patrick Sherry, ‘Von Hügel’s Retrospective View of Modernism’, in John Henry Newman and Modernism, 129–141; and Arthur Hilary Jenkins, ‘Newman under Scrutiny: The Modernist Crisis in England and the Issues of Conscience, Obedience and Resistance’, in John Henry Newman and Modernism, 85–104. 124. Von Hügel, The Mystical Element of Religion, vol. 1, xv. 125. Quoted in Keith Beaumont, ‘The Reception of Newman in France at the Time of the Modernist Crisis,’ in Receptions of Newman, ed. Frederick D.  Aquino and Benjamin J.  King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 166. 126. Alfred Loisy, ‘The Development of Christianity According to Cardinal Newman’, in Prelude to the Modernist Crisis: The ‘Firmin’ Articles of Alfred Loisy, trans. Christine Thirlway, ed. C. J. T Talar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3. 127. Bremond published his translations of Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1904) and selected sermons as Psychologie de la foi (Psychology of Faith, 1905) and La vie chrétienne (The Christian Life, 1906). His study of Newman’s work was completed with the biography Newman: Essai de biographie psychologique published in 1906, and translated into English in 1907 as The Mystery of Newman. See Peter J.  Gorday, Pure Love, Pure Poetry, Pure Prayer: The Life and Work of Henri Bremond (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2018), 43–62. 128. Henri Bremond, The Mystery of Newman, trans. H. C. Corrance (London: Williams & Norgate, 1907). 129. George Tyrrell, ‘Introduction,’ in Bremond, The Mystery of Newman, ix, xv. 130. John Henry Newman, Fede e ragione, trans. Domenico Battaini (Torino: Bocca, 1907).

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131. John Henry Newman, Lo sviluppo del domma cristiano, trans. Domenico Battaini and Romolo Murri (Roma: Società Nazionale di Cultura, 1908). 132. John Henry Newman, Il Papa, il Sillabo e l’Infallibilità papale, ossia lotte d’altri tempi oggi rinate et rigogliose, trans. Domenico Battaini (Torino: Bocca, 1909). 133. Quoted in Lease, “Odd Fellows” in the Politics of Religion, 101. 134. Charlotte Blennerhassett, John Henry Kardinal Newman: ein Beitrag zur religiösen Entwicklungsgeschichte der Gegenwart (Berlin: Paetel, 1904). 135. John Henry Newman, Philosophie des Glaubens, trans. Theodor Haecker (München: H.A. Wiechmann, 1912). 136. John Henry Newman, Przys'wiadczenia wiary, trans. Stanisław Brzozowski (Lwów: Księgarnia polska B. Połonieckiego, 1915). 137. Marian Zdziechowski, Pesymizm, romantyzm a podstawy chrzes'cijan'stwa, vol. 2 (Kraków: Drukarnia Czasu, 1915), 389. 138. George Tyrrell, ‘The Pope and Modernism’, The Times, September 30, 1907, p. 4; October 1, 1907, p. 5. 139. ‘The Vatican and Father Tyrrell’, The Times, November 2, 1907, p. 9. 140. Edward Thomas O’Dwyer, Cardinal Newman and the Enyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis: An Essay (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 5. 141. Ibid., 5. 142. ‘The Pope and Cardinal Newman: Letter to the Bishop of Limerick’, The Tablet, 28 March 1908, p. 491. 143. Ramon Fernandez, ‘The Experience of Newman,’ Criterion 3, no. 9 (October 1924): 84–102; Frederic Manning, ‘A French Criticism of Newman,’ Criterion 4, no. 1 (January 1926): 19–31; Ramon Fernandez, ‘The Experience of Newman: Reply to Frederic Manning,’ Criterion 4, no. 4 (October 1926): 645–658. 144. Pope Pius X, Pascendi, 71. 145. The Union was founded in 1898 as the Churchmen’s Union for the Advancement of Liberal Religious Thought, and changed its name for the Modern Churchmen’s Union in 1928. See Alan M. G. Stephenson, The Rise and Decline of English Modernism (London: SPCK, 1984), 52–75. A list of conferences held by the Union from 1914 to 1984 and the titles of the papers presented can be found in Appendix A to Stephenson’s book, 206–241. 146. William Ralph Inge, ‘Roman Catholic Modernism,’ in Outspoken Essays (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1920), 167. 147. Ibid., 145. 148. Ibid., 166. 149. Stephenson, 12. 150. Major, 43, 47.

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151. The most influential publications included: H.  D. A.  Major, English Modernism (1927); J. F. Bethune-Baker, The Way of Modernism (1927); Percy Gardner, Modernism in the English Church (1926); W.  Maurice Pryke, Modernism as a Working Faith (1925); and Walter Grierson, Modernism and What it Did for Me (1929). 152. See, for example, Charles Harris, Creeds or No Creeds: A Critical Examination of the Basis of Modernism (1922); Arthur C. Champneys, A Different Gospel which is not another Gospel (1922); and Francis J. Hall, Christianity and Modernism (1924). 153. Lawrence Barmann, ‘Confronting Secularization: Origins of the London Society for the Study of Religion,’ Church History 62.1 (1993): 22–40. 154. Papers Read Before the Synthetic Society 1896–1908 and Written Comments Thereon Circulated Among the Members of the Society (Spottiswoode & Co, 1909). 155. Charles Briggs, ‘Loisy and his Critics in the Roman Catholic Church’, London Expositor 11 (1905): 254. See also Mark S. Massa, ‘“Mediating Modernism”: Charles Briggs, Catholic Modernism, and an Ecumenical “Plot,”’ Harvard Theological Review 81, no. 4 (1988): 413–430. 156. Charles Briggs and Friedrich von Hügel, The Papal Commission and the Pentateuch (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1906). 157. Charles Briggs, ‘Modernism Mediating the Coming Catholicism’, North American Review 187 (1908): 877. 158. Newman Smyth, Passing Protestantism and Coming Catholicism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), 41. 159. Major, English Modernism, 12–13. 160. Victor Branford, Living Religions: A Plea for the Larger Modernism (London: Leplay House, 1924), vii. 161. Van der Wall, The Enemy Within, 13. 162. The proceedings of the Congress were published as Freedom and Fellowship in Religion: Proceedings and Papers of the Fourth International Congress of Religious Liberals, Held at Boston, U.S.A., September 22–27, 1907, ed. Charles W. Wendte (Boston: International Council, 1907). 163. Charles W.  Eliot, ‘Address of Welcome by President Charles W.  Eliot, LL.D.,’ in Freedom and Fellowship in Religion, 240–241. See also Charles W.  Eliot’s lecture ‘The Religion of the Future,’ Harvard Theological Review 2, no. 4 (October 1909): 389–407. 164. Albion W.  Small, ‘The Bonds of Nationality,’ American Journal of Sociology 20, no. 5 (1915): 674. 165. R.  J. Campbell, ‘The Aim of the New Theology Movement,’ Hibbert Journal 5, no. 3 (1907): 483. 166. Shailer Mathews, The Faith of Modernism (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1925), 19.

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167. Ibid., 23. 168. This statement was made by George F. Washburn in a speech given at a launch of the Bible Crusaders organisation in Clearwater, FL. Quoted in Maynard Shipley, The War on Modern Science: A Short History of the Fundamentalist Attacks on Evolution and Modernism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), 52. On the American modernist–fundamentalist controversy, see George M.  Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992). 169. On the King’s Bussiness’s role in the controversy, see Marsden, 144–164. See also Edward B.  Davis, ‘Fundamentalist Cartoons, Modernist Pamphlets, and the Religious Image of Science in the Scopes Era’, in Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America, ed. Charles L.  Cohen and Paul S.  Boyer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 175–198. 170. John F.  Scott, ‘Alice in Literal-Land: An Allegory of the War in the Churches,’ Century Magazine, May 1924, pp. 52–59. 171. Ibid., 53. 172. Ibid. 173. Ibid., 57. 174. Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 175. Ibid. 176. Ibid., 58. 177. Van der Wall, The Enemy Within, 11. 178. Mrs Humphry Ward [Mary Ward], The Case of Richard Meynell (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1911). 179. Ibid., 100–101. 180. Ibid., 101. 181. Ibid., 103. 182. Norman Vance, ‘The Church in Danger: Mrs Humphry Ward’s The Case of Richard Meynell,’ International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 12, no. 3/4 (2012): 260. 183. H.  M. Burge, The Doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body: Documents Relating to the Question of Heresy Raised Against the Rev. H. D. A. Major, Ripon Hall, Oxford (London A.R. Mowbray & Co, 1922), 1. 184. Major dismissed the charges levelled against him in the pamphlet A Resurrection of Relics: A Modern Churchman’s Defence in a Recent Charge of Heresy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1922).

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185. The Times, ‘A Protest in St. Paul’s: City Rector and Dr. Barnes,’ October 17, 1927, p. 11. 186. The Times, ‘The Protest in St. Paul’s: Bishop’s Letter to Archbishop,’ October 20, 1927, p. 9. 187. Charles Gore, ‘Doctrines of The Sacraments,’ The Times, October 20, 1927, p. 15. 188. G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (London: Bodley Head, 1905), 12. 189. For an account of the history of the Society, see Damon Franke, Modernist Heresies: British Literary History, 1883–1924 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008), 1–76. 190. Franke, xiii. 191. Jane Harrison, ‘Heresy and Humanity’, in Alpha and Omega (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1915), 27–28. Emphasis in the original. 192. Franke, 45. 193. Ibid., 56. 194. Ibid., 20. Emphasis in the original. 195. The list of the meetings of the Society held between 1909–1924 with the names of speakers and titles of their papers is included in Franke’s appendix (219–229). 196. Martha Hanna, ‘Iconology and Ideology: Images of Joan of Arc in the Idiom of the Action Française, 1908–1931,’ French Historical Studies 14, no. 2 (1985): 216. See also Jennifer Kilgore, ‘Joan of Arc as Propaganda Motif from the Dreyfus Affair to the Second World War,’ Revue LISA 6, no. 1 (2008): 279–296. 197. Michael Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism, and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics, 1890–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 198. Hanna, 216. 199. Hanna, 221. 200. See, for example, Maurice Barrès, Autour de Jeanne d’Arc (Paris: Edouard Champion, 1916); Charles Maurras, Méditation sur la politique de Jeanne d’Arc (Paris: Ducros et Colas, 1931); Charles Maurras, Jeanne d’Arc, Louis XIV, Napoléon (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1937). 201. Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers: Luther-Descartes-Rousseau, [n.trans.] (London: Sheed & Ward, 1928), 28. 202. See Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981). 203. G. B. Shaw spoke at the Cambridge Heretics Society meeting on ‘The Religion of the Future’ on 29 May 1911. G. K. Chesterton responded

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with a talk on ‘The Future of Religion’ on 17 November 1911. For a discussion of their debate, see Franke, Chap. 4. 204. Franke, 117. 205. G. B. Shaw, Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue (London: Penguin, 2003), 38. 206. Ibid. 207. Ibid., 124. 208. Ibid., 13. 209. Ibid., 16. 210. Ibid., 163. 211. Franke, 129. 212. T.  S. Eliot, ‘A Commentary,’ in The Complete Prose of T.  S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 2, ed. Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber, 2014), 542–543. 213. T.  S. Eliot, ‘Mr. Robertson and Mr. Shaw: A Review of Mr. Shaw and “The Maid,” by J. M. Robertson,’ in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, 781–782. 214. G. K. Chesterton, ‘Second Thoughts on Shaw,’ in The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, vol. 11, ed. Denis J. Conlon (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 590, 587. 215. Franke, 117.

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The Tablet. ‘The Pope and Cardinal Newman: Letter to the Bishop of Limerick.’ March 28, 1908, p. 491. The Times. ‘A Protest In St. Paul’s: City Rector and Dr. Barnes.’ October 17, 1927a, p. 11. The Times. ‘The Protest In St. Paul’s: Bishop’s Letter to Archbishop.’ October 20, 1927b, p. 9. The Times. ‘The Vatican and Father Tyrrell.’ November 2, 1907, p. 9. Tyrrell, George. George Tyrrell’s Letters, edited by Maude D.  Petre. London: Unwin, 1920. Tyrrell, George. ‘“Revelation as Experience”: An Unpublished Lecture of George Tyrrell,’ edited by Thomas M.  Loome. Heythrop Journal 12, no. 2 (1971): 117–149. Tyrrell, George. ‘The Pope and Modernism.’ The Times, October 1, 1907a, p. 5. Tyrrell, George. ‘The Pope and Modernism.’ The Times, September 30, 1907b, p. 4. Tyrrell, George. Letters from a ‘Modernist’: The Letters of George Tyrrell to Wilfred Ward, 1893–1908, edited by Mary Jo Weaver. London: Sheed and Ward, 1981. Tyrrell, George. Medievalism: A Reply to Cardinal Mercier. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908. Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism. London: Methuen, 1911. Vance, Norman. ‘The Church in Danger: Mrs Humphry Ward’s The Case of Richard Meynell.’ International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 12, no. 3/4 (2012): 248–262. Walsh, Milton T. Ronald Knox as Apologist: Wit, Laughter, and the Popish Creed. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007. Ward, Mrs Humphry [Mary]. The Case of Richard Meynell. London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1911. Warner, Marina. Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism. New  York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. Weaver, Mary Jo, ed. Newman and the Modernists. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985. Weiss, Otto. Der Modernismus in Deutschland: Ein Beitrag zur Theologiegeschichte. Regensburg: Pustet, 1995. Wendte, Charles W., ed. Freedom and Fellowship in Religion: Proceedings and Papers of the Fourth International Congress of Religious Liberals, Held at Boston, U.S.A., September 22–27, 1907. Boston: International Council, 1907. What We Want: An Open Letter to Pius X from a Group of Priests. Translated by Alfred Leslie Lilley. London: John Murray, 1907. Worms, Frédéric. ‘James and Bergson: Reciprocal Readings.’ In The Reception of Pragmatism in France and the Rise of Roman Catholic Modernism, 1890–1914, edited by David G. Schultenover, 76–92. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009.

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Yang, Emoretta, and Jean-Michel Heimonet. ‘Bataille and Sartre: The Modernity of Mysticism.’ Diacritics 26, no. 2 (1996): 59–73. Zalar, Jeffrey T. Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Zdziechowski, Marian. Pestis perniciosissima: Ein Beitrag zur Charakteristik der modernen Strömungen im Katholizismus. Wien: Karl Gerolds Sohn, 1905.

CHAPTER 3

Spiritualising the War: Religion, Conflict, and Politics

World War 1 and Religion: Reimagining the Real The complex interface of Christianity and modernity shaped by the pre-­ World War 1 debates became even more complicated with its outbreak. Paradoxically, ‘the most “modern” of wars,’ as Jay Winter observes, ‘triggered an avalanche of the “unmodern”.’1 Religion and different kinds of belief in the supernatural feature prominently in the letters, diaries, memoirs, and a wider print culture of the period.2 The war, which became the formative experience for many writers and readers, lent a new urgency to religious questions. It created a need for a language that would be capable of expressing the horror of the trenches and the trauma of the warfare, as well as provide a means of mourning the loss of the loved ones.3 In Britain alone, around three million people in a population of under forty-two million lost a close relative, and as Adrian Gregory observes, ‘the secondary bereaved’ who mourned a friend, neighbour, or cousin ‘encompassed virtually the entire population’.4 In the aftermath of the war, Winter contends, ‘[t]he need to bring the dead home, to put the dead to rest, symbolically or physically, was pervasive’.5 The wish to communicate with those who had fallen evinced renewed interest in the after-life, the paranormal, and the spiritual. Among the members of Christian churches, prayers and services for the dead became increasingly popular. In 1927, Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke in the House of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Rzepa, Modernism and Theology, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61530-7_3

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Lords of ‘the need that was everywhere, the craving desire which existed, for some prayers in commemoration of the departed’.6 Those who sought alternative forms of belief often turned to spiritualism, which in some circles was considered a ‘new synthesis between Darwinian evolution and humanistic Christianity’ and enjoyed both a ‘visionary and emotional attraction’ and ‘scientific and rational appeal’.7 Religious language and imagery became a recurrent motif of soldiers’ private letters and diaries. Annette Becker connects it to the fact that ‘the experience of the trenches could not easily be explained in conventional theological (or indeed in any other rational) terms’ and, thus, produced ‘a host of spiritual images, stories, and legends [that] proliferated during the conflict among frontline troops’.8 The danger of imminent death revived the faith of many and brought others, who before the war did not participate in religious observations, back to the church. Captain Ferdinand Belmont provides an example of such a ‘return to the altars’ in a letter of 11 October 1914, in which he describes a Catholic mass celebrated by Abbé Paradis, a voluntary chaplain of the ambulance of the 28th division: Many came there, many confessed and received the Holy Communion who for long years had not directed their footsteps to church,—forgotten through negligence, or deserted through egoism or self-interest. Here all these smallnesses disappear, trial has swept them away, and left to one’s own resources every one here seeks for a support which he finds nowhere else. War, to say the least, possesses, like all great sacrifices, an undoubted purifying virtue. Regeneration comes through sacrifice and suffering.9

The Christian understanding of sacrifice and suffering had a special meaning for soldiers, as it allowed them to interpret their war experience through the framework of Christ’s passion and resurrection, which brought hope of expiation and salvation. The Catholic intellectual Henri Massis in The Sacrifice (Le Sacrifice, 1917) went as far as to compare the religious dimension of the experience of the trenches with that of the contemplative solitude of monastic life: ‘No anchorite was ever more ardent in his meditations […]. What monastery, what enclosure can offer such a spectacle of nakedness and abandonment, a deeper, more intense vision of death, such depths of solitude, such a society of fraternal souls sustained by such fervour?’10 Another combatant, the Jesuit intellectual Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who served at the front as a stretcher-bearer and took part in the battles of Marne and Ypres (1915), Nieuport (1916), and

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Verdun (1917), in his letters from the trenches described how the deep experience of the presence of the incarnate Christ could completely transform the landscape of destruction into one filled with spirit and grace. In one of his war pieces, ‘The Spiritual Power of the Matter’, he relates a vision in which the narrator apprehends a unique redemptive relationship between the matter and the spirit, with the former being thoroughly permeated with the latter, and thus ultimately unconquerable by death.11 He falls to his knees, blessing the ‘mighty matter’ and ‘irresistible march of evolution’ as ‘the divine milieu, charged with creative power, as the ocean stirred by the Spirit, as the clay moulded and infused with life by the incarnate Word’.12 Teilhard de Chardin’s hymn celebrates the revelational experience in which the matter is seen anew and its creative and spiritual potential is affirmed. This redemptive relationship between the matter and the spirit, or the natural and the supernatural, is founded in the event of the Incarnation. Inspired by Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin hails the process of evolution as the dynamic growth of the mystical Christ: ‘By the Incarnation, which redeemed man, the very Becoming of the Universe, too, has been transformed. Christ is the term of even the natural evolution of living beings; evolution is holy.’13 The holiness of matter that Teilhard de Chardin discovered in the face of mass destruction provided him with what he considered a unique insight. ‘Through the war,’ he asserted, ‘a rent had been made in the crust of banality and convention. A window was opened on the secret mechanisms and deepest layers of human development.’14 The Austrian author Robert Musil explores a similar instance of mysticism in the trenches in the short story ‘The Blackbird’ (‘Die Amsel’, 1928).15 The main character Atwo takes part in a battle in Tyrol (Musil himself served in South Tyrol as commander of the Landsturm March Battalion), when he suddenly hears ‘subtle singing’ that was directed at him, though he could not identify its source.16 The singing had a dream-­ like quality and ‘there was something unreal about it’.17 Recalling this experience years later, he struggles to find words that would capture what happened to him at that moment: I can only say that I was certain that in the next second I would feel God’s proximity close up to my body—which, after all, is saying quite a bit for someone who hasn’t believed in God since the age of eight. […] And suddenly the singing became an earthly sound, ten, a hundred feet above us and it died. He—it—was here. Right here in our midst, but closer to me,

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s­omething that had gone silent and been swallowed up by the earth, had exploded into an unreal hush.18

It turns out that the mysterious sound that the soldier heard was an aerial dart that he was stunned by. While his experience has a rational explanation, he nevertheless states that ‘if at that very moment someone had said that God had entered my body, I wouldn’t have laughed.’19 Narrating his story with hindsight, he remarks: ‘whenever I think back to that incident, I feel an overwhelming desire to experience something like it again even more vividly!’20 Teilhard de Chardin’s and Musil’s Atwo’s reflections on the spiritual aspects of the war were by no means without parallel. Becker, having examined a number of conversion stories from the years 1914–1918, contended that the destruction brought about by the war was conducive to spiritual transformations. She observed that ‘[s]uffering, even the sure approach of death, plunged individuals into a favourable psychological atmosphere’ in which they were faced with urgent questions of existential importance.21 One of them was the question concerning the meaning of the material reality surrounding them—a radically defamiliarised world filled with dereliction—and its relationship to the potentially invisible reality, one that is not tangible and eludes rational logic, yet perhaps can be intuited or experienced through faith. The writer André Breton, who spent the war working with traumatised soldiers hospitalised in a psychiatric ward in Nantes, addressed this question in his famous Manifesto of Surrealism (Manifeste du surréalisme, 1924). It called for a rejection of neo-Thomism and a radical reimagining of the notion of ‘reality’: the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. […] The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating directly to our experience. Logical ends, on the contrary, escape us. It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge. […] Under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices.22

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For Breton, the ultimate aim of modern art should be to reclaim the experience of ‘the presence of the marvellous’ and the ‘passion for eternity’— invisible and unmeasurable, yet of vital importance for a holistic understanding of humanity.23 The ‘surreality’ that he proclaimed was to be a fusion of two seemingly contradictory states: reality and dream, which, as he asserted—when joined together—reveal ‘the absolute reality’. Its aim was to transcend the ‘increasingly circumscribed’ understanding of experience and create spaces where that which violates the laws of reason could be freely expressed.24 Teilhard de Chardin’s Christological realism and Breton’s surrealism are two examples of inter-war attempts to reimagine the real through a reflection on how the experience of the trenches shaped people’s perception of life and death, creating an openness to the idea that there might be an invisible or supernatural side to the reality they inhabited.25 Questions relating to the nature of religious experience and its potential to grant access to what cannot be comprehended in empirical ways became a vital issue not only for those who directly witnessed the atrocities of the war, but also for non-combatants who stayed behind, listening to the stories brought from the front and mourning those who did not return. Evelyn Underhill in her Practical Mysticism (1914) referred to those stories as demonstrative of the fact that ‘the mystical consciousness has the power of lifting those who possess it to a plane of reality which no struggle, no cruelty, can disturb: of conferring a certitude which no catastrophe can wreck.’26 She considered her own research into mysticism and religious traditions part of the war effort since, as she argued, ‘it becomes a part of true patriotism to keep the spiritual life, both of the individual citizen and of the social group, active and vigorous’.27 The writer May Sinclair, influenced by Underhill’s studies, also explored the liminal nature of combatants’ wartime experiences as offering a glimpse into the phenomenon of mysticism. That mysticism, she argued, consists in ‘the positively ecstatic vision of Reality that comes to [the wartime hero] when he faces death for the first time’.28 According to her, moments of certainty that mystics experience rarely come when they are actively sought. On the contrary, they most frequently are experienced as ‘unsought, and unexpected and with a shock of surprise’ and the war in its extremity has proved to be a powerful trigger for such states.29 Sinclair contends that ‘the world has been full of these mystics, these visionaries, since August, 1914.’30 This affirmative vision of the war as producing a generation of mystics that could open humanity to new spiritual dimensions that had been

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banished by the rationalism and materialism of the nineteenth century competed with another way of understanding the war through a religious lens, namely, viewing it as a source of profound spiritual shame. The German philosopher Max Scheler in his On the Eternal in Man (Vom Ewigen im Menschen, 1921) argued that ‘only the gradual raising of the whole of the European heart, mind and judgment to that sunlit plateau, only the clear vision of Europe’s—and indeed the world’s—inseparably interwoven common guilt for the late war, can even begin any edifice of religious renewal.’31 He emphasised that it is only through the recognition and acceptance of the collective guilt (understood in a moral, not political, way), and subsequent ‘collective repentance and atonement’ for that guilt that a genuine spiritual awakening can be achieved.32 Similar ideas were put forward by the British author and critic John Middleton Murry. In his autobiographical reminiscences, he presented the war as a traumatic experience not only for the combatants, but also those whom they left behind: The war was a thunderclap. […] my friends had begun to be killed. I was totally unprepared for their deaths. Men of my own age, who had shared my interests, and whom after my fashion I loved, were suddenly blotted out. A chasm yawned in my universe. Day after day I brooded over this abyss, to no end.33

Murry argued that the war ‘made the dark things clear and the clear things dark once more’.34 He contended that the religious awakening that the war brought about should be regarded as equally or perhaps even more important than the redrawing of the map of Europe at the Congress of Vienna. He declared that ‘[t]he fundamental thing is that the leaven of a religious sense is at work in the world,’ and urged his contemporaries to accept ‘the burden of the guilt’ and to ‘live dangerously’.35 One way to do it, Murry maintained, was to inquire once again into the nature of reality and reject any prefabricated answers. The real, he asserted, ‘inevitably escapes from the hands of those who imagine that they hold it’, but in fact grasp after shadows; hence, the pressing need to ‘find the secret, to make the new synthesis’ in the aftermath of the war.36 According to Murry, it was necessary to work towards that synthesis because the message of Christianity was squandered by the churches that had refused to move with the times and respond to the pressing issues of the modern world. The issues of guilt and sinfulness, and the extent to which ecclesiastical institutions were implicated in the war, were further explored in the

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French author and combatant Georges Bernanos’s The Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d’un curé de campagne, 1936). In a powerful scene that queries the relationship between war and religion the fictional combatant Olivier Tréville-Sommerange, who serves in the Foreign Legion, rebukes the young priest of Ambricourt when he tries to preach him on the ideal of a Christian soldier. Olivier argues that the ‘first real secularization was that of the soldier’, when the church entered into a pact with the state and chose to ‘take charge of our conscience into the bargain’.37 Theology, he claims, has become subservient to the needs of the state, and thus, when deemed necessary, theologians ‘grant us permission to kill, kill anywhere, anyhow, to kill by order, like executioners’.38 The priest is not able to find any arguments to refute these accusations. Indeed, he himself constantly reflects on evil, corruption, and sinfulness that seem to gradually permeate the soul of humanity: The world of sin confronts the world of grace like the reflected picture of a landscape in the blackness of very still, deep waters. There is not only a communion of saints; there is also a communion of sinners. In their hatred of one another, their contempt, sinners unite, embrace, intermingle, become as one; one day in the eyes of Eternal God they will be no more than a mass of perpetual slime over which the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly.39

This emphasis on human wretchedness and corruption exposed by the war found a powerful theological expression in Karl Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans, written during the war and published first in 1918, and in a revised version in 1922. Barth’s study challenged mainstream Protestant theology, emphasising the radical otherness of God.40 Throughout the war, Barthes preached and lectured on the meaning of warfare and politics for Christian faith, developing a critique of liberal theology.41 In one of his wartime lectures, ‘The Righteousness of God’ (1916), he asks: ‘Isn’t it remarkable that the greatest atrocities of life—here I think of the capitalistic order of society and the War—can justify themselves on purely moral principles?’42 According to him, the war has laid bare human illusions relating to God and the human-divine relationship. It has exposed idols that have replaced the living God and served to justify moral values and socially acceptable standards of behaviour, and proven that ‘God’s innermost being is […] completely alien to humankind.’43 Throughout The Epistle to the Romans, which the Roman Catholic theologian Karl Adam

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described as ‘a bombshell in the playground of the theologians’, Barth underlines the fundamental distinction between the omnipotent God and humankind whose viewpoint is always limited and cannot possibly reach out towards the divine.44 In his critique of the widespread interest in mysticism and various forms of spirituality, Barth takes an uncompromising stance: The difference between the incorruption, the pre-eminence and originality of God, and the corruption, the boundedness and relativity of men had been confused. Once the eye, which can perceive this distinction, has been blinded, there arises in the midst, between here and there, between us and the ‘Wholly Other’, a mist or concoction of religion in which, by a whole series of skilful assimilations and mixings more or less strongly flavoured with sexuality, sometimes the behaviour of men or of animals is exalted to be an experience of God, sometimes the Being and Existence of God is ‘enjoyed’ as a human or animal experience. In all this mist the prime factor is provided by the illusion that it is possible for men to hold communication with God or, at least, to enter into a covenant relationship with Him without miracle—vertical from above, without the dissolution of all concrete things, and apart from THE truth which lies beyond birth and death.45

According to Barth, the illusion that the communication with the divine can be established from below, and that mysticism is part of everyday devotional life of, as Underhill put it, ‘normal people’, has been effectively shattered by the experience of the war. This provided an opportunity to reject the idols erected to replace God, and to reconsider the question of human limitations and God’s ultimate incomprehensibility. ‘So far as human possibility is concerned,’ Barth contends, ‘prophets and priests, theologians and philosophers, men of faith, hope, and charity, break in pieces on the impossibility of God.’46 The reality of God is radically different from human ideas of God, and the task of the faithful is to acknowledge that and patiently wait on God. What Barth’s, Scheler’s, and Murry’s theological reflections, and Teilhard de Chardin’s and Breton’s creative attempts to reimagine the real had in common—whether approached from the perspective of guilt and sinfulness or a positive affirmation of wartime mysticism—was their openness towards the unseen and the incomprehensible. The notion of ‘realism’ in the aftermath of the war became substantially redefined, and there emerged a number of ‘realisms’ that differed from the positivist understanding of the term prevalent in the nineteenth century. The critic

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Stephen Spender recalled how after the war ‘sensitive undergraduates worried a lot about what was “real”’. According to him, ‘the concern with being “real” or “unreal” arose because we felt ourselves to be living in a contemporary reality from which we were somehow shut out by circumstances.’47 As Stephen Schloesser puts it, different ways of imagining the real, including surrealism, magical realism, social realism, and religious realism, ‘attempted to combine, in a dialectical synthesis, both the positivist’s observed world as well as something else unseen’.48 Thus, the experience of the material world could be synthesised with religious experiences that could not be investigated within a scientific framework and required more imaginative ways of conceptualising mystical and religious experiences and various forms of orthodox and heterodox spirituality.

Fighting for Christianity: Religion, Politics, and Propaganda in the 1910s–1940s The visible growth of belief in the supernatural stimulated by the war was successfully utilised by state propaganda in numerous pamphlets, brochures, and posters that presented World War 1  in religious terms. Religious discourse provided a useful means to justify political and military ends.49 Some of the arguments that gained traction during the modernist controversy were now recast to align with the discourse of patriotic fervour. At the outset of the war, Pope Benedict XV in his encyclical Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum, issued on 1 November 1914, announced that among the root causes of the ‘general unrest’ in Europe was ‘the absence of respect for the authority of those who exercise ruling powers’.50 He named modernism as an example of contempt for law and order, and reiterated Pope Pius X’s condemnation of ‘the monstrous errors’ of modernism that are ‘as the plague [that] is not yet entirely stamped out, but lurks here and there in hidden places’.51 The propaganda of the Allies was quick to frame the war as a product of the corrupt German culture, which was portrayed as being responsible for the modernist crisis in theology. It presented Germany as the Kultur that has betrayed Christianity by giving birth to higher criticism and the Tübingen School of Theology, whose work could be seen as the baleful legacy of Luther’s break with Rome. Within this narrative, Germany’s corrupt religious and political culture was leading Europe to destruction, which for intellectuals who had opposed theological modernism before

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the war was the final proof that the movement of modernism was a misconceived and deeply anti-Christian enterprise. ‘The new theology has led Germany into barbarism,’ argued the American Methodist Arno C. Gaebelein, ‘and it will lead any nation into the same demoralization.’52 Germany’s military actions were presented as ‘related to (among other things) rationalism, evolutionary naturalism, and the philosophy of Nietzsche’.53 The religious press presented the war as the battle over the future of Christian civilisation. The American Evangelical King’s Business quoted from an editorial by the Congressman Henry Watterson, declaring in May 1918: ‘The Kaiser boldly threw down the gage of battle—Infidel Germany against the believing world—Kultur against Christianity—the Gospel of Hate against the Gospel of Love.’ […] this same Kultur, ‘the genius of Infidelity,’ is what many professors in our own land are striving hard to introduce into our Universities in their evolutionary teaching and in their promulgation of the Higher Criticism. If it obtains such a universal sway in our Universities, Colleges and High Schools as it has in Germany it will produce the same results here that it did there.54

Such discourse was not restricted to the most conservative Christian audiences. Similar statements can be found in works of many intellectuals writing during or just after the war. The French neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain in his Antimodern (Antimoderne, 1922) contended: ‘Looking at the war from its philosophical and intellectual aspect, […] pan-Germanism is the monstrous but inevitable fruit of the great break in balance of the sixteenth century, Germany’s separation from Christianity.’55 In Three Reformers (Trois réformateurs, 1923), Maritain focused on the erroneous aspects of Luther’s, Descartes’s, and Rousseau’s thought so as to prove that the roots of the contemporary endorsement of destructive individualism which led to the German aggression could be traced back to Germany’s Lutheranism.56 Thus, German militarism was presented as directly connected to the Reformation, the Tübingen School of Theology, higher criticism, and finally, theological modernism. This type of religiously inflected Allied propaganda presented the military confrontation between the Allies and the Central Powers as a war in which the very survival of Christianity was at stake. With Germany standing for higher criticism that was viewed as ultimately leading to unbelief, the Allies’ role was portrayed as upholding orthodox values and defending Christianity. Such a way of representing the conflict was common on both

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sides of the Atlantic. The American Ernest James Pace’s cartoon ‘The J(udas) 2’ (1918) turns submarine warfare into a confrontation of spiritual order (see Fig.  3.1). The German submarine, representing ‘Modern “Higher Criticism”’, threatens the ship of the Bible that is crossing the sea of unbelief. Comparing higher critics to Judas, the image suggests that

Fig. 3.1  Ernest James Pace, Cartoon ‘The J(udas) 2’, 1918, from the E. J. Pace Christian Cartoons Collection, Digital Commons @ Biola, Biola University Library and Archives

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their militant efforts to challenge the ways in which the Bible has been traditionally read by ‘the little ones’ ignore the danger of those who are unable to rise to the challenge posed by higher criticism and might easily drown in the sea of unbelief. The use of such images in the print propaganda campaign helped the Allies frame the military conflict not only as a secular war, but as a confrontation of a higher order, with traditional religious and moral values threatened by what was essentially presented as a corrupt atheist culture. The propagandists for the Central Powers did not fall behind. The German Catholic philosopher Max Scheler in The Genius of War and the German War (Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg), published in early 1915, developed a metaphysical interpretation of the war that provided a justification for Germany’s military actions.57 He described the conflict as a clash of Germany’s idealism and Britain’s empiricism. For Scheler, it was Germany that embodied the true spirit of Christianity by prioritising moral unity, loyalty, and love. British endorsement of materialism and capitalism, on the other hand, created a culture that values economy above all else. He argued that since Britain was determined to follow the path of destructive utilitarianism and social Darwinism, the war was a wake-up call for Europe, and an opportunity for Germany to unify European states and lead the process of spiritual revival. Religio-nationalist narratives of the war were employed in the polemics between the German and French Catholics. In 1915, the Catholic Committee of French Propaganda Abroad published the pamphlet The German War and Catholicism (La Guerre Allemande et le Catholicisme, 1915), endorsed by Cardinal Léon Adolphe Amette of Paris.58 It depicted the war as an anti-Catholic aggression, claiming that German Catholicism was corrupted by the influence of Protestantism and the spirit of modernism.59 German Catholics responded by publishing a collection of essays entitled German Culture, Catholicism, and the World War (Deutsche Kultur, Katholizismus und Weltkrieg, 1915).60 Indirectly supported by German bishops, the volume brought together contributions by leading Catholic thinkers. Among them was the prominent modernist, Joseph Sauer, who maintained regular contact with Friedrich von Hügel, George Tyrrell, and Henri Bremond. In his essay, Sauer rejected the accusations of barbarism that were levelled against German troops, criticising the French army for using churches for military purposes, and, thus, revealing their hypocrisy.61 Alluding to the secularising policies of the French state, he argued that the current charges against Germany come ‘from a country

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whose present generation, from sheer atheism, leaves his ecclesiastical monuments to decay if not to wanton destruction’.62 Sauer’s essay, which put emphasis on the rich religious life of German Catholics and the deep connection between German culture and Catholicism, was republished in 1917 as a monograph.63 In the preface, Sauer reflected on the detrimental impact of the war on the transnational modernist network: ‘At the beginning of war, the “res publica literarum” has collapsed like a chart house— as have many other ideals in which one had believed as in dogmas.’64 Indeed, the breakdown of personal relationships and transnational contacts that made possible the collaborative project of modernist theology was one of the invisible casualties of the war. In the context of rising nationalism and the ongoing military hostilities, the vibrant exchanges between British, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Austrian, Polish, and American thinkers who helped to build the foundations of modernist theology were no longer possible. As Claus Arnold contends, ‘war put the final stamp on the dissolution of the Modernist combination. It destroyed not only Modernist friendships but also the entire social setting of “modernist” contacts’.65 In the interwar period, explanations of contemporary political developments that resorted to religious frameworks and connected theological thought with political concepts to offer a comprehensive explanation of the current state of affairs gained further currency. A sense of metaphysical crisis that in the pre-war years was debated within the confined circles of scholars and intellectuals entered everyday life. As Roger Griffin contends in his seminal study Modernism and Fascism: Four years of total war had ruthlessly stripped the West bare of conventional myths affirming its inherent progressiveness and revealed its underlying ontological void. Yet the unprecedented depth that disenchantment had reached created a vast potential constituency of post-war individuals eager to re-erect the sacred canopy, ‘rebuild the house’ on the rubble of the nineteenth-­ century world devastated by the war, so that time ‘could begin anew’.66

The boundary between the religious and the political was becoming increasingly blurred in the 1920s and 1930s, with a growing conviction that to understand modern political phenomena one had to look beyond rationalistic legal frameworks and examine the spiritual crisis that might be a key yet unacknowledged cause of the political malaise. In 1927, Aldous

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Huxley contended that ‘[p]erhaps the most important substitute for religion is politics’, singling out both ‘extreme nationalism’ and ‘extreme democracy’ as presenting their devotees with new gods to be worshipped— the nation and a utopian version of the future.67 The German political theorists Carl Schmitt and Eric Voegelin put forward the concepts ‘political theology’ and ‘political religion’ that soon gained traction and were employed to analyse the contemporary political situation. Carl Schmitt in his influential Political Theology (Politische Theologie, 1922) argued that ‘[a]ll significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.’68 He offered a historical analysis of the process that led to the contemporary perception of politics as a secular domain. Contending that political theory relies on theological foundations, even though it tries to deny them, Schmitt uses the theological analogy of the miracle to analyse the state of exception in jurisprudence. According to him, the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century deism banished the possibility of a miracle, which had political implications. ‘This theology and metaphysics rejected not only the transgression of the laws of nature through an exception brought about by direct intervention as is found in the idea of a miracle,’ Schmitt argues, ‘but also the sovereign’s direct intervention in a valid legal order.’69 He critiques the theology of immanence, which diminished the concept of the ruler’s transcendent sovereignty and his freedom to decide on a state of exception that supersedes all laws. ‘All the identities that recur in the political ideas and in the state doctrines of the nineteenth century rest on such conceptions of immanence’, he claims, illustrating it with reference to ‘the democratic thesis of the identity of the ruler and the ruled’.70 His critique of the legacy of the Enlightenment rested on the assumption that, as Gavin Rae puts it, the ‘historical process of de-theologization does not annihilate the theological, but displaces and transforms how it is manifested’.71 Since the 1920s, Schmitt lectured at a number of German universities, including the University of Bonn, the University of Cologne, and the University of Berlin. With the rise of Nazism, his scholarly work on political theory, especially his extensive critique of liberal democracy and his reflections on the concept of the sovereign dictator, served to justify Hitler’s policies. In 1933, he joined the Nazi Party, and was soon appointed the president of the Union of National Socialist Jurists. As Claudia Koonz observes, his philosophical writings on political leadership, morality, and justice revolved around ‘a dream of ethnic wholeness that could stave off corrosive

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modernity’ and ‘envisioned a political sphere so vast and so absolute that it resembled medieval Catholicism’.72 On the other side of the political spectrum, the German political scientist Eric Voegelin offered a critique of the modern state’s usurpation of the sphere of religion. His treatise Political Religions (Die politischen Religionen) was published in April 1938, a month after Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany and Voegelin was dismissed from his post at the University of Vienna, narrowly escaping arrest by the Gestapo. It provides an analysis of the modern state and ways in which it ‘makes itself into the only true reality’ and offers the people ‘new stimulus in their role as parts of the superhuman reality’, which he compares to ‘a mystical process’.73 Drawing on contemporary research into comparative religions as well as William James and Max Scheler, Voegelin argues that ‘when God is invisible behind the world, the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly language of science to take their place.’74 He contends that new symbols developed by modern states to substitute the ‘order of God’ revolve around formulae such as the ‘order of history’, ‘historical mission’, or the ‘order of blood’.75 Modern day regimes assume religious structures, but the ‘end realm is no longer a transcendent community of the spirit but an earthly condition of perfected humanity’.76 Just like traditional religions created communities of believers, modern states ‘bind the masses emotionally’ and ‘arouse in them the politically effective expectation of salvation’ by means of new symbols and myths.77 Thus, National Socialism, fascism, and communism develop their own mode of apocalyptic thinking, and conceptualise evil that has to be fought against in an idiosyncratic way, whether by scapegoating Jews as the inferior race or the bourgeoise as the arch-enemy of the proletariat. ‘The formation of the myth and its propaganda by means of newspapers and radio, the speeches and celebrations, the assemblies and parades, the planning and the death in battle,’ Voegelin observes, ‘make up the inner-worldly forms of the unio mystica.’78 People are effectively bound together as a community, and united around a leader who assumes the role of ‘the speaker of the spirit of the people’.79 Voegelin was highly critical of contemporary political theories, and his study, published a year before the outbreak of World War 2, linked the concepts of political violence, spiritual malaise, and mysticism in a provocative way, making a significant impact on contemporary political discourse.

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Schmitt’s and Voegelin’s theories rejected the hitherto commonly accepted distinction between the sacred and the secular. That distinction was also challenged by Christian intellectuals and writers who more readily than before endorsed the view that the political turmoil could be resolved only on the spiritual plane. As the influential British historian Christopher Dawson contended in 1931, the ‘disorder of the modern world is due either to the denial of the existence of spiritual reality or to the attempt to treat the spiritual order and the business of everyday life as two independent worlds which have no mutual relations.’80 As many intellectuals were grappling with this problem, the interwar years saw a renaissance of the neo-scholastic movement, with Thomas Aquinas being heralded even by professed atheists, including the French writers and critics Gonzague Truc and Charles Maurras.81 Jacques Maritain hailed Thomism as the most comprehensive philosophical response to the modern condition, while Maurras used it as a philosophical foundation for the Action française movement. In the preface to his Saint Thomas Aquinas (1931), Maritain lamented ‘the most insidious and the most lively opposition’ to Thomism that had gained momentum at the turn of the century through the work of modernist theologians; however, in his view the ‘Thomist renaissance’ would prevail, because it ‘does not wish to destroy but to purify modern thought’.82 Indeed, Maritain described his position as anti-modern ‘ultra-­ modernism’ that consists in a synthesis of Thomist thought with modernity (that nevertheless has to be cleansed from its errors and prejudices). Charles Maurras endorsed Thomist philosophy alongside French nationalism, monarchism, and classicism that, in his view, was meant to revitalise the weakened French spirit. In 1920, Maurras and Maritain founded the journal Revue universelle, edited by Jacques Bainville and Henri Massis, that would serve as a forum for Action française. The ideas Maritain subsequently developed in his Antimodern (1922) and Three Reformers (1923) were very much aligned with Maurras’s thought. In the latter work, building on Maurras’s writings, Maritain critiques the three thinkers who, as he argues, were behind the intellectual roots of the Reformation, the French Revolution, and the Romantic movement, which taken together introduced ‘disorders and delirium’ in Western thought.83 He blames them for ‘all the -isms which adorn the modern world’, including individualism, idealism, and subjectivism, and he critiques Rousseau’s view of political sovereignty as deriving from and residing in the people.84 ‘There we have the true myth of modern Democracy, its spiritual source,’ Maritain argues, ‘absolutely opposite to Christian law which will have

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sovereignty derive from God as its first origin and only go through the people to dwell in the man or men charged with the care of the common good.’85 Maurras and Maritain advocated a rejection of the modern tendencies that they found responsible for the contemporary malaise and a return to order in religion, philosophy, politics, and culture. That order was to be grounded in Thomism and Greek- and Latin-inspired classicism, as well as explicit rejection of theological modernism, and various forms of individual spirituality and mysticism in religion, liberal democracy in politics, and Romanticism in literature. These proposals proved extremely influential in providing a framework for the ongoing debates on the spiritual crisis of modernity. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s they were widely discussed in various circles of intellectuals, critics, artists, and writers across Europe. Action française was repeatedly criticised by philosophers and theologians associated with the modernist movement, in particular Maurice Blondel and Lucien Laberthonnière, as well as Christian democrats, including Marc Sangnier and the Le Sillon movement.86 However, Le Sillon was condemned for its socialist sympathies in the encyclical Notre Charge Apostolique issued by Pope Pius X in 1910, and Laberthonnière received a lifetime publication ban for his defence of theological modernism in 1913. Throughout the 1910s and early 1920s, Action française seemed to enjoy the Vatican’s support, hence its condemnation in 1926 came to many as a surprise.87 Placing the periodical L’Action française on the Index, Pope Pius XI cautioned Catholics against ‘a school which puts the interests of political parties above religion and causes the latter to serve the former’.88 The papal condemnation led to a division of loyalties among French Catholics, with Maritain first attempting to defend Maurras, but later coming out in support of the Vatican’s decision, and critiquing the excessive nationalism of the movement. The papal condemnation was followed by the publication of Julien Benda’s influential book The Treason of the Intellectuals (La trahison des clercs) in 1927. It offered a scathing critique of Maurrasian politics that, in Benda’s view, conflated the concepts of patriotism and religious passion, leading to a ‘mystical adoration of the nation’.89 Benda argues that the end of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century saw an alarming rise of nationalism that had been endorsed by public intellectuals. Considering the impact this has had on society at large, he claims that at present ‘national passions […] assume the character of mysticism, of a religious adoration’.90 According to him, ‘[t]he State, Country, Class, are now frankly God’ as they undergo a

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process of divinisation.91 Benda blames the ‘clerks’ (intellectuals, philosophers, scholars, writers, and artists) for this state of affairs, as at the turn of the century they ‘began to play the game of political passions’ instead of providing clear moral and ethical guidelines as they had done in the past.92 Among those who ‘betrayed’ their vocation he names Maurras, Maurice Barrès, and Charles Péguy, criticising them for endorsing nationalism, xenophobia, racism, and antisemitism. Unless suppressed, those ‘passions’, Benda contends, will lead to ‘the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world, whether it is a war of nations, or a war of classes’.93 Benda’s prediction, which came true twelve years later, expressed a deep unease with the twentieth-century marriage of religion and politics. The unease that Benda’s polemic gave expression to was also evident in a marked change of tone that could be discerned in the Vatican’s religio-­ political rhetoric. The Vatican’s stance showed a gradual transformation of the Catholic Church’s official view on modernism in the run-up to World War 2. ‘In the 1930s,’ James Chappel observes, ‘the Church transitioned from an antimodern institution into an antitotalitarian one.’94 In a series of encyclicals issued in the 1930s and 1940s, the Vatican condemned statolatry as an ideology that turns the state into an idol that replaces God (Non Abbiamo Bisogno, 1931), attacked the ‘neopaganism’ of National Socialism (Mit Brennender Sorge, 1937), and endorsed a critical study of the Bible (Divino Afflante Spiritu, 1943). The latter encyclical stated that the interpreter of the Bible should make use of ‘the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology, and other sciences, accurately [to] determine what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact did use’.95 The encyclical asserts that the findings of such research ought to be employed by theologians who work on biblical explications, which was the stance of the modernist theologians, such as Alfred Loisy, whose proposals were condemned at the turn of the century. As Chappel contends, this change of direction in the Vatican’s official rhetoric can be linked to the rise of totalitarianism across Europe. The wave of nationalist and fascist movements that were gaining real political power forced the church to distance itself from them in an attempt to reassert its institutional and spiritual sovereignty. While in the 1920s Christian thinkers ‘blamed secular modernity for World War I and sought salvation in some form of Catholic antimodernity’, in the 1930s, as Chappel points out, ‘faced with the rise of fascism and Communist movements across the continent, Catholics in much of Europe gave up on that dream’.96

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Jacques Maritain’s case illustrates well this transition in the political thinking of religious intellectuals. While in the 1920s, alongside Maurras, he voiced his strong opposition to democracy, by the early 1940s, he came around to supporting it against encroaching totalitarianism. In a 1939 lecture, subsequently published as The Twilight of Civilization (Le crépuscule de la civilisation, 1941), he argued that the most threatening ‘anti-­ Christian forces’ of the day were Soviet Marxism, Italian fascism, and German Nazism.97 Maritain sets out to examine their spiritual implications, describing Marxism as ‘an atheism which declares that God does not exist and which makes a social idol its god’, and fascism and Nazism as an atheism that ‘invokes God, but as a protective genius attached to the glory of a people or of a state, or as the demon of the race’.98 Of the three, he identifies Nazism as the most dangerous since it is based on ‘a mystical hatred of truth itself, intellectual or moral, a mystical hatred of wisdom and of all asceticism’.99 Maritain’s interpretation of the political situation of wartime Europe shows that his thinking evolved from a clear anti-­ modernist stance into an anti-totalitarian position that saw democracy as the most viable form of political governance. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, Christian intellectuals and critics began to frame the political tensions leading to World War 2, and the war itself, in an explicitly religious language, returning to the spiritual discourse that was commonly used during World War 1. In 1936, at the World Congress of Faiths held at University College, London, the Russian philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev, commenting on the outbursts of violence in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, argued that a ‘real war against the spirit is being waged’, threatening ‘the very existence of spirituality’.100 When T.  S. Eliot explained his decision to close down the Criterion in 1939, he pointed out that for him ‘a right political philosophy came more and more to imply a right theology’.101 He soon became involved in the Moot group, which sought to plan for the postwar reconstruction of Britain, considering the question of religion as one of the key issues to be addressed. This was deemed crucial because, according to Eliot, under the surface of ‘social and class impulses’ there were ‘resources of violent religious passion’, and the public intellectual’s task was to ‘bring to the surface these true religious impulses’.102 In 1942, Douglas Woodruff, the editor of the Catholic Tablet, argued that the ‘great heresy of the twentieth century is political’ since ‘[w]here men have no religious doctrine as a framework, there is a vacuum into which political ideas expand, swelling to monstrous sizes’.103 In a similar vein, the philosopher Simone Weil in

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her 1943 essay ‘A War of Religions’ contended that even though people ‘have often dreamed of abolishing the religious problem’, World War 2 turned out to be ‘a single religious drama whose theatre is the whole world’.104 Considering both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as states living ‘by an idolatry’, Weil argued that the ‘conquered peoples can only oppose the conqueror with a religion,’ insisting that ‘[i]f a faith were to arise in this unhappy continent, victory would be rapid, certain, and secure.’105 The view that the political turmoil was closely related to a spiritual crisis and as such should be addressed on the spiritual plane expressed by Eliot, Woodruff, and Weil was widely accepted among Christian intellectuals across Europe. The language of spirituality was also used in war propaganda. In Britain, the war aims were defined within an explicitly religious framework. Mainstream political figures resorted to religious language in their public speeches and parliamentary debates. On 1 September 1938, twenty-seven British MPs signed an open letter to The Times in support of the movement of ‘Moral Rearmament.’ The letter stated that ‘in an age when lowered moral standards have become a breeding-ground for destructive forces’, there was an urgent need for a moral renewal or ‘inner quickening’.106 Just before the outbreak of the war, the British Ministry of Information set up the Religions Division, which, as Ian McLaine contends, seemed to have ‘few qualms about pressing religion into the service of propaganda’.107 By launching its weekly bulletin The Spiritual Issues of the War, the Religions Division was trying to impart ‘a real conviction of the Christian contribution to our civilisation and of the essential anti-­ Christian character of Nazism’.108 Throughout the war, political leaders and statesmen repeatedly employed a religious framework to add gravity to their interpretation of the ongoing conflict and boost the public’s morale on the home front. On 16 November 1939, Viscountess Davidson in a House of Commons debate compared the war to a crusade, arguing: ‘We are fighting for right against wrong; the forces of good against the forces of evil. […] We are fighting for Christianity, and all that Christianity means, against those who do not believe in Christianity.’109 In February 1940, Lieut-Colonel Sir Thomas Moore talked about the ongoing conflict as ‘a war for Christianity against barbarity; […] a war for the rights of conscience and religious freedom’, and in April 1940, the Earl of Glasgow presented it as ‘a struggle between countries on the one side professing Christian principles and, on the other, a Government which does not’.110 Viscount Halifax, Chancellor of Oxford University, in an address delivered

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in February 1940 compared Europe to a ‘waste land’, in which ‘an active force of evil’ is at work, threatening to ‘reduce our civilization to a desert of the soul’.111 The only solution, according to him, was for Britain to ‘base [itself] firmly on social, moral, and religious standards’.112 In a similar vein, Winston Churchill, in a broadcast delivered on 14 July 1940 declared that Britain was not fighting for herself alone, but the war was ‘of deep consequence to Christian civilization’.113 This kind of religious language was used in political discourse throughout the war. As Phillip Williamson observes, politicians who resorted to this type of vocabulary ‘drew upon the most powerful language available to sharpen and solemnize the confrontation with Germany’ and to establish the role of Britain as the defender of Christianity.114 Presenting the war in religious terms served to give it a positive purpose: it was not only a war against Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, but also a war for Christian Europe. Thus, even ostensibly secular newspapers and magazines, such as The Times, began to portray the war as ‘ultimately not material but spiritual’ and as a fight for ‘not the mere fabric of civilization but its spirit and its soul’.115

‘A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question’ The religious interpretation of the political and military conflict employed by public intellectuals and political leaders in the interwar years and during World War 2 to increase the morale and justify the war effort had a considerable impact on how the ongoing persecution and, from 1941, systematic extermination of European Jews was understood and narrated in the public discourse.116 With the rise of nationalism and antisemitism across Europe, the so-called Jewish question was intensely debated from many angles: as a political, social, scholarly, and religious issue.117 That last aspect of the ‘Jewish question’ engaged Christian thinkers, some of whom connected it to the ongoing debate on theological modernism, which they saw as part of the broader process of secularisation that they thought should be contained.118 The trope of a ‘rootless’, ‘individualistic’, and ‘free-thinking’ Jew became the standard antisemitic stereotype of the 1920s and 1930s. Traits associated with Jewishness, including excessive subjectivity, irrationalism, and cosmopolitanism, paralleled the portrayal of modernist theologians in the polemical texts of neo-scholastic thinkers. The narrative of the enemy within, used in the papal condemnation of modernists in 1907, was commonly applied to Jews in the interwar period. They were portrayed as destructive agents who threaten the cohesion of

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Christian society by virtue of their secularising influence. Such tropes were not used solely by rabid antisemites, but also by thinkers who otherwise maintained personal relationships and friendships with individual Jews, and who in their writings tended to conflate philosemitic and antisemitic stereotypes, including Jacques Maritain, Rainer Maria Rilke, and T. S. Eliot. In Britain, the conceptual link between theological modernists and Jews was most explicitly established by G. K. Chesterton, whose writings include numerous virulently antisemitic tropes.119 In his books Orthodoxy and Heretics, as well as his journalism and public talks and debates, the Roman Catholic Chesterton defended dogmatic orthodoxy against modernist tendencies and what he saw as excessive concessions to the sensibilities of the modern world.120 In a 1930 editorial ‘An Attack from the Altars’, he argued that modernists associated with the Modern Churchmen’s Union were subverting the Church of England.121 He described modernists as thinkers who ‘express the realities of corruption’: ‘These men of substantial wealth; of impressive education, of varied influences; have all the powers of destruction they may wish to wield. It is not enough to tolerate them. They must be actively opposed.’122 He accused modernists of espousing materialism, which leads to paganism, and threatens to destroy Christian civilisation from within: One by one, the defences of our civilisation are being broken down by a concentrated attack upon the mind. Rome’s barbarians were a menace on her borders; ours are also within the State. No camouflage or hypocrisy will hide for long the affinities between the philosophy of the Modern Churchmen (with their fellows who profess no God) and the practice of materialism to be seen in Russia.123

In Chesterton’s view, modernist theologians are the enemy within who ‘seem to have abandoned the use of reason’ and ‘sunk back into their own subconsciousness’.124 Modernist clergymen’s interest in psychology, mysticism, and individual experience leads them into the realm of heresy, though—as Chesterton maintains—they remain invisible heretics who clandestinely operate within the church, attacking religious orthodoxy from the very altars that it should be preached from. According to Chesterton, the heresy of modernism is directly linked to what he refers to as the Jewish ‘heresy of race’, which had been transposed onto the fabric of Protestantism, and subsequently adopted by modernists. In his 1933 essay ‘The Judaism of Hitler’, he argues that Hitler’s

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racial thinking is shaped by the Protestant spirit that has its roots in Judaism.125 He goes as far as to claim that ‘Hitlerism is almost entirely of Jewish origin’.126 He contends that ‘among the thousand and one ways in which Semitism affected Germanism is in this mystical idea, which came through Protestantism.’127 According to him, Jewish mystical ‘scepticism’ that rejects reason on the one hand, and Jewish belief in being the chosen people on the other, were transmitted onto Protestantism. Thus, he argues that Nazi ideologists, drawing on those ideas, could construct the Aryan race as the superior race, and use quasi-mystical discourse and emotions to manipulate the crowds. For Chesterton, Judaism was at the foundation of the destructive Protestant tendencies that were later integrated into theological modernism. He characterised both Jews and modernists as engaged in an active ‘conspiracy against Christendom’, accusing them of being on the one hand greedy capitalists and on the other, materialist Bolsheviks.128 As such, in his view both groups threatened Christianity and ought to be opposed. This kind of anti-Jewish rhetoric is a particularly extreme example of interwar antisemitism, but the link between theological modernism, secularisation, and Jews that Chesterton points to was explored by other influential religious thinkers as well. In France, Jacques Maritain was one of the key authors who developed a sustained reflection on the rise of antisemitism in twentieth-century Europe, approaching the question from a political and theological angle within a neo-Thomist framework.129 His impact on contemporary intellectuals and writers cannot be overestimated, especially in light of his appointment as the French ambassador to the Holy See in 1945–1948.130 Throughout 1920s and 1930s, Maritain produced a number of texts on the relationship between Jews and Christians, delivered as talks and published as essays, and he continued to write on the topic during and after World War 2. While in the early 1940s the ongoing extermination of Jews gave additional urgency to his writings, certain themes that he developed in the 1920s, including the role of Jewish spirituality in a secularising world, remain a constant in his reflections on the topic. In one of his early texts, which was first delivered as a lecture at the Catholic Writers’ Week in 1921 and subsequently published in the periodical La Vie Spirituelle, Maritain referred to Jews as a ‘Messianic people’ and ‘the race of the prophets’.131 What defined their precarious situation in the modern world, he argued, was their rejection of Christ, ‘the true Messiah’:

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an essentially messianic people such as the Jews, from the instant when they reject the true Messiah, inevitably will play a subversive role in the world; I do not mean through some premeditated plan, but rather because of a metaphysical necessity, which makes of messianic Hope, and a passion for absolute Justice, when they are brought down from the supernatural to the natural level, and are falsely applied, the most active ferment of revolution.132

Maritain’s lecture reiterated the common antisemitic trope of Jews being a subversive element in society, inciting revolutionary ferment and acting as agents of destruction. His emphasis on the ‘metaphysical necessity’ seems to suggest that the Jewish people cannot be blamed for what he refers to as their subversive actions, which he nevertheless sees as a result of false and mistaken beliefs. Maritain’s text directs his readers to a study by Simon Deploige, Belgian Thomist and professor at the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie in Louvain (now Leuven), which was founded in 1889 to promote neo-Thomism across Europe.133 In Saint Thomas and the Jewish Question (Saint Thomas et la question juive, 1897), first published as a two-part article and later reissued as a booklet that was distributed in France and Belgium, Deploige argued for a distinction between racial antisemitism, as exemplified by Édouard Drumont, founder of the Antisemitic League of France, and the anti-Judaism of Thomas Aquinas. According to Deploige, Aquinas’s attitude to Jews could be summarised in the following words: ‘No hostilities. Nothing but defensive measures. Freedom for the Jews. Protection for the Christians.’134 Following Aquinas, Deploige decried violence against Jews, yet argued that Christians ought to be protected from ‘the proselytism of the Jews’.135 Thus, he endorsed legislative proposals to isolate Jews socially and advised Catholics against maintaining any personal relationships with Jews as that could prove detrimental to their faith. While endorsing the religious version of Thomist anti-Judaism, Maritain began to take a stronger stance against the racist version of antisemitism in the 1930s, in the context of a considerable rise of antisemitism across Europe and increasingly discriminatory legislation introduced in Nazi Germany after 1933. In his 1937 text ‘Impossible antisemitism’ (‘L’impossible antisemitisme’), he criticised definitions of Jewishness that relied on the criterion of race. He emphasised that his aim was to reveal the ‘hidden and sacred meaning’ of the Jewish predicament, which he considered to be linked to the realm of the spirit.136 He argues that ‘Jews

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are not a “race” in the biological sense of the word’, but ‘[t]hey are a consecrated tribe; they are a house, the house of Israel. Race, People, Tribe— all these words, if they are to designate the Jews, must be made sacred.’137 Maritain is appalled by the ‘extraordinary baseness of the leading themes of anti-Semitic propaganda’ and observes that ‘it is impossible to hate the Jewish people and at the same time remain an intelligent being’.138 Having discarded racist theories, Maritain attempts to provide his own explanation for why Jews are subject to widespread discrimination and persecution. He argues that by not recognising Christ as their saviour, ‘[t]he Jews (I do not mean the Jews individually, but the mystical body of Israel at the moment when it struck against the rock) the Jews at a crucial moment chose the world; they have loved it; their penalty is to be held captive by their choice.’139 Through their refusal to accept Christ as the Messiah, Maritain contends, ‘the mystical body of Israel’ turned into ‘a Church fallen from a high place’, ‘an unfaithful and a repudiated Church’, though he hastens to add that Jews are ‘repudiated as a Church, not as a people’.140 Thus, for Maritain, ‘[t]he basic weakness in the mystical communion of Israel is its failure to understand the Cross, its refusal of the Cross, and therefore its refusal of the transfiguration.’141 While the mystical body of Israel rejected the cross, it nevertheless retained its spiritual identity, which is what makes them different, and assigns them the task of ‘the earthly leavening of the world’.142 The central argument of his essay is that Israel (understood as the spiritual body of the Jewish people) is a spiritual stimulant in a secularising society: Israel is here—Israel which is not of the world—at the deepest core of the world, to irritate it, to exasperate it, to move it. Like some foreign substance, like a living yeast mixed into the main body, it gives the world no quiet, it prevents the world from sleeping, it teaches the world to be dissatisfied and restless so long as it has not God, it stimulates the movement of history.143

Thus, the subversion that Jews stand for in Maritain’s 1921 lecture is re-­ evaluated in his 1937 essay and given a positive slant as the work of spiritual quickening that the modern world is in clear need of. Maritain still refers to Jews as ‘foreign substance’, but this time his focus is on spiritual foreignness, which forces the world to seek God. Hence, Maritain views the violence directed at the Jews as ‘the repercussion of the activation [Israel] produces’.144 The secularising world does not want to be woken up from its metaphysical stupor and, according to Maritain, it hates the

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Jews ‘because the world is well aware that they will always be supernaturally strangers to it’.145 Since for Maritain the spiritual mission of Jews is to act as ‘irritants’, he argues that ‘[t]he Jew is lost if he settles down, and by settling down I mean a spiritual phenomenon, like the loss of a stimulating disquiet and the failure of vocation.’146 Insisting on the spiritual otherness of Jews, Maritain further contends that ‘Jews who become like others become worse than others’.147 Since for Maritain the hatred that Jews experience stems from their spiritual vocation and the role they play in society, the next step in his reasoning is to connect that discrimination with the intolerance that Christians face. ‘The hatred of the Jews and the hatred of the Christians spring from the same source,’ he points out, ‘from the same will of the world which refuses to be wounded either with the wounds of Adam, or with the wounds of the Messiah, or by the spear of Israel for its movement in time, or by the Cross of Jesus for eternal life.’148 Thus, antisemitism becomes for Maritain ‘a substitute for an obscure and unconscious passion of anti-clericalism, or even of resentment against God’.149 Ultimately, in Maritain’s 1937 analysis of antisemitism, ‘[a]nti-­ Semitic frenzy is a directly anti-Christic frenzy to make vain the blood of Jesus and to make void His death.’150 This kind of understanding of the predicament of European Jews in the late 1930s continued to inform Maritain’s writings on the topic both on the eve of the war and in the following years. In his 1938 lecture, A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question, Maritain strongly opposes political solutions that would require Jews to emigrate from their countries of residence, pointing out how unjust such measures are.151 He again emphasises that ‘the Jews are not a race in the biological sense of the word’, rejecting ‘scientific’ racism as ‘political misappropriation of anthropology’.152 Speaking of Israel as a spiritual body that rejected Christ, and consequently is ‘bound to the world, prisoner and victim of that world which it loves, but of which it is not’, Maritain argues, following Paul, that ‘[o]n the spiritual plane, the drama of love between Israel and its God […] will reach a denouement only with the reconciliation of the Synagogue and the Church.’153 Thus, according to Maritain, it is only with the final conversion of Jews to Christianity that they will be able to escape the persecution that they face. According to Maritain, ‘what is called the Jewish problem is an insoluble problem, that is, one without definitive solution until the great reconciliation foretold by the apostle, which will resemble a resurrection from among the dead.’154 For Maritain, the intensification of violent discriminatory measures directed against

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European Jews—which he interprets as an assault on both Judaism and Christianity, since  ‘never has persecution attacked, as today, both Jews and Christians’—is a sign that he and his contemporaries ‘have entered upon an apocalyptic period of history’.155 In words that in hindsight strike a particularly ominous tone, he speaks out against those who ‘fan the evil flame now consuming nations’ and ‘under the stupid apparatus of scientific Racism or forged documents, conceal from others and sometimes from themselves, a mad dream of a general massacre of the race of Moses and Jesus.’156 While on the eve of the war Maritain explicitly denounces racist antisemitism, he nevertheless essentialises Jewishness in a spiritual way. Insisting that, on the one hand, Jews who are faithful to their vocation cannot belong to the world, and on the other, those who ‘settle down’ and assimilate betray their vocation and, as a result, become worse than non-Jews, he suggests that Jews will be persecuted until they convert to Christianity. While he is careful not to blame Jews for the suffering they experience—according to him the blame is on the secular materialist-­ oriented world that cannot tolerate spirituality, whether Judaic or Christian—he nevertheless reiterates the idea that the only solution to the ‘Jewish question’ is the ultimate conversion of Jews to Christianity. Thus, while some scholars commend him for taking a strong stance on racist antisemitism and denouncing the Nazi policies, others emphasise the fact that his views can also be considered antisemitic—not in a racist but in a religious sense. Thus, Leon Klenicki refers to Maritain as a ‘metaphysical anti-Semite’ who ‘fought for the civil rights of Jews, but denied meaning to Jews in their spirituality’, Richard F. Crane speaks of Maritain’s ‘ambivalent philosemitism based on Jewish stereotypes both positive and negative’, while John Hellman argues that ‘[t]here are good reasons to say simply that Jacques Maritain was—at least for the earlier part of his career—an anti-Semite.’157 While one might have expected that Maritain would revise at least some of his views after World War 2, reflecting on the challenges that the Holocaust poses for Christian theology, he did not retract his earlier arguments. In the volume Messages, published in 1945, he argued that ‘Jews and Christians are persecuted together and by the same enemies: the Christians because they are faithful to Christ, and the Jews because they have given Christ to the world.’158 Furthermore, interpreting the Holocaust as a re-enactment of the Calvary, he contended: ‘Like strange companions, Jews and Christians have travelled the way of Calvary

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together (I have already noted it many times since 1941). The great, mysterious fact is that the sufferings of Israel have taken on, more and more, the form of the cross.’159 Such a description of the systemic extermination of six million European Jews, as Klenicki points out, ‘is painful and even offensive to the Jewish people’, as it imposes a bluntly Christian framework on a specifically Jewish tragedy, yet it was precisely this line of thinking that defined the post-war Christian understanding of the Holocaust.160 Throughout the war, the view that antisemitism was an assault on religion in general was frequently reiterated on the pages of Christian magazines, journals, and pamphlets. Even the texts that explicitly called for the rescue of European Jews and openly condemned the antisemitic policies of the Nazis did not challenge the perception of Nazism as an anti-Christian menace. The meaning of Nazism, as Tom Lawson argues, ‘continued to be explained and understood in the threat National Socialism posed for the Christian world’.161 Nazism, as well as Soviet communism, was presented as a quasi-religious system that aimed to eradicate all religion and thus destroy European civilisation. Jewish people were referred to as a religious group, and their persecution was viewed as part of a more universal assault on religion by totalitarian regimes. Within this framework, the extermination of European Jews was seen as a ‘crime not against the Jews alone, but against mankind’.162 Similar views were expressed by many contemporary intellectuals and writers, including Rainer Maria Rilke and T. S. Eliot, who—while rejecting racial antisemitism—nevertheless essentialised Jews through reference to religion or by conflating spirituality with nationality or race. In 1907, Rilke contributed to the volume The Solution to the Jewish Question (Die Lösung der Judenfrage, 1907), which was edited by the German-Jewish politician Julius Moses and included ninety-seven invited responses by prominent intellectuals, including the writers Thomas Mann and Maxim Gorky.163 In his brief essay, Rilke situated Jewish spirituality within the historico-political context of the ongoing discrimination and persecution that Jews faced. ‘Because the Jewish people is pressured, discriminated against, and defamed,’ he argued, ‘it must be permitted to make use of its truly enormous advantage. It must base its existence with single-minded devotion on the fact that its race corresponds to an inseparable religion, or, to be more accurate, religiosity.’164 Rilke considers the correspondence of race and religion a unique feature of Jewishness, which is also an inherent advantage since Jews have direct access to God, which other religions struggle with in the modern world. He argues that individual Jews,

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‘everyone for himself, at his proper place’, ought to make the best of that special connection to God as it can have transformative power.165 While Rilke clearly condemns antisemitic persecution, he links the issues of race and religion and, as Ulrich Baer points out, ‘draws no political conclusions from his suggestion that the Jews should find their way back to their God’.166 What becomes clear in Rilke’s correspondence from later years is that his interest in Judaism and Jewishness focused on what he considered a direct experience of God that he came to believe was shared by ‘the Jews, the Arabs, and to a certain degree the orthodox Russians’.167 In his letters to the German-Jewish poet Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss, he expressed a conviction that there is a certain innate connection between religion, nationality, and race that holds true in particular for Jews: I have an indescribable confidence in those peoples that have not come to God through belief but have experienced God through their own race, in their own stock. […] To them God is origin, and therefore future as well. To the others he is something deduced, something away from which and toward which they strive as really strangers or as people who have grown estranged—and so they are always needing the intercessor, the mediator, him who translates their blood, the idiom of their blood into the language of the godhead.168

The God of Judaism, Islam, and Eastern Orthodoxy, Rilke claims, is ‘a God to whom one cannot just be converted at any time as to that Christian God, but a God to whom one belongs, through one’s people’.169 What this means, according to him, is that religion is inscribed in the very fabric of national and ethnic communities that one is born into, and is a lived experience as opposed to an object of reflection or conscious belief. However, according to Rilke, this inner ‘superiority’ of Jews acquired an ominous dimension when they were forced to live in diaspora. Then the instinct of ‘self-preservation’ meant that the Jew ‘transformed his being nowhere attached from a misfortune into a superiority’.170 Rilke characterises the condition of European Jews as ‘rootlessness’ that brought into the world ‘the truly transportable spirit’.171 While he considers that spirit as ‘ultimately indispensable to all of us’, he nevertheless devotes much attention to its potential abuses, which he describes by using common antisemitic tropes. He describes a stereotypical Jew who ‘happens to misuse this dearly bought superiority pettily, greedily and inimically’, who

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‘involuntarily […] revenges himself’, and who thus ‘has become noxious, an intruder, a disintegrator’.172 This kind of portrayal of corrupt Jewishness shows that for Rilke the unique spiritual advantage that he considered Jews to possess could easily turn them into the very embodiments of the worst antisemitic tropes: subversive elements in society, the others who do not belong, and the greedy profiteers who corrupt the fabric of society. Thus, the idealised spirituality that Rilke links to Judaism and Jewishness has a dark underside. It consists in the potential of Rilke’s idealised Jews to turn into an antisemitic stereotype of the Jew as the subversive other who betrayed his God and now embodies eternal rootlessness and is an alien body that undermines social cohesion.173 Eliot, similarly to Rilke, in his remarks on Jews and Jewishness was primarily concerned with the question of religion.174 In the run-up to World War 2, his reflections increasingly focused on the concept of Christian society, which he explored in The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), numerous essays and reviews, as well as the discussions of the Moot group.175 While his infamous remark in the Page-Barbour Lectures given at the University of Virginia and published as After Strange Gods in 1934 has been widely discussed, it has not been analysed within the context of the religious discourse employed by contemporary Christian intellectuals.176 ‘The population should be [culturally] homogeneous,’ Eliot wrote, ‘[w]hat is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-­ thinking Jews undesirable.’177 The term ‘free-thinking Jew’ refers here to Jews who—in Maritain’s words—have ‘settled down’ and became secularised, rejecting their spiritual vocation or who—in Rilke’s words—abuse their spiritual ‘advantage’. What Eliot, alongside Maritain and Rilke, opposes is the idea of the Jew who rejects his spiritual inheritance and breaks with the Judaic tradition. As Maritain argues in his 1921 essay, quoting the Swiss writer Maurice Muret’s The Jewish Spirit (L’Esprit Juif ): ‘The contemporary Jewish thinker is an ardent destructive agent. […] the function of contemporary Israelites boils down to the de-Christianization of the world.’178 According to both Maritain and Eliot, it is Jews who have rejected religion and become independent thinkers who pose a real threat to Christian society as they become proponents of secularisation. On the eve of World War 2, Eliot viewed this issue with increasing alarm. For him, secularisation was responsible for both Nazism and Communism, and the only way to oppose them was to uphold tradition and orthodoxy. ‘If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God),’ he asserts in 1939, ‘you

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should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.’179 In his view, free-thinkers and those who choose to follow individual paths are dangerous since they undermine the communal wisdom. Eliot contended that ‘when morals cease to be a matter of tradition and orthodoxy—that is, of the habits of the community formulated, corrected, and elevated by the continuous thought and direction of the Church—and when each man is to elaborate his own, then personality becomes a thing of alarming importance.’180 Thus, ‘personality’, ‘individuality’, and ‘free-thinking’ tendencies, which are traits that Eliot repeatedly associated with theological modernism (see Chap. 6), remain key elements of the framework through which Eliot defines the threat posed by Jews. While the question of race, as Ronald Schuchard argues, is less important for Eliot than the issue of religion, it nevertheless does appear in his writings.181 Just like Maritain and Rilke, whose reflections on Jewish spirituality touch on the issues of blood and nationality, Eliot also links religious and racial identity when commenting on ‘the Jewish question’. This manner of essentialising Jews, while distinct from the biological, eugenic type of antisemitism common in Nazi propaganda, shares certain features with the Nazi discourse, emphasising the alleged otherness, foreignness, and corruption of Jews. The religious type of antisemitism transposes those traits onto the realm of the spirit. To name this phenomenon, Leon Klenicki has coined the term ‘metaphysical’ antisemitism, which he employs with reference to Maritain’s writings. According to some critics, this kind of antisemitism, as Crane puts it, reflects a ‘level of unreflective prejudice—fortified by cultural presuppositions’ as opposed to racial antisemitism which should be seen as ‘a pathological hatred of Jews increasingly activated in the interwar period by the biological imperative of racial hygiene’.182 However, the problem with such a neat distinction is that it fails to account for the fact that the two were historically more closely related than much scholarship on the topic has so far acknowledged. It might be comforting to see biological antisemitism propagated by the Nazis as ‘pathological hatred’ based on pseudo-scientific biological distinctions, but historians such as Deborah Hertz have established that religious essentialism played an important role in the Nazi discourse too.183 Through her analysis of Nazi genealogy bureaucracy implemented in Germany in the late 1930s, Hertz demonstrates that ‘race was dramatic rhetoric’, but in practice Nazi policies failed to separate race from religion:

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Nazi ideologists had promised to dig under faith and discover blood, but they could not totally succeed in this aim. For the underlying premise of this entire endeavor was false, in that racial identity could not then and cannot ever be measured by scientific methods. In that setting, when the inability to measure race became obvious, the various policymakers involved brought back religion as a way to separate individuals into neat racial categories.184

The impact of religious prejudice on the socio-political reality that shaped Jewish lives was acknowledged by a few contemporary Christian thinkers. James Parkes, an Anglican clergyman and proponent of theological modernism, in his comprehensive analysis of the historical and contemporary forms of antisemitism concluded that the roots of contemporary antisemitism were neither racial nor economic, but theological.185 As Parkes’s biographer Haim Chertok observes, theological modernism was Parkes’s ‘natural métier’ and ‘[j]ust as its bracing spirit moulded a new approach to traditional Christianity, its avidity to challenge the received wisdom of the Church steered Parkes onto a track which would eventually lead him to ground-breaking conceptions of Judaism and the Jewish people.’186 In his major study, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue (1934), Parkes argued that ‘the main responsibility must rest upon the theological picture created in patristic literature of the Jew as a being perpetually betraying God and ultimately abandoned by Him.’187 According to Parkes, it was early Christian writings that considerably contributed to perpetuating anti-Jewish stereotypes. From the 1930s until after the war, through numerous publications Parkes attempted to re-evaluate the history of Jewish-Christian relations, and tackle antisemitism by changing the attitudes of contemporary Christian communities. In his 1945 book An Enemy of the People: Antisemitism, he argued that when it came to the history of Judaism, churches’ ‘ignorance is both dishonourable and disgusting’: They [churches] maintain missions to convert the Jews, while at the same time they will not spend a penny of either time or effort to see that Judaism and the story of the Jewish people are fairly presented to their congregations. […] They don’t mean to be prejudiced; they are not conscious of antisemitic feeling; but the share that they bear for providing a fertile breeding ground for every kind of antisemitic misrepresentation is an exceedingly heavy one; and a few resolutions of sympathy with the victims of Hitler’s massacres do not square the account.188

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Parkes was critical of the missionary attitude of Christian churches that— even in the face of the ongoing extermination of Europe’s Jews—continued to emphasise the need to preach conversion and, like Maritain, maintained that the ‘Jewish question’ can be solved only with the communal conversion of the tribe of Israel. Instead, Parkes urged churches to recognise Jews’ right to an independent religious identity and to re-assess Judaism by placing it on an equal footing with Christianity.

Conclusion World War 1 brought about a spiritual revival that saw an increased interest in the supernatural, the metaphysical, and the religious. The language of religion provided a framework that allowed some veterans and their families to deal with the trauma of the trenches, and rites for the mourning for the dead. The war had a significant impact on contemporary religious thought. For some theologians and religious intellectuals, it was a moment that forced humanity to see themselves in a new way and reclaim what was ‘real’. For others, it brought a sense of spiritual guilt and the need for repentance. In 1914, the Vatican saw it as an end product of contemporary philosophy and ideology, which included theological modernism. While World War 1 brought an end to much of the transnational collaboration that sustained the project of theological modernism, the idiom generated by the modernist crisis found extensive use in the political propaganda employed in wartime by both the Allies and the Central Powers. The Allies portrayed German culture as the breeding ground of heretical modernity that produced the school of higher criticism in biblical studies and gave rise to the intellectual tendencies that led to the development of modernism, which ultimately undermines the Christian civilisation. German propaganda, on the other hand, depicted France as a secularised culture that actively seeks to destroy the Christian legacy of Europe, and Britain as a materialist society that had sold its spirit to the ideology of capitalism. Employing religious language in political propaganda added a metaphysical dimension to the military conflict and served to mobilise society by solemnising the war. The politics of the interwar period, which saw a resurgence of nationalism and antisemitism, engaged religion in explicit ways. The concepts of ‘political theology’ and ‘political religion’ were employed by contemporary intellectuals to account for the rise of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes in Italy, Germany, and Russia. Both fascism and communism were seen as political ideologies that

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imitate religion by providing quasi-religious frameworks to engage a wide spectrum of followers who relate to the god-like leaders on a deeply emotional level. Contemporary Christian intellectuals and the ecclesiastical authorities were increasingly alarmed by what they portrayed as godless regimes that deny God and seek to destroy the Christian civilisation. Following the rise of antisemitism in the interwar period, the tropes that presented Jews as exponents of secularism who promote individualism, subjectivism, and free-thinking, in the rhetoric of neo-Thomist thinkers paralleled the portrayal of modernist theologians as the enemy within. The line diving philosemitism from antisemitism in the thought of Christian intellectuals was fine, as they referred to Jews who abandoned Judaic tradition as subversive elements in society, threatening its future cohesion. In the writings of contemporary religious intellectuals, World War 2 was again framed as a fight for the survival of Christianity. Viewing the war through such a lens had a significant impact on how the ongoing persecution and extermination of European Jews were narrated and understood by contemporary Christian thinkers. The Christian framework they adopted prevented them from seeing the antisemitic policies of the Nazis as directed specifically against the Jews. Instead, what came to be known as the Holocaust was universalised and presented as an assault on all humankind and all religion or, in Jacques Maritain’s words, ‘a directly anti-Christic frenzy’. Few Christian thinkers, including James Parkes, challenged this view, insisting that many antisemitic tropes could be traced back to the malicious portrayal of Jews in early Christian theology, and calling for churches to abandon their attempts to convert Jewish refugees.

Notes 1. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 54. 2. George M.  Johnson, Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling with Ghosts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 3. Pat Jalland, Death in War and Peace: Loss and Grief in England, 1914–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 15–82. 4. Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day, 1919–1946 (London: Bloomsbury, 1994), 19. 5. Winter, 28.

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6. The Parliamentary Debates: Official Report, House of Lords, 5th series (London: 1909–), vol. 69: Third Session of the Thirty-Fourth Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Fourth Volume of Session 1927 (1928), 782. 7. Winter, 59–61. 8. Annette Becker, War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, 1914–1930, trans. Helen McPhail (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 65. 9. Ferdinand Belmont, A Crusader of France: The Letters of Captain Ferdinand Belmont of the Chasseurs Alpins (August 2, 1914–December 28, 1915), trans. G. Frederic Lees (London: Andrew Melrose, 1917), 109. The phrase ‘return to the altars’ is used by Becker, 106–107. 10. Quoted in Becker, 22. 11. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, ‘The Spiritual Power of Matter,’ in Hymn of the Universe, trans. Gerald Vann (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 53–70. 12. Ibid., 65–67. 13. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, ‘Cosmic Life,’ in Writings in Time of War, trans. René Hague (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 59. 14. Quoted in Becker, 23. 15. Robert Musil, ‘The Blackbird,’ in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, trans. Peter Wortsman (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2006), 145–169. 16. Ibid., 158. 17. Ibid., 159. 18. Ibid., 159–160. 19. Ibid., 160. 20. Ibid. 21. Becker, 51. 22. André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism (1924),’ in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R.  Lane (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 6–10. 23. Ibid., 14–15. 24. Ibid., 14. 25. See Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); and Edward Baring, Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). 26. Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism: A Little Book For Normal People (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1914), ix. 27. Ibid., x. 28. May Sinclair, A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 269. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid.

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31. Max Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1972), 124–125. 32. Ibid., 125. 33. John Middleton Murry, God: Being an Introduction to the Science of Metabiology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929), 16–17. 34. John Middleton Murry, ‘The Sign-Seekers,’ in The Evolution of an Intellectual (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927), 15–16. 35. Ibid., 19, 23. 36. John Middleton Murry, ‘Realism,’ in The Evolution of an Intellectual, 99, 111–112. 37. Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest, trans. Pamela Morris (London: Boriswood, 1937), 261–262. 38. Ibid., 262. 39. Ibid., 151. 40. Kenneth Oakes, Reading Karl Barth: A Companion to Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011). 41. Karl Barth, A Unique Time of God: Karl Barth’s WWI Sermons, trans. William Klempa (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016). See also John Howard Yoder, Karl Barth and the Problem of War, and Other Essays on Barth (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2003). 42. Karl Barth, ‘The Righteousness of God,’ in The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 18. 43. Barth, A Unique Time of God, 111. 44. Quoted in John McConnachie, ‘The Teaching of Karl Barth: A New Positive Movement in German Theology,’ Hibbert Journal 27 (1926–1927): 385. 45. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. from the 6th edition by Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 49–50. 46. Ibid., 185. 47. Stephen Spender, ‘Remembering Eliot,’ Encounter 24, no. 4 (1965): 5. 48. Schloesser, 7–8. 49. See Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade (New York: HarperOne, 2014); Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2014); Jonathan H.  Ebel, Faith in the Fight: The American Soldier and the Great War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); and Annette Becker, War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, 1914–1930, trans. Helen McPhail (Oxford: Berg, 1998). 50. Pope Benedict XV, ‘Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum,’ in The Papal Encyclicals, ed. Claudia Carlen, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: McGrath, 1981), 149. 51. Ibid.

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52. Quoted in George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 148. 53. Ibid. 54. ‘Return to the Dark Ages,’ King’s Business 9.5 (1918): 365–366. 55. Quoted in Becker, 11. 56. Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers: Luther-Descartes-Rousseau [n.trans.] (London: Sheed & Ward, 1928). 57. Max Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg (Leipzig: Weissen Bücher, 1915). See also Rainer Schäfer, ‘Scheler’s Metaphysics of War,’ Tijdschrift voor Philosophie 79 (2017): 801–817. 58. La Guerre Allemande et le Catholicisme, ed. Alfred Baudrillart (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1915). 59. See Claus Arnold ‘La Guerre Allemande et le Catholicisme (1915)— Katholisch-Theologische Kriegsarbeit und die Nachwirkungen der Modernismuskrise,’ in Katholiken im langen 19. Jahrhundert. Akteure— Kulturen—Mentalitäten. Festschrift für Otto Weiß, ed. Dominik Burkard and Nicole Priesching (Regensburg: Pustet, 2014), 299–311. 60. Deutsche Kultur, Katholizismus und Weltkrieg. Eine Abwehr des Buches ‘La Guerre Allemande et le Catholicisme’, ed. Georg Pfeilschifter (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1915). 61. Joseph Sauer, ‘Kunst und heilige Stätten im Kriege,’ in Deutsche Kultur, Katholizismus und Weltkrieg, 173–233. 62. Quoted in Claus Arnold, ‘Joseph Sauer—A German ‘Modernist’ in War Time,’ in Roman Catholic Modernists Confront the Great War, ed. C.  J. T.  Talar and Lawrence F.  Barmann (New York: Palgrave Pivot, 2015), 117–118. 63. It was published in both German and French: Joseph Sauer, Die Zerstörung von Kirchen und Kunstdenkmälern an der Westfront (Freiburg i. Br.: B. Herder, 1917) and La destruction d’églises et de monuments d’art sur le front ouest (Freiburg i. Br.: B. Herder, 1917). 64. Quoted in Arnold, 118. 65. Quoted in Arnold, 115. 66. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 162. 67. Aldous Huxley, Stories, Essays & Poems (London: J.M.  Dent, 1960), 281–282. 68. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 36. See also Gavin Rae ‘The Theology of Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology,’ Political Theology 17, no. 6 (2016): 555–572. 69. Schmitt, 36–37.

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70. Ibid., 49–50. 71. Rae, 559. 72. Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 60. 73. Eric Voegelin, ‘The Political Religions,’ trans. Virginia Ann Schildhauer, in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 5: Modernity Without Restraint, ed. Manfred Henningsen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 30. 74. Ibid., 60. 75. Ibid., 59. 76. Ibid., 60. 77. Ibid., 62. 78. Ibid., 64. 79. Ibid., 66. For a comparison of Schmitt’s and Voegelin’s theories, see Thierry Gontier, ‘From “Political Theology” to “Political Religion”: Eric Voegelin and Carl Schmitt,’ The Review of Politics 75 (2013): 25–43. 80. Christopher Dawson, ‘General Introduction,’ in Jacques Maritain, Peter Wust and Christopher Dawson, Essays in Order (New York: Macmillan, 1931), vi. 81. Michael Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism, and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics, 1890–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 82. Jacques Maritain, Saint Thomas Aquinas, trans. and revised by Joseph W. Evans and Peter O’Reilly (New York: Meridian 1958), 16, 19. 83. Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers: Luther-Descartes-Rousseau [n.trans.] (London: Sheed & Ward, 1928), 95. 84. Ibid., 96. 85. Ibid., 136–137. 86. See Sutton, 123–201. 87. Oscar L. Arnal, Ambivalent Alliance: The Catholic Church and the Action Française, 1899–1939 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985). 88. Quoted in Arnal, 125. 89. Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (La trahison des clercs), trans. Richard Aldington (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1969), 22. 90. Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 91. Ibid., 38. 92. Ibid., 45. 93. Ibid., 183. 94. James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2018), 11. Emphasis in the original.

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95. Pope Pius XII, ‘Divino Afflante Spiritu,’ in The Papal Encyclicals, ed. Claudia Carlen, vol. 4 (Washington, DC: McGrath, 1981), 73. 96. Chappel, 60. 97. Jacques Maritain, The Twilight of Civilization, trans. Lionel Landry (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1943). 98. Ibid., 18. 99. Ibid., 20. 100. Nicolas Berdiaeff [Nicolas Berdyaev], World Fellowship through Religion: The Brotherhood of Man and the Religions (London: The World Congress of Faiths, [1938]), 9. 101. T. S. Eliot, ‘Last Words,’ in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 5, ed. Iman Javadi, Ronald Schuchard, and Jayme Stayer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 661. 102. The Moot Papers: Faith, Freedom and Society 1938–1944, ed. Keith Clements (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 114. 103. Douglas Woodruff, ‘Religion and Patriotism,’ The Sword of the Spirit Bulletin, April 16, 1942, p. 1. 104. Simone Weil, Selected Essays, 1934–1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings, trans. Richard Rees (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015), 211. 105. Ibid., 214, 218. 106. ‘Moral Rearmament,’ The Times, September 1, 1938, p. 7. See also Moral Rearmament: The Battle for Peace, ed. H.  W. Austin (London: Heinemann, 1938). 107. Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979), 151. 108. Ibid. 109. UK Parliament, Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 16 November 1939, vol. 353, cols. 929–930. https://www.parliament.uk/. 110. UK Parliament, Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 27 February 1940, vol. 357, col. 1975; and 11 April 1940, vol. 116, col. 95. https:// www.parliament.uk/. 111. Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, Viscount Halifax, Speeches on Foreign Policy by Viscount Halifax (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), 363. 112. Ibid., 364–365. 113. Winston Churchill, Into the Battle (London: Cassell, 1943), 248–249. 114. Philip Williamson, ‘Christian Conservatives and the Totalitarian Challenge, 1933–40,’ English Historical Review 115, no. 462 (2000): 608. 115. ‘The Nation at Prayer,’ The Times, September 30, 1939, p. 7. 116. See Tom Lawson, The Church of England and the Holocaust: Christianity, Memory and Nazism (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2006); and Ulrike Ehret, Church, Nation and Race: Catholics and Antisemitism in Germany

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and England, 1918–1945 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013). 117. See Shmuel Almog, Nationalism and Anti-Semitism in Modern Europe 1815–1945 (Oxford: Pergamon, 1990); William I.  Brustein, Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe before the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-­Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940, ed. Marius Turda and Paul Weindling (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007). 118. See, for example, Todd H.  Weir, ‘The Specter of “Godless Jewry”: Secularism and the “Jewish Question” in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany,’ Central European History 46, no. 4 (2013): 815–849. 119. Simon Mayers, Chesterton’s Jews: Stereotypes and Caricatures in the Literature and Journalism of G. K. Chesterton (Manchester: CreateSpace, 2013); David Lodge, ‘The Chesterbelloc and the Jews,’ in The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1971), 145–158. 120. G.  K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.  K. Chesterton, vol. 1, ed. David J. Dooley (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986). 121. G.  K. Chesterton, ‘An Attack from the Altars,’ in Brave New Family: G. K. Chesterton on Men and Women, Children, Sex, Divorce, Marriage and the Family, ed. Alvaro de Silva (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 218–222. 122. Ibid., 221. 123. Ibid., 221–222. 124. G.  K. Chesterton, ‘Marriage and the Modern Mind,’ in Brave New Family, 31. 125. G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Judaism of Hitler,’ in The End of the Armistice (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1940), 92. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid., 95. 128. Ibid. See also G.  K. Chesterton, ‘The Materialist in the Mask,’ New Witness, June 30, 1922, pp. 406–407. 129. See Richard F.  Crane, Passion of Israel, Jacques Maritain, Catholic Conscience and the Holocaust (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2010); Jacques Maritain and the Jews, ed. Robert Royal (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994); and Robert A.  Ventresca, ‘Jacques Maritain and the Jewish Question: Theology, Identity and Politics,’ Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 2, no. 2 (2007): 58–69.

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130. Michael R.  Marrus, ‘The Ambassador and the Pope: Pius XII, Jacques Maritain and the Jews,’ Commonweal 131, no. 18 (2004): 14–18. 131. Quoted in Crane, 7. 132. Ibid. 133. Simon Deploige, Saint Thomas et la question juive (Louvain: Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1897). 134. Ibid., 7. 135. Ibid., 15. 136. The essay was published in English as Jacques Maritain, ‘The Mystery of Israel,’ in Ransoming the Time, trans. Harry Lorin Binsse (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941), 141–179. 137. Ibid., 147, 149. Emphasis in the original. 138. Ibid. 139. Ibid., 153. 140. Ibid., 154. 141. Ibid., 155. 142. Ibid., 156. Emphasis in the original. 143. Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 144. Ibid. 145. Ibid., 164. Emphasis in the original. 146. Ibid., 164–165. Emphasis in the original. 147. Ibid., 165. 148. Ibid., 166. Emphasis in the original. 149. Ibid., 175. 150. Ibid., 179. 151. Jacques Maritain, A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1939). 152. Ibid., 20–21. 153. Ibid., 27, 33. Emphasis in the original. 154. Ibid., 25. 155. Ibid., 89. 156. Ibid., 83. 157. Rabbi Leon Klenicki, ‘Jacques Maritain’s Vision of Judaism and Anti-­ Semitism,’ in Jacques Maritain and the Jews, 73; Crane, 9; John Hellman, ‘The Jews in the “New Middle Ages”: Jacques Maritain’s Anti-Semitism in Its Times,’ in Jacques Maritain and the Jews, 89. 158. Quoted in Bernard Doering, Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 159. 159. Quoted in Klenicki, 85. 160. Ibid. 161. Tom Lawson, The Church of England and the Holocaust: Christianity, Memory and Nazism (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 91.

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162. Christian News-Letter 173, February 17, 1943. 163. Die Lösung der Judenfrage. Eine Rundfrage, ed. Julius Moses (Berlin: Curt Wigand, 1907). 164. Quoted in Ulrich Baer, The Rilke Alphabet, trans. Andrew Hamilton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 95. 165. Ibid. 166. Ibid. 167. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letter to Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss, 28 December 1921,’ in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 2, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M.  D. Herter Norton (New York: W.  W. Norton & Co., 1948), 276. 168. Ibid., 276–277. Emphasis in the original. 169. Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 170. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letter to Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss, 25 April 1922,’ in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 2, 306. 171. Ibid. 172. Ibid. 173. See also Baer, ‘J for Jew-boy,’ in The Rilke Alphabet, 87–103. 174. Ronald Schuchard, ‘My Reply: Eliot and the Foregone Conclusions,’ Modernism/modernity 10, no. 1 (2003): 57–70. 175. Roger Kojecky, T.  S. Eliot’s Social Criticism (London: Faber, 1971), 126–197; Stefan Collini, ‘The European Modernist as Anglican Moralist: The Later Social Criticism of T.  S. Eliot,’ in Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity: Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture, ed. Mark S. Micale and Robert L. Dietle (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 207–229; and Steve Ellis, British Writers and the Approach of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 17–65. 176. See Antony Julius, T.  S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003); and the contributions to the special issue of Modernism/modernity 10, no. 1 (2003). 177. T. S. Eliot, ‘After Strange Gods,’ in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 5, ed. Iman Javadi, Ronald Schuchard, and Jayme Stayer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 20. 178. Quoted in Hellman, 94. 179. T.  S. Eliot, ‘The Idea of a Christian Society,’ in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 5, 717. See also Joanna Rzepa, ‘The “demonic forces” at Auschwitz: T.  S. Eliot reads Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Roll Call,’ Modernism/modernity 26, no. 2 (2019): 329–350. 180. Eliot, ‘After Strange Gods’, 40. Emphasis in the original. 181. Schuchard, ‘My Reply: Eliot and the Foregone Conclusions.’ 182. Crane, 12.

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183. Deborah Hertz, ‘The Genealogy Bureaucracy in the Third Reich,’ Jewish History 11, no. 2 (1997): 53–78. See also Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary AngloAmerica (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 184. Hertz, 54. 185. See James Parkes, The Jew and His Neighbour: A Study in the Causes of Anti-Semitism (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1930); The Nature of Anti-Semitism (London: The Church Overseas, 1933); A History of Antisemitism (London: Soncino Press, 1934–38). 186. Haim Chertok, He Also Spoke as a Jew: The Life of the Reverend James Parkes (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006), 131. 187. James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Anti-Semitism (London: Soncino Press, 1934), 375. 188. James Parkes, An Enemy of the People: Antisemitism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945), 143–144.

Bibliography Almog, Shmuel. Nationalism and Anti-Semitism in Modern Europe 1815–1945. Oxford: Pergamon, 1990. Arnal, Oscar L. Ambivalent Alliance: The Catholic Church and the Action Française, 1899–1939. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985. Arnold, Claus. ‘Joseph Sauer—A German ‘Modernist’ in War Time.’ In Roman Catholic Modernists Confront the Great War, edited by C.  J. T.  Talar and Lawrence F. Barmann, 107–125. New York: Palgrave Pivot, 2015. Arnold, Claus. ‘La Guerre Allemande et le Catholicisme (1915)  – Katholisch-­ Theologische Kriegsarbeit und die Nachwirkungen der Modernismuskrise.’ In Katholiken im langen 19. Jahrhundert. Akteure  – Kulturen  – Mentalitäten. Festschrift für Otto Weiß, edited by Dominik Burkard and Nicole Priesching, 299–311. Regensburg: Pustet, 2014. Austin, H.  W., ed. Moral Rearmament: The Battle for Peace. London: Heinemann, 1938. Baer, Ulrich. The Rilke Alphabet. Translated by Andrew Hamilton. New  York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Baring, Edward. Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Barth, Karl. A Unique Time of God: Karl Barth’s WWI Sermons. Translated by William Klempa. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016. Barth, Karl. The Epistle to the Romans. Translated from the 6th edition by Edwyn C. Hoskyns. London: Oxford University Press, 1968. Barth, Karl. The Word of God and the Word of Man. Translated by Douglas Horton. New York: Harper & Row, 1957.

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Baudrillart, Alfred, ed. La Guerre Allemande et le Catholicisme. Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1915. Becker, Annette. War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, 1914–1930. Translated by Helen McPhail. Oxford: Berg, 1998. Belmont, Ferdinand. A Crusader of France: The Letters of Captain Ferdinand Belmont of the Chasseurs Alpins (August 2, 1914–December 28, 1915). Translated by G. Frederic Lees. London: Andrew Melrose, 1917. Benda, Julien. The Treason of the Intellectuals (La Trahison des Clercs). Translated by Richard Aldington. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1969. Benedict XV, Pope. ‘Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum.’ In The Papal Encyclicals, edited by Claudia Carlen, vol. 3, 143–151. Washington, DC: McGrath, 1981. Berdiaeff [Berdyaev], Nicolas. World Fellowship through Religion: The Brotherhood of Man and the Religions. London: The World Congress of Faiths, 1938. Bernanos, George. The Diary of a Country Priest. Translated by Pamela Morris. London: Boriswood, 1937. Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1972. Brustein, William I. Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe before the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Chappel, James. Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Chertok, Haim. He Also Spoke as a Jew: The Life of the Reverend James Parkes. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006. Chesterton, G.  K. Brave New Family: G.  K. Chesterton on Men and Women, Children, Sex, Divorce, Marriage and the Family, edited by Alvaro de Silva. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990. Chesterton, G. K. The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, vol. 1, edited by David J. Dooley. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986. Chesterton, G. K. The End of the Armistice. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1940. Chesterton, G.  K. ‘The Materialist in the Mask.’ New Witness, June 30, 1922, pp. 406–407. Christian News-Letter 173, February 17, 1943. Churchill, Winston. Into the Battle. London: Cassell, 1943. Collini, Stefan. ‘The European Modernist as Anglican Moralist: The Later Social Criticism of T. S. Eliot.’ In Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity: Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture, edited by Mark S.  Micale and Robert L. Dietle, 207–229. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Crane, Richard F. Passion of Israel, Jacques Maritain, Catholic Conscience and the Holocaust. Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2010. Deploige, Simon. Saint Thomas et la question juive. Louvain: Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1897.

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Doering, Bernard. Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983. Ebel, Jonathan H. Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Ehret, Ulrike. Church, Nation and Race: Catholics and Antisemitism in Germany and England, 1918–1945. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013. Eliot, T. S. The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 5, edited by Iman Javadi, Ronald Schuchard, and Jayme Stayer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Ellis, Steve. British Writers and the Approach of World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1914. Freedman, Jonathan. The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gontier, Thierry. ‘From “Political Theology” to “Political Religion”: Eric Voegelin and Carl Schmitt.’ The Review of Politics 75 (2013): 25–43. Gregory, Adrian. The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day, 1919–1946. London: Bloomsbury, 1994. Griffin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Hellman, John. ‘The Jews in the “New Middle Ages”: Jacques Maritain’s Anti-­ Semitism in Its Times.’ In Jacques Maritain and the Jews, edited by Robert Royal, 89–103. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994. Hertz, Deborah. ‘The Genealogy Bureaucracy in the Third Reich.’ Jewish History 11, no. 2 (1997): 53–78. Huxley, Aldous. Stories, Essays & Poems. London: J.M. Dent, 1960. Jalland, Pat. Death in War and Peace: Loss and Grief in England, 1914–1970. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Jenkins, Philip. The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade. New York: HarperOne, 2014. Johnson, George M. Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling with Ghosts. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Julius, Antony. T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003. Klenicki, Rabbi Leon. ‘Jacques Maritain’s Vision of Judaism and Anti-Semitism.’ In Jacques Maritain and the Jews, edited by Robert Royal, 72–88. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994. Kojecky, Roger. T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism. London: Faber, 1971. Koonz, Claudia. The Nazi Conscience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

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Lawson, Tom. The Church of England and the Holocaust: Christianity, Memory and Nazism. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006. Lindemann, Albert S. Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Lodge, David. ‘The Chesterbelloc and the Jews.’ In The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism, 145–158. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971. Maritain, Jacques. A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1939. Maritain, Jacques. Ransoming the Time. Translated by Harry Lorin Binsse. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941. Maritain, Jacques. Saint Thomas Aquinas. Translated and revised by Joseph W. Evans and Peter O’Reilly. New York: Meridian, 1958. Maritain, Jacques. The Twilight of Civilization. Translated by Lionel Landry. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1943. Maritain, Jacques. Three Reformers: Luther-Descartes-Rousseau [n.trans.]. London: Sheed & Ward, 1928. Maritain, Jacques, Peter Wust, and Christopher Dawson. Essays in Order. New York: Macmillan, 1931. Marrus, Michael R. ‘The Ambassador and the Pope: Pius XII, Jacques Maritain and the Jews.’ Commonweal 131, no. 18 (2004): 14–18. Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Mayers, Simon. Chesterton’s Jews: Stereotypes and Caricatures in the Literature and Journalism of G. K. Chesterton. Manchester: CreateSpace, 2013. McConnachie, John. ‘The Teaching of Karl Barth: A New Positive Movement in German Theology.’ Hibbert Journal 27 (1926–1927): 385–400. McLaine, Ian. Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II. London: Allen & Unwin, 1979. Murry, John Middleton. God: Being an Introduction to the Science of Metabiology. London: Jonathan Cape, 1929. Murry, John Middleton. The Evolution of an Intellectual. London: Jonathan Cape, 1927. Musil, Robert. Posthumous Papers of a Living Author. Translated by Peter Wortsman. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2006. Oakes, Kenneth. Reading Karl Barth: A Companion to Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011. Parkes, James. A History of Antisemitism. London: Soncino Press, 1934–38. Parkes, James. An Enemy of the People: Antisemitism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945.

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Parkes, James. The Conflict of the Church and Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Anti-Semitism. London: Soncino Press, 1934. Parkes, James. The Jew and his Neighbour: A Study in the Causes of Anti-Semitism. London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1930. Parkes, James. The Nature of Anti-Semitism. London: The Church Overseas, 1933. Pfeilschifter, Georg, ed. Deutsche Kultur, Katholizismus und Weltkrieg. Eine Abwehr des Buches ‘La Guerre Allemande et le Catholicisme. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1915. Pius XII, Pope. ‘Divino Afflante Spiritu.’ In The Papal Encyclicals, edited by Claudia Carlen, vol. 4, 65–80. Washington, DC: McGrath, 1981. Rae, Gavin. ‘The Theology of Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology.’ Political Theology 17, no. 6 (2016): 555–572. ‘Return to the Dark Ages.’ King’s Business 9, no. 5 (1918): 365–366. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 2. Translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M.  D. Herter Norton. New  York: W.  W. Norton & Co., 1948. Royal, Robert, ed. Jacques Maritain and the Jews. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994. Rzepa, Joanna. ‘The “Demonic Forces” at Auschwitz: T.  S. Eliot Reads Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Roll Call.’ Modernism/modernity 26, no. 2 (2019): 329–350. Schäfer, Rainer. ‘Scheler’s Metaphysics of War.’ Tijdschrift voor Philosophie 79 (2017): 801–817. Scheler, Max. Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg. Leipzig: Weissen Bücher, 1915. Scheler, Max. On the Eternal in Man. Translated by Bernard Noble. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1972. Schloesser, Stephen. Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Schuchard, Ronald. ‘My Reply: Eliot and the Foregone Conclusions.’ Modernism/ modernity 10, no. 1 (2003): 57–70. Sinclair, May. A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions. New York: Macmillan, 1917. Special Forum on T. S. Eliot and antisemitism. Modernism/modernity 10, no. 1 (2003): 1–70. Spender, Stephen. ‘Remembering Eliot.’ Encounter 24, no. 4 (1965): 3–13. Sutton, Michael. Nationalism, Positivism, and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics, 1890–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. Hymn of the Universe. Translated by Gerald Vann. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

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Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. Writings in Time of War. Translated by René Hague. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. The Parliamentary Debates: Official Report, House of Lords, 5th series (London: 1909–), vol. 69: Third Session of the Thirty-Fourth Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Fourth Volume of Session 1927 (1928). The Times. ‘Moral Rearmament.’ September 1, 1938, p. 7. The Times. ‘The Nation at Prayer.’ September 30, 1939, p. 7. Turda, Marius, and Paul Weindling, eds. Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007. UK Parliament. Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 11 April 1940a, vol. 116, col. 95. https://www.parliament.uk/ UK Parliament. Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 16 November 1939, vol. 353, cols. 929–930. https://www.parliament.uk/ UK Parliament. Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 27 February 1940b, vol. 357, col. 1975. https://www.parliament.uk/ Ventresca, Robert A. ‘Jacques Maritain and the Jewish Question: Theology, Identity and Politics.’ Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 2, no. 2 (2007): 58–69. Voegelin, Eric. ‘The Political Religions.’ Translated by Virginia Ann Schildhauer. In The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 5: Modernity Without Restraint, edited by Manfred Henningsen, 19–73. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. Weil, Simone. Selected Essays, 1934–1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings. Translated by Richard Rees. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015. Weir, Todd H. ‘The Specter of “Godless Jewry”: Secularism and the “Jewish Question” in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany.’ Central European History 46, no. 4 (2013): 815–849. Wilkinson, Alan. The Church of England and the First World War, 3rd edn. Cambridge: Lutherworth Press, 2014. Williamson, Philip. ‘Christian Conservatives and the Totalitarian Challenge, 1933–40.’ English Historical Review 115, no. 462 (2000): 607–642. Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Wood, Edward Frederick Lindley, Viscount Halifax. Speeches on Foreign Policy by Viscount Halifax. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940. Woodruff, Douglas. ‘Religion and Patriotism.’ The Sword of the Spirit Bulletin, April 16, 1942, pp. 1–2. Yoder, John Howard. Karl Barth and the Problem of War, and Other Essays on Barth. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2003.

CHAPTER 4

Spaces of Encounter: Theological Modernism and Neo-scholasticism in Literature and Literary Criticism

In 1928, Paul Valéry, when commenting on contemporary debates on poetic theory, observed that ‘the general public [attached] an interest, even a passionate interest, […] to these almost theological discussions’.1 His remarks on the theological dimension of the literary debates highlighted a number of topics that had been extensively discussed in the exchanges between modernist and neo-scholastic theologians and that— perhaps quite unexpectedly—made their way into the field of literary criticism in the 1920s: What is more theological than to discuss, for example, inspiration, work, or the value of intuition compared with that of the artifices of art? Are not these problems quite comparable to the celebrated theological problem of Grace and Works? Similarly, there are problems in poetry which, by setting in opposition the rules laid down and fixed by tradition and the immediate data of personal experience or intuition, are absolutely analogous to the problems one finds in the domain of theology between private judgment, the direct knowledge of divine things on the one hand, and on the other the teachings of various religions, the texts of Scripture, and the forms of dogma…2

Valéry’s evaluation of the state of contemporary literary criticism was accurate. As this chapter demonstrates, concepts derived from ongoing theological debates, including terms such as mysticism, personal © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Rzepa, Modernism and Theology, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61530-7_4

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experience, intuition, heresy, tradition, dogma, and orthodoxy, were adopted by literary critics, intellectuals, and authors who incorporated them into the language of literary critical discourse and even put forward brand new frameworks for thinking about the meaning and role of literature. Even authors who did not participate in those debates were quick to observe a qualitative change in the literary scene. As W.  B. Yeats contended in 1928, ‘the new Thomist movement in literary criticism’ has made the knowledge of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas ‘almost essential to a man of letters’.3 As this chapter shows, the scope of mutual exchanges between the fields of theology, literature, and literary criticism was enormous. These exchanges took many forms, and the aim of this chapter is to showcase and analyse a representative selection. Issues related to the modernist controversy were readily addressed by many European authors. A number of literary works published in the period, including the novels of the Italian author Antonio Fogazzaro and the Austrian writer Enrica von Handel-­ Mazzetti, explicitly engaged with the contemporary theological crisis. The content and plots of literary texts, such as Fogazzaro’s The Saint (Il Santo, 1906) and Handel-Mazzetti’s Jesse and Maria (Jesse und Maria, 1905/1906), were structured around some of the key ideas of the religious controversies.4 As the first section of this chapter shows, these texts were read, analysed, debated, and actively disseminated as well as censored by the theologians on both sides of the ongoing dispute. The exchanges between theology and literary criticism had a twofold impact. On the one hand, the language of literary criticism began to adopt terminology related to the theological debate and employ selected theological concepts in the analysis and interpretation of literary works. Examples of literary critical works directly shaped by the debate between theological modernists and neo-scholastics include T. E. Hulme’s essays, Wyndham Lewis’s Time and Western Man (1927), and T. S. Eliot’s After Strange Gods (1934). On the other hand, certain theologians and religious intellectuals, especially those associated with theological modernism, having voiced their concerns about the perceived exhaustion of theological idiom, looked to poetic language as a source of potential renewal and inspiration. Those ideas took the shape of a full-fledged poetic theory put forward by the modernist scholar of religion Henri Bremond in his Prayer and Poetry (1925), which triggered a heated debate among literary critics, poets, and religious intellectuals across Europe. This chapter analyses the French side of the debate by considering the contributions of Bremond

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and Jacques Maritain, while the British offshoot of the debate in the form of exchanges between T. S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry is examined in Chap. 6.

‘A cause which finds living expression in a great novel […] cannot fail’ When the first instalment of Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti’s novel Jesse and Maria appeared on the pages of the journal Hochland in October 1904, it immediately generated public attention. The novel was an invited contribution commissioned by Karl Muth, the founder and editor of Hochland, a journal which aimed to provide a platform for an open-minded discussion of culture and literature and soon became ‘the leading Catholic cultural forum in the German-speaking world’.5 Muth envisioned a project of modernisation of German-language Catholic literature and literary criticism, which he considered to be too preoccupied with moral judgements, dogmatic pronouncements, and ‘inquisitorial’ critical practice.6 He identified a potential for renewal in new tendencies in contemporary literature, including the exploration of the inner meaning of religious experience, individual moral struggles, and interdenominational appeal through aesthetically sophisticated means (as opposed to strictly Catholic literature that defined its identity in opposition to Protestantism).7 Jesse and Maria, which was the first novel serialised in Hochland, fulfilled Muth’s expectations, though at the same time it became a centre of a heated critical debate that in a few years reached the Vatican and brought about the threat of both the novel and the journal being placed on the Index of Prohibited Books. Handel-Mazzetti, an author born in Vienna in 1871 to an Austrian father and a Hungarian mother, was raised in a Catholic spirit and started her literary career in 1897. Her prolific writings exploring the topic of religion—she penned more than fifty novels—earned her the name of ‘one of the most controversial female authors in Central Europe’.8 She received religious education under the Jesuits, who put strong emphasis on the scholastic tradition. However, Handel-Mazzetti developed her own understanding of Catholicism, and in her works, she explored the complex interface between religious dogma and individual moral sensibility. Jesse and Maria, which came to be one of her most widely read works, was inspired by her research into the history of Maria Taferl, a popular

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pilgrimage site in Austria.9 The historical novel, set in 1658–9, explores the origin of a local Marian devotion that later led to the foundation of the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows, which remains an important pilgrimage destination to this day. The novel tells the story of a bitter conflict between the Catholic Maria Schinnagel, an illiterate wife of the forester to the local bishop, and the Lutheran nobleman Jesse von Velderndorff. It opens with the arrival of Jesse, who settles at Pechlarn Castle and soon impresses the local Catholic community with his wealth, intelligence, and good manners. He is extremely well-educated and soon starts to challenge the local priest, Pastor Wolf, who is relatively ignorant, naïve, and generally ill-respected by his parishioners. They grow tired of hearing ‘[e]very Sunday a sermon about heretics and more heretics and nothing but heretics’.10 The well-­ read Jesse hopes to spread a more enlightened and intellectual attitude to religion among the villagers whom he gradually befriends. When he learns of the local devotion to the wooden figure of the Virgin Mary, the Sorrowful Mother, made by a local peasant and placed in an oak tree at a nearby hillside, he develops an irresistible urge to destroy it, considering it a harmful folk superstition. For Jesse, the figure embodies Catholic ignorance that has to be opposed by all means. The local community, on the other hand, believes the figure to be miraculous and worships it as such. In the course of the novel, Jesse becomes obsessed with the Sorrowful Mother, whom he sees as ‘a wooden fetish’. He decides to visit her shrine in person and is appalled by what he sees: Velderndorff stood close to the Forester and, folding his arms, examined the miraculous Virgin. She looked at him from behind a lattice—ugly of countenance, ascetic of figure, without feminine shape, dressed in abominable taste—blue, brick-red, with a white cloth over her head in the manner of nuns. On her knees she held an emaciated, half-naked man almost as ugly as she. As Velderndorff looked, everything in him revolted against this picture […] So it was this thing, this freak, this impossible daub, which stood between the people of the Danube and the Word! It shocked him, this fetish!11

As Jesse schemes to destroy the statue, which he views as ‘ugliness incarnate’, the forester’s wife, Maria Schinnagel, is determined to save her as she believes that the Sorrowful Mother offers protection to her family and the entire community.12 She has no trust in Jesse’s reasoned attempts to convince them that the local cult of the Virgin Mary is nothing but

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superstition. Maria Schinnagel rejects his learned arguments in the knowledge that mystical devotion exceeds intellectual discourse. When all her efforts to save the Sorrowful Mother fail, she informs the Inquisition of Jesse’s heretical teachings. He is investigated for his distribution of anti-­ Catholic pamphlets, disruption of Catholic services, and an illegal celebration of a Lutheran service. In the course of his examination, agitated Jesse, who is repeatedly accused of being a heretic who ‘poison[s] the simple Catholic folk’ in ‘a united, pure, Marian Austria’, loses his nerve and shoots an abbot who sits on the commission conducting the investigation.13 The novel ends on a tragic note, with Jesse’s refusal to recant his beliefs and his subsequent execution. In the course of his trial, he becomes a Christ-like martyr to the Lutheran faith. Maria Schinnagel, though on the winning side, does not triumph but recognises that ‘through her fault he had died’ and ‘blood is on [her] hands’.14 This causes her immense suffering. As she undergoes intense internal struggle, trying to come to terms with the terrible consequences of her boundless faithfulness to the Virgin Mary, she is compared to the Sorrowful Mother watching the death of her son. On publication of the first instalments of the novel, it began to generate controversy among those who opposed Muth’s vision of the renewal of German-language Catholic literature. The opposition came primarily from the circle of thinkers associated with the journal Der Gral, founded and edited by the writer and philosopher Richard von Kralik, a leader of the conservative literary circles in Vienna.15 He condemned the modernist tendencies in both contemporary thought and literature, and, as Richard S. Geehr observes, ‘at critical junctures during the battle over Modernism, he enjoyed the backing of Pope Pius X’.16 In their response to Jesse and Maria, critics supportive of Kralik argued that the novel is a ‘glorification of the Reformation’, a ‘mockery of Marian devotion’, and a violation of ‘morality’.17 The sympathetic portrayal of Jesse and his sense of mission did not tally well with the Catholic evaluation of his actions as heresy. Likewise, the novel’s portrayal of the Catholic Pastor Wolf as a poorly educated and ignorant parish priest whom even the members of the Inquisitorial Commission see as a ‘clownish cleric’ and a ‘third class priest’, and who is unable to make his parishioners attend religious services, stands in direct contrast with the positive representation of Jesse and the Protestant clergyman Fabricius.18 When the Catholic Schinnagel, Maria’s husband, accidentally happens to attend a Lutheran service, he is ‘disturbed and moved […] so much that tears stood in his eyes’.19 Indeed, the secret Lutheran service during which Jesse gets married is compared to a

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rite performed by first Christians in Roman catacombs that could not fail but inspire awe even among their enemies: Fabricius sat in a chair before the altar praying fervently. The sun fell like a halo upon his snow white head. In the scene there was something so sacred and at the same time so touching that even those who had a moment ago trembled and grumbled vigorously now silently wiped their eyes. Hunters of the early Christians felt just so when, having lost their way in the catacombs, they suddenly spied an altar and before it a priest-martyr, celebrating the sacred rites.20

By presenting the conflict between Maria and Jesse in a way that is sympathetic to both characters, the novel explores the complex history of the Counter-Reformation and the impact it had on communities and individuals across the German-speaking lands. Through the development of well-rounded characters who have to explore difficult dilemmas and question the limits of individual loyalty to dogmatic religion, Handel-Mazzetti avoids straightforward moral judgements and challenges the reader to see the complexity of religious controversies and to put in question the concepts of heresy and orthodoxy. The positive portrayal of Protestants alongside an exploration of personal dilemmas relating to faith that many characters in the novel, including Maria Schinnagel and Jesse von Velderndorff, struggle with, led the critics associated with Der Gral to the conclusion that the book failed to offer a clear and positive vision of Catholicism. Their pronouncements exemplified a view of literature that focuses on its didactic role and moral responsibility. Kralik postulated a development of specifically Catholic literature that would be dogmatically aligned with the spiritual guidance issued by the Vatican.21 He argued that ‘without a clear Weltanschauung [worldview], artistic creation is unthinkable’ and that worldview ‘must be religious […], positive, affirmative, uniting, not critically derisive’.22 Art should not encourage critical attitude, doubt, or moral ambiguity, but it should convey a clear and positive message that is in line with the official dogmatic teaching of the church. Kralik strongly opposed the modernist tendencies in theology and penned a number of articles and pamphlets attacking what he considered modernist errors, including A Year of the Catholic Literary Movement (Ein Jahr katolischer Literaturbewegung, 1910), which provided a detailed month-by-month record of his involvement in the ongoing debates from July 1909 to June 1910.23

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The key opponents of Kralik and Der Gral were Muth and Hochland. Muth praised and defended Jesse and Maria, arguing that it provided a model for a new Catholic literature that could become part of modern German-language writing. The novel met the standards that he set in his 1898 and 1899 manifestos, Is Catholic Fiction up to date? (Steht die katolische Belletristik auf der Höhe der Zeit?) and The Literary Tasks of German Catholics (Die litterarischen Aufgaben der deutschen Katholiken).24 Muth advocated a radical rethinking of the role, content, and language of Catholic writing. He argued for an endorsement of modernity, that is, an active engagement with the currents of contemporary thought in the spirit of Catholicism. His claim was that Catholic writers who prioritised moral education over aesthetics allowed the literary standards to fall so low that their texts were little more than didactic writing and could not compare to modern literary achievements of secular culture. The writer’s task is not to conduct disputes or to be a ‘fighter and champion’ for the right moral values; the writer, Muth argues, is ‘above all an observer and creator’.25 The writer’s soul desires ‘absolute beauty, perfection, unity and harmony’, and if they experience a vision that exceeds human comprehension, their aim is ‘to give body and form to it, for the enjoyment of other people’.26 Thus, by putting their spiritual vision in words, the artist ‘does not persuade’ because ‘what he has to show speaks louder through the silent, calm, well-proportioned beauty’.27 According to Muth, the Catholic poet ought to enjoy as much creative freedom as any other poet, because ‘art in its highest and purest form will never contradict the highest moral and religious consciousness’.28 He argues that while ‘the richness and depth of religious life are inexhaustible sources of real poetry […] one should not want to exploit its power in order to drive the effort of an overly deliberate religious and ecclesiastical propaganda’.29 According to Muth, Catholic writers, poets, and artists ought to prioritise aesthetic considerations over the didactic message that they might want their works to convey, because art viewed as a propaganda tool loses its artistic qualities and ceases to appeal to the reader. Hochland and Der Gral became two major platforms in the long debate which saw the clash of two different visions of the future of Catholic literature (the so-called Literaturstreit), and, more importantly, two opposing ways in which German-speaking Catholics related to contemporary culture, modern scholarship, and the intellectual challenges brought about by modernity in relation to the ecclesiastical and dogmatic tradition.30 Muth argued for an open exchange and an integration of Catholics with

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non-Catholic secular culture and saw the role of literature as evoking ‘a feeling of dependence on the unearthly world’ in the reader.31 While his debate with Kralik started as a disagreement about the status and role of Catholic literature, it soon turned into an argument that brought together both literary critical and theological questions. As Kralik put it in his 1909 pamphlet, his exchanges with Muth and other pro-modernist thinkers amounted to questions that pertained to issues occupying contemporary modernist and neo-scholastic theologians: Is there in this world something fixed, something lasting, something certain, or not? … If we answer with yes, we have knowledge as well as belief, religion, the church. If we answer with no, we have not only unbelief, religious doubt, hostility to the church, but also ‘Modernism,’ in science that means scepticism, hypercriticism, relativism; and as further consequences we have the ending of science, of morality, of life—we have nothing, despair, and chaos.32

The debate between Muth and Kralik engaged many German-speaking Catholic intellectuals. In September 1909, twenty-year-old Martin Heidegger, who at the time studied theology in Freiburg, delivered an anti-modernist talk in which he discussed ‘the disputes between the reviews Hochland and Gral, showing how Hochland was going too deeply into the waters of modernism’.33 As the Catholic daily Heuberger Volksblatt reported, he ‘forcefully encouraged his listeners, particularly the students, to subscribe to Gral and to join the organization publishing the review’.34 In the following year, Heidegger contributed opinion pieces endorsing anti-modernism to several Catholic journals, arguing that modernist attitudes ‘both promote and are promoted by weakness, delusion, and enslavement to the superficial, ephemeral, and “low”’.35 He contrasted that with the higher life of spirituality that he associated with Christian belief and the church as the ‘richest and deepest source of religious-ethical authority’.36 The issues discussed in the debate were of particularly incendiary nature as they touched on the question of identity of German-speaking Catholics, who, under Otto von Bismarck’s government, had been subject to the Kulturkampf (culture struggle) of the 1870–1880s.37 The period saw many Catholic priests in Prussia imprisoned and exiled, Catholic educational and ecclesiastical institutions placed under strict state control, Catholic newspapers censored or disbanded, and Catholic civil servants

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dismissed from their posts.38 A wave of anti-Catholic sentiment spread across Prussia and the German-speaking lands. ‘Invoking the language of “progress”’, Protestant Germans, as Róisín Healy contends, ‘conceived their struggle against Catholicism as a prerequisite for the modernization of the economy and society’.39 The ideological conflict was pitched as a clash of modern Protestant worldview against the backwater and irredeemably anti-modern Catholicism. As Helmut Walser Smith observes, ‘the repressive measures of the Kulturkampf deepened the cultural rifts, already existent, between Catholics and Protestants’ and led to a revival of ‘Catholic piety [that] expressed this politicization’.40 That piety frequently found expression in pilgrimages, in particular to sites of Marian apparitions, whose number visibly increased during the years of the Kulturkampf. Mary was reported to have appeared in Krüth and Issenheim (1872–1873), Dietrichswalde (1877), Marpingen (1876), and Metten (1878).41 The cult of Mary brought together marginalised Catholics and allowed them to express resistance through a development of ‘a vocabulary of opposition to the dominant culture of Germany, which when seen through Catholic eyes seemed to be elite, liberal, enlightened, Protestant, and German national’.42 Thus, the consequence of the Kulturkampf, which was explicitly aimed at unifying German culture around the concept of the nation, led to the widening of ‘the gulf separating the educated Protestant merchant from the pious Catholic underclasses’.43 In Jesse and Maria this gulf is portrayed by the deep chasm separating the well-educated nobleman Jesse von Velderndorff from the illiterate wife of the local forester, Maria Schinnagel, which is the source of the central conflict in the book. The early-twentieth-century debate about Catholic literature, as Paul Silas Peterson points out, was directly informed by the recent history of the Kulturkampf. The ‘marginalisation and “orientalization” of Catholicism’ by Protestant intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century provoked a strong response from Catholics.44 The Catholic resistance consisted in a rejection of what was perceived as modernising tendencies in contemporary Protestant-dominated culture. ‘[T]he critique of Protestantism and the anti-modernist front became central features of much of Weimar cultural Catholicism.’45 Kralik’s and Der Gral’s stance in the debate about Jesse and Maria was shaped by the anti-Protestant discourse that at the beginning of the twentieth century turned into an anti-­ modernist rhetoric. Handel-Mazzetti’s response to the controversy generated by her novel illustrates the ambiguous position in which German Catholic intellectuals found themselves in the 1900s. Initially, when

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confronted by critics from Der Gral’s circle, in a letter to Muth, Handel-­ Mazzetti described the process of artistic creation as she experienced it. Instead of viewing literature as a didactic platform to communicate a strictly Catholic worldview, she emphasised that when writing ‘she did not think of any audience’ and wrote in an ‘ecstasy’, with critical reflection coming only in the aftermath.46 Thus, she rejected the idea that aesthetics could be inferior to the ideological message to be conveyed through a literary text, highlighting the role of artistic inspiration instead. In this way, in 1904 she positioned herself alongside Muth and in opposition to Kralik’s circle. However, the publication of Jesse and Maria in a book form in 1906 brought about more hostile and damaging criticism. In 1909, Caspar Decurtins, professor of cultural history at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, published a pamphlet in which he argued that theological modernism, which had been effectively suppressed by the Pascendi encyclical, found a new outlet in literature.47 The pamphlet, published in German, French, and Italian to maximise its reach, singled out Handel-Mazzetti’s Jesse and Maria as an example of a novel that, according to the Catholic Decurtins, demonstrated modernist tendencies. Having analysed the novel in the context of the Pascendi encyclical, Decurtins concluded that: Everything in the novel is done to prove to the reader the relativity of religious experience. A careful reading of the encyclical Pascendi reveals Jesse and Maria to be the pioneer of the religious outlook that has been condemned; we do not know of any other literary product where religious subjectivism is celebrated with such perfected art as it is in Jesse and Maria.48

According to Decurtins, the fact that modernism as a theological movement had been condemned did not mean that its opponents could triumph since modernist thought could easily find outlet in other areas, including literature and art. He argued that the assumption that modernism was a strictly theological movement was erroneous. Supporting this argument with a close-reading of Jesse and Maria, Decurtins emphasises that the novel expresses religious ideas condemned in the Pascendi encyclical and suggests that ‘all religions [might] be equally true and untrue’.49 According to him, the literary version of modernism could be even more dangerous than theological modernism since it is not ‘the folios of theologians and philosophers’ but ‘popular fiction’ that can bring about quick change in social attitudes.50 Hence, Decurtins attempts to mobilise his

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readers, arguing that the struggle against modernism has not ended, but is just beginning, and its current field is contemporary literature, which according to him has ‘left the soil of Christianity’, as it promotes ‘wild subjectivism’ and seeks to create ‘a new religion for the new people’.51 With the publication of Decurtins’s pamphlet, an initially contained debate about German Catholic literature escalated into an international controversy about the presence of intellectual tendencies that had been condemned as heretical in 1907  in contemporary literature written and read by Catholics. Decurtins communicated his key thesis directly to Pope Pius X and received a response in which the pope thanked him for his warning against the modernist tendencies in literature and conceded that Catholics should ‘strongly denounce and repel such insidiousness’.52 Thus, the view that literature may become a means of spreading heretical ways of thinking while disguising itself as harmless entertainment received validation from the highest Catholic authority. As Bernhard Doppler points out, the papal letter challenged the view that the condemnation of modernism in 1907 had nothing to do with literature, as the Catholic critics associated with Hochland tried to maintain.53 The pope’s endorsement of Decurtins’s thesis about the presence of theological modernism in literature placed both Handel-Mazzetti and Muth together with Hochland in a precarious position, as they argued for the independence and freedom of artistic creation. In view of the sustained attacks on her text, on 23 October 1910 Handel-Mazzetti issued a statement that she sent to a number of newspapers and magazines. She attempted to clarify her stance and present herself and her work as fully compliant with the Vatican’s position. She referred to herself as ‘a faithful and obedient daughter of the Church’ who always wished to comply with ‘the orders and wishes of the Holy Father in everything, including my humble art’.54 In an unprecedented move for a lay writer, she followed the wording of the anti-modernist oath imposed on priests and candidates to priesthood: ‘with due reverence, I submit and adhere with my whole heart to the condemnations, declarations, and all the prescripts contained in the encyclical Pascendi and in the decree Lamentabili’, adding that she ‘committed neither open nor hidden modernism’ and did not engage in ‘relativism’, ‘agnosticism’, the ‘theory of immanence’, ‘criticism of dogmas’, or ‘subjectivism’, ‘except in the points of art [where this was] permissible’.55 Through this statement of submission, which took Muth and other members of the Hochland circle by surprise, Handel-Mazzetti sought to distance herself from the group of thinkers who were in danger of being

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placed under censure so as to avoid having her works put on the Index. Indeed, this public submission led to the pope sending her an apostolic blessing with a note expressing his gratitude for the drama on Sophie Barat, founder of the Society of the Sacred Heart, that she had penned earlier that year. Muth and his circle considered Handel-Mazzetti’s step unnecessary and harmful and did not follow in her steps.56 Their uncompromising stance, which maintained that in aesthetic matters writers were free to experiment and it was hardly possible to produce aesthetically sophisticated literature while considering it a didactic tool to impart dogmatic and moral instruction, ultimately led to Hochland being placed on the Index in 1911. The dispute between Muth and Kralik came to an end, and in the May 1911 issue Der Gral printed a letter from Pope Pius XI, which endorsed and praised their work.57 The pope asserted that he agreed with the Catholic critics who, like Kralik and his followers, denied that ‘religious spirit which exhibits a type of beauty that is perfect and uncircumscribed by any limits cripples the spirit of poets’.58 On the contrary, he pointed out that they ‘rightly maintain that in Christian poetics the beauty of art is united with the honesty and splendour of truth, and it serves to that end’, and art should not provide a ‘playful delight of the soul’, but it should embrace its didactic nature and see itself as ‘the real fruit of public usefulness’.59 The pope clearly sided with the view of art and literature that reduced it to a tool of instruction, considering aesthetics to be subordinate to doctrinal correctness. Before Hochland was placed on the Index, it managed to publish a German translation of Antonio Fogazzaro’s novel The Saint (Il Santo), which explored the idea of a reform taking place in the Catholic Church. When it was first published in Italian in 1905, little indicated that it would soon become a worldwide bestseller. It was translated into English, French, German, and Dutch in 1906, with Hungarian, Spanish, and Portuguese translations appearing in 1907, and Czech in 1911.60 This astonishing amount of international attention was a direct result of the text being censored by the Vatican and put on the Index in July 1906. As the English translator observes in her 1906 preface, the book became ‘the storm centre of religious and literary debate’, which won it enormous popularity.61 The novel can, in fact, be read as a fictionalised account of the modernist controversy. The saint of the title, Piero Maironi of Brescia (later Benedetto), is a reformed Catholic and a mystic who comes to believe that if Catholicism is to survive, a movement of renewal needs to be initiated from within the church. The movement should explore a dynamic

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understanding of Christian tradition and focus on personal religious experience. The views expressed by the main character can be said to correspond with Fogazzaro’s own stance. As a Catholic writer who firmly supported the reform of the church, he took part in regular meetings with Italian-based modernists, such as Giovanni Semeria, Pio Molajoni, Romolo Murri, Ernesto Buonaiuti, and Geremia Bonomelli. He also corresponded extensively with modernist thinkers and sympathisers across Europe— including Friedrich von Hügel in England, Henri Bremond in France, Marian Zdziechowski in Poland, and Karl Muth in Germany—and his letters demonstrate detailed familiarity with the thought of Alfred Loisy, Lucien Laberthonnière, Maurice Blondel, and George Tyrrell.62 In the course of the novel, the repentant Maironi, known as monk Benedetto, begins to gain a reputation of a saint among the local peasant community. He embodies the spirit of humility and repentance and calls for a reform within the church. In the second chapter, which according to Laura Wittman motivated the Vatican censure, Benedetto participates in a meeting of both Catholic and Protestant religious intellectuals, priests, and theologians from Italy, Germany, and France.63 This includes the gentle Benedictine Don Clemente, the down-to-earth Abbé Marinier, and Professor Giovanni Selva, a mystic and a biblical scholar. They all ‘desire reforms in religious instruction, in the ceremonies, in the discipline of the clergy, reforms even in the highest sphere of ecclesiastical government’, and they are convinced that ‘[v]ery probably a large number of pious and cultured people in the Catholic world feel as we do’.64 In the words of Dom Clemente, their imperative is to ‘point out this necessity, standing the while on absolutely Catholic ground, looking for the new laws from the old authorities, bringing proofs that if these garments which have been worn so long and in such stormy times, be not changed, no decent person will come near us’.65 The novel’s portrayal of the movement for the church reform emphasises its heterogeneity. The way the meeting of these reform-­ minded thinkers and clergymen is presented evokes both a sense of intellectual rigour and a historical reflection on the evolution of the church, as exemplified by Professor Andrea Minucci and Professor Giovanni Selva, and deep religious piety, as embodied by Abbé Marinier and Dom Clemente. In their gathering, different and often contradictory perspectives on how the reform of the church could be achieved are discussed and analysed, from philosophical revival, through liturgical and dogmatic reform, to social activism, which reflects the diverse and multi-dimensional nature of the movement of theological modernism as Fogazzaro knew it

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first-hand. Ultimately, Abbé Marinier voices his scepticism about the possibility of an intellectual movement being able to achieve any real change: I do not believe any good can be achieved through this league. Associations may be useful in helping to raise salaries, they may promote industries and commerce; but science and truth, never. […] Science and religion progress only through the individual, through the Messiah. Have you a saint among you? Do you know where to look for one? Then find him and let him march forward.66

In the course of the novel Benedetto becomes the designated saint of the movement, and his personal transformation into a pious man who leads a life of prayer gives visible spiritual force to the movement. As Wittman points out, ‘he inhabits from the beginning a liminal space, on the edge of silence: he is an orphan, of parents one Catholic and one Protestant’, and his mystical experiences escape the framework of Catholic dogmas, drawing the reader’s attention to the unconscious, the inner self, and personal experience.67 By placing emphasis on Benedetto’s saintliness and inner transformation, Fogazzaro highlights the significance of the mystical tradition and ways in which it can inform the proposed reforms. When speaking about his understanding of church history and tradition, Benedetto employs the evolutionary metaphor of the tree, borrowed from Loisy, thus becoming a spokesperson for the modernist movement that would be condemned by the pope in 1907, a year after The Saint was placed on the Index.68 Talking to a group of disgruntled reformists who are considering the option of breaking with the Catholic Church, Benedetto argues: My friends, you say: ‘We have rested in the shade of this tree, but now its bark is splitting, is being dried up, the tree will die; let us seek another tree.’ The tree will not die. If you had ears you would hear the movement of the new bark which is forming, which will have its span of life, which will crack, will be dried up in its turn, only to be replaced by another coat of bark. The tree does not perish, the tree grows.69

Benedetto positions himself as a reformer working from within the church whose intention is not to break away from it or start a schism, but to initiate a movement of organic renewal. He is granted an audience with the pope, whom he urges to heal the ‘four wounds’ from which the church is suffering: ‘the spirit of falsehood’, ‘the spirit of clerical domination’, ‘the spirit of avarice’, and ‘the spirit of immovability’.70 He describes the latter

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as the erroneous worship of the past in words strikingly similar to Tyrrell’s, Loisy’s, and other modernists’: [A]ll the religious men […] who to-day oppose progressive Catholicism, would, in all good faith, have caused Christ to be crucified in the name of Moses. […] It is the spirit of immovability which, by straining to preserve what it is impossible to preserve, exposes us to the derision of unbelievers; and this is a great sin in the sight of God.71

On hearing Benedetto’s diagnosis of the malaise afflicting the church, the pope acknowledges the need for reform, yet at the same time adds that he is not the one who will begin it, as he feels ‘old’, ‘weary’, and ‘ill’.72 Through this admission, the pope comes to embody the church hierarchy’s incapacity to begin the movement of renewal which stems partly from the lack of hope that it can be achieved and partly from the unwillingness to undertake such tremendous effort. The enthusiasm with which the novel was received internationally—it soon was considered ‘the mouthpiece of […] all intelligent Catholics in Italy’73—despite or, perhaps, thanks to the fact that it was placed on the Index just a year before the official papal condemnation of modernism, illustrates the widespread public interest in the ongoing theological controversy. The Saint challenged the discourse of neo-scholastic theology and did much to make the ideas discussed in the modernist circles enter the public domain, showing that the issues of the church reform and mystical renewal were interconnected. The book was read and intensely discussed by thinkers associated with the modernist movement. Newman Smyth, the American proponent of modernist theology who saw it as an ecumenical way forward for both Catholicism and Protestantism, considered The Saint a manifesto for the ongoing reform movement. He argued that: Fogazzaro has given voice to the feeling of the people, which, after too long ebb of irreligion, seems now to be coming in as a flood tide of social religious renovation. It has been said with truth that this novel Il Santo bears very much the same relation to reform in the Roman Church that Uncle Tom’s Cabin bore to the anti-slavery agitation. A cause which finds living expression in a great novel, which the people take to heart, cannot fail.74

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In a similar vein, the Polish philosopher Marian Zdziechowski in his book on modernist theology, Pestis perniciosissima (1905), contended that Fogazzaro’s writings powerfully express the most important ideas of the movement.75 In his personal correspondence with the writer, Zdziechowski hailed him as an author who ‘can direct the spiritual longings (langueurs spiritualistes) that are being reborn on the terrain ravished by materialism and positivism towards the Christian ideal’.76 He was invested in disseminating Fogazzaro’s texts internationally, especially among Russian readers, to promote new currents in Catholic thought as widely as possible. The importance of the book was also acknowledged by literary critics and writers. The British Catholic author Virginia Mary Crawford considered The Saint an ‘epoch-making book’ that was both a significant literary and cultural achievement.77Admiring its ‘high literary qualities’, she contended that: In Il Santo, the outcome of several years’ labour, Fogazzaro has presented his mature convictions concerning those fundamental principles of religion, morality, and national well-being which it has been the aim of his life’s work to uphold. The novel is frankly a book of the moment, and the sensation it has produced is due in no small measure to the fact that it gives expression to ideas hitherto lying dormant in the consciousness of the nation for lack of a popular exponent.78

For Crawford, the novel ought to be read as a ‘powerful appeal’ to the Italian laity ‘not to be content to profess a merely formal and conventional creed, but to cultivate with the intellect, no less than with the will, a faith that shall be as a vitalising power penetrating their whole lives’.79 In a similar vein, the American critic and author William Roscoe Thayer, in his review of the novel emphasised its ‘extraordinary power and pertinence’, which is testified by the debate it has generated.80 ‘Some regard it as a thinly disguised statement of a creed; others, as a novel pure and simple; others, as a campaign document (in the broadest sense); others, as no novel at all, but a dramatic sort of confession. The Jesuits have had it put on the Index; the Christian Democrats have accepted it as their gospel.’81 Thayer praises the novel for its artistic qualities and intellectual depth and criticises the ‘myopic censors’ who placed the novel on the Index, predicting that ‘it will be sought by a still wider circle, eager to see what the doctrines are, written by the leading Catholic layman in Italy, at which the Papal advisers have taken fright’.82

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When The Saint was placed on the Index, Fogazzaro chose to accept the ecclesiastical sanction and agreed not to republish the work. In a letter of submission published in L’Avvenire d’Italia on 21 April 1906, he stated: ‘I decided to obey the decree, as it is my duty as a Catholic to do, or rather not to dispute it, not to work against it by authorizing further translations and reprints apart from those which were contracted before the decree, and are impossible to break’.83 Some of the modernists who came to his defence, including Ernesto Buonaiuti, were disappointed with Fogazzaro’s stance. However, as Olivia Santovetti points out, Fogazzaro ‘did not abjure or disown his own work’.84 He continued to correspond with modernist thinkers and advocate church reform, but he ‘wished to carry out the project of reform from within, under the ecclesiastical authorities’.85 Both Handel-Mazzetti’s and Fogazzaro’s novels contributed to the popularisation of the theological questions that had been debated in the circles of ecclesiastics and scholars of religion, and the wide attention they gained was a direct result of the criticism and censure they met with from the church authorities. In the wake of the controversies evoked by the publication of their novels, the two writers—aware that their fictional works entered the theological controversies in a forceful way—chose to position themselves as working from within the church. The fact that Handel-Mazzetti and Fogazzaro were put under pressure to issue public statements confirming their submission to the ecclesiastical authorities shows that the contemporary novel, due to its capacity of reaching wide reading audience, was seen as a real threat to maintaining theological orthodoxy.

Orthodoxy and Heresy in Literary Criticism As W. B. Yeats pointed out in 1928, the ‘new Thomist movement in literary criticism’ was a phenomenon that a man of letters could hardly ignore.86 T. S. Eliot, likewise, considered the movement ‘a very significant current of contemporary thought, which has already affected many minds besides those of technical metaphysicians, and many persons not included in the Roman communion’.87 The movement was directly informed by the modernist crisis in theology and shaped by literary scholars who followed the religious debates and began to transplant some of the terms, concepts, and metaphors employed in the modernism versus neo-scholasticism debate into their critical writings. The way in which theological concepts were applied to literature was neither always coherent nor consistent. By the 1920s, as Eliot pointed out, the ‘influence of neo-Thomism has

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reached many persons who have probably never read a word of St. Thomas’.88 Indeed, at times the mixing of literary and theological idioms led to misunderstandings and alienated authors, critics, and readers who were taken aback by the sudden incursion of theology into the field of literary criticism, as was the case with Eliot’s After Strange Gods. The impact of the theological controversy on the language of literary criticism can be traced back to the time of the Pascendi encyclical, which was issued in September 1907. Soon afterwards, T. E. Hulme delivered ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ in London.89 In the talk, he compared the evolution of poetry to that of religion: The latter stages in the decay of an art form are very interesting and worth study because they are peculiarly applicable to the state of poetry at the present day. They resemble the latter stages in the decay of religion when the spirit has gone and there is a meaningless reverence for formalities and ritual. The carcass is dead and all the flies are upon it.90

Hulme’s description of religious ‘formalities and ritual’, which become the object of ‘meaningless’ worship despite the fact that ‘the spirit has gone’, follows the arguments of modernist theologians who advocated liturgical and dogmatic reform. In his lecture, Hulme argued that historically the recognition of ‘the fluidity of the world and of its impermanence’ generated fear and an urge to ‘construct things of permanence’.91 Examples of such constructions can be seen, according to Hulme, ‘[m]aterially in the pyramids, spiritually in the dogmas of religion’.92 Hulme’s view parallels modernist theologians’ argument that the world of the spirit undergoes constant evolution and the fixity of the dogmas provides only illusory stability, doing injustice to the ongoing revelation. Arguing from what he describes as the ‘standpoint of extreme modernism’ and comparing the world of the spirit with that of poetry, Hulme advocates an openness to new poetic forms, the ‘new spirit’ that has to find new forms of expression.93 Among these forms he pays particular attention to poetry that dispenses with ‘the crude pattern of rhetorical verse’ and relies on images instead.94 Identifying the origin of older forms of poetry with ‘a religious incantation’, he goes on to argue that ‘one of the great blessings of the abolition of regular metre would be that it would at once expose all this sham poetry’.95 Hulme’s characterisation of his position as that of ‘extreme modernism’ seems quite accurate. His identification of regular metre and syllabic verse with religious dogmas and his proposal to abolish them in

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modern verse follow in the footsteps of the more radical modernist arguments. While the modernist theologians frequently employed an arboreal metaphor to illustrate the organic growth of Christian doctrine, pointing to the fact that each year a tree renews itself by growing new branches and leaves, the metaphor Hulme opts for is that of an egg shell: One might sum it all up in this way: a shell is a very suitable covering for the egg at a certain period of its career, but very unsuitable at a later age. This seems to me to represent fairly well the state of verse at the present time. While the shell remains the same, the inside character is entirely changed. It is not addled as a pessimist might say, but has become alive, it has changed from the ancient art of chanting to the modern impressionist, but the mechanism of verse has remained the same. It can’t go on doing so. I will conclude, ladies and gentlemen, by saying, the shell must be broken.96

While the modernist theologians argued that the old forms can be revisited and renewed in the process of ecclesiastical reform, Hulme’s argument—when translated onto the field of literary criticism—is more ‘modernist’ and radical. The egg shell has to be broken for the new life to see the light of day. Once broken, the egg shall can be discarded since it has served its function. The use of syllabic verse and metre in modern poetry, in Hulme’s view, is ‘cramping, jangling, meaningless, and out of place’.97 It has to make space for the new. While in his lecture on modern poetry Hulme took the ‘extreme’ modernist position, a few years later in his essay on ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ he endorsed the neo-scholastic side of the theological debate.98 He developed a critique of romanticism in literature that was informed and shaped by the neo-Thomist critique of theological modernism with its emphasis on personal experience, individualism, and mysticism. In his paper, Hulme connects romanticism to the philosophic tradition dating back to Rousseau, who at the time was a regular target of neo-Thomist attacks. Defining the terms ‘romanticism’ and ‘classicism’, Hulme associates the former with a view that ‘man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance’ and the latter with the idea that man ‘is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent’.99 For Hulme, classicism is historically linked to the church, since it is ‘absolutely identical with the normal religious attitude’—‘the Church has always taken the classical view since the defeat of the Pelagian heresy and the adoption of the sane classical dogma of original sin’.100 If classicism denotes

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the norm in the context of religious views, romanticism, Hulme argues, is a kind of perversion: You don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.101

In his essay, Hulme defines the two terms traditionally used in literary periodisation by resorting to a religious framework shaped by the modernist controversy. The manner in which he critiques romanticism for ‘blurring the clear outlines of human experience’ is in line with the neo-scholastic arguments waged against modernist theologians, who were considered to deify man in the tradition of Rousseau. While Hulme sets out to speak about literary critical terms, his entire discussion of romanticism and classicism circles around philosophy and religion. Indeed, he acknowledges that of what those terms mean in poetry, he ‘can only say that it means the result of these two attitudes towards the cosmos, towards man, in so far as it gets reflected in verse’.102 He does not go much further than providing examples for what he considers romantic and classical attitudes in literature, with ‘[o]n the one hand […] such diverse people as Horace, most of the Elizabethans and the writers of the Augustan age, and on the other side Lamartine, Hugo, parts of Keats, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Swinburne’.103 He argues that the romantic conviction that man is infinite and essentially good has shaped not only writers’ worldviews as expressed in their works, but also the readerly expectations. Thus, poetic verse began to be associated with ‘emotions that are grouped round the word infinite’.104 According to him, the ‘essence of poetry to most people is that it must lead them to a beyond of some kind’, which is the romantic inheritance that Hulme critiques.105 ‘So much has romanticism debauched us’, he complains, ‘that, without some form of vagueness, we deny the highest’.106 What he longs for is classical verse that ‘is always perfectly human and never exaggerated: man is always man and never a god’.107 Hulme’s prediction is that the romantic sensibility has become exhausted and will soon come to an end, and a classical revival is about to begin.

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Hulme’s way of framing the question of classicism and romanticism owes much to the modernist controversy. His sympathy is clearly on the side of classicism, which according to him views human nature as finite and limited, marred by original sin, and in need of order and structures that would provide a stable frame of reference. This is the attitude that Hulme associated with the norm in the context of religion, sharing in the neo-Thomists’ opposition to Rousseau’s view of man as essentially good and noble. Considering the seemingly contradictory ways in which Hulme engages with the theological debates—taking a modernist position in ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ and an anti-modernist one in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’—he can be dubbed, in Henry Mead’s words, as an ‘anti-­ modern modernist’.108 Ultimately, Hulme endorsed the neo-scholastic rejection of modernism that allowed him to develop his own philosophical system. In Speculations (1924), he argues for a recognition of ‘absolute divisions’ between the inorganic world (mathematical and physical science), the organic world (biology, psychology, and history), and the world of ethical and religious values.109 ‘There must be no continuity, no bridge leading from one to the other’, he emphasised.110 Ignoring the discontinuity between the three worlds has lead, according to Hulme, to many misunderstandings in the fields of religion, philosophy, science, and literature. He is particularly critical of the modernist theologians who adopted Bergson’s thought and identified the élan vital as active simultaneously in human consciousness, in nature, and in the supernatural world, ignoring the discontinuities between those different planes of reality. ‘Biology is not theology, nor can God be defined in terms of “life” or “progress”’, Hulme contends, arguing that ‘Modernism entirely misunderstands the nature of religion’.111 His critique of contemporary theology and philosophy is multifaceted, as he opposes both materialistic frameworks and modernist-­ inflected thought: Two sets of errors spring from the attempt to treat different regions of reality as if they were alike. (1) The attempt to introduce the absolute of mathematical physics into the essentially relative middle zone of life leads to the mechanistic view of the world. (2) The attempt to explain the absolute of religious and ethical values in terms of the categories appropriate to the essentially relative and non-absolute vital zone, leads to the entire ­misunderstanding of these values, and to the creation of a series of mixed or bastard phenomena, which will be the subject of these notes. (Cf. Romanticism

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in literature, Relativism in ethics, Idealism in philosophy, and Modernism in religion.)112

Hulme considers both romanticism in literature and modernism in religion as products of a fundamental misunderstanding of the absolute chasm between the reality of human life and the supernatural reality of religion. ‘The divine is not life at its intensest. It contains in a way an almost anti-­ vital element’, he contends.113 His argument draws on a key aspect of the modernism versus neo-scholasticism debate as it poses a question of whether the divine can be intimated on the human plane through, for example, mystical experience, which the modernists saw as a bridge built over the radical chasm that Hulme claimed to be unbridgeable. The contradictions in the positions Hulme defended and critiqued in his early lecture on modern poetry and in his later writings demonstrate a sustained reflection on the issues posed by the modernist crisis of 1907 and the ongoing theological debates. They provided Hulme with a springboard to develop his critical method, which allowed him, on the one hand, to draw on the modernist critique of excessive dogmatism and defend the rejection of rhyme and metre in favour of free verse experimentation, and on the other—following the neo-scholastic dismissal of what neo-Thomists saw as a Rousseauian naivety of modernist thinkers—advocate forsaking poetry that promotes excessive emotionalism and blurs the boundaries between the human and the divine. Hulme’s thought had a significant impact on a number of modernist authors and critics, including Wyndham Lewis. In his Time and Western Man, published in 1927, Lewis embarks on a lengthy critique of what he refers to as ‘time-philosophy’.114 He uses this term to bring together a number of seemingly disparate concepts that he considers to display features of mechanistic thought. Philosophies and literary works that view history as a process, celebrate constant change, focus on the flow of time, and present reality in a state of flux, according to Lewis, deprive the self of stability, free will, and agency. He directs his critique of time-philosophy at Bergson, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and Oswald Spengler, on the one hand, and writers such as Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein, on the other. In order to challenge those who, in his view, promote the increasing instability of the self, Lewis frequently draws on the neo-scholastic critique of theological modernism to support his points. At the same time, he does not endorse either neo-Thomism or theological modernism, finding fault with both positions.

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Among the time-philosophies that he sets out to challenge, Lewis identifies ‘a very considerable theological literature’, inspired by James’s The  Varieties of Religious Experience.115 Discussing it, he finds himself ‘march[ing] with the “thomist”’, though he emphasises that he cannot fully endorse the neo-scholastic position.116 While he admits that neo-­ scholasticism ‘says many shrewd and damaging things about “modernism”’, which puts forward an evolutionary vision of time that Lewis fundamentally opposes, he nevertheless distances himself from ‘a tyrannic orthodoxy’ and ‘herd-discipline’ of neo-Thomism.117 At the same time, he is drawn to its reliance on reason as opposed to the ‘irresponsible and lonely gushings of “intuitive” heart’.118 Lewis positions himself as an interpreter of the theological debate, aptly summarising the modernist controversy and reframing it in quite a surprising way: There is a great deal of popular misunderstanding about the catholic, or thomist, position, and one point may be cleared up for the reader not at all acquainted with these theologies. The dispute between the thomist and the average ‘Idealist’ or Absolutist, is not at all a dispute between, on the one hand, a ‘religious’ man, and, upon the other, an ‘irreligious’ man. In a sense it is quite the opposite. As things stand today, it is not a paradox to say that the catholic is much the less ‘religious’ of the two. Indeed, it would not be at all a paradox to say that the catholic position […] is that of the irreligious, or non-religious mind, in contrast to the God-hungry mysticism of the James type.119

Lewis designates the Thomist position as ‘non-religious’ because it is based on everyday experience of the external world, ‘the solid ground’ of reality in which one searches for proofs of God’s existence.120 In opposition to this, the modernists seek to find God through the world of inner experience, and this God—as Lewis contends—turns out to be the ‘evolutionist God in-the-making, who is not, but who is a non-existent progressive potential Something that is pushed along and “upwards” (it is noisily hoped) by the advance of evolving mankind’.121 The position ideologically closest to Lewis’s is that of neo-Thomist rationalism. ‘That characteristic traditional health of the catholic mind’, he pronounces, ‘is an island in the midst of our “decadence” and “decline,” whose airs it is invigorating sometimes to breathe.’122 In the literary critical chapters of Time and Western Man, Lewis argues that modern time-philosophy permeates not only scholarship and

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intellectual debates, but also literary production. ‘Without all the uniform pervasive growth of the time-philosophy starting from the little seed planted by Bergson, discredited, and now spreading more vigorously than ever, there would be no Ulysses, or there would be no A la Recherche du Temps perdu.’123 He identifies signs of time-philosophy in the structure and composition of Joyce’s Ulysses, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, and Gertrude Stein’s Composition as Explanation and Three Lives. He attempts to prove that all those works demonstrate the victory of ‘the time-cult, which is the master-­concept of our day’.124 While some of the criticisms that he levels at those works may not sound very convincing—as David Ayers points out, Time and Western Man is a ‘polemical’ work ‘directed against an ideological target’—the entire project of the critique of time-philosophy and its philosophical, theological, political, and literary expressions is deeply informed by the modernist controversy.125 This did not go unnoticed among Lewis’s contemporaries. Quite appropriately, on reading Time and Western Man, Yeats remarked that the book ‘fills [his] imagination’ and Lewis ‘reminds [him] of a Father of the Church’.126 In Men Without Art, published in 1934, Lewis revised some of his views, developing a more critical perspective on neo-Thomism. In his polemic with a neo-scholastic approach to literature, he argued that neo-­ Thomism propagates a contrived framework that allows ‘all the intellect-­ snobs all at once’ to reject the view that religion can be seen as ‘an affair of the heart’ with ‘complete contempt’ and to adopt a view of religion as ‘the more august machinery of the intellect’.127 This, he argues, can easily lead to Nietzschean arrogance: ‘religion’ may become the rendezvous of persons with powerful power-­ complexes out of a job, of social and intellectual snobs seeking an ‘authority’ outside their little ‘individualist’ selves for the most disagreeable forms of ‘individualism’ possible—and […] the (well-merited) contempt into which morals and moralists have fallen may provide a religious sanction for every inhumanity […].128

In a personal attack on T. S. Eliot and his Criterion, which he dubbed a ‘strange organ of Tradition’, Lewis argues that Eliot’s use of neo-Thomism in his literary criticism produced ‘an elaborate system of dogmatic insincerity’.129 He claims that in his endorsement of orthodoxy and tradition, Eliot ‘has allowed himself to be robbed of his personality, such as it is, and he is condemned to an unreal position’.130 Ultimately, this position,

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according to Lewis, may lead to a point when one has to ‘hide in a volatilized hypostasization of his personal feelings’, since impersonality that Eliot argues for is humanly impossible.131 For Eliot, by the 1920s it was clear that ‘neo-Thomism has some of the appearance of a literary and philosophic mode. It represents, beyond its strictly theological import, a reaction against such philosophies as that of Bergson, against Romanticism in literature and against democracy in government’.132 He credited Jacques Maritain as both a philosopher and ‘the leading propagator’ of neo-Thomism for the widespread popularity of the movement. Eliot himself did much to promote neo-Thomism as the editor of the Criterion. This is what led Lewis and other critics to accuse him of turning the Criterion into a platform for ‘Frenchified’ doctrine and ‘an exclusive Thomist club’.133 Eliot’s own critical writings of the late 1920s and early 1930s reveal a sustained attempt at incorporating the language and conceptual framework of theology into the field of literary criticism. A prime example of this, and perhaps a proof that the project was ultimately doomed to failure, is After Strange Gods, which bears a meaningful subtitle A Primer of Modern Heresy. The volume includes lectures that Eliot delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933. When preparing them, he informed Paul Elmer More that ‘the field of After Strange Gods was one to which [his] real interest had turned’, adding that ‘pure literary criticism has ceased to interest [him]’.134 In the introduction, Eliot informs his readers that he will assume ‘the role of moralist’.135 He proceeds to revisit the concept of tradition from the moral and religious point of view. As he remarks, the issue now ‘does not seem to [him] so simple as it seemed’ when he wrote ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’.136 When reformulating his definition of tradition, he includes ‘the maintenance of certain dogmatic beliefs’, but first and foremost ‘all those habitual actions, habits and customs, from the most significant religious rite to our conventional way of greeting a stranger’.137 Eliot emphasises the mutable and evolutionary character of tradition, in line with the view advocated by theological modernists. He points out that ‘what is a healthy belief at one time may, unless it is one of the few fundamental things, be a pernicious prejudice at another’.138 Therefore, one should exercise one’s critical faculties in evaluating ‘what in the past is worth preserving and what should be rejected’.139 To illustrate the development of tradition, Eliot uses a metaphor of the tree:

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We become conscious of these items, or conscious of their importance, usually only after they have begun to fall into desuetude, as we are aware of the leaves of a tree when the autumn wind begins to blow them off—when they have separately ceased to be vital. Energy may be wasted at that point in a frantic endeavour to collect the leaves as they fall and gum them onto the branches: but the sound tree will put forth new leaves, and the dry tree should be put to the axe.140

Using the arboreal image frequently employed by modernist theologians, Eliot offers an understanding of tradition as an organic entity that grows (and dies) according to its own natural cycle. Having established the meaning of the term tradition and the ultimate conditions for its development, which include social stability and cultural and religious homogeneity, Eliot introduces two further concepts derived specifically from the discourse of theology: orthodoxy and heterodoxy (or heresy). Alluding to Hulme’s essay on ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ and Eliot’s own critical debate with John Middleton Murry, he states that ‘the concept of orthodoxy’ appears to him ‘more fundamental (with its opposite, heterodoxy, for which I shall also use the term heresy) than the pair classicism-romanticism which is frequently used’.141 According to Eliot, the concepts of tradition and orthodoxy are complementary. The key difference for him is that tradition and its elements are largely unconscious, ‘whereas the maintenance of orthodoxy is a matter which calls for the exercise of all our conscious intelligence’.142 Tradition, in Eliot’s view, ‘must be perpetually criticised and brought up to date under the supervision of […] orthodoxy’.143 Heresy, on the other hand, is a way of thinking that is ‘not simply […] wrong’ but also ‘partly right’ and is ‘apt to have a seductive simplicity, to make a direct and persuasive appeal to intellect and emotions, and to be altogether more plausible than the truth’.144 When this framework is applied to literary works, one can differentiate, according to Eliot, between three types of contemporary literature. The first one is a ‘superfluous kind of writing’ that attempts to do ‘what has already been done perfectly’.145 It fails, because it lacks originality, and assumes that tradition stands still. The second type ‘aims at an exaggerated novelty’ but in fact consists in ‘fundamental commonplaceness’.146 Finally, the third type is writing that is ‘worth taking seriously’.147 While Eliot does not call any of the three types orthodox or heretical, he emphasises that it is ‘disastrous’ for a writer to ‘deliberately give rein to his “individuality”’ and ‘cultivate his differences from others’.148 That moves readers to

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appreciate not the tradition that the writer works in, but his or her alleged uniqueness. ‘It is fatally easy, under the conditions of the modern world’, Eliot contends, ‘for a writer of genius to conceive of himself as a Messiah’.149 The argument he puts forward about contemporary literature, tradition, and orthodoxy is that ‘when morals cease to be a matter of tradition and orthodoxy—that is, of the habits of the community formulated, corrected, and elevated by the continuous thought and direction of the Church— and when each man is to elaborate his own, then personality becomes a thing of alarming importance’.150 Moving towards a neo-Thomist position, Eliot is concerned that excessive attention directed at individual experience and personality alongside a growing disregard for orthodoxy might drive contemporary writers into the position where they might mistake their human emotions for the divine message. Eliot provides several examples of this tendency in contemporary literature. He considers Yeats’s early poetry, arriving at a conclusion that his ‘“supernatural world” was the wrong supernatural world. It was not a world of spiritual significance, not a world of real Good and Evil, of holiness or sin, but a highly sophisticated lower mythology summoned […] to supply the fading pulse of poetry with some transient stimulant.’151 He critiques Thomas Hardy’s ‘extreme emotionalism’, which he associates with romanticism and the belief that ‘there is something admirable in violent emotion for its own sake’, which Eliot clearly disagrees with.152 The other ‘almost perfect example of the heretic’ is D.  H. Lawrence. While Eliot admits that Lawrence’s ‘vision is spiritual’, he qualifies it as ‘spiritually sick’.153 It is purely individualistic and not shaped or restricted by tradition. Thus, it can mislead many readers who are ‘hungry for any form of spiritual experience’.154 In contrast to those negative examples of what he considers heretical writing, Eliot puts forward texts that he sees as properly shaped by tradition and firmly grounded in ‘a world of Good and Evil’: Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, James Joyce’s The Dead, and Henry James’s Turn of the Screw. Eliot explains that the aim of his application of moral criticism to literature by transplanting theological terms such as ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’ onto the discourse of literary criticism was twofold. First, he aimed to demonstrate that ‘you cannot restrict the terms “romantic” and “classical,” as professors of literature conveniently do, to the literary context’, since they also point to the world of values that have been under extensive debate in the circles of philosophers and religious thinkers.155 Second, he attempted to show the nature of ‘the dangers of authorship to-day’ and

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suggest ‘that there are standards of criticism, not ordinarily in use, which we may apply to whatever is offered to us as works of philosophy or of art, which might help to render them safer and more profitable for us’.156 Those standards, according to Eliot, can serve as an ‘external test of the validity of a writer’s work’, helping the reader distinguish between ‘the truth of [the author’s] view of life and the personality which makes it plausible’.157 The key issue recurring throughout the three lectures—that of the contrast between works that acknowledge the external world of values (i.e., orthodox works) and those that focus on personal visions (i.e., heretical works)—is in line with Hulme’s distinction between classical works that see the human being as finite and in need of redemption, and the romantic vision that emphasises infinite possibilities and turns into ‘spilt religion’.158 When preparing his lectures for publication, Eliot decided to include a pedagogically informed appendix with exercises ‘offered primarily to those who may be interested in pursuing the subject by themselves’.159 He provides four examples of contemporary texts, ‘beginning with very simple examples of heresy, and leading up to those which are very difficult to solve’.160 The exercises that Eliot designed show that his proposal to introduce theologically informed criticism into the field of literary criticism was a challenge to be taken up by his readers. Interestingly, however, the four examples of heresy that he provided in the appendix all come from non-­ literary texts: lectures, talks, and essays by John A.  Hobson, Cyril Norwood, Herbert Read, and John MacMurray.161 What this demonstrates is that the question of how to apply the concepts of ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’ to literature remained unresolved even for Eliot himself, especially since his analysis of Lawrence’s or Hardy’s writings seemed largely impressionistic and antagonised many of his contemporaries. Ultimately, After Strange Gods, just like Lewis’s Time and Western Man, remains a polemical intervention that testifies to the impact of the modernist crisis and the ensuing theological debates on the field of literary criticism. While with hindsight it is clear that Eliot’s attempts to reshape the field of literary criticism through such interventions failed, his critical texts show that he traversed the theological debates in idiosyncratic ways. He shared in the modernist theologians’ view of tradition as an organic ever-changing entity, yet at the same time endorsed the neo-Thomist concerns about the disappearance of the external dogmatic framework that would validate personal experience.

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‘Rancid’ Theology and ‘Pure Poetry’ While literary critics such as T. E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, and T. S. Eliot attempted to incorporate theological concepts into the discourse of literary criticism in the hope of arriving at a more incisive critique of contemporary tendencies in literature, a number of religious intellectuals looked to literature in general, and poetry in particular, as a source of renewal of theological idiom. George Tyrrell in Medievalism (1908) pointed to the disconnect between the formalistic discourse of neo-scholastic theology and the living experience of faith. ‘[W]hen we preach to the people what Christ preached— the coming of God’s Kingdom, the baptism of repentance and a new life— we feed them with bread’, he argued, ‘when we preach scholasticism, we feed them with words and wind’.162 The remedy that Tyrrell envisaged was modernist theology that is ‘living and growing’, that ‘cannot be presented with the clearness and definiteness of a theology that is finished and dead, and that is impervious to the quickening influence of contemporary culture’.163 Contemporary culture, particularly literary culture, was also considered an important influence by Anglican modernists. Canon B. H. Streeter, who in 1927 became T. S. Eliot’s godfather, argued that since for ‘the discussion of moral and religious questions, the younger generation […] are largely dependent on writers like Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. H. G. Wells’, a contemporary theologian ‘must imitate Mr. Wells to the extent of thinking, writing, and preaching in the language of the contemporary world’.164 According to Streeter, the modernist theologians’ rapprochement with contemporary literature was a risky but worthwhile venture that could result in the development of a new mode of theological inquiry. In a similar vein, the writer R. Ellis Roberts argued at the Anglican Church Congress in Cheltenham in 1928 that ‘the mystical approach to God, that is the attempt to attain an immediate apprehension of his being and character, is found in England, as elsewhere, first in the poets’.165 Literary works that explored the topic of religion approached the question of theological language in a similarly critical manner, pointing to a modern exhaustion of the traditional idiom of theology. In Antonio Fogazzaro’s The Saint, the reform-minded Abbé Marinier speaks of the Catholic Church as an ancient temple where ‘only a dead language may be spoken aloud’, while ‘living languages may only be whispered there’.166 The mystic Fernando Ossorio in Pío Baroja’s Road to Perfection refers to ‘the word’ of dogma as ‘the enemy of the feeling’.167 The young priest in Georges Bernanos’s The Diary of a Country Priest ponders on the fact that

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the clergymen he knows ‘stick to austere theological doctrine expressed in words so trite and hackneyed as to be certain of shocking nobody’.168 In his bleak reflections on contemporary Catholicism, he comes to a conclusion that many priests ‘supposedly standing for law and order, are merely clinging on to old habits, sometimes to a mere parrot vocabulary, its formulae worn so smooth by constant use that they justify everything and question nothing’.169 The views expressed by these fictional characters were shared by contemporary theologians, religious thinkers, and writers across different denominations. The launch of the new Irish literary journal To-morrow in 1924 saw the publication of two poetic manifestos. The first one, ‘To All Artists and Writers’, penned by W. B. Yeats, pronounced: We proclaim that we can forgive the sinner, but abhor the atheist, and that we count among atheists bad writers and Bishops of all denominations. […] What devout man can read the Pastorals of our Hierarchy without horror at a style rancid, coarse and vague, like that of the daily papers? […] We condemn, though not without sympathy, those who would escape from banal mechanism through technical investigation and experiment. We proclaim that these bring no escape, for new form comes from new subject matter, and new subject matter must flow from the human soul restored to all its courage, to all its audacity.170

Yeats’s condemnation of the ‘rancid, coarse and vague’ language of contemporary bishops chimes in with Tyrrell’s critique of scholastic theology. It is through the language of poetry that allows for more imaginative exploration of the spiritual that the editors of To-morrow aimed to address this issue. More radical thinkers, like the anthropologist Jane Harrison, postulated complete abolition of theology as a discipline that has exhausted its potential and lost justification for its very existence. In an address delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, she argued: ‘Theology is the letter that killeth, religion the spirit that maketh alive, and, if the good ship Religion is to live in to-day’s turbulent waters, we must not shrink, we must throw overboard the Jonah of theology.’171 Harrison found the idea of theology as a discipline that is governed by reason and logic entirely futile since it could not possibly produce an understanding of something that by definition cannot be comprehended by reason. ‘It is not only that the particular forms of theology are dead’, she argued, ‘but that the idea

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of theology—i.e., a science of the unknowable—is, if not dead, at least, I venture to think, dying. God and reason are contradictory terms.’172 Cyril M. Picciotto, a founder of the Cambridge Heretics Society, in his Via Mystica (1910) pointed out that the mystic has always been aware of the fact that ‘to try to express his sensations in language is about the same as for the surgeon to use a scythe for a subtle and delicate operation in the eye’.173 According to him, mystics have been traditionally mindful of the shortcomings of language and used it as an instrument that is always already inadequate. He identifies a strong affinity between the language of mysticism and that of art. ‘Mystical religion’, he contends, ‘has always gone hand in hand with art: art has begun to wither when the cold winds of rationalism have blown’.174 Thus, while scholastic theologians have endorsed reason and used language to make rational arguments about the divine, mystics, on the contrary, operated on a different plane, working with language in a creative manner. Evelyn Underhill, contemporary authority on the topic of Christian mysticism, makes a similar point in her seminal volume Mysticism (1911), arguing that ‘mysticism joins hands with music and poetry’ through its use of symbolic language, which she defines as ‘the clothing which the spiritual borrows from the material plane’.175 She points out that mysticism ‘forms an interesting link with poetry which—in so far as it is genuine and spontaneous—is largely the result of subliminal activity’.176 In her view, both the mystic and the poet translate reality (which, for the mystics, can take the form of the ‘voice of the Absolute’) ‘into terms of rhythm and speech’, since all ‘true poets’ have an innate ‘mystical sense’.177 The affinity between the language of mysticism and that of poetry, and between mystical and poetic experience, was explored by both religious thinkers and literary scholars. The question at the heart of those explorations pertained to the modern understanding of the relationship between religion and aesthetics. The perceived collapse of the traditional discourse of theology (and the sense of imminent threat to the unity of European culture that it brought about) added a sense of urgency to these considerations. The issue was explored by prominent thinkers, philosophers, and writers across Europe, including Vladimir Solovyov and Nicolas Berdyaev in Russia, Marian Zdziechowski and Stanisław Brzozowski in Poland, Henri Bremond, Jacques Maritain, and Ramon Fernandez in France, and T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, and John Middleton Murry in Britain, to name just a few. In the aftermath of World War 1, one of the key issues discussed in literary critical debates was the question of how to redefine the

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relationship of the domain of aesthetics to that of religion. The thinkers who tackled that question differed in their understanding of the relationship of art and metaphysics, with, for instance, Berdyaev and Bremond elevating the meaning of a creative act by emphasising the proximity of the poetic and mystical experiences, while Hulme and Maritain, on the contrary, insisting on an unbridgeable gap between them and the subordination of art to religion. The scope and depth of those disagreements became evident in the 1920s, with a heated exchange between Henri Bremond, a modernist ex-­ Jesuit and literary scholar, and Jacques Maritain, a neo-Thomist philosopher and cultural critic. Their writings on religion and art, which demonstrate conflicting views on the relationship between the aesthetic and the religious, were soon translated into a number of European languages. They provide a particularly interesting example of how theological modernism and neo-scholasticism entered and reshaped the literary critical scene of the period. The questions posed by Bremond and Maritain in France travelled fast across Europe and the Atlantic, and featured prominently in John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi and T. S. Eliot’s Criterion in Britain, Karl Muth’s Hochland in Germany, Władysław Korniłowicz’s Verbum in Poland, and the Jesuit Studies in Ireland. As Herbert Read recalls in his memoir, ‘[t]he problem of poetry and belief was endlessly discussed in these years 1925–30, in conversation and in print’.178 The way in which Bremond’s and Maritain’s ideas came to play a prominent role in the literary and religious debates between Eliot and Murry, and Miłosz and Gombrowicz, testifies to the cultural significance of issues raised by religious intellectuals of the period. Closer attention to these debates reveals an urgency with which the subject of the relation between aesthetics and metaphysics was approached. When Henri Bremond was elected to the Académie Française in 1924, he was already a well-known figure in the French intellectual circles, both as a Catholic thinker, ex-Jesuit and theological modernist, and a literary scholar.179 However, he was yet to deliver the paper that would establish his international reputation. On 24 October 1925, at the annual meeting of the Institut de France, he chose to discuss the idea of ‘pure poetry’ (‘la poésie pure’). His address met with both immediate praise and objections and marked the beginning of what Albert Thibaudet referred to as the ‘tournament of pure poetry’.180 As Henry Decker remarks:

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There was then hardly a journal concerned with the literary movement of the time which did not offer either an article contributing to the discussion or a commentary upon it. […] The widespread interest it created, and the number of writers of solid contemporary standing, added to those of permanent stature, who took part or at least cared to comment, make it the central literary controversy of the period.181

In October 1926, Bremond published his lecture accompanied by Robert Souza’s response as The Pure Poetry (La Poésie Pure) together with the volume Prayer and Poetry (Prière et Poésie). The latter appeared in English in Algar Thorold’s translation as Prayer and Poetry: A Contribution to Poetical Theory in 1927.182 Other translations soon followed: German in 1929, Czech in 1935, and Spanish in 1947. Bremond conceived of ‘pure poetry’ as ‘a special knowledge’ born in poetic experience that ‘permits the poet to surpass the order of abstract ideas, or arguments, and to achieve the concrete, the real itself, insofar as one can attain it here below’.183 He insisted that this knowledge ‘is not sub-  but is super-rational; a superior reason, more rational than the other’.184 Poetry, thus, becomes a means of reaching out towards the ‘real’, which Bremond equated with arriving at transcendence and establishing contact with the divine. In Prayer and Poetry, Bremond traces back his interest in the idea of ‘pure poetry’ to A. C. Bradley’s lecture ‘Poetry for Poetry’s Sake’ delivered at Oxford in 1901.185 Bremond reminisces: I still remember, after twenty years, the deep impression these pages made upon me. I did not understand them very well, but I felt that the reason of my incomprehension was my rationalist and anti-mystical prejudices. Since then these pages have not ceased to work in me, and if in my turn, I have been able to advance a step towards the solution of this unique problem, it is to Mr. Bradley, after Newman and the mystics, that I owe it.186

Having overcome his ‘anti-mystical prejudices’, Bremond took as his starting point Bradley’s assertion that the poet ‘does not address himself to the discursive reason of his readers’.187 Bradley contests the notion of poetry as a didactic tool, arguing that its function is not to convey any moral instruction, teaching, or argument. According to Bradley, ‘pure poetry’ is not an expression of a preconceived and defined content—it is something that ‘springs from the creative impulse of a vague imaginative mass pressing for development and definition’.188 The process of writing consists in

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giving shape to this ‘imaginative mass’, yet it is not something of which the poet is able to take entire control: ‘For only its completion can reveal, even to him, exactly what he wanted. When he began and while he was at work, he did not possess the meaning; it possessed him’.189 Since the poet cannot claim to possess the meaning of the poem before it has been written, Bradley refers to poetry as ‘both discovery and creation in one’.190 The revelatory and creative aspect of poetry makes it enter the ‘higher realms where poetry touches religion and philosophy’.191 The purity of poetry that Bradley refers to consists precisely in ‘the degree in which we feel it hopeless to convey the effect of a poem or passage in any form but its own’.192 He further argues that poetry, ‘content and form in unity, embodies in its own irreplaceable way something which embodies itself also in other irreplaceable ways, such as philosophy or religion’.193 On the one hand, Bradley points to the close affinity of poetry, religion, and philosophy, yet on the other, he is careful not to blur the boundary between them as he contends that poetry ‘cannot satisfy the needs’ that philosophy and religion meet. Bremond, inspired by Bradley’s lecture, redefines Bradley’s understanding of the purity of poetry, removing one of the distinctions that Bradley was cautious to maintain. He puts forward a vision of poetry that is much more closely aligned with religion than Bradley claimed it to be. According to Bremond, in the history of European culture, reason has been posed against poetry in a way similar to how it has been employed to derogate religion, which is one indication that poetry and religion share a special affinity. He defines this affinity as a ‘psychological mechanism’ that allows the mystic and the poet to arrive at what he calls ‘unitive knowledge’.194 Bremond distinguishes here between conceptual, discursive knowledge that can be arrived at by means of reason and conveyed through the language of ideas and arguments, and a higher type of knowledge that includes the conceptual, yet goes beyond it, and leads to ‘the apprehension of the real’.195 One of the crucial questions that Bremond attempts to answer is the problem of whether and how such knowledge can be communicated. He enquires: Is he then, qua poet, condemned to silence? Yes and no. His poetical experience not being a rational activity, not placing him in relation with truth by the intermediary of ideas, that experience remains in itself ineffable. The most beautiful words in the world cannot translate it, since words only translate ideas. From another point of view, it is a certain fact that the poet

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cannot hoard that experience for himself. The more magnificent it is, and therefore the more ineffable, the more he feels the need of communicating it.196

Thus, even though poets cannot fully express their experience in the language of ideas, they attempt to do it in order to ‘communicate to us a certain shock, to train us to be worthy of a certain experience, to raise us to a certain condition’.197 According to Bremond, to understand the situation of the poet better, it is worth comparing poetic creation to mystical experience. In their psychological design they are essentially the same, they only vary in the degree of intensity: ‘it is in […] more or less vivid apprehension of the real that these diverse states resemble each other’.198 Another difference that Bremond points out is the degree to which such an experience can be communicated: The more of a poet any particular poet is, the more he is tormented by the need of communicating his experience […]. The more of a mystic any particular mystic is, the less he feels this need of self-communication, and the more such communication seems to him impossible, should he have the desire to make it, as, indeed, in point of fact it is, all mystical grace supposes, ‘an absolutely gratuitous and free intervention on the part of God.’199

Bremond proposes to view the poet as somebody who, on the one hand, follows in the footsteps of the mystic and is offered insight into the divine reality, yet on the other hand, rejects the ultimate fulfilment in order to be able to communicate this experience: ‘mysticism is absolutely transcendent; poetic experience is, indeed, a preliminary sketch of mystical experience, but a sketch which, on the one hand, calls for the brush to complete it, and, on the other, rejects it’.200 The first among Anglo-American critics to comment on Bremond’s theory was Paul Souday, who contributed an article on ‘pure poetry’ to the New York Times Book Review in November 1925.201 His view of Bremond’s theory was highly critical. According to Souday, it did not offer much new insight and, in fact, was a misappropriation of Edgar Allan Poe’s and Paul Valéry’s thought (what Souday does not mention in his review, however, is that Bremond acknowledged the importance of Poe’s and Valéry’s ideas, but distanced himself from them). Souday argues that Bremond’s grounding of ‘pure poetry’ in mystical experience and his references to God-given inspiration are dubious and ‘extremely chimerical’.

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He proposes to return to Poe’s understanding of this notion as ‘rational harmony of verbal music’ rather than consider it in terms of ‘inspiration from on high’ that cannot be proved to exist.202 In Britain, Bremond’s theory found a more receptive audience, as it touched upon several questions that have already been raised in the debate between T. S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry. Both Murry and Eliot found it important to clearly define their stances on the perspective offered by Bremond. His work was first reviewed by Murry in the Adelphi and the Times Literary Supplement. Eliot did not write a review himself, but solicited it from the critic Mario Praz, who shared his views on poetry and mysticism.203 Bremond’s work was subsequently discussed by Herbert Read and Wyndham Lewis. Despite the fact that Bremond enthusiastically referred to John Middleton Murry’s work in Prayer and Poetry, in his Adelphi review Murry disagreed with the central argument of Bremond’s work. While he emphasised that he considered it exceptional that the ‘pure poetry’ debate was inspired by a Roman Catholic priest, he still believed that, due to his allegiance to Catholic orthodoxy, Bremond compromised the ideas that he could have developed further. According to Murry, the poetic experience cannot be understood as inferior to religious experience, either in its nature or degree of intensity. ‘No, though I am willing—none more willing—to grant an affinity between the poetic and the religious experience’, Murry argues, ‘I cannot for one moment allow that the poetic experience is a subaltern form of the religious experience.’204 Murry claims that it is a common misconception that the end of the mystical path consists in the union with God. He argues that ‘the true and perfect mystic only ascends to the One in order to descend once more to the Many with the knowledge of its Oneness to sustain him’.205 Thus, he blurs the subtle distinction between the poet and the mystic that Bremond was careful to maintain. Murry supports his argument with the example of Jesus, whom he considers a great mystic who uttered his truth by means of ‘the living, creative and significant word’.206 In a review published in the Times Literary Supplement a year later, Murry points out a further problem with Bremond’s work, which is its ambiguous approach to the notion of the ‘purity’ of poetry. On the one hand, Bremond connects it to the creative process and the experience of the poet, and on the other, he devotes a considerable amount of time discussing the readers’ response, which according to him should consist in a similar type of experience. This,

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Murry points out, unnecessarily complicates Bremond’s ‘brilliant little lecture’.207 When Eliot asked Mario Praz, with whom he exchanged ideas about metaphysical poetry, to review Bremond’s work for the Criterion, Praz submitted a critique of the theory of ‘pure poetry’ written from a perspective opposite to Murry’s. Referring to Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism (Art et Scolastique, 1920), Praz contests Bremond’s thesis that the experience of the poet and that of the mystic by means of their psychological design partake in the same order of knowledge.208 He insists on maintaining a distinction between the two and presents Maritain’s strict distinction between the aesthetic and the mystical as an authoritative view, objecting to Bremond’s ‘conception of poetic activity as a sort of falling off from a mystical state’.209 Thus, while Murry criticised Bremond for not elevating poetry high enough and making it subordinate to religion, Praz, on the contrary, finds fault with Bremond’s theory on the grounds that it places poetic creation too close to mystical experience. For Praz, Bremond turns out to be too radical in his views, for Murry, not radical enough. Praz’s reference to the authority of Maritain, who was hailed by Eliot as ‘probably the most powerful force in contemporary French philosophy’, is not accidental.210 It was in line with the neo-scholastic revival and the growing popularity of neo-Thomist aesthetics, which offered a new, potentially promising framework to reimagine the relationship between religion and art. Maritain’s essay ‘Frontiers of Poetry’ (‘Frontières de la Poésie’), which was translated into English by Eliot and published in the Criterion in 1927, challenges many of Bremond’s basic assumptions.211 Maritain postulates two dimensions of art: its transcendental ‘essence’ and its ‘conditions of existence’ in this world. According to Maritain: All things (like intelligence and art) which touch upon the transcendental order and are realised either in a pure state in God, or ‘by participation’ in created subjects, hold such an antinomy. In the very measure that they tend (with an ineffectual but real tendency) to the plenitude of their essence taken in itself (transcendentally), and in its pure formal line, they tend to pass beyond themselves, to cross the limits of their essence taken in a created subject (with the specific determinations belonging to it), and at the same time to escape from the conditions of existence.212

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Thus, the purity that Bremond ascribes to poetry, in Maritain’s view is impossible, as it would imply complete transcendence. He argues that ‘to command our art to be art in a pure state, by effectively freeing itself from all the conditions of existence in the human object, is to desire to usurp for it the aseity of God’.213 Maritain argues for the recognition of a radical separation between religion and art. For him, the ultimate creative impulse belongs to religion; art does not create but ‘transforms, displaces, brings together again, transfigures’.214 While Maritain assumes a definition of poetry as ‘the divination of the spiritual in the sensible’, he is careful not to equate poetry with metaphysics. For him the latter ‘isolates the mystery in order to know it’, whereas the former ‘manipulates it and uses it as an unknown force’.215 The problem of modern art that Maritain draws attention to is its inability to recognise that it is different from metaphysics. This failing leads to constant disillusionment and dissatisfaction. According to Maritain, ‘modern art does penance, it wears itself out, mortifies itself, flagellates itself like an ascetic who is mad to destroy himself in order to obtain the grace of the Holy Spirit, and who often remains empty of what a child has in abundance’.216 Just like Bremond, Maritain seeks to provide his theory with a historical dimension, presenting the condition of contemporary art as an end result of a pursuit of ‘the frontiers of the mind’ that began in the Renaissance, when art first ‘opened its eyes on itself’.217 A similarly important development of self-consciousness, Maritain argues, took place in twentieth-­ century art, and in Picasso’s paintings one can see ‘a terrible progress in self-knowledge’.218 The progress is ‘terrible’ because, despite all its self-­ transgressions and self-mortifications, art is not capable of offering anyone ‘eternal sustenance’. If one attempts to find the absolute in poetry, Maritain warns, he or she may be easily misled as poetry will offer a ‘counterfeit of the supernatural and the miraculous’.219 Using language that recalls the vocabulary of the Pascendi encyclical, he asserts: Disguised as an angel of counsel, it [poetry] will lead the human soul astray on false mystical paths. Its spirituality, turned aside from its own direction and proper place, under the guise of an internal drama entirely profane, will give a new issue to the old heresies of the free spirit.220

Art in general, and poetry in particular, according to Maritain, should strive to recognise their limits, originating in their conditions of existence.

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While they can always ‘tend to’ purity, they should have the awareness that they cannot ever reach this state. Maritain makes a definitive claim that: it is only in the theological light that art can advance to final self-knowledge, and cure itself of the false metaphysics that obsess it. By showing us where moral truth and the authentic supernatural are, religion spares poetry the error of thinking it was made to transform ethics and life; protects it against presumption.221

The ‘final self-knowledge’ of art, then, consists in an acceptance of the fact that art belongs to the natural, not the supernatural, order. Maritain contends that ‘the sole end of art is the work itself and beauty’.222 He rejects Bremond’s argument that poetic inspiration differs only in degree from the divine grace that mystics experience, asserting that art ‘does not reside in an angelic mind’ and insisting that while poetic inspiration belongs to the natural order, divine inspiration is part of the supernatural order.223 Maritain also does not consider art, as Bremond does, a mode of knowing. In his system, epistemology belongs to what he calls ‘the speculative order’ of mind, whereas aesthetics is the domain of ‘the practical order’, whose ‘orientation is towards doing, not to the pure inwardness of knowledge’.224 Art makes a ‘work of beauty’, which produces ‘joy or delight in the mind through the intuition of the sense’, but cannot generate knowledge.225 ‘The perception of the beautiful’, Maritain argues, ‘is related to knowledge, but by way of addition […]; it is not so much a kind of knowledge as a kind of delight’.226 Delight ‘stirs desire and produces love’, yet does not give access to truth.227 For Maritain, then, ‘the artist, if he is not to shatter his art or his soul, must simply be, as artist, what art would have him be—a good workman’.228 Art cannot claim to be a source of any supernatural knowledge or mystical apprehension. It belongs entirely to the natural world and its essence is circumscribed by its conditions of existence. Its only connection with the supernatural is that ‘from afar off, without thinking, it prepares the human race for contemplation, […] the spiritual joy of which surpasses every other joy’.229 However, what this preparation exactly involves, Maritain does not explain. In the conclusion of ‘Frontières de la Poésie’, Maritain discusses the important role that theology has to play in restoring the balance between art and religion that has been upset by fashionable ‘mystical’ speculations that neglect intellect and reason. He considers these speculations detrimental to Christian tradition and warns that:

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henceforward it is from ‘religion’ and the mind, and no longer from matter and ‘science’, that we must look for the great danger of the century. […] A reign of the heart, which is not first of all a reign of truth, a Christian revival, which is not first of all theological, would but hide suicide under the guise of love. The age swarms with fools who look down on reason.230

Thus, the ideas that Bremond and Murry would, in one form or another, advocate are dubbed by Maritain the ‘heresies of the free spirit’ and considered one of the spiritual threats of contemporary times. At the same time, critics of Maritain’s thought, such as Murry, argued that it is not modern psychological perspective that should be regarded as dangerous, but the inflexibility and alleged ‘objectivism’ of the neo-Thomist system.231 In his 1926 volume Messages, Ramon Fernandez, critic, philosopher, and a frequent contributor to the Criterion, offered a critique of Maritain, contending that ‘Thomism is the work of a thought already terminated, a conception that has looped the loop’, and Maritain constructs ‘a metaphysic incommensurable with modern experimental intelligence’.232 For Fernandez, Thomism ‘does not belong to the same spiritual baking’ as the modern man and thus fails to engage with the pressing spiritual issues of modernity.233 ‘It links up, frames, and dominates problems which are not those we are anxious to solve’, Fernandez concludes.234 The debate on ‘pure poetry’ soon drew further contributors, including Herbert Read and Wyndham Lewis. Read devoted a full chapter to ‘pure poetry’ in his 1928 volume Phases of English Poetry.235 His key argument was that while Bremond provided an insightful way of thinking about poetry, his ‘romantic phraseology’ obscured the issue.236 According to Read, Bremond’s explanation of the poetic effect was too vague. Read addressed that issue by proposing to focus on three elements of poetry: sound, sense, and suggestion.237 Suggestion, Read states, ‘covers all those vague notions which the Abbé Bremond has wrapped in a fluff of romantic terms, such as “mystery”, “enchantment”, “intimate nature of the soul”, “magic”, and so on’.238 Even very subjective states and emotions, in order to be expressed in words, have to be subjected to intelligence, Read argues. If the poet were to fully renounce their intelligence in a mystical-like manner, they would not be able to write poetry. ‘This problem is fundamental’, emphasises Read: it is more profound than the distinction between romanticism and classicism, for after all a writer may be quite objective (and therefore classical)

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about his own subjective (and therefore romantic) reactions or feelings. This is no less than the problem of art or no art—of whether the writer is to control his means of expression (keep his eye on the object, as we say), or whether he is merely to abandon himself to the stream of feeling—to incantations, evocations, vague reveries, and false mysticism.239

According to Read, even if the element of suggestion does originate in a ‘stream of feeling’, it has to be subdued by intelligence for it to be expressed in words. ‘The only mystery in poetry resides in the nature of the reality which poetry attempts to express’, he concludes.240 Ultimately, however, he concedes that even though Bremond presented poetic process as too ‘mysterious’ and ‘elusive’ since some of its elements (sound, sense, suggestion) can be analysed rationally, there is ‘no rational explanation of the process of imagination’ which binds them together.241 Read’s moderate critique of ‘pure poetry’ can be contrasted with Wyndham Lewis’s scathing repudiation of Bremond’s theory in Time and Western Man. Lewis identifies a strain of ‘mystical bergsonism’ in Bremond’s thought, and since he considers Bergson to be practising ‘intellectual fraud’, he sees little value in the concept of ‘pure poetry’.242 While he regards the distinction that Bremond makes between poetry and prose sensible, he views Bremond’s interpretation of poetic experience as that of ‘a religionist’.243 He is far more interested in mysticism, to say the least of it, than he is in poetry—“pure” or otherwise. And that seems to me what is the trouble with him, as with so many other propagandists; namely, that he is a religionist, masquerading as an artist or critic of art, or philosopher. […] Bremond addresses his attention to art in the interests of religious mysticism […]. What is wanting in the world of the mystic of dogmatic religion we know. He is in very low water indeed. The artist might have anticipated his visit […].244

Lewis proposes to view Bremond’s theory as a symptom of a wider issue of religious crisis. He suggests that ‘pure poetry’ is a concept endorsed by those who are determined to find a way to revitalise religion, but the problem with their approach is that it treats art and poetry in a purely instrumental manner. Lewis points out that literary critics should reject such theories as they do not add to the understanding of aesthetics and only serve to obfuscate critical discourse.

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Having registered his fundamental disagreement with Bremond’s method, he nevertheless proceeds to say that ‘all M.  Bremond and M. Souza substantially say about the nature of artistic expression is true’.245 Taking exception to ‘their way of expressing themselves’ and ‘their motives’, Lewis agrees with their position ‘where the matter of the “spiritual” character of creation is concerned’.246 At the same time, he distances himself from the final conclusion of Bremond’s theory. ‘For me’, Lewis states, ‘art is the civilized substitute for magic; as philosophy is what, on a higher or more complex plane, takes place of religion. By means of art, I believe […] M. Bremond wish[es] to lead us down and back to the plane of magic, or of mystical, specifically religious, experience.’247 While Lewis accepts that an artist may be inspired by religious emotion, he insists that ‘it is exercised personally’ and it should not be interpreted within the framework of dogmatic religion.248

Conclusion The modernist crisis in theology and the ongoing debates between theological modernists and neo-scholastics were an important part of the cultural landscape of the early twentieth century. They made their way into both the fiction and the literary criticism of the period. Enrica von Handel-­ Mazzetti’s Jesse and Maria and Antonio Fogazzaro’s The Saint provide examples of novels that fictionalised some of the contemporary theological debates, challenging the rigid view of dogmatic orthodoxy. The controversies around the reception of both titles show that they were read as texts of highly topical significance that helped to disseminate the key questions of the theological debates among lay readership. The fact that both authors faced the threat of their works being placed on the Index of Prohibited Books and they both chose to make public statements to confirm their submission to the Catholic hierarchy demonstrates that the novels were viewed as a significant threat by ecclesiastical authorities. The debates between the theological modernists and neo-Thomists had a formative influence on the field of literary criticism as well. Contemporary critics who considered their work to have important philosophical and religious implications, such as T.  E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, and T. S. Eliot, drew on the language of theology and began to employ concepts derived from contemporary theological debates in their literary critical works. They used the theological terms ‘modernism’ and ‘neo-scholasticism’ (or ‘neo-Thomism’) in parallel with the literary critical

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terms ‘romanticism’ and ‘classicism’ to indicate the continuity of thought and sensibility that they traced across the domains of literature, philosophy, and religion. The concepts of orthodoxy, heresy, and heterodoxy, and the questions of individual experience, the inner voice, mysticism, dogmatic tradition, order, and authority—the most important topics of the ongoing theological debates—recurred frequently in their writings. While contemporary critics transplanted theological idiom onto the field of literary criticism, theologians and religious intellectuals looked to literature, in particular poetry, for a source of renewal of the theological discourse that was seen as excessively formalised and detached from the modern world. The ‘pure poetry’ debate, which began with a lecture given by Henri Bremond in 1924, continued well into the 1930s and engaged writers and critics across Europe and in the United States. It threw into relief the problem of defining the relationship between poetry and religion in the context of the spiritual revival of the interwar years as well as new emerging research into the human psyche. The ‘pure poetry’ debate and the attempts of Hulme, Eliot, and Lewis to adapt theological terminology to the needs of literary criticism show how the ongoing theological debates reshaped the discourse of literary criticism, in particular the understanding of the distinction between the concepts of ‘romanticism’ and ‘classicism’, which were mapped onto the terms ‘modernism’ and ‘neo-scholasticism’, as well as ‘heresy’ and ‘orthodoxy’. The integration of theological idiom into literary criticism expanded its breath and introduced the dimension of metaphysics into the discussions of contemporary literature. At the same time, by linking aesthetics with issues of moral and eschatological gravity, critical works such as Eliot’s After Strange Gods highlighted the shortcomings of theologically inflected literary criticism, which could easily turn into an exercise in heresy hunting, emulating the language of Pope Pius X’s Pascendi encyclical.

Notes 1. Paul Valéry, ‘Pure poetry,’ in The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot, with an introduction by T.  S. Eliot (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), 186. 2. Ibid., 186. 3. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Censorship and St Thomas Aquinas,’ in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 10, ed. Colton Johnson (New York: Scribner, 2000), 211.

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4. Antonio Fogazzaro, Il Santo (Milano: Baldini, 1906); English translation: The Saint, trans. M. Prichard-Agnetti, 5th edn (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1906); Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti Jesse und Maria: Ein Roman aus dem Donaulande (Kempten: J. Kösel, 1906); English translation: Jesse and Maria, trans. George Nauman Shuster (New York: H. Holt, 1931). All quotations are from the English translations. 5. Derek Hastings, ‘How “Catholic” was the Early Nazi Movement? Religion, Race, and Culture in Munich, 1919–1924,’ Central European History 36, no. 3 (2003): 389. 6. Maria Critstina Giacomin, ‘Katholische Schriftstellerinnen im Literaturstreit: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen literarischer Emanzipation’, in Literatur—Gender—Konfession, Katholische Schriftstellerinnen I: Forschungsperspektiven, ed. Jörg Seiler (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 2018), 104. 7. For the programmatic manifesto of Hochland, see Karl Muth, ‘Ein Vorwort zu “Hochland,”’ Hochland 1 (1903–4): 1–8. 8. Jeffrey T. Zalar, ‘Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti (1871–1955),’ in Catholic Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, ed. Mary R. Reichardt (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 149. 9. Giacomin, 107. 10. Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti, Jesse and Maria, 6. 11. Ibid., 46, 79. 12. Ibid., 79. 13. Ibid., 232–3. 14. Ibid., 350–1. 15. For the programmatic manifesto of Der Gral, see Franz Eichert, ‘Gralfahrt—Höhenfahrt!,’ Der Gral 1 (1906): 1–7. 16. Richard S.  Geehr, The Aesthetics of Horror: The Life and Thought of Richard von Kralik (Boston: Brill, 2003), 38. 17. Quoted in Giacomin, 116. 18. Handel-Mazzetti, 215–216. 19. Ibid., 40. 20. Ibid., 37. 21. Richard von Kralik, ‘Ästhetische Prinzipien und praktische Folgerungen’ (1903) and ‘Ein literarisches Programm’ (1906–7), in Literarische Manifeste der Jahrhundertwende, 1890–1910, ed. Erich Ruprecht and Dieter Bänsch (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1970), 397–8, 404–6. 22. Quoted in Geehr, 43. 23. Richard von Kralik, Ein Jahr katolischer Literaturbewegung (Regensburg: J. Habbel, 1910). 24. [Karl Muth], Steht die katolische Belletristik auf der Höhe der Zeit?: Eine litterarische Gewissensfrage (Mainz: Kirchheim, 1898); ‘Die litterarischen

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Aufgaben der deutschen Katholiken. Gedanken über katolische Belletristik und litterarische Kritik, zugleich eine Antwort an seine Kritiker’ (1899), in Literarische Manifeste der Jahrhundertwende, 1890–1910, 374–7. 25. Muth, ‘Die litterarischen Aufgaben,’ 375. 26. Ibid., 375. 27. Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 28. Ibid., 376. 29. Ibid. 30. Markus Ries, ‘Zwischen Literaturstreit und Osterstimmung: Katholische Belletristik nach der Modernismuskrise’, in Antimodernismus und Modernismus in der katholischen Kirche: Beiträge zum theologiegeschichtlichen Vorfeld des II. Vatikanums, ed. Hubert Wolf (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1998), 283–297. 31. Carl [Karl] Muth, ‘Wem gehört die Zukunft?,’ in Literarische Manifeste der Jahrhundertwende, 1890–1910, 364. 32. Quoted in Geehr, 39–40. Emphasis in the original. 33. Quoted in Víctor Farías, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 34. 34. Ibid. See also Judith Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology: Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s Early Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), chapter 1: ‘Heidegger’s Religious Provenance: Kulturkampf and the Modernist Crisis’. 35. Wolfe, 14. 36. Quoted in Wolfe, 16. 37. See Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995) and Michael B.  Gross, The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in NineteenthCentury Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 38. Ronald J.  Ross, ‘The Kulturkampf: Restrictions and Controls on the Practice of Religion in Bismarck’s Germany,’ in Freedom and Religion in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Richard Helmstadter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 172–195. 39. Róisín Healy, The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany (Boston: Brill, 2003), 57. 40. Smith, 42, 46. 41. David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 42. Smith, 47. 43. Ibid., 46. 44. Paul Silas Peterson, The Early Hans Urs von Balthasar: Historical Contexts and Intellectual Formation (Boston: De Gruyter, 2015), 15–16.

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45. Ibid. 46. Quoted in Giacomin, 117. 47. Caspar Decurtins, Zweiter Brief an einen jungen Freund (Der Modernismus in der Literatur) (Basel: Volksblatt, 1909), 5. 48. Ibid., 13. 49. Ibid., 15. 50. Ibid., 16. 51. Ibid., 5. 52. Quoted in Bernhard Doppler, Katholische Literatur und Literaturpolitik. Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti: Eine Fallstudie (Königstein: Hain, 1980), 33. 53. Doppler, 33. See also Otto Weiß, Kulturkatholizismus: Katholiken auf dem Weg in die deutsche Kultur (1900–1933) (Regensburg: Pustet, 2014), 42–68. 54. Quoted in Doppler, 34. 55. Ibid. 56. Giacomin, 131–5. 57. Pope Pius X, ‘Dilectis Filiis Francisco Eichert ceterisque sodalibus e Societate litteratorum “Gralbund,”’ Der Gral 5, no. 2 (May 1911): 467–9. 58. Ibid., 467. 59. Ibid., 467–7. 60. See Laura Wittman, ‘Omnes velut aqua dilabimur: Antonio Fogazzaro, The Saint, and Catholic Modernism’, in Italian Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-Garde, ed. Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 130–166. 61. M. Prichard-Agnetti, ‘Introduction’, in Antonio Fogazzaro, The Saint, v. 62. Michele Ranchetti, The Catholic Modernists: A Study of the Religious Reform Movement, 1864–1907, trans. Isabel Quigly (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 103–114. 63. Wittman, 136–137. 64. Fogazzaro, 43–44. 65. Ibid., 55. 66. Ibid., 52–53. 67. Wittman, 140. 68. See Chap. 2, 27–39. 69. Fogazzaro, 246. 70. Ibid., 281–291. 71. Ibid., 287. 72. Ibid., 291. 73. Prichard-Agnetti, xv. 74. Newman Smyth, Passing Protestantism and Coming Catholicism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), 59–60.

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75. Marian Zdziechowski, Pestis perniciosissima: rzecz o współczesnych kierunkach mys'li katolickiej (Warszawa: Księgarnia E.  Wende i Spółka, 1905), 87. 76. Krystyna Jaworska, ‘Korespondencja Zdziechowskiego i Fogazzara,’ Przegla ̨d Humanistyczny 33, no. 10 (1989): 156. 77. Virginia M.  Crawford, ‘A Saint in Fiction,’ Fortnightly Review 79, no. 472 (1906): 661. 78. Ibid., 661. 79. Ibid., 667. 80. William Roscoe Thayer, ‘Antonio Fogazzaro and His Masterpiece,’ The North American Review 183, no. 597 (1906): 178. 81. Ibid., 180. 82. Ibid., 178. 83. Quoted in Ranchetti, 163. 84. Olivia Santovetti, ‘Metaliterary Fogazzaro: Bovarysme and Mysticism in Malombra (1881),’ Italian Studies 68, no. 2 (2013): 243. 85. Ibid. 86. Yeats, 211. 87. T.  S. Eliot, ‘Three Reformers: An unsigned review of Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau, by Jacques Maritain,’ in The Complete Prose of T.  S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 3, ed. Frances Dickey, Jennifer Formichelli, and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 508. 88. Ibid., 504. 89. T. E. Hulme, ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry,’ in The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 51. 90. Ibid., 51. 91. Ibid., 53. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid., 53–4. 94. Ibid., 54. 95. Ibid., 55. 96. Ibid., 56. 97. Ibid., 54. 98. See also Henry Mead, T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 99. T. E. Hulme, ‘Romanticism and classicism,’ in The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, 61. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid., 62. 102. Ibid., 62. 103. Ibid.

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104. Ibid., 66. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid. 108. Henry Mead, ‘Modernist Anti-Modernists: T. E. Hulme, “Spilt Religion” and “The Religious Attitude,”’ in Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse, ed. Erik Tonning, Matthew Feldman, and David Addyman (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 80–96. 109. T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1924), 5. 110. Ibid., 6. 111. Ibid., 8. See also Henry Mead, ‘T.  E. Hulme, Bergson, and The New Philosophy,’ European Journal of English Studies 12, no. 3 (2008): 245–260. 112. Hulme, Speculations, 10. Emphasis in the original. 113. Ibid., 8. Emphasis in the original. 114. Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993). See also David Ayers, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992); and Geoffrey Wagner, Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). 115. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 361. 116. Ibid. 117. Ibid., 362. 118. Ibid., 365. 119. Ibid., 364. 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid., 366. Emphasis in the original. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid., 87. 124. Ibid., 115. 125. Ayers, 73. 126. W. B. Yeats, ‘Letter to Olivia Shakespear, 12 January 1928,’ in The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), 734. 127. Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art (London: Cassell & Co., 1934), 216. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid., 95, 88. 130. Ibid., 88. 131. Ibid., 91. 132. Eliot, ‘Three Reformers,’ 504.

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133. Desmond MacCarthy and Laura Riding quoted in Jason Harding, ‘“The Just Impartiality of a Christian Philosopher”: Jacques Maritain and T.  S. Eliot,’ in The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism, ed. Rajesh Heynickx and Jan de Maeye (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010), 187. See also Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chapter 9: ‘A Religio-Political Organ’. 134. T. S. Eliot, ‘Letter to Paul Elmer More, 20 June 1934,’ in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 7, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber & Faber, 2017), 245. 135. T. S. Eliot, ‘After Strange Gods,’ in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 5, ed. Iman Javadi, Ronald Schuchard, and Jayme Stayer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 15. 136. Ibid., 17. 137. Ibid. 19. 138. Ibid. 139. Ibid. 140. Ibid. 141. Ibid., 20. Emphasis in the original. 142. Ibid., 25. Emphasis in the original. 143. Ibid., 45. 144. Ibid., 22–23. 145. Ibid., 22. 146. Ibid. 147. Ibid. 148. Ibid., 27. 149. Ibid., 28. 150. Ibid., 40. Emphasis in the original. 151. Ibid., 36. 152. Ibid., 40. 153. Ibid., 31. 154. Ibid., 44. 155. Ibid., 24. 156. Ibid., 45. 157. Ibid. 158. See Ronald Schuchard, ‘Did Eliot Know Hulme? Final Answer,’ Journal of Modern Literature 27, no. 1/2 (2003): 63–69; and Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chapter 2: ‘Hulme of Original Sin.’ 159. Eliot, ‘After Strange Gods,’ 45. 160. Ibid.

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161. The four passages included in the appendix are taken from John A. Hobson, The Moncure D. Conway Lecture: Rationalism and Humanism (London: Watts & Company, 1933), 40; Cyril Norwood’s address at the Conference of the Incorporated Association of Preparatory Schools: ‘Latin in the Schools,’ The Times, 21 December 1933, p.  11; Herbert Read, Form in Modern Poetry (London: Sheed & Ward, 1932), 18–19, and John Macmurray, The Philosophy of Communism (London: Faber & Faber, 1933), 62–63. 162. George Tyrrell, Medievalism: A Reply to Cardinal Mercier (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 157. 163. Ibid., 158. 164. Canon B. H. Streeter, ‘The Broad Church and Modernist Movement,’ in The Anglican Communion: Past, Present and Future: Being the Report of the Church Congress at Cheltenham, 1928, ed. Canon H.  A. Wilson (London: John Murray, 1928), 150. 165. R. Ellis Roberts, ‘Mysticism in the Church of England,’ in The Anglican Communion, 142. 166. Fogazzaro, 51. 167. Pío Baroja, Road to perfection: Camino de perfección, trans. Walter Borenstein (Oxford: Oxbow, 2008), 175. 168. Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest, trans. Pamela Morris (London: Boriswood, 1937), 36. 169. Ibid., 50. 170. H. Stuart [W. B. Yeats] and Cecil Salkeld, ‘To All Artists and Writers,’ To-morrow 1, no. 1 (August 1924): 4. 171. Jane Harrison, ‘Alpha and Omega’, in Alpha and Omega (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1915), 186. 172. Ibid., 206. 173. Cyril M. Picciotto, Via Mystica (Cambridge: Heffer and Sons, 1910), 8. On Cambridge Heretics Society, see Chap. 2, 61–62. 174. Ibid., 30. 175. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (London: Methuen, 1911), 80. 176. Ibid., 278. 177. Ibid., 126. 178. Herbert Read, ‘A Memoir’, in T.  S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, ed. Allen Tate (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), 35. 179. See Peter J.  Gorday, Pure Love, Pure Poetry, Pure Prayer: The Life and Work of Henri Bremond (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2018); Henry Hogarth, Henri Bremond: The Life and Work of a Devout Humanist (London: SPCK, 1950), and C.  J. T.  Talar, ‘The Historian and the Mystic: The Revisionist Vision of Henri Bremond’, Downside Review, 440 (2007), 157–196.

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180. Albert Thibaudet, ‘Réflexions sur la littérature: Poésie’, Nouvelle Revue Française 26 (January 1926): 104. 181. Henry Decker, Pure Poetry, 1925–1930: Theory and Debate in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 1–2. See also Leon Surette, The Modern Dilemma: Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and Humanism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 233–272. 182. Henri Bremond and Robert Souza, La poésie pure avec un débat sur la poésie (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1926); Henri Bremond, Prière et poésie (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1926); Henri Bremond, Prayer and Poetry: A Contribution to Poetical Theory, trans. Algar Thorold (London: Burns, Oats & Washbourne, 1927). 183. Quoted in Surette, 265–266. 184. Ibid. 185. The lecture was published as the opening chapter of A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1963). 186. Bremond, Prayer and Poetry, 66. 187. Ibid., 68. 188. Bradley, 23. 189. Ibid., 23–24. 190. Ibid., 172. Bremond quotes Bradley’s argument in Prayer and Poetry, 68–70. 191. Bradley, 24. 192. Ibid., 22. 193. Ibid., 25. 194. Bremond, Prayer and Poetry, 155. 195. Ibid., 155, 187. 196. Ibid., 75–76. 197. Ibid. 198. Ibid., 155. 199. Ibid., 189. 200. Ibid., 197. 201. Paul Souday, ‘Poe and the Theory of Pure Poetry,’ New York Times Book Review, 29 November 1925, p. 9. 202. Ibid. 203. John Middleton Murry, ‘Poetry and Prayer’, Adelphi 4, no. 7 (January 1927): 403–412; [John Middleton Murry], ‘Pure Poetry’, Times Literary Supplement, 25 October 1928, pp.  765–766; Mario Praz, ‘Review of Prayer and Poetry: A Contribution to Poetical Theory by Henri Bremond’, Criterion 8 no. 33 (July 1929): 740–745. Bremond’s work was also favourably reviewed by Maude Petre and E. Watkin in the Dublin Review: E.  Watkin, ‘The Philosophy of Henri Bremond’, Dublin Review 183

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(October 1928): 161–175; and Maude Petre, ‘Poetry and Prayer: A Recent Discussion’, Dublin Review 185 (October 1929): 177–193. 204. Murry, ‘Poetry and Prayer,’ 408–411. 205. Ibid., 408–409. 206. Ibid., 410. 207. Murry, ‘Pure Poetry’, 765. 208. Praz, ‘Review of Prayer and Poetry’, 741. 209. Ibid. 210. T. S. Eliot, ‘A Commentary’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, 3. 211. Jacques Maritain, ‘Poetry and Religion’, trans. F. S. Flint [T. S. Eliot], part 1, Criterion 5, no. 1 (January 1927): 7–22; part 2, Criterion 5, no. 2 (May 1927): 214–230. The essay was later retranslated by J. F. Scanlan and published as Jacques Maritain, ‘The Frontiers of Poetry,’ in Art and Scholasticism, with Other Essays, trans. J.  F. Scanlan (London: Sheed & Ward, 1930), 87–122. All quotations are given in Eliot’s translation. 212. Maritain, ‘Poetry and Religion’, 9–10. Emphasis in the original. 213. Ibid., 9. Emphasis in the original. 214. Ibid., 14–15. 215. Ibid., 15–16. 216. Ibid., 18. 217. Ibid., 19. 218. Ibid. 219. Ibid., 22. 220. Ibid. 221. Ibid., 218. 222. Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, 74. 223. Ibid., 78. 224. Ibid., 4. 225. Ibid., 57. 226. Ibid., 26. 227. Ibid. 228. Ibid., 37. 229. Ibid., 80. 230. Maritain, ‘Poetry and Religion’, 224–225. 231. John Middleton Murry, ‘Towards a Synthesis,’ Criterion 5, no. 3 (June 1927): 312. 232. Ramon Fernandez, Messages, trans. by Montgomery Belgion (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927), 269. 233. Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 234. Ibid. 235. Herbert Read, ‘Pure poetry,’ in Phases of English Poetry (London: Hogarth Press, 1928), 107–129.

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236. Ibid., 128. 237. Ibid., 116. 238. Ibid., 120. 239. Ibid., 122–123. 240. Ibid., 125. 241. Ibid., 128. 242. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 179, 182. 243. Ibid., 183. 244. Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 245. Ibid., 186. 246. Ibid. 247. Ibid., 188. Emphasis in the original. 248. Ibid.

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Picciotto, Cyril M. Via Mystica. Cambridge: Heffer and Sons, 1910. Pius X, Pope. ‘Dilectis Filiis Francisco Eichert ceterisque sodalibus e Societate litteratorum “Gralbund.”’ Der Gral 5, no. 2 (May 1911): 467–9. Praz, Mario. ‘Review of Prayer and Poetry: A Contribution to Poetical Theory by Henri Bremond.’ Criterion 8, no. 33 (July 1929): 740–745. Ranchetti, Michele. The Catholic Modernists: A Study of the Religious Reform Movement, 1864–1907. Translated by Isabel Quigly. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. Read, Herbert. ‘A Memoir.’ In T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, edited by Allen Tate, 11–37. London: Chatto & Windus, 1967. Read, Herbert. Phases of English Poetry. London: Hogarth Press, 1928. Ries, Markus. ‘Zwischen Literaturstreit und Osterstimmung: Katholische Belletristik nach der Modernismuskrise.’ In Antimodernismus und Modernismus in der katholischen Kirche: Beiträge zum theologiegeschichtlichen Vorfeld des II.  Vatikanums, edited by Hubert Wolf, 283–297. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1998. Roberts, R.  Ellis. ‘Mysticism in the Church of England.’ In The Anglican Communion Past, Present and Future: Being the Report of the Church Congress at Cheltenham, 1928, edited by Canon H. A. Wilson, 139–147. London: John Murray, 1928. Ross, Ronald J. ‘The Kulturkampf: Restrictions and Controls on the Practice of Religion in Bismarck’s Germany.’ In Freedom and Religion in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Richard Helmstadter, 172–195. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Santovetti, Olivia. ‘Metaliterary Fogazzaro: Bovarysme and Mysticism in Malombra (1881).’ Italian Studies 68, no. 2 (2013): 230–245. Schuchard, Ronald. ‘Did Eliot Know Hulme? Final Answer.’ Journal of Modern Literature 27, no. 1/2 (2003): 63–69. Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Smith, Helmut Walser. German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Smyth, Newman. Passing Protestantism and Coming Catholicism. New  York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908. Souday, Paul. ‘Poe and the Theory of Pure Poetry.’ New York Times Book Review, November 29, 1925, p. 9. Streeter, Canon B.  H. ‘The Broad Church and Modernist Movement.’ In The Anglican Communion: Past, Present and Future: Being the Report of the Church Congress at Cheltenham, 1928, edited by Canon H.  A. Wilson, 148–156 (London: John Murray, 1928). Surette, Leon. The Modern Dilemma: Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and Humanism. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2008.

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Talar, C.  J. T. ‘The Historian and the Mystic: The Revisionist Vision of Henri Bremond.’ Downside Review 440 (2007): 157–196. Thayer, William Roscoe. ‘Antonio Fogazzaro and His Masterpiece.’ The North American Review 183, no. 597 (1906): 178–88. Thibaudet, Albert, ‘Réflexions sur la littérature: Poésie.’ Nouvelle Revue Française 26 (January 1926): 104–113. Tyrrell, George. Medievalism: A Reply to Cardinal Mercier. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908. Valéry, Paul. The Art of Poetry. Translated by Denise Folliot, with an introduction by T. S. Eliot. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958. Wagner, Geoffrey. Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957. Watkin, E[dward]. ‘The Philosophy of Henri Bremond.’ Dublin Review 183 (October 1928): 161–175. Weiß, Otto. Kulturkatholizismus: Katholiken auf dem Weg in die deutsche Kultur (1900–1933). Regensburg: Pustet, 2014. Wittman, Laura. ‘Omnes velut aqua dilabimur: Antonio Fogazzaro, The Saint, and Catholic Modernism.’ In Italian Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-Garde, edited by Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni, 130–166. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Wolfe, Judith. Heidegger’s Eschatology: Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s Early Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Yeats, W. B. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 10, edited by Colton Johnson. New York: Scribner, 2000. Yeats, W.  B. The Letters of W.  B. Yeats, edited by Allan Wade. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954. [Yeats, W. B.] Stuart H., and Cecil Salkeld. ‘To All Artists and Writers.’ To-morrow 1, no. 1 (August 1924): 4. Zalar, Jeffrey T. ‘Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti (1871–1955).’ In Catholic Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Mary R. Reichardt, 149–54. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Zdziechowski, Marian. Pestis perniciosissima: rzecz o współczesnych kierunkach mys´li katolickiej. Warszawa: Księgarnia E. Wende i Spółka, 1905.

PART II

Poetry, Aesthetics, and Theology (c. 1900–1950)

CHAPTER 5

The Ripening Dark God of Modernity: Religion and Creativity in Rainer Maria Rilke’s and Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Writings

Modernist theologians and religious intellectuals who were sympathetic to the movement linked the perceived crisis in Christian theology, discussed in Chap. 2, to the ecclesiastical endorsement of a rationalist philosophy and a system of thought grounded in Thomas Aquinas’s work. Modernist theologians, such as Friedrich von Hügel or Henri Bremond, aimed to reclaim the meaning and value of mystical experience, which they considered to belong to the very core of Christian tradition. For others, including William James, Western Christianity had already lost its vitality, and genuine spiritual experience was to be found elsewhere. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), raised in a German-speaking Catholic household in Austro-Hungarian Prague, came to endorse the latter view. He was brought up by a devoutly Catholic mother, Sophie Entz, and attended a German Catholic school run by the Piarists in 1882–1886.1 However, he became subsequently disillusioned with institutionalised religion to the extent that, as he reported in 1912, he was seized by ‘a rabid anti-­ Christianity’.2 Nevertheless, he continued to demonstrate intense interest in Christian religion and spirituality, which is evidenced both in his writing and in his reading, which included the Bible and various apocryphal texts, Jacob of Voragine’s The Golden Legend, Angela of Foligno’s Book of Visions and Instructions, St Augustine’s Confessions, as well as the works of St John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Ávila, and Catherine of Siena.3 He produced poetic and prosaic cycles as well as individual poems © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Rzepa, Modernism and Theology, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61530-7_5

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and prose pieces that explore explicitly Christian topics on a regular basis.4 This includes the cycles Visions of Christ (Christus-Visionen, 1896–1898), The Book of Hours (Das Stunden-Buch, 1899–1903), Stories of God (Geschichten vom Lieben Gott, 1900), and The Life of Mary (Das Marien-­ Leben, 1912), as well as individual poems and prose pieces that he wrote throughout his entire career. What the four cycles have in common is a creative reinterpretation of the Christian religion that hinges on a critical view of the contemporary version of Western Christianity and an emphasis on the need to find an alternative way to conceptualise the divine. In The Book of Hours and Stories of God that search for an alternative turns into an endorsement of Eastern Christianity, specifically Russian Orthodoxy. Contrasting Western and Eastern Christianity, Rilke credits Russian religiosity with bringing about his spiritual and creative awakening. More than twenty years after his two trips to Russia in 1899 and 1900, he contended: ‘Russia opened out for me and gave me the brotherliness and darkness of God, in whom alone there is fellowship’.5 Rilke’s encounter with Russian culture and the Eastern Orthodox religion was initiated and mediated by Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937), a prolific writer, thinker, and psychoanalyst. Their first meeting was triggered by Rilke’s letter of admiration written in response to her article ‘Jesus the Jew’ (‘Jesus der Jude’), published in 1896. The connection they forged was informed by their shared interest in spirituality, psychology of religion, and search for religious tradition that would offer a corrective to the ‘rational’ and ‘cold’ Western Christianity. As Robert Vilain recently observed, ‘[a]lthough the theme of Rilke’s relationship to God is an obvious one, indeed one that leaps out as central to an understanding of Rilke the writer and Rilke the man, there is relatively little modern scholarship on it’.6 This chapter addresses this critical gap by examining Rilke’s and Andreas-Salomé’s engagement with Russian culture and spirituality to demonstrate how it shaped their views on the role and nature of artistic creativity. It shows that Rilke’s portrayal of the human-divine dynamic in his poetic cycles The Book of Hours and The Life of Mary and the collection of mini-parables Stories of God was informed by an understanding of spirituality that he associated with the religious landscape of Russian culture and that was shaped by Andreas-Salomé’s work on psychology and philosophy of religion. By tracing Rilke’s and Andreas-­ Salomé’s sustained engagement with the question of religious experience, the chapter shows that their interest focused on what they referred to as ‘inner life’ or ‘interior life’. The concept of ‘interiority’ lay at the centre of

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contemporary studies of mysticism as well as writings of early psychologists of religion, among whom Andreas-Salomé was a prominent figure.7 Like modernist theologians, both Rilke and Andreas-Salomé saw ‘inner life’ as the pivot of religion, though unlike Catholic modernists, they considered Western Christianity to have lost the vitality that could still be found in Russian Orthodoxy. According to them, the religiosity that the latter represented consisted in inner patience, spiritual depth, and a close connection to the land, which in their writings took shape of an orientalised and feminised form of mysticism to be juxtaposed with the masculine rationality represented by Western Christianity. In their view, the latter’s time has passed, even as it was attempting to cling to forms of doctrine and worship that historically had ceased to fulfil their function.

The Misrepresented God of Dogmatic Christianity In 1896, Lou Andreas-Salomé published the article ‘Jesus the Jew’ (‘Jesus der Jude’), which presented her reflections on the figure of the historical Christ and the psychological mechanisms behind religious belief.8 The article offered an interpretation of the historical development of religions that was  much in line with what William James would present in his Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh five years later.9 Michael Conrad, the editor of the journal Gesellschaft, forwarded ‘Jesus the Jew’ to Rilke, who was working on a series of poems titled Visions of Christ (Christus-Visionen, 1896–1898). The poet considered Andreas-Salomé’s text a ‘revelation’. He wrote to her enthusiastically: ‘it was like a great rejoicing in me to find expressed in such supremely clear words, with the tremendous force of a religious conviction, what my Visions present in dreamlike epics. […] your essay was to my poems as reality is to dream, as fulfilment is to a desire.’10 The essay that made such a strong impression on Rilke was one of many that Andreas-Salomé, who studied philosophy, psychology, and theology at the University of Zürich, penned on the topic. She engaged in lively debates on Christian tradition, psychology of religion, spirituality, and religious affect since 1892, regularly contributing to the journals Neue Deutsche Rundschau and Die Zukunft.11 Rilke’s reading of her article proved to be the starting point of their intense romantic relationship between 1897 and 1901 and a long-lasting friendship that ended only with Rilke’s death in 1926. Eighteen years older than Rilke, Andreas-Salomé played a central role as his intellectual mentor and mediator of Russian culture. Her work on the history and psychology of religion

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and religious experience provided Rilke with an important stimulus, as his interests in spirituality and inner mechanisms of belief became closely aligned with hers. Her writings on religion offered Rilke a set of questions that he explored in his poetic work, with Andreas-Salomé being also one of his first critics (her monograph on Rilke was published in 1928).12 The essay ‘Jesus the Jew’, which prompted Rilke to make an acquaintance with Andreas-Salomé in 1897, focuses on the historical development of religions, which was widely discussed by both Protestant theologians and Catholic modernists. Andreas-Salomé’s contribution to their debates presented the historical Jesus as a religious Jew whose message was misunderstood and misconstrued by his followers. The greatness of Jesus, she argues, did not reside in him being the Son of God who took flesh to redeem humankind, but in his reimagining of the relationship between God and people. What ‘great religious leaders bring about is not an invention of new deities, but of a new relation towards them’ that consists in greater intimacy between God and the world, she claims.13 The father-son relationship postulated by Jesus was aimed at renewing the divine-human connection, but his thought was later misconstrued by institutionalised Christianity. The teachings of Jesus’s followers turned him into a divine being, constructing dogmas that codified his divinity for the generations of Christians to come. Andreas-Salomé analysed the process of dogma formulation and ossification in her earlier essay ‘Harnack and the Apostolic Creed’ (‘Harnack und das Apostolikum’, 1892).14 Her thesis was aligned with William James’s, who saw the origin of religions in the spiritual vision of individuals whose teachings, when institutionalised by their followers, gradually lost their vitality and became fossilised. Andreas-Salomé concurred with this view to a large degree, but her original contribution to the debate on the Lutheran Harnack’s proposal to revise the Apostles’ Creed and offer worshippers a modern confession of faith went much further.15 Since her interest was primarily in the inner dynamic and psychological structures of religious belief, she resisted making any categorical statements about the truth value of theological or metaphysical explications of the divine. Commenting on Harnack’s and other liberal theologians’ attempts to challenge what they perceived to be obscure historical doctrines and renew key liturgical texts, such as the Apostles’ Creed, she highlighted the tension between individual meaning and the ecclesiastical authority. While one might be tempted to see the history of religions as a struggle between individual religious experience and authoritative dogmas that are said to preserve but also fossilise the

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substance of religious truth, she argues that those very dogmas are part and parcel of individual religious belief in the first place. As she states, ‘the petrification of the formulas of faith is not added to the human-generated object of belief afterwards, but develops naturally from the innermost essence of the religious belief itself.’16 According to Andreas-Salomé, the process of forming dogmatic pronouncements that are conceived as authoritative axioms belongs to the psychological structure of religious belief. It allows the individual to erect a ‘protective stone wall’ of objectivity around their beliefs and then turn them into and, subsequently, accept them as, an external necessity.17 Revising or discarding what seem to be obsolete dogmas—as Harnack postulated—in Andreas-Salomé’s view risked misunderstanding the psychological structure of belief that necessitates the presence of those elements. She argues against using science in determining which elements of religion ought to be retained as this leads to further misunderstanding—religion originates in inner necessity and is the product of inner life, thus it cannot be examined and dissected in accordance with the laws of empirical science.18 Andreas-Salomé’s understanding of religious experience focused on its psychological mechanisms. She did not equate the truth value of religious experience with its potential to prove or disprove the objective existence of God. According to her, the positivist rejection of religion does not invalidate any person’s individual faith as it is precisely their faith that creates God as an objective reality for that person. Andreas-Salomé’s primary interest was in the structures of religious experience and as such was aligned with the work of modernist theologians such as von Hügel, Bremond, and Tyrrell. She was critical of what she perceived as Protestantism’s excessive theological accommodation to rationalism, empiricism, and materialism, which created a false sense of certainty that religious belief can be scientifically explained. Such an explanation is only possible, according to her, if one focuses on inner experiences of individual believers rather than disproving them as erroneous feelings or impressions. In ‘Jesus the Jew’, she puts forward a theory of back-effect (die Rückwirkung) to explain her approach. ‘If one begins with the human being instead of, as one used to do, with God, then one almost involuntarily overlooks the fact that the actual religious phenomenon first comes to be present in the back-effect of a godhead upon the person who believes in that godhead, no matter how that belief arose.’19 She argues that while God historically was invented by people, in the course of time people’s belief in God’s divinity led to an inner transformation that has had real

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effect on the structures of their inner selves, and in that sense their relation to the divine is authentic, and God becomes real. Rilke’s Visions of Christ, a cycle of narrative poems written between 1896 and 1898, but unpublished in Rilke’s lifetime, develops the motif of misrepresented Christ, which Andreas-Salomé analysed in ‘Jesus the Jew’.20 The poems ‘The Painter’ and ‘The Fair’ in particular explore the relationship between artistic creation, religious experience, and the historical development of Christian dogmas. ‘The Painter’ opens with a description of a painter spending a night at his studio, contemplating his piece depicting Jesus—portrayed as ‘far poorer than the rest’—surrounded by a crowd that ‘clawed and pressed’ him.21 Looking at the canvas, the painter experiences the presence of Jesus, who challenges him on the accuracy of the portrait. ‘Why do you paint me thus?’ (l. 52), Jesus asks the painter, who becomes overwhelmed with ‘guilt and shame’ (l. 65) as he is reminded of his personal encounters with Jesus that his canvas did not do justice to. Protesting against being depicted as belonging to a ‘pauper-­ stock’ (l. 72), Jesus asserts: ‘I was no slave, until I died’ (l. 78). He further explicates the complex dynamic of the human-divine relationship:    And only those among the gods are great, whom no one knows; they need not answer the impetuous-throated who crave a god, and frantically call. But soon or late, the rabble, madness-bloated, summons the gods from their celestial hall, and in the desperate stare of the devoted they melt, they fall. (l. 79–86)

The dynamic of belief that these lines establish hinges on the transcendence and inaccessibility of the divine. A god that remains ‘never-known’ retains ultimate perfection, but a god who gives in to the crowd’s call and takes flesh loses some of their divinity in the process. Human desire and need for the divine, while one might expect it to strengthen people’s relationship with God, on the contrary, results in a systematic anthropomorphisation of the divine and the pulling of gods out of the ether, which leads to their ultimate dissolution. Thus, paradoxically, human need to come closer to the divine inadvertently destroys all divinity. Jesus is wary of this process and admonishes the painter to make changes to his canvas:

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…In matching grief and in matching clothes, freezing with my friends I’ll range, but before those to whose souls I am strange into my princeliest garb I’ll change (l. 92–95)

Aware of the power of representation, Jesus opts for a portrayal that will both humanise him, but also emphasise his royal and divinely status. Fearful that an image of god as a beggar devoid of dignity will ultimately lead the worshippers to lose faith, he opts for a more traditional depiction that reinstates his divine attributes. Through the tension between two different ways of portraying the incarnated God, the poem offers a reflection on one of the key concerns that a few years later became subject of the modernist debates. The process of humanising God and translating the message of the Gospel into a call for social activism and solidarity with the disenfranchised, the poem suggests, can inadvertently lead to the dissolution of the divine in the anxious gaze of its worshippers. The poem ‘The Fair’, which Johannes Wich-Schwarz considers the ‘narrative hub of the cycle’, explores the theme of misrepresented Christ from a different angle.22 The first-person narrator attends the Oktoberfest in Munich when he comes across a stall advertising a staging of ‘The story of Christ Jesus and His passion’ (l. 63). The narrator enters the booth by himself and watches the Gospel story unfold. When Christ is crucified, the narrator experiences a powerful vision that has a strong effect on him: ‘all my blood rushed hotly toward my heart’ (l. 103). Christ speaks out to him from the cross in the following words: This is my curse. Since my disciples, led to folly by vainglorious boasts of faith, plundered my body from the pit of death, there’s been no place where I could lay my head. […] From rood to rood I travel, penance-bound: each time men drive a cross into the ground, once more – in bloody shoes – I seek that mound; the agony of old returns to hound and humble me; a nail grows from each wound; the minutes fasten me unto the rood. (l. 120–124, 129–134)

Jesus complains about being taken hostage by his followers and not allowed to rest. He is forced to be ‘ever dying’ (l. 135) and knows no

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relief. Comparing himself to the mythical Wandering Jew, Christ denies having any salvific power. His resurrection brings no redemption and leads only to further suffering. Thus, the poem suggests, the eschatological vision offered by Christianity is built on a fabrication, and Christ’s death on the cross is meaningless as it can bring no atonement. His repeated appearances in ‘the chill of churches’ and in the ‘profane booth of a gaudy fair’ (l. 137–138) make him embittered, sick, and ‘strengthless’. The narrator is transfixed by Jesus’s complaints and his ‘dreadful prophesying’ (l. 160), and it is only the passing crowd that liberates him from the trance he experiences. While Christ’s speech is part of the narrator’s vision, the contrast between the joyous atmosphere of the fair, with ‘varieties of beer, and waterfalls / of wine’ (l. 17–18), colourful crowds, and loud laughter, and the pitiful plea of Christ who is doomed to never-ending torment re-­ enacted in an amusement booth brings to fore the dangers of misrepresentation. The content of the dogmatic teaching of the church that portrays Christ as the son of God whose death on the cross offers redemption to all humankind belies the lived experience of the poetic Christ. The narrator, instead of being fortified and exalted by the vision of the Risen Lord, is horrified at the discrepancy between Christian doctrine and the story narrated by Christ himself. This discrepancy emphasises the constructedness of Christian dogmas and the potential for alternative readings of the biblical story. Throughout his poetic career, Rilke explored the potential for various reinterpretations of the Gospel narrative in the poems like ‘Christ on the Cross’ (‘Christus am Kreuz’, 1893), ‘The Crucifixion’ (‘Die Kreuzigung’, 1899), ‘The Last Supper’ (‘Das Abendmahl’, 1899), ‘The Olive Garden’ (‘Der Ölbaum-Garten’, 1906), and ‘The Harrowing of Hell’ (‘Christi Höllenfahrt’, 1913). He returns to the question of how to represent Christ and his role in the sacred story in his prose writings, in particular ‘The Letter of the Young Worker’ (‘Der Brief des jungen Arbeiters’, 1922).23 In this text, written by a fictitious young man and addressed to ‘Herr V.’—a poet whose reading the narrator had recently attended, Rilke reflects on how the message of Christianity might be received by his contemporaries. The young worker raises a number of questions that undermine the traditional portrayal of Christ and depict him as a religious visionary whose message was not understood for what it was meant to be: I cannot believe that the cross was meant to remain; rather, it was to mark the crossroads. It certainly was not meant to be something to brand us

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everywhere. It should have dissolved in him. Is it not something like this: he wanted to simply create a taller tree on which we could more easily mature. He on the cross is this new tree in God, and we were to be warm, happy fruit at its top.24

The worker compares Christ to an index finger that was pointing to God to renew people’s relationship with the divine. However, as he argues, Christ’s followers ‘were like dogs that do not comprehend the meaning of an index finger and think they have to snap at the hand’.25 Insisting that the cross was meant to be a signpost that indicates a pathway along which people are to walk, the worker laments the fact that it was interpreted literally as a symbol of salvation by Christ’s followers. Thus, instead of actively pursuing God, ‘Christians have settled beneath’ the cross.26 For the worker, the cross becomes a symbol of misrepresentation as believers who uncritically endorse it become spiritually inert and cease to see the need to actively seek God. Thus, the worker asserts, ‘they do not really live in Christ, these people whose hearts are so stubborn and who are always reproducing him and are drawing their existence from erecting these crooked or completely windblown crosses.’27 The contrast between the images of the cross and the tree is significant. The cross as dead wood centres attention on itself, whereas the tree as a living organism through its growth allows people to further Christ’s work and make sure that God the tree bears fruit. The organic imagery used by the young worker was frequently employed in contemporary theological discourse, first by the theologians associated with the Catholic School of Tübingen and subsequently by theological modernists.28 The use of the arboreal metaphor allowed them to emphasise the evolutionary character of Christianity and to portray doctrinal tradition as an organic entity that matures in history. Thus, Alfred Loisy put forward a dynamic vision of Christianity, arguing: Why not find the essence of Christianity in the fullness and totality of its life, which shows movement and variety just because it is life, but inasmuch as it is life proceeding from an obviously powerful principle, has grown in accordance with a law which affirms at every step the initial force that may be called its physical essence revealed in all its manifestations? Why should the essence of a tree be held to be but a particle of the seed from which it has sprung, and why should it not be recognized as truly and fully in the complete tree as in the germ?29

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This organic metaphor offers a model of doctrinal development that emphasises continuity and sees growth as a process of unfolding revelation. It draws on biological imagery used frequently in the New Testament as well as more contemporary models, such as the theory of evolution. This understanding of Christianity is aligned with the views put forward by Rilke’s young worker: One should not always talk about the previous but should start with what comes afterward. It seems to me that this tree should become one with us or we with it and through it, so we need no longer concern ourselves with it but solely with God by remaining in him more purely and doing what Christ’s ultimate intent was.30

The worker’s understanding of Christian religion is that of an ongoing growth—a revelation that unfolds in time. What is more, he suggests that Christ himself would have shared in that understanding. He argues that by focusing too much on the cross and suffering, Christians cannot stop ‘denigrating and devaluing what is of this world and which, after all, should fill us with joy and confidence’.31 The reflections of the young worker chime in with Rilke’s own critique of Christianity as a religion that fails to engage with lived experience. While modernist theologians such as Loisy, Tyrrell, or von Hügel maintained that the Catholic Church was in a position to undergo reform and, by endorsing the experiential dimension of faith, it could come into step with modernity, both Rilke and Andreas-Salomé remained sceptical of Christianity in its Roman Catholic and Protestant versions. According to them, both confessions, together embodying Western Christianity, were part of the decaying Western culture built on ‘dry, cold theories’ and enamoured with rationalist thought, whereas the youthful religiosity they considered to have found in Russia offered them what Rilke referred to as ‘spiritual home’.32

Russia and Its Vocation: From the Third Rome to the Universal Church Rilke’s and Andreas-Salomé’s two visits to Russia on 25 April–15 June 1899 and 9 May–22 August 1900 led Rilke to profess: ‘That Russia is my homeland is one of the great and mysterious certainties in which I live’.33 During the two trips they visited Moscow, St Petersburg, Yasnaya Polyana,

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Kiev, Veliky Novgorod, as well as several cities on the Volga River, including Saratov, Samara, Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, and Yaroslavl, and met with numerous Russian intellectuals, critics, and artists, including Leo Tolstoy, the peasant poet Spiridon Droschin as well as the painters Leonid Pasternak, Victor Vasnetsov, and Ilya Repin.34 The two trips were preceded by an intense period of preparation, when Rilke and Andreas-Salomé spent months immersed in the study of Russian history, culture, art, and literature, reading Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gogol, Chekhov, Leskov, and Lermontov, as well as collections of Russian folk tales, ballads, and verse tales.35 Born and raised in a German-speaking Protestant family in St Petersburg, Andreas-Salomé was educated in schools ‘of a strongly international cast’.36 Her interest in and fascination with Russian culture came later, during her emigration in Germany, when she forged connections with Russian cultural critics and intellectuals, including the art critic Akim Volynsky, and penned articles on Russian culture in 1896–1898.37 When she met Rilke, she was in a position to serve as his guide to Russian literature and culture and assist him with language instruction. By the beginning of 1900, Rilke knew Russian well enough to begin translating Russian literature, including Lermontov and Chekhov, and to make an attempt at composing his own verses in Russian.38 The period when Rilke and Andreas-Salomé immersed themselves in Russian culture coincided with the time of fascination with Russia in Germany, and as Biddy Martin observes, ‘Salomé’s representations of Russian literature installed her […] at the center of a collective fetishization’.39 This fetishization focused on ‘the Russian soul’ and the perceived contrast between Russian and West European spirituality and proved central in Rilke’s and Andreas-Salomé’s accounts of their Russian trips, as well as Rilke’s poetic construction of Russia. Having arrived in Moscow with Andreas-Salomé and her husband, Friedrich Carl Andreas, linguist and scholar of the Middle East, on Maundy Thursday, 27 April 1899, Rilke was given an opportunity to witness the Orthodox celebrations of Easter. The imposing Dormition Cathedral (Uspensky sobor) in the Kremlin made a deep impression on him: In the dusk, the giant outlines of the church projected straight into the sky and to its sides, in the fog; there were two silver chapels. On their steps, pilgrims awaited the opening of the doors. This sight so unusual for me shook me to the depth of my soul: for the first time in my life I had an

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i­nexpressible feeling, something like a feeling of home—I felt strongly that I belonged to something, my God, to something in this world.40

What Rilke considered a turning point in his spiritual development took place on the night of the Easter Vigil, when together with his fellow travellers, he attended Easter services in the Dormition Cathedral. A few years later, he recalled that night in a letter to Andreas-Salomé: For me Easter was one single time: back in that long, extraordinary, incomparable, excited night when everyone was out in the streets and amidst all the jostling of Иванъ Великій [Ivan the Great, the famous bell] struck me in the darkness, blow after blow. That was my Easter, and I believe it will suffice for an entire life; the Good News was given to me writ strangely large in that Moscow night, was given into my blood and into my heart, I know this now: Христосъ воскресъ!41

In his description of the event, Rilke renders the Paschal greeting ‘Christ is risen!’ in Russian, emphasising the cultural embeddedness of the experience that proved so significant for him. After his two visits to Russia, he referred to it as his true homeland and for years to come continued to confess his ‘love for this vast, holy land’.42 Rilke and Andreas-Salomé came to see Russian people as, in Rilke’s words, ‘avatars of patience and endurance’ whose true potential will be revealed only in the future: That biding quality in the Russian character (which the German, with his busy, self-important zeal for trifles, calls indolence—) would thus appear in a new, more revealing light: perhaps the Russian was meant to let the history of human beings pass him by, so that he might later enter with his singing heart into the harmony of things.43

The portrayal of Russian people as living by the heart (as opposed to the mind, associated with the West) and existing outside of history turns them into those who possess a spiritual depth that has been lost in the West (represented by the Germans with their ‘zeal for trifles’). This representation of Russia reappears in Andreas-Salomé’s writings. In her autobiography, she devotes an entire chapter to ‘the Russian experience’, providing a detailed analysis of Russia and its ‘spiritual life [which] remains innocent and childlike in its simplicity when compared to more “mature” nations’.44 She argues that Russian spirituality is ‘marked by attachment to the

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people, to what is fundamental, an intimacy of the heart rather than the principle of civilized behavior, or intelligence, or rationality’.45 Contrasting the heart, innocence, and simplicity with intelligence and rationality, she defines Russian identity by mapping it onto the West-East division along orientalist lines.46 She associates the Orient with inaccessibility and ‘marvelous wisdom of its ancient traditions’ and positions Russia as a bridge between the East and the West, a synthesis of the two opposites.47 She compares the Russian land with its ‘immeasurable depths’ and ‘its inner universality’ to: the slower, heavily laden tread of the “long-term nomad” who has covered great distances: continually wandering from East to West and back again in order not to lose, by settling down too soon, any part of the precious burden he bears—to hold in readiness for that his dancing feet, his singer’s joy in even the most melancholy of his songs, which sound a note anticipating the (possible) decline of the Western world.48

The picture that Andreas-Salomé’s and Rilke’s writings on Russia paint is that of a land and a people who are full of patience and simple goodness, who are still in the process of development and maturing, and whose religion gives them fortitude to withstand suffering and provides them with a way of life that looks forward to a better future. In contrast to the decadent West that lost faith in God and relies on arid rationalist philosophies, the youthful Russia is open to the East, with Asia providing it with ‘direct cultural enrichment’.49 Thus, both Andreas-Salomé and Rilke came to see Russia in terms of what they considered its ‘deepest destiny’, which in Andreas-Salomé’s words was ‘to fight through toward a synthesis, toward a spiritually fruitful union of Eastern and Western culture’.50 This kind of portrayal draws on a number of tropes and stereotypes that had been employed in the representations of Eastern Europe since the seventeenth century. As Larry Wolff points out in his seminal study Inventing Eastern Europe, the metaphors used to describe Russians and Slavic people in general frequently included the idea of infancy and childishness. ‘Notions of immaturity and imperfection’, Wolff contends, ‘helped define the underdevelopment of Eastern Europe relative to Western Europe’.51 Western travellers to Russia described the natives as ‘bearded children; the creatures of the present hour’, who possessed ‘extreme sensibility, unsubdued or ungoverned by reason’.52 Other East and Central European lands, including Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, and

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Moravia, were frequently characterised through the notions of ‘infantilism, of immaturity, of retarded development’.53 During the Enlightenment, as Wolff observes, this kind of discourse served to construct Eastern Europe as the barbaric other of self-professedly civilised and rational Western Europe and was employed as a means of exercising (symbolic) power. Rilke had previously drawn on those tropes in his characterisation of Czechs in Two Stories of Prague, where Rezek, who speaks on behalf of Czech people, admits: ‘Our nation is like a child. […] Our grudge is not that we have to share our homeland with the Germans, but that we’re growing up among such a mature race—that makes us sad.’54 In the case of Russians, Rilke’s and Andreas-Salomé’s portrayal of their alleged immaturity acquired an unexpected spiritual dimension. By the early twentieth century, the alleged ‘otherness’ of Russia, whose religious practices developed under the influence of Greek Orthodox Constantinople (former Byzantium) rather than Roman Catholic Rome, began to be positively re-evaluated in the West through the construct of ‘the Russian soul’. As both Rilke and Andreas-Salomé viewed the developed and rational Western Europe as a civilisation in the state of decay, they reappraised the childishness and immaturity that Slavs had been associated with. Their orientalised characterisation of Russia was given a positive valuation as it represented future-oriented youthfulness and natural innocence. What those tropes provided Rilke and Andreas-Salomé with was a vision of a spiritual renewal that can be brought about by a branch of Christianity that had long been perceived as peripheral from a Western perspective. Rilke’s poetic portrayal of the Russian God in The Book of Hours and Stories of God explores the possibility of moving beyond the paradigm defined by the choice between the materialist rejection of religion and the endorsement of positivist philosophy (exemplified by Ludwig Feuerbach and Ernest Renan), on the one hand, and the defensive pronouncements of the Roman Catholic and Protestant ecclesiastics who began to adopt the rationalist paradigms of empirical science (in the spirit of Thomas Aquinas), on the other hand. On the contrary, Russian Orthodox spirituality is portrayed as offering a fresh paradigm for exploring religious experience in the modern world, as it provides a different set of terms for reflecting on the portrayal of the divine and the human-divine relationship. This kind of representation of Russia, while drawing strongly on orientalist imagery and linking Russian identity to the mystical, the ineffable, and the affective, is also connected to the debates on the spiritual destiny

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of Russia that engaged contemporary Russian thinkers such as Vladimir Solovyov, Sergei Bulgakov, and Nicolas Berdyaev, as well as the Silver Age writers, including Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Aleksandr Blok, and Vyacheslav Ivanov.55 Drawing on the Slavophile movement’s work, and building on the strand of thought that conceived of Moscow as the third Rome that would flourish while the first Rome and Constantinople (the second Rome) fell into decline, these thinkers imagined future Europe as led by Russia whose messianic destiny was to bring Europe together under the banner of universal religion.56 As Judith Kalb points out, by creating a ‘Rome-based discourse of Russian national identity’, Russian thinkers and writers challenged the positioning of Russia on the periphery, claiming that unbeknownst to the West, it had become the spiritual centre of Europe. In 1903, the newspaper Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow News), commenting on Tsar Nicholas II’s visit to Moscow, stated: ‘Here, among the national shrines of the Kremlin, one’s lips involuntarily whisper, “This is the Third Rome. There will be no fourth.”’57 The portrayal of Moscow as the third and final Rome, which also served to justify Russia’s geopolitical imperialism, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was widespread and could be found both in popular print culture and in scholarly publications.58 For the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, whose views proved influential to a number of Russian thinkers and writers, including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Andreas-Salomé, the unique quality of Russia was its synthetizing power.59 In his study The Crisis of Western Philosophy (1874), Solovyov put forward a critique of empiricism and rationalism as two major strands of Western philosophy, arguing that they favour excessively materialist worldview that fails to account for the spiritual dimension of life.60 At the same time, he was not uncritical of East European intellectuals. While the West has elevated human individuality and sovereignty, abandoning God, Solovyov argued, the East stood for endorsement of God’s divinity that obliterated human individuality and freedom. It was only through the synthesis of these two approaches, Solovyov claimed, that the Universal Church of the future that could bring about spiritual renewal would be founded. ‘The Eastern principle of passive devotion to the divine and the eternal’, he contended, ‘and the Western principle of man’s independent activity (through power and through freedom) will be harmonized and justified in the free and active service of the divine truth by all the powers of man’.61

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Solovyov’s ideas were developed further by a number of Russian thinkers, including the philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev. Drawing on Solovyov, he maintained that Russia, due to its specific historico-cultural situatedness, had a special part to play in the upcoming religious renewal. As he pointed out in a 1908 essay, the spiritual difference between the West and the East is that ‘the East has prostrated itself before the Divinity, whereas the West makes an intense effort to lift itself up to the Divinity’.62 This, according to Berdyaev, is reflected in how the human-divine relationship is conceived; the Christian East views Christ as a subject—‘the foundation of life, and not the object of aspiration’, whereas the Christian West considers Christ ‘an object of imitation and love […] in the objective realm, and not the subjective’.63 These key differences, which Berdyaev argues can also be traced in the architectural style of Western and Eastern churches, led to the gradual striving of the East for the West and the West for the East. That striving can be fulfilled in Russia—‘only Russia can be the connecting link between West and East’.64 Berdyaev contends that ‘[w]ithin Russia beats the pulse of the religious life of the world’ and Russia’s vocation is to become an ‘intermediary between East and West, an uniter of the cultures of God and of man’.65 Both Solovyov and Berdyaev travelled widely and forged intellectual connections and friendships across Europe in the hope of initiating a spiritual revival under the banner of Russian Orthodoxy. Their works were translated into French, English, German, Italian, and other languages, and in France and Britain Solovyov came to be known as the ‘Russian Newman’.66 Berdyaev, after his expulsion from Soviet Russia in 1922, settled down in France and founded an informal ecumenical network of religious intellectuals and theologians. As he later remarked, those meetings brought together thinkers who otherwise did not maintain contact with one another due to scholarly and sectarian divisions: It was significant, perhaps, that, so far as I knew, these gatherings provided the first opportunity for French Catholics and Protestants to come together for the purpose of discussing religious matters. It also proved an occasion for Catholic Modernists and Thomists to meet across the barrier of ecclesiastical sanctions. Orthodoxy provided a meeting-point between the various sections of a divided Christendom, uninhibited as it is by the weight of historical memories which impede mutual understanding between the various Western Churches.67

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It was Berdyaev’s gatherings that brought together Lucien Laberthonnière, one of the leading French modernists, and Jacques Maritain, firm advocate of neo-Thomism. When reflecting on his personal contribution to those gatherings, Berdyaev pointed to his ‘consciousness of the crisis of historical Christianity’ as well as his hope for a ‘new creative epoch in Christianity’.68 Viewing the modernist crisis in the Catholic Church (see Chap. 2) as a proof for the ‘crisis of Western Catholicism and the crisis of the contemporary European consciousness’, Berdyaev analyses the conflict between modernist and neo-Thomist theologians within the framework of binary oppositions.69 He argues that modernists such as Loisy and LeRoy were ‘caught up entirely within the limitations of the antitheses of the contemporary consciousness, the will and reason for them are disunited, faith and knowledge are sundered apart’.70 According to Berdyaev, the solution to the crisis of religious consciousness defined in terms of the opposition of irrationalism (Catholic modernists) and rationalism (neo-­ Thomists), lies in the possibility of an alternative path, ‘traversed by Russian philosophic and religious thought, the path of supra-­rationalism’.71 Since Russian Orthodoxy, he contends, did not have to deal with the legacy of scholasticism and the intellectualism of Thomas Aquinas, both rationalism and irrationalism are foreign to it.72 Orthodoxy has preserved a different way of thinking about dogmas—as ‘facts not of the empirical, but of the mystical order’.73 Thus, he asserts, ‘the new religious consciousness ought to base itself upon the traditions of Russian philosophy’ in the spirit of Solovyov and his idea of the Universal Church.74 Andreas-Salomé’s essays on Russian religiosity and Rilke’s poetic exploration of it in The Book of Hours and Stories of God, while inspired by their visits to Russia, were significantly shaped by the idealised vision of the country’s spiritual vocation developed by Solovyov and Berdyaev. Andreas-­ Salomé’s and Rilke’s idealisation of Russia contradicted some of their direct experiences. As Sofya Shil, a Russian intellectual who accompanied them on parts of their journey observed: Our friends from abroad experienced the journey to Russia as a festival of the spirit. How should one not be glad of such sympathy. But they sought and saw in our country an idyll, while storm clouds were gathering there and the first dull peals of thunder were rumbling. They saw in the people everything pure and bright and this was the truth. But they did not want to see the other truth just as true—the fact  that the people were perishing without rights, in poverty, in ignorance, and that the vices of slaves were

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growing in them: laziness, filth, deception, drunkenness. When we spoke of this with deep sorrow, we felt it was unpleasant to our friends; they wanted (very legitimately) gladness and miraculous peacefulness.75

Rilke’s and Andreas-Salomé’s focus was on the idealised vision of Russia, which in their writings provided a powerful challenge to the materialist West. While they did not seem to focus on the socio-economic and educational inequalities that their hosts attempted to bring to their attention, Rilke did consider the power dynamic that generated them in his reflections on the condition of Russian peasants. In his letters, he repeatedly denied the value of social justice movements, as he thought they might inhibit the development of religious consciousness in impoverished groups, doing more harm than good in the long term. Using the example of impoverished Russians, he asserted: There is here, at least for the Slavic soul, a degree of subjection that deserves to be called so consummate that, even under the most ponderous and burdensome oppression, it provides the soul with something like a secret playroom, a fourth dimension of its existence, in which, however crushing conditions become, a new, endless and truly independent freedom begins for it.76

In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Rilke argued that it had been proved that the fight for freedom understood in socio-economic and political manner will not lead to greater freedom in the realm of the spirit. He advocated submission to a higher authority, following the example of the Russian peasant, as a means of developing a deeper religious understanding of the self and the world. As the young worker in ‘The Letter of the Young Worker’ argued, ‘submission goes further than resistance’.77 He proposed that: one should try hard to see in any type of power that claims its right over us all the power there is, power as a whole, power at large, the power of God. One should say to oneself that there is only one power and perceive the small, the spurious, the defective power as if it were rightfully the one to make claims on us. […] If one were always to see in any kind of power, even in the painful and malicious one, the one great power itself, I mean that which ultimately and justly retains its claim to it, would one then not survive unharmed, so to speak, even the power that is unjust and arbitrary?78

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What Rilke saw as a solution to the spiritual crisis of Europe was a return to forms of religious practice that does not challenge the socio-political and material conditions of existence but focuses on inner life that includes the idea of self-surrender. Downplaying the issues of poverty and social inequality, Andreas-Salomé and Rilke consciously focused on the spiritualised view of Russia, seeking in it the messianic land and people described by Solovyov, Berdyaev, and the Slavophiles. Their interest was in the Russia that was to lead the process of religious renewal that will counter the spiritual crisis of Western Christianity, which was linked to the ongoing urbanisation and industrialisation of Europe. Rilke developed this idea poetically in The Book of Hours (Das Stunden-­ Buch), which comprises three cycles of poems inspired by his travels to Russia—‘The Book of Monkish Life’, ‘The Book of Pilgrimage’, and ‘The Book of Poverty’—composed, respectively, between 20 September–14 October 1899, 18–25 September 1901, and 23 March–28 April 1903.79 The first cycle, ‘The Book of Monkish Life’ (initially titled ‘Prayers’), consists of sixty-eight poems that are connected by the figure of the speaker— a Russian monk who is also an icon-painter and a poet. As the title of the volume suggests, the poems can be read as poetic prayers that are an inherent part of monastic life. The prose notes that connected the poems in the first manuscript (and were removed by Rilke before publication) gave a composition date for each of the poems and often offered additional insight into the circumstances in which the monk persona uttered or recorded it.80 Some of the poems are presented as visions and dreams that came to him during prayer or in sleep, while others were his reflections on his relationship with God, his icon-painting, and the future of the Christian faith in the modern world. When reflecting on the latter, Rilke’s monk employs the metaphor of the tree to describe the development of Christianity: he sees God as the tree that has grown two primary branches, corresponding to Western and Eastern Christianity. A series of eleven poems dated 26 September—which, according to the accompanying prose notes, is the monk’s ‘most pious night’—develop the concept of the growth and ripening of God that corresponds to the historical development of Christianity. The monk considers the Western branch to have already fulfilled its task: The branch from God the tree that reached across all Italy has already bloomed. It might have liked

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to hasten becoming heavy-laden with fruit, but grew weary at the height of its blossoming – and now will yield no more. It felt only the spring of God’s presence, and only His Son, the Word, came to fruition.81

The Italian branch, the Roman Catholic Church, has historically borne only one fruit: Jesus Christ, Son of God. Its present-day ‘wear[iness]’ and infertility is contrasted with the youthfulness of the Eastern branch. The latter is expected to bear fruit in the near future and surpass the Western branch: ‘With a branch which was never like that one, / God the tree will eventually come, announcing / summer and murmuring with ripeness.’82 In the monk’s vision, Christian revelation was not completed with Jesus’s Incarnation, which marked only the spring of God’s presence on earth. Similarly to modernist theologians such as Loisy and Tyrrell, the monk conceives of revelation as an ongoing process, or ‘ripening’, of God. Unlike them, however, he envisions that Russian Orthodoxy will become the source of the Christian revival and bring about the spiritual ‘summer’. Like Solovyov and Berdyaev, he regards Western Christianity as having grown ‘weary’ and, at least for the time being, incapable of bearing any more fruit. Rilke’s monk uses here the same metaphor that Solovyov used in his dialogue The Sophia to explain his understanding of the sacred history and the universal religion to come: ‘The universal religion is the fruit of a large tree, whose roots are formed from primitive Christianity, and whose trunk is formed from the religion of the Middle Ages. Modern Catholicism and contemporary Protestantism are withered and fruitless branches, ready to be pruned.’83 Both for Solovyov and for Rilke’s monk, the Western branches of Christianity are ‘withered’ but that does not mean that the tree itself is dead. The other branch, symbolising Eastern Christianity, will bear fruit that to some may come as a surprise. This, for Rilke’s monk, is the organic process of the ripening of God. The monk’s critical attitude to Western Christianity comes to the fore again when he compares Western and Eastern styles of religious art. He contrasts the images of the glowing and brilliant God of the Italian Renaissance, which Rilke saw during his journey to Italy in spring 1898, with the dark God of Orthodox icons, suggesting that the time of the former has passed. In a poem that the monk writes, as the prose interpolation explains, ‘[i]n remembrance and anticipation’, he meditates on the

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differences between the manner in which God has been conceived and represented by Western and Eastern artists. Western art depicted God among ‘the stars in the height’, but the monk asserts that God was ‘only a guest of this gold’: Only to oblige that age when they entreated You with their clear and marbled prayers did You reveal Yourself as the King of comets, proud of the rays that streamed across Your brow. You turned homeward when that time melted away. Utterly dark is Your mouth from which I drifted astray, and Your hands are of ebony.84

The brightness of God, the poem asserts, is not his inherent quality, but rather one of the many ways in which he has revealed himself throughout history. At the time, people’s ‘clear and marbled prayers’ asked for a powerful and awe-inspiring ‘King of comets’ and God responded to their request, assuming that guise. However, when ‘that time melted away’, God ceased to reveal himself through bright images and retreated ‘homeward’. As the final lines suggest, at present it is the dark, wooden icons, not the golden Renaissance paintings that are capable of revealing his nature. To continue to represent him as bright and glowing is to insist on preserving an early form in which God revealed himself and ignore the meaning of the continuing evolution of Christian revelation. The contrast between the Western and the Eastern representations of God is further developed in Rilke’s Stories of God (Geschichten vom lieben Gott), which appeared in 1900.85 This cycle of prose parables is connected by the figure of the narrator, who travels widely and shares stories with people he meets in different circumstances, asking them to pass his tales on to children and, thus, participate in the construction of a story-telling community. Drawing on Russian oral folk tales (byliny), which Rilke studied in preparation for his trips to Russia, the narrator weaves stories that bring together the themes of creativity and aesthetics with the recurring motif of human-divine relationship. One of the narrator’s listeners, the disabled Ewald, is particularly keen to hear stories of Russia. In ‘How Treason Came to Russia’ (‘Wie der Verrat nach Rußland kam’), the narrator describes Russia as a land that enjoys special proximity to God: ‘The

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influence of God is very powerful. However much one may bring from Europe, all Western things are stones as soon as they are over the frontier.’86 Western possessions, the narrator claims, lose their value in Russia, where things are reduced to their basic essence (e.g., precious stones become simply stones). In another story, the narrator describes Russian people and the religious rituals that govern their lives, helping them organise the immense space that surrounds them: Deep, dark, silent are these people, and their words are but weak, swaying bridges over their real being. […] In all directions, everything seems limitless. Even the houses are no protection against this immeasurableness; their little windows are full of it. Only in the darkening corners of the rooms the old ikons stand, like milestones of God, and the glint of a tiny light runs over their frames like a lost child through the starry night. These ikons are the only hold, the only reliable sign on the way, and no house can endure without them.87

The Orthodox icon, the narrator claims, plays the role of a spatial and temporal milestone. It is not seen as a religious and aesthetic object that adorns Russian houses, but as the very foundation of households that cannot ‘endure’ without it. Just like icons occupy a special position in Russian culture, so do the tales (byliny) that the narrator emulates through his own yarn-spinning. As Old Timofei the singer remarks in another story, in the most beautiful byliny ‘the words are like ikons and not at all to be compared with ordinary words’.88 Those words, it is implied, can intimately touch the listener and evoke emotions deeper than ordinary language is able to. While the narrator maintains an ironic distance from his characters and listeners, he is nevertheless invested in passing on stories that may challenge traditional assumptions about the nature of God and religious belief. This becomes evident in his encounter with the schoolmaster, who claims that it is ‘wrong to treat religious, especially biblical, subjects in a free and arbitrary manner’.89 He argues that ‘it has all been so expressed in the Catechism that it could not be better said’.90 When the narrator offers a different perspective, suggesting that ‘God is just on the point of making a new attempt’ to come down to earth and get to know man better, the schoolmaster rebukes him, asking: ‘And is that known to the authorities?’91 The narrator’s conversation with the schoolmaster, who exemplifies a rigid approach to the doctrines of faith, abounds in ironic innuendos,

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revealing the learned man’s inability to appreciate the multivalent meanings of the biblical narratives and the creative potential of story-telling. When the schoolmaster complains that the narrator’s story of God who wants to get to know man better has no ending, the narrator concedes, adding that ‘a poet ought to get hold of that story and invent some sort of fantastical ending, for in fact it has no end yet’.92 Drawing attention to the open-ended nature of his stories, the narrator brings to the fore the narrative structures of religious culture that unfolds in time, with subsequent generations passing the sacred stories onto their children, the ultimate target audience of Stories of God, who can add their own contributions to the tales. The stories have no end as they embody the development of religious tradition, highlighting the important role of aesthetic creativity, which is also one of the central themes of Rilke’s The Book of Hours.

The Orthodox Icon and the Creative Act In The Book of Hours, Rilke explores the theological aspect of creativity through the figure of the icon-painting monk. The opening poem of the cycle brings together two medieval traditions of prayer: the liturgy of hours and icon veneration. They become sites of negotiation in which the monk explores his relationship with God, drawing attention to his own creative powers and ways in which they respond to, but also challenge, God. In the opening poem of the cycle, the ringing of bells, reminiscent of Rilke’s experience in Moscow as recorded in his letters, transports the speaker into a distinct dimension of temporality—that of prayer. The poem establishes the identity of the speaker as somebody who is clearly aware of and reflective about his place within tradition, which he is also ready to actively shape: The hour bows down and stirs me with a clear and ringing stroke; my senses tremble. I feel that I can – and I seize the forming day.93

The poem portrays a meeting of two types of ‘hours’: what Ben Hutchinson calls the profane hours of the everyday and the sanctified moments of prayer.94 The latter enhance the speaker’s agency and inspire his iconpainting. The statement ‘I seize the forming day’ recalls the notion of the book of hours as a set of prayers whose purpose is to sanctify the day from

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sunrise to sunset—the prayers provide a means through which one can shape the day by placing it within a liturgical framework.95 The regularly re-enacted experience of prayer becomes part of the monk’s everyday reality and ultimately opens him up to a renewed perception of the world— the ‘ripe’ ways of seeing—which is conveyed in the two stanzas that follow. The most noticeable feature of the renewed vision is the affection with which the speaker relates to the world: ‘Nothing is too small for me, and I love it anyway’ (l. 9). He undertakes the task of transforming his vision into an icon on which he paints the things that came to him ‘on the golden base and large’ (l. 10). In the Orthodox iconographic tradition, applying gold leaf to the icon’s background and painting small things in larger size symbolically indicate the change that takes place when the human and the divine meet.96 This colour symbolism is meant to give the viewer a glimpse into the divine reality and depict the transfiguration that the world will have undergone. The stroke of the monk’s brush brings about the transfiguration of the things around him. The movement of the whole poem is thus characterised by a certain circularity: the monk who has been affected and touched through prayer paints an icon that is capable of touching other people, opening them up to the divine in a similar fashion. By the end of the poem, the linguistic prayer (the poem) and the visual one (the icon-painting) become closely united. The poem establishes the monk’s icon-painting as an activity that takes place in the hours sanctified by the liturgical prayer and an act that transfigures reality and can result in the spiritual awakening of others.97 Opening The Book of Hours with this poem, Rilke establishes the status of icon-painting as an act of both aesthetic and theological creativity, which becomes one of the central themes of the cycle. Orthodox iconography was an aspect of Russian culture that both Rilke and Andreas-Salomé found of particular interest. In the summer of 1897, before their visits to Russia, they spent a month with Akim Volynsky, a Russian art critic and icon collector, in Wolfrathausen.98 He introduced them to contemporary debates on the Orthodox icon, as well as the writings of Nikolai Leskov, on whom  he was completing a monograph. Leskov’s novella The Sealed Angel (1873), which centres around the practice of icon veneration among Russian Old Believers, had made ‘a significant contribution to the revival of interest in icons among the general public’.99 Rilke’s and Andreas-Salomé’s extensive reading in Russian history and culture sparked their interest in the Orthodox icon as both an aesthetic artefact and an object of veneration. When in Russia, they visited churches and shrines holding important icons, including the Dormition

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Cathedral in Moscow, the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, the Chudov Monastery in Moscow, the Trinity Monastery in Sergiev Posad, and the Cathedral of St Sophia in Veliky Novgorod.100 They both penned essays on Russian art that discussed the aesthetic and spiritual aspects of the Orthodox icon. Andreas-Salomé’s ‘The Russian Holy Icon and Its Poet’ (‘Das russische Heiligenbild und sein Dichter’, 1898) drew on Volynsky’s work and discussed Leskov’s writings, while Rilke’s ‘Russian Art’ (‘Russische Kunst’, 1900) and ‘Modern Russian Art Movements’ (‘Moderne russische Kunstbestrebungen’, 1902) focused on the Orthodox icon and the paintings of Viktor Vasnetsov, which Rilke saw in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, as well as the interface between Russian art and spirituality.101 On his return to Germany, Rilke decorated his study with icons purchased in Russia, creating his own version of the Orthodox devotional corner (Russian krasnyi ugol—literally ‘beautiful corner’). In an 1899 letter to his friend Helene Voronin, he described ‘a pious Russian corner’ that he erected in his study from ‘chests, crosses, and paintings’ from which ‘all things Russian should always flow into and fill the room’.102 Rilke’s and Andreas-Salomé’s reflections on the meaning of the Orthodox icon are closely aligned. In his essay ‘Russian Art’, Rilke explores the relationship between the iconographic tradition and the role of the individual viewer-supplicant who participates in icon worship.103 Rilke’s interest was in the relational space in which centuries-old iconographic forms can become a source of authentic religious experience for a contemporary believer. He asserts that both the traditional form of the icon and the individual experiences of the artist and the viewer hold value, and the meaning of the icon is born in their encounter. The centuries-old forms, according to Rilke, may gradually lose their comprehensibility and slowly fade like the facial features of the painted Madonnas. With time the layers of varnish darken because of the candle smoke, and only empty dark ovals of the saints’ faces are left. These ‘empty ovals’, he argues, do not testify to the demise of tradition but constitute a ‘space in which the viewer has to create anew what the artist originally created, a possibility that fulfils itself in the frames of the paintings through the piety of those who pray before them’.104 He observes that even though over centuries icons may have lost their original glamour, they can continue to bear relevance to the contemporary world, because in the act of veneration their meaning is time and again actualised. Their meaning can be revived through the ritual of icon veneration, in which the viewer-supplicant takes on an active role:

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It can happen that in the course of centuries the two forms, that of gestures and that of paintings, through repetition become empty, meaningless or burdened with misconceived content—but they are passed on with embarrassing precision, and if there comes a supplicant or an artist, full of true values, he will find a beautiful, simple vessel ready to receive his riches, a vessel that is great enough to hold everything, even the overflow.105

According to Rilke, the iconographic forms may become fossilised and seemingly meaningless, yet a modern-day supplicant can fill those forms with content in a personal encounter with the icon. The icon, thus, becomes a vessel that is revived by the contemporary viewer-supplicant in an experiential manner. Just like liturgical gestures, it acquires meaning through of prayerful event in which its form undergoes interpretation by a modern believer. Rilke describes the viewer-supplicant’s engagement with the icon as ‘a dance of thoughts [passing] through a lasting form’, suggesting that the medieval form, far from limiting the viewers’ freedom, provides them with space that gives shape to their thoughts.106 By performing a religious ritual, he suggests, believers can through their praxis remove the dividing line between the inherited tradition and their lived experience. The believer’s engagement with the visual form of the icon, the verbal form of prayer, and the bodily form of gestures revives the inherited traditions and actualises their meaning. Viewed from this perspective, the medieval icon—similarly to the medieval dogmas in the modernist theologians’ interpretation—does not seem to have a timeless, inherent meaning of its own. Its meaning is relational, born in an encounter with the viewer-supplicant. Rilke conceives of the iconographic tradition as being constantly renewed through the ritual of icon veneration in which Orthodox Christians contemplate and co-create the icon. Andreas-Salomé’s reflections on Orthodox iconography followed a similar path. In her travelogue recording the details of their trip to Russia in 1900, she describes a lasting impression that the icons they saw in the Chudov Monastery made on her.107 She contrasts the Orthodox icons that show ‘dark, brown, almost unrecognizable holy figures’ which look like ‘a spectral procession beneath the golden robes’ with Western-style religious paintings that, while they might seem beautiful, ‘betray’ and ‘delimit the sacred’.108 According to her, the Orthodox icon foregrounds the darkness and indeterminacy of the sacred, making it impossible for the viewer to circumscribe its meaning. ‘Beneath the golden dresses’, Andreas-Salomé asserts, ‘everyone can imagine what he wants and likes; what he sees are

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merely questions, symbols, vessels for that which he places inside’.109 While the Western-style religious painting makes the sacred visible, providing it with a form and shape, all that the icon does it to offer questions. This difference, Andreas-Salomé contends, shapes the way in which one engages with both types of paintings. She claims that one should make a clear distinction between the Western and Eastern styles of religious painting and conceptualise it as ‘a difference in essence and not simply in degree’.110 To emphasise that, throughout her travelogue she referred to the Orthodox icon with the Russian word икона (ikona), suggesting that translating the term into German and spelling it in the Latin script would risk losing some of the spiritual, cultural, and emotional connotations that it had in Russian.111 The Orthodox tradition of icon veneration played a central role in Andreas-Salomé’s reflections on the key differences between Western and Eastern Christianity, which could be encapsulated through her understanding of the opposition of dogma and ritual. According to her, Western Catholicism is defined by dogma that treats individual feelings as a ‘mere plaything’, whereas Russian Orthodoxy assigns more importance to ritual, which ‘[i]n spite of its formalism […] is broader and more flexible than the dogmas’ and can accommodate personal experience.112 Formalised Catholic dogmas cease to inspire the feelings of awe, Andreas-Salomé argues, whereas the Orthodox ritual—of which icon veneration is a good example—‘still conveys God to Russians, no matter what the individual dogmas say about this God’.113 Rilke’s and Andreas-Salomé’s reflections on the ritual of icon veneration and the viewer-supplicant’s active role in it chimed with the analysis of the icon’s religious aesthetics by the contemporary Orthodox theologian Pavel Florensky. Florensky, whose works were influential among Russian philosophers and art critics, in his essay ‘Reverse Perspective’ (‘Obratnaya perspektiva’, 1919), argued that the pictorial difference between the icon’s reverse perspective and Western painting’s linear perspective carried serious metaphysical implications.114 He viewed linear perspective that defined Western painting as an attempt at presenting an objective perception of reality which, according to him, was flawed because the artist assumed his own single viewpoint to be ‘the last instance’ and ‘on the basis of his own furtive experience he constructs all of reality, all of it, on the pretext of objectivity, squeezing it into what he has observed of reality’s own differential’.115 On the contrary, in paintings that employ reverse perspective, like the Orthodox icon, ‘the visual image is not presented to the consciousness as something simple, without work and effort,

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but is constructed, pieced together from fragments successively sewn one to the other, such that each of them is perceived more or less from its own point of view’.116 The sewing of these diverse fragments together produced what Florensky calls the ‘polycentric perspective’, which transcended a single human experience in order to embrace a larger, synthetic view of reality.117 According to Florensky, the manner in which the viewer apprehends the two perspectives is radically different. While linear perspective is characterised by a certain ‘theatricality’ and situates the viewer as a mere observer who views life ‘as just a spectacle’, reverse perspective creates a challenge for the viewer, as they need to undertake a cognitive effort to re-create the synthetic image painted by the artist.118 The fact that the Orthodox icon depicts transfigured reality employing reverse perspective, according to Florensky, averts the danger of objectifying God and idolising any single viewpoint and at the same time encourages the viewer’s participation in the co-creation of the icon’s synthetic vision. Since transfigured reality is dynamic and living, Florensky implies, it would be reductive to attempt to depict it from a single linear perspective. The polycentric perspective of the icon grants viewers more agency than linear perspective, offering them a space in which they become active co-creators. Entering this space, the viewer can integrate a number of apparently inconsistent elements, creating a unique meaning: in one beholder, it [the icon] will awaken in the bright clarities of his conscious mind a spiritual vision that matches directly the bright clarities of the icon; and the beholder’s vision will be comparably clear and conscious. But in another person, the icon will steer the dreams that lie deeper in the subconscious, awakening a perception of the spiritual that not only affirms that such seeing is possible but also brings the thing seen into immediately felt experience.119

Since the icon’s meaning, according to Florensky, is co-created by the viewer, as such, it cannot be prescriptively determined. As Maria Taroutina observes, for Florensky iconic representations were ‘visualised theology or God’s words materialized as images’.120 His emphasis on the role played by individual believers and the ways in which they participate in this visualised theology parallels George Tyrrell’s and other theological modernists’ reflections on the nature and meaning of Christian dogmas.121 Their meaning, the modernist theologians argued, is not

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self-evident (as the neo-scholastic school maintained) but can be fully realised only through personal experience of faith. ‘There must be some inward evidence and light added to the preacher’s words’, Tyrrell wrote, ‘by which, for us, they become God’s words in effect’.122 Florensky’s, Rilke’s, and Andreas-Salomé’s reflections on icon veneration all underscored the importance of what Tyrrell referred to as ‘inward evidence’ as opposed to the externally prescribed interpretation. Several poems in The Book of Hours portray the ritual of icon veneration from the perspective of the individual supplicant. In poem 58, Rilke’s monk describes the act of icon veneration as the entering of a valley at dusk. The poem acknowledges that though the icon’s form may limit the perspective, giving a certain frame to one’s individual experience—just like the mountains circumscribe the space of a valley—it simultaneously helps to focus one’s attention on the opening that appears on the horizon: I surrounded Your dark being, and entered into every painting with two kisses or three, as if at dusk in a valley.123

The traditional Orthodox practice of kissing of the icon creates an entrance through which the viewer can venture into the icon’s world. The hermeneutics of trust exercised by supplicants is reciprocated by the icon’s offering them a space that invites their personal responses—each viewer enters the valley by themselves. The importance of the icon’s traditional form, as opposed to the modernised Western paintings, is emphasised in the poem that is presented as a letter of the monk to his superior.124 The monk reflects on the ‘meager pictures’ (l. 38) hanging in Western churches that present God and the saints in an accessible and humanly manner. Rejecting them, the monk ascertains: ‘my God is difficult’ (l. 47).125 He ponders on the interface between tradition and modernity in religious art: There are no paintings which signify God and yet gladden an age with all the achievements of its particular time. […] God flees from every portrayal that finds its own colors in the flow of time;

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in all such paintings only the garment endures with which the impatient ones illumined Him. (l. 48–50, 80–83)

The monk emphasises the impossibility of finding a form that would both please his contemporaries and prevent God from fleeing. He approves of the ‘difficult’ forms of icons as opposed to paintings that seem to respond to the aesthetics of a particular age. Comparing icons to the ‘tolling of church bells, / immutable in their festivity’, like Florensky, he underscores the significance of iconographic tradition. At the time when Rilke was composing The Book of Hours, Orthodox iconography was enjoying an unprecedented revival, with late nineteenthand early twentieth-century Russian ethnographers, historians, and artists showing a growing interest in the aesthetics and spirituality of medieval icons.126 This marked an significant shift in the perception of Orthodox icon veneration, which until the mid-nineteenth century had been considered a sign of backwardness and superstition among the Russian intelligentsia. At the turn of the century, however, the icon was rediscovered as an object of artistic, historical, and theological value.127 A number of prominent art historians undertook extensive restoration projects under the patronage of Tsar Nicholas II, who hoped to present the newly discovered Orthodox icon as evidence for the ancient heritage and integrity of Russian national identity. The restored icons were displayed at several exhibitions of old Russian art and subsequently brought to the attention of Western public, with a special collection of icons presented at the Russian Art Exhibition at the 1906 Salon d’Automne in Paris.128 Avant-­ garde painters such as Wassily Kandinsky, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Marc Chagall, and Kazimir Malevich explored the icon’s rules of composition and technique, experimenting with selected elements of traditional iconography in their own works.129 As Sarah Pratt observes, from a present-day perspective this might seem quite paradoxical: ‘Given the backward-looking nature of the icon and the thoroughgoing anachronisms of the Orthodox Church, we would expect the icon to be among the first objects cast overboard from the Steamship of Modernity. And yet, the artistic avant-garde unabashedly exploited the vocabulary of the icon.’130 The world seen through the prism of the Orthodox icon seemed significantly different from that found in Western painting. The aspects of the icon that avant-garde painters found particularly inspiring included flat forms, strong angular line, bold monochromatic colours, and lack of

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perspectival vision that creates the conventional illusory sense of space. They also experimented with the iconic composition and its use of geometrical shapes. The changing understanding of space seemed to require new aesthetic modes to respond to it. The discovery of electromagnetism, radioactivity, the electron, and the birth of quantum physics all in different ways drew attention to the invisible dimensions of the material world and, as Stephen Kern observes, ‘challenged the popular notion that [space] was homogeneous and argued for its heterogeneity.’131 New scientific modes of conceptualising space were reflected in the artists’ rejection of mimetic naturalism and experimental re-imaginings of spatiality. Icons appealed to avant-garde painters such as Mikhail Larionov, whose aim was to portray the immaterial dimensions of the world, outside of time and space. His theory of Rayism (or Rayonism) consisted in painting rays imagined to be reflected by various objects and achieving what Anthony Parton calls the ‘visualisation of the invisible’, which was in line with the Orthodox iconography.132 Icons attracted abstractionist artists, like Kazimir Malevich, because—designed as objects of contemplation—‘they tended to have a minimum of narrative and symbolic content’.133 For other painters, who like Chagall and Kandinsky were devoted to experimentation with colour range, it was the spiritual principles of the icon’s colour symbolism that was particularly inspiring. Chagall wrote that his ‘heart was rested by the icons’, and on seeing Andrei Rublev’s works in the Alexander III Museum in St Petersburg he was ‘born to the mystical and religious’.134 Kandinsky eventually produced his own theory of art that emphasised the spiritual meaning of colour and composition, published in his manifesto Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 1911).135 The iconographic experimentation of the early twentieth-century avant-garde did not escape the attention of contemporary art critics. Alexander Benois, founder of the influential journal Mir iskusstwa (The World of Art), with whom Rilke maintained regular contact on his return to Germany, argued that icons displayed ‘unexpected closeness to our times’.136 A comparison of contemporary art and the medieval icon, according to Benois, revealed a number of common characteristics: [O]ne would have to be blind not to believe in the salutariness of the icon’s artistic effect, in their huge capacity to affect contemporary art and in their unexpected closeness to our times. Not only does any 14th century Nicholas the Miracle Worker or Nativity of the Mother of God help us understand Matisse, Picasso, Le Fauconnier or Goncharova; but through Matisse,

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Picasso, Le Fauconnier and Goncharova, we feel the great beauty of these Byzantine pictures much better, the fact that they have youth, power and animation.137

According to Benois, what Orthodox icons and contemporary art had in common was their ‘reluctance to settle with what we call “realism”’ and ‘the use of colour [that] lifts the art above the prosaic, away from feeling linked to everyday experience […] into a realm belonging to another world’.138 Benois observed that contemporary art and medieval iconography shared ‘the logic of the irreal’, through which ‘art returns in full to its mystic meaning’.139 The icon-painting that Rilke’s monk undertakes in The Book of Hours follows the Orthodox precepts, but at the same time touches on the close interface between artistic creativity and divine creation. ‘We dare not point You in our own pose,’ the monk admits to God.140 He and his fellow brothers use the ‘old palettes’ (l. 3) and apply ‘the same strokes and the same beams’ (l. 4) that his predecessors did. As prescribed by the Orthodox iconographic tradition, they use the prototypes that are believed to have been passed on from the times of the apostles. The icons painted by the monks serve a twofold goal: to both reveal and conceal God: We build paintings before You like walls so that thousands of them now surround You – for our pious hands veil You whenever our hearts simply open to behold You. (l. 6–9)

The monks’ paintings are placed in the iconostasis to create a wall that in Orthodox churches separates the altar, as the holiest space, from the nave, where the faithful pray. The tension between the hearts that ‘behold’ God and the hands that ‘veil’ him points to the paradoxical dynamic of iconic representation, which offers a reflection on the human-divine relationship as requiring both proximity and distance. The monks’ paintings in the iconostasis are there not to represent the divine, but to indicate the presence of what Benois called ‘the logic of the irreal’, and to simultaneously hide the divine from view. In the subsequent poems, the monk reflects not only on how his creative work transfigures reality, but also on how it creates God himself. In the opening lines of poem 48, the monk exclaims: ‘O how beautifully I shaped You / with my proud hand’.141 He goes on to narrate the stages of

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the creative act that produced God’s image. He started by working on ‘elegant drafts’ (l. 6), but his ‘lines and rounded shapes’ (l. 9) soon ‘became tangled like thornbushes’ (l. 10). The sketch that he worked on in a systematic way turned out to be a failure. It is only when he acknowledged that failure and experienced ‘uncertainty’ (l. 12) and disappointment that ‘the most pious of forms sprang forth’ (l. 13). The process of arriving at the final form of the painting is portrayed as out of the monk’s control— the fact that the form ‘sprang forth’ underlines its givenness. In the final stanza of the poem, the monk reflects on the completed work, recording his feelings: I can’t survey the breadth of my work, yet I feel that it stands now complete. But when I turn my eyes aside I want to build it once again. (l. 14–17)

The paradox of the monk’s satisfaction with the work he has completed and his immediate urge to start it all over again emphasises the dynamic nature of the divine that he is trying to portray, on the one hand, and of the process of artistic creation, on the other. This is further emphasised in poem 15, where the monk employs an architectural metaphor to describe the work of human-divine co-creation: We build on You with trembling hands and construct towers, atom upon atom. But who could ever complete You, You cathedral?142

The monk’s aspiration is to ‘complete’ God. While this might sound blasphemous, when read in parallel with contemporary Russian philosophers such as Vladimir Solovyov and Nicolas Berdyaev, who attempted to elevate the value of human creativity by exploring its spiritual dimension, it acquires a deeper theological meaning. Both Solovyov and Berdyaev emphasised human participation in the process of the spiritualisation of the created world.143 Solovyov discussed the continuous evolution of life forms, which he viewed as a process that has both material and spiritual dimensions. The Incarnation of Christ, he argues, is a critical stage in that process and promises the ultimate spiritual transformation of the whole natural world order. Through the Incarnation,

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the humankind became aware of its spiritual dimension and the need to cooperate with God for their salvation. Ultimately, the duty of man is to work towards the spiritual transfiguration of the natural world, which Solovyov thought would happen by means of religious aesthetics. He defined beauty as ‘the transfiguration of matter through the incarnation in it of another, a super-material principle’.144 God is the ‘cosmic artist’, and even in the animal kingdom he ‘incites the creatures to make out of their own flesh and blood all kinds of beautiful coverings’ to undertake the task of transfiguration by means of instinct, which continues the work of original creation.145 While animals participate in this work instinctively, people are ‘capable of knowing the purpose of that activity and consequently striving to achieve it freely and consciously’.146 Thus, human art is revealed to play an important role in the ongoing transfiguration of the material world—it should be ‘transforming reality and not merely reflecting it’.147 While history still continues there can be only partial and fragmentary anticipations of perfect beauty. In their highest achievements the arts that exist at present catch glimpses of eternal beauty in our transitory existence and, extending them further, anticipate and give us a foretaste of the reality beyond, which is to come. They are thus a transition stage or a connecting link between the beauty of nature and the beauty of the life to come. Interpreted in this way art ceases to be empty play and becomes important and instructive work, not, of course, in the sense of a didactic sermon but of an inspired prophecy.148

According to Solovyov, the artist’s role is to undertake a spiritual transfiguration of the material world and, in this way, continue the divine work of creation. While the ultimate perfection is impossible to achieve until ‘the end of the cosmic process as a whole’, art enables people to comprehend ‘the closest and deepest interaction between the inner or spiritual and the outer or material being’.149 This spiritual understanding of aesthetics was further developed by Berdyaev, whose work elevated creativity to the key principle that ‘constitutes man’s relation and response to God’.150 Drawing on Solovyov’s writings, Berdyaev undertakes a critique of systems of thought that offer ‘static transcription[s] of religious ontology’, such as positivism, rationalism, and scholastic theology.151 He traces the hegemonic presence of the ‘scholastic principle’, which he defines as ‘science-like rationalism’, in contemporary philosophy and culture.152 To oppose this trend, he proposes to reinvent

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philosophy as ‘creativeness, and not adaptation or obedience’, arguing that the ‘liberation of philosophy as a creative act is its liberation from all dependence upon science’.153 Creative activity is the primary human response to the world that, as opposed to the scientific mindset that entails obedience to necessity, allows for an exercise of freedom. That freedom is best exemplified in art, which is ‘always a victory over the heaviness of “the world”—never adaptation to “the world”’.154 Like Solovyov, Berdyaev asserts that ‘[e]very creative artistic act is a partial transfiguration of life’, and the ‘purpose of the artistic-creative act is theurgical’.155 He defines theurgy as ‘man working together with God, […] divine-human creativeness’.156 He emphasises that it is the nature of theurgy as an act of co-­ creation that makes it a religious act, not the perception of its outcome as religious art. Theurgy, he underscores, is ‘action together with God; it is the continuation of creation with God’.157 Berdyaev revisits the human-divine relationship through the prism of creativity. ‘God awaits man’s creative act, which is the response to the creative act of God’, he asserts.158 In his view, the concept of creativity defines the very foundations of the human-divine relationship. ‘The idea of God is the greatest human idea, and the idea of man is the greatest divine idea.’159 He admits that suggesting that ‘God has need of man and of man’s response to him’ is ‘extraordinarily daring’, but he argues that it is the only perspective that avoids rationalising the infinite and takes into account the realm of ‘spiritual experience’.160 Ultimately, for Berdyaev, the ‘creative act signifies an ek-stasis, a breaking through to eternity’.161 Going further than Western modernist theologians, Solovyov and Berdyaev asserted not only that God’s revelation was a process that was still taking place, but also that humankind had a significant role to play in that process. Drawing on Russian Orthodox tradition, they rejected what they perceived as Western rationalism and scholasticism, but also distanced themselves from the official teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church. The latter did not endorse their writings, forcing Solovyov to publish his Russia and the Universal Church in France to avoid Russian censorship. Berdyaev was to be tried for blasphemy for his attack on the Holy Synod in the essay ‘Quenchers of the Spirit’, and expected to be sentenced to exile to Siberia, but the trial never took place because of the outbreak of the revolution.162 Their ambivalent stance with respect to the official Russian Orthodox Church’s teachings positioned them close to Western modernists. Berdyaev expressed sympathy with Catholic modernists and referred to his own writings as ‘modernist’, asserting: ‘I am a modernist in

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the sense that I recognize the possibility of a creative process, of the emergence of ever new realities within Christianity.’163 The human-divine co-creation that both Solovyov and Berdyaev explored in the writings is repeatedly foregrounded by Rilke in The Book of Hours. In poem 56, the monk describes himself as a ‘seeker’: ‘one who dreams of completing You / and: of becoming completed himself.’164 The idea that the monk can participate in the process of divine creation challenges the power dynamic between the divine being who creates and the human being who is created. In this sense, the cycle moves away from a hierarchical view of this relationship to propose a more open and indeterminate paradigm. In some poems, the emphasis is explicitly placed on the dependence of God on the humankind. In poem 36, the monk inquires: What will You do God when I die? I am Your tankard – when I shatter? I am Your drink – when I go sour? I am Your robe and Your calling165

The speaker imagines his own death and, considering the significance of his role as the divine collaborator and co-creator, challenges God to think about the implications of his demise. When he is no more, God’s gaze will not be able to rest any more ‘warmly upon [his] cheek’ (l. 12), it ‘will come and search for [him]—persistently’ (l. 13), and all it will be able to rest on is ‘the lap of stones unknown’ (l. 15). The monk imagines God’s reaction to follow the pattern of grief and mourning that one experiences after the death of a loved one. ‘What will You do God? I’m afraid’ (l. 16), he asks rhetorically in the closing line of the poem, highlighting the affective dimension of their relationship. Emphasising the co-creative nature of his work, Rilke’s monk challenges the traditional power dynamic of the human-divine relationship, which he also questions by gendering God in ways that defy standard Christian representations of the divine.

Divinity and Gender: Mary, Sophia, and Androgyne When studying Russian icons, Rilke paid particular attention to the depictions of the Virgin Mary. In letters to Helene Voronin written in the summer of 1899, he enumerates the icons of the Virgin Mary that made special impression on him: the Kazan and Smolensk icons, the Vladimir icon in the Uspensky (Dormition) Cathedral in the Kremlin, the Iberian Madonna

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of the Iverskaya Chapel, and—his favourite—the Znamenskaya icon in the Znamensky Monastery in Moscow.166 Both Stories of God and The Book of Hours include recurring references to icons of the Virgin Mary that demonstrate Rilke’s sustained interest in the Orthodox veneration of Marian icons. In a poem from ‘The Book of Monastic Life’, the speaker reflects on Mary’s continued presence in the sacred history and the way in which she migrated from the manger into the icons. She dwelled in them, and at times ‘crept forth out of the wide and precious frames / in the evenings when only a few supplicants came’, establishing her presence among contemporary believers.167 In ‘The Song of Justice’ from Stories of God, the Iberian Madonna in Moscow ‘leave[s] her little shrine’ and in the ritual of icon visitation ‘she drives in a black coach with four horses to those who are celebrating something, be it a christening or a death’ to participate in the key events of the Orthodox laity’s life.168 Rilke’s later cycle, The Life of Mary (Das Marien-Leben, 1912), offers a poetic exploration of the key moments in Mary’s life, based on the Gospel stories and apocryphal narratives.169 Just like The Book of Hours, the cycle offers a twentieth-century poetic version of medieval cycles that explored the life of the Virgin Mary from the moment of her birth to her death and assumption into heaven. The medieval cycles took both pictorial and textual form, with the latter sometimes referred to as the Hours of the Virgin or the Little Office.170 Rilke’s modern rewriting of the Hours of the Virgin presents Mary as a person with an extraordinarily rich inner life, whose actions shape the direction of the sacred history. Her religious life is juxtaposed with clerical hierarchy in ‘The Presentation of Mary in the Temple’ (‘Die Darstellung Mariae im Tempel’).171 The poem portrays an event described in the apocryphal Proto-Gospel of James.172 According to James, Mary’s parents, Anna and Joachim, took her to the Temple in Jerusalem when she was three years old to fulfil a vow they had made when she was born. Mary was presented to priests, sat down at the altar, and blessed by God. She lived in the temple until she was twelve years old, when she was given to Joseph. Rilke’s poem offers a reflection on Mary’s experience, inviting the reader to ‘grasp how she was then’ (l. 1). In order to do that, the poem—instead of portraying Mary visiting the temple— asks readers to imagine an inner temple ‘where pillars mount to ceilings / which are in you’ (l. 2–3). That temple is extremely spacious and elaborate, filled with ‘palaces’ and ‘banisters’ (l. 15–16), as well as the ‘smoke that surges / from burning censers’ (l. 19–20). The profusion of visual and sensual stimuli can cause the reader to become ‘seized with vertigo’ (l.

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18). Mary, however, ‘a child, a little girl between grown women’ (l. 27) remains calm and ‘undazed’ (l. 29), reaffirming her inner strength: so far was all that had been built by men inferior to the voice that praised within her heart. And the desire to go by inner signs, by these alone. (l. 30–33)

Mary derives her strength from the voice that she hears in her heart and the ‘inner signs’ (inner Zeichen), which challenge what ‘had been built by men’ and offer a personal response that might not comply with the prescribed meaning of the ritual. The word ‘temple’ acquires a new meaning in the poem. The title of the poem refers directly to the apocryphal story of Mary’s presentation in the temple in accordance with the Judaic tradition, where her fate is decided by priests. However, as the poem unfolds, the temple acquires the meaning of an inner space that an individual believer creates in themselves, a space that is superior to anything ‘built by men’. Mary becomes here an ideal lay person to imitate because she has the strength and conviction to follow the ‘inner signs’ that are revealed to her. This trait of Mary is further explored in the poems that follow, including ‘Annunciation to the Shepherds from Above’ (‘Verkündigung über den Hirten’), which is a monologue of the angel who comes down to the shepherds to share the good news with them.173 When speaking of their own nature, the angel pronounces ‘I am the ray / thrown by her inwardness, which is your guide’ (l. 36–37). Mary’s inwardness (Innigkeit) is thus portrayed as a source of supernatural light that can produce a being who is ‘one blaze’ and an ‘uprising star’ (l. 4). Her inner assurance is put forward as a guide for the shepherds, the first lay community to have recognised the new-born Jesus’s divinity. The connection between the Virgin Mary and the laity, which Rilke explores in his poems, in the second half of the nineteenth century gained new meaning through the increased popularity of Marian devotion across Europe. The period between 1850 and 1950 has been dubbed the Marian Age in Western Europe, as it was marked by official pronouncements that provided a dogmatic framework for popular devotion.174 This included Pope Pius IX’s promulgation of the dogma of Immaculate Conception in 1854 and Pope Pius XII’s proclamation of the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin in 1950, as well as a series of eleven Marian encyclicals issued

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by Pope Leo XIII between 1883 and 1902. These ecclesiastical pronouncements paralleled a growth in popular devotion linked to a series of reported visions of the Virgin Mary, which generated much attention across Europe. These included the apparitions in La Salette (1846), Lourdes (1858), and Pontmain (1871) in France; Marpingen (1876), Mettenbuch (1876), and Heede (1937, 1940) in Germany; Knock (1879) in Ireland; Rome (1842) and Castelpetroso (1888) in Italy; Flippsdorf (1866) in Bohemia (now Czechia); Gietrzwałd (1877) in East Prussia (now Poland); Fátima in Portugal (1917); Pontevedra (1925) in Spain; and Beauraing (1932–1933) and Banneaux (1933) in Belgium.175 In most of these cases, Mary appeared to young children and illiterate peasants, and while the secular press suspected the apparitions to be ‘manipulations of a wily clergy’, their defenders challenged that view using ‘the Christian paradox that the humble and ignorant could see the truth far better than the educated and worldly’.176 The Vatican’s doctrinal endorsement of the Immaculate Conception in 1854 significantly elevated Mary’s position, as she became the only human incapable of sin. This meant, as Marina Warner points out, that ‘Mary surpassed the beatitude of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden’ and was ‘the most perfect created being after Jesus Christ’.177 In Russia, the Marian Age was marked not by apparitions, but by a resurgence of popular worship of miracle-working Marian icons. Those icons, as Vera Shevzov observes, shaped the Russian Orthodox believers’ communal experience of faith and ‘bore witness, through the stories of signs and miracles associated with them, to the believers’ own perceived participation in the same ongoing sacred story’.178 In the second half of the nineteenth century, such stories developed into a genre of its own, which allowed for a dissemination of local narratives of miraculous icons on a wider scale. The period ‘saw the mass publication of devotional pamphlets concerning the lives of Marian icons for popular consumption’, with an important shift regarding the main actors involved in icon narratives.179 ‘Whereas the central characters in more ancient narratives tended to be male monastics, clerics, and princes’, Shevzov contends, ‘by the nineteenth century the overwhelming number of icon stories concerned common laity—peasants, merchants, or townspeople, male and female’.180 The Russian Orthodox Church, while emphasising Mary’s perfection, was keen to underline her humanity, distancing itself from the Catholic dogma of Immaculate Conception. Mary was put forward as an ideal human whose example was to be emulated by the Orthodox laity. She led an

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exemplary life and could identify with individual believers and their personal struggles. At the same time, Mary offered a communal religious identity that was intimately linked with the historical fate of Russia. Since the Middle Ages, Mary had been portrayed as a defender of Rus’ who offered protection to her people through the miracle-working icons. As Shevzov observes: More than Christ himself or any one saint, Mary as present in several of her icons stood at the interface between religious and national identity in Russia. […] The tradition of tracking Russia’s history through the behavior of Mary, and in particular though the lives of her icons, continued throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, with clergy frequently using the occasions of feasts of nationally known miracle-working Marian icons to reiterate age-old themes: Russia was Mary’s “home” and “principality”; her numerous miracle-working icons were one means by which Mary designated Russia’s divine election.181

The most revered Marian icons, such as the ‘Vladimir’ icon or the ‘Kazan’ icon, were linked to the turning points in Russian history when Mary was believed to have intervened on behalf of the Russian people, bringing together political history and sacred history. The intercession of Mary through the ‘Kazan’ icon was believed to have helped defend Russia from the Polish invasion in 1612, the Swedish invasion in 1709, and the French invasion in 1812. The belief in the icons’ miracle work continued well into the twentieth century. During World War 1, Tsar Nicholas II had the ‘Vladimir’ icon, which was believed to have helped repel the Tatars in the late fifteenth century, delivered to his military headquarters at the war front.182 The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century resurgence in Marian devotion had important socio-economic implications in both Western and Eastern Europe. Many stories of Marian apparitions and miracle-working icons were initiated by illiterate believers, including women, coming from rural and underprivileged backgrounds. The popularity of their narratives demonstrated an affective connection between Mary and the impoverished laity, and their effective dissemination and circulation, sometimes without the official ecclesiastical approval, showed that lay piety could bypass the normative structures of the church. At times, this led to conflicts with the clerical authorities, like in the case of the Polish noblewoman Feliksa (also known as Maria Franciszka) Kozłowska, who

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experienced a series of visions in 1893–1918, which inspired her to start a movement of spiritual renewal that included devotion to Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The leaders of the Mariavite movement (from Latin: qui Mariae vitam imitantur—‘[those] who imitate the life of Mary’) soon came into conflict with local bishops and, eventually, with the Vatican. The movement was subsequently condemned by Pope Pius X in the encyclical Tribus Circiter (1906), Kozłowska’s visions classified as hallucinations, and the movement’s leaders excommunicated, which led to the foundation of the Mariavite Church outside of the Catholic fold.183 Since ecclesiastical structures were historically male-dominated, visions and miracles experienced by women challenged the gender dynamic that had defined church hierarchy and served as a source of clerical authority. In the Russian context, Shevzov asserts, ‘icons of the Mother of God added social and gender diversity to an otherwise highly male monastic profile of Russian Orthodoxy’.184 Furthermore, the narratives of lay believers’ personal encounters with Marian icons that generated popular attention frequently deemphasised clerical authority, focusing on the role of individual believers instead. Lay believers orally disseminated stories of miracle-working icons, and some of those narratives were subsequently incorporated into the religious culture of Orthodox communities. Those stories, as Shevzov points out, ‘never identified church and truth exclusively with clerical establishment’, underscoring the significance of lay experience and Mary’s inclusive embrace of believers from all walks of life, including children and women.185 In Rilke’s The Life of Mary, which should be read in the context of the contemporary resurgence of Marian devotion, Mary embodies spiritual inwardness that transcends external clerical authority portrayed by the priests in the temple. Inwardness becomes a key term that defines spiritual experience for both Rilke and Andreas-Salomé. The terms ‘inner’ and ‘inward’ (innig, innerlich) recur with particular frequency in their descriptions of the ‘Russian soul’, which they consider to bring together, like Rilke’s Mary, the features of inwardness, youthfulness, and femininity, providing the most fruitful ground for a contemporary religious renewal. In her essay ‘Russian Poetry and Culture’ (‘Russische Dichtung und Kultur’, 1897), Andreas-Salomé argued that Russian poets can still draw on ‘dark inwardness’ that is lost in more ‘mature’ cultures, such as those of Germany, France, and Scandinavia.186 The best Russian poetry, she asserted, expresses ‘warm inwardness and spiritual depth’, which can nevertheless be lost if Russian authors allow themselves to be influenced by

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Western culture.187 In their comparisons of Western and Eastern Christianity, both Rilke and Andreas-Salomé draw attention to what they consider a feminine element in Russian religious culture, which is ‘naturally oriented toward the inner life’.188 Their references to submissiveness, passivity, ‘childlike directness’, and youthful fertility of the Russian soul paint a feminine-oriented image that can be juxtaposed with the positivist and rational, and thereby masculine-centred, Western Christianity.189 Instead of pitting the two types of religiosity against each other, however, both Rilke and Andreas-Salomé explore the possibility of bringing them together in a synthesis that would supersede gendered differences. In Rilke’s ‘A Tale of Death and a Strange Postscript Thereto’ (‘Ein Märchen vom Tod und eine fremde Nachschrift dazu’) from Stories of God, the narrator offers a parable that charts the development of Christianity from Judaism, through a masculine-oriented medieval period, to a phase that endorses markedly feminine divinity, opening a new chapter in the sacred history. The story opens with the narrator’s evening walk to a small churchyard, where he converses with a gravedigger who observes that his occupation is not exceptional in any way as most people imitate his actions. ‘They bury God up there as I bury men here’, he remarks, referring to the sky as ‘a great grave’.190 In response to that, the narrator tells the gravedigger a story that explains how God left the heavens and is no longer to be found there. In the beginning, the narrator asserts, people prayed with arms wide open and ‘God would cast himself into all these human abysses, full of despair and darkness’.191 As God ‘drew closer over the earth […] a new faith began’.192 To make sure that people could distinguish between the old and the new God, who were in fact not very different, the manner of praying was changed, and people were told to fold their hands. This bred discord on earth, and ‘the gesture of open arms […] was fastened to the cross that all might see in it a symbol of agony and death’.193 As the new ritual took hold and sacred buildings, such as Gothic cathedrals, were erected to glorify God, he became scared, as ‘the hands and the roofs, alike steep and sharp, stretched pointing towards him like the weapons of an enemy’.194 To evade them, God ‘departed out of his domain at the other side’.195 What he found there was ‘a beginning darkness that received him silently’ and for which he was content to forsake his ‘radiant home’.196 This experience led God to reflect on the meaning of darkness:

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Then for the first time it occurred to him that the heads of men are lucid, but their hearts full of a similar darkness; and a longing came over him to dwell in the hearts of men and no longer to move through the clear, cold wakefulness of their thinking. Well, God has continued on his way. Ever denser grows the darkness around him, and the night through which he presses on has something of the fragrant warmth of fecund clods of earth. […] The God who has fled from us out of the heavens, out of the earth will he come to us again.197

The parable that the narrator tells the gravedigger, while gendering God through the use of masculine pronouns, portrays him as abandoning the patriarchal structures of Western Christianity with its phallic-like ‘steep and sharp […] steeples’ that seem to God like weapons. The medieval Gothic cathedrals that point to heaven are associated with light and reason, but also an act of hubris that ultimately drives God out of heaven. The passage into darkness leads to God’s adoption of feminine, maternal, and earthly traits: ‘fragrant warmth’ and fecundity. In this transition, God chooses the dark human heart over the lucid mind. This opposition of the mind and the heart, in both Rilke’s and Andreas-Salomé’s writings, can be mapped onto their juxtaposition of Western and Eastern Christianity, but also the interface between Russian Orthodoxy and femininity, and Catholicism and masculinity. For Andreas-Salomé, the ‘woman question’ was to be approached primarily via the analysis of psychological and philosophical meanings of femininity.198 In her autobiography, reflecting on the origin of her interest in depth psychology, she explicitly credited the childhood she spent in Russia, ‘among people who were naturally oriented toward the inner life’.199 Keen to examine inner and religious experiences from a psychoanalytic perspective, she studied with Sigmund Freud in Vienna in 1911–1912 and continued working on her own interpretation of gender difference, offering a significant re-evaluation of Freud’s view of female sexuality.200 Her essay ‘The Human Being as Woman’ (‘Der Mensch als Weib’, 1899), written against the background of the women’s emancipation movement in Germany, discusses the issue of sexual and gender difference.201 Andreas-­ Salomé accepts the claim that woman is the less differentiated being, but this status in her writings leads to a fuller and nobler existence, which is closer to what she refers to as the original unity. She rejects Freud’s idea that woman is naturally passive and receptive, arguing that even at the cellular level, the female egg is as active as the sperm, as it prepares itself for

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the process of procreation and chooses when to open itself up. As Biddy Martin points out, for Andreas-Salomé woman ‘as the name of multiplicity and possibility, exceeds the order of the masculine, the logical, the linear, and exceeds as well the conventional divisions drawn between male and female’.202 Andreas-Salomé extends her reflections to female psychology, emphasising the superiority of woman who always feels spiritually at home, being more complete and unified: There is a self-sufficiency and repose in [the feminine], in accordance with the deepest intentionality of being, which cannot be reconciled with the restlessness and disquiet of that which pushes itself forward with such passion to the outermost limits and splinters all its forces more and more intensively and pointedly in the service of specialized activities. In this the feminine behaves in relation to masculinity as a piece of age-old aristocracy, in its own castle and land, relates to the future-rich parvenu with his secure future, the parvenu who might make it much farther but who also sees the ideals of an ultimate beauty and completeness constantly disappear before his very eyes.203

The association of femininity with ancient aristocracy, land, and property emphasises the timeless, grounded, and self-sufficient traits of woman as opposed to the restlessness of man. The features Andreas-Salomé associates with femininity in her essays on women and sexuality recur in her descriptions of Russia. Reflecting on her travels with Rilke, she recounts how Russia ‘spread about [her] in all its vastness, its human suffering, its resigned and patient longing’.204 The key characteristics of Russia are its timeless ‘vastness’ and ‘receptivity’, which coincide with Andreas-Salomé’s interpretation of femininity.205 The undifferentiated state that defines femininity in her thought is subsequently associated by her with the ‘Russian soul’. Just like woman is more complete and unified than man, the Russian soul—due to its ‘primitive and undifferentiated state’—‘is clearly less attuned to dualism: thus what one dreams about and what one experiences tend to be less sharply divided into separate and successive realms—nor is such a clear distinction made between heaven and earth’.206 Andreas-Salomé thus maps her understanding of sexual difference onto the relationship between Russia and Western Europe. Masculinity, which in her words is generally ‘more dependent, more needy’, is associated with the West, whereas femininity, which she redefines as more unified, with Russia.207 Since it is woman who is able to

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overcome dualisms more readily than man, Russian culture read through a feminine lens can bring together the material and the spiritual, ‘heaven and earth’.208 Andreas-Salomé continued to explore female sexuality in The Erotic (Die Erotik, 1909–1910), where she characterised it as selfless and spanning beyond individual love, allowing woman to connect with her inner self.209 She sees the Virgin Mary as an epitome of sexual selflessness that is both bodily and spiritual. ‘[I]n all woman’s greatest hours, the man is never more than Mary’s carpenter, compared with a god’, she contends, highlighting the union of the body and the soul that, according to her, defines female sexuality.210 Andreas-Salomé’s work on femininity and spirituality draws on Russian philosophy, in particular Vladimir Solovyov’s concept of all-unity (Russian ‘vseedinstvo’, also translated as pan-oneness) and his Sophiology.211 Solovyov, whose works Andreas-Salomé considered to embody the Russian spirit in philosophy, saw all-unity as the ideal condition of humanity that was embodied in the figure of Sophia, who is the feminine counterpart of the masculine Logos. He drew on the biblical figure of Wisdom from the Book of Proverbs, the Judaic Chokmah, and traditional iconographic representations of Sophia and the Virgin Mary as Theotokos (the Mother of God, Russian: Bogoroditsa), as well as the neo-Platonic tradition and poetic portrayals of the Eternal Feminine (Goethe).212 His Sophia is a mediator between humanity and divinity, and a transformative force that brings the two together, enabling the process of transfiguration of humanity into divinity. In Lectures on Divine Humanity, he defines Sophia as ‘ideal or perfect humanity, eternally contained in the integral divine being, or Christ’.213 Solovyov distinguishes between two types of divine unity, which Logos and Sophia correspond to: If in the divine being, in Christ, the first, the producing unity is, strictly speaking, Divinity, God as the active force, or Logos, and if, thus, in this first unity we have Christ as the divine being proper, then the second, the produced unity, to which we have given the mystical name Sophia, is the principle of humanity, the ideal or normal human being.214

For Solovyov, Sophia is to be distinguished from the ‘primordial unity of the divine Logos’ because its ‘produced unity’ contains both ‘the divine principle and creaturely being’.215 In his writings, she is referred to as the ‘World Soul’ and ‘archetypal humankind’.216 She ‘receives the divine Logos into itself’ and, thus, becomes ‘the divine humanity of Christ, the

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body of Christ’, uniting the divine and the human, as well as the masculine and the feminine.217 Through the figure of Sophia, as Judith Kornblatt points out, Solovyov was able to overcome dualistic oppositions and introduce a triadic model in which Sophia is the third ‘uniting or completing side of a triad, not simply equivalent to the other two but a transfiguring force that makes of the union a new whole, undivided, yet unmerged’.218 Thus, in Solovyov’s writings, Sophia is at times feminine, at times androgynous, and at times gender-neutral. Christ as Logos is masculine, but as Sophia feminine. This emphasis on a gender-inclusive image of divinity is further explored by Berdyaev, who argued that ‘neither man nor woman is the image and likeness of God but only the androgyne’.219 According to him, the ‘differentiation into male and female is a result of the cosmic fall of Adam’.220 As a consequence of Original Sin, the androgyne fell apart into differentiated male and female, but that separation was not final as both man and woman deep inside remained essentially androgynous and bisexual beings.221 Berdyaev argues that ‘Christ restored the androgynous image of man’, ‘unit[ing] in himself the male and female’, and becoming the second Adam and Sophia simultaneously.222 Thus, he revealed the possibility for man and woman to restore in themselves ‘the androgynous image and likeness of God’.223 Berdyaev views the cult of the Virgin Mary and the Eternal Feminine as an important step in that process, which should lead to the ‘cult of the androgyne’ as the ‘all-uniting revelation’.224 Rilke’s portrayal of God and the divine-human relationship in The Book of Hours shows extensive affinities with Andreas-Salomé’s reflections on femininity and contemporary explorations of the interface of spirituality and gender in Russian philosophy. God experienced by the icon-painting monk bears a number of traits that are associated with femininity and is described through an imagery that evokes darkness, earth, and organic growth. The monk, whose prayers in the middle of the cycle, according to the prose interpolations, turn into visionary poems that ‘leap into words from chaos and wildness’, explores the dark nature of God in a number of poems.225 In poem 3 he asserts: ‘My God is dark’ (l. 7); poem 11 opens: ‘You, darkness from which I come’ (l.1); in poem 28 the speaker professes: ‘You’re so dark that my little brightness / makes no sense’ (l. 3–4), and in poem 37 he refers to God as ‘the dark unconscious one’ (l. 4). The darkness of Rilke’s God recalls the darkness of the icons he saw on his journey to Russia, but more importantly, the cycle associates that darkness with the images of earth and organic growth. While speaking about his relationship

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with the divine, the monk repeatedly refers to images of ‘roots’ (poems 3, 5, 23, 34), ‘branches’ (poem 3), ‘trunks’ (poem 23), ‘trees’ (poems 3, 5, 59), ‘fruit’ (poems 31 and 34), and ‘blossoming’ (poems 31 and 32). In the poems where such arboreal imagery is employed, God is most frequently associated with the roots of the tree of which the speaker forms the trunk and branches. This imagery is contrasted with the traditional portrayals of God and the saints in Western religious art. In a poem that juxtaposes the God of Italian painters with the God of the monk’s experience, the image of darkness becomes connected to a vision of organic co-existence between the believer and God. The poem is divided into two parts: in the first stanza, the speaker reflects on the paintings of fellow-monks ‘who live in cloisters under southern skies’.226 The cloisters of the Southern monks are adorned by the fragrant bay laurel, which in the antiquity was associated with Apollo, the god of the sun and light. Their religious art, for Rilke’s monk, is defined by the likes of Titian and the ‘humanly’ painted Madonnas (l. 3). This kind of art does not correspond to the God that the monk has experienced, who is described in the second stanza: But when I bow down into my self: My God is dark and like a clump of a hundred roots drinking silently. I lift myself from His warmth; more than this I don’t know, for all my branches rest in the depths and only sway in the winds. (l. 6–11)

The dark God, who is to be found in the monk’s own ‘self’, provides roots that uphold the monk’s very existence. The boundary between the human and the divine becomes blurred, as the trunk and branches cannot exist without roots. The fact that God and the speaker are both parts of a singular organic entity emphasises the intimate nature of their relationship marked by mutual nurturing. God is dark, silent, and hidden deep underground, yet at the same time remains a source of life-giving water and uplifting ‘warmth’. Such a vision of a dark God, Rilke’s monk concedes, differs radically from the radiant divinity painted by the Italian artists. The monk’s God destabilises the traditional masculine portrayal of God the Father by assuming characteristics associated with femininity that is rooted in fecund earthliness.

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The image of the tree, which regularly recurs in Rilke’s cycle, is also used by Andreas-Salomé in her interpretation of femininity. She employs the tree metaphor to make a distinction between female and male creativity. According to her, while man’s focus is on an activity at hand with a view to accomplish a particular task, woman’s creativity should be viewed in a more organic way. Woman can be compared to a fruit tree whose fruits ‘are not to be picked, separated, packaged, dispatched’ but whose essential beauty lies in its ‘blooming, ripening, shadow-giving’.227 The tree should not be exploited for its fruits but appreciated in its wholeness. According to her, while man directs his creative powers outwards and focuses on the production of fruit, woman ‘expends her power and juice within the core of her being’ as her focus is on the inner life.228 Rilke’s monk’s use of the tree imagery evokes the feminine and the earthly in a similar way. The association of the divine with organic growth ascribes to God traits connected to the Russian Orthodox portrayal of the Virgin Mary, who is ‘a sexualized, moist mother rather than a pristine virgin’.229 At times conflated with Sophia, as Judith Deutsch Kornblatt points out, she becomes ‘Mother Moist Earth (mat’ syra zemlia) [who] is androgynous, consuming both male and female reproductive processes as she produces and nourishes her offspring’.230 Mary’s earthliness and Sophia’s androgyny are incorporated into the portrayal of God in The Book of Hours. Both Mary and Sophia destabilise gender metaphors dominant in the discursive framework of Christian tradition. The monk’s prayer-poems refer to God in an explicitly sensual manner, merging the image of darkness with references to the earth and the body that suggest an affective and sexually charged encounter. In poem 19 the speaker refers to his feelings that ‘have found wings’ and ‘circle around Your [God’s] face’.231 In poem 59 he shelters God’s body and, by offering it protection, experiences an effusion of feelings: My sleep is a granite roof held up above Your body, and like a wondrous creek that gushed out of the mountains, my feelings are crushed there a thousandfold.232

In a poem in which the monk refers to his relationship with God as a work of art that unites the two of them, he also compares himself to a ‘sparkling necklace’ that adorns God’s neck:

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And for beauty’s sake we’re both consecrated wondrously to a single work. We’re like images deeply stained in old silk. And whether I paint or dream or suffer, I hang like a sparkling necklace around the darkness of Your shoulders.233

These descriptions of the monk protecting and bejewelling God evoke an image of a lover who courts the beloved, attempting to win her favour. God becomes a feminised object of intense feelings that keep the monk awake. This framing of the human-divine relationship is, however, destabilised by other poems in the cycle that reverse this positionality by emphasising the masculinity of God and place the monk in the feminine position. In poem 36 the monk wonders what will happen to God after his death. He emphasises their symbiotic relationship and God’s need of him, depicting his role as the person who provides God with a sense of warmth, home, and belonging: After me You’ll have no house where soft and warm words might greet You, and the satin sandals which I am will fall from Your weary feet.234

The monk’s comparison of his role to that of ‘satin sandals’ evokes the Gospel scene in which Mary, Martha’s sister, anointed Jesus’s feet with precious oil (John 12:1–3). Stooping to take care of God’s feet indicates humble submission to his divinity and the assumption of the feminine position. A similar gender dynamic can be seen in poem 43, in which the monk ‘bowed down after gently struggling’ and submitted to God, acknowledging his ‘victory’:235 You hold me very tenderly, and listen as I stroke my hands through Your old beard. (l. 16–18)

The dynamic of the monk’s relationship with God changes through the metaphor of a conquest, in which the monk assumes the feminine role of the object to be conquered, who first struggles and then gives in. The physical intimacy between God and the monk brings them together through the experience of the senses, rectifying what in ‘The Letter of the

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Young Worker’ Rilke criticised as Christianity’s systematic denigration of sensuality that ‘borders on hurting God’.236 By employing a wide range of gendered metaphors, the cycle as a whole destabilises traditional gender binaries. Both God and the monk are fluid in their sexual and gender identities and ultimately transgress the male/ female and masculine/feminine paradigms. Each of them assumes both roles, illustrating the androgyny that Solovyov and Berdyaev explored in their philosophical writings. In this way, the relationship between God and the monk disrupts the heteronormative framework and offers a gender-­ inclusive portrayal of the human-divine encounter. This reflects Rilke’s sustained interest in androgyny, which he connected to the act of creation.237 In Letters to a Young Poet (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter, 1903–1908), he reflects on the proximity of man and woman: And it seems to me that in man, too, there is motherhood, both physical and spiritual; his begetting is also a form of giving birth, and in creating he too gives birth, out of innermost abundance. And perhaps the sexes are more related than we suspect, and perhaps the great renewal of the world will come about when men and girls, freed from all crazed feelings and deadened appetites will seek each other not as opposites but as siblings and neighbors, and unite as human beings so that they may simply, seriously and patiently carry together the difficult sex that has been enjoined upon them.238

To bring together all humanity in an attempt to renew the world is the uniting task of Solovyov’s Sophia, who mediates between the human and the divine. Solovyov’s Sophiology, whose advanced version developed by Father Sergei Bulgakov was condemned as heresy by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1935, is thought to have been partly inspired by the iconographic image of Sophia the Sacred Wisdom.239 Solovyov might have seen the Sophia icon and fresco in the Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin, which is the church in which Rilke celebrated Easter 1899, participating in the Orthodox liturgy with Andreas-Salomé and Friedrich Carl Andreas.240 On their Russian travels, Rilke and Andreas-Salomé saw several important depictions of Sophia that portrayed her as an angel of royal demeanour, including the famous icons in the Holy Trinity Monastery in Sergiev Posad and the Cathedral of St Sophia in Veliky Novgorod. In The Book of Hours, Rilke’s monk reflects on his visit to the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow, where he saw frescos of both Mary and Sophia. In poem 57, he describes of an image of an unnamed woman ‘who is keeper of the gate’.241 This

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portrayal can refer simultaneously to Mary and to Sophia, as it evokes Solovyov’s poetic depiction of Sophia in Three Encounters (Tri svidanoia, 1898).242 In Solovyov’s poem, the speaker attends a mass and experiences a vision of a woman who clasps ‘[u]nearthly flowers’ in her hands.243 In Rilke’s poem, the woman whom the monk sees is compared to ‘the morning dew / who blossoms […] like a meadow / without ceasing’ (l. 15–17). In Solovyov’s poetic vision, the woman is ‘[t]ranspierced throughout by rays of golden azure’ (l. 17); Rilke’s monk sees a woman ‘blue like nights’ (l. 12). The correspondence between these two poetic depictions of femininity is connected to the shared features of the Sophia and Mary icons. In Solovyov’s poem, the woman becomes ‘[a] single image of all female beauty’ and leads the speaker to experience a mystical vision of perfect unity: ‘I saw it all, and all I saw was one. […] You stand alone before me, and within me’.244 Sophia unlocks a mystical sense of unity in which the speaker internalises her presence. She inspires the speaker to cultivate an inner space in which—as he states—‘The roses in my soul shall ever flourish, / From now, no matter where I’m tossed about’ (l. 83–84). The cultivation of such spiritual interiority is a practice which for Rilke and Andreas-Salomé was specifically linked to their view of Russian religiosity.

Conclusion At the turn of the century, when modernist theologians were exploring ways to renew Christianity and align Catholic theology with modern philosophy, Rilke and Andreas-Salomé rejected Catholicism as a religion that lost its original vitality. They looked to Eastern Christianity for a source of both spiritual and creative rejuvenation. Rilke’s poetic exploration of certain features of Orthodox iconography, in particular, its polycentric and dynamic perspective, and the practice of icon veneration allowed him to reclaim the icon as both a religious artefact and a work of art that allows for, or even requires, an individual believer to co-create its meaning. The view of Russian religiosity that dominated Rilke’s and Andreas-Salomé’s writings centred around gendered and orientalised spirituality. They mapped the differences between Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy onto the binary opposition of masculine rationality and feminine affectivity, as well as the geopolitical divide between Western Europe and Russia. Rilke’s and Andreas-Salomé’s gendered understanding of spirituality should be viewed in the context of the resurgence of Marian devotion

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across Europe, but also the development of psychoanalysis, and the socio-­ political context of women’s emancipation movements. Their view of femininity corresponds with the interpretations of mysticism put forward by modernist theologians such as Friedrich von Hügel and Henri Bremond. In The Mystical Element of Religion (1908), von Hügel analysed the case of Catherine of Genoa, linking her gender with strong feelings and ‘quasi-­ physical seizures’.245 He argued that a ‘coral reef, growing up from, and just peering above, a hundred fathom-deep ocean, would be an appropriate picture of the large predominance of subconsciousness in [her] spacious soul’.246 The connection between spiritual depth, subconsciousness, and femininity is also emphasised in Bremond’s Prayer and Poetry. Drawing on Paul Claudel’s parable of Animus and Anima, Bremond interprets the masculine Animus as the ‘surface self’ and ‘rational knowledge’ and the feminine Anima as the ‘deep self’ and ‘mystical or poetic knowledge’.247 He argues that while Animus or the surface self is ‘so busy in the narrow wings of the little theatre that he ends by no longer hearing the concerts which are given behind the scenes’, Anima or the deep self, while she seems ‘asleep, inert and passive; […] receives visits of God’.248 Bremond’s interpretation was endorsed by Evelyn Underhill in the preface to the 1930 edition of her influential study Mysticism, where she contended that Bremond’s examination of ‘a genuine two-foldness in human nature’ and his focus on the feminine-oriented transcendental self that is ‘in touch with supernatural realities’ transformed the discourse defining contemporary studies of mysticism.249 The notion of the deep self that transcends the rational mind and constitutes an inner space orientated towards the divine shaped both Rilke’s and Andreas-Salomé’s writings on religion. Their primary interest was in religion as a lived experience that transforms the inner self of the believer. Concurring with Solovyov’s view that the ‘beginning of everything good in this world comes out of our dark sphere of unconscious processes and relations’, Andreas-Salomé’s essays and Rilke’s poetry challenged the institutionalised and dogmatised aspects of religion to shift attention to the psychological structures of individual religious experience.250 Their approach was aligned with William James’s work and centred around the inner life that was also becoming the central subject of Freud’s depth psychology.251 Rilke’s poetic works systematically remove God from radiant heavens to place him in the darkness of the human heart or the unconscious. This spatial displacement of the divine corresponds with Andreas-­ Salomé’s contention that the structures of belief are both shaped by and,

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in turn, actively shape one’s inner self. Since religion cannot be experienced other than through one’s psyche, the distinction between God and one’s experience of God ceases to have importance. The fact that God is created by and located in an individual believer does not make the divine any less real or authentic, as the psychological mechanisms of belief turn God into an objective reality that has the power to transform a person’s life. In this sense, God both creates human beings and is created by them and as such can be viewed as—in Rilke’s words—‘the oldest work of art’.252

Notes 1. George C.  Schoolfield, Young Rilke and His Time (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009). 2. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letter to Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-­ Hohenlohe, 17 December 1912,’ in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 2, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M.  D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1948), 76. 3. See Robert Vilain, ‘Rilke the Reader’ and Paul Bishop, ‘Rilke: Thought and Mysticism,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Rilke, ed. Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010), 131–144 and 159–173. 4. For a review of critical approaches to Rilke and religion, see Robert Vilain, ‘Rilke and God,’ Oxford German Studies 48, no. 4 (2019): 472–493. 5. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letter to Ilse Jahr, 22 February 1923,’ in Selected Letters: 1902–1926, trans. by R. F. C. Hull (London: Quartet, 1988), 373. 6. Vilain, ‘Rilke and God,’ 475. 7. Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia, trans. Noah and Maria Rubins (Oxford: Westview, 1997), chapter 1: ‘At the Crossroads of Worlds and Centuries: The Life and Work of Lou Andreas-Salomé’. 8. Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘Jesus der Jude,’ in Aufsätze und Essays, vol. 1, ed. Hans-Rüdiger Schwab (Taching am See: MedienEdition Welsch, 2011), 169–184. 9. The Varieties of Religious Experience was originally delivered as a series of lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901–1902. 10. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, 13 May 1897,’ in Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Correspondence, trans. Edward Snow and Michael Winkler (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006), 3.

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11. Lou Andreas-Salomé, Aufsätze und Essays, vol. 1. See also Angela Livingstone, Lou Andreas-Salomé: Her Life and Work (Mount Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell, 1984); and Biddy Martin, Woman and Modernity: The (Life) Styles of Lou Andreas-Salomé (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 12. Lou Andreas-Salomé, Rainer Maria Rilke (Leipzig: Insel, 1928); English translation: You Alone Are Real to Me: Remembering Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Angela von der Lippe (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2004). 13. Andreas-Salomé, ‘Jesus der Jude,’ 172–173. Emphasis in the original. 14. Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘Harnack und das Apostolikum,’ in Aufsätze und Essays, vol. 1, 197–214. 15. Adolf von Harnack, The Apostles’ Creed (London: A. and C. Black, 1901). See also Adolf von Harnack: Liberal Theology at Its Height, ed. Martin Rumscheidt (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991). 16. Andreas-Salomé, ‘Harnack und das Apostolikum,’ 203–204. Emphasis in the original. 17. Ibid., 203. 18. Ibid., 207–209. 19. Andreas-Salomé, ‘Jesus der Jude,’ 169. Emphasis in the original. 20. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Christus: Elf Visionen,’ in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Rilke-Archiv, Ruth Sieber-Rilke, and Ernst Zinn, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1963), 127–169. All quotations are from the English translation: Visions of Christ: A Posthumous Cycle of Poems, ed. Siegfried Mandel, trans. Aaron Kramer (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1967). 21. Rilke, ‘Painter,’ in Visions of Christ, 88–94, lines 24 and 22. 22. Rilke, ‘Fair,’ in Visions of Christ, 62–69. Johannes Wich-Schwarz, Transformation of Language and Religion in Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 13. 23. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Der Brief des jungen Arbeiters,’ in Werke: Kommentierte Ausgabe in vier Bänden mit einem Supplementband, vol. 4, ed. Horst Nalewski (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1996), 735–747. All quotations are from the following English edition: ‘The Letter of the Young Worker,’ in Letters on God and Letters to a Young Woman, trans. Annemarie S.  Kidder (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 19–31. 24. Ibid., 20. 25. Ibid., 21. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. See John E.  Thiel, Senses of Tradition: Continuity and Development in Catholic Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 56–67.

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29. Alfred Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, trans. Christopher Home (London: Isbister and Co., 1903), 16. See Chap. 2: ‘A Theological History of Modernism’. 30. Rilke, ‘The Letter of the Young Worker,’ 20. 31. Ibid., 21. 32. Lou Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back: Memoirs, ed. Ernest Pfeiffer, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Marlowe & Co., 1995), 41; Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letter to General-Major V.  Sedlakowitz, 9 December 1920,’ in Selected Letters: 1902–1926, 313. 33. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, 15 August 1903,’ in Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Correspondence, 85. 34. For detailed itinerary, see Rilke und Russland: Briefe, Erinnerungen, Gedichte, ed. Konstantin Asadowski, trans. Ulrike Hirschberg (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1986), 20–49. On Rilke and Russia, see Patricia Pollock Brodsky, Russia in the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984); and Anna A. Tavis, Rilke’s Russia: A Cultural Encounter (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994). 35. Among the books that Rilke studied were Nikolay Karamzin’s Istorija gosudarstva Rossijskago [History of the Russian State, 1816–1826], William R. S. Ralston’s The Songs of the Russian People (1872), ballads and verse tales compiled by Pavel N.  Rybnikov (Pesni sobrannye P. N. Rybnikovym [Songs Collected by P. N. Rybnikov, 1861–1867]) and Russian folktales and fairy tales published by Alexander Afanasev as Narodnye russkie skazki [Russian Fairy Tales, 1855–1863]. See Brodsky, 212–213. 36. Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back, 35. See also Livingstone, 15–31. 37. On Akim Volynsky, see Helen Tolstoy, Akim Volynsky: A Hidden Russian-­ Jewish Prophet, trans. Simon Cook (Leiden: Brill, 2017). 38. Brodsky, 15–24. 39. Martin, 46. 40. Quoted in Tavis, 20. 41. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, 31 March 1904,’ in Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Correspondence, 104. 42. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, 15 August 1903,’ in Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Correspondence, 82. 43. Ibid. 44. Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back, 36. 45. Ibid. 46. See Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003). 47. Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back, 41. 48. Ibid. Emphasis in the original.

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49. Lou-Andreas Salomé, ‘Letter to Rainer Maria Rilke, 20 March 1904,’ in Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Correspondence, 102. 50. Ibid. 51. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 189. 52. Quoted in Wolff, 86–87. 53. Ibid., 45. See also Ezequiel Adamovsky, ‘Euro-Orientalism and the Making of the Concept of Eastern Europe in France, 1810–1880,’ The Journal of Modern History 77, no. 3 (2005): 591–628. 54. Rainer Maria Rilke, Two Stories of Prague, trans. Angela Esterhammer (University Press of New England: Hanover and London, 1994), 76. 55. Judith E.  Kalb, Russia’s Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008); Anna Frajlich, The Legacy of Ancient Rome in the Russian Silver Age (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). 56. Marshall Poe, ‘Moscow, the Third Rome: The Origins and Transformations of a “Pivotal Moment”,’ Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 49, no. 3 (2001): 412–429; David G.  Rowley, ‘“Redeemer Empire”: Russian Millenarianism,’ The American Historical Review 104, no. 5 (1999): 1582–1602. 57. Quoted in Kalb, 16. 58. On the later usage of the Third Rome trope, see Dmitrii Sidorov, ‘Post-­ Imperial Third Romes: Resurrections of a Russian Orthodox Geopolitical Metaphor,’ Geopolitics 11, no. 2 (2006): 317–347. 59. Jonathan Sutton, The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov: Towards a Reassessment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988). 60. Vladimir Solovyov, The Crisis of Western Philosophy: (Against The Positivists), trans. Boris Jakim (Hudson: Lindisfarne Press, 1996). 61. Vladimir Solovyov, ‘The Union of the Churches,’ in A Solovyov Anthology, ed. S. L. Frank, trans. Natalie Duddington (London: SCM Press LTD, 1950), 101. See also Vladimir Solovyov, Russia and the Universal Church, trans. Herbert Rees (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1948); and Freedom, Faith, and Dogma: Essays by V. S. Soloviev on Christianity and Judaism, ed. and trans. Vladimir Wozniuk (Albany: State University of New  York Press, 2008). 62. Nicolas Berdyaev, ‘Russia and the West,’ in The Spiritual Crisis of the Intelligentsia, trans. Fr. Stephen Janos (Mohrsville, PA: Frsj Publications, 2015), 138. 63. Ibid., 139. 64. Ibid.

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65. Ibid., 140. See also Nicolas Berdyaev, The Russian Idea, trans. R. M. French (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1947). 66. Michel d’Herbigny, Vladimir Soloviev: A Russian Newman (1853–1900), trans. A. M. Buchanan (London: R. & T. Washbourne, 1918). 67. Nicolas Berdyaev, Self-Knowledge: An Essay in Autobiography, trans. Katharine Lampert (San Rafael, CA: Semantron Press, 2009), 258–259. 68. Ibid., 252. 69. Nicolas Berdyaev, ‘Catholic Modernism and the Crisis of the Contemporary Consciousness,’ in The Spiritual Crisis of the Intelligentsia, 274. 70. Ibid., 285. 71. Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 72. Ibid., 283. 73. Ibid., 285. 74. Ibid., 293. 75. Quoted in Livingstone, 111–112. 76. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letter to Major-General von Sedlakowitz, 9 December 1920,’ in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 2, 235–236. 77. Rilke, ‘The Letter of the Young Worker,’ 27. 78. Ibid. See also Egon Schwarz, Poetry and Politics in the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. David E. Wellbery (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981). 79. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Das Stunden-Buch,’ in Werke: Kommentierte Ausgabe in vier Bänden mit einem Supplementband, vol. 1, ed. Manfred Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1996), 153–252. 80. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Die Gebete (Das Buch vom Mönchischen Leben),’ in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Rilke-Archiv, Ruth Sieber-Rilke, and Ernst Zinn, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Insel-Verlag, 1963), 305–373. The only English edition that retains the prose notes is Mark S. Burrows’s translation. All subsequent quotations and the numbering of the poems are from this edition: Rainer Maria Rilke, Prayers of a Young Poet, trans. Mark S. Burrows (Brewster: Paraclete Press, 2013). 81. Rilke, ‘[Poem 32],’ in Prayers of a Young Poet, 66, lines 1–9. Emphasis in the original. 82. Rilke, ‘[Poem 34],’ in Prayers of a Young Poet, 69, lines 1–3. 83. Vladimir Solovyov, ‘Sophie. First Triad. First Principles,’ trans. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, in Divine Wisdom: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov, ed. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 121. 84. Rilke, ‘[Poem 29],’ in Prayers of a Young Poet, 64, lines 8–14. 85. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Geschichten vom lieben Gott,’ in Werke: Kommentierte Ausgabe in vier Bänden mit einem Supplementband, vol. 3, ed. August Stahl (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1996), 343–429. All

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quotations are from the following English edition: Stories of God, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1992). 86. Rilke, Stories of God, 41. 87. Ibid., 60. 88. Ibid., 50. 89. Ibid., 34. 90. Ibid. 91. Ibid., 35. 92. Ibid., 37. 93. Rilke, ‘[Poem 1],’ in Prayers of a Young Poet, 35, lines 1–4. 94. Ben Hutchinson, Rilke’s Poetics of Becoming (London: Legenda, 2006), 70. 95. See Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-­ Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); and Robert Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the Divine Office and Its Meaning for Today (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1986). 96. Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, trans. by G.  E. H.  Palmer and E.  Kadloubovsky, rev. edn (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994), 38. 97. Aris Fioretos, ‘Prayer and Ignorance in Rilke’s “Buch Vom Mönchischen Leben”,’ Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 65, no. 4 (1990): 171–177. 98. Tavis, 65–71; Tolstoy, 68–72. 99. Andrew Spira, The Avant–Garde Icon: Russian Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2008), 30. 100. Rilke und Russland, 20–49. 101. Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘Das russische Heiligenbild und sein Dichter,’ in Aufsätze und Essays, vol. 3.2, ed. Hans-Rüdiger Schwab (Taching am See: MedienEdition Welsch, 2013), 125–137; Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Russische Kunst’ and ‘Moderne russische Kunstbestrebungen,’ in Werke: Kommentierte Ausgabe in vier Bänden mit einem Supplementband, vol. 4, ed. Horst Nalewski (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1996), 152–160, 285–292. 102. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke to Helene *** [Voronin],’ ed. Vladimir Boutchik, E.  L. Stahl, and Stanley Mitchell, Oxford Slavonic Papers 9 (1960): 161. 103. Rilke, ‘Russische Kunst’. 104. Ibid., 154. 105. Ibid., 155. 106. Ibid.

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107. Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘Russland mit Rainer’: Tagebuch der Reise mit Rainer Maria Rilke im Jahre 1900, ed. Stéphane Michaud and Dorothee Pfeiffer (Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1999). 108. Ibid., 42. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid. 111. Gabriele Eckart, ‘Intermixing German and Russian in Lou Andreas-­ Salomé’s Travelogue Russland Mit Rainer and Katja Petrowskaja’s Autobiographical Narrative Vielleicht Esther,’ Rocky Mountain Review 71, no. 2 (2017): 135–150. 112. Andreas-Salomé, ‘Russland mit Rainer’, 37. 113. Ibid. 114. Pavel Florensky, ‘Reverse Perspective,’ in Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. Nicoletta Misler, trans. Wendy Salmond (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 197–272. See also Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. Olga Andrejev and Donald Sheehan (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996). 115. Florensky, ‘Reverse Perspective,’ 264. 116. Ibid., 270. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid., 211–212. 119. Florensky, Iconostasis, 71–72. 120. Maria Taroutina, The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018), 53. 121. See Chap. 2: ‘A Theological History of Modernism’. 122. George Tyrrell, ‘“Revelation as Experience”: An Unpublished Lecture of George Tyrrell,’ ed. Thomas M.  Loome, Heythrop Journal 12, no. 2 (1971): 131. 123. Rilke, ‘[Poem 58],’ in Prayers of a Young Poet, 95, lines 5–8. 124. Rilke, ‘[Poem 63],’ in Prayers of a Young Poet, 100–107. 125. Emphasis in the original. 126. Jennifer S. Cushman, ‘The Avant-Garde Rilke: Russian (Un)Orthodoxy and the Visual Arts,’ in Unreading Rilke: Unorthodox Approaches to a Cultural Myth, ed. Harmut Heep (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 137–148. 127. See Shirley Glade, ‘A Heritage Discovered Anew: Russia’s Reevaluation of Pre-Petrine Icons in the Late Tsarist and Early Soviet Periods,’ Canadian–American Slavic Studies 26 (1992): 145–195; and Robert L. Nichols, ‘The Icon and the Machine in Russia’s Religious Renaissance, 1900–1909,’ in Christianity and the Arts in Russia, ed. William Brumfield

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and Milos Velimirovic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 131–144. 128. See Spira, 54. 129. See Taroutina, The Icon and the Square; Spira, The Avant-garde Icon; and John E. Bowlt, ‘Orthodoxy and the Avant-Garde: Sacred Images in the Work of Goncharova, Malevich, and Their Contemporaries,’ in Christianity and the Arts in Russia, 145–150. 130. Sarah Pratt, ‘Avant-Garde Poets and Imagined Icons,’ in Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity, ed. Jefferson J.  A. Gatrall and Douglas Greenfield (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 174. 131. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 132. 132. Anthony Parton, Mikhail Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993), 65. 133. Spira, 78. 134. Quoted in Spira, 128. 135. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. Michael T. H. Sadler ([Auckland]: Floating Press, 2008). 136. Quoted in Spira, 121. 137. Ibid. 138. Ibid., 121–122. 139. Ibid., 122. 140. Rilke, ‘[Poem 41],’ in Prayers of a Young Poet, 38, line 1. 141. Rilke, ‘[Poem 48],’ in Prayers of a Young Poet, 83, lines 3–4. 142. Rilke, ‘[Poem 15],’ in Prayers of a Young Poet, 49, lines 1–4. 143. See Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology—Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000); Anna Lisa Crone, Eros and Creativity in Russian Religious Renewal (Leiden: Brill, 2010); and Richard A.  Hughes, ‘Nikolai Berdyaev’s Theology of Creativity,’ International Journal of Orthodox Theology 7, no. 2 (2016): 119–141. 144. Vladimir Solovyov, ‘Beauty in Nature,’ in A Solovyov Anthology, 129. Emphasis in the original. 145. Ibid., 136. 146. Ibid., 138. Emphasis in the original. 147. Vladimir Solovyov, ‘The Meaning of Art,’ in A Solovyov Anthology, 142. 148. Ibid., 146–147. Emphasis in the original. 149. Ibid., 146, 144. 150. Berdyaev, Self-Knowledge, 207. 151. Nicolas Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, trans. Donald A. Lowrie (San Rafael, CA: Semantron Press, 2009), 19.

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152. Ibid., 22. 153. Ibid., 29. 154. Ibid., 225. 155. Ibid., 225–226. 156. Ibid., 247–248. 157. Ibid., 249. 158. Berdyaev, Self-Knowledge, 208. 159. Ibid., 209. 160. Ibid. 161. Ibid. 162. Ibid., 202–203. 163. Ibid., 184. 164. Rilke, ‘[Poem 56],’ in Prayers of a Young Poet, 93, lines 11, 17–18. 165. Rilke, ‘[Poem 36],’ in Prayers of a Young Poet, 71, lines 1–4. 166. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke to Helene *** [Voronin],’ 155–158. 167. Rilke, ‘[Poem 32],’ in Prayers of a Young Poet, 67, lines 14–15. Poem 32, 168. Rilke, Stories of God, 56. 169. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Das Marien-Leben,’ in Werke: Kommentierte Ausgabe in vier Bänden mit einem Supplementband, vol. 2, ed. Manfred Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1996), 21–35. All quotations are from the following English edition: The Life of Mary, trans. N. K. Cruickshank (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, [1952]). 170. See David R.  Cartlidge and James Keith Elliott, Art and the Christian Apocrypha (London: Routledge, 2001), chapter 2: ‘Mary’. 171. Rilke, ‘The Presentation of Mary in the Temple,’ in The Life of Mary, 12–15. 172. Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 63–72. 173. Rilke, ‘Annunciation to the Shepherds from Above,’ in The Life of Mary, 22–25. 174. Barbara Corrado Pope, ‘“Immaculate and Powerful”: The Marian Revival in the Nineteenth Century,’ in Immaculate & Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, ed. Clarissa Atkinson et  al. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 173–200. 175. See Chris Maunder, Our Lady of the Nations: Apparitions of Mary in 20thCentury Catholic Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); and Sandra L.  Zimdars-Swartz, Encountering Mary: From La Salette to Medjugorje (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 176. Pope, 181. 177. Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, new edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 241–242.

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178. Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 197. 179. Ibid., 218. 180. Ibid., 219. 181. Ibid., 247. 182. Ibid., 182. 183. Jerzy Peterkiewicz, The Third Adam (London: Oxford University Press, 1975). 184. Shevzov, 236. 185. Ibid., 214. 186. Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘Russische Dichtung und Kultur,’ in Lebende Dichtung, vol. 2, 27–53. 187. Ibid., 29–30. 188. Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back, 94. 189. Ibid., 94. 190. Rilke, Stories of God, 87. Emphasis in the original. 191. Ibid., 88. 192. Ibid. 193. Ibid. 194. Ibid. 195. Ibid., 89. 196. Ibid. 197. Ibid. 198. See Martin, 141–175. 199. Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back, 94. 200. Martin, 191–229. 201. Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘Der Mensch als Weib: Ein Bild im Umriß,’ in Aufsätze und Essays, vol. 2, ed. Hans-Rüdiger Schwab (Taching am See: MedienEdition Welsch, 2014), 95–130. 202. Martin, 160. 203. Quoted in Martin, 151. 204. Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back, 40. 205. Ibid., 41. 206. Ibid., 39. 207. Andreas-Salomé, ‘Der Mensch als Weib,’ 100. 208. See also James L. Rice, Freud’s Russia: National Identity in the Evolution of Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2017). 209. Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Erotic, trans. John Crisp (New York: Routledge, 2017). 210. Ibid., 85. See also Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Freud Journal, trans. Stanley A. Leavy (London: Quarter Books, 1964).

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211. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, ‘Who Is Solovyov and What Is Sophia?,’ in Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov, 16. 212. Ibid., 52–53. 213. Vladimir Solyvov, ‘Lectures on Divine Humanity,’ in Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov, 180. 214. Ibid. 215. Ibid., 188. 216. Ibid. 217. Ibid., 189. 218. Kornblatt, ‘Who Is Solovyov and What Is Sophia?,’ 27. 219. Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, 184. See Anna Lisa Crone, Eros and Creativity in Russian Religious Renewal, 118–150. 220. Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, 184. 221. Ibid., 185. 222. Ibid., 187. 223. Ibid., 202. 224. Ibid., 204. 225. Rilke, Prayers of a Young Poet, 56. 226. Rilke, ‘[Poem 3],’ in Prayers of a Young Poet, 37, line 1. 227. Andreas-Salomé, ‘Der Mensch als Weib,’ 109–110. 228. Ibid., 110. 229. Kornblatt, 54. 230. Ibid. 231. Rilke, ‘[Poem 19],’ in Prayers of a Young Poet, 53, lines 3–4. 232. Rilke, ‘[Poem 59],’ in Prayers of a Young Poet, 96, lines 11–15. 233. Rilke, ‘[Poem 21],’ in Prayers of a Young Poet, 55, lines 1–6. Emphasis in the original. 234. Rilke, ‘[Poem 36],’ in Prayers of a Young Poet, 71, lines 6–9. 235. Rilke, ‘[Poem 43],’ in Prayers of a Young Poet, 78, lines 10, 12. 236. Rilke, ‘The Letter of the Young Worker,’ 22. 237. See Ulrich Baer, The Rilke Alphabet, trans. Andrew Hamilton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 61–70. 238. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Mark Harman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 49–50. Emphasis in the original. 239. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, ‘Visions of Icons and Reading Rooms in the Poetry and Prose of Vladimir Solov’ev,’ in Aesthetics as a Religious Factor in Eastern and Western Christianity, ed. Wil van den Bercken and Jonathan Sutton (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 125–143. 240. Kornblatt, ‘Who Is Solovyov and What Is Sophia?,’ 55–60. 241. Rilke, ‘[Poem 57],’ in Prayers of a Young Poet, 94. 242. Vladimir Solovyov, ‘Three Encounters,’ in Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov, 263–272.

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243. Ibid., 266, part I, line 18. 244. Ibid., 271, part III, lines 78, 77, 80. 245. Friedrich von Hügel, The Mystical Element of Religion: As Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends, vol. 1 (London: Dent, 1909), 221. 246. Ibid. 247. Henri Bremond, Prayer and Poetry: A Contribution to Poetical Theory, trans. Algar Thorold (London: Burns, Oats & Washbourne, 1927), 109. 248. Ibid. 249. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness, 12th edn (London: Methuen, 1930), x. 250. Quoted in Etkind, 33. See also Judith Ryan, The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991). 251. See William B. Parsons, The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Depth Psychology and Mysticism, ed. Thomas Cattoi and David M. Odorisio (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 252. Rainer Maria Rilke, Diaries of the Young Poet, trans. Edward Snow and Michael Winkler (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 27.

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Asadowski, Konstantin, ed. Rilke und Russland: Briefe, Erinnerungen, Gedichte. Translated by Ulrike Hirschberg. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1986. Berdyaev, Nicolas. Self-Knowledge: An Essay in Autobiography. Translated by Katharine Lampert. San Rafael, CA: Semantron Press, 2009a. Berdyaev, Nicolas. The Meaning of the Creative Act. Translated by Donald A. Lowrie. San Rafael, CA: Semantron Press, 2009b. Berdyaev, Nicolas. The Russian Idea. Translated by R.  M. French. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1947. Berdyaev, Nicolas. The Spiritual Crisis of the Intelligentsia. Translated by Fr. Stephen Janos. Mohrsville, PA: Frsj Publications, 2015. Bishop, Paul. ‘Rilke: Thought and Mysticism.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Rilke, edited by Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain, 159–173. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Bowlt, John E. ‘Orthodoxy and the Avant-Garde: Sacred Images in the Work of Goncharova, Malevich, and Their Contemporaries.’ In Christianity and the Arts in Russia, edited by William Brumfield and Milos Velimirovic, 145–150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Bremond, Henri. Prayer and Poetry: A Contribution to Poetical Theory. Translated by Algar Thorold. London: Burns, Oats & Washbourne, 1927. Brodsky, Patricia Pollock. Russia in the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984. Cartlidge, David R., and Elliott, James Keith. Art and the Christian Apocrypha. London: Routledge, 2001. Cattoi, Thomas, and David M.  Odorisio, eds. Depth Psychology and Mysticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Crone, Anna Lisa. Eros and Creativity in Russian Religious Renewal. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Cushman, Jennifer S. ‘The Avant-Garde Rilke: Russian (Un)Orthodoxy and the Visual Arts.’ In Unreading Rilke: Unorthodox Approaches to a Cultural Myth, edited by Harmut Heep, 137–148. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. d’Herbigny, Michel. Vladimir Soloviev: A Russian Newman (1853–1900). Translated by A. M. Buchanan. London: R. & T. Washbourne, 1918. Eckart, Gabriele. ‘Intermixing German and Russian in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Travelogue Russland Mit Rainer and Katja Petrowskaja’s Autobiographical Narrative Vielleicht Esther.’ Rocky Mountain Review 71, no. 2 (2017): 135–150. Ehrman, Bart D. Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make it into the New Testament. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Etkind, Alexander. Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia. Translated by Noah and Maria Rubins. Oxford: Westview, 1997. Fioretos, Aris. ‘Prayer and Ignorance in Rilke’s “Buch Vom Mönchischen Leben”.’ Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 65, no. 4 (1990): 171–177.

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Florensky, Pavel. Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art. Translated by Wendy Salmond, edited by Nicoletta Misler. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Florensky, Pavel. Iconostasis. Translated by Olga Andrejev and Donald Sheehan. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996. Frajlich, Anna. The Legacy of Ancient Rome in the Russian Silver Age. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Glade, Shirley. ‘A Heritage Discovered Anew: Russia’s Reevaluation of Pre-Petrine Icons in the Late Tsarist and Early Soviet Periods.’ Canadian–American Slavic Studies 26 (1992): 145–195. Harnack, Adolf von. Adolf von Harnack: Liberal Theology at Its Height, edited by Martin Rumscheidt. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991. Harnack, Adolf von. The Apostles’ Creed. London: A. and C. Black, 1901. Hügel, Friedrich von. The Mystical Element of Religion: As Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends, vol. 1. London: Dent, 1909. Hughes, Richard A. ‘Nikolai Berdyaev’s Theology of Creativity.’ International Journal of Orthodox Theology 7, no. 2 (2016): 119–141. Hutchinson, Ben. Rilke’s Poetics of Becoming. London: Legenda, 2006. Kalb, Judith E. Russia’s Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Translated by Michael T. H. Sadler. Auckland: Floating Press, 2008. Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918, 2nd edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch. ‘Visions of Icons and Reading Rooms in the Poetry and Prose of Vladimir Solov’ev.’ In Aesthetics as a Religious Factor in Eastern and Western Christianity, edited by Wil van den Bercken and Jonathan Sutton, 125–143. Leuven: Peeters, 2005. Livingstone, Angela. Salomé: Her Life and Work. Mount Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell, 1984. Martin, Biddy. Woman and Modernity: The (Life)Styles of Lou Andreas-Salomé. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Maunder, Chris. Our Lady of the Nations: Apparitions of Mary in 20th-century Catholic Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Nichols, Robert L. ‘The Icon and the Machine in Russia’s Religious Renaissance, 1900–1909.’ In Christianity and the Arts in Russia, edited by William Brumfield and Milos Velimirovic, 131–144. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Translated by G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky, rev. edn. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994. Parsons, William B. The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

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Parton, Anthony. Mikhail Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde. London: Thames & Hudson, 1993. Peterkiewicz, Jerzy. The Third Adam. London: Oxford University Press, 1975. Poe, Marshall. ‘Moscow, the Third Rome: The Origins and Transformations of a “Pivotal Moment”.’ Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 49, no. 3 (2001): 412–429. Pope, Barbara Corrado. ‘“Immaculate and Powerful”: The Marian Revival in the Nineteenth Century.’ In Immaculate & Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, edited by Clarissa Atkinson et al., 173–200. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. Pratt, Sarah. ‘Avant-Garde Poets and Imagined Icons.’ In Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity, edited by Jefferson Gatrall and Douglas Greenfield, 173–190. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Rice, James L. Freud’s Russia: National Identity in the Evolution of Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 2017. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Diaries of the Young Poet. Translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 2 vols. Translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M.  D. Herter Norton. New  York: W.  W. Norton and Co., 1945–48. Rilke, Rainer Maria. ‘Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke to Helene *** [Voronin]’, edited by Vladimir Boutchik, E. L. Stahl, and Stanley Mitchell. Oxford Slavonic Papers 9 (1960): 129–164. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters on God and Letters to a Young Woman. Translated by Annemarie S. Kidder. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. Translated by Mark Harman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Prayers of a Young Poet. Translated by Mark S.  Burrows. Brewster: Paraclete Press, 2013. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Sämtliche Werke, edited by Rilke-Archiv, Ruth Sieber-Rilke, and Ernst Zinn, 6 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1962–1966. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Selected Letters: 1902–1926. Translated by R.  F. C.  Hull. London: Quartet, 1988. Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Life of Mary. Translated by N. K. Cruickshank. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1952. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Two Stories of Prague. Translated by Angela Esterhammer. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Visions of Christ: A Posthumous Cycle of Poems. Translated by Aaron Kramer, edited by Siegfried Mandel. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1967. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Werke: Kommentierte Ausgabe in vier Bänden mit einem Supplementband, edited by Manfred Engel, Ulrich Fülleborn, Dorothea

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Lauterbach, Horst Nalewski, and August Stahl, 5 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1996–2003. Rilke, Rainer Maria, and Lou Andreas-Salomé. The Correspondence. Translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006. Rowley, David G. ‘“Redeemer Empire”: Russian Millenarianism.’ The American Historical Review 104, no. 5 (1999): 1582–1602. Ryan, Judith. The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991. Said, Edward. Orientalism, 5th edn. London: Penguin, 2001. Schoolfield, George C. Young Rilke and His Time. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009. Schwarz, Egon. Poetry and Politics in the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke. Translated by David E. Wellbery. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981. Shevzov, Vera. Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Sidorov, Dmitrii. ‘Post-Imperial Third Romes: Resurrections of a Russian Orthodox Geopolitical Metaphor.’ Geopolitics 11, no. 2 (2006): 317–347. Solovyov, Vladimir. A Solovyov Anthology. Translated by Natalie Duddington, edited by S. L. Frank. London: SCM Press LTD, 1950. Solovyov, Vladimir. Divine Wisdom: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov, edited by Judith Deutsch Kornblatt. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. Solovyov, Vladimir. Freedom, Faith, and Dogma: Essays by V.  S. Soloviev on Christianity and Judaism. Edited and translated by Vladimir Wozniuk. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Solovyov, Vladimir. Russia and the Universal Church. Translated by Herbert Rees. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1948. Solovyov, Vladimir. The Crisis of Western Philosophy: (Against The Positivists). Translated by Boris Jakim. Hudson: Lindisfarne Press, 1996. Spira, Andrew. The Avant–Garde Icon: Russian Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition. Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2008. Sutton, Jonathan. The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov: Towards a Reassessment. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988. Taft, Robert. The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the Divine Office and Its Meaning for Today. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1986. Taroutina, Maria. The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-­ Byzantine Revival. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. Tavis, Anna A. Rilke’s Russia: A Cultural Encounter. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994. Tolstoy, Helen. Akim Volynsky: A Hidden Russian-Jewish Prophet. Translated by Simon Cook. Leiden, Brill: 2017.

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Tyrrell, George. ‘“Revelation as Experience”: An Unpublished Lecture of George Tyrrell,’ edited by Thomas M.  Loome. Heythrop Journal 12, no. 2 (1971): 117–149. Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness, 12th edn. London: Methuen, 1930. Valliere, Paul. Modern Russian Theology—Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000. Vilain, Robert. ‘Rilke and God.’ Oxford German Studies 48, no. 4 (2019): 472–493. Vilain, Robert. ‘Rilke the Reader.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Rilke, edited by Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain, 131–144. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Warner, Marina. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, new edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Wich-Schwarz, Johannes. Transformation of Language and Religion in Rainer Maria Rilke. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Zimdars-Swartz, Sandra L. Encountering Mary: From La Salette to Medjugorje. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

CHAPTER 6

A ‘Raid on the Absolute’: Dogmatic Tradition and Mystical Experience in  T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Criticism

Since in 1928, in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes, Eliot announced that he wished to make his present position clear and presented his readers with a collection of essays whose ‘general view may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion’, his readers and critics have been constantly confronted with the question of how to approach his public profession of Christian faith and, more importantly, how to determine the degree of relevance it bears to our understanding of his writings.1 Eliot’s engagement with religion has been studied from a wide range of perspectives and discussed at length by scholars including Lyndall Gordon, Ronald Schuchard, Barry Spurr, and Jewel Spears Brooker.2 His engagement with neo-Thomism in particular has been examined by Hugh Bredin, Jason Harding, Shun’ichi Takayanagi, and James Matthew Wilson.3 However, surprisingly few critics, with the exception of David Goldie and Donald J. Childs, have drawn attention to the ongoing theological debates between neo-scholastic and modernist thinkers that contextualise Eliot’s interest in neo-Thomism.4 The modernist crisis in theology and its religious, philosophical, and cultural implications recur in Eliot’s correspondence, reviews, and articles on a regular basis, yet it has attracted little critical attention. This apparent lack of interest is all the more surprising in view of the fact that Eliot considered the term ‘modernism’ to belong primarily to the discourse of theology. While today Eliot is recognised as the canonical poet of modernism, he himself © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Rzepa, Modernism and Theology, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61530-7_6

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argued that the term ‘modernism’ should be ‘avoided in poetry’, though it was ‘unhappily, necessary in theology’.5 In this chapter, I trace Eliot’s engagement with the philosophical and theological debates leading up to and following the modernist crisis of 1907 to shed light on Eliot’s understanding of the concept of ‘modernism’ and explain why he was deeply ambivalent about what he saw as the modernist tendencies in theology, philosophy, and culture of the period. Eliot’s interest in religion and theology was deeper, and its influence on his poetry and criticism more sustained, than it has been recognised. The issues that were at the heart of the theological debates of the period—the possibility and value of mystical experience, the problem of its interpretation, the relation between mysticism and systematic theology, religious interpretations of the dialectic between appearance and reality—were among the problems Eliot got increasingly interested in during the period he spent at Harvard University as a graduate student in philosophy and kept continually returning to both in his poetry and prose. They surface for the first time in his Harvard essays and notes on mysticism, reappear in his reviews of theological and religious literature written for the International Journal of Ethics in 1916–1918, recur again in his contributions to the debate with John Middleton Murry, and in the series of Clark Lectures (1926), Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (1932–1933), and Turnbull Lectures (1933). The period when Eliot started his literary career was rich in religious debate both in the Roman Catholic and in the Anglican context. Theological issues were widely debated not only within theologians’ and religious intellectuals’ circles, but also in leading newspapers and magazines. The Times regularly informed its readers about the development of the controversy in the Vatican and inside the Church of England, and in 1922 one of its contributors wrote that only somebody ‘who has buried his head like an ostrich in the sand’ could have ‘heard nothing of the Modernist school in the English Church’.6 The questions Eliot found compelling included crucial issues discussed in the debates surrounding the modernist crisis in the Roman Catholic Church and the work of the Modern Churchmen’s Union in the Church of England. It is hardly surprising that he went as far as to state that ‘since the early seventeenth century there has been no age of such acute theological controversy as is our own’.7 He closely followed the theological debates, and when in the 1920s they began touching on the question of aesthetics, with Jacques Maritain publishing Art et Scolastique in 1920, and Henri Bremond putting forward his theory of ‘pure poetry’ in 1925, Eliot used the Criterion as a forum to introduce English readers to what he considered to be the debates’ key points.

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Considering the fact that Eliot showed such a deep and long-lasting interest in problems relating to religion and theology, regarding his baptism and confirmation into the Church of England in 1927 as a break with, or even betrayal of, his earlier scepticism for the sake of what some critics view as the ‘solace of dogma’ seems quite specious.8 As Barry Spurr argues, even the term ‘conversion’—if employed without appropriate qualifications—may distort the image of Eliot’s journey of faith, since it ‘tends to diminish the importance of the diverse elements that led up to his baptism and confirmation over so many years and, by implying certitude and finality, contradicts Eliot’s conception of the individual Christian’s experience (especially in the modern age) as a much more complex phenomenon’.9 Eliot’s remark on his turn to Christianity in a letter to Paul Elmer More of 3 August 1929 substantiates Spurr’s point: Most critics appear to think that my catholicism is merely an escape or an evasion, certainly a defeat. I acknowledge the difficulty of a positive Christianity nowadays; and I can only say that the dangers pointed out, and my own weaknesses, have been apparent to me long before my critics noticed them. But it [is] rather trying to be supposed to have settled oneself in an easy chair, when one has just begun a long journey afoot.10

This chapter historicises Eliot’s ‘long journey afoot’ and situates it within the context of theological debates originating in the modernist crisis. I show that the issues discussed by theologians and religious thinkers provided Eliot with a springboard for a poetic exploration of the key points of contention, such as questions of how to interpret religious and mystical experience and how to conceptualise their relation to the dogmatic tradition. The analysis of Eliot’s critical writings and correspondence traces his preoccupation with the question of religious experience and registers important shifts in his thinking, which, as I show, are poetically explored in ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ (c. 1912–1915), ‘Journey of the Magi’ (1927), and ‘Marina’ (1930).

The Varieties of Mysticism: Interpreting Religious Experience T. S. Eliot was born and grew up in St Louis, Missouri, where his grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, settled down on graduating from Harvard Divinity School, to found the first Unitarian church in the region in 1834. Young Eliot and his siblings were taught to place high value on the virtues

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of practicality, self-denial, and public service.11 Years later, Eliot responded critically to the religious dimension of his upbringing. He considered himself ‘brought up as an Atheist’, as he wrote in a letter to Bertrand Russell.12 His home environment he would characterise as ‘that intellectual and puritanical rationalism which is found in the novels of George Eliot’, where Herbert Spencer’s theory of evolution is ‘regarded as the key to the mystery of the universe’.13 As he later remarked, for him Unitarianism did not incorporate much that would qualify as Christian belief, and thus lay ‘outside the Christian Fold’.14 He recalled that: in the form of Unitarianism in which I was instructed, things were either black or white. The Son and the Holy Ghost were not believed in, certainly; but they were entitled to respect as entities in which many other people believed, and they were not to be employed as convenient phrases to embody any cloudy private religion.15

In 1905, Eliot was sent to Milton Academy, a prestigious boarding school in New England, from which he graduated the following year to start a philosophy degree at Harvard College. Living and studying in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, Eliot identified a peculiar trait of the place, which years later he called ‘the Boston doubt’, and defined as ‘a scepticism which is difficult to explain to those who are not born to it. […] a product, or a cause, or a concomitant, of Unitarianism; it is not destructive, but it is dissolvent’.16 This particular kind of scepticism, according to Eliot, drives people to study various disciplines but prevents them from putting complete trust in any one of them. Eliot’s concept of ‘the Boston doubt’ serves well to convey the sense of turmoil in the philosophy department where he did his degree. Philosophy as a discipline was at a crossroads, striving to define anew its methodology and subject of study. As James E. Miller observes, philosophers were ‘forced to decide whether to encompass or ignore science and religion, which by many had come to seem—in the light of Darwinism—quite incompatible’.17 William James and Josiah Royce were among those who actively pursued the view that a philosophical reconciliation of science and religion was possible. When Eliot commenced his studies, the philosophy department was living through what Bruce Kuklick called its ‘Golden Age’, with new paradigms of knowledge and fresh methods of scholarly inquiry devised and discussed on a regular basis.18 Thus, the degree Eliot took, apart from courses in history of ancient and modern philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and logic, included lectures and seminars in experimental psychology, Sanskrit, and Pali.19

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Eliot attended seminars run by Irving Babbitt, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana, and the problems with which they challenged students stimulated Eliot’s thinking on the issue of the interpretation of religious experience. The question that preoccupied him was the following: if philosophy was to adopt scientific methods of inquiry consisting in a description of facts, and at the same time be capable of accounting for what is considered to be a religious experience, how can any reconciliation be achieved?20 Eliot addressed this problem in the paper ‘The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual’, which he presented in Josiah Royce’s seminar in December 1913.21 In his paper, Eliot probes into the sociological and anthropological methods of describing religious experience employed by scholars belonging to the French school, including Émile Durkheim and Lucien Lévy-­ Bruhl. On examining their work, Eliot concludes that they confuse what can be considered a ‘scientific definition’ of religion with its ‘philosophic interpretation’.22 He argues that while science should rest on facts, in the case of religion it is hardly possible to obtain a set of neutral facts that could be regarded as research data. When Durkheim put emphasis on the objectivity of social facts that for him consisted in observable behaviour and provided material for a scientific description, Eliot pointed to difficulties that such an approach creates, reducing the meaning of religion to its purely external expression and approaching it as yet another form of social behaviour. He contests Durkheim’s method: if you take a purely external point of view, then it is not behaviour but mechanism, and social phenomena (and ultimately, I believe, all phenomena) simply cease to exist when regarded steadfastly in this light. You must take into account the internal meaning: what is a religious phenomenon, for example, which has not a religious meaning for the participants?23

Even though Eliot points to the necessity of accounting for the ‘internal meaning’ of a religious act, he acknowledges that there is no reliable scientific methodology that would make it possible. He asserts that an individual’s explanation of their religious behaviour cannot be accepted because it is not verifiable and ‘in the scientific explanation the purposes of the people examined can never be taken on faith’.24 Eliot thus reaches an aporia to which seemingly there is no satisfactory solution. To conceive of a science of religion that meets the standards of objectivity one needs to focus on the observable exteriority, yet such a methodology falsifies the description, as it obliterates its internal meaning. In the conclusion of his seminar paper Eliot admits that he could find no solution to this impasse:

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I admit that I have no better methods to substitute, but I am sure that neither of these gives us what we are looking for. I do not think that any definition of religious behaviour can be satisfactory, and yet you must assume, if you are to make a start at all, that all these phenomena have a common meaning; you must postulate your own attitude and interpret your so-called facts into it, and how can this be a science? And yet there is the material, and there must be a science of it.25

The question of the abundant material related to religious phenomena for which, from the scientific point of view, there was no adequate interpretative framework occupied Eliot throughout his Harvard years. In search for the answer to his question, he carried out extensive research into one particular type of religious phenomenon—mysticism. His copious unpublished notes provide a record of his reading and offer an outline of his exploration of various types and interpretations of mystical experience.26 The works that Eliot studied can be broadly divided into two categories: works which are attempts at a scholarly and psychological account of mysticism and those that offer spiritual and theological interpretations of mystical experiences.27 The former included William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, Josiah Moses’s Pathological Aspects of Religions, and Pierre Janet’s Névroses et idées fixes; among the latter were Evelyn Underhill’s Christian Mysticism and William Inge’s Studies of English Mystics and Christian Mysticism. Eliot’s notes make it clear that one of the issues that he was primarily interested in was mystical visions and ecstasies and the question of how to find a key to their interpretation. He records the details of visions experienced by Teresa of Ávila, Julian of Norwich, Bernard of Clairvoux, John of the Cross, Walter Hylton, and Madame Guyon alongside the accounts of experiments with nitrous oxide, ether, and other stimulants conducted by William James, and case studies of neurotic patients documented by Pierre Janet. Eliot’s attention is drawn to the distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ or ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mysticisms that some of the authors he read made in order to discriminate between various types of visions. He also takes note of the question of mystics’ attitudes towards their visions and the relationship of visions and ecstasies to theology. Reading Underhill’s work, he takes note of her argument that one distinguishes between good and bad forms of ecstatic visions by the effect they have on a given person’s life. He notes her point that a ‘healthy’ mystic ‘is generally an acceptor and not a rejector of […] creeds’.28

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Nearly every theological and devotional study of mysticism included in Eliot’s reading list tried to establish a hermeneutic framework according to which it would be possible to determine the validity of a mystical vision or trance. Underhill’s argument (which Eliot records in his notes) is that: If we would cease, once for all, to regard visions and voices as objective, and be content to see in them forms of symbolic expression, ways in which the subconscious activity of the spiritual self reaches the surface-mind, many of the disharmonies noticeable […] would fade away. Visionary experience […] is a picture which the mind constructs […] from raw materials already at its disposal.29

Underhill argues that mystics’ visions are constructed from the elements of tradition of which they are part and should be interpreted in accordance with the framework provided by that tradition, since it is often by the help of his spiritual ancestors that the mystic ‘elucidates for himself the meaning of the dim perceptions of his amazed soul’.30 The hermeneutic framework found in tradition allows one to discriminate between visions that Underhill calls ‘the media by which the “seeing self” truly approaches the Absolute’ and those that ‘[a]t best, […] are but the result of the self’s turning over her treasures: at worst, they are the dreams—sometimes the diseased dreams’.31 The interpretative key proposed by Underhill is to measure the validity of mystical experience by placing it within the framework of spiritual tradition and theology. The other perspective that Eliot assumed in his studies of religious experience and that presented him with an almost completely antithetical interpretation of mysticism was the psychological approach. The works on the psychology of religion that Eliot studied interpreted religious experience as a type of mental phenomenon, often of a pathological type, and included numerous case studies of diagnosed patients. Some of the authors, for example, Edwin Starbuck, attempted to account for both ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ religious experiences; others, like Josiah Moses, focused solely on the ‘pathological’ side of religion.32 In this framework, experiences that could be interpreted as mystical according to theological standards are mostly considered abnormal products of the human mind that mistakes its own fantasies for divine presence. Quoting the physician Max Nordau, Moses argues:

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The word Mysticism describes a state of mind in which the subject imagines that he perceives or divines unknown and inexplicable relations among phenomena, discerns in things hints at mysteries, and regards them as symbols by which a dark power seeks to unveil, or at least to indicate, all sorts of marvels. […] It is always connected with strong emotional excitement.33

Among the characteristic features of mystical visions, Moses identifies ‘sexual disturbances’ and points to visions experienced by St Teresa of Ávila, St Catherine of Siena, and St Gertrude. He argues that religion and sexuality are closely bound together and the erotic dimension is strongly present in religious visions and ecstasies. To corroborate his argument, Moses refers to Havelock Ellis’s interpretation of the relationship between love and religion and Ellis’s claim that the ‘auto-erotic impulse […] pass[es] its unexpended energy over to the religious emotion, there to find the expansion hitherto denied it, the love of the human becoming the love of the divine’.34 The most salient point of the psychological interpretations of religious and mystical experiences that Eliot studied is the emphasis put on the physiological reactions of those who have them. The commonly described symptoms include emotional arousal, heightened physiological activity, uncontrollable changes of moods, erotic hallucinations, and ecstasies. They are considered products of the activity of the mind that has become unstable due to a variety of traumas, repressed desires, and other similar reasons. To return to Eliot’s seminar paper on the issue of the interpretation of religious phenomena, it seems that neither the religious interpretations of mystical experience nor the psychological ones met the standards that Eliot set for a ‘science of religion’. The religious interpretations did not attempt to identify objective facts that could be studied in a scholarly manner—they immediately proceeded towards interpretation that would be in line with a given spiritual tradition; psychological interpretations focused primarily on physiological symptoms, but did not consider the inner meaning that the experience carried for a given individual. Thus, despite his extensive reading on the subject—as his fellow-student Harry T. Costello recorded in his notebook, in the academic year 1913–1914, Eliot’s whole year’s work ‘circled around’ the issue ‘of the truth of interpretations’—Eliot did not seem to find a satisfactory answer to the question of how to interpret religious experience.35 The vexing question of the interpretation of religious experience to which Eliot failed to find a solution either in psychological studies or in

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religious and devotional works is at the heart of several of his early poems, including ‘Silence’ (1910), ‘After the turning of the inspired days’ (1913), ‘The Little Passion: From “An Agony in the Garret”’ (c. 1911/1915), ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ (c. 1912–1913/1915), and ‘The Burnt Dancer’ (1914). ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ in particular explores the blurred boundary between ‘true’ and ‘false’ mysticism, effectively demonstrating how a single experience can be interpreted as both an ecstatic vision and a pathological delusion.36 Called by Ted Hughes ‘the first portrait, perhaps the only full-face portrait, of Eliot’s genius’, the poem occupies a peculiar place in Eliot’s oeuvre.37 It is thought to have been written between 1912 and 1913 or in 1915, but it was published only thirty-five years later, in 1950.38 However, several lines of the poem, in a slightly altered form, were included in The Waste Land (1922).39 The title figure of Saint Narcissus combines the mythological Narcissus and the second-century Bishop of Jerusalem who withdrew to the desert after he was falsely accused of wrong-doing by members of his community.40 Withdrawal into solitude, as Eliot learnt from his research into mysticism, provides an opportunity for undisturbed spiritual contemplation, but also, as Starbuck remarks, ‘[s]ome of the most marked pathological tendencies are shown in persons who are let alone’.41 The poem’s title alludes to traditional hagiographic narratives, yet instead of the expected phrase ‘The Life of …’, places the emphasis on St Narcissus’s death. It opens with a direct address to the reader and an unusual promise made by the speaker: ‘I will show you his bloody cloth and limbs / And the gray shadow on his lips’ (l. 6–7). As we move to the second stanza, the revelation of what happened to Saint Narcissus is postponed. The speaker commences with a narrative of his life instead, describing the awakening of Narcissus’s self-consciousness, which consists in a celebration of his body, its rhythm and sexuality, witnessed by no one but nature. ‘His eyes were aware of the pointed corners of his eyes / And his hands aware of the pointed tips of his fingers’ (l. 14–15). The self-awareness that Narcissus acquires makes a dramatic impact on his life: ‘Struck down by such knowledge / He could not live men’s ways, but became a dancer before God’ (l. 16–17). The knowledge that Narcissus has attained separates him from other people. He is ‘struck down’ or—as the first draft of the poem reads—‘struck mad’ by the awareness of his bodily beauty. The city where he feels to be treading ‘on faces, convulsive thighs and knees’ (l. 19) in the first draft of the poem is named as Carthage (l. 18).42 Eliot accompanied his reference to Carthage in The Waste Land

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with a note referring readers to Book V of Augustine’s Confessions, where the city is described as ‘a cauldron of unholy loves’. It is there that Augustine first experiences ‘a famine of that inward food’, but nevertheless cannot bring himself to embrace God, and as his ‘soul was sickly and full of sores, it miserably cast itself forth, desiring to be scraped by the touch of objects of sense’.43 Narcissus in Eliot’s poem in a similar way detests the city and comes to a conviction that he has to leave its temptations behind, ‘so he came out under the rock’ (l. 20). Narcissus’s life comes to a turning point that in traditional hagiographic narratives would be described as a moment of conversion. Narcissus abandons walking in the city streets, which is part of ‘men’s ways’, to devote to himself to dancing, a more sublime and aesthetically sophisticated movement, possibly a meditative trance resembling Sufi whirling. However, the image of ‘a dancer before God’ in the poem remains ambivalent. The phrase ‘dancer before God’ includes a reference to ‘The Burnt Dancer’, a poem that Eliot wrote a year earlier, in June 1914.44 The dancer from the title is a black moth ‘caught in the circle of desire’ (l. 3), having been distracted from ‘more vital virtues’ (l. 6). The poem sets a dichotomy between the ‘yellow ring of flame’ in which the moth burns (l. 1) and the ‘whiter flames that burn not’ from which it strayed (l. 38). The ‘whiter flames’ come from ‘a distant star’ (l. 39) to which the moth, the ‘broken guest’ (l. 40), may not be able ever to return. If Narcissus’s dance is related to the moth’s, it should be seen as a mixture of agony and delight, possibly an expression of his sexual desires or a form of autoerotic self-celebration. The three stanzas that follow present a series of visions in which Narcissus undergoes metamorphoses. First he thinks he is a tree, then a fish, and finally a young girl. The common element in all three visions is their autoeroticism: as a tree, Narcissus twists his branches and tangles his roots among each other; as a fish, he holds tight in his fingers his ‘slippery white belly’, ‘writhing in his own clutch’ (l. 25–26); as a girl raped by a drunken old man, he gets to know ‘the taste of his own whiteness / The horror of his own smoothness’ (l. 30–31), and in the end feels ‘drunken and old’ (l. 32). This series of visionary or hallucinatory transformations, which can be read as a desperate attempt at finding sexual satisfaction, is reminiscent of the anguished passion of the mythological Narcissus. In Ovid’s account, when a sage prophet was consulted on Narcissus’s birth, he prophesied that Narcissus may live until old age only ‘[i]f he ne’er know himself’.45 The prophecy turns out to be true; when Narcissus

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rejects the affection of the nymph Echo, he is led by her to a pond where he sees his reflection on the water, falls in love with himself, and, as Ovid recounts: Unwittingly he desires himself; he praises, and is himself what he praises; and while he seeks, is sought; equally he kindles love and burns with love. How often did he offer vain kisses on the elusive pool? How often did he plunge his arms into the water seeking to clasp the neck he sees there, but did not clasp himself in them! What he sees he knows not; but that which he sees he burns for, and the same delusion mocks and allures his eyes.46

Ovid’s Narcissus seeks fulfilment in gazing at his reflection in the water, and when he realises that he will never be able to obtain the object of his desire, he kills himself. Eliot’s Narcissus uses dance as a way to reach satisfaction, and in this ecstatic movement experiences visions in which he turns into a plant, an animal, and a person of opposite sex. None of these visions and transformations brings him fulfilment, which he reaches only in his death, recounted in the last stanza: Because his flesh was in love with the burning arrows He danced on the hot sand Until the arrows came. As he embraced them his white skin surrendered itself to the redness of blood, and satisfied him. (l. 34–37)

Only the ‘burning arrows’—presumably the rays of the scorching desert sun that seem like piercing arrows to sun-struck Narcissus while also evoking the death of Saint Sebastian—bring the satisfaction for which he longed. The erotic imagery of these lines, with him surrendering to suffering and, thus, reaching satisfaction, parallels the description of the black moth as an ‘acolyte of pain’ (l. 32) in ‘The Burnt Dancer’. Narcissus’s dancing terminates in a complete mortification of the flesh, which is at the same time his final, triumphant dance in which he embraces death. The death of Narcissus and the description of his corpse as ‘green, dry and stained’ (l. 38) in the final lines of the poem raises the question of how to interpret his experience of becoming a ‘dancer to God’. Contemporary psychology would classify his behaviour as hallucinations induced by autoerotic obsession and narcissism (the term used for the first time in 1898 by Havelock Ellis).47 From an external perspective his behaviour can be seen

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as a destructive and deluded movement towards self-annihilation, which is caused by his self-enamourment and his erroneous belief in the truth value of his inner feelings. In that view, ‘God’ is a product of Narcissus’s mind and a notion used to justify his erratic behaviour. The material evidence of Narcissus’s dry corpse does not seem to lend itself to other interpretations. If his dancing did have a deeper spiritual meaning, it cannot be established through the analysis of his external behaviour only. The ambiguity of the poem, suggested by the description of Narcissus as ‘a dancer to God’, encapsulated the crux of the intellectual challenge that Eliot encountered in his studies of religious and mystical experience. Accounts of mystical visions, if analysed through the framework put forward by contemporary psychologists, could be reduced to symptoms of mental disorders. Narcissus’s dance can be seen as  evidence of his disturbed mental health rather than a movement towards God, for whom he chooses the ascetic way of life in the desert. The speaker in ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ presents the reader with a wealth of material evidence that tells the story of Narcissus from his withdrawal from the city to a series of hallucinatory visions. However, this material evidence does not seem to allow for any transcendental meaning, despite Narcissus’s self-proclaimed status of ‘a dancer to God’. In this sense, the poem reflects on Eliot’s ongoing search for a reliable frame of interpretation that would allow one to verify the truth value of mystical experience. It also shows his reservations about placing excessive trust in what can turn out to be the projections of one’s own mind, without acknowledging any external authority. He would expand on this more fully in his debate with John Middleton Murry, when he rejected Murry’s appeal to the ‘inner voice’ as a practice of ‘palpitating Narcissi’ who cannot distinguish between themselves and God.48

Eliot’s Early Encounters with Neo-scholasticism and Theological Modernism The question of how to interpret religious and mystical experience that occupied Eliot during his Harvard years was one of the key points of contention in the modernist controversy. Eliot might have become aware of the controversy soon after it broke out in 1907, as it featured in the American press.49 It was also discussed at Harvard, where Arthur C.  McGiffert, Washburn Professor of Church History at the Union

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Theological Seminary, devoted his Dudleian Lecture of May 1909 to ‘Modernism and Catholicism’.50 He argued that ‘the open conflict between conservative and liberal tendencies within [the Catholic] communion is most interesting and instructive’, recognising the transnational dimension of the modernist movement and commenting on its development in Germany, France, Italy, England, and America.51 Summarising the postulates of Alfred Loisy and George Tyrrell, he contended that their endeavour was driven by ‘the desire to bring about a better adjustment between Christianity and the modern world’, which may lead to ‘a wider unity and a more general cooperation’ between Catholics and Protestants.52 It can be assumed that by 1910 Eliot was familiar with the modernist controversy. The T. S. Eliot Collection of the Houghton Library includes the Catalogue of Catholic Books American and Imported that Eliot owned as a student at Harvard, which features a prominent advertisement of the first American pamphlet written in refutation of modernist theology. The advertisement announces that The Doctrine of Modernism and Its Refutation by J. Godrycz (published by J. J. McVey in 1908) disproves the ideas held by the modernists not by means of theological arguments, but ‘by an appeal to reason and to science’.53 Eliot’s interest in the controversy grew during his stay in Paris in 1910–1911. As he later recalled, the year that he spent studying at the Sorbonne was the time when ‘at the Collège de France, Loisy enjoyed his somewhat scandalous distinction’.54 Eliot refers here to Loisy’s refusal to revoke his views after they were condemned by the Pascendi encyclical and his subsequent excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church and election to the chair of history of religions at the Collège de France.55 When neo-scholasticism—endorsed by Pope Pius X as a philosophy sanctioned by tradition and grounded in reason and, thus, capable of countering modernist theology—was gaining momentum in Europe, Eliot deepened his knowledge of its roots, studying and teaching medieval scholasticism. He was appointed teaching assistant in philosophy at Harvard in the academic years 1912–1913 and 1913–1914 and was asked to teach an introductory course in philosophy that included three seminars devoted to the discussion of the rise and decline of scholasticism.56 The Jesuit Joseph Rickaby’s Scholasticism, which was one of the required readings, apart from providing a historical account of the thirteenth-century rise of scholasticism, traces its inheritance into contemporary times, pointing to the significance of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris and ‘the Leonine Revival of 1879’, against which modernist theology was a reaction.57 Rickaby makes two predictions about the future

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of scholasticism: ‘(1) Scholasticism will return; (2) It will not return as it was in the Middle Ages. In other words, what will come back will be Neo-­ Scholasticism.’58 According to him, neo-scholasticism should consist in an informed reinterpretation of Aquinas’s teaching; following ‘a living, not a dead Thomas’.59 Rickaby sets clear limits to this work of reinterpretation, stating that the body of church dogma does not fall within its scope. The neo-scholastic theologian, in Rickaby’s view: must unsay without reserve whatever it is certain that St. Thomas, were he now living, would unsay; and that is whatever is in manifest contradiction with the valid and firm conclusions of science, e.g. Ptolemaic astronomy, the doctrines of the four elements, the four humours, and astral influences. […] On the other hand, there are clear fixed principles which, living in no age of the world, would St. Thomas ever unsay. He would never unsay any of the dogmatic teachings of that Church which has numbered him among her Doctors.60

The idea of a philosophy that is, on the one hand, systematic and coherent, and on the other, offers a methodology that is suited to the study of religious experience appealed to Eliot. As he remarked years later, ‘[t]he root cause of the vagaries of modern philosophy—and perhaps, though I was unconscious of it, the reason for my dissatisfaction with philosophy as a profession—I now believe to lie in the divorce of philosophy from theology’.61 At the beginning of the  twentieth century, neo-scholasticism promised to bring an end to this divorce and reconcile the two once again, reviving Aquinas’s system, which itself was based on Aristotle’s philosophic method. However, as demonstrated in Chap. 2, this attempt at a return to the medieval system of thought was met with resistance on the part of modernist theologians, who considered the project untenable. They argued that ‘it is impossible to impose religious experience on the modern mind in the same forms as were adapted to the utterly medieval mind’, pointing out that the church ‘cannot, and ought not to, pretend that the Summa of Aquinas answers to the exigencies of religious thought in the twentieth century’.62 Having acquired a solid background knowledge in the history of scholasticism and conducted extensive research into the phenomenon of mysticism, Eliot naturally developed an interest in the modernism–neo-scholasticism debate. From early on he tended to side with the neo-scholastic thinkers, yet his stance towards modernist

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theologians was by no means unambiguous. He found some of their ideas, particularly the emphasis on the importance of the inner meaning of religion (which he himself was careful to underscore in his seminar paper on primitive ritual), quite appealing. His early engagement with theological modernists and his increasing dissatisfaction with the philosophical strains that he identified in their thought are well illustrated by his encounter with Reverend Hastings Rashdall. In the period when Eliot studied mysticism and taught seminars on scholasticism and neo-scholasticism, he also presided over the Harvard Philosophical Club. The meetings of the Club were held twice a month, and debates with chosen guest speakers were organised every semester. In the academic year 1913–1914, the list of special guests invited by the Club included Hastings Rashdall, Canon of Hereford Cathedral, who was to deliver a talk on 21 November 1913.63 Rashdall was an influential Anglican modernist theologian and Fellow of New College, Oxford, who advocated a radical rethinking of the notions of dogma and doctrine, as well as the concepts of good and evil. He developed his arguments in Doctrine and Development (1898), The Theory of Good and Evil (1907), and Philosophy and Religion (1910). In 1913, he was working on his upcoming book Is Conscience an Emotion? Three Lectures on Recent Ethical Theories (1914). The issues Rashdall tackled in his work spoke to Eliot’s interests, and as President of the Club, in 1913 Eliot likely met Rashdall in person. If the members of the Club had read or discussed Rashdall’s work in preparation for his visit, Eliot would have found Rashdall’s exposition of the relationship between psychology and religion pertinent to his own problem of the interpretation of religious experience. In Philosophy and Religion, Rashdall writes: I would venture to add a word of caution against the tendency fashionable in many quarters to talk of basing religious belief upon Psychology. […] It cannot possibly tell us whether the beliefs which are found [in the human mind] are true or false. An erroneous belief is as much a psychological fact as a true one. […] The idea of a Religion which is merely based upon Psychology and involves nothing else is a delusion: all the great Religions of the world have been, among other things, metaphysical systems.64

While Rashdall opposes the interpretation of religious experience as a purely psychological phenomenon, the way he approaches metaphysics significantly differs from the Catholic neo-scholasticism that Eliot studied

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and taught. Rashdall proposes to divorce theology from dogma, so as to make it compatible with modern methods of scholarly enquiry. The editor of the series in which his book was published endorsed his position, arguing: Wise books, not in dogma but in theology, may […] be described as the supreme need of our day, for only such can save us from much fanaticism and secure us in the full possession of a sober and sane reason. […] These books then,—which have all to be written by men who have lived in the full blaze of modern light,—though without having either their eyes burned out or their souls scorched into insensibility,—are intended to present God in relation to Man and Man in relation to God.65

The title of the talk that Rashdall delivered at Harvard was not revealed in the Announcement of the Philosophical Club, yet one could speculate that Eliot found himself in disagreement with Rashdall’s arguments, as one of the first texts he wrote for the International Journal of Ethics three years later was a scathing review of Rashdall’s most recent book, Conscience and Christ: Six Lectures on Christian Ethics.66 In his review, Eliot openly attacks what he considers to be Rashdall’s pragmatist outlook hidden under the guise of theology and leading to the conflation of the divine and the human. While Eliot admits that Rashdall is ‘distinguished both as a Christian and as a moral philosopher’, he goes on to argue that Rashdall gradually assimilates Christ’s teaching to the conscience that consists in ‘the usual structure of prejudices of the enlightened middle classes’.67 Quoting Rashdall’s argument that a certain part of Christ’s teaching ‘would require some correction before it could be literally applied to the case of those who do not believe that the world is just coming to an end’, Eliot retorts: ‘All that is anarchic, or unsafe or disconcerting in what Jesus said and did is either denied, or boiled away by the “principle of development”’.68 The danger of approaching the principle of development as an idea of the ultimate value, according to Eliot, is that it deprives truth of its absolute meaning.69 He does not accept the pragmatist argument that ‘the “truth” of any particular proposition means a number of other things, its consistency with other “truths,” its influence upon our behaviour, its success in leading to a desired end’.70 On these grounds, Eliot argues against what he perceives as Rashdall’s assimilation of Christ’s teaching ‘to [Rashdall’s] own morality’.71 He mocks Rashdall’s attempt to make the following of Christ ‘easier’ by concluding: ‘Certain saints found the following of Christ very hard, but modern methods have facilitated

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everything. Yet I am not sure, after reading modern theology, that the pale Galilean has conquered.’72 Eliot’s strong objection to Rashdall’s interpretation of modern Christian ethics is all the more interesting when considered in parallel with his essay on the relativity of moral judgement written about a year earlier.73 In his paper, Eliot endorses what he calls a ‘naturalistic or biological attitude in ethics’.74 He maintains that while it cannot be claimed that biology is able to explain value, he believes that ‘any system of values is built up on feelings, and that as our feeling changes, so will that which is valuable always be something else’.75 Eliot understands ‘feeling’ as the product of various insights: the feeling may sometimes be said to be the result of an intellectual insight and […] sometimes the insight may be said to spring from the feeling; but […] ultimately we have no better criterion for rightness than what each one feels to be right […].76

The assertion that the ultimate or, in fact, the only feasible criterion for rightness is one’s feelings is not very different from Rashdall’s. Yet the crucial difference between Eliot’s and Rashdall’s theses is that Eliot reaches his conclusion on the ground of purely secular ethics, while Rashdall is professing to construct a Christian vision of ethical life. What Eliot finds unacceptable is that Rashdall, in Eliot’s view, dispenses with the metaphysical perspective and the notion of absolute values and, instead, settles with a pragmatist vision of values that are fluid and changeable. Even more outrageous to Eliot is Rashdall’s claim that the ‘continuous teaching of Conscience’ contains ‘a progressive and evolving revelation—of God’.77 Thus, Rashdall’s argument that Christian ethics needs to evolve and move with the times is legitimised by the fact that this evolution is in fact an ongoing revelation of God. Eliot finds this thesis unacceptable as, according to him, it compromises the Christian faith. His review touches on several issues—such as the understanding of revelation, the importance of dogmatic tradition, and the role of individual conscience—which were constantly disputed in the modernism–neo-scholasticism debate. In his review Eliot takes a firmly neo-scholastic stance, denouncing modernist Rashdall as a ‘pragmatist’. As historians of religion have noted, the modernist crisis ‘generated an abundance of umbrella terms to denote heterodox philosophical and theological tenets’, pragmatism being one of them.78 The term was

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employed by the neo-scholastic circles as a pejorative label meant to discredit theologians who were considered unorthodox. Neo-scholastic thinkers feared that if Christian ethics adopted a pragmatist emphasis on the value of individual conscience and inner life, it would mean that what had been considered the external standards of religion—the biblical canon, ecclesiastical tradition, a set of dogmas and doctrines—would become dispensable. Eliot’s dissatisfaction with pragmatism was already visible in the Harvard period, and his final rejection of this school of thought came around 1913–1914. In the paper on ‘Relation between Metaphysics and Politics’ delivered before the Philosophical Society of Harvard, Eliot vehemently rejected both William James’s and Henri Bergson’s thought.79 He objected to contemporary philosophy on the grounds of it being an ‘uncritical attempt to be critical, its feeling of the need for law at the same time that it denies law’.80 According to Eliot, this could be seen in philosophy’s search for ‘an intellectual justification for anti-intellectualism’ and ‘a metaphysical justification of its blind enthusiasm’.81 His diagnosis of the malaise of contemporary philosophy points to its endorsement of ‘the most dangerous of dogmas—the dogma that we must do without dogmas’.82 This, Eliot argues, leads to ‘two great modern fallacies: the fallacy of Progress, which is the Bergsonian fallacy, and the fallacy of the Relativity of Knowledge, which is the Pragmatic fallacy’.83 Eliot’s objections to Bergsonism’s and pragmatism’s rejection of ‘dogmas’ consist in an observation that while they dispose of the traditional ontological and ethical Absolute, they do not hesitate to put forward their own Absolutes—progress and relativity, respectively. This Eliot considers to be the blind spot that undermines their method. While he acknowledges the differences between the two systems, he argues that ultimately they both lead to philosophical pessimism, in which the balance between ‘human meaning’ and ‘cosmic meaning’ is upset: Bergson denies human values; for Pragmatism man is the measure of all things. The latter is a ‘practical’ philosophy. You choose a point of view because you like it. You form certain plans because they express your character. Certain things are true because they are what you need; others, because they are what you want. Yet the two philosophies, like all antithetical philosophies, tend to meet. For they both reduce the world to illusion. For Bergson history is a vitalistic process in which human purposes do not exist; for Pragmatism, a chaotic process in which human purposes are illusory. For if all meaning is human meaning, then there is no meaning.84

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Eliot’s ultimate rejection of pragmatism is a result of his disapproval of the substitution of the absolute value of truth—being the basis of traditional metaphysical systems—with notions such as ‘development’, ‘progress’, and ‘usefulness’. His rejection of Bergsonism is connected to his conviction that by ‘hypostasis[ing] the impulses’, Bergson turns life into an abstraction and loses his hold on social reality.85 Ultimately, according to Eliot, the systems offered by James and Bergson are ‘two forms of escape from reality as we know it in ordinary experience’.86 Bergson’s abstract terms, Eliot argues, elevate the elusive élan vital to the principal force governing life, while James’s emphasis on progress, need, and satisfaction exalts the instrumental to the level of the metaphysical; thus, they both avoid confronting ‘reality’. The conclusion Eliot reaches is important in that it touches on one of the core issues of the modernist controversy. Modernist theologians levelled very similar objections against neo-scholasticism, contesting its tendency to ignore reality as it is known in ordinary experience in favour of abstract speculation. Bergson and James, while their philosophies were not unequivocally endorsed by all modernist theologians, were nevertheless hailed as thinkers who return to the exploration of ordinary ‘reality’. Yet, as Eliot argues, their approach can be viewed as equally abstract and futile. Instead of devising a way that would make it possible to approach truth without renouncing ordinary experience, which consists in ‘a constant friction between the mechanical and the volitional’, they impose their own visions of truth on reality—visions that exalt either ‘mechanism’ or ‘impulse’.87 It is impossible to construct any coherent ethical system in which human behaviour could be judged according to external standards. Hence, as Eliot observes in his analysis of Rashdall’s pragmatic Christianity, the notion of ‘truth’ has lost its value and anything that seems ‘anarchic, or unsafe or disconcerting’ can be freely discarded. Eliot’s final disillusionment with philosophy took place in 1915, when he finished his doctoral dissertation on the idealism of Francis Herbert Bradley.88 From the ethical point of view, Bradley’s system promised to offer a solution to problems posed by pragmatists’ instrumental view of truth.89 However, Eliot soon became dissatisfied with Bradley’s thought and with his own thesis. Reporting on the progress of his research to his friend Norbert Wiener, he complained: ‘I took a piece of fairly technical philosophy for my thesis, and my relativism made me see so many sides to questions that I became hopelessly involved, and wrote a thesis perfectly unintelligible to anyone but myself.’90 The insistence with which Eliot

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demanded that if ‘there is the material, and there must be a science of it’ in his seminar paper in 1913 has changed into a mood of resigned acceptance that in certain situations devising satisfactory criteria for making a scientific judgement is not possible. The recognition that the number of objects that are ‘not exactly enough to be subject matter for science’ may be quite high was one of the reasons why Eliot became disillusioned with philosophy as a scholarly discipline.91 In his 1915 letter, Eliot describes ‘all philosophising’ as ‘a perversion of reality’: It has no working by which we can test it. […] It invariably involves cramming both feet into one shoe: almost every philosophy seems to begin as a revolt of common sense against some other theory, and ends—as it becomes itself more developed and approaches completeness—by itself becoming equally preposterous—to everyone but its author. The theories are certainly, all of them, implicit in the inexact experience of every day, but once extracted they make the world appear as strange as Bottom in his ass’s head.92

In a passage that quite clearly anticipates his future life choices, Eliot reflects on his personal understanding of the difficulties of contemporary philosophy: ‘For me, as for Santayana, philosophy is chiefly literary criticism and conversation about life […]. The only reason why relativism does not do away with philosophy altogether, after all, is that there is no such thing to abolish!’93 Eliot’s evocation of George Santayana out of all the lecturers whose classes he attended at Harvard is telling. Santayana was keenly interested in aesthetics, in particular the relation between philosophy, religion, and poetry, which he discussed in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900) and Three Philosophical Poets (1910). The issues he wrote about in a few years would become the central points of Eliot’s debate with John Middleton Murry, discussed in the following sections.

Dogma in the Modern World: Rewriting the Incarnation In 1915 Eliot took the decision not to pursue a scholarly career in philosophy and not to return to the Unites States. With Ezra Pound’s encouragement, he resolved to settle down in London and focus on poetry. However, he continued to follow the debates concerning mysticism, scholasticism, modernism, and neo-Thomism. While he abandoned philosophical speculation almost immediately after he finished his doctoral dissertation, he

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began reviewing recent publications addressing various topics related to religion, beginning with theological works, to studies in sociology of religion, anthropology of religion, and philosophy of religion.94 He chose most of the titles himself and they, to a large extent, reflect the topics in which he became particularly interested. In a letter to his mother, Eliot reported that he found Philip Jourdain, the editor of the International Journal of Ethics for which he wrote the reviews, ‘the most satisfactory employer’.95 He added: ‘I have only to suggest an article, and he clamours for it, and any book I see advertised and want to review he will send for’.96 In 1916, Eliot began working for one of the Oxford University Extension Centres, where he proposed to run a course on ‘Tendencies of Contemporary French Thought’. In the reading list for the course, he included Alfred Loisy’s The Gospel and the Church and Paul Sabatier’s Modernism.97 Both authors were considered influential modernist theologians. Sabatier’s work provides an introduction to the main principles of modernist theology, situating it in opposition to both ‘anti-religious rationalism’ and ‘orthodox intellectualism’.98 According to Sabatier, a Protestant pastor and lecturer in theology at the University of Strasbourg, modernism helps to re-situate religion on ‘the plane of reality, of life, of experience’—it is ‘an unexpected current of mysticism, passing over [the] age and giving an unspeakable fervour and power to those who drink of it’.99 Sabatier in his work contests many points raised by the Pascendi encyclical, which was reprinted as an appendix to his book. He is critical of the Vatican’s decision to excommunicate the modernists who refused to revoke their views since, according to him, this would ‘no more save the Church […] than such a general would save his army by shooting the men who are courageous enough to warn him of his errors’.100 Eliot’s choice of texts to include on the syllabus of his course shows that he read extensively on the modernism–neo-scholasticism dispute. His commentaries, reviews, and letters include numerous references to the leading thinkers associated with the modernist controversy both in the Catholic Church and in the Anglican Communion, including George Tyrrell, H. D. A. Major, William Temple, Friedrich von Hügel, Henri Bremond, and Édouard Le Roy, demonstrating his familiarity with their work. In the 1920s, Eliot’s engagement with the problem of the interpretation of religious experience becomes closely bound with the question of how to interpret Christian dogmas, in particular the dogma of the Incarnation. One of the most important Christian dogmas, included in both the Anglican creed (the Thirty-Nine Articles) and the Roman

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Catholic ones (the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed), the Incarnation became one of the key issues of Anglican theologians’ debates concerning the possibility of a modern reinterpretation of the creeds. Their disputes were widely reported by the press, engaging a broader public. The arguments raised in these debates inform Eliot’s heated exchange with John Middleton Murry and shape his understanding of dogmatic tradition, which he explored poetically in the Ariel poems published in 1927–1930. In 1912–1914, when Eliot was still a student at Harvard, he recorded in his notes, reading Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism, that the theory of God’s immanence is ‘notoriously apt to degenerate into pantheism’ if not corrected by the dogma of the Incarnation.101 In her work, Underhill, who considered herself ‘“Modernist” on many points’, undertook a re-­ assessment and rehabilitation of the notion of individual religious experience after its value had been undermined by the Pascendi encyclical.102 Referring in more detail to the encyclical’s lengthy discussion of modernist theologians’ misinterpretation of the theory of divine immanence, which, according to the Pascendi, leads to the assertion of ‘the identity of man with God, which means Pantheism’, Underhill asserts that the dogma of the Incarnation serves as a safeguard against such interpretations of the mystic’s experience.103 She agrees with the claims of modernist theologians that dogmas are historically conditioned formulae that cannot hold the entire content of the individual’s religious experience and hence cannot be the only interpretative tool employed: ‘Attempts to limit mystical truth—direct apprehension of the divine substance—are as futile as the attempts to identify a precious metal with the die which converts it into current coin.’104 At the same time, however, she acknowledges (and Eliot records her point in his notes) that the individual’s visions may indeed lead to distorted ‘false mysticism’; more often than not, however, the mystic is ‘an acceptor and not a rejector of […] creeds’.105 According to Underhill, ‘[w]hether the dogmas of Christianity be or be not accepted on the scientific and historical plane, […] those dogmas are necessary to an adequate description of mystical experience.’106 She challenges scientific approaches to mystical experience on the grounds that they are too reductive and do not acknowledge mystics’ belonging to a certain theological tradition, which provides interpretative tools more appropriate to those offered by science. Thus, she also touches on the blind spot discussed in Eliot’s early paper on primitive ritual, in which he argued for the inadequacy of the existing scientific methodology to explore the meaning of religious experience, yet at the same time he did not allow for the inner meaning of the

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experience as it is understood by the believer to be taken ‘on faith’. Underhill points to yet another way of approaching the same problem, which is through the lens of tradition: Each mystic, original though he be, yet owes much to the inherited acquirement of his spiritual ancestors. These ancestors form his tradition, are the classic examples on which his education is based; and from them he takes the language which they have sought out and constructed as a means of telling their adventures to the world.107

This understanding of tradition emphasises its formative impact on an individual, which Eliot explored a few years later in his ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919). His engagement with Underhill can be seen as the beginning of his long-lasting preoccupation with the idea of tradition, understood both in a literary and in a spiritual sense, and with the dogma of the Incarnation, which becomes crucial to his theological thinking long before he enters the Church of England. In 1917, in one of his early reviews, Eliot tries to define the difference between philosophy and religion. He points out that ‘philosophy depends upon the whole course of history’, whereas Christian religion ‘depends upon one important fact’, which is the Incarnation.108 Eliot argues that ‘it seems therefore insufficient to claim […] that Jesus was an historical person’.109 While history and philosophy can account only for Jesus’s human existence, it is theology which by means of dogma, ‘a proposition that is either true or false, its terms having a fixed meaning’, can account for Jesus’s divine nature.110 To Eliot, dogma appears to be a statement whose value can be determined in absolute terms as either true or false, and even if there is no scientific criterion that could be employed to verify it, to Christians who endorse it, it ought to have ‘a fixed meaning’. However, as modernist theology began gaining increasing support within the Church of England in the 1910s–1920s, it was becoming clear that the Incarnation was considered one of the doctrines which lacked the ‘fixed meaning’ that Eliot wished to ascribe to it.111 The modernist-minded Anglican theologians, associated with the Modern Churchmen’s Union, launched their own journal, the Modern Churchman, in 1911. They also held an annual themed conference. In 1921, the conference was hosted at Girton College, Cambridge, and its topic was ‘Christ and the Creeds’. The conference aimed to provide a space for modernists to rethink the meaning of the Incarnation in the light

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of historical research and developments in the field of psychology. The majority of papers presented tackled the question of how to re-­conceptualise the union of the human and the divine that took place in the act of the Incarnation.112 The organisers of the conference acknowledged that it would be ‘idle to pretend that all the views expressed at Girton are in harmony with popular orthodoxy, or even with traditional orthodoxy’, yet they professed that: There is an orthodoxy which by becoming stagnant can become heresy, just as there is a religious devotion which, by refusing to become intelligent and moral, can become superstition. The Girton Conference speakers were more concerned to adjust their orthodoxy to the orthodoxy of the future, than to harmonize it with the orthodoxy of the past.113

Most speakers at the conference seemed to agree that the doctrine of the Incarnation leaves the question of the relationship of Jesus to God open, and that—in the words of Bishop Barnes—‘modern views of God and modern conceptions of personality may lead us more fully to understand the divine nature of Jesus and His spiritual supremacy’.114 It was emphasised that the Incarnation is an expression of the understanding of Jesus’s humanity and divinity held by early Christians and that the obligation of a modern believer is to probe into the historically contingent layers of the doctrine in order to arrive at the core of its meaning. The speakers agreed that, as J. F. Bethune-Baker, a leading modernist and professor of Divinity at Cambridge, stated some years earlier, ‘[i]t is conceivable that Christians of a future age may yet find some other category that will express more exactly for them, in closer correspondence with their knowledge of the universe and of life, what their early forefathers meant by the Incarnation.’115 The issues discussed at the conference were brought to the attention of the general public by extensive press coverage, which—depending on the newspaper’s stance in the modernism–neo-scholasticism debate—was either supportive or dismissive. The Times Literary Supplement reported that the conference was a successful ‘attempt to indicate the mode in which the educated Christian of to-day may most clearly state what his belief in the Incarnation implies’ and that the speakers ‘were animated by a true religious spirit and were anxious to secure a reverent yet free consideration of one of the basal elements of Christianity, not to excite doubt but to re-establish faith’.116 At the same time, the Roman Catholic Tablet announced:

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Our very separated Brethren, the Anglicans, have been holding a feast of infidelity at Cambridge. […] You can put a charge of dynamite at the foundations and blow down a tower, but you can’t blow down a tower that has already been blown down. Anglicanism isn’t a building, it is a heap of doctrinal ruins.117

The negative reaction proved to be serious enough to bring the charge of heresy against Henry D. A. Major, the editor of the Modern Churchman, and lead to the appointment of the first Doctrine Commission in the Church of England in 1922. In the same year, Major published the pamphlet A Resurrection of Relics: A Modern Churchman’s Defence in a Recent Charge of Heresy in which he dismissed the charges levelled against him and expounded on what he believed ought to be the attitude of modern Christians towards the Church doctrines: The doctrine of the Incarnation, the doctrine of Christ’s Resurrection and Ascension, the doctrine of Eternal Judgment and the Second Advent, are all doctrines where the Church of England today will do well to make the clearest distinction possible between the fact and the mode, and to say in unmistakable and emphatic tones to her clergy and laity: The moral and spiritual realities to which these doctrines witness are of supreme and eternal value to Mankind: the forms which they assume in men’s minds in particular ages are temporary and mutable.118

The charge of heresy that Major faced was eventually dismissed by Bishop Burge of Oxford, yet heated debates continued. The key notions discussed—the role of religion in the contemporary world, the authority of tradition, and the question of inner conscience—were soon to become part of the famous debate between Eliot and John Middleton Murry. Both Murry and Eliot read the Modern Churchman, and the disputes taking place on its pages offered them a set of questions that they kept exploring in the following years both in the essays written as part of their own debate and in their later independent works.

The Inner Voice and Tradition: The Eliot– Murry Debate The polemic between Eliot and Murry began in 1923 with Murry’s essay ‘On Fear; and on Romanticism’. It was written as a response to a remark by Raymond Mortimer, the New Statesman’s literary editor, who

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suggested that Murry’s journal, the Adelphi, was ‘the last stand’ of Romanticism. Murry disagreed with Mortimer and argued that if one insists on the use of the terms ‘Classic’ and ‘Romantic’, then all English ‘classics are romantic’, since ‘[i]n England there never has been any classicism worth talking about: we have had classics, but no classicism’.119 Eliot accepted the challenge and responded with ‘The Function of Criticism’, published in the Criterion the following month. As David Goldie observes, the Eliot–Murry polemic ‘quickly move[d] on to a dispute about the religious content that was becoming manifest in the work of both men’.120 While their exchange is often referred to as the Romanticism–Classicism debate, in the very text that started it, Murry asserted unequivocally: ‘I do not think the opposed forces are Romantic and Classic’.121 Eliot, in a letter written a year later, likewise admitted: ‘I am not among those who believe in an absolute distinction between Classicism and Romanticism’.122 Murry’s and Eliot’s initial unease about the appropriateness of these terms led to their subsequent dismissal of them as, in Murry’s words, ‘Protean and unsatisfactory words’ that, according to Eliot, ‘inflame political passions, and tend to prejudice our conclusions’.123 The following discussion, therefore, moves away from the Romanticism–Classicism paradigm to focus on the question of the interpretation of religious experience, which lay at the heart of the Eliot–Murry polemic. In 1923, the question of ‘the inner voice’ and external authority became one of the key issues of the debate. In ‘On Fear; and on Romanticism’, Murry argued that ‘individualism’ was inherent in the English tradition, claiming that ‘the man who truly interrogates himself will ultimately hear the voice of God; in terms of literary criticism, the writer achieves impersonality through personality’.124 Murry introduced the notion of ‘the inner voice’ to counter Eliot’s emphasis on the necessity of self-surrender put forward in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, which Murry identified with the spirit of Catholicism. He argued that ‘Catholicism stands for the principle of unquestioned spiritual authority outside the individual; that is also the principle of classicism in literature’.125 Murry did not believe that one’s inner experience could be interpreted according to a set of external criteria and contended that in the contemporary world the church had lost its spiritual authority, hence it had no power over individual conscience. In ‘Christ and Christianity’ (1925), he stated that ‘the finer conscience of mankind has now passed definitely outside the Church’.126 He argued that the only way for theology to ‘rehabilitate itself is for it to become truly modern’, sympathising with Anglican modernists’ attempts

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to rethink the Christian creeds.127 According to Murry, the church’s resistance to the idea that dogmas and doctrines may undergo evolution was yet another proof that the church was incapable of maintaining its spiritual authority in modernity. Hence, at present, Murry claimed, Christians who were honest in their faith ought to realise that they did not need to comply with the dogmatic aspect of Christianity. Since the church failed to respond to the religious consciousness of humankind, ‘the man who believes in God does not need a Church’ any more and should learn to imitate Jesus’s heroic individualism.128 Eliot’s reply targets Murry’s emphasis on the value of ‘the inner voice’. In ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923), Eliot reaffirms the views he expressed in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, arguing that there is ‘something outside the artist to which he owes allegiance, a devotion to which he must surrender and sacrifice himself in order to earn and to obtain his unique position’.129 Eliot rejects Murry’s notion of ‘the inner voice’ and points out that it may easily lead to a self-absorbed attitude, which precludes the possibility of any genuine religious experience.130 Responding to Murry’s proposition that one should focus more on one’s ‘inner voice’ rather than any external authority, Eliot, perhaps referring to Saint Narcissus from his poem, writes that listening to the ‘inner voice’: is an exercise, however, which I believe was of enough interest to Catholicism for several handbooks to be written on its practice. But the Catholic practitioners were, I believe, with the possible exception of certain heretics, not palpitating Narcissi; the Catholic did not believe that God and himself were identical. ‘The man who truly interrogates himself will ultimately hear the voice of God’, Mr. Murry says. In theory, this leads to a form of pantheism […].131

Eliot’s argument echoes closely the warning against pantheism that Pope Pius X expressed in the Pascendi encyclical, as well as Underhill’s discussion of true and false mysticism, in which she characterised the latter as a tendency to identify oneself with the deity.132 Following Underhill, Eliot asserts that dogmas provide a hermeneutic framework for the interpretation of the individual’s religious experience, and it is in the act of interpretation that such an experience is validated and elucidated. The meaning of mystical experience, Underhill claims, is confirmed by the way in which it enters into relations with other mystics’ experiences that form part of the order of tradition, including inherited doctrines and dogmas, the Incarnation being the most crucial among them.

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Murry, however, could not agree with this, and in The Life of Jesus (1926) developed his own interpretation of Christian spirituality, rejecting dogmatic tradition and putting emphasis on the radical individualism of Jesus.133 Referring to works of Anglican modernist theologians such as William Inge, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, Ernest William Barnes, Bishop of Birmingham, and Canon Burnett Hillman Streeter (who was to become Eliot’s godfather the following year), Murry weaves a narrative of Jesus, a man and a sinner, who with his baptism starts believing that he is the Son of God. In Murry’s story Jesus, born as a human, becomes God’s son when he receives baptism from John and lives through a mystical experience in which he is struck by the knowledge that God loves all humankind and every person can become God’s son. He becomes ‘a teacher and a prophet,’ spreading the good news that everyone can be reborn and begin a new life among the people of Israel.134 His teaching that ‘all men were God’s sons in precisely the same sense as he’, however, has come to be misunderstood by his disciples and, Murry argues, in time the metaphor of the ‘Son of God’ has acquired a metaphysical meaning that Jesus did not intend it to have.135 A similar distortion of meaning took place in the case of the ‘Kingdom of God’ that Jesus preached and that was meant to refer to the individual’s inner transformation: Jesus had believed that the miracle of rebirth into a new condition of consciousness which had happened to him would happen to all men: the spirit would be instantly poured out upon all flesh as he proclaimed the mystery of the Kingdom of God. Just as one man’s mode of perception becomes an objective reality the moment all men share it, so the Kingdom of God—the condition of consciousness in which Jesus actually lived—would swiftly and suddenly become a reality as the Word of the Kingdom sank into all men’s hearts.136

Murry reiterates his earlier argument that the divinity of Jesus consists in the fact that he died out of love for men, to convince them that God was their loving Father, and thus in Jesus ‘God was manifest as he has never since been manifest in man’.137 While Murry rejects the idea of bodily resurrection, he strongly argues for the notion of ‘the continued life of Jesus in a “spiritual body,”’ which can be experienced by anybody who approaches Jesus and his teachings in earnest.138 In The Life of Jesus, Murry carries out a radical rewriting of what Eliot considers the central dogma of Christian tradition, arguing that the

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Incarnation understood as the taking flesh of the divine Word never happened. For Murry, Jesus was of fully human nature, and by imitating him, anybody can find ‘the spark of that divine something’ within his or her own self.139 An organised religion, Murry warns his readers, will always try to eliminate such personal revelations. In an institutionalised context, ‘new revelation cannot be suffered, for it strikes direct at the heart of authority. It is, and must be condemned as subversive and heretical’.140 According to him, the spiritual dynamism that faithfulness to Jesus implies cannot be contained in ecclesiastical structures since in the formal church setting it ‘becomes petrified into dogmas and ceremonies’ and soon turns into ‘Church-mummery’.141 For Eliot, who has just started making arrangements for his baptism and confirmation into the Church of England, Murry’s book must have indeed seemed heretical, embodying most of the difficulties that he identified in modernist theology: excessive focus on the individual self, leanings towards the interpretation of the divine as the Bergsonian élan vital, the perception of the development of Christian tradition as an evolutionary process, and the denial of Original Sin.142 At the same time, however, Eliot acknowledged the theological validity of Murry’s book. As he planned to review it in the Criterion, he warned Murry: ‘You may not be pleased, but you know I take theology seriously, as you do.’143 Before the review went to print, in several private letters Eliot questioned Murry about the problem of finding a mode of interpretation of individual religious experience. ‘I cannot perceive’, he wrote, ‘that you admit any objective restraint upon translating any feeling into a belief, & I think this can only lead to non-­ conformist individual chaos.’144 Murry replied: ‘when you ask me for a theology, my reply is that the men of religious experience (of whom Jesus is to me the highest example) didn’t have, or want one. They knew, what I too know, having learned it from them, that theologies are unnecessary to misleading.’145 Eliot wrote back asking: ‘if one has no theology, should not one try to get one? They are misleading, but to have no theology is to be still worse misled’.146 While Eliot acknowledged the problems inherent in theology and its abstract speculations, he regarded the other extreme— which he considered to be Murry’s refusal to speculate within a traditional theological framework—even more dangerous. In his review published in the Criterion, Eliot acknowledged the ‘evidence of hard labour’ and theological research that Murry undertook, yet severely criticised his ‘tergiversation of metaphor’ that led to the identification of the human with the divine.147 Eliot discovers affinities with both

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modernist theology and ‘Jesuit Catholicism of the seventeenth century’ in Murry’s reasoning.148 In the Clark Lectures of 1926, he describes Jesuit spirituality as a tendency of religion to abandon ‘the pursuit of metaphysical truth’, which he associated with Dominican scholasticism, and develop ‘in the direction of psychology’.149 Against the Spanish psychological mysticism, which he deems ‘a spiritual haschisch, a drugging of the emotions’, he sets the ontological ‘Artistotelian-Victorine-Dantesque’ mysticism, which he considers ‘an intellectual preparation for spiritual contemplation’.150 The main objection he voices against the former is that it substituted ‘the divine passion by the human’ (in a manner resembling Murry’s substitution of the divine by the human in his narrative of Jesus’s life), whereas the latter, present in the poetry of Dante and his contemporaries, was able ‘to enlarge the boundary of human love so as to make it a stage in a progress toward the divine’.151 While it is not clear whether Eliot considered his theory of the two types of mysticism a satisfactory refutation of Murry’s vision of the Incarnation, the fact that he compared Murry to Spanish mystics, such as Teresa of Ávila or John of the Cross, and a few months later called him ‘the genuine Heretic—a very rare bird’, suggests that Eliot did acknowledge the seriousness of the theological questions that Murry’s work posed.152 Despite Eliot’s hostile review, Murry’s book was warmly received by a general reading public, especially in the circles open to modernist theology, which was gaining attention and ‘rapidly capturing the Church of England’.153 In recognition of his book’s value, Murry was appointed a reviewer of subsequent narratives of Jesus’s life for the Times Literary Supplement.154 More importantly, his views were validated by the modernist theologians who quoted them with approval in their own works, with Dean Inge remarking that Murry’s work can be seen as ‘a sort of Ecce Homo for our generation’.155 Eliot’s debate with Murry was no longer confined to the pages of the Criterion and the Adelphi, as now Eliot would encounter Murry’s views repeated by theologians belonging to the Anglican community of which he has just become a member. It is not surprising, then, that he was not impressed with the works of Hugh R. L. Sheppard and Maude Royden, which he mentions reading in 1930.156 The former endorses Murry’s argument that Jesus is ‘the most real Man Who ever lived’, while the latter quotes Murry’s statement that Jesus became God’s son because he ‘claimed [it] for himself’.157 No longer was the Eliot–Murry debate confined to the English language either. The French Catholic modernist and literary critic Henri Bremond, having

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learnt about the debate from the pages of the Criterion, in his book Prayer and Poetry (Prière et Poésie, 1926) extensively quotes from Murry’s work and hails him for shedding light on the relation between religion and literature.158 Eliot, despite the fact that he did not agree with Murry on many issues, implicitly acknowledged the value of his work. In one of his letters to Murry, he wrote: ‘I know that in many ways—spiritually, you are much wiser than I’,159 and a few years after he called Murry ‘the genuine Heretic’, he admitted: the essential of any important heresy is not simply that it is wrong: it is that it is partly right. It is characteristic of the more interesting heretics, in the context in which I use the term, that they have an exceptionally acute perception or profound insight, of some part of the truth; an insight more important often than the inferences of those who are aware of more but less acutely aware of anything. So far as we are able to redress the balance, effect the compensation, ourselves, we may find such authors of the greatest value.160

Eliot attempted to ‘redress the balance’ both in his critical writings and in his poetry. His early Ariel poems explore the key questions recurring in the theological debates of the period, and reflect his own rethinking of the Incarnation, prompted by the works of Murry and modernist theologians. The first poem of the cycle, ‘Journey of the Magi’, is a poetic response to Murry’s claim that ‘[t]he birth in the manger at Bethlehem, the Star in the East, the visit of the Wise Men, are devoid of historical reality. These wonderful things did not happen’.161 The poem challenges Murry’s statement and presents the Magi’s journey as a re-enactment of the modern believer’s search for the meaning of the Incarnation—a long hermeneutic journey to understand ‘this Birth’.162 While Murry denied the value of Christian dogmas on the premise that they comprise a fossilised set of religious ideas that have lost their meaning in the modern world, and in The Life of Jesus rejected the Incarnation as one of them, Eliot in his ‘Journey of the Magi’ challenged Murry’s interpretation, taking Lancelot Andrewes—for whom, Eliot believed, the Incarnation was ‘an essential dogma’—as his guide.163 In his essay on Andrewes, Eliot places particular emphasis on Andrewes’s hermeneutical method. He contrasts ‘the vague jargon’ of contemporary times, when people seem to have ‘a vocabulary for everything and exact ideas about

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nothing—when a word half-understood, torn from its place in some alien or half-formed science, as of psychology, conceals from both writer and reader the utter meaninglessness of a statement’ with Andrewes’s impressive ability to engage with the written word and patiently inquire into its possible meanings.164 Andrewes, Eliot argues, ‘takes a word and derives the world from it; squeezing and squeezing the word until it yields a full juice of meaning which we should never have supposed any word to possess’.165 The fact that Eliot quotes Andrewes’s Nativity Sermon of 1622 in the opening of ‘Journey of the Magi’ suggests that he saw it as an example of Andrewes’s interpretative method. This method prompts us to read the journey taking place in the poem as a combination of multiple journeys happening simultaneously: the historical journey of the Wise Men from the East to Bethlehem, a journey of a convert who through baptism embraces death and is born into new life, and a journey of a modern Magus who attempts to comprehend the ancient dogma even though his contemporaries consider it a ‘folly’ (l. 20). The last of these journeys in particular can be read as Eliot’s poetic response to Murry. It probes into the hardships that a modern Magus faces on his hermeneutic journey to understand the dogma of the Incarnation—a journey that is an attempt to make the word (which is also the Word) yield ‘a full juice of meaning’ from which a new world can be derived.166 In his Nativity Sermon of 1622, Andrewes reflects on the passage from Matthew 2.1–2 that relates the arrival of the Wise Men in Jerusalem.167 He draws attention to the two stages of the Magi’s journey: the first one he refers to as ‘vidimus stellam’ and the second one ‘venimus adorare’. According to Andrewes, there is a large and difficult gap to bridge between the act of seeing the sign that announces Jesus’s birth (vidimus) and acting upon it (venimus). In fact, that gap may even incapacitate the one who sees the sign. The Magus in Eliot’s poem has already bridged it. He has accepted the fact that to understand Christus natus, who is also Christus signatus, one needs to take action; as Andrewes argues, ‘there is no promise […] of finding but to such as “seek”’.168 The seeking consists in imitating the biblical Magi and setting out on a journey on which one is stripped of almost everything that has comprised one’s comfort zone: ‘The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, / And the silken girls bringing sherbet’ (l. 9–10). The biblical journey, as Andrewes and Eliot’s first stanza assert, was taken under the most adverse conditions; it was ‘a wearisome, irksome, troublesome, dangerous, unseasonable journey’, yet the Magi did

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complete it.169 What made it possible for them to find Christus natus was the ‘light of the star in their eyes, the “word of prophecy” in their ears, the beam of His Spirit in their hearts’.170 In Eliot’s poetic account of the journey, however, there is no star to guide the Magi. In their ears, instead of the ‘word of prophecy’, there are ‘the voices singing […], saying / That this was all folly’ (l. 19–20), which could well be read as an ironic reference to Murry’s ‘inner voice’. The experience of the modern Magus appears to be even more ‘unseasonable’ than the biblical journey as he seems to be left without any guidance. There is counsel, however, to be found in the conclusion of Andrewes’s sermon. He addresses his contemporaries in the following words: ‘We cannot say vidimus stellam; the star is gone long since, not now to be seen. […] It is enough we read of it in the text; we see it there’.171 Thus, he adds one more stage to the modern believer’s journey of faith; before one can arrive at vidimus stellam—seeing the sign—and venimus adorare—embarking on a journey to worship God—there is an initial stage of legimus— reading the Scripture. For the modern believer, then, Christus natus becomes Christus signatus in yet a new way. He is not only a sign that needs to be found, but also a hermeneutic task to be performed—a textual and historical sign that needs to be, first, found and, second, interpreted. The question of hermeneutics is one of the central themes of the second stanza. When the Magi reach their destination, they find themselves in a landscape whose concentrated symbolic imagery begs for interpretation: Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation; With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness, And three trees on the low sky. And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow. (l. 21–5)

As Michael P.  Dean suggests, these lines and their condensed imagery contain almost the entire Gospel narrative.172 The opening image of the wet valley that smells of vegetation evokes the notion of rebirth and the new beginning. The ‘running stream’ and the ‘water-mill’ bring to mind the image of God as ‘the fountain of living waters’ (Jeremiah 2.13) and ‘the wells of salvation’ (Isaiah 12.3). The symbolism of water merges with the light and darkness imagery: the Magi enter the valley at dawn and soon will see the sun rising; the water-mill is ‘beating the darkness’. The

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rising sun evokes light that symbolises Christ: ‘the light of the world’ (John 8.12), ‘a light to lighten the Gentiles’ (Luke 2.32). The ‘three trees’ recall the three crosses on Golgotha, and the following lines, as Grover Smith points out, include numerous ‘allusions to the Communion (through the tavern “bush”), to the paschal lamb whose blood was smeared on the lintels of Israel, to the blood money of Judas, to the contumely suffered by Christ before the Crucifixion, to the soldiers casting lots at the foot of the Cross, and, perhaps, to the pilgrims at the open tomb in the garden’.173 Despite such a proliferation of symbolic images, to the Magi it seems that there was ‘no information’ that would help them find their way. Without the interpretative key, they are unable to read the signs that surround them. The ironic overtone of their conclusion that ‘no information’ was left for them suggests that the modern Magi have possibly begun attaching too much importance to what can be referred to as ‘information’—a straightforward and scientifically verifiable fact—and subsequently have lost the ability to read symbolic signs that are more elusive and require interpretation. While Andrewes focuses on the importance of the Magi’s adoration and worship of Christus natus (‘That is all in all, and without it all our seeing, coming, seeking, and finding is to no purpose’), the Magus in the poem is silent about what happened in the manger.174 This is even more striking when one considers Rudolf Germer’s apt observation that among different Nativity stories, the Adoration of the Magi is possibly the most frequently depicted in paintings and Christmas cards and ‘the most cherished, connected by all who are brought up in Christian families with the excitement, wonder and joy of Christmas’.175 The fact that the modern Magus refuses to reveal any details related to this experience may reflect his conscious attempt to break away from the over-sentimentalised, superficial understanding of the Incarnation and draw attention to its more crucial dimension. The ambivalence of the only term with which the Magus eventually and hesitatingly describes the event that he witnessed—saying that it was ‘satisfactory’ (l. 31)—has puzzled many critics; John H. Timmerman goes as far as to call it ‘an enigma in Eliot criticism’.176 The term has been interpreted in a theological sense in which the word ‘satisfaction’ refers to Christ’s atonement for sin.177 Lancelot Andrewes in one of his Nativity sermons refers to Christ as ‘a complete, full, every way sufficient satisfaction’.178 Other critics have emphasised the negative overtone of the adjective ‘satisfactory’, considering it an inadequate response to the metaphysical

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meaning of the event. For example, Childs argues that ‘the Incarnation is “satisfactory” in the sense of “merely adequate”; it is evaluated as a satisfaction according to whether or not it answers the needs of the inquirer’.179 Consequently, Childs reads the Magus’s comment as a testimony to his pragmatist attitude to the Incarnation, which did not meet his expectations. This interpretation, however, does not seem to be corroborated by the last stanza, in which the Magus asserts that he ‘would do it again’ (l. 33), affirming the value of the event and asserting that it made the hard and long journey worthwhile. Yet, his affirmation is by no means unambiguous: All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? (l. 32–6)

The Magus reflects on his experience from a certain distance; possibly years have passed since he took his journey. Yet some questions he has not been able to ‘set down’: how to understand the relationship between the Incarnation (‘Birth’) and the Passion (‘Death’), and the radical changes that a full comprehension of the meaning of those events brings into one’s life? The ‘Birth’ was the Magi’s ‘death’ as it made them aware that they would feel alienated from those who did not take the journey and still lived ‘in the old dispensation’ (l. 41). The old ways are rejected by the Magi, since the experience of the journey has changed them to the point where they cannot imagine living their old lives any more. Yet the rejection of certain aspects of their former lives that are now considered sinful—an act necessary, according to Paul, to be able to ‘walk in newness of life’ and to live ‘under grace’ (Romans 6.4–14)—can be ‘hard and bitter agony’ (l. 39). All the harder, if one knows that one needs to return to the old ‘places’ (l. 40), where one will meet again people ‘clutching their gods’ (l. 43), reminiscent of the self-enamoured Narcissus ‘writhing in his own clutch’. The problem set out in this stanza shows the biggest difficulty concerning the Magus’s experience to be not the disbelief in what he saw (he has ‘evidence’ and ‘no doubt’ (l. 37)), but a reconciliation with the way it has changed his life. Instead of the joy present in the Gospels and Nativity stories, there is a feeling of resignation and incomprehension. The meaning arrived at turns out to be profoundly disturbing. While the

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ancient Magi reacted with joy to the sight of the Birth, the modern Magus’s hermeneutic journey revealed to him that Birth is inextricably bound to Death, yet the deeper meaning of this bond is something that surpasses his understanding. The final sentence invites different readings. Its ambivalence resides in the phrase ‘another death’ (l. 43) that could be understood either as a ‘different death’—perhaps one that is less painful and does not require such a big sacrifice—or as ‘another experience of the same type’ that could possibly reveal the full meaning of what has been witnessed in the manger. This ambiguity of the words the Magus utters can be understood as expressive of the ambivalence of his reaction to the event he witnessed and its impact on his life. Ultimately, as Alan Weinblatt observes, the Magus ‘can find no language, no vocabulary, no system of meaning, no frame of reference either logical or theological, in which to set forth his experience’.180 His lack of theological framework, evident in his incomprehension of the symbolic signs that he sees in the second stanza, and his scientific mindset tuned to processing ‘information’ and ‘evidence’, but missing subtler signs and hints, make his journey equally or, perhaps, more difficult than that of the ancient Magi. And yet, through his persistence, he does arrive at his destination, which defies Murry’s assertion that dogmas necessarily petrify the spirit of Christianity. In fact, the modern Magus’s journey shows how the patient ‘squeezing and squeezing’ of the dogmatic word, such as the Incarnation, can reveal meanings that ‘we should never have supposed any word to possess’.181 Even if these meanings may give birth to yet more disconcerting questions, ‘despair’, as Eliot points out in his 1931 essay on Blaise Pascal, is ‘a necessary prelude to, and element in, the joy of faith’.182

Between Religious and Aesthetic Experience: Neo-­Thomist Aesthetics and the ‘Pure Poetry’ Debate In the mid-1920s, the question of how to interpret religious experience was debated no longer exclusively in the pages of the Criterion and the Adelphi, but, as Herbert Read reminisced, was ‘endlessly discussed […] in conversation and in print’.183 The debate widened its scope, addressing the complex relation between religion and art, in particular, poetry. What started as a dispute between Eliot and Murry entered a wider network of

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transnational exchanges between a number of writers and thinkers, including critic I. A. Richards, literary scholar Mario Praz, philosopher Ramon Fernandez, and religious thinkers Henri Bremond and Jacques Maritain.184 This somewhat unexpected interaction between English writers and critics and French religious intellectuals—carried out in letters, essays, and reviews—sheds light on the development of Eliot’s views on the relationship between religion and aesthetics, as well as the transnational nature of contemporary critical and theological debates. The new element brought into the discussion by the French thinkers was the relationship (or lack thereof) between mystical experience and poetic inspiration. This question became central to the French debate after Bremond announced in his two books, La Poésie Pure and Prière et Poésie, published in 1926, that he considered mysticism and poetry to be inherently related. Maritain, his most influential opponent, demanded, on the other hand, a strict separation between poetic activity and spiritual life. Bremond’s and Maritain’s arguments, discussed in detail in Chap. 4, further stimulated the polemic between Eliot and Murry, prompting them to redefine their understanding of aesthetics and its relationship to religion. On 6 May 1924, Eliot received a letter from Henri Bremond, who expressed interest in Eliot’s debate with Murry, which he learnt about from an advertisement of the Criterion published in the Times Literary Supplement. Bremond became intrigued by the fact that Eliot’s polemic with Murry seemed to touch on the questions present in the French debate sparked off by the publication of Bremond’s book For Romanticism (Pour le Romanticisme, 1923). He wrote: As I intend to re-enter the fray in order to sum up the debate so far, I should be very curious to know what views have been expressed in England. It would, indeed, be very interesting to discover the same literary ­preoccupation at work on both sides of the water. Can I, without putting you to too much trouble, ask you to send me what has been written on the question in your review?185

In his reply to Bremond’s letter, Eliot acknowledges that Bremond’s book was ‘already known’ to him, and that he has begun reading it ‘with great interest’.186 With regard to his polemic with Murry, he states: I shall have great pleasure in sending you the two issues of the Criterion which attracted your attention. I fancy that the discussion between Mr

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Murry and myself is concerned with quite a different area from that of your admirable study. I am not among those who believe in an absolute distinction between Classicism and Romanticism; I even find that, more often than is supposed, one and the same author can be looked at from both angles. What is at issue between Mr Murry and myself is rather that he, in my opinion, confuses literature with religion […].187

Eliot’s assumption that the issue that concerned Bremond was not the relation between literature and religion was incorrect, as this was the precise subject-matter on which Bremond published his next two books, provoking the ‘pure poetry’ debate, discussed in detail in Chap. 4. When the ‘pure poetry’ debate began and Bremond’s work was translated into English, Eliot did not comment on it in writing. However, he was aware of the debate as he read the journals Nouvelle Revue Française and Dublin Review, which at that time published several reviews of Bremond’s work. The only early comment that Eliot made on Bremond’s work classified it as part of the modernist movement in theology, which Eliot already considered a thing of the past. In a 1928 obituary-review of Friedrich von Hügel’s Selected Letters, he wrote: Von Hügel, though not a Modernist, belongs to the period of Modernism. And von Hügel’s variety of orthodoxy, I suspect, is as out of date as Tyrrell’s variety of Modernism. The last survival of the old Modernism is that elusive spirit which appears at the Abbé Brémond’s literary séances: La Poésie Pure.188

While Eliot did not offer any more explicit criticism of Bremond’s work before the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures on Poetry delivered in 1932–1933, his indirect response to the interest that Bremond’s ideas generated in literary circles was his turn to Jacques Maritain’s work. At the time when critics in England began publishing reviews of Bremond’s influential Prayer and Poetry, Eliot published in the Criterion his translation of Maritain’s essay on poetry and religion (January and May 1927), contributed two reviews of Maritain’s works to the Times Literary Supplement (June and November 1928), and devoted a considerable space to Maritain in his article on Julien Benda published in the Cambridge Review (June 1928).189 In 1928, he was also considering submitting an article on Maritain to the journal Forum, and in 1930, he solicited a review of Art et Scolastique from John Gould Fletcher.190 Eliot’s considerable investment in Maritain’s work stemmed from his hope that the

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neo-­Thomist methodology that Maritain was proposing could provide a new interpretative framework for the discussion of religion and literature—a perspective that would be a viable alternative to the theories of modernist-­minded Murry and Bremond. At the time, Eliot might have considered Maritain the long-awaited ‘astute theologian’ who could once again separate religious and artistic values from the ‘flux of [the] development of knowledge and information’, providing a metaphysical basis on which a new ‘unity’ could be constructed.191 The publication of the first part of the translation of Maritain’s essay ‘Frontières de la Poésie’ in the Criterion was accompanied by a commentary in which Eliot hailed Maritain as ‘the most conspicuous figure, and probably the most powerful force, in contemporary French philosophy’.192 The fact that Eliot changed the title of Maritain’s paper—translating it as ‘Poetry and Religion’ instead of ‘Frontiers of Poetry’ (as it has been known in English since it was published in J. F. Scanlan’s translation in 1930)— proves that he intended it to enter the debate on the relation of literature and religion that until now focused primarily on Bremond’s theory.193 The essay rejected Bremond’s argument that art could achieve the ‘purity’ that is reserved for mystical states only and emphasised the material conditions of art’s existence. Murry was quick to respond to Eliot’s translation of Maritain’s essay. He argued that it was not modern psychological perspective and yearning for ‘purity’ that should be regarded as dangerous, but the inflexibility and the alleged ‘objectivism’ of the neo-Thomist system. According to him, the outdated scholastic thought of Aquinas can only be regarded as ‘a symbol’ of a unitive system towards which one should strive, but not as ‘a pattern’ to be followed in modern metaphysics.194 Murry emphatically asserted that the Thomistic synthesis ‘once discarded, cannot be re-established’ and should be approached only as a model belonging to the past.195 Eliot’s attitude to Maritain’s work was complex. His initial response was highly enthusiastic as Maritain helped Eliot find a convincing and well-reasoned way to refute the arguments put forward by Murry and Bremond. In the Times Literary Supplement Eliot dubbed Maritain the ‘leader of Roman Catholic intellectualism’.196 However, he soon expressed dissatisfaction with certain aspects of Maritain’s work. In Eliot’s view Maritain’s writing ‘always stimulates the intellectual appetite’, but ‘it does not always give intellectual satisfaction’.197 Maritain, whom Eliot now calls ‘the lyrist of Thomism’, appeals in Eliot’s view ‘to the heart rather than the head’. 198 This somewhat puzzling dissatisfaction with Maritain’s

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emotional side on Eliot’s part becomes more comprehensible when the definition of neo-Thomism that Eliot puts forward in one of his reviews is considered in more detail: The word ‘neo-Thomism’ may be taken with more than one meaning. It can be applied to the philosophic work of Dominicans and members of other Orders which has gone on at least since the pronouncement of Leo XIII in favour of Aquinas, including the work of such men as Rousselot, Sertillanges, and Garrigou-Lagrange. Or it can be applied to the popularization of intellectual Catholicism in the life of contemporary Paris. In the latter aspect, if we consider it only as an aspect, neo-Thomism has some of the appearance of a literary and philosophic mode. It represents, beyond its strictly theological import, a reaction against such philosophies as that of Bergson, against Romanticism in literature and against democracy in government.199

The latter understanding of neo-Thomism—that is, viewing it not only as a theological, but also as ‘a literary and philosophic mode’—was of key importance to Eliot. The neo-scholastic metaphysics of Maritain presented a philosophical system in which theology, epistemology, and aesthetics were assigned clearly defined places and provided a tenable alternative to the anti-rationalist strain of Bergson’s philosophy and Romantic literature. It was due to his engagement with neo-Thomism that Eliot defined the direction in which his views developed as ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion’.200 Classicism provides here an antidote to Romantic emotionalism, royalism is a reaction to democracy, and Anglo-Catholicism serves as a corrective to the fluidity of Bergson’s philosophy and theological modernism. If one reads this statement within the context of Eliot’s neo-Thomist sympathies, it becomes evident that he considered religion, philosophy, literature, and politics connected to each other within a wider framework of metaphysics. Conceiving of such a framework was a way of restoring the lost metaphysical unity that Eliot mourned in the Clark Lectures. He hinted at the fact that he considered neo-Thomism to have the potential to perform this work of restoration in the reviews he wrote in 1926 and 1927. He predicted that contemporary times may see a ‘revolution’ of the mind comparable to the ‘dissociation of the medieval mind’.201 That this revolution was to be brought about by neo-Thomism is evident in Eliot’s suggestion that ‘[t]he most fruitful kind of interest in the Middle Ages is not the interest in a remote or

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obscure “period,” but the interest which finds lessons for the present time from particular traditions of art, of philosophy and theology, or of social organization’.202 Neo-Thomism with its orderly metaphysics was thus enthusiastically hailed by Eliot as a system with enormous potential (with which, however, what he considered Maritain’s emotional side was not congruous enough). Eliot’s translation of Maritain’s essay, as Jason Harding suggests, ‘had a profound and long-lasting effect upon the formulation of Eliot’s Christian poetics’.203 Maritain played an important role in the development of Eliot’s poetics and literary criticism of the mid-1920s, which exhibit a strong orientation towards neo-Thomist aesthetics, and had an impact on his views on the relation of poetry and religion. This comes to the fore, for instance, in the preface to the second edition of The Sacred Wood, written in March 1928. Eliot admits in it that on re-reading the essays he wrote in 1917–1920, he realised that his interests have developed and expanded and ‘passed on to another problem […] that of the relation of poetry to the spiritual and social life of its time and of other times’.204 He offers a definition of poetry as ‘a superior amusement’, adding that he puts forward such a definition not because it is true, but ‘because if you call it anything else you are likely to call it something still more false’.205 This explanation is followed by a series of negative definitions, directed primarily against Wordsworth’s, Arnold’s, and Murry’s understanding of poetry, and concluded in a statement that ‘certainly poetry is not the inculcation of morals, or the direction of politics; and no more is it religion or an equivalent of religion, except by some monstrous abuse of words’.206 Following Maritain’s lead, Eliot insists on a strict separation of the poetic and the religious. He reiterates this point in ‘Religion without Humanism’ (1929). In a passage discussing the possibility of reconciling science and religion, he quite unexpectedly attacks Bremond’s theory of ‘pure poetry’: The theologian says ‘of course dogma is not truth,’ and the scientist says, ‘of course science is not truth.’ Every one is happy together; and possibly both parties turn to poetry (about which neither scientist nor theologian knows anything) and say ‘there is truth, in the inspiration of the poet.’ The poet himself, who perhaps knows more about his own inspiration than a psycho-­ analyst does, is not allowed to reply that poetry is poetry, and not science or religion—unless he or some of his mistaken friends produce a theory that Poetry is Pure Poetry, Pure Poetry turning out something else than poetry and thereby securing respect.207

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Eliot’s objection to the idea of ‘pure poetry’ bears a clear affinity to Maritain’s arguments. Eliot paraphrases Maritain’s warning against taking the promise that modernity makes to artists at face value. Doing that may make artists ‘squander [the] substance’ of art in attempts to ‘secure respect’.208 While Bremond is not named in Eliot’s essay, the references to ‘pure poetry’ would have been clearly intelligible to his contemporaries. When in the mid-1920s Eliot endorsed Maritain’s neo-Thomism, he became increasingly frustrated with the way the term ‘mysticism’ was constantly misused by modernist theologians and thinkers associated with their circles, who firmly rejected scholastic emphasis on rationalism and endorsed the irrational instead.209 In 1928, Eliot went as far as to argue that modernism was ‘a mental blight which can afflict the whole of the intelligence of the time, whether within or without the Church’ and it led to ‘muddy thinking’.210 It jeopardised the absoluteness of truth, producing ‘half-Christians and quarter-Christians’.211 He declared modernist theology and the mystical revival to be things of the past: We have […] a new attitude towards religion—we are brawling over Thomism and the Liturgy. […] The present age seems to me much more an age of black and white, without shadows. Mysticism—even the particular Christian mysticism studied by von Hügel—is not the issue of our time. We are able to quote with approval that remark of Bossuet of which Professor Babbitt has reminded us: ‘true mysticism is so rare and unessential and false mysticism is so common and dangerous that one cannot oppose it too firmly.’212

Eliot’s endorsement of neo-Thomism, however, was not uncritical. Already in 1925, he expressed his dissatisfaction with Maritain’s Réflexions sur l’intelligence in a letter to Herbert Read: ‘I think it a valuable and significant book, but nevertheless am a little disappointed with it. I feel that the man has been somehow in too great a hurry to arrive, that he has with good intentions fallen into the trap of zealotry’.213 Eliot reiterated the difficulties he identified in neo-Thomism in a 1928 letter to Bonamy Dobrée: ‘I am myself aware of the “dangers” of “creating a system”; though I should say that the dangers come not from creating it but from one’s way of holding it. Some of these Frenchmen, for instance, risk compromising Christianity by seeming to make it depend upon St. Thomas’.214 While Eliot initially enthusiastically welcomed neo-Thomists’ achievement in creating a tenable intellectual system, towards the end of 1920s

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he seemed to grow increasingly doubtful whether it was the only right way of comprehending Christianity. In the mid-1920s, the neo-scholastic framework provided him with satisfactory answers to the variety of questions raised in his debates with Murry and was a response to the need of ‘as precise and clear a creed as possible’ that he expressed back in 1924.215 At the beginning of the 1930s, however, a distinct shift in Eliot’s theological thinking can be discerned. Now Eliot’s references to Maritain or other neo-­Thomists become less frequent, and in a number of critical texts he seems to contradict the theses that he fiercely defended in the 1920s. This reconsideration of his previous stance follows Pope Pius XI’s condemnation of Action française in December 1926, and the subsequent decline of Charles Maurras’s political version of neo-Thomism, which Eliot was attracted to and defended in a number of letters and articles published in 1927–1928.216 In 1927, he characterised Maurras as a restorer of the ‘social order without which the Catholic Church cannot flourish’, and in 1928 praised him for demonstrating that ‘a political and a religious view can be harmonious’.217 By 1929, however, he becomes wary of the way in which political systems such as fascism and communism use the terms ‘order’ and ‘loyalty’ to generate positive emotions and attract followers.218 With the rise of fascism and communism, the word ‘order’, which was central to the Maurrasian version of neo-Thomist classicism, acquired ominous connotations. In a 1930 letter to Bonamy Dobrée, Eliot concedes: ‘I think we are in agreement that “Order” and “Authority” are […] dangerous catchwords now […]. I am as scared of Order as of Disorder’.219 A few months earlier, in a letter to the editor of The Bookman, he attempted to distance himself from Maurras, explaining that his ‘personal acquaintance with M. Maurras is but slight’ and adding that he was ready to admit that there were ‘positive errors’ and ‘dangers’ in Maurras’s thought.220 Thus, while in 1927–1928 Eliot defended Maurras, by the early 1930s, he begins to dissociate himself from the Maurrassian emphasis on the orderly and rational, considering it as extreme an option as disorder. By 1940, he admits that the Pope’s censure of Action française was well informed, observing that ‘the Pope understood its tendencies better’ than Eliot himself.221 Distancing himself from the version of neo-Thomism promoted by Maurras and Maritain, Eliot seemed to be following the middle way—via media—which he praised in his essay on Archbishop John Bramhall. He hailed this seventeenth-century Anglican theologian as ‘a perfect example of the pursuit of the via media’, which according to Eliot ‘is of all ways the

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most difficult to follow’.222 He asserted that finding ‘the middle way’ between various extremes is a strenuous effort, as it ‘requires discipline and self-control, it requires both imagination and hold on reality’.223 If Eliot was searching for his own via media, neo-Thomism provided him with a firm hold on reality, yet perhaps lacked imagination from which Eliot could not or did not want to resign. While in the mid-1920s he emphasised the necessity of clear and exact thought, in 1931 he reconsidered his earlier views and argued that ‘[t]he admission of inconsistencies, sometimes ridiculed as indifference to logic and coherence […] may be largely the admission of inconsistencies inherent in life itself, and of the impossibility of overcoming them by the imposition of a uniformity greater than life will bear’.224 Eliot finds a notable example of a Christian thinker who is able to admit the perceived inconsistencies of life and follow his own via media in Blaise Pascal. In his essay on Pensées (1931), he refers to Pascal as ‘a man of the world among ascetics, and an ascetic among men of the world’; a person who ‘had the knowledge of worldliness and the passion of asceticism, and in him the two are fused into an individual whole’.225 In the conclusion of his essay, Eliot recommends Pascal as the most appropriate religious thinker to be read in contemporary times, his special merit being the ‘unique combination and balance of qualities’.226 In Pascal’s sensibility Eliot seems to have found a perfect embodiment of the balance he wished to see in a modern Christian thinker—‘a new type of intellectual, combining the intellectual and the devotional’.227 This marked shift in Eliot’s thinking is reflected in his literary criticism, particularly the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that he gave at Harvard University in 1932–1933 and the Turnbull Lectures given at Johns Hopkins University in January 1933. In these lectures Eliot revises some of his earlier views and redefines his understanding of the nature and function of poetry. In the third Turnbull Lecture, he significantly extends the definition of poetry he offered in the preface to the second edition of The Sacred Wood, in what appears to be an attempt to find ‘the middle way’ between Maritain’s neo-Thomist aesthetics and Bremond’s theory of ‘pure poetry’. Eliot’s definition is twofold: in the first part he asserts that the poet’s ‘first purpose is to amuse’, and in the second he qualifies this statement with a claim that ‘the ultimate purpose, the ultimate value, of the poet’s work is religious’.228 The way Eliot now conceives of the religious purpose of art is reminiscent of Bremond’s emphasis on poetry’s capability to unite the poet and the reader to the ‘real’:

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The artist is the only genuine and profound revolutionist, in the following sense. The world always has, and always will, tend to substitute appearance for reality. The artist, being always alone, being heterodox when everyone else is orthodox, and orthodox when everyone else is heterodox, is the perpetual upsetter of conventional values, the restorer of the real. He may appear at one time to hold one extreme opinion, at another period another; but his function is to bring back humanity to the real.229

Eliot’s new definition of poetry encompasses both Maritain’s understanding of a work of art as a source of joy and delight and Bremond’s vision of poetry as an inspired devotional activity granting the poet (and possibly the reader) access to reality hidden behind appearances. Thus, Eliot raises the status of poetry from a ‘superior amusement’ to an act of partaking in the restoration of the ‘real’. Further, more explicit references to Bremond’s theory are included in the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures on Poetry of 1932–1933. In his penultimate lecture entitled ‘The Modern Mind’, Eliot summarises the most significant theories of poetry developed in the recent period. He identifies in them a tendency to move beyond strictly poetic considerations—a ‘belief that poetry does something of importance, or has something of importance to do’ and a conviction that ‘art, specifically poetry, has something to do with religion’, though there is no consensus on what the importance of poetry consists in and how its relationship with religion should be conceptualised.230 Outlining the different stances that critics adopted on this issue, Eliot mentions Bremond, who ‘presented a modern equivalent for the theory of divine inspiration’ and in whose work one can find ‘many penetrating remarks about the nature of poetry’.231 Eliot’s main objection to Bremond’s theory is, surprisingly, not his thesis that mysticism and poetic experience belong to one continuum, but the argument that poetry can be conceived of as an act of communication of a certain experience. This critique, however valid in itself, does not touch upon the key thesis of Bremond’s work, which in fact Eliot is now ready to endorse. In his final lecture, Eliot asserts: That there is an analogy between mystical experience and some of the ways in which poetry is written I do not deny; and I think that the Abbé Bremond has observed very well the differences as well as the likenesses; though, as I have said, whether the analogy is of significance for the student of religion, or only to the psychologist, I do not know.232

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While this time Eliot refuses to give any definition of poetry, claiming that he has ‘no general theory’ of his own, he adds: ‘No one of us, when he thinks about poetry, is without his own bias; and Abbe Bremond’s preoccupation with mysticism and Mr. Richards’s lack of interest in theology are equally significant.’233 This conclusion demonstrates a shift in Eliot’s evaluation of Bremond’s theory, from its explicit rejection in the late 1920s to a conditional endorsement in the 1930s. It follows his growing scepticism regarding neo-Thomist aesthetics, which he initially enthusiastically championed, and signals an openness to diverse ways of conceptualising the relationship between poetry and religion. The poem ‘Marina’ and the story of its composition illustrate the turn in Eliot’s thinking, showing how his renewed interest in mysticism was woven into his poetry.234 The poem was written in 1930, after Eliot read G. Wilson Knight’s work on Shakespeare. In 1929, Knight was a budding literary critic who, having graduated from Oxford, had an ambition to publish a radically new interpretation of Shakespeare’s late plays. He found his mentor in Murry. As he recalled years later: When […] I was groping for a way to express what I had to say about Shakespeare, Middleton Murry’s articles in the monthly Adelphi magazine acted on me like an avatar; and to his writings of this period my debt remains. Here was someone who without reservations was proclaiming the religious importance of literature in a voice of authority.235

Murry became ‘the apostle of the new age’ for Knight, while Eliot remained an adversary from the opposite camp.236 On reading Eliot’s The Sacred Wood and For Lancelot Andrewes, Knight observed that the essays seemed to him ‘cool and urbane in manner’, lacking the ‘prophetic’ quality that he found so appealing in Murry’s writings.237 Therefore, when Knight published his essay ‘The Poet and Immortality’ in the Shakespeare Review, he was surprised to learn that it met with Eliot’s approval: ‘Eliot, whose critical writings had been, or at least to me appeared, in opposition to mystical interpretations, was strangely sympathetic’.238 Encouraged by Eliot’s positive feedback, in 1929 Knight sent him his Myth and Miracle: On the Mystic Symbolism of Shakespeare and a selection of essays that he hoped to publish with Faber and Faber. The manuscript was rejected by the editorial board, but Eliot offered to personally recommend it to Oxford University Press and write an introduction to the volume.239 It was

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eventually published as The Wheel of Fire in 1930 and is still regarded as an important contribution to Shakespeare criticism.240 The unexpected interest that Eliot took in Knight’s work is representative of the shift in his thinking. Knight’s insistence on writing ‘mystical interpretations’ of Shakespeare clearly went against Maritain’s precept that art and religion ought to be kept separate. Knight’s belief that ‘art is an extraverted expression of the creative imagination which, when introverted, becomes religion’ was much closer to Murry’s and Bremond’s views than to the neo-Thomist aesthetics that Eliot endorsed in the mid-­1920s.241 And yet, in a reference letter that Eliot wrote for Knight in 1937, he stated that he had ‘a very high opinion of his [Knight’s] Shakespeare scholarship’.242 Knight did not expect such a positive reaction from Eliot and was even more surprised when ‘during the same year, 1930, […] he [Eliot] sent me his “Marina,” inscribed “for” me as “with, I hope, some appropriateness”’.243 ‘Marina’, inspired by Knight’s discussion of Shakespeare’s Pericles, is built around the scene of recognition in which, according to Knight, ‘some mystic apprehension of a life that conquers death has sprung to vivid form, as it were, spontaneously: a shaft of light penetrating into the very heart of death’.244 Knight’s discussion of the scene presenting Pericles’s reunion with his daughter Marina must have deeply impressed Eliot as several years later in his Edinburgh Lectures he singled it out as the most powerful of all of Shakespeare’s recognition scenes, describing it as: a perfect example of the ‘ultra-dramatic,’ a dramatic action of beings who are more than human. Shakespeare’s consummate dramatic skill is as bright as ever; his verse is as much speech as ever: only, it is the speech of creatures who are more than human, or rather, seen in a light more than that of day.245

Eliot’s double emphasis on the ‘more than human’ quality of the characters in Pericles suggests that, following Knight, he reads the scene as an intimation of something mystical, which is impossible to comprehend by human standards alone. What it exactly is he sets out to explore poetically in ‘Marina’. The dialectic of life and death—so ambivalently played out in the concluding stanza of ‘Journey of the Magi’—recurs in the epigraph and opening lines of ‘Marina’. The title suggests that the monologue that follows will be uttered by Pericles, who in Shakespeare’s play after many incidents is reunited with his daughter, yet the epigraph interposes a much darker

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plot of Seneca’s Hercules Furens. ‘Quis hic locus, qua / regio, quae mundi plaga?’ (‘What place is this? What region, what quarter of the world?’) are the words that Hercules utters on awakening from the frenzy in which he killed his wife and children.246 He gradually regains consciousness and begins to realise that he has taken the lives of his loved ones. The first words of the poem’s unnamed speaker echo Hercules’s: ‘What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands / What water lapping the bow’ (l. 1–2). The initial lines convey a sense of disorientation. The repetition of the pronoun ‘what’ and the broken syntax of the first two lines express the speaker’s bewilderment and confusion. Like Pericles, after a long sea-­ journey he reaches the land, but is surrounded by an aura of the unknown. The senses of the speaker are stimulated by the ‘scent of pine’ and ‘the woodtrush singing through the fog’ (l. 3) and he nostalgically remembers his lost daughter. The second stanza brings a radical change of mood. Lines 6–13 have been generally interpreted as evoking symbolic representations of four of the seven cardinal sins (pride, sloth, lust, and envy or gluttony). What all four depictions have in common is the animalistic imagery. Death that the sins bring about deprives human beings of humanity, reducing them to no more than biological creatures. The foregrounding of the word ‘Death’ by means of a fourfold repetition and the special verse arrangement evokes a sense of the overwhelming scope of human corruption and the omnipresence of evil. Death, the inevitable consequence of Original Sin, looms behind every wrong committed either in thoughts or in deeds.247 The images evoked may remind Hercules-Pericles of the misdeeds that he committed or witnessed in the past. However, the gloom of this stanza unexpectedly dissipates in the three lines that follow: Are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind, A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog By this grace dissolved in place (l. 14–6)

The devastating evil brought about by the sins evoked in the previous stanza is deprived of its efficacy by ‘a wind’ and ‘a breath’, which become agents of ‘grace’. ‘Grace’ does not erase evil, but makes it ‘unsubstantial’ by cleansing what has been corrupted. The English words ‘wind’ and ‘breath’ are alternative translations of Hebrew ruah and Greek pneuma, which can also be rendered as ‘spirit’. They reference the biblical acts of creation: of the world (Genesis 1.2) and of humankind (Genesis 2.7). The

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other important allusion is to the Holy Spirit that Jesus bestows—literally, ‘breathes’—upon the Apostles after his resurrection (John 20.22). The stanza evokes the idea of creation and birth of new life through the spirit, in the face of which the death imagery of the preceding lines is obliterated. It also reinforces the sensory experience present in the first stanza: the synesthetic ‘woodsong fog’ merges the sound, smell, and image, and ‘a breath of pine’ blurs the boundary between the natural and the supernatural. Standard sensory categories fail to fully capture the richness of this experience. The inexplicable work of ‘grace’ leads to the next stanza, which re-enacts the Shakespearian scene of recognition: What is this face, less clear and clearer The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger— Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye (l. 17–9)

The questions asked by the speaker testify to his inability to comprehend what he sees. His reaction closely resembles Pericles’s in Shakespeare’s play: ‘But are you flesh and blood? / Have you a working pulse and are no fairy?’248 In Pericles, Marina has to answer a series of questions to make Pericles believe in what he sees. She challenges Pericles, saying: ‘If I should tell / My history, it would seem like lies / Disdained in the reporting’ (5.1.108–110). He responds to this with a resolution to suspend his doubt:          I will believe thee, And make my senses credit thy relation To points that seem impossible. For thou look’st Like one I loved indeed. (5.1.113–116)

It is love that makes Pericles take the risk of believing in something that his senses may defy. As Marina tells him the story of her life, he gradually arrives at the moment of recognition and exclaims in joy:           O, come hither, Thou that beget’st him that did thee beget, Thou that wast born at sea, buried at Tarsus, And found at sea again! (5.1.184–187)

Piero Boitani links this joyous scene of recognition with the Apostles’ and Mary Magdalene’s reactions to seeing Jesus who has risen from the dead.

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Since Pericles had been convinced that Marina and her mother Thaisa were dead and he would never see them again, for him, like for Jesus’s disciples, ‘recognition lies beyond the mystery of death’.249 On having recognised Marina as his lost and newly found daughter, Boitani argues, ‘Pericles becomes—to paraphrase Dante in Paradiso XXXIII—“figlio di sua figlia”, his daughter’s son, and […] Marina is presented as the shadow of Christ made man, the parent of his mother: “god-like perfect” and “another life / To Pericles thy father”, as he will state a few lines on.’250 Eliot’s ‘Marina’ brings together Shakespeare’s, Seneca’s, and the New Testament’s recognition scenes. The recognition consists here in a rush of contradictory feelings and thoughts experienced by the speaker in lines 17–19—the apprehension of ‘this’ face that is at the same time ‘less clear’ (perhaps seen through the fog) and ‘clearer’ (than it ever was in memories); the pulse that is ‘less strong’ (than one would expect in a person made of flesh) and yet ‘stronger’ (than a supernatural being’s); the being that is ‘more distant than stars’ (coming back from the dead) and simultaneously ‘nearer than the eye’ (being one’s own flesh and blood). The speaker is certain that this ‘grace’ is something that he has received, though it remains unclear whether it was ‘given’ or ‘lent’ (l. 20). The sense that his long-dead daughter has crossed the threshold of death and been restored to him brings to Pericles a surge of memories and gives a new sense of hope and meaning to his life. The despair and death present in the first two stanzas become transformed into new life. In the vow that Pericles makes—which consists in a free and willing sacrifice made of his old life— he transcends his self and trustfully embraces the unexplained mystery of ‘this face’ and ‘this life’ (l. 29) that he believes has conquered death. Since language cannot grasp the heart of this mystery—it has already failed him when he tried to describe what he saw in the fourth stanza (the only way to do it was through a series of paradoxes)—he is also ready to resign his ‘speech for that unspoken’ (l. 31). Yet in his vision the word or Word is ‘awakened’, just about to speak, with ‘lips parted’ (l. 32) and—even before any words have been uttered—Pericles believes that they will be words of new ‘hope’, opening new horizons and guiding him when he embarks on ‘new ships’ (l. 32). The poem’s closing stanza mirrors the opening one, yet certain subtle alterations reveal the impact that the mysterious experience had on Pericles’s perception of the world. The ‘seas’, ‘shores’, and ‘islands’ now appear to be directed ‘towards’ his ship (l. 33), as if they were welcoming him back to the world and promising new journeys. The woodthrush is no

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longer ‘singing’ but ‘calling’ through the fog (l. 34), which suggests that on his awakening Pericles is able to discern the meaning of the bird’s song and will respond to its summons. The mode of his being in the world has radically changed—through the work of grace, trust, and love he has received a unique sense of intentionality and harmonious unity with nature. The final line—‘My daughter’ (l. 35)—serves as a powerful affirmation of life that has conquered death and imbued Pericles with new hope. In this way, he has come to directly experience the mystical meaning of ‘Birth’ and ‘Death’ that the Magus could not fully fathom.

Conclusion The question of how to interpret religious experience in the modern world was at the heart of Eliot’s intellectual and poetic development from the early years of his Harvard studies. Eliot’s writings reveal an initial scepticism about the possibility of accounting for the meaning of religious experience, which led to his subsequent endorsement of neo-Thomism, and a later turn to the mystical tradition. The debates surrounding the modernist crisis in theology informed Eliot’s reflections on the value of dogma and the meaning of mysticism, and provided him with a frame of reference that shaped his own thinking on the matter. His use of the term ‘modernism’ clearly shows that he considered it to refer to a mindset that originated in theological debates, but denotes an increasingly widespread philosophical and cultural outlook, with important implications for literary criticism. The theological terminology originating in the modernist crisis provided Eliot with a set of ideas that he transplanted into his literary criticism, using the terms ‘modernism’ and ‘neo-Thomism’ (or ‘neo-scholasticism’) alongside ‘Romanticism’ and ‘Classicism’ to refer to the tendencies in contemporary thought that, according to him, ought to be promoted or rejected. While Eliot actively engaged with and appreciated the writings of theological modernists such as Evelyn Underhill, Friedrich von Hügel, and Henri Bremond, as well as literary critics supportive of the modernist movement in theology, including John Middleton Murry and G. Wilson Knight, he was careful to distance himself from that label. In a 1940 letter on modernism printed in the Anglican periodical The Guardian, he suggested that he would rather prefer for his work to be ‘completely forgotten’ than associated with modernism.251 Despite this explicit reluctance to be connected to the modernist movement, Eliot’s thinking on the meaning of religious experience and the relationship

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between poetry and mysticism was shaped by his wide reading in contemporary theological polemics, including the ‘pure poetry’ debate. His engagement with mysticism finds its full expression in the meditative passages of Four Quartets (1936–1942), with the final lines of ‘Little Gidding’ referencing Julian of Norwich—the celebrated mystic of modernist theologians.252 In 1933 Eliot asserted, quoting Jacques Rivière, that with the advent of ‘a wilful perversity’ of Romanticism, a literary act has come to be seen as ‘a sort of raid on the absolute’.253 This critical assessment echoes Maritain’s complaint that with the unfolding of modernity, art ever more frequently intrudes into the realm of religion. Yet Eliot’s observation acquires another meaning when read in parallel with the lines of ‘East Coker’ that offer a metacommentary on Eliot’s own poetic practice:           And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate […] There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious.254

Eliot’s recovery of the mystical tradition prompts him to describe his poetic work as a ‘raid on the inarticulate’, directly referencing his earlier criticism of the Romantics’ and Bremond’s poetics as a ‘raid on the absolute’. His own poetic work shows that those raids—despite the ‘unpropitious’ conditions of modernity—can succeed and, like Pericles’s search for Marina, lead to the recovery of ‘what has been lost’.

Notes 1. T. S. Eliot, ‘Preface to For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order,’ in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 3, ed. Frances Dickey, Jennifer Formichelli, and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber, 2015), 513. 2. Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, rev. edn (London: Virago, 2012); Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Barry Spurr, ‘AngloCatholic in Religion’: T.  S. Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2010); Jewel Spears Brooker, T.  S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).

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3. Hugh Bredin, ‘T.  S. Eliot and Thomistic Scholasticism’, Journal of the History of Ideas 33, no. 2 (1972): 299–306; Shun’ichi Takayanagi, ‘T.  S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain, and Neo-Thomism’, Modern Schoolman 73, no. 1 (1995): 71–90, and ‘T. S. Eliot, the Action Française, and Neo-­ Scholasticism’, in T.  S. Eliot and Christian Tradition, ed. Benjamin G. Lockerd (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), 89–97; Jason Harding, ‘“The Just Impartiality of a Christian Philosopher”: Jacques Maritain and T. S. Eliot’, in The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism, ed. Rajesh Heynickx and Jan De Maeyer (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010), 180–191; and James Matthew Wilson, ‘Style and Substance: T.  S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain, and NeoThomism’, Religion & Literature 42, no. 3 (2010): 43–73, and ‘An “Organ for a Frenchified Doctrine”: Jacques Maritain and The Criterion’s Neo-Thomism’, in T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition, 99–116. 4. Donald J.  Childs, T.  S. Eliot: Mystic, Son and Lover (London: Athlone Press, 1997), 53–83; David Goldie, A Critical Difference: T. S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry in English Literary Criticism, 1919–1928 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 128–180. See also Joanna Rzepa, ‘Tradition and Individual Experience: T. S. Eliot’s Encounter with Modernist Theology’, in Religion and Myth in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry, ed. Scott Freer and Michael Bell (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 99–119. 5. T. S. Eliot, ‘Letter to John W. Nance, 19 December 1929’, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 2013), 723. 6. Percy Gardner, ‘Shaken Creeds: Reasoned Certainty or Tradition’, The Times, 19 January 1922, p. 6. 7. T.  S. Eliot, ‘An Emotional Unity’, in The Complete Prose of T.  S. Eliot, vol. 3, 338. 8. Manju Jain, T.  S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), xi. 9. Barry Spurr, ‘Religion’, in T.  S. Eliot in Context, ed. Jason Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 305. 10. T. S. Eliot, ‘Letter to Paul Elmer More, 3 August 1929’, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4, 567. 11. See Gordon, The Imperfect Life of T.  S. Eliot, and Robert Crawford, Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015). 12. T. S. Eliot, ‘Letter to Bertrand Russell, 22 June 1927’, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), 568. 13. T. S. Eliot, ‘A Sermon Preached in Magdalene College Chapel’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 7, ed. Iman Javadi and Ronald Schuchard

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(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber, 2018), 112. 14. T. S. Eliot, ‘A Review of Son of Woman: The Story of D. H. Lawrence, by J. Middleton Murry’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4, ed. Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber, 2015), 316. 15. Ibid. 16. T. S. Eliot, ‘A Sceptical Patrician: A Review of The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography’, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, ed. Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber, 2014), 43. 17. James E. Miller, T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, 1888–1922 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 163–164. 18. Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 229–401. 19. A complete list of courses that Eliot attended at Harvard is included in Jain, 252–256. 20. Harry T. Costello, Josiah Royce’s Seminar, 1913–1914: As Recorded in the Notebooks of Harry T. Costello, ed. Grover Smith (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 193–194. 21. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual’, in The Complete Prose of T.  S. Eliot, vol. 1, ed. Jewel Spears Brooker and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber, 2014), 106–119. 22. Ibid., 106. 23. Ibid., 112. Underlining in the original. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 115. 26. Eliot’s notes on mysticism recorded on fifty-nine 4 × 6-inch index cards are part of the T.  S. Eliot Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1691 (129). 27. A full list of titles that Eliot recorded in his notes is included in Gordon, Appendix 1. 28. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness, 3rd edn (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1912), 115. 29. Ibid., 325. 30. Ibid., 542. 31. Ibid., 323–324. Emphasis in the original. 32. Edwin Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Study of the Growth of Religious Consciousness, preface by William James, 3rd edn

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(London: Walter Scott Publishing, 1911); Josiah Moses, Pathological Aspects of Religions (Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1906). 33. Moses, 69. 34. Quoted in Moses, 18. 35. Costello, 193–194. 36. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’, in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), 270–271. All subsequent quotations are from this edition. 37. Ted Hughes, A Dancer to God: Tributes to T.  S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1992), 33. 38. For the dating of the poem, see ‘Commentary’ in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 1154–1156. 39. Lines 1–5 of ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ became lines 25–29 of The Waste Land. See Valerie Eliot’s notes in T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, ed. Valerie Eliot, rev. edn (London: Faber and Faber, 2010). 40. See, for example, Lives of the Saints: With Reflections for Every Day in the Year, Compiled from Alban Butler’s ‘Lives of Saints’, [ed. by John Dawson Shea] (New York: Benziger Brothers, [1894]), 346. 41. Edwin Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Study of the Growth of Religious Consciousness, preface by William James, 3rd edn (London: Walter Scott Publishing, 1911), 177. 42. See ‘Textual History’, in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), 585–586. Carthage appears again in The Waste Land’s ‘Fire Sermon’, line 307. 43. Saint Augustine, The Confessions of St Augustine, trans. Edward B. Pusey (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909), 33. 44. T.  S. Eliot, ‘The Burnt Dancer’, in The Poems of T.  S. Eliot, vol. 1, 262–263. 45. Ovid, Metamorphoses, with an English translation by Frank Justus Miller, 2nd edn, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heineman, 1946), Book III, line 348. 46. Ibid., lines 425–431. 47. Havelock Ellis, ‘Auto-Eroticism: A Psychological Study’, Alienist and Neurologist 19 (1898): 280. 48. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Function of Criticism’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, 461. 49. William L. Portier, ‘George Tyrrell in America,’ U.S. Catholic Historian 20, no. 3 (2002): 69–95. 50. Arthur C. McGiffert, ‘Modernism and Catholicism’, Harvard Theological Review 3 (1910): 24–46. 51. Ibid., 25.

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52. Ibid., 26, 46. 53. Catalogue of Catholic Books American and Imported, published and for sale by John Joseph McVey, T.  S. Eliot Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 2560 (118). The catalogue is undated, but it was probably printed in 1910–1911. 54. T. S. Eliot, ‘A Commentary’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 5, ed. Iman Javadi, Ronald Schuchard, and Jayme Stayer (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber, 2017), 80. 55. See Chap. 2: ‘A Theological History of Modernism’. 56. The syllabus and list of recommended readings for the introductory course ‘Philosophy A’ that Eliot taught included: History of Scholasticism by Maurice de Wulf, influential Belgian Thomist, Scholasticism by Joseph John Rickaby, British Jesuit, Proslogium by St Anselm and Of God and His Creatures by Thomas Aquinas. ‘Philosophy A’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 775–782. The original syllabus with Eliot’s autograph annotations is part of the T.  S. Eliot Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 2560 (99). 57. Joseph Rickaby, Scholasticism (London: Constable, 1911), 81. Eliot refers to Rickaby’s book with approval in his review of Peter Coffey’s Epistemology, see ‘A Contemporary Thomist’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 623–625. 58. Rickaby, 90–91. 59. Ibid., 92. 60. Ibid., 93–94. 61. T. S. Eliot, ‘Introduction to Leisure: The Basis of Culture, by Josef Pieper; trans. Alexander Dru’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 7, 656. Emphasis in the original. 62. The Programme of Modernism: A Reply to the Encyclical of Pius X, ‘Pascendi Dominici Gregis’, trans. George Tyrrell (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908), 6. 63. Eliot is named President of the Club in the printed Announcement for the academic year 1913–1914. The list of guest speakers with the dates of their talks is printed on the third page of the Announcement, T. S. Eliot Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 2560 (99). 64. Hastings Rashdall, Philosophy and Religion: Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 111–116. 65. Ibid., v–vi. 66. T. S. Eliot, ‘A Review of Conscience and Christ: Six Lectures on Christian Ethics, by Hastings Rashdall’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 428–429. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 429.

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69. See also T. S. Eliot’s two reviews of Wilhelm Wundt’s Elements of Folk Psychology: Outlines of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind in The Complete Prose of T.  S. Eliot, vol. 1, 507–509 and 673–674. 70. Eliot, ‘A Contemporary Thomist’, 624. Emphasis in the original. 71. Eliot, ‘A Review of Conscience and Christ’, 429. 72. Ibid. 73. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Relativity of the Moral Judgment’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 197–215. 74. Ibid., 197. 75. Ibid., 199. 76. Ibid., 204. Underlining in the original. 77. Hastings Rashdall, Conscience and Christ: Six Lectures on Christian Ethics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), ix. 78. Clara Ginther, ‘“Notre attitude en face du Pragmatisme”: George Tyrrell’s Relation to Pragmatism’, in The Reception of Pragmatism in France and the Rise of Roman Catholic Modernism, 1890–1914, ed. David G. Schultenover (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 186. See also Michael J. Kerlin, ‘Blondel and Pragmatism: Truth as the Real Adequation of Mind and Life’, in the same collection, 122–142. 79. T. S. Eliot, ‘[Relation between Politics and Metaphysics]’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 90–105. 80. Ibid., 91. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid, 94. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., 99. Underlining in the original. 85. Ibid., 95. 86. Ibid., 100. 87. Ibid. 88. T. S. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (London: Faber and Faber, 1964). 89. For Bradley’s refutation of pragmatism, see F. H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), chapter 4: ‘On Truth and Practice’. 90. T. S. Eliot, ‘Letter to Norbert Wiener, 6 January 1915’, in The Letters of T.  S. Eliot, vol. 1, rev. edn, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), 89. 91. Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 92. Ibid., 87. 93. Ibid., 88. Emphasis in the original.

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94. The titles that Eliot reviewed for the International Journal of Ethics between 1915 and 1918 included A. J. Balfour’s Theism and Humanism, A. Wolf’s The Philosophy of Nietzsche, Hastings Rashdall’s Conscience and Christ: Six Lectures on Christian Ethics, Clement C.  J. Webb’s Group Theories of Religion and the Religion of the Individual, John Theodore Merz’s Religion and Science: A Philosophical Essay, A.  Clutton Brock’s The Ultimate Belief, Wilhelm Wundt’s Elements of Folk Psychology. Outlines of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind, William Temple’s Mens Creatrix, R. G. Collingwood’s Religion and Philosophy, and Cardinal Mercier’s A Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy. Eliot also published several reviews of philosophical and theological works in the New Statesman. The works he reviewed included William James’s Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine, Peter Coffey’s Epistemology, and May Sinclair’s A Defence of Idealism. 95. T. S. Eliot, ‘Letter to His Mother, 6 September 1916’, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 163. 96. Ibid. 97. The course was later renamed ‘Modern French Literature’. See Ronald Schuchard, ‘T. S. Eliot as an Extension Lecturer, 1916–1919’, Review of English Studies 25, no. 98 (1974): 163–174. 98. Paul Sabatier, Modernism: The Jowett Lectures, 1908, trans. C.  A. Miles (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 27. 99. Ibid., 98. 100. Ibid., 46–47. 101. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness, 3rd edn (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1912), 119. 102. Evelyn Underhill, The Letters of Evelyn Underhill, ed. Charles Williams (London and New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1943), 126. 103. Pope Pius X, ‘Pascendi Dominici Gregis,’ in The Papal Encyclicals, ed. Claudia Carlen, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: McGrath, 1981), 90. 104. Underhill, Mysticism, 115. 105. Ibid., 95. 106. Ibid., 128. 107. Ibid., 452. 108. T. S. Eliot, ‘A Review of Religion and Philosophy, by R. G. Collingwood’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 556. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid. 111. For a contemporary discussion of modernism in the Church of England, see Henry D.  A. Major, English Modernism: Its Origin, Methods, Aims (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), and C. W. Emmet,

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‘The Modernist Movement in the Church of England’, The Journal of Religion 2.6 (November 1922): 561–576. See also Alan M. G. Stephenson, The Rise and Decline of English Modernism (London: SPCK, 1984). 112. The papers presented at the conference were published in Modern Churchman 11, no. 5/6 (September 1921). 113. Henry D. A. Major, ‘The Modern Churchmen’s Conference of 1921’, Modern Churchman 11, no. 5/6 (September 1921): 193. 114. E. W. Barnes, ‘The Present Situation’, Modern Churchman 11, no. 5/6 (September 1921): 347. 115. James F.  Bethune-Baker, The Faith of the Apostles’ Creed: An Essay in Adjustment of Belief and Faith (London: Macmillan, 1918), ix–x. 116. Samuel Knight, ‘Christ and the Creeds’, Times Literary Supplement, 22 September 1921, p. 606. 117. ‘The Limit’, The Tablet, 20 August 1921, p. 15. 118. Henry D.  A. Major, A Resurrection of Relics: A Modern Churchman’s Defence in a Recent Charge of Heresy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1922), xii. Emphasis in the original. 119. John Middleton Murry, ‘On Fear; and on Romanticism’, Adelphi 1, no. 4 (September 1923): 274. See also Goldie, A Critical Difference, 61–127, and Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 25–43. 120. Goldie, 132. 121. Murry, ‘On Fear; and on Romanticism’, 273. 122. T. S. Eliot, ‘Letter to Henri Bremond, 14 May 1924’, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), 417–418. 123. John Middleton Murry, ‘Towards a Synthesis’, Criterion 5, no. 3 (June 1927): 300; T. S. Eliot, ‘The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4, 673. 124. Murry, ‘On Fear; and on Romanticism’, 275. 125. Ibid., 276. 126. John Middleton Murry, ‘Christ and Christianity’, Adelphi 3, no. 4 (September 1925): 233–234. 127. John Middleton Murry, ‘A Theological Encounter’, Adelphi 3, no. 3 (July 1925): 84. 128. John Middleton Murry, ‘Religion and Christianity’, Adelphi 1, no. 8 (January 1924): 670. 129. Eliot, ‘The Function of Criticism’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, 458. 130. A few years later Eliot reiterated this view, arguing against Irving Babbitt’s notion of ‘the inner check’. Eliot stated that the way Babbitt formulated his concept suggests that ‘there is nothing left for the individual to check himself by but his own private notions and his judgment, which is pretty

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precarious’. T.  S. Eliot, ‘The Humanism of Irving Babbitt’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, 458. 131. Eliot, ‘The Function of Criticism’, 461. 132. In Mysticism, Underhill argues that ‘[u]nless safeguarded by limiting dogmas, the theory of Immanence, taken alone, is notoriously apt to degenerate into pantheism’ (119). 133. John Middleton Murry, The Life of Jesus (London: Jonathan Cape, 1926). 134. Ibid., 129. 135. Ibid., 189. 136. Ibid., 134–135. 137. Ibid., 209. 138. Ibid., 315. 139. Murry, ‘Christ and Christianity’, 239–240. By putting emphasis on the humanity of Jesus, Murry places himself in the tradition of Victorian narratives of the life of Jesus. Most of them attempted to separate the historical account of Jesus’s life from the later religious interpretations of his actions and teaching. The most popular of such narratives were David Strauss’s Leben Jesu (1835–1836), Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jesus (1863), and Frederic William Farrar’s Life of Christ (1874). See also Daniel L.  Pals, The Victorian “Lives” of Jesus (Texas: Trinity University Press, 1982). 140. Murry, The Life of Jesus, 53–54. 141. Murry, ‘Romanticism and the Tradition’, 273. 142. Eliot asked W. Force Stead for advice on and assistance in entering the Church of England in a letter of [3?] February 1927, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, 403–404. 143. T. S. Eliot, ‘Letter to John Middleton Murry, 1 February 1927’, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, 397–398. 144. T. S. Eliot, ‘Letter to John Middleton Murry, 8 February 1927’, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, 415–416. Emphasis in the original. 145. John Middleton Murry, ‘Letter to T. S. Eliot, 18 March 1927’, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, 452. 146. T. S. Eliot, ‘Letter to John Middleton Murry, 28 March 1927’, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, 459. Emphasis in the original. 147. T. S. Eliot, ‘Popular Theologians: Mr. Wells, Mr. Belloc and Mr. Murry’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, 66. 148. Ibid., 68. 149. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Clark Lectures: Lectures on the Metaphysical Poetry of the Seventeenth Century with Special Reference to Donne, Crashaw and Cowley’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, 634. 150. Ibid., 654. In a letter to Francis Yealy, who attended his lectures and questioned his interpretation of Ignatian mysticism, Eliot wrote: ‘Until

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you persuade me to the contrary I remain in sympathy with the Dominican tradition in contrast to the Jesuit tradition’. ‘Letter to Francis Yealy, 16 March 1926’, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, 104. See also Ronald Schuchard’s discussion of Eliot’s views on Ignatian mysticism in Eliot’s Dark Angel, 162–174. 151. Eliot, ‘The Clark Lectures’, 707. 152. T. S. Eliot, ‘Why Mr. Russell Is a Christian: A Review of Why I Am Not a Christian, by the Hon. Bertrand Russell’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, 162. 153. R.  A. Wynter, ‘The Future of Anglicanism’, Dublin Review 168 (1921): 273. 154. Goldie, 152. 155. Quoted in Goldie, 152. 156. T.  S. Eliot, ‘Religion without Humanism’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4, 36–43. 157. Hugh R. L. Sheppard, The Impatience of a Parson: A Plea for the Recovery of Vital Christianity (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1927), 65; A. Maude Royden, I Believe in God (London: Benn, 1927), 109. 158. Henri Bremond, Prayer and Poetry: A Contribution to Poetical Theory, trans. Algar Thorold (London: Burns, Oates & Co., 1927). See Chap. 4, 168–178. 159. T.  S. Eliot, ‘Letter to John Middleton Murry, 12 April 1925’, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, 628. 160. T.  S. Eliot, ‘After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 5, 22–23. 161. Murry, The Life of Jesus, 14. 162. T.  S. Eliot, ‘Journey of the Magi’, in The Poems of T.  S. Eliot, vol. 1, 101–102, line 38. All subsequent quotations are from this edition. 163. T.  S. Eliot, ‘Lancelot Andrewes’, in The Complete Prose of T.  S. Eliot, vol. 2, 821. 164. Ibid., 822. 165. Ibid. 166. Ibid. 167. Lancelot Andrewes, ‘Sermon XV’, in Seventeen Sermons on the Nativity, new edn (London: Griffith, Farran & Co., [1887]), 245–259. 168. Ibid., 255. 169. Ibid., 253. 170. Ibid., 252. 171. Ibid., 259. 172. Michael P. Dean ‘T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi”: Confrontation with Christianity’, Xavier Review 1, no. 1/2 (1980–1981): 80.

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173. Grover Smith, T.  S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 124. 174. Andrewes, 266. 175. Rudolf Germer, ‘“Journey of the Magi” in the Context of T. S. Eliot’s Religious Development and Sensibility’ in T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World, ed. Jewel Spears Brooker (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), 20. 176. John H.  Timmerman, T.  S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1994), 77. 177. Dean, 80. See ‘The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion’, in The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed. Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 682, Article 31. 178. Lancelot Andrewes, ‘Sermon XI’, in Seventeen Sermons on the Nativity, 181. 179. Childs, T. S. Eliot: Mystic, Son, and Lover, 65. 180. Alan Weinblatt, ‘T.  S. Eliot: Poet of Adequation’, in T.  S. Eliot: Essays from the Southern Review, ed. James Olney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 312. 181. Eliot, ‘Lancelot Andrewes’, 822. 182. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Pensées of Pascal’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4, 345. 183. Herbert Read, ‘A Memoir’, in T.  S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, ed. Allen Tate (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), 35. 184. See Chap. 4, 168–178. 185. Henri Bremond, ‘Letter to T. S. Eliot, 6 May 1924’, quoted in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, 417, note 2. 186. T.  S. Eliot, ‘Letter to Henri Bremond, 14 May 1924’, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, 417–418. 187. Ibid. Eliot refers to vol. 2, no. 5 (October 1923) and vol. 2, no. 7 (April 1924), in which his ‘The Function of Criticism’ and Murry’s ‘Romanticism and the Tradition’ were published. 188. T.  S. Eliot, ‘An Emotional Unity’, in The Complete Prose of T.  S. Eliot, vol. 3, 338. 189. Jacques Maritain, ‘Poetry and Religion’, trans. F. S. Flint [T. S. Eliot], part 1, Criterion 5, no. 1 (January 1927): 7–22; part 2, Criterion 5, no. 2 (May 1927): 214–230; T. S. Eliot, ‘The Life of Prayer: An Unsigned Review of Prayer and Intelligence, by Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, trans. Algar Thorold’, in The Complete Prose of T.  S. Eliot, vol. 3, 446–448; ‘Three Reformers: An Unsigned Review of Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau, by Jacques Maritain’, in the same volume, 504–509; ‘The Idealism of Julien Benda: A second review of La Trahison des clercs, by Julien Benda’, in the same volume, 435–445.

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190. T. S. Eliot, ‘Letter to Henry Goddard Leach, 21 February 1928’, in The Letters of T.  S. Eliot, vol. 4, 52–53. John Gould Fletcher’s review of Maritain’s Art et Scolastique was published in Criterion 9, no. 35 (January 1930): 346–349. 191. Eliot, ‘The Clark Lectures’, 750–751. 192. T. S. Eliot, ‘A Commentary’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, 3. 193. Jacques Maritain, ‘The Frontiers of Poetry’, in Art and Scholasticism, with Other Essays, trans. J.  F. Scanlan (London: Sheed & Ward, 1930), 87–122. 194. John Middleton Murry, ‘Towards a Synthesis’, Criterion 5, no. 3 (June 1927): 312. 195. Ibid. 196. Eliot, ‘The Life of Prayer’, 446. 197. Eliot, ‘Three Reformers’, 505. 198. Ibid. 199. Ibid., 504. 200. Eliot, ‘Preface to For Lancelot Andrewes’, 513. 201. T.  S. Eliot, ‘Medieval Philosophy: An Unsigned Review of History of Mediaeval Philosophy, by Maurice de Wulf. Trans. Ernest C. Messenger. Vol. II: From St. Thomas Aquinas to the End of the Sixteenth Century’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, 872. 202. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Twelfth Century: An Unsigned Review of The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, by Charles Homer Haskins’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, 176–177. 203. Harding, ‘“The Just Impartiality of a Christian Philosopher”’, 184. 204. T. S. Eliot, ‘Preface to the 1928 Edition of The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism,’ in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, 413. 205. Ibid., 414. 206. Ibid. 207. Eliot, ‘Religion without Humanism’, 39. Emphasis in the original. 208. Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, 37. 209. See Chap. 2, 39–48. 210. T.  S. Eliot, ‘A Commentary’, in The Complete Prose of T.  S. Eliot, vol. 3, 536. 211. Eliot, ‘An Emotional Unity’, 340. 212. Ibid., 338–340. 213. T. S. Eliot, ‘Letter to Herbert Read, 11 December 1925’, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, 796–797. 214. T.  S. Eliot, ‘Letter to Bonamy Dobrée, [early February 1928]’, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4, 30. 215. T. S. Eliot, ‘Letter to Herbert Read, [18 October 1925]’, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, 514.

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216. T.  S. Eliot, ‘The Action Française, M.  Maurras and Mr. Ward’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, 369–378; and ‘L’Action Française… A Reply to Mr. Ward’, in the same volume, 421–424. In 1927–1928, Eliot penned four letters to The Church Times in an attempt to defend Maurras. See The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, 290–292, 302–303, 351–353, 364–365. 217. T. S. Eliot, ‘To the Editor of The Church Times’, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, 290; ‘L’Action Française… A Reply to Mr. Ward’, in the same volume, 423. 218. T. S. Eliot, ‘Mr. Barnes and Mr. Rowse’, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, 662. 219. T. S. Eliot, ‘Letter to Bonamy Dobrée, 7 November 1930,’ in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 5, 375–376. 220. T. S. Eliot, ‘To The Editor, The Bookman, 31 March 1930’, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 5, 133–134. 221. T. S. Eliot, ‘An Issue of The Christian-Newsletter’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 6, 123. 222. T. S. Eliot, ‘John Bramhall’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, 146. 223. Ibid., 146–147. 224. T. S. Eliot, ‘Thoughts after Lambeth’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4, 232. 225. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Pensées of Pascal’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4, 345. 226. Ibid., 348. 227. T. S. Eliot, ‘Letter to Paul Elmer More, 3 August 1929’, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4, 567. 228. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Percy Graeme Turnbull Memorial Lectures: The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4, 747. 229. Ibid., 748. 230. T.  S. Eliot, ‘The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures for 1932–33’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4, 671. 231. Ibid., 678. 232. Ibid., 685. 233. Ibid., 688. 234. T. S. Eliot, ‘Marina’, in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 107–108. All subsequent quotations are from this edition. 235. G. Wilson Knight, ‘J. Middleton Murry’, in Of Books and Humankind: Essays and Poems Presented to Bonamy Dobrée, ed. John Butt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 149. 236. G. Wilson Knight, ‘T. S. Eliot: Some Literary Impressions’, in T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, 245.

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237. Ibid. 238. Ibid., 246. 239. T.  S. Eliot, ‘Letter to G.  Wilson Knight, 4 November 1929’, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4, 672. On 30 November 1929, Eliot wrote to Gerard Hopkins from Oxford University Press on Knight’s behalf, recommending the publication of his essays (The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4, 684). 240. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Sombre Tragedies, introduction by T. S. Eliot (London: Oxford University Press, 1930). All quotations are from the fifth revised edition (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1964). 241. G. Wilson Knight, ‘Myth and Miracle’, in G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays (London: Methuen, 1965), 22. 242. T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4, 293, note 1. 243. Knight, ‘T. S. Eliot: Some Literary Impressions’, 247. 244. Knight, ‘Myth and Miracle’, 17. 245. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse: Two Lectures’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 5, 555. Underlining in the original. 246. See Seneca, ‘Hercules Furens’, in Tragedies, trans. Frank Justus Miller, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1917), 1–120, lines 1138–1143. 247. On the importance that Eliot attached to the dogma of Original Sin, see Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel, chapter 2: ‘Hulme of Original Sin’. 248. William Shakespeare, Pericles, ed. Suzanne Gossett, The Arden Shakespeare: Third Series (London: Thomson Learning, 2004), 5.1.43–44. All subsequent quotations are from this edition. 249. Piero Boitani, The Bible and Its Rewritings, trans. Anita Weston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 166–167. 250. Ibid., 169. 251. T. S. Eliot, ‘Modernism: To the Editor of The Guardian’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 6, 27. 252. Friedrich von Hügel referred to Julian of Norwich in his The Mystical Element of Religion, and George Tyrrell wrote a preface to the new edition of her Revelations of Divine Love, which was used by Eliot. 253. Eliot, ‘The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism’, vol. 4, 672. 254. T. S. Eliot, ‘East Coker,’ in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 185–192, V, lines 7–8, 15–17.

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CHAPTER 7

‘A Passionate Pursuit of the Real’: Theology and Poetics in Czesław Miłosz’s Writings

In a 1961 letter to the American Trappist Thomas Merton, Czesław Miłosz wrote: ‘My poetry has always been religious in a deeper sense’.1 However, as he admitted in an earlier letter to Merton: ‘few people suspect my basically religious interests and I have never been ranged among “Catholic writers”. Which, strategically, is perhaps better.’2 While Miłosz’s religious poetics has been discussed by a number of critics, including Aleksander Fiut, Jerzy Szymik, Charles S.  Kraszewski, Łukasz Tischner, Joanna Zach, and Karina Jarzyńska, his engagement with the debates between theological modernists and neo-scholastics has not yet been examined.3 This chapter addresses this critical gap in scholarship and demonstrates that the legacy of the modernism versus neo-scholasticism debates shaped Miłosz’s views on religion and its relationship with aesthetics. Born in 1911, Miłosz saw the modernist crisis in theology as a thing of the past. However, as his essays written in the 1930s and 1940s demonstrate, he considered the intellectual tendencies that led to the crisis to be still operating in contemporary culture and actively shaping the political milieu of interwar Europe. His engagement with modernist theology was mediated by two Polish philosophers and critics, Marian Zdziechowski (1861–1938) and Stanisław Brzozowski (1878–1911), who both endorsed and hailed the modernist movement as bringing a long-awaited breath of fresh air into Catholic theology. Their works, published in the 1900s and 1910s, provided Miłosz with a springboard for his © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Rzepa, Modernism and Theology, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61530-7_7

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reflections on the role of religion in the modern world and the relationship of the aesthetic to the religious. On the eve of World War 2, he became wary of certain intellectual tendencies that he associated with theological modernism, especially the rejection of reason, irrationalism, emotionalism, and excessive focus on the inner self. Neo-Thomism, in particular Jacques Maritain’s writings, provided him with an alternative system of thought that focused on the intellectual analysis of the world of senses. The politics of the interwar period, in particular the rise of fascism and nationalism, served Miłosz as a foil that revealed the shortcomings of both theological modernism and neo-Thomism. While the former, according to Miłosz, privileged irrational impulses and undermined intellectual inquiry, preparing the ground for populist ideologies, the latter treated faith in an instrumental way, exploiting it politically to engineer socio-­ political change along the lines of a right-wing nationalist agenda, endorsing antisemitic rhetoric. The way in which both theological movements became implicated in politics undermined their value. While developing a critical attitude to what he considered the political legacy of both theological movements, Miłosz drew on them extensively in the domain of aesthetics. His reflections on the status and role of poetry in the modern world are informed by the concepts of ‘pure poetry’ put forward by Bremond and the neo-Thomist understanding of art advocated by Maritain. As this chapter demonstrates, the question of the boundary between art and religion and the social and ethical role of poetry in a war-­ stricken world were at the heart of Miłosz’s writings in the late 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s. He extensively engaged with Maritain’s work and participated in debates about the concept of ‘pure poetry’ and its Polish equivalent, the theory of ‘Pure Form’ developed by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. These thinkers allowed him to formulate questions that he continued to explore in his later poetry and prose.

Apocalyptic Visions and the Question of Evil: Marian Zdziechowski’s Christian Pessimism Miłosz was born in 1911  in the town of Szetejnie (now Šeteniai in Lithuania) and raised in a Catholic family.4 In his autobiographical Native Realm, he devotes a lengthy chapter to the Catholic instruction that he received in the King Sigismund Augustus Boys’ Gymnasium in Wilno

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(now Vilnius in Lithuania) in 1921–1929. The level of religious education classes taught by Father Leopold Chomski, who regularly recurs in Miłosz’s later writings, ‘rarely fell below the level of early seminary training’.5 Miłosz reminisces that while due to his rebellious behaviour he fell into conflict with the teacher, he remained fascinated with the subject and ‘searched for answers in a textbook to which’, he wrote, ‘I owe a large part of my education: our manual of Church history [which] contained the history of Europe in its entirety.’6 The manual, Roman Archutowski’s An Outline of the History of the Roman Catholic Church (Historia Kos ́cioła katolickiego w zarysie), narrated the institutional, dogmatic, and liturgical history of the church from antiquity to the early twentieth century. It also included a discussion of the most important heterodoxies in each period. As Miłosz later recalled, he was particularly interested in the ‘sections in small print’ describing ‘various heresies’ that tried to provide a viable explanation for the presence of evil.7 ‘My favourites were the Gnostics, the Manichaeans, and the Albigensians’, Miłosz reminisced, since ‘[t]hey at least did not take refuge behind some vague will of God in order to justify cruelty’.8 He was also interested in the extensive discussion of the theological debates of the Reformation period: ‘While avidly reading in my textbook about the quarrel between those who made everything depend on grace and those who left some leeway for human will, I was cultivating in myself Protestant leanings.’9 Finally, he learnt about the modernist crisis of the early twentieth century. The manual summarised the modernist movement in the following way: ‘In their philosophy, modernists focused on inner phenomena; they denied that reason had the ability to prove the existence of God; they considered religious feelings that are unconsciously present in a person as the source of religion.’10 To counter the modernist fallacy, Archutowski observed, at the turn of the century ‘[t]he Church paid particular attention to philosophy. […] Pope-philosopher Leo XIII, to protect Catholics from error, reminded them of the old philosophical system of Thomas Aquinas, enriched with the findings of empirical sciences. Neo-scholastic philosophy was born under his influence.’11 The manual emphasised that neo-Thomism drew extensively on contemporary science, particularly biology, which spoke to Miłosz’s developing interest in the natural world. In the religious education classes that Miłosz attended, Father Chomski put much emphasis on the necessity to adopt strict spiritual discipline that stemmed from his scholastically inflected worldview. He argued that ‘[s]ince men are weak, it would be madness to give them free rein,

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counting on their ability to find union with God on their own’.12 According to Chomski, strict discipline that involved participation in communal rituals of the church, and included regular prayer, confession, mass attendance, and observance of holy days, could bring about an inner change that was impossible to achieve through one’s own individual effort. ‘[I]f some hope does remain’, he claimed, ‘a change of nature can be accomplished only from the outside in, and not vice versa’.13 Initially, Miłosz rebelled against Chomski’s uncompromising views. When thrown out of class, he recalled that ‘Protestant-like, [he] was groping for [his] own private answers’.14 In the course of his reading, he became particularly impressed with two books: Augustine’s Confessions and William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience.15 As he later remarked, he considered ‘the experience of reading James as a phenomenon in and of itself’.16 James’s study allowed him to approach the concept of religious experience from a new perspective, with a focus on the individual self as opposed to dogmatic religion. However, Miłosz soon began to find affinity with Chomski, seeing value in some of his teachings, especially on the doctrine of Original Sin, the sinfulness of human nature, and the necessity of discipline: ‘I agreed, in spite of everything, that discipline was necessary, since by myself I would have been unable to invent one’.17 In this sense, the religious education that he received from Chomski left a mark on his poetic oeuvre and gave shape to some of the key theological questions relating to human nature and evil present in his writings. Miłosz once remarked that ‘his oeuvre to a great extent has been a dialogue with Father Chomski’.18 He dedicated two poems to his teacher: ‘To Father Ch.’ (‘Do księdza Ch.’), which was written in 1934, and ‘Father Ch., Many Years Later’ (‘Ksia ̨dz Ch., po latach’), published in 1984, when Miłosz learnt of Chomski’s death.19 The 1934 poem ‘To Father Ch.’ takes the form of a poetic letter addressed to a ‘vengeful’ prefect who is ‘bent over the Lord’s sad altars’.20 The speaker, who identifies as the prefect’s student, confesses: I often dream of your mouth. Its notorious pout for a long time has taught [us] to despise everything except demise. Today I, your student, have learnt of the vanity of graceful forms, and, thus, now we both belong to the same order. (l. 9–12)

In the lines that follow the student describes the power of the prefect’s words, which turned human relationships and sensuality into ‘bitter fluid’

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full of ‘hidden poisons’ (l. 15). The metaphors and imagery employed in the poem draw attention to the bleakness of the prefect’s worldview: he ‘burns with hatred’ (l. 19) and his teachings assume apocalyptic dimensions, centring on the dire consequences of reaching out for the ‘heavy apple, a dream of the paradisiac tree’ (l. 35), and dwelling on the ‘sea of nothingness’ that will drown all life (l. 38). The speaker describes the prefect as a dark angel whose words have the power to reveal the full scope of evil present in human nature: You, always unaware of the outcomes of your teachings, in the old cassock hovering over the immensity of the earth, dropped your dark cloak on human deeds. (l. 28–30)

The prefect unwittingly deprives all human activity of joy, revealing to his students the ultimate vanity of all human endeavours. While the speaker acknowledges his initial rejection of the prefect’s worldview, the final stanza of the poem announces his ultimate endorsement of the dark view of human nature: We are reconciled after the long quarrel, knowing that of human happiness there will not be left one stone upon another. The earth will open its mouth, in its rumbling cathedral the last pagans will receive baptism. (l. 42–6)

The apocalyptic vision of the end of the world, as the letter-poem emphasises several times, is a product of the prefect’s teachings and a testimony to the power of his words. The earth’s open mouth corresponds to the prefect’s mouth that visits the speaker in his dreams. His powerful words turn the ‘stuffy village church’ (l. 3) of the opening stanza into the ‘rumbling cathedral’ full of grandeur. It is through their power that the last non-believers will be converted on the day of the final annihilation or the Last Judgement. Thus, the impact that the prefect has on his students is due to the force of his language. It is through his terrifying words that the imaginative power of his theological teachings is conveyed to his students. His words are compared to ‘David’s slingshot’ (l. 16), which—while seemingly unassuming—if used skilfully by the prefect, can conquer much stronger opponents, including the Goliaths who would praise the essential goodness of human nature.

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The scholastic rigour and pessimism of Father Chomski’s view of essentially corrupt human nature that shaped Miłosz’s school years was matched by the pessimistic view of the natural world professed by the scholar and philosopher Marian Zdziechowski (1861–1938), whom he encountered during his studies at Stefan Batory University in Wilno, where he enrolled to study law in 1929. Zdziechowski, a prominent philosopher and cultural critic, took up a professorship at Stefan Batory University in 1919 and served as its rector in 1925–1927. He closely followed the modernist debates in theology in the 1900s and corresponded with a number of modernist thinkers, including Friedrich von Hügel, Antonio Fogazzaro, and George Tyrrell.21 He contributed to the modernist debate with a pro-­ modernist pamphlet Pestis perniciosissima (1905) and attended an audience with Pope Pius X to plead for more openness towards modernist ideas.22 Miłosz attended Zdziechowski’s lectures, and through his writings engaged with the key issues of the debates surrounding the modernist controversy and its aftermath. The figure of Zdziechowski, just like that of Chomski, recurs in Miłosz’s writings over the years: in the essay ‘Zdziechowski’s Religiosity’ (1943), an unfinished autobiographical novel (c. 1956), and the poems ‘To Mrs. Professor in Defense of My Cat’s Honor and Not Only’ (‘Do Pani Profesor w obronie honoru kota i nie tylko,’ c. 1994) and ‘Zdziechowski’ (c. 2000).23 Miłosz found Zdziechowski’s writings significant and repeatedly returned to his work because it chimed in well with his own ongoing reflections on the relationship between religious belief and biological determinism.24 In Native Realm he reminisces how questions similar to those posed by Zdziechowski ‘plunged [him], sometimes for weeks, into a state bordering on physical illness’ when he was still a schoolboy:25 If nature’s law is murder, if the strong survive and the weak perish, and it has been this way for millions and millions of years, where is there room for God’s goodness? Why must man, suspended on a tiny star in the void, no more significant than the microbes under a microscope, isolate his own suffering as though it were different from that of a bird with a wounded wing or a rabbit devoured by a fox? Why must human suffering alone be worthy of notice and redemption?26

An ongoing reflection on the inescapability of pain and suffering present in the world of nature and the failure of the anthropocentric Christian

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framework to account for it in a persuasive way drew Miłosz to Zdziechowski’s writings.27 Zdziechowski’s reflections on the rationalism of neo-scholasticism, which—if applied in a rigorous way in an intellectual analysis of the natural world leads one to conclude that the world is full of cruelty and suffering—prompted him to endorse theological modernism. His Pestis perniciosissima, which was praised by Friedrich von Hügel for showing an in-depth understanding of the contemporary religious crisis, was published simultaneously in Polish in Warsaw and in German in Vienna.28 The volume brings together Zdziechowski’s reflections on philosophy and religion in the modern world and presents his stance on the theological debates raging across Europe on the eve of the modernist crisis. He draws on the Italian modernists Geremia Bonomelli and Giovanni Semeria and endorses the idea of the church reform. He argues that the reform would not strike at the very roots of faith, but only result in ‘certain changes in the philosophical foundations of the Church’s teaching’, which would ‘emphasise the moral dimension, which had been unjustifiably neglected in favour of the foundations that are grounded in reason’.29 He is critical of the attempts to ground theology in empirical sciences, as ‘the constant mixing of theology with mathematics leads to an unforgivable absolutism of judgement, desiccates the heart, and deprives it of the ability to understand the moral domain.’30 The new Christian apologetics, according to Zdziechowski, should originate in a more in-depth engagement with contemporary philosophy and moral ethics and distance itself from the neo-­ Thomist emphasis on empirical sciences. As such, Zdziechowski endorses the views of modernists like George Tyrrell and Maurice Blondel, who highlighted the importance of individual religious experience and its moral dimensions. In the wake of the papal condemnation of modernism, as a lay philosopher working at a secular university, Zdziechowski was not obliged to recant his views. On the contrary, in the publications that followed, he consistently defended modernist thinkers. He argued against neo-­ scholasticism in his studies Pessimism, Romanticism and the Foundations of Christianity (Pesymizm, romantyzm a podstawy chrzes ́cijaństwa, 1914) and On Cruelty (O okrucieństwie, 1928), which had a major influence on Miłosz.31 In the introduction to the former, Zdziechowski challenged the basic neo-scholastic axiom that one comes to know God through the exercise of reason. Recalling his own journey of faith, he observed:

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In the course of time, the further I moved on in life and the world, the more clearly and painfully I became aware that this world, if one considers it as a whole, is disorderly and senseless, and not, as they teach us, a masterpiece of reason: it did not issue from the hand of God. There is no God—both nature and history cry out loud… but their voice is submerged in the harmony of psalms and hymns, and by the avowal coming from the depth of the spirit that the human soul is like ‘earth without water’ without God. There is God. But the fact of God’s existence transgresses the limits of thought that is preoccupied with the external world, it is a miracle.32

Zdziechowski proclaims that if one were to analyse the world of nature using reason—as the neo-Thomists proposed—the only logical conclusion one could arrive at is that God does not exist. The passage above, quoted by Miłosz both in his poem ‘Zdziechowski’ and in the manuscript of his unfinished autobiographical novel, turns the scholastic method against itself. Zdziechowski argues that by observing nature, as neo-Thomists propose, a reasonable person has to reach a conclusion that the created world is full of pain and suffering. It does not know pity, and its laws are cruel. If one were to infer the existence of God from such observations, it would not be a good and loving God, but a God that takes pleasure in suffering. Alternatively, one would have to state that there is no God. Zdziechowski’s argument against the hegemony of discursive reason is in line with the modernist George Tyrrell’s reflections on the incoherence of the intellectual method championed by neo-Thomists. In Lex Credendi (1906), Tyrrell contends that: The evidence of all-controlling goodness and love in the world round us grows weaker and not stronger in the cold light of purely intellectual criticism; for such criticism excludes the reasons of the heart. […] there are oceans of such seemingly gratuitous and useless agony all round us at every moment. We cannot, then, under pain of moral scepticism, say that the world, as it seems in the light of purely intellectual criticism, appears to be the work of One who is at once all-good and all-mighty.33

Zdziechowski concurred with Tyrrell’s view and asserted that the only way to salvage faith in a good God is to conclude that reason is not capable of making any pronouncements about God at all. As he remarks, in order to save his faith in God, he had to rethink its foundations, and as a consequence he arrived at an ‘antitheological thesis that faith is violence inflicted on reason’.34 The world of nature examined by reason is a Darwinian

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universe in which only the fittest survives. While this contention, Zdziechowski concedes, leads to a form of philosophical pessimism, if one considers John Henry Newman’s reflections on reason, especially his argument that reason’s ‘tendency is towards a simple unbelief in matters of religion’, a new form of Christian apologetics might still be possible.35 The philosophical standpoint of radical pessimism, Zdziechowski contends, is a promising starting point for the development of a new way of theological justification of the world that would appeal to a modern believer. In the period when the ‘intellectual foundations on which religion was built are collapsing, one needs new foundations, new philosophy and theology’, which according to Zdziechowski should draw on Newman and his followers, including Maurice Blondel and Lucien Laberthonnière.36 What leads Zdziechowski to ultimately reject reason as the foundation of faith in favour of moral conscience and inner spiritual experience are his reflections on pain, suffering, and cruelty. His volume On Cruelty opens with a Darwinian axiom that man is an animal, which Zdziechowski qualifies with the following statement: ‘man is an animal that is distinguished from all other animals through his cruelty. He is an animal that possesses reason, and thus an awareness of his cruelty and the possibility of curtailing it’.37 Reason, he argues, should make it possible for people to demonstrate their superiority by reducing the suffering they inflict on other creatures. After all, ‘if there is anything in the world that should bring all species that inhabit this earth together, then it is pain; man and animal are equal before this horrific enemy of the whole world; man and animal are connected in the community, and let’s say it, in the fraternity of suffering’.38 While Zdziechowski acknowledges the theological explanation of human suffering as the consequence of the fall and the subsequent expulsion from Eden, he fails to find a coherent theological justification for animal suffering. ‘This does not explain the suffering of animals under human sovereignty; and it was in this question that all my doubts were focused.’39 The pain experienced by all living creatures, and, more specifically, the pain inflicted on animals by humans in full knowledge of the suffering that it causes—when considered in an intellectual fashion—not only does not prove the existence of a good God, but to the contrary. Zdziechowski argues: The intellectual foundations of faith are in their nature fragile and the structure they gave rise to has to be constantly and industriously repaired; in the end, it seems that it will somehow hold, but then I walk the street and I see

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a coachman who is torturing a horse burdened with weight, or I see a butcher grabbing terrified, whining dogs; and I see clearly what awaits them,—and the structure collapses.40

Thus, Zdziechowski concludes, it is not reason that is the source of faith for it constantly runs into unresolvable contradictions when processing the empirical evidence provided by the external world. ‘What happens in the world screams against God too loudly’, he contends.41 For Zdziechowski, the source of faith is in the inner reaction to those observable horrors—the longing for beauty that will provide consolation and for God who will alleviate the despair one experiences. According to Zdziechowski, it is the inner disagreement and revolt against the terror, pain, and suffering that brings out the moral imperative, awakens one’s conscience, and provides an experiential certainty that God exists.42 Through prayer, contemplation, and mysticism one can overcome the pessimism originating in the recognition of the omnipresence of evil in the world. ‘The pessimistic awareness that “the whole world is in the power of the evil one” is a call to prayer and it deepens the prayer’s power, which then turns into an attitude of optimistic affirmation of God, which is based in the direct experience of struggle against evil’.43 For Zdziechowski, then, pessimism that is bred by reason leads to the ‘deepening of the individual and supernatural dimension of religion, which finds its expression in inner life’.44 This conclusion leads him to endorse modernist theology and its critique of neo-scholasticism. He rejects the accusation that theological modernism is excessively subjective, pointing out that reason itself can hardly be considered an objective or universal faculty: Can we call the thesis that reason alone cannot provide the foundations of faith subjectivism? If reason was absolutely objective, if each person did not contribute something personal to their reasoning, especially in the matters of religion, then we would all think the same, and religion with theology would be exactly the same for everyone. Yet theology is not mathematics and faith cannot be proven, it can only be made more possible, and who contributed more to making it possible than those who bound it to the deepest recesses of human being and found it at the bottom of the human soul as a need that cannot be separated from human essence?45

According to Zdziechowski, Newman and the modernist theologians helped make a convincing case for the continued relevance of religion in the modern age by emphasising the non-empirical nature of the discipline

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of theology and highlighting the inner dimension of faith. In this view, one ought to accept that religion cannot be disproved by science because religion and science belong to two different modes of discourse—one relying on empirical objectivity and the other on subjective experience. Miłosz endorsed Zdziechowski’s view of nature. Zdziechowski’s reflections on the Christian form of pessimism and his refusal to accept the neo-­ Thomist arguments that attempt to logically prove the existence of God inform much of Miłosz’s poetry from this period. His ‘Ballad of Levallois’ (‘Pieśń Levallois,’ 1936), inspired by Miłosz’s visit to the shelter for unemployed Poles in Levallois-Perret in 1934, when he was in Paris on a scholarship, portrays a world that is full of misery and devoid of any empirical presence of (though also yearning for) the divine. The poem opens with the invocation: ‘O God, have mercy on Levallois’ (l. 1).46 The speaker describes the bleak barracks in which ‘the weak’ and ‘the drunk’ (l. 3) ‘lie in their bunks and lick their wounds’ (l. 6). The poem suggests that while the inhabitants of the barracks may be thought to deserve their fate, as they committed theft and other crimes, they spent their lives in back-­ breaking drudgery, perishing ‘in mines, in the snow, in the heat / In mud and the depths of the seas’ (l. 16–7). Their lives and death are described in an impersonal way as a biological process that is part of the cruel cycle of nature. Their creaturely existence is given a specifically human dimension only in the lines that refer to their faith, which unites them in a special kind of community. The speaker urges God to recognise that: It was they who lifted you above themselves, Their hands sculpted your face. So deign to look on your faithful priests, Give them the joys of table and bed. (l. 18–21)

Despite the speaker’s conviction that the residents of Levallois should be given a chance to ‘learn how to live and die more lightly’ (l. 25), God does not answer his requests, remaining silent and, perhaps, non-existent. The poem ends on a bleak note, offering no redemption to the impoverished Poles: Darkness. Silence. A bridge hums in the distance. The wind streams through Cain’s trees. On the void of the earth, on the human tribe No mercy, no mercy on Levallois. (l. 26–29)

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The name of Cain further highlights the bleakness of the Levallois residents’ joyless existence, emphasising their guilt and complicity. As members of humankind, they carry the burden of Original Sin and the first murder, and following in Cain’s footsteps, they participated in modern warfare and ‘often they drenched themselves in their brothers’ blood’ (l. 12). The final lines pose a question of whether there can be any response to their prayers other than ‘darkness’ and ‘silence’ (l. 26).47 The reality of Levallois closely resembles the world described by Zdziechowski, in which ‘nature’s law is murder’. In such a world, intellectual enquiry cannot but fail to find God or any convincing arguments for his existence. The question of evil and suffering came to occupy a central place in Miłosz’s prose and poetry written during World War 2. The outbreak of the war found Miłosz in Warsaw, where he worked at the Polish Radio. Their headquarters were evacuated to Lublin and then to Lwów (now Lviv in Ukraine). In Lwów, Miłosz learnt that the Soviet Army invaded Poland from the east on 17 September 1939, and to avoid capture, he fled to Romania, and through Bucharest made his way back to Wilno. In 1940, to rejoin his partner Janka Cękalska, he returned to Warsaw, where they both stayed until the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, when they moved to Goszyce.48 Living in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, Miłosz interrogated with renewed urgency the possibility of maintaining religious faith in a world immersed in violent conflict and overwhelmed with pain. In the essay ‘The Experience of War’ (‘Doświadczenie wojny’), written in the early 1940s, he questions Christian anthropocentrism, drawing a strong parallel between the war atrocities that he was witnessing and the cruelty inscribed in the biological mechanism of natural selection: Everything collapses; everything seems artificial and ephemeral in comparison with these elementary facts: the cruelty of human beings that is identical in its results with the cruelty of nature; the ease with which in one second a sentient, thinking creature turns into a dead object; the treatment of individuals (each one of whom, he had believed, is a unique being) as toys to be destroyed, thrown from place to place, mutilated.49

Miłosz points out that if one considers the war from a biological perspective, disregarding issues of politics and ideology, the human experience of war seems to conform with the law of nature that promotes the survival of the fittest. The conclusion one reaches is that nature’s law is murder, both

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in the world of animals and on the human plane. ‘The rest’, Miłosz argues, ‘appears to be an unessential superstructure’.50 The war prompted Miłosz to return to Zdziechowski’s writings on Christian pessimism and to re-examine them in a critical way. In his essay ‘Zdziechowski’s Religiosity’ (‘Religijność Zdziechowskiego’, 1943), Miłosz analyses Zdziechowski’s key arguments, tracing them back to the late nineteenth-century split between reason and inner feelings, and the influence of Henri Bergson, William James, and Émile Durkheim. As he points out, ‘for a Catholic of that period, the Scholastic slogan that God is recognized through intellect gave no support at all’.51 This meant that the position Zdziechowski naturally gravitated towards was theological modernism. As Miłosz observes, he ‘often defended the Modernists against excessively severe, uncompromising condemnation’, and ‘where they proclaimed the irrationality of achieving knowledge, Zdziechowski was at one with them’.52 Miłosz views Zdziechowski’s sympathy for Loisy, Tyrrell, and theological modernism as an attempt to reconcile ‘an uncompromising, despairing pessimism’ with Christian faith to rescue a glimmer of hope in a world that otherwise seems to be governed by ‘a merciless and blind Nature’.53 Miłosz views Zdziechowski as a thinker who ultimately concurs with Darwin’s and Freud’s views that man is ‘a biological being, he is nothing but a chaos of drives and desires, and that located within the order of Nature, he commits the most base acts all the time, prettifying them before himself’.54 To come to terms with this conclusion, Zdziechowski had to turn away from intellectualised faith that cannot produce any empirical evidence for the existence of God, and endorse the religion of the heart, which is expressed through ‘the voice of yearning for a Divinity’, ‘the voice of hope against hope, a yearning for a miracle’.55 Ultimately, for Miłosz, Zdziechowski embodies ‘an uncompromising ethical stance, in which evil cannot be justified even if we summon the loftiest slogans to our aid’.56 This uncompromising perspective seemed newly relevant in wartime and came to inform much of Miłosz’s writings from the period. An image of a world overwhelmed by evil recurs in Miłosz’s poetry from the early 1940s. It is a world governed by biological laws and historical necessity in which suffering does not seem to have any deeper meaning. In ‘The River’ (‘Rzeka’, 1940), the speaker describes a bird’s-eye view of the river Vistula and the surrounding landscape, including a column of labourers supervised by armed Nazi troops.57 The captives are ‘dirty, indifferent’ (l. 42) and ‘obedient’ (l. 49), and—as the speaker observes—‘the

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glow of future or prophecy is not for them’ (l. 51). They seem to be resigned to their fate and expect no divine intervention: The heavens are deaf, dead, no divine signal Will fall as a lightning upon their bowed heads, And they will not dwell on their own age-old misery, Nor question why they have to bow down To the ruler’s authority, whence their punishment and what their guilt is. (l. 53–7)

The captive labourers seem to know that no one will come to their help and that there will be no salvation for them, as the world described in ‘The River’ does not offer any possibility of transcendence. The cruelty that the captives face at this particular moment in time is described as part of the larger centuries-old pattern of violence and oppression. The poem suggests that this violence is inscribed both into the biological cycle of nature and into the social fabric of human history, which perhaps stems from the cruel streak in human nature that Zdziechowski interrogated in his writings. It is that streak that determines the labourers’ fate, not any divine prophecies nor interventions, which fail to take place. In a similar manner, the poem ‘Flatlands’ (‘Równina,’ 1941), which portrays a rural landscape, highlights the insignificance of human actions when contrasted with nature.58 The plain, as the opening line proclaims, has been ‘[f]or years, for years the same, incomprehensible’ (l. 1). It remains equally indifferent to the passing of seasons, harvests, and human tragedies, such as wars, which barely register their presence in the landscape of the flatlands: Red fortresses, rickety capitals, The streams of wings in the sky and barbed wire Are here for a moment and turn into dust. (l. 26–8)

The flatlands attain a certain grandeur in the speaker’s eyes—they are described as ‘immeasurably deep’ (l. 18) and ‘forever incomprehensible’ (l. 24). One has to ‘shield one’s eyes’ (l. 17) when looking at the plain, and its ‘unknown element’ can arouse ‘fear’ (l. 36). There is no escape from it either, since the space of the flatlands does not allow for transcendence: Neither a pillar of revelations, nor the bush of Moses Will flame up at the edges of the horizon. (l. 13–4)

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The flatlands reduce human life to a relatively insignificant part of nature’s cycle. Within that framework, as the speaker ponders, violence inflicted by humans on one another seems like an ‘innocent crime’ (l. 40). The speaker wonders: ‘Treading on ruins in the nettles and mint, / How could I judge human deeds’ (l. 22–3). If, as Zdziechowski maintained, an intellectual analysis of the world can only reveal the omnipresence of pain and suffering, and the sole conclusion one can arrive at is that the law of nature is murder, one can question—as the poem does—how to evaluate human actions when viewed within that context. Both ‘The River’ and ‘Flatlands’ put in question the issue of morality and evoke the divine by referring to its absence, in this way re-enacting Zdziechowski’s ‘uncompromising stance’ that Miłosz considered particularly relevant at the time.59 They suggest that the evil present in the world of nature and in human actions could only be redeemed through the divine intervention. As Zdziechowski argues, while it is not humanly possible to reclaim innocence, it is possible to refuse to accept a view of the world dominated by evil. This refusal and a yearning for a reality free of evil and pain is simultaneously a supplication to the divine. Miłosz poetically re-enacts Zdziechowski’s movement from despair to Christian hope in the poems ‘Journey’ (‘Podróż,’ 1942) and ‘Nativity Story’ (‘Basʹnʹ wigilijna,’ 1942).60 In the former, the speaker, who has grown tired of the destruction and despair that surrounds him, walks through the outskirts of Warsaw and dreams of seeing a ‘mouth uncorrupted by pain’ (l. 57):       To see a smile of goodness And faith—that after all there is something that separates people From the cruelties of nature, bloody but innocent. (l. 58–60)

In ‘Nativity Story’, a desperate man who on his death has been turned by God into a ‘silver angel’ (l. 2) visits the manger where the Son of God is born. Standing over the crib, he makes a prophecy: Knowing that the snow will soon be covered in blood again, The angel said: The Child will not save the earth from blood. Like a ray that restores fluidity to the dark waves, It will restore innocence to human crime. (l. 17–20)

Both poems describe the longing for a divine intervention that will restore the lost innocence. While it will neither stop ongoing violence nor

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eradicate suffering, it might provide hope that gives one strength in the face of omnipresent destruction. This hope, as Zdziechowski argued, challenges discursive intellect, and if it leads to faith, that ‘faith is violence inflicted on reason’.61

Society, Language, and Creativity: Stanisław Brzozowski’s Philosophy of Labour Miłosz’s encounters with theological modernism were mediated through Zdziechowski’s reflections on evil and his Christian pessimism, on the one hand, and through Stanisław Brzozowski’s socialist philosophy of labour, on the other. Soon after Miłosz entered Stefan Batory University in 1929, he became a member of the student group Z ̇agary, which published a literary journal of the same title. The group had left-leaning sympathies and advocated a socially engaged type of writing. In 1931, its magazine published a literary manifesto penned by Miłosz. The text argued that the disconnect between contemporary poetry and politics, especially considering the alarming rise of fascism in Germany, was shameful, since the role of art was to organise social consciousness.62 Miłosz endorsed a Marxist view of literature that emphasised the way in which it shapes society by ‘moulding the type of person who will be needed in the near future for social reasons’.63 The key postulate that Miłosz argued for in the evaluation of literary works was ideological. ‘The main criterion, which includes all other criteria’, Miłosz asserted, ‘is the likely impact that a given work will have on the communal psyche. We have had enough chatter about absolute beauty that is higher than all human matters.’64 The manifesto rejected what Miłosz perceived as ideologically suspect discourse of individualism and proposed to examine the political implications of particular literary forms and genres. Miłosz’s interest in the social impact of literature was shaped by the writings of Stanisław Brzozowski (1878–1911), which he read extensively in 1930–1932. He was so impressed with Brzozowski’s thought that in 1937, during his trip to Italy, he visited Brzozowski’s tomb in Florence and met with his widow Antonina Brzozowska, and years later published a monograph on Brzozowski and his philosophy.65 Brzozowski was a writer, literary critic, and philosopher, who, similarly to Zdziechowski, found inspiration in thinkers such as Bergson and James, as well as the modernist movement in Catholic theology which ‘drew him toward

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reconversion to the Catholic fold’.66 At the same time, however, his work was informed by Marx and Fichte, creating an original synthesis which offered a novel analysis of the nature and meaning of human labour and creativity.67 The key premise of Brzozowski’s philosophy, as laid out in his studies A Legend of Young Poland (Legenda Młodej Polski, 1906–10) and Ideas (Idee, 1910), was a critique of the existing theories of knowledge that relied on the model of human reason that assumes that it is possible objectively to examine external reality and arrive at certain scholarly conclusions about it. The critique that Brzozowski developed allowed him to reclaim the value of human labour and rethink the role of artistic creativity. His contributions offered Miłosz an important theoretical framework that helped him explore the question of the social function and impact of artistic production and informed his critical and poetic oeuvre. As Miłosz later recounted, it was Brzozowski’s writings that inspired his thinking on the relationship between literature and society and the ‘justifications of the poet’s responsibilities’.68 What Miłosz shared with Brzozowski in the 1930s was a deep belief that art in general, and poetry specifically, ought to endorse its social responsibilities. In Brzozowski’s view, literature, just like religion, had the potential to reclaim the creative nature of human labour, challenging theories of knowledge that attempted to deny it. Both Miłosz’s and Brzozowski’s thinking on the topic is characterised by a nuanced approach to issues that other key Marxists addressed in a more schematic way. Vladimir Lenin in his 1905 address on ‘Party Organization and Party Literature’ argued that ‘[l]iterature must become a component of organised, planned and integrated Social-Democratic Party work’, and that ‘[p]ublishing and distributing centres, bookshops and reading-rooms, libraries and similar establishments—must all be under party control’.69 Brzozowski remained critical of such an instrumental approach to literature and compared the centrally planned control of literary production to the attempts of ecclesiastical authorities to suppress any forms of independent religious thought. He observed that ‘the spiritual condition of many a social-democratic congress shares a lot with the spiritual condition of those cardinals and theologians who had edited the papal encyclical against modernists’, drawing a parallel between ‘dogmatic thinkers’ of various ilk.70 In a similar vein, Miłosz, while reflecting on the social role of literature, remained wary of any political and ideological attempts to circumscribe its form or content, which might curtail the artist’s freedom. In a 1936 essay, he distanced himself from Marxist critics who wished to impose strict control over literary production, rejecting

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their restrictive view of literature. He pointed out that such critics, ‘[a]ssuming that literature is a faithful reflection of certain economic processes, […] are under the illusion that it is their calling to evaluate how those processes are to be portrayed in literature’.71 The philosophical perspective that Brzozowski adopted to account for the social role of literature was grounded in his rejection of what he saw as formalised ways of thinking that deny the value of human labour. The first target of his critique was a theory of knowledge that assumes that it is possible to observe and know the external world in an objective way. According to Brzozowski, such an assumption is flawed because ‘man does not develop knowledge about any existing world, but first unconsciously and then intentionally creates and becomes aware of different forms of action’.72 Reality cannot be observed in an objective way since the very process of intellectual examination consists in the creation of concepts and methods of examination that determine its outcome. The theory of knowledge that denies this is, according to him, ‘an ugly medieval accretion on the body of modern thought’.73 The knowledge that one acquires by examining the external world is the knowledge produced by one’s intellect, which, according to Brzozowski, is the knowledge of the actions one has performed on the reality that one has interacted with. Thus, Brzozowski takes a decidedly anti-scholastic approach and argues that ‘the theory of knowledge that attempts in this or that way to deductively arrive at a scientific understanding—whether by the examination of the essence and spirit of an object, or from nature, or from God’s will—is as scholarly as disciplines that would attempt to determine what sphere steam engines breed in or what tree Wellington boots grow on’.74 According to Brzozowski, all one generates when interacting with the world is a set of fixed ideas that produce an illusion of impartial knowledge, while in fact they reflect one’s thought processes. The reliance of contemporary natural sciences, philosophic systems, and religious thought (in the form of neo-­ scholasticism) on this kind of reasoning, Brzozowski argues, is a form of self-delusion. He references the work of the modernist Maurice Blondel, who showed that ‘you do not have to go from the idea to being or to postulate a reality which would be exterior to us, but that our living thought is already in being, that it is pregnant with reality’.75 This argument becomes a point of central importance in Brzozowski’s work. Drawing on Bergson’s Creative Evolution, Brzozowski argues that since reality is in a state of constant flux, it is impossible to encapsulate it in a set of fixed formulae.76 He proposes that scholarly concepts are not

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only to be considered as creations of a mind that performs labour by shaping the reality that it encounters, but they are also to be examined as products of a particular historical moment. ‘History has created what we call our soul,’ he argues, ‘history has created our nature, it is the foundation that lifts us up, carries us across the abyss; we are of it and only through it can we encounter what is beyond human’.77 Connecting his reflections on theories of knowledge to the crisis of religion, Brzozowski argues that the modernist theologians’ recognition of the importance of historiography and the insufficiency of dogmatic formulae placed them at the forefront of a revolutionary intellectual movement sweeping across Europe.78 He rejects neo-scholasticism in no uncertain terms, stating that ‘whenever faith is expressed in conceptual formulae, it becomes something essentially antireligious’.79 He posits that the core issue that the debate between modernist and neo-scholastic theologians revolved around was the concept of truth. According to Brzozowski: One should not be deluded that truth can be established doctrinally. Thomas Aquinas belongs to the past for ever. We have to understand that there is a different foundation to truth than intellectual agreement and coincidence, and that truth has to rely on one being true rather than recognizing the truth.80

The act of intellectual recognition of the truth, Brzozowski claims, is a human construct. Furthermore, he argues that reason itself is a human construct. ‘It is simply a systematisation of the paths that labour eroded in human life, in human nature’.81 It is not reason, but labour that defines human relation to the world. Through labour, he contends, ‘reality ceases to be what one finds, and begins to be what one can create’.82 He attributes contemporary resistance to the idea that scientific knowledge cannot offer an understanding of the external world to a reluctance to recognise and appreciate the value of human labour. Blaming positivism and the theory of evolution for the devaluation of everyday life, Brzozowski observes that since people ‘do not see value in the lives they live’, they attempt to find it elsewhere, endorsing systems of thought that promise to offer it.83 However, he argues, ‘logical thought, knowledge, science have very little to tell us about matters relating to the meaning of our life: these are domains that this very life creates’.84 Brzozowski’s emphasis on the need to move beyond the theory of knowledge that elevates reason at the cost of devaluing human labour and

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creativity spoke to Miłosz’s disappointment with contemporary philosophy, which he considered to be suffering from ‘a fear of illusion’, which made it disengage from simple everyday experiences.85 Miłosz saw contemporary philosophy as focused on endless self-reflection and constant re-examination of its own concepts and methods. What he hailed as a courageous break away from this impasse was the phenomenological approach. It offered a way out, showing that: one can get to know the world not through a search for some universal key that will open all the secrets of the matter, but when one appreciates the world in its endless multiplicity, when one considers phenomena such as honour, courage, and faithfulness as equally real to a spring storm, day, night and a snowy road. Being is not an endless circle of illusions, but a continuous touching of the concrete in both its material and spiritual forms.86

As Max Scheler, whom Miłosz references in his essay, states in On the Eternal in Man (1921), modernity’s predicament is a deep mistrust of the world of experience as a construct produced by the human mind and not the world itself and the devaluation of the discipline of philosophy, which became ‘progressively cheapened in traffic from science to science (in the service now of geometry, now of mechanics, now psychology, and so on)’.87 What he proposes instead is a positive re-evaluation of experience and a reconsideration of the modern understanding of reality along the lines proposed also by Brzozowski, moving beyond what he sees as a harmful distinction between the objective external world and the subjective inner experience of that world. In Brzozowski’s view, language plays a crucial role in the devaluation of the experience of everyday life and human labour. The illusion that one can know being objectively is, he argues, ‘to a large extent created and maintained by the word, by the belief that it refers to something independent, external—existing in an objective way’.88 For Brzozowski, language is a ‘social construct’ yet it creates an ‘illusion that it expresses something that exists beyond life and beyond the human […] an external world, existing in an objective way, independent of human interactions, of the flowing stream of experiences—whether we call it nature or God or matter’.89 Brzozowski critiques what he considers a ‘theological’ use of language, which he defines as an attempt ‘to extract “truth” by systematising and analysing the hypostases of ossified human life and creation’, and

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refers to contemporary naturalists, materialists, and evolutionists as ‘theologians par excellence’.90 While language itself, Brzozowski observes, is a conservative medium because it gives deceptively permanent forms to fluid and continually changing reality, certain thinkers, including Catholic modernists and before them, John Henry Newman, whose works Brzozowski translated into Polish, recognised this disconnect and tried to account for it. In Newman’s An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent and works by Loisy, Tyrrell, and Blondel, Brzozowski identifies ‘a modern view of language and an understanding of the dogmatising role that it plays in intellectual life’.91 According to Brzozowski, it is specifically religion and art that can challenge the harmful illusion that everyday life and labour are of little value. While social reality shapes and restricts ways in which one can conceptualise one’s life and its meaning and can create an impression that life lacks any value in itself, religion ‘is a method of bringing forth energy from those depths of creativity that do not appear to us in any of the forms available to our consciousness and will’.92 Thus, Brzozowski reads Blondel’s L’Action as a study that turns ‘Marx’s austere thought into a living being’.93 More specifically, according to Brzozowski, Catholicism, through sacraments, seeks to sanctify everyday life through a series of rituals or actions that have a physical dimension as well as intellectual content. ‘A sacramental religious system’, Brzozowski contends, ‘resembles a system of actions that allow us to maintain at the surface of our consciousness and our will those incomprehensible, deeper energies that exceed them’.94 In this way, religion can serve to expand human consciousness by providing everyday life with value that social reality might have denied it. Brzozowski assigns a similar role to art. Since people are largely dependent on ‘the rhetorical practices of culture’ they live in, he claims that ‘we instinctively consider being to be what we can verbalise effortlessly in our community’.95 In this sense, ‘the boundaries of concepts and ideas related to being’ that are in use in a given social group depend on the language and discourse available to that group. This language, Brzozowski states, can be transformed through literature: Art, by expanding the scope of what can be uttered in a given social environment, as if adds certain permanent qualities to the world of that society: from now on the world that an individual experiences as their social foundation will be richer by those qualities, which thanks to art it will be possible to articulate.96

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Since art has the unique capacity to enhance the language of a given community, it changes its ways of thinking and, thus, its reality, by reshaping the ways in which people interact with the world and with one another. Brzozowski’s philosophical re-evaluation of human creativity and artistic production shaped Miłosz’s reflections on the role of poetry in a war-­ stricken world. As Miłosz later remarked in his book on Brzozowski, his philosophy responded to Miłosz’s and his contemporaries’ attempts ‘to place the individual in society, [and] to reconcile art with social commitment’.97 Brzozowski offered left-leaning Miłosz a philosophical framework that allowed him to reconceptualise the value of human labour and the social responsibility of the poet, whose duty Brzozowski saw as the shaping of the communal imagination. Following in Brzozowski’s footsteps, in ‘A Semi-Private Letter About Poetry’ (‘List półprywatny o poezji,’ 1946), Miłosz argues that the poet’s role is neither to strive for an intellectual detachment, nor to yield to the temptation to write ‘fluent, patriotic, ideological poems whose words ring out, whisper, and stupefy’.98 Rather, it is to engage with the world in its multiplicity, ‘to inhabit the skin of various people’, and to refuse ‘to share the moral approbation of evil’.99 By doing this, the poet expands readers’ sensibility and broadens the scope of ethical responses to a liminal situation. Miłosz emphasises that present-­ day poetry needs to do more than simply reflect on the world as it is. He argues: ‘Sometimes the world loses its face. It becomes too base. The task of the poet is to restore its face, because otherwise man is lost in doubt and despair. It is an indication that the world need not always be like this; it can be different.’100 This particular role of poetry Miłosz calls its ‘salvational goal’.101 The link between poetry and salvation recurs in several poems included in Miłosz’s first post-war volume Rescue (1945). The opening poem, ‘Dedication’ (‘Przedmowa,’ 1945), takes the form of a poet’s monologue.102 The speaker addresses an unknown war casualty (‘You whom I could not save’, l. 1), posing a question about the role of poetry: ‘What is poetry which does not save / Nations or people?’ (l. 14–15), and reflecting on the fate of those who perished. The same question recurs in the poem ‘In Warsaw’, which portrays a poet standing ‘on the ruins / Of St. John’s Cathedral’ on a ‘sunny / Day in spring’ (l. 1–3).103 Both poems reveal a tension between the ethical need to mourn the dead and the aesthetic choice to reassert the poet’s freedom from the obligations imposed on him by society and literary tradition. The speaker of ‘In Warsaw’ points

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out this tension in the words he utters to the poet contemplating the ruins of his city: You swore never to be A ritual mourner. You swore never to touch The deep wounds of your nation So you would not make them holy With the accursed holiness that pursues Descendants for many centuries. (l. 7–13)

The speaker, perhaps the poet’s alter ego, suggests that despite the poet’s firm rejection of the Romantic tradition that requires him to glorify patriotic sacrifice, viewing the ruins of his homeland, he experiences a moment of cognitive dissonance. The poet is aware that his readers might be waiting for him to give in to the poetic tradition. That tradition would provide the language that turns war casualties into martyrs and ‘make[s] them holy’. The tension experienced by the poet seems unendurable: My pen is lighter Than a hummingbird’s feather. This burden Is too much for it to bear. How can I live in this country Where the foot knocks against The unburied bones of kin? (l. 26–30)

The poet acknowledges the ethical urgency of lending his pen to the grieving community—he is haunted by the dead’s ‘voices’ and ‘smiles’ (l. 31). At the same time, however, he is also reluctant to take on what he considers to be too heavy a ‘burden’ and assume the position of a ‘ritual mourner’ (l. 36). This would restrict his creativity, but also deprive his verses of joy and happiness. These, as he asserts, are not just ornamental elements of poetry, but its very essence. Without those ‘moment[s] of happiness’ (l. 40), the speaker contends, the ‘world will perish’ (l. 41). This strong assertion brings into focus the important function of beauty—if it is not to be found in the external world, it can be recovered through poetry. If the world is full of horror and overcome by death, poetry can—in Miłosz’s words—‘restore its face’, reminding everyone of what the world should be or could be like. Thus, ‘Dedication’ and ‘In Warsaw’ pose an aesthetic and ethical dilemma. If read in parallel with Miłosz’s essays and Brzozowski’s

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work, they suggest that only art that can achieve both—fulfil a social function by expanding the limits of what can be expressed in language and provide space for aesthetic creativity—lives up to its responsibility.

‘[D]efence against irrationalism’: Wartime Reckoning with Theological Modernism and Neo-Thomism While in the 1930s Miłosz was drawn to Zdziechowski’s and Brzozowski’s thought, which was informed by the writings of Bergson, James, and the theological modernists, with the outbreak of World War 2, he started to reassess contemporary tendencies in religion and philosophy to examine their impact on the ideology and politics of the interwar period. In lengthy letter-essays exchanged with the fellow writer and friend Jerzy Andrzejewski in 1942–1943, which he later published under the title Legends of Modernity (Legendy nowoczesnos ́ci), perhaps gesturing to Brzozowski’s A Legend of Young Poland, Miłosz conducts a re-evaluation of theological modernism and the philosophies that it drew on.104 Exchanging his reflections with Andrzejewski, he explicitly refers to his writings as an attempt to construct ‘if not the new edifices of an unknown tomorrow, then at least the foundations leading to a new systematic doubting that might be capable of unearthing the few values worthy of rescue and development’.105 To establish those foundations is a priority for Miłosz, since he describes the present moment as a time of crisis when ‘the idea of democracy had perished’, philosophy had turned into ‘conventionalism and fictionalism’, and ‘Catholicism had been transformed into a desiccated mummy’.106 Viewing the interwar years as a bygone historical period, Miłosz considers the outbreak of the war to have radically transformed the contemporary intellectual outlook. He becomes particularly critical of what he views as the ‘irrationalism’ and ‘the demon of practical application’ that have dominated contemporary philosophy and theology, and which lead to the ‘the repudiation of truth for the sake of action’, as evidenced by Bergson, Blondel, and Brzozowski.107 In his critique of theological modernism, Miłosz argues that in matters of faith it is most prudent to practice ‘restrain and caution’, since states of exaltation that are said to bring about ‘the light of faith’ require one to suspend rational thought and surrender

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critical judgement.108 For Miłosz, this kind of intellectual operation breeds a ‘fear of artificiality’ and a ‘fear of falling into falsehood’:109 To make the state of Grace into a sudden blow, a sudden illumination, entirely separate from a condition of normal thinking—is that not too daring a step? […] the worst are those noble states of exaltation, that pseudo-­ grace to which we are urged by certain individuals who modestly call it submissiveness of thought and who promise that while we practice it, faith will descend on us as a state separate from what we were previously. Like everything that arises from the sphere of inner darknesses—this exaltation has my “I” as its subject—my own knowledge, goodness, humility, my own bestowing of gifts, become the cause of my tender emotional state and crocodile tears.110

For Miłosz, doubt remains an important intellectual operation that provides a check on the exaltation coming from ‘the hidden corners of the human soul’ disguised as a work of grace.111 He rejects what he considers a contemporary repudiation of the intellect and its right to doubt and remain detached. He identifies the modern focus on the subconscious, the irrational, the intuitive—which he refers to as ‘the gloomy regions of the “underground I”’—with the mode of thought present in authoritarian ideologies, such as communism and fascism.112 The emphasis on inner action and vitality makes those systems appeal to the masses, who give in to the demand that they should suspend their critical judgement and willingly submit to a greater cause. According to Miłosz, fascism and communism had flourished precisely because masses of people willingly submitted to the visions they were offered, following their ‘intuition’ instead of ‘common sense’. Miłosz names James, Blondel, and Freud as the thinkers whose work had legitimised and laid the scholarly foundations for this mode of thinking.113 He blames writers and philosophers for contributing to the ‘anti-intellectualism’ that is now ‘recognized by masses of people and whose contents are blind faith in the biological drive, in the voice of blood and race, in the infallibility and accuracy of animal appetites’.114 While in his essay on ‘Zdziechowski’s Religiosity’ (1943) Miłosz applauded Zdziechowski’s critique of scholastic theology, he remained critical of Zdziechowski’s modernist stance. Miłosz appreciates the contribution of theological modernists to the ongoing debate on the role of religion in the modern age, yet he has serious reservations about what he

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perceives as an uncritical rejection of reason and the affirmation of the concept of the inner voice: If “the world lies in evil” and we ourselves are flawed to our very depths, lying ceaselessly, do we have the right to believe that the voices we hear inside ourselves, along with our entire inner experience, are not also stamped with falsehood? Is it not too risky a proposition to rescue religion by reference to feelings emerging from the darkness that is every human soul? Is not a harmony imposed by reason more worthy of recommendation than echoes of the subconscious?115

Miłosz’s questions are not unlike those that T.  S. Eliot posed to John Middleton Murry.116 Similarly to Eliot, Miłosz remains distrustful of the inner voice, which might turn out to be a product of the dark human psyche. He maintains that ‘the errant, unstable intellect is the lesser of two evils, […] it leads us astray less often than a constant—but lying—heart.’117 His reassessment of the modernist endorsement of irrationalism is informed by what he sees as its historical outcome, that is, fascist ideologies. Quoting Albert Leclère’s critique of theological modernism (Pragmatisme, modernisme, protestantisme, 1909), Miłosz remarks: ‘Today we recognize the correctness of such a severe critique, for we have recently seen the ramifications of irrationalism. But for Zdziechowski, as for many enlightened Catholics at that time, the matter did not seem quite so straightforward.’118 It is historical distance and the experience of the war that leads Miłosz to accept Leclère’s condemnation of modernism. Following Leclère, he contrasts the development of Protestantism’s optimistic ‘act of faith in autonomous morality’ with Catholicism’s ‘pessimistic view of human nature as marred by original sin’.119 Endorsing the Catholic view, Miłosz emphasises that one is unable to judge one’s actions and clearly distinguish between good and evil. ‘I do not trust myself; in general, I do not trust man’, he confesses. ‘He is too often led into temptation. Too often he mistakes the fire of his own desires for the star that leads to Bethlehem.’120 Those desires or ‘hidden powers’, as he argues in the essay ‘Absolute Freedom’ written at the same time, may quite possibly turn out to be ‘demons and phantoms’, which—as recent history has shown—‘if they are recklessly liberated from the fetters of reason, they will succeed in devastating the earth and bringing it to ruin’.121 He argues that fascist programmes ‘appealed to emotion, to imagination’ and made masses ‘drunk on action as action, heroism as heroism, might as

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might—the rapture of self-liberation and destruction’.122 Miłosz appears disillusioned with philosophers and theologians such as Blondel and James, who—as he saw it—promoted anti-intellectualism that became the breeding ground for fascism and communism. In no uncertain terms, he refers to contemporary philosophers’ focus on the mystical and the subconscious as ‘a new Trojan horse, closely related to the Modernism condemned by the Church’.123 This kind of disillusionment was shared by Miłosz’s contemporaries in Poland, some of whom turned to neo-Thomism (primarily in the version promoted by Maritain), in an attempt to adapt it to the particular socio-­ political context of the mid-1930s. This context included an increasing sense of ideological and military threat from both Nazi Germany in the West and Soviet Russia in the East, with neo-Thomism providing a way to endorse Catholic identity in both a  religious and a  cultural sense (as opposed to German Protestantism and Russian Orthodoxy). The interwar period saw a surge of popularity of Jacques Maritain’s writings in particular. His thought was popularised in Poland by the circle of intellectuals associated with the religious community of Laski. Led by Father Władysław Korniłowicz, a graduate of philosophy and theology at the University of Fribourg, the group aimed to initiate a Catholic revival, bringing together clergy, lay intellectuals, philosophers, and writers.124 Like Maritain in France, Korniłowicz hosted regular weekly seminars to propagate and deepen the understanding of Aquinas’s thought and its contemporary relevance. Korniłowicz and Maritain were aware of each other’s seminars, and, as Piotr H.  Kosicki points out, ‘traded ideas in written correspondence about how to facilitate critical, thoughtful reading of Thomas Aquinas. Korniłowicz came to Maritain’s seminar as a guest in 1921, and Maritain visited the Laski seminar in 1934’.125 Maritain’s visit to Poland was occasioned by the International Thomist Congress in Poznań on 28–30 August 1934, which he attended at the invitation of the Polish Primate August Hlond. Maritain’s talk at the Congress, which brought together neo-Thomists from all over Europe, including Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange from the  Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome, and representatives from the Catholic institutes of Milan, Louvain, and Fribourg, proved so popular that the organisers struggled to accommodate the audience of 900 attendees.126 Maritain owed his popularity in Poland to the work of Korniłowicz and the Laski circle. In 1934, they founded the journal Verbum, which served as a forum for a lively discussion of religion, philosophy, and culture,

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publishing many of Maritain’s texts, as well as contributions by Polish and international thinkers. As Kosicki observes, ‘[b]etween 1929 and 1939, nineteen of [Maritain’s] shorter texts were published in Poland, as were complete Polish-language translations of five books (Three Reformers, Science and Wisdom, Art and Scholasticism, Religion and Culture, and the lecture that he delivered at Laski in 1934).’127 Miłosz knew Father Korniłowicz and attended a few meetings of the Laski circle. He read their journal Verbum, where he also published his poem ‘Siena’ (1937).128 He deepened his knowledge of Thomism during the year that he spent on a scholarship in Paris (1934–1935), attending regular classes in Thomist philosophy at the Catholic Institute (l’Institut Catholique). The seminars were taught by Father Daniel Lallement, a close associate of Maritain and a regular member of Maritain’s Thomist seminar, whom the theologian Yves Congar later remembered as ‘a very serious priest’ and ‘a man of doctrine’ who promoted an ‘exigent, rigorous, even austere vision of Catholicism’.129 In his reflections on Lallement’s classes, Miłosz compared them to an architectural design: ‘In architecture there is an intervention that consists in injecting concrete into the ground if it is too loose to uphold the foundations. St. Thomas’s system is like this concrete. The grains of time stop hissing and humming anxiously, this pulpit is in its fullness, for eternity.’130 Lallement’s classes provided Miłosz with an impulse to consider an alternative framework to analyse what he perceived as a cultural crisis and the ideological responses provided by communism and fascism. The impact of rising nationalism was becoming increasingly real. When in Paris, Miłosz witnessed student riots directed at foreign workers near Montagne Sainte-Genevieve in February 1935.131 As Elżbieta Kiślak points out, it is likely that—when taking up Lallement’s classes at the Catholic Institute—he aimed to explore ways in which neo-Thomism could serve as a potential antidote to the authoritarian ideologies.132 On his return from France, Miłosz continued to engage with neo-Thomism. In a 1938 survey asking respondents to identify the most interesting book they read in 1937, Miłosz listed Maritain’s Frontières de la poésie and Art et scholastique.133 He argued that these books constitute the surest ‘defence against irrationalism that at present poses a threat in all domains’.134 While neo-scholasticism had an intellectual and ideological appeal to Miłosz as it presented a system of thought that offered certainty and clarity in times of political upheaval, remarks that Miłosz makes in his correspondence reveal that he considered this system of thought to be excessively detached from everyday life. In 1930, in a letter to his mentor, poet

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Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, he refers to Catholicism as ‘a bridge suspended in mid-air’ and a ‘structure enclosed in itself, self-sufficient, not attempting to capture the truth of the external world’.135 In 1931, commenting on Henri Massis’s Defence of the West (Défense de l’Occident, 1927), published in the series Roseau d’Or edited by Maritain, Miłosz remained sceptical of the increasing ‘drive towards absolute criteria, towards closed structures of Catholicism, structures that might appear coherent at the expense of logic’.136 The architectural metaphors that Miłosz employs to describe neo-scholastic thought emphasise its seeming inner coherence and self-­ contained status, but also draw attention to its constructedness and insufficient engagement with the social reality of the time. This lack of effective engagement with contemporary socio-politics in ways that would challenge threats posed by rising nationalism, fascism, and antisemitism became particularly pronounced in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In Miłosz’s view, instead of providing a strong moral leadership, Thomist thinkers disturbingly frequently supported political initiatives that exhibited fascist tendencies. In 1943, looking with hindsight at the 1930s, Miłosz levels an uncompromising judgement at the interwar neo-Thomist revival: The majority of Catholics who promoted Saint Thomas grounded their Catholicism with the help of sociopolitical inferences, with the help of a vision of a new Middle Ages that could be incarnated only be relying on a Catholic worldview. […] It is not at all surprising that those Catholics linked Saint Thomas with ideas taken from fascism, because at bottom, without realizing it, they accepted Catholicism as one more fiction, useful for the goals of the political structure.137

Miłosz argues that for neo-Thomists ‘outcomes were supposed to justify and create an internal faith’ and the ‘closed form of sentences borrowed from the Summa theologica entered like a substitute article, saved the Thomists from floundering into open engagement with mystery’.138 Instead of providing a genuine religious response to the ongoing cultural and spiritual crisis, they focused on the political and ideological purposes to which Aquinas and his thought could be used. In his 1943 critique of both neo-scholasticism and theological modernism, Miłosz sides with the modernists, appreciating their theological ambition and emphasising the real contribution they made to twentieth-century theology: ‘wasn’t the

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price that had to be paid for the turn away from the spirit of Modernism way too high?’, he asks, stating that: What drove people toward it—that hunger, that anxiety—is worth something, if religion in general is worth something. […] the Modernists and their sympathizers, like Zdziechowski, were the last religious thinkers—not Catholic philosophers (because there were many of those who came after them), but truly thinkers who probed the meaning of religion. Standing beneath a starry sky or experiencing empathy for the sufferings of a fly is a phenomenon that lies at the birth of faith and rituals, whereas Saint Thomas’s judgments are only one of the ways to codify metaphysical dread.139

Appreciating Maritain as a ‘splendid philosopher’, Miłosz points out that as a theological system, neo-Thomism remains ‘harnessed by worldliness’.140 It forces one to suspend all doubt, and do violence to one’s intelligence by submitting to a doctrine that promises an order, but goes against one’s better judgement. This, Miłosz contends in a letter essay to Andrzejewski, can have dire consequences: During the two interwar decades many people became convinced that they had to be Communists and, doing violence to their doubts, “joined the ranks.” Others, chasing after a “worldview,” stifled their common sense with a mixture of Thomas Aquinas and theoreticians of imperialism and fascism. People were consumed by a rage to denounce their own thought, a blind drive to subordinate and discipline themselves—which is, perhaps, understandable as a reaction to the excessively liberal nineteenth century, but which projected a quite pitiful image.141

By 1942–1943, Miłosz expresses deep scepticism about ideological and philosophical systems that require their followers to suspend doubt. He opts for a position of an observer who considers various, even conflicting, positions. ‘People are thirsting for prescriptions and models, today more than ever before’, he writes to Andrzejewski, ‘Don’t you think, though, that the spirit in which questions are asked is more important than universal answers?’142 In a neo-Thomist spirit, Andrzejewski points out that while contemporary man can ‘discover’ and ‘understand’ truth, they are ‘incapable of submitting to that Truth’ and ‘coexisting with it in accordance with the laws which that Truth demands’.143 This inability to submit to a higher truth is, according to him, related to the individualism that historically one can trace back to ‘the path from the medieval mystics,

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through Luther, Romanticism, and all the way to Mein Kampf and The Myth of the Twentieth Century’.144 In comparing the manifestos of Hitler and Rosenberg to Luther’s and mystics’ writings, Andrzejewski draws directly on Maritain, suggesting that the roots of World War 2 and Europe’s political turmoil are spiritual. Indeed, he argues that the widespread spiritual anxiety ‘characterizes our time more eloquently, perhaps, than fascist jabbering’ and laicisation ‘seems to be a phenomenon that is a hundred times more dangerous’ than the exploits of the Nazis.145 Miłosz disagreed with Andrzejewski, becoming increasingly wary of neo-scholastic solutions to the contemporary spiritual and political crisis. His disillusionment with neo-scholasticism and what he saw as its lack of effective engagement with the real issues plaguing society is satirically portrayed in his 1943/1944 poem ‘On a Certain Book’ (‘Na pewna ̨ ksia ̨żkę’).146 While the poem was written in response to a particular publication—Bogdan Suchodolski’s Where Do We Come From and Where Are We Going? (Ska ̨d i doka ̨d idziemy?, 1943), which provided a commentary on contemporary culture and politics—it reflects more generally on the impotence of contemporary thinkers in the face of war and the ideological upheaval. Suchodolski’s volume, referencing present-day intellectual tendencies, including Maritain’s neo-Thomism, argued that ‘whatever the errors that we might have committed in life, there was no error in our thinking. Our thought has always defended the concept of human dignity, the principles of freedom and justice, and the subordination of the material issues to the spirit’.147 Conceding that fascism and communism aptly identified and efficiently addressed certain human needs, including a sense of belonging and a need for a clear hierarchy, Suchodolski does not offer any convincing alternative, apart from repeatedly stating that democratic ideals ought to be upheld and a certain golden means between liberal and conservative values has to be found. Miłosz’s poem offers a scathing critique of this proposal, alongside other similar attempts to uphold intellectual systems that have already proved helpless in their failure to challenge authoritarian ideologies. The poem emphasises the lack of intellectual rigour among thinkers who insist on maintaining the status quo in the face of unprecedented political upheavals. All they do is recycle the ideas that were rendered null and void by the outbreak of the war. The poem compares their efforts to a theatre play staged by a quack-director: Melancholic, kind-hearted, shy thinkers In the midst of death will set up a tent of rotten trinkets

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And they will show you a mystery play with Saint Thomas Aquinas, Whose coattail is held by Maritain. […] A crowd of devils will stage modern history, And the quack-director looking at those wonders Will sigh relieved, certain that he is saving the world. (l. 7–10, 12–14)

The poem mocks ‘kind-hearted’ intellectuals who attempt to bring together disparate systems of thought in the hope of finding the solution to the pressing crises. Their attempts are doomed to failure as they try to square the circles, bringing together a system that offers ‘[h]alf freedom, half oppression, and half renunciation’ (l. 17). Their failure, the poem suggests, lies in the continuous privileging of half-measures and golden means and in the lack of intellectual commitment and integrity. The thinkers who look to Aquinas, Maritain, and Berdyaev, trying to ‘resurrect the new Middle Ages’ (l. 35) are a ‘pitiful sight’ (l. 34), like ‘drunkards who fall under the table after a plentiful feast’ (l. 36). Their efforts are completely futile, yet like the quack-director, they continue to reassure themselves that they are ‘saving the world’ (l. 14). Miłosz’s rejection of neo-Thomism in the 1940s is informed by his scepticism about the ways in which it had become directly implicated in politics since the 1930s and served as a tool to promote nationalism and antisemitism. In Poland, references to Aquinas appeared frequently in the writings of both the proponents of nationalism who argued for a closer link between the church and the state, and advocates of social Catholicism, who emphasised issues relating to democracy and social justice. The former included Roman Dmowski and the journal Prosto z mostu (Straight Out), edited by the right-wing activist Stanisław Piasecki; the latter journals such as Verbum, edited by Father Korniłowicz, and Pra ̨d (The Current), the journal of the Catholic university students’ association ‘Odrodzenie’ (‘Renaissance’), edited by Father Antoni Szymański. Dmowski, the leader of the movement of National Democracy (founded in 1887), like Charles Maurras in France, advocated a close relationship between the state and the church.148 After 1926, wary of the recent papal condemnation of Action française, he was careful to express his political aims in a way that would spare him accusations of treating religion as a means to achieve a political end. ‘The politics of a Catholic nation must be sincerely Catholic,’ he wrote in the pamphlet The Church, the Nation, and the State (Kos ́ciół, naród i państwo, 1927), ‘which means that religion and

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its development and strength must be considered as a goal that cannot be used as a means to other ends that have nothing to do with religion’.149 He argued that the time was ripe for a religious revival, evidencing a turn to Catholicism in countries across Europe, from France to Poland, which he read as a ‘sign of the new period in European history’.150 This sense of a religious revival initiated by neo-Thomism was shared by members of the Laski circle and the ‘Renaissance’ movement, though they did not endorse Dmowski’s nationalism.151 Commenting on the potential of neo-Thomism to shape the future of Europe’s intellectual life, Sister Teresa Landy, an important member of the Laski circle, echoing Maritain, argued that ‘it is not only a universal system, but also a system of current relevance considering the issues and special difficulties of our own time’ since it could curtail the spread of secularism, which is the legacy of the Reformation, Renaissance, and Enlightenment.152 Thinkers associated with Verbum and Pra ̨d, including Korniłowicz and Szymański, were openly critical of how nationalist groups, such as Dmowski and his party, attempted to turn Catholicism into a political tool that would make it possible to reinvent Poland as a homogenous nation-­state (despite the presence of considerable ethnic and religious minorities—Lithuanians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Jews, Germans, and Czechs accounted for a third of the population of the Second Polish Republic). At the same time, as Kosicki points out, Catholic thinkers of different political persuasions— from the nationalist-oriented supporters of Dmowski to the proponents of Christian socialism and Maritain’s new Christendom—linked ‘the imagined community of “Jews” with the worst of the world’s ills—capitalism, Communism, and the dethroning of Catholicism’s God by modernity’.153 Stefan Swieżawski, a prominent lay Thomist who attended Maritain’s seminars in France and was the leader of the students’ movement ‘Odrodzenie’ in 1927/1928, in response to the ongoing debates on the introduction of numerus clausus at Polish universities, in 1930 wrote in Pra ̨d: ‘we must defend our special Polish culture from a deluge by the bankrupt Jewish culture, particularly in education, art, and social mores, and at the same time strengthen and expand our economic wealth as energetically as possible’.154 Swieżawski’s views, while not endorsing a nationalist version of Catholicism, nevertheless espoused an antisemitic agenda. This agenda was shaped primarily by the circle of Dmowski and his followers, who framed their politics within a wider context of a perceived crisis of Western civilisation brought about by moral and economic liberalism, capitalism, and secularism.155 As the writer Adam Doboszyński, a National Democrat and

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admirer and translator of G. K. Chesterton, put it: ‘the sudden shock of the great war set free the range of dark forces of liberalism […]. Yet even in the contemporary world, demoralised to its core, there is still enough of idealism whose roots reach bygone centuries’.156 Acknowledging that it is urgent to take action, since ‘[f]ascist and Hitlerite economic theories are solving certain economic issues’, Doboszyński offered an antidote to the civilisational malaise in his National Economy (Gospodarka narodowa, 1934/1936), which aimed to reconstruct the very foundations of contemporary economic thought.157 He rejected the liberal notion of progress in favour of a Christian understanding of labour that was firmly grounded in Aquinas’ Summa Theologica and his conceptions of social and economic justice. The conclusion he drew was that there were two economic models that were inherently opposed to one another: a Christian-national model and a Jewish-liberal model. Doboszyński denounced the latter, linking it to the practices of credits and loans, and, quoting Aquinas, the medieval concept of usury.158 Doboszyński, a frequent contributor to the nationalist Prosto z mostu, did not stop at a textual denunciation of what he perceived to be a Jewish control of the national capital. In June 1936, he led an armed group of civilians to raid the town of Mysʹlenice, plundering Jewish shops and trying to set fire to the synagogue.159 His militant antisemitism was fully endorsed by National Democracy, and in the 1930s gained legitimacy in the Catholic circles due to its grounding in the Thomist tradition. It was further reinforced by Anna Danuta Drużbacka’s study on Aquinas and the Jewish question, inspired by the Belgian Thomist Simon Deploige’s earlier publication on the topic.160 Drużbacka, who was well-read in the scholastic tradition, having studied philosophy at the University of Fribourg and translated into Polish the writings of the neo-Thomist Garrigou-Lagrange, in her 1937 pamphlet exhibits a vitriolic anti-Jewish sentiment, supported with direct quotations from Aquinas, stopping short of an open call for violence against Jews.161 What the antisemitic writings of Doboszyński, Drużbacka, and other Catholic intellectuals had in common was the construction of ‘the Jews’ as agents of secular culture, subversive members of society who can never become fully integrated and will always work against the values of Christianity.162 As Ronald Modras observes, ‘assimilated Jews represented not only political liberalism and secular institutions but all that [the] champions of Catholic tradition disliked in modern culture’.163 On the eve of the war and in the years to come, this antisemitic rhetoric led Miłosz to distance himself from neo-scholasticism. He was particularly

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critical of how this school of thought could be co-opted by right-wing political parties that openly endorsed antisemitism. Reflecting on the ways in which neo-Thomist Catholicism was used by Stanisław Piasecki’s magazine Prostu z mostu, Miłosz wrote: ‘[t]he paper’s “Catholic national” program promoted the idea of a state inhabited exclusively by Catholic Poles. Linguistic and religious minorities were to be Polonized, and Jews forced into emigration. The paper’s Catholicism was expressed in frequent citations of Saint Thomas Aquinas.’164 The use of Thomism to justify ongoing discrimination and persecution of Jews relied on a confluence of politics and religion, bringing together nationalism and religious antisemitism. In 1943, Miłosz observed that it was ‘not at all surprising that […] Catholics linked Saint Thomas with ideas taken from fascism’ since the concept of a new Middle Ages promised a new socio-political order to be firmly grounded in a Catholic worldview.165 By 1961, he explicitly wrote of his ‘hatred of the Thomists,’ whom he considered to be ‘usually totalitarians’.166 Miłosz’s rejection of antisemitic rhetoric was informed by his early experiences. Born in 1911, he was only a teenager when antisemitic violence started to spread across East-Central Europe. In 1921, when he was ten years old, his family moved to Wilno (present-day Vilnius), a city that—as Miłosz later remembered—was ‘to a significant degree […] a Jewish city’ with ‘a robust Jewish cultural center with traditions’.167 What he observed in Wilno was a strict separation between the Jewish and non-­ Jewish residents of the city—‘they spoke and wrote in different languages’, Jews opting for Yiddish and Hebrew, non-Jews for Polish and Lithuanian.168 With hindsight, Miłosz remarks that he ‘knew nothing about the history of the Jews in Poland and Lithuanian, about their religious thought, Jewish mysticism, Cabala. Only much later, in America, did I begin learning about them’.169 It was when he lived in Wilno that Miłosz saw antisemitic violence first-hand, and as a young boy, was about to participate in it. As he reminisces later in Native Realm: In our city, people called May 1st the ‘Jewish holiday.’ There was a big parade with banners and flags. And indeed in the crowd, which represented various species of the Left, young Jewish people were predominant. […] I have the scene before me now: spring sun shining into our classroom windows, sparrows chirping, the first of May. Our French teacher […] looks at me suspiciously. He beckons me to him with his finger. I go up to his table, my hair is unkempt, I am twelve years old. ‘What do you have there?’ Sticking out of

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my pocket are the forks of a slingshot. ‘What are you going to do with that?’ I try to give my voice a hard, masculine ring, ‘Beat Jews.’ He narrows his eyes in a cold reflex as if he were looking at an animal. I feel hot, I feel as if I had turned beet-red. He confiscates the weapon.170

When confronted by the teacher, Miłosz realised that he had internalised some of the antisemitic stereotypes that he had heard during his uncle’s ‘political harangues at the dinner table’.171 While he had Jewish school friends, young Miłosz did not make an immediate connection between them and the Jews against whom he intended to use violence—the Jew to be targeted was ‘an abstraction, a creature without a face, a fusion of concepts bearing a minus sign’.172 Miłosz’s humiliation by the teacher proved to be a life-changing lesson. As a student at Stefan Batory University in Wilno, Miłosz was involved in organising events aimed to build bridges across different ethnic communities. As a consequence, he and his friends ‘were dubbed “Jewish lackeys”’.173 After the Poetry of Protest evening that they hosted on 5 February 1933, bringing together young Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Belarusian, and Jewish poets, they were attacked by supporters of National Democracy.174 Looking back at those years, Miłosz later remarked: The political climate was ugly. Since the turn of the century, a division into two camps characterized the political life in Poland: liberals and socialists on one side and the nationalists on the other; but in the late thirties the second camp seemed to encounter no open resistance. Its chauvinism, its anti-­ Semitism, its fanning of hatred for other nationalities led to acts of violence, particularly at the universities, where gangs of students would attack their Jewish colleagues. The press was full of inflammatory articles directed against presumed conspiracies of Jews and Freemasons.175

The violent incidents were becoming more frequent in the late 1930s, and—as Andrzej  Franaszek remarks—the ‘anti-Semitic zeal of the right had the effect of crystallising views among the left-leaning young in Wilno, who were very conscious of the increasing persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany’.176 When World War 2 broke out, Miłosz together with his brother, Andrzej Miłosz, and fellow writers, Jerzy Andrzejewski and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, contributed to the rescue efforts. Andrzej Miłosz, who received military training as a member of Polish resistance, ‘established a

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transit point for Jews escaping from the Wilno ghetto to the Rudnicka Forests’.177 The escapees were assisted by Czesław Miłosz, who found safe hiding places for them in Warsaw.178 The outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943, which was brutally quenched by the SS troops, threw into sharp relief the horror of the Jewish tragedy. Miłosz later reminisced: In the spring of 1943, on a beautiful quiet night, a country night in the Warsaw suburbs, standing on the balcony, we heard screams from the ghetto. […] Those screams made our blood run cold. It was the scream of thousands of people being murdered. It travelled through the silent city spaces from under the red glow of fire, beneath the indifferent stars, in this tender quietude of the gardens in which plants industriously produced oxygen, the air was fragrant, and one could feel that it was good to be alive. There was something particularly cruel in this serenity of the night, in which beauty and human crime simultaneously struck our hearts. We didn’t look into each other’s eyes.179

Miłosz’s position as a witness to the unspeakable crimes committed against Jews, along with a reflection on the solitude of those who were being murdered, and the guilt associated with his situatedness as a Christian bystander, became recurrent themes in his poetry and prose writings.180 In the 1943 poems ‘Campo dei Fiori’ and ‘A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto’ (‘Biedny chrześcijanin patrzy na getto’), he explores those issues with immediate urgency, drawing attention to the stance of Christian witnesses to the ongoing extermination of Jews.181 In ‘A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto,’ the speaker emphasises his fear of the ‘guardian mole’ (l. 22) who resembled an Old Testament patriarch as he digs through the ruins of the ghetto and ‘touches buried bodies, counts them’ (l. 17). The speaker is terrified of the moment of reckoning, sensing that he will be pronounced guilty: What will I tell him, I, a Jew of the New Testament, Waiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus? My broken body will deliver me to his sight And he will count me among the helpers of death: The uncircumcised. (l. 26–30)

The overwhelming guilt experienced by the speaker is linked not only to personal responsibility, but also to a collective failure of Christians

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who—while ‘[w]aiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus’—provided, in the words of the Anglican campaigner for Jewish-­ Christian dialogue James Parkes, ‘a fertile breeding ground for every kind of antisemitic misrepresentation’.182

‘I criticise Pure Form out of love’: Miłosz Reads Henri Bremond and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz While in his wartime re-evaluation of theological modernism and neo-­ Thomism Miłosz questioned the value of their philosophical and political legacy, he remained interested in the aesthetic propositions they put forward. The ‘pure poetry’ debate started by Henri Bremond in France in 1925, drew the attention of Polish critics in the late 1920s, turning the 1930s into the period of intense debates on poetic theory.183 Miłosz himself became familiar with Bremond’s work in the early 1930s, and in 1938 he joined the critical debate by publishing an essay on the ‘The Lie of Contemporary “Poetry”’ (‘Kłamstwo dzisiejszej “poezji”’).184 In his polemical piece, Miłosz takes a strong stance against ‘pure poetry’, which he understands as poetry excessively focused on the formal elements, aiming to create powerful rhythmic and sound effects, which he sees as an ‘unproductive entertainment’.185 He emphasises that one cannot ‘detach art from its proper foundation, from the sphere of metaphysical and ethical concepts’.186 Poets should demonstrate that they can be visionaries and display ‘some gift of prophecy’ to deserve that name. Miłosz’s understanding of ‘pure poetry’ was informed by Paul Valéry’s and Stéphane Mallarmé’s strong focus on the form, which he disagreed with, rather than Bremond’s view of poetry as a semi-mystical activity.187 He claims that it is pointless to devote time to metaphors, similes, expressions, and sounds if one does not have a vision to convey. A poem, according to him, is not an experience but a form of communication. Miłosz’s arguments were refuted by the critics Gustaw Herling-­ Grudziński and Jan Aleksander Król. The latter claimed that Miłosz leashed out on ‘pure poetry’ because this has become a fashionable thing to do in literary circles. He criticised Miłosz for not offering any analytical arguments that would support his points.188 Herling-Grudziński, on the other hand, focused on Miłosz’s critique of the metaphor. He argued that it is precisely through the use of metaphors that poets create their visions, and hence the focus on the metaphor is not an abuse of poetry.

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Herling-­Grudziński argues that contemporary poetry can be considered ‘pure poetry’ because the world it creates is pure—it is a separate world ‘pure in its shape and content’, that gives us insight into the poet’s world, with metaphor being its starting point.189 In his response to the two critics, Miłosz published the article ‘A Defence of Things Unacknowledged’ (‘Obrona rzeczy nieuznanych,’ 1938), referencing Maritain’s Frontières de la poésie, which he considered to provide a new way to conceptualise the nature and role of art.190 He pointed to Maritain’s argument that there are boundaries that art ought to observe, which are circumscribed by its duty towards people and the need to respect the basic principles of art, which require it to be readable and accessible. If those boundaries are not respected, Miłosz argues, quoting Maritain, art will tend towards purity, committing the ‘sin of angelism’. Miłosz’s critique of ‘pure poetry’ and his recourse to Maritain signal a period of deeper engagement with neo-Thomist aesthetics. Maritain’s influence on Miłosz’s thinking about art becomes evident in other essays that he penned in 1938. In the article ‘On Silence’ (‘O milczeniu’), Miłosz comments on what he had diagnosed as contemporary poets’ desire to experience ‘a flash of revelation’, to arrive at ‘metaphysical knowledge’, which with the passing of time turns into deeper and deeper ‘insatiability’.191 He points out that some readers seek answers in art, refusing to understand that ‘a work of art is not a mass during which their hands could complete the mystery’s transubstantiation into bread and wine’.192 While Miłosz welcomes renewed interest in the spiritual, he underlines that art is only one of the domains of human activity, and it does not offer a direct access to any mystical revelation. Following in the footsteps of Maritain, he again refers to the two sins of art: the ‘sin of angelism’ and the ‘sin of materialism’—the former is committed by the worshippers of ‘pure art’ who do not do justice to the abundance of the material world; the latter by copying the material world and becoming complicit in its evil and cruelty.193 Art, he argues, should take heed of these two extremes and recognise its own limitations. Ironically, another of Miłosz’s essays on the nature of artistic creation published in 1938 brought about accusations that he himself had committed the ‘sin of angelism’, which he spoke against in such strong terms. The title of the essay, ‘Coming down to earth’ (‘Zejście na ziemię’), aptly encapsulates Miłosz’s description of the process of poetic creation. He uses the idea of coming down to earth as the conceptual figure that

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illustrates the phenomenon of writing poetry. Referring to the religious and literary examples of Buddha, Greek heroes, Christ, and Adam Mickiewicz, the essay suggests that the mythico-religious act of coming down to earth best captures Miłosz’s own experience of leaving the world of youthful ideals to become a member of modern society, to observe and learn more about humanity. What he finds on earth as a poet, however, is rather dire. He describes the people he encounters as a nameless crowd, ‘a dough that submitted to the loudspeakers of propaganda’:194 An undifferentiated human mass, a substance from which insidious hands cut out, according to their will, the most monstrous patterns, and millions repeating only one word, the name of the state they reside in, their race, the name of their leader or some other call, picked randomly from an encyclopaedia, and becoming intoxicated with it, as if it was heavenly food.195

The language of propaganda and political discourse used by authoritarian leaders has contributed to what Miłosz refers to as ‘pagan beliefs’ that find fulfilment in ‘nationalist and communist totalisms’.196 As he claims, to be a poet in this specific historical context means either to suppress the individual self and become part of the mass, accepting the dominant ideology, or—which Miłosz opts for—to hope to remain a ‘radiant entity’ by focusing on individual personalities in the crowd.197 The way Miłosz describes the poet—as a kind of prophet who enters the human crowd to break through the poisonous political discourse and to remind people of the forgotten religious truths—draws closely on Bremond’s ideal of a poet who experiences a mystical vision, but refrains from pure contemplation to come down to earth and share it with others.198 For Miłosz, the act of ‘coming down to earth’ in the late 1930s, when politics firmly encroached on the literary and cultural production, was a ‘bitter’ and painful experience.199 The article he penned became subject to much critique. The critic Ignacy Fik accused him of committing the ‘sin of angelism’ and returning to the Romantic cliché of the poet who is superior to the ignorant masses and whose vocation is to enlighten them. He points to the inconsistency in Miłosz’s endorsement of Maritain’s thought, on the one hand, and his claiming the status of a visionary poet for himself, on the other. Describing Miłosz’s ‘angelic prophetism’ as destructive, he views it as an example of ‘abusing the demagogic slogans of depth, waiting for miracles and inspirations, remaining detached from the earth’.200 Fik situates Miłosz’s poetic manifesto alongside Bremond’s work,

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demonstrating that Miłosz views the poet as a bearer of (in Miłosz’s words) a ‘divine birthmark’.201 Fik dismisses Miłosz’s ‘religiosity’ as ‘snobbism’ and accuses him of attempting to jump on the fashionable bandwagon of ‘neo-Catholicism’.202 The outbreak of World War 2 did not bring an end to these heated debates. Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Miłosz’s poetic mentor, lectured on Bremond and ‘pure poetry’ during the underground cycle of classes delivered in occupied Warsaw in 1942 to a young audience that included Miłosz, Andrzejewski, and Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński.203 The poet and critic Jan Lechoń, who went into exile to New York, explored the concept of ‘pure poetry’ and its presence in the Polish poetic tradition in a lengthy essay published in 1946.204 Lechoń professed admiration for Bremond’s theory, arguing that ‘[t]he concept of “pure poetry”, defined and introduced into the literary debates by Father Bremond, is certainly the closest to a synthesis of all new theories, [as] it conveys both the formal and the moral dimension of the issue’.205 Miłosz also returned to Bremond’s reflections on aesthetics and religion in several essays he penned in the early 1940s. In his letter-essays to Andrzejewski, Miłosz explores the aesthetic consequences of the process that he and Andrzejewski diagnosed as the ‘dematerialisation of the absolute’.206 According to Miłosz, the changes taking place in the religious imagination of modern society have a significant impact on contemporary art and writing, which he characterises by ‘a great blossoming of, if not metaphysical, then at least mystical interests’.207 Those new interests, Miłosz points out, inform the new thinking about the nature and role of poetry and visual arts: Bremond charmingly, though vaguely and deceptively, defends “pure poetry” as a mystical revelation related to prayer. Here in Poland, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz constructs a theory of art as “the sense of the Strangeness of Existence,” stemming from metaphysical insatiability. […] We can […] see in them a shared aspiration to be liberated from the constraints imposed by so often maligned common sense, a hunt for the mysterious core of human existence, which is unknowable and alien to consciousness.208

The painter and playwright Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939), whom Miłosz compares to Bremond, developed his theory of ‘Pure Form’ in the late 1910s and early 1920s.209 He argued that realism should be rejected as it reproduces dead forms and styles, asserting that ‘[i]n our time, the highest art, in which the condition of modern man is expressed

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indirectly, without hypocrisy, must of necessity be complicated, or as the case may be, artificially simplified, artistically perverse, disturbing’.210 Witkiewicz put forward the concept of ‘Pure Form’, which he defined as an artistic form that acts directly on the audience, reader, or viewer, evoking a ‘metaphysical feeling’ of unity in multiplicity, which brings about ‘aesthetic satisfaction’.211 Pure Form in poetic texts depends on the blending of sound, image, and semantic elements, ‘thus giving new, mixed elements, the structuring of which is Pure Form in poetry’.212 Witkiewicz argues that it is specifically ‘the formal construction that directly arouses metaphysical feeling’.213 Discussing ‘Pure Form’ in the theatre, he emphasises that while the specificity of the material used is not relevant, ‘the social significance of the theatre could be infinitely enhanced if it ceased being a place for taking a fresh look at life, for teaching and for expounding “views,” and instead became a true temple for experiencing pure metaphysical feelings’.214 For Witkiewicz, realist art that aims to portray life as it is and didactic art that provides moral instruction are irrelevant for the modern age as they are formally underdeveloped. He argues that true ‘Art acts as a kind of narcotic whose effect is to evoke […] metaphysical feeling through a grasp of formal constructions’.215 Such art attempts to counteract the ongoing industrialisation and technologization that impoverish human lives. ‘The revival of Pure Form’, he claims, is ‘a final desperate effort [that] opposes the tide of grayness and mechanization flooding the world’.216 This effort requires bold new forms, which means that critics who reject, for example, Cubist experimentation, according to Witkiewicz, fail to understand that ‘the expansion of compositional possibilities can be achieved only by means of certain deviations from now-­hackneyed forms that realism caused to degenerate’.217 Ultimately, he argues that while realistic art is always imitative, art that shows a tendency towards Pure Form ‘is something absolute, autonomous,’ which evokes metaphysical feelings in the viewer or reader, allowing them to experience the ‘mystery of existence’.218 According to Miłosz’s reading of Bremond and Witkiewicz in 1942–1943, they both are ‘seeking understanding for the needs that images of heaven, hell, and purgatory no longer satisfy’.219 Their theories provide a metaphysical substitute for the lost religious imagination by offering a vision of art that reaches the boundary of intelligible knowledge and can penetrate beyond it. They suggest that art makes transcendence possible because ‘inspiration is a form of ecstasy enabling union with the very root of being’.220 ‘Perhaps I, too, believed in this a little’, admits Miłosz in his fifth letter-essay to Andrzejewski, but he adds that he now

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endorses a view ‘that art does not rise to any heights that are inaccessible to thought’ and that ‘[t]here is a boundary that one must not cross if one does not want to taste disillusionment and repugnance’.221 In his essay ‘The Boundaries of Art’ (‘Granice sztuki,’ 1943), Miłosz further explores the parallels between Witkiewicz’s theory of ‘Pure Form’ and Bremond’s ‘pure poetry’. He argues that ‘Bremond’s ineffable is nothing other than Witkiewicz’s Pure Form’ and that they both ‘stand at the edge of mystery’.222 Miłosz brings the two thinkers together, demonstrating that they both argue that ‘[t]he silence toward which the excellent, maximally tense weight of poetry aims is the ultimate insatiability by form that marks the boundary of art’.223 Reflecting on the two theories and other similar tendencies in contemporary thought, Miłosz puts forward a diagnosis that links such reflections to the ongoing changes in religious sensibility, proposing that ‘the so-called liberation of art from the subject is intimately connected with the dying out of religion, at least with certain aspects of it, in particular with the metaphysical-dogmatic aspects’.224 Referencing Maritain, Miłosz points out that the issue with such an understanding of art is that even though it ‘becomes a religion of the laity’, it is incapable of providing the spiritual nourishment that believers used to receive from religion.225 He further argues that to reach absolute purity would mean to fall silent, which would put an end to all art. This critique, however, is qualified by quite a surprising statement: If I seem to stand in opposition to the element that Bremond called the ineffable, that is only illusory. Actually, I criticize Pure Form out of love, because although one is pining for paradise, one may refuse oneself permission to return, if that return would only result in corruption. There is danger in a programmatic recognition of Pure Form as the root of art. […] There are mechanisms in culture so delicate that when one points one’s finger at them, they immediately change into something else because of the excessively strained attention focused on them.226

The danger that Miłosz highlights is what Bremond refers to as the ‘ineffability’ of pure poetry. According to Miłosz, it cannot be turned into the foundation of art precisely because it is a characteristic so subtle and elusive that it cannot provide a framework to define all artistic creation. The conclusion that Miłosz arrives at in ‘The Boundaries of Art’ is that ‘art exists between two extremes’: on the one hand, ‘it is threatened by a freedom purchased at the cost of renouncing its influence on human relations,

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as can be seen in the proponents of “pure poetry,” “pure form,” and “art for art’s sake,”’ and on the other hand, ‘it is threatened by enslavement to social ideas’, as testified by the insistence of Marxist critics that art should be subordinate to ideological goals.227 Miłosz’s poem ‘The Sun’ (‘Słońce’, 1943) is perhaps one of his most significant poetic reflections on the question of ‘pure poetry’.228 The poem closes the cycle ‘The World’ (subtitled ‘Naïve Poems’; ‘Świat. Poema naiwne’), which is Miłosz’s wartime response to William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, forming part of the volume Rescue. As he later recalled, while the poems included in ‘The World’ might seem deceptively simple, ‘they are really a metaphysical tract, an equivalent, in colors and shapes, of the school blackboard on the Rue d’Assas where Father Lallemant [sic] drew his Thomistic circles’.229 The classes in Thomist philosophy that Miłosz attended in Paris, as he later recalled, where a kind of therapy in the course of which he tried to ‘understand what a joyful acceptance of the world might look like’.230 ‘The Sun’, as the closing poem of the cycle, provides a meditation on both a neo-scholastic view of the world and its aesthetic implications, including an implicit critique of ‘pure poetry’. The first stanza of the poem employs the image of the sun as God the Creator (Deus Artifex), describing his relationship to the creation in the following words: ‘the whole Earth is like a poem / While the sun above represents the artist’ (l. 3–4). God the Artist—portrayed as the sun—shines above the created world. The opening lines emphasise the createdness of the world of senses: ‘All colors come from the sun. And it does not have / Any particular color, for it contains them all’ (l. 1–2). The image of God as the sun in which all is contained and all originates comes directly from the scholastic manuals of Thomas Aquinas, where it is employed to emphasise divine perfection. In Summa Theologica, Aquinas argues that the sun ‘while remaining one and shining uniformly, contains within itself first and uniformly the substances of sensible things, and many and diverse qualities’.231 In the same way, God should be thought of as the cause of all things that contains their perfection: ‘things diverse and in themselves opposed to each other, pre-exist in God as one, without injury to His simplicity’.232 Aquinas references Dionysius the Areopagite, who argued that every created thing ‘possesses in its own way a share in the same single sun’ and the one sun ‘contains beforehand in itself under the form of an unity the causes of all the things that participate in it’.233 Through these intertextual references to scholastic theology, the stanza establishes a relationship between the Creator, who is simple and perfect

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in himself, and his work, which is diverse and of many ‘colors’ but shares in his perfection by virtue of the sun ‘renewing, nourishing, guarding, and perfecting’ the created things, ‘warming them and making them fruitful, causing them to grow […] and giving them life’.234 With the relationship between the divine Creator and the created world established in the first stanza, the second continues to reflect on the position of a human artist and his work: Whoever wants to paint the variegated world Let him never look straight up at the sun Or he will lose the memory of things he has seen. Only burning tears will stay in his eyes. (l. 5–8)

An attempt to look ‘straight up at the sun’—to look God in the face—will lead to a painful encounter with light that is unbearable to human eyes. It can both blind one’s vision and erase one’s memories of the visible world, confining the artist to eternal darkness. The possibility of looking ‘straight up at the sun’ and of creating an artwork that will reflect the sun’s qualities is, of course, akin to entering a mystical state and recording one’s experience of it in the form of ‘pure poetry’. Miłosz’s lines allude here to Maritain’s critique of ‘pure poetry’, in particular his objection to art that aims at ‘freeing itself in effect from all its conditions of existence in the human subject’.235 Maritain asserts that ‘just as a plant, though lacking knowledge, directs its stem towards the sun, the artist, however sordid his life, is oriented in the direction of subsisting Beauty, whose sweetness the saints enjoy in a light inaccessible to art and reason’.236 The act of looking straight up at the sun is possible for saints but not for artists, because the beauty that art expresses, in Maritain’s view, ‘is seized in the sensible and through the sensible, and not separately from it’.237 This is precisely the admonition given to the artist in the final stanza of ‘The Sun’: ‘Let him kneel down, lower his face to the grass, / And look at the light reflected by the ground’ (l. 9–10). The role of artists, the poem suggests, is to explore the world around them and look at the created matter as a reflection of the light coming from above. They ought to use their senses and focus on their immediate conditions of existence rather than attempt to reach transcendence or achieve mystical visions. The price to pay for the latter is to ignore the created world and life that takes place around them. For Maritain, poetry ought to focus specifically on a close engagement with the created world.

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In fact, he defines poetry as the ‘divination of the spiritual in the things of sense, and which expresses itself in the things of sense’.238 According to Maritain, the value of conceptualising poetry, and art in general, in this way is to draw attention to their rootedness in the sensible, and thus, to help artists avoid the ‘sin of angelism’.239 At the same time, he emphasises that the sensible is not the limit of art—through the sensible, art reaches towards the spiritual. ‘The artist, whether he knows it or not,’ Maritain claims, ‘consults God in looking at things.’240 Likewise, the final lines of ‘The Sun’ affirm the possibilities open to the artist who engages with the world of senses: ‘There he will find everything we have lost: / The stars and the roses, the dusks and the dawns’ (l. 11–12). The restored connection to the beauty present in the natural world can help one reclaim, however briefly, the lost paradise. The affirmation of that beauty in art, Maritain remarks, ‘delight[s] the spirit’, making it believe ‘that paradise is not lost’.241 Artistic beauty thus conceived ‘has the savor of the terrestrial paradise, because it restores, for a moment, the peace and the simultaneous delight of the intellect and the senses’.242 Miłosz’s affirmative poetic meditation on the nature of art and the role of the artist developed in ‘The Sun’ and clearly inspired by Maritain’s neo-­ scholastic aesthetics closes the cycle ‘The World: Naïve Poems’. The date and time of composition that accompany the poem—Warsaw 1943, the year of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which claimed the lives of c. 35,000 Jews killed by the German SS  troops—offer a subtle indication that the neo-Thomist affirmation of the world that the poem advocates ought to be put into question. This way of glorifying the Creator by finding beauty in the created world would be difficult, if not impossible, to practice in a wartime reality. The poem ‘The Poor Poet’ from the cycle ‘Voices of Poor People’—Miłosz’s ironic wartime response to Songs of Experience—revisits the framework put forward in ‘The Sun’, providing a much bleaker corrective to it.243 The poem is a dramatic monologue uttered by a ‘poor poet’ who reflects on the role and nature of his writings. Opening with an affirmative acclamation—‘The first movement is singing, / A free voice, filling mountains and valleys. / The first movement is joy’ (l. 1–3)—the poem soon assumes an ominous note as the poet’s joy ‘is taken away’ (l. 4). His engagement with the world—in which, according to the neo-­Thomist dictum, he relies on his reason and senses to find the spiritual in the created world—is shaped by ‘the glow of fires, massacres, / Only injustice, humiliation, and the laughable shame of braggarts’ (l. 22–3). These wartime experiences change the poet from a joyful person who was curious

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of the world into ‘a sly and angry poet / With malevolently squinted eyes’ (l. 7–8) who ‘plot[s] revenge’ (l. 10). The poet’s anger and disillusionment with the reality surrounding him, and the omnipresent pain and suffering brought about by the war, trigger a reflection on the role of poetry in the world that is hurting: I poise the pen and it puts forth twigs and leaves, it is covered with blossoms And the scent of that tree is impudent, for there, on the real earth, Such trees do not grow, and like an insult To suffering humanity is the scent of that tree. (l. 11–14)

The poet’s revenge on the world that had promised to offer beauty which would restore ‘peace’ and ‘delight’ (Maritain), but instead presents him with ‘fires’, ‘massacres’ and ‘humiliation’ is to create a reality of the utmost beauty. Through his writing, which he sees as ‘an insult’ to those who suffer, the poet challenges the ‘real earth’, which cannot possibly compete with his ‘impudent’ creations. Not only does the poet not see any trace of the spiritual in the world that surrounds him, but he issues a direct challenge to the concept of poetry as a ‘divination of the spiritual in the things of sense’ (Maritain). On the contrary, his poetry shows people a world out of reach—a space of idealised beauty that has little in common with their painful day-to-day existence in a war-stricken reality. While the poet rejects the neo-Thomist affirmation of the world, he does not endorse other communal responses to the war. He distances himself from those who ‘take refuge in despair, which is sweet / Like strong tobacco’ (l. 15–6) as well as from ‘the hope of fools, rosy as erotic dreams’ (l. 17). He has little in common with people who ‘find peace in the idolatry of country’ (l. 18) and chooses instead ‘a cynical hope’ (l. 21). As he explains, it is ‘the hope of revenge on others and on myself’ (l. 24). His poetry, while full of beauty—perhaps even touching on ‘pure poetry’— brings relief neither to him nor to others. On the contrary, he hopes that the purity of his creations will become the instrument of his revenge, allowing him to inflict pain on the reality that had caused his suffering and deprived him of the joy he used to experience. In this way, the poem poses several questions relating to the role and status of art in time of war. If Maritain’s view of poetry as a ‘divination of the spiritual in the things of sense’ is outdated, and if Bremond’s ‘pure poetry’ paradigm seems too detached and, perhaps, cruel to practice during the war, how should poets

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conceptualise their task and in what ways should they engage with the war-­ torn world? During the war, Miłosz’s ongoing reflections on the nature of poetry and its social role, while building on both Bremond’s and Maritain’s writings—as illustrated by the poems ‘The Sun’ and ‘The Poor Poet’ as well as his essays—centred on the present historical moment and its significance for the future of art. As he later recalled, the war prompted him to re-­ evaluate contemporary poetry and explore poetry’s ‘new and vital patterns’.244 ‘From the stress of daily tragedy for millions of human beings’, Miłosz reflected, ‘the word had burst and fallen to pieces. All the previous forms had become meaningless.’245 According to him, in the liminal situation brought about by the war and occupation, although the poetic forms had to be re-examined, the ‘schism between the poet and the great human family’ disappeared.246 Miłosz’s re-assessment of the existing poetic forms was intimately linked to the translation projects that he undertook during the war. The most important of them was his anthology of English and American poetry, which, as Franaszek points out, was ‘a political gesture’ and ‘an attempt on Miłosz’s part to re-orient Polish culture away from its strong traditional ties with France towards the Anglo-Saxon countries’.247 Miłosz taught himself English in Nazi-occupied Warsaw and, working as a janitor at the National Library, spent much time acquainting himself with English language poetry.248 The anthology that he had planned included selected poems by John Milton, William Blake, and William Wordsworth. He also translated Shakespeare’s As You Like It and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.249 The texts that he worked with provided him not only with new ways of thinking about poetic verse, but also a framework in which to think through his wartime experiences. As he remarked, The Waste Land ‘made somewhat weird reading as the glow from the burning ghetto illuminated the city skyline’, while Paradise Lost’s ‘cosmic visions responded to […] key experiences’ of his and his contemporaries’.250 Eliot’s Collected Poems was the volume that Miłosz held on to when the Warsaw Uprising broke out on 1 August 1944: ‘Heavy fire broke loose at our every leap, nailing us to the potato fields. In spite of this I never let go of my book— first of all out of respect for social ownership, since the book bore a call number of the University Library; secondly I needed it (although I could stop needing it)’.251 It was in particular poems of apocalyptic visions and eschatological dimensions that appealed to Miłosz as a translator.252 Eliot’s verse seemed to have made a deep impression on Miłosz, as in the summer of 1945, when Margaret Storm Jameson, president of the British branch

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of PEN International, visited Kraków, Eliot was the poet that he was particularly keen to discuss with her. She later recalled their meeting in the following words: [D]uring the Occupation, when to be caught with an English book cost either a concentration camp or a quicker death in one of the bi-weekly executions, he taught himself English to be able to read our poets, and translated The Waste Land, finishing it, with a fine sense of justice, the day the Rising started. […] He was saying that he respected Eliot as a great poet, and the one poet of our time who fused two realities, the sensuous and the metaphysical—which may be what a modern poet must do if he is to tell even part of the truth about an age which contains Picasso, Proust, and the Auschwitz gas chambers. Not that he had any impulse to imitate Eliot. On the contrary.253

Miłosz asked Jameson to pass to Eliot a letter in which he informed him of his completed translation of The Waste Land and requested Eliot’s permission to publish it, which Eliot granted him in a letter of 5 October 1945.254 As the wartime experiences shaped Miłosz’s understanding of the social and ethical role of poetry, his engagement with Eliot and other English language poets inspired his reflections on poetry and poetics. In the 1946 essay ‘A Semi-Private Letter About Poetry’, which was a response to the critic Kazimierz Wyka’s review of his volume Rescue, Miłosz asserted that the ‘main problem with contemporary poetry is […] a detachment from reality caused by remaining inside the chalk circle of rigidly defined ways of reacting to the world’.255 He argued against adopting the well-worn forms of Romanticism and indulging in ‘patriotic themes’.256 As an antidote to that he saw the poetic forms developed by T.  S. Eliot and W. H. Auden and the devices of poetic irony and dramatic monologue, which allow the poet to assume different voices while not identifying with any of them. At the same time, however, Miłosz is also wary of what he views as contemporary poetry’s excessive preoccupation with the processes of perception, cognition, and intellectual dissection, at the price of forsaking a deeper engagement with the world. The contemporary poet, he complains, has turned into ‘a creature with a head covered with mathematical lumps, with exceptionally large lenses for its eyes, and suffering from atrophy of the heart and liver’.257 The poetry that this creature produces ‘depends on noting down intellectual impressions’ since ‘intellect

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fulfils the role of an engineer of impressions’ and ‘a certain degree of insensitivity helps one keep one’s calm and balance’.258 In this kind of well-­balanced writing, Miłosz suggests, there is little room ‘for a panorama including people, animals, the rising and setting of the sun’.259 The final exchange on ‘pure poetry’ that Miłosz participated in took form of a polemic with the writer Witold Gombrowicz on the pages of the Paris-based journal Kultura in the early 1950s. The debate was triggered by Gombrowicz’s essay ‘Against Poets’ (‘Przeciw poetom’), originally delivered as a talk in 1947 in Buenos Aires.260 In this text, Gombrowicz, in a typically ironic way, reacted against what he dubbed the ‘cult of poetry’, which he saw as ‘one of the rare ceremonies which we have left’.261 He boldly stated that ‘[e]ven though we have come to doubt practically everything, we still venerate the cult of Poetry and Poets and this is the only deity which we are not ashamed to worship with great pomp, deep bows, and inflated voice’.262 Focusing in particular on what he refers to as the ‘pharmaceutical extract called “pure poetry”’, he criticises it for being excessively conventional and conformist.263 Using the term ‘pure poetry’, Gombrowicz does not reference Bremond, but Valéry, and focuses on the purity of poetic form and material: Why didn’t I like the taste of pure poetry? Why? Wasn’t it for the very same reasons that I didn’t like the sugar in a pure state? Sugar is good for sweetening coffee, but not for eating by the spoonful like gruel. In pure, rhymed poetry, the excess wearies; the excess of poetry, poetic words, metaphors, sublimations, finally, the excess of condensation and purification of all antipoetic elements, which results in poems similar to chemical products.264

Gombrowicz suggests that the language of ‘pure poetry’, which he later conflates with rhymed verse, has become too ‘ritualistic’ and helpless ‘in the face of reality’.265 He uses religious imagery to emphasise the parallels between appreciating poetry and participating in religious worship. ‘Of all artists’, he argues, ‘poets are people who fall to their knees most persistently—they pray most fervently—they are priests par excellence and ex professio, and Poetry in this understanding simply becomes celebration’.266 He argues that by turning poetry into celebration and ritual, poets sacrifice its authenticity and their creativity. They participate in a ritual that is forced on others (readers), mindlessly glorifying the convention. If considered in the context of the debates on theology and poetry discussed in Chap. 4, Gombrowicz’s reflection leads to an interesting paradox. While

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theologians and religious thinkers such as Bremond, B. H. Streeter, and Evelyn Underhill looked to poetry to renew the language of theology, Gombrowicz points out that poetry has already become as ritualised and formulaic as religion itself.267 The article generated a number of responses, including Miłosz’s ‘Letter to Gombrowicz’ (‘List do Gombrowicza,’ 1951).268 While Miłosz agreed with Gombrowicz on a number of points, he insisted on differentiating between pure poetry and poetic verse. He points out: Not all ‘poetic verse’ is ‘pure poetry’ in the twentieth-century meaning of ‘purity’, i.e. in the sense of meals prepared with sugar only, with some addition of honey at the most. ‘Pure poetry’ is one of mental aberrations. […] true ‘magic’ happens only when the author uses rhythm and images as a means to say something and not an end in itself.269

Miłosz’s understanding of ‘pure poetry’ centres on something ‘ineffable’ that takes place on the level of sound, image, or poetic technique, but restricts what can be said to the reader. He expresses his reservations about ‘pure poetry’, insisting that the poet should have a chance to communicate matters of importance without being constrained by formal considerations. At the same time, reflecting on the literary debates of the 1930s, he notes that while ‘pure poetry’ had been legitimately attacked in Warsaw in the interwar years, its rejection paved the way for ideologically inflected literature that is meant to serve the state. Thus, while writers and critics strove to design a new poetic language to describe the wartime and postwar reality, that language has now been tainted by the use it has been put to in communist-controlled Poland. Critical of the socialist realist aesthetic propagated by the communist leaders across the Soviet Bloc, Miłosz argues that an attempt to turn away from ‘pure poetry’ led to a situation in which ‘the baby was thrown out with the bathwater’.270 For Miłosz, who defected from the Polish People’s Republic in 1951, artistic freedom and the role of poetry as a means of questioning reality and communicating with readers remained of prime importance. In the article ‘No’ (‘Nie,’ 1951), published in Paris-based Kultura, he rejected socialist realism as an aesthetic that restricts what can be said by ‘defining how the writer is supposed to observe [the world], how he is expected to select from his observations, and what kind of conclusions he is to arrive at’.271 As Łukasz Tischner points out, the postwar reality ‘deepened the poet’s sense of the threat of historical evil, which now gave all the signs of

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becoming an enduring reality’, and prompted him to refuse to submit his freedom as a writer.272 In The Captive Mind, published in 1953, Miłosz analyses the political ideology of the Polish People’s Republic, arguing that communism filled in the vacuum left empty by the gradual withering of religious and philosophical thinking. He builds on Witkiewicz’s theory that links ‘Pure Form’ with the ongoing secularisation of Western culture. ‘As long as a society’s best minds were occupied by theological questions, it was possible to speak of a given religion as the way of thinking of the whole organism. All the matters which most actively concerned the people were referred to it and discussed in its terms’, Miłosz summarises Witkiewicz’s main thesis.273 While ‘the rightist totalitarian program was exceptionally poor’, providing only ‘collective warmth’, communism ‘lays scientific foundations’ and provides a well-developed worldview with its own ‘language of ideas’, which Miłosz refers to as ‘the New Faith’.274 This New Faith could triumph precisely because religion and metaphysics were already undergoing an existential crisis. Describing communism as a new religion, Miłosz identifies the key point of its programme as ‘the development of a new man’.275 He compares the process of admission into the Communist Party to an ‘entrance into a religious order’, which ‘the literature of the New Faith treats […] with a gravity equal to that with which Catholic literature speaks of the vows of young nuns’.276 The ambitious goal of the transformation of humankind requires art and literature that will support the specific vision of reality. The ‘Party too is a church’, argues Miłosz, ‘“Club” ceremonies, poetry, novels, films are so important because they reach deeper into the stratum on which the emotional conflict rages’.277 Under such historical circumstances, the ethical and aesthetic duties of poets and artists are greater than ever. As Miłosz later remarked in his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, ‘when an entire community is struck by misfortune, […] “the schism between the poet and the great human family” disappears and poetry becomes as essential as bread’.278

Conclusion In his 1965 essay on T. S. Eliot, Miłosz argued that while Eliot was an ‘intellectual’ poet, his poetics ‘demanded more and more “purity”’, which led to a development of a ‘metalanguage’ that ‘precluded various types of description and discourse’.279 According to Miłosz, ‘the dimensions of

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[Eliot’s] poetic compositions kept shrinking, until finally not the stanza, but a single line, was the locus of tension and brilliance’.280 Miłosz saw Eliot as a poet of metaphysical ‘insatiability’—a term he borrowed from Witkiewicz’s writings on the Theatre of Pure Form.281 ‘Despite the fact that [Witkiewicz’s] understanding moved along different tracks’, Miłosz argued, ‘both he and Eliot share the central motif of “insatiability”’ as Witkiewicz’s plays can be considered ‘contemporary morality plays, whose hero is Everyman, deprived, however, of both heaven and hell, and condemned to Limbo’.282 Miłosz points out that Eliot’s poetic and Witkiewicz’s dramatic works both look back at the time when ‘the religious imagination shaped the cosmos without stumbling over obstacles placed there by discursive thought’ and when the system of Thomas Aquinas provided a stable and reliable frame of reference.283 In the twentieth century, he argues, religious imagination does not fulfil that vital role any more; its function drastically limited and deprived of its earlier prominence. Miłosz thus sees Eliot’s oeuvre as ‘an attempt at learning that the imagination, and also religious poetry, can regain its privileges’, which is ‘an almost unbelievable undertaking’.284 In his ‘Reflections on T. S. Eliot,’ Miłosz ascribes to Eliot’s work qualities that his own poetry had been debated to display. The theory of ‘pure poetry’ and the neo-Thomist aesthetics of Maritain provided Miłosz with a set of questions that he continued to explore in his prose and poetic works. In his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1981–1982, drawing on the work of his cousin Oskar Miłosz, he defined poetry as ‘a passionate pursuit of the Real’.285 This pursuit, as Miłosz’s writings from the late 1930s and 1940s show, at times consists in maintaining a sceptical distance and putting into question systems of thought that did not live up to their promises, aligning themselves with the nationalist and fascist ideologies, and promoting antisemitic rhetoric. Reflecting back on what happened during World War 2, Miłosz observes that ‘[t]he main reproach made to culture, a reproach at first too difficult to be formulated, then finally formulated, was that it maintained a network of meanings and symbols as a façade to hide the genocide under way. By the same token, religion, philosophy, and art became suspect as accomplices in deceiving man with lofty ideas, in order to veil the truth of existence.’286

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Notes 1. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Letter to Thomas Merton, 30 May 1961,’ in Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czesław Miłosz, ed. Robert Faggen (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 117. 2. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Letter to Thomas Merton, 21 May 1959,’ in Striving Towards Being, 30–31. 3. Aleksander Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czesław Miłosz, trans. Theodosia S. Robertson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Jerzy Szymik, Problem teologicznego wymiaru dzieła literackiego Czesława Miłosza (Katowice: Księgarnia św. Jacka, 1996); Charles S.  Kraszewski, Irresolute Heresiarch: Catholicism, Gnosticism and Paganism in the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012); Łukasz Tischner, Miłosz and the Problem of Evil, trans. Stanley Bill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015); Joanna Zach, Biologia i teodycea: Homo poeticus Czesława Miłosza (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2017); Karina Jarzyńska, Literatura jako ćwiczenie duchowe: Dzieło Czesława Miłosza w perspektywie postsekularnej (Kraków: Universitas, 2018). 4. Andrzej Franaszek, Miłosz: A Biography, trans. Aleksandra and Michael Parker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). 5. Czesław Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, trans. Catherine S. Leach (London: Penguin Classics, 2014), 70. 6. Ibid., 77. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 77–8. 9. Ibid., 79. 10. Roman Archutowski, Historja Koscioła ́ katolickiego w zarysie, 9th edn (Warszawa: Ksia ̨żnica, 1928), 268. 11. Ibid., 275. 12. Miłosz, Native Realm, 73. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 86. 15. Ibid. 16. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Beyond Truth and Falsehood,’ in Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942–1943, trans. Madeline G. Levine (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005), 65. 17. Miłosz, Native Realm, 88. 18. Quoted in Magdalena Bauchrowicz-Kłodzińska, ‘Ksia ̨dz Ch. w cieniu apokaliptycznych znaków: Sensy i symbole poetyckiej wizji eschatologicznej Czesława Miłosza,’ Pamiętnik literacki 4 (2014): 27, note 11.

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19. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Do księdza Ch.’ and ‘Ksia ̨dz Ch, po latach’, in Wiersze wszystkie, 2nd edn (Kraków: Znak, 2015), 103–4 and 866–70. The latter was published in English as ‘Father Ch., Many Years Later’, in Czesław Miłosz, New and Collected Poems 1931–2001, trans. Czesław Miłosz, Robert Hass et al. (London: Penguin, 2001), 436–40. 20. Miłosz, ‘Do księdza Ch.’, lines 2–3. My translation. 21. See Chap. 2: ‘A Theological History of Modernism.’ Zdziechowski’s correspondence is part of the Collection of Marian Zdziechowski (Marijanas Zdziechovskis), Vilnius University Library, F33. See also Marian Rogalski, Producenci margaryny?: Marian Zdziechowski i polski modernizm katolicki (Kraków: Universitas, 2018). 22. Marian Zdziechowski, Pestis perniciosissima: Rzecz o współczesnych kierunkach mys ́li katolickiej (Warszawa: E. Wende i Spółka, 1905), published in German as Pestis perniciosissima: Ein Beitrag zur Charakteristik der modernen Strömungen im Katholizismus (Wien: Karl Gerolds Sohn, 1905). 23. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Zdziechowski’s Religiosity,’ in Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942–1943, trans. Madeline D. Levine (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005), 88–108; ‘Ziemia jest miejscem doskonałej ekstazy’ (beginning of an autobiographical novel), typescript, c. 1956, The Czesław Miłosz Papers (GEN MSS 661), Beinecke Library, Yale University, b. 119, f. 1805; ‘Zdziechowski’ and ‘Do Pani Profesor w obronie honoru kota i nie tylko,’ in Wiersze wszystkie, 1204–6 and 1115–6 (the English translation of ‘Zdziechowski’ is included in New and Collected Poems, 714–7). 24. See Joanna Zach, Biologia i teodycea: Homo poeticus Czesława Miłosza (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2017). 25. Miłosz, Native Realm, 77. 26. Ibid. 27. See also Łukasz Tischner, Miłosz and the Problem of Evil, trans. Stanley Bill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015). 28. Friedrich von Hügel, ‘Letter to Marian Zdziechowski, 27 April 1905,’ The Collection of Marian Zdziechowski (Marijanas Zdziechovskis), Vilnius University Library, F33-452. 29. Zdziechowski, Pestis perniciosissima: Rzecz o współczesnych kierunkach mys ́li katolickiej, 78. 30. Ibid., 14. 31. Marian Zdziechowski, Pesymizm, romantyzm a podstawy chrzes ć ijaństwa, 2 vols (Kraków: Drukarnia Czasu, 1915); O okrucieństwie (Kraków: Krakowska Spółka Wydawnicza, 1928). See also Jan Skoczyński, Pesymizm filozoficzny Mariana Zdziechowskiego (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im.

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Ossolińskich, 1983) and Wartos ć ́ pesymizmu: Studia i szkice o Marianie Zdziechowskim (Kraków: Uniwersytet Jagielloński, 1994). 32. Zdziechowski, Pesymizm, vol. 1, xiii. 33. George Tyrrell, Lex Credendi (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906), 127. 34. Zdziechowski, Pesymizm, vol. 1, xiii. 35. John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, ed. Ian Ker (London: Penguin Classics, 1994), 218; quoted in Zdziechowski, Pesymizm, vol. 1, xiii. 36. Zdziechowski, Pesymizm, vol. 2, 143. 37. Zdziechowski, O okrucieństwie, 8. 38. Ibid., 48. 39. Ibid., 55. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 60. 42. Zdziechowski, Pesymizm, vol. 2, 370–1. 43. Ibid., 372. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 382. 46. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Pieśń Levallois,’ in Wiersze wszystkie, 159–160. All quotations are from the English translation: ‘Ballad of Levallois,’ trans. by the author and Robert Hass, in New and Collected Poems, 25–6. 47. See also Marek Zaleski, ‘Miłosz: piosenki niewinności i doświadczenia,’ Teksty Drugie 7/8 (1991): 81–95. 48. Franaszek, 179–224. 49. Czesław Miłosz, ‘The Experience of War,’ in Legends of Modernity, 80. 50. Ibid. 51. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Zdziechowski’s Religiosity,’ in Legends of Modernity, 95–6. 52. Ibid., 97. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 99. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 107. 57. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Rzeka,’ in Wiersze wszystkie, 176–7. My translation. 58. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Równina,’ in Wiersze wszystkie, 181–2. My translation. 59. See also Stefan Chwin, ‘“Dachau koników polnych”: Miłosz i “uka ̨szenie darwinowskie,”’ in Miłosz: Interpretacje i s w ́ iadectwa (Gdańsk: Tytuł, 2012), 13–55. 60. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Podróż’ and ‘Baśń Wigilijna,’ in Wiersze wszystkie, 185–190 and 191. My translation. 61. Zdziechowski, Pesymizm, vol. 1, xiii.

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62. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Bulion z gwoździ,’ in Przygody młodego umysłu: Publicystyka i proza 1931–1939, ed. Agnieszka Stawiarska (Kraków: Znak, 2003), 31–2. 63. Ibid., 33. 64. Ibid., 34. 65. Czesław Miłosz, Człowiek ws ŕ ód skorpionów: studium o Stanisławie Brzozowskim (Paryż: Instytut Literacki, 1962). 66. Piotr H.  Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and ‘Revolution,’ 1891–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 80. 67. See Andrzej Walicki, Stanislaw Brzozowski and the Polish Beginnings of ‘Western Marxism’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) and Stanisław Brzozowski and the Migration of Ideas: Transnational Perspectives on the Intellectual Field in Twentieth-Century Poland and Beyond, ed. Jens Herlth and Edward M. Świderski (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2019). 68. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Przypis po latach,’ in Człowiek ws ŕ ód skorpionów: Studium o Stanisławie Brzozowskim (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2011), 28. 69. V. I. Lenin, ‘Party Organization and Party Literature,’ in Collected Works, vol. 10, trans. Andrew Rothstein (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, [1960]), 45–6. 70. Stanisław Brzozowski, Idee: Wstęp do filozofii dojrzałos ć i dziejowej (Lwów: Księgarnia polska B. Połonieckiego, 1910), 466. 71. Czesław Miłosz, ‘List do obrońców kultury,’ in Przygody młodego umysłu, 148. 72. Brzozowski, Idee, 154–5. 73. Ibid., 163. 74. Ibid., 156. 75. Ibid., 493. See also James G. Hart, ‘Blondel and Husserl: A Continuation of the Conversation,’ Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 58, no. 3 (1996): 490–518. 76. Brzozowski, Idee, 164. 77. Ibid., 207. 78. Ibid., 466. See also Tadeusz Lewandowski, ‘Młodopolskie spotkania z modernizmem katolickim,’ in Problematyka religijna w literaturze pozytywizmu i Młodej Polski, ed. Stanisław Fita (Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, 1993), 197–252. 79. Brzozowski, Idee, 360. 80. Ibid., 233. 81. Ibid., 147. 82. Ibid., 151. 83. Stanisław Brzozowski, ‘John Henry Newman (przedmowa tłumacza),’ in J.  H. Newman, Przys w ́ iadczenia wiary, trans. Stanisław Brzozowski (Lwów: Księgarnia polska B. Połonieckiego, 1915), 16.

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84. Brzozowski, Idee, 477. 85. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Obowia ̨zek,’ in W cieniu totalitaryzmów, 669. 86. Ibid., 669–70. 87. Max Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (Hamden: Archon Books, 1972), 80. See also Edward Baring, Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 116–147. 88. Stanisław Brzozowski, Legenda Młodej Polski: Studja o strukturze duszy kulturalnej (Lwów: Księgarnia polska B.  Połonieckiego, 1910), 97. Emphasis in the original. 89. Ibid., 98. 90. Ibid., 98–9. 91. Ibid. 92. Brzozowski, Idee, 483. 93. Brzozowski, Legenda, 544. 94. Brzozowski, Idee, 484. 95. Ibid., 338. 96. Ibid. 97. Miłosz, Człowiek ws ŕ ód skorpionów, 106. 98. Czesław Miłosz, ‘A Semi-Private Letter About Poetry,’ trans. Madeline G. Levine, in To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essay, ed. Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline G.  Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 340. 99. Ibid., 343, 350. 100. Ibid., 350. 101. Ibid. 102. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Przedmowa,’ in Wiersze wszystkie, 155. All quotations are from the English translation: ‘Dedication,’ trans. by the author, in New and Collected Poems, 77. 103. Czesław Miłosz, ‘W Warszawie,’ in Wiersze wszystkie, 239–40. All quotations are from the English translation: ‘In Warsaw,’ trans. by the author, Robert Hass, and Madeline Levine, in New and Collected Poems, 75–6. 104. Czesław Miłosz and Jerzy Andrzejewski, ‘Letter Essays of Jerzy Andrzejewski and Czesław Miłosz,’ in Legends of Modernity, 149–257. 105. Ibid., 150–151. 106. Ibid., 152. 107. Ibid., 155, 157. 108. Ibid., 203. 109. Ibid., 204. 110. Ibid., 205–206. 111. Ibid., 205.

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112. Ibid., 205. 113. Ibid. 114. Ibid., 228. 115. Miłosz, ‘Zdziechowski’s Religiosity,’ 99. 116. See Chap. 6, 291–302. 117. Miłosz, ‘Zdziechowski’s Religiosity,’ 100. 118. Ibid., 98–99. 119. Ibid., 183. 120. Andrzejewski and Miłosz, ‘Letter Essays,’ 237. 121. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Absolute Freedom,’ 54–5. 122. Ibid., 61. 123. Andrzejewski and Miłosz, ‘Letter Essays,’ 205. 124. Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades, 21–61. See also Elżbieta Przybył-­ Sadowska, Triuno: instytucje we wspólnocie Lasek, 1911–1961 (Kraków: Libron, 2015). 125. Kosicki, 39–40. 126. Ibid., 49. 127. Ibid., 46. 128. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Siena,’ Verbum 4, no. 3 (1937): 553–554. 129. Quoted in  Paul R.  Caldwell, Yves Congar, O.P.: Ecumenicist of the Twentieth Century and the Theologian of Vatican II, PhD thesis, (Marquette University, 2012), 37 and 43, note 82. 130. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Niedziela w Brunnen,’ Kultura 3, no. 77 (1954): 44. Emphasis in the original. 131. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Aux chiottes les meteques,’ in Przygody młodego umysłu, 97–100. 132. Elżbieta Kiślak, ‘Rue d’Assas i ulica Wolność. Miłosz i środowisko “Verbum,”’ in Warszawa Miłosza, ed. Marek Zaleski (Warszawa: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2013), 136–155. 133. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Jaka ̨ najciekawsza ̨ ksia ̨żkę przeczytałem w roku 1937? Ankieta,’ in Przygody młodego umysłu, 197–8. 134. Ibid., 197. 135. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Letter to Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, 11 December 1930,’ in Czesław Miłosz and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Portret podwójny, ed. Barbara Toruńczyk and Robert Papieski (Warszawa: Fundacja Zeszytów Literackich, 2011), 12. 136. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Letter to Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, 3 February 1931,’ in Portret podwójny, 25. 137. Miłosz, ‘Zdziechowski’s Religiosity,’ 103–104. 138. Ibid., 104. 139. Ibid., 104–105.

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140. Ibid., 107. 141. Andrzejewski and Miłosz, ‘Letter Essays,’ 206. 142. Ibid., 254. 143. Ibid., 192. 144. Ibid., 168. 145. Ibid., 193. 146. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Na pewna ̨ ksia ̨żkę,’ in Wiersze wszystkie, 224–6. My translation. 147. Bogdan Suchodolski, Skąd i dokąd idziemy? przewodnik po zagadnieniach kultury współczesnej (Wilno [Warszawa]: Inst. Wydawniczy [Tow. Wydawnicze Załoga] 1939 [1943]), 42. 148. See Brian Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity and Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 158–207. For a discussion of Dmowski’s politics, see Andres Kossert, ‘Founding Father of Modern Poland and Nationalistic Antisemite: Roman Dmowski,’ in In the Shadow of Hitler: Personalities of the Right in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Rebecca Haynes and Martyn Rady (London: I.  B. Tauris, 2011), 89–104. For parallels between Dmowski and Maurras, see Kosicki, 26–29. 149. Roman Dmowski, Kos ć iół, naród i państwo (Warszawa: Obóz Wielkiej Polski, 1927), 30. 150. Ibid., 7. 151. Kazimierz Kowalski, ‘Tomizm warunkiem odrodzenia,’ Prąd 23 (1932): 112–131; Teresa Landy, ‘Dlaczego św. Tomasz?,’ Prąd 19 (1930): 301–309; I. M. Bocheński, ‘O racjonalizmie i irracjonalizmie katolickim,’ Verbum 2 (1936): 251–270. 152. Landy, ‘Dlaczego św. Tomasz?,’ 309. 153. Kosicki, 60. See also Ronald Modras, ‘The Catholic Press in Interwar Poland and the “Jewish Question”: Metaphor and the Developing Rhetoric of Exclusion,’ East European Jewish Affairs 24, no. 1 (1994): 49–69; 154. Quoted in Kosicki, p. 45. 155. See also Chap. 3, Sect. ‘A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question’, 109–121. 156. Adam Doboszyński, Gospodarka narodowa, 2nd edn (Warszawa: Skład główny, 1936), 9. 157. Ibid., 10. 158. Ibid., 310. 159. Paweł Tomasik, ‘Wyprawa myślenicka 23 czerwca 1936 roku,’ Kwartalnik Historyczny 96, no. 3/4 (1989): 139–159. 160. Simon Deploige, Saint Thomas et la question juive (Louvain: Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1897).

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161. Anna Danuta Drużbacka, Moralne oblicze kwestii żydowskiej w s ́wietle nauki s ́w. Tomasza z Akwinu (Katowice: Księgarnia i Drukarnia Katolicka, 1937). 162. See Porter-Szűcs, 272–327. 163. Modras, 184. 164. Czesław Miłosz, Miłosz’s ABC, trans. Madeline G.  Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 217. 165. Miłosz, ‘Zdziechowski’s Religiosity,’ 103–104. 166. Milosz, ‘Letter to Thomas Merton, 5 October 1961,’ in Striving Towards Being, 133. 167. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Dialogue about Wilno with Tomas Venclova,’ in Beginning with my Streets, 35–6. 168. Ibid., 35. 169. Ibid., 36. 170. Miłosz, Native Realm, 95–6. 171. Ibid., 96. 172. Ibid. 173. Franaszek, 88. 174. Ibid. 175. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Foreword,’ in Aleksander Hertz, The Jews in Polish Culture, trans. Richard Lourie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), ix. See also Czesław Miłosz, ‘Jews—The 1920s,’ trans. Agnieszka Marczyk, in Against Anti-Semitism: An Anthology of Twentieth-­ Century Polish Writings, ed. Adam Michnik and Agnieszka Marczyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3–30. 176. Franaszek, 89. 177. Ibid., 186. 178. In 1987, in recognition of their rescue efforts, Czesław and Andrzej Miłosz received the title of the Righteous among the Nations, awarded by the Yad Vashem Institute in Israel. 179. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Na skraju Warszawy,’ in W cieniu totalitaryzmów, 106–7. 180. See also Marek Bernacki, ‘Problematyka żydowska w twórczości Czesława Miłosza—rekonesans,’ Konteksty Kultury 10, no. 1–2 (2013): 116–125. 181. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Campo di Fiori’ and ‘Biedny chrześcijanin patrzy na getto,’ in Wiersze wszystkie, 204–6 and 223–4; ‘Campo dei Fiori,’ trans. Louis Iribarne and David Brooks, and ‘A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto,’ trans. by the author, in New and Collected Poems, 33–5 and 63–4. All quotations are from the English edition. 182. James Parkes, An Enemy of the People: Antisemitism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945), 143–4. See Chap. 3, 109–121.

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183. Henri Bremond and Robert Souza, La poésie pure avec un débat sur la poésie (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1926); Henri Bremond, Prière et poésie (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1926); published in English as Henri Bremond, Prayer and Poetry: A Contribution to Poetical Theory, trans. Algar Thorold (London: Burns, Oats & Washbourne, 1927). See also Peter J. Gorday, Pure Love, Pure Poetry, Pure Prayer: The Life and Work of Henri Bremond (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2018). For a detailed discussion, see Chap. 4, 165–178. 184. Miłosz, ‘Kłamstwo dzisiejszej “poezji,”’ in Przygody młodego umysłu, 233–241. See also Marek Zaleski, ‘O “grzechu anielstwa,” czyli historia pewnego nieporozumienia,’ Teksty 4–5 (1981): 77–92. 185. Ibid., 233. 186. Ibid., 239. 187. When he was in Paris, Miłosz attended a talk by Paul Valéry. It inspired his later poem ‘Odczyt,’ in Wiersze wszystkie, 1051–3. It was translated into English as ‘A Lecture,’ by the author and Robert Hass, in New and Collected Poems, 580–2. 188. Jan Aleksander Król, ‘Przeciw wyrażaniu siebie,’ in Przygody młodego umysłu, 361. 189. Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, ‘Obrona metafory (Poprawki do artykułu Czesława Miłosza),’ Przygody młodego umysłu, 356. 190. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Obrona rzeczy nieuznanych,’ in Przygody młodego umysłu, 246. 191. Czesław Miłosz, ‘O milczeniu,’ in Przygody młodego umysłu, 201. 192. Ibid., 203. 193. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Zejście na ziemię,’ in Przygody młodego umysłu, 206. 194. Ibid., 219. 195. Ibid., 220. 196. Ibid. 197. Ibid., 224. 198. See Chap. 4, 165–178. 199. Ibid., 223. 200. Ignacy Fik, ‘Grzech anielstwa: Na przykładzie Czesława Miłosza,’ in Przygody młodego umysłu, 378. 201. Miłosz, ‘Zejście na ziemię,’ 224. 202. Fik, ‘Grzech anielstwa,’ 378. 203. Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Dzienniki 1911–1955, ed. Agnieszka i Robert Papiescy (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 2010), 185–6. 204. Jan Lechoń, ‘Poezja czysta w poezji polskiej’ in O literaturze polskiej (New York: Wydawnictwo “Tygodnika Polskiego”, 1946), 106–126. 205. Ibid., 108. 206. Miłosz and Andrzejewski, ‘Letter Essays,’ 196.

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207. Ibid., 208. 208. Ibid., 209. 209. S. I. Witkiewicz, ‘On Pure Form’, trans. Catherine S. Leach, in Aesthetics in Twentieth Century Poland, ed. J.  G. Harrel and A.  Wierzbiańska (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1973), 41–65; and S. I. Witkiewicz, ‘Pure Form in the Theatre,’ trans. D.  C. Gerould, in The Witkiewicz Reader, trans. and ed. D.  C. Gerould (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 147–152. See also Christine Kiebuzinska, ‘Witkacy’s Theory of Pure Form: Change, Dissolution, and Uncertainty,’ South Atlantic Review 58, no. 4 (1993): 59–83. 210. Witkiewicz, ‘On Pure Form,’ 55. 211. Ibid., 54, 56. 212. Ibid., 52. 213. Witkiewicz, ‘Pure Form in the Theatre,’ 148. 214. Ibid. 215. Ibid., 149. 216. Ibid. 217. Ibid. 218. Ibid., 152. 219. Miłosz and Andrzejewski, ‘Letter Essays,’ 209–210. 220. Ibid., 210. 221. Ibid., 210, 206. 222. Czesław Miłosz, ‘The Boundaries of Art,’ in Legends of Modernity, 131. 223. Ibid., 131. 224. Ibid. 225. Ibid., 132. 226. Ibid., 135. Emphasis in the original. 227. Ibid., 142. 228. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Słońce,’ in Wiersze wszystkie, 217. All quotations are from the English translation: ‘The Sun,’ trans. by the author and Robert Hass, in New and Collected Poems, 55. 229. Miłosz, Native Realm, 248. 230. Miłosz, ‘Niedziela w Brunnen,’ 44. 231. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, rev. Daniel J. Sullivan, vol. 1, First Part, (London: William Benton, 1923), I, Question 4, Article 2, Reply to Objection 1, 22. 232. Ibid. 233. Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology, trans. C. E. Rolt (London: SPCK, 1920), Chapter V, 8, 140. 234. Ibid.

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235. Jacques Maritain, ‘The Frontiers of Poetry,’ in Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry, trans. Joseph W. Evans (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), 122. 236. Jacques Maritain, ‘Art and Scholasticism,’ in Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry, 80. 237. Ibid., 25. Emphasis in the original. 238. Maritain, ‘Frontiers of Poetry’, 128. 239. After the war, in a letter sent on 4 January 1947, Miłosz thanked Maritain for his writings, adding that they helped him overcome ‘the sin of angelism’ in his own poetry. The Czesław Miłosz Papers, GEN MSS 661, Beinecke Library, Harvard University, b. 42, f. 612. 240. Maritain, ‘Art and Scholasticism,’ 61. 241. Ibid., 24. 242. Ibid. 243. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Biedny poeta,’ in Wiersze wszystkie, 220–1. All quotations are from the English translation: ‘The Poor Poet,’ trans. by the author, in New and Collected Poems, 59–60. 244. Miłosz, Native Realm, 237. 245. Ibid., 237–8. 246. Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1981–82 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 31. 247. Franaszek, 233. 248. Miłosz, Native Realm, 235–6. 249. See Czesław Miłosz, Przekłady poetyckie wszystkie, ed. Magda Heydel (Kraków: Znak, 2015). 250. Miłoesz, Native Realm, 238; Kontynenty (Kraków: Znak, 1999), 16. 251. Miłosz, Native Realm, 249. 252. Czesław Miłosz, ‘A few words on the adventures of T. S. Eliot in my part of Europe…,’ The Czesław Miłosz Papers, GEN MSS 661, Beinecke Library, Yale University, b. 126, f. 1991. See also Magda Heydel, ‘“Somewhat Weird Reading”: Czesław Miłosz and T.  S. Eliot,’ in International Reception of T. S. Eliot, ed. Elisabeth Däumer and Shyamal Bagchee (London: Continuum, 2007), 226–42. 253. Margaret Storm Jameson, Journey from the North, vol. 2 (London: Collins and Harvill, 1970), 159–161. 254. The letters are part of the T.  S. Eliot Collection, Faber & Faber Archive, London. 255. Miłosz, ‘A Semi-Private Letter About Poetry’, 339. 256. Ibid., 341. 257. Ibid., 340. 258. Ibid., 340–341.

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259. Ibid., 339. 260. Witold Gombrowicz, ‘Przeciw poetom,’ Kultura 10/48 (1951): 3–11. Translated into English as ‘Against Poets,’ in Witold Gombrowicz, Diary, trans. Lillian Vallee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 264–273. 261. Gombrowicz, ‘Against Poets,’ 264. 262. Ibid. 263. Ibid. 264. Ibid., 266. 265. Ibid., 269–270. 266. Ibid., 267. 267. See also Michał Głowiński, ‘Gombrowiczowska diatryba,’ Pamiętnik literacki 91, no. 4 (2000): 63–81. 268. Czesław Miłosz, ‘List do Gombrowicza,’ Kultura 11/49 (1951): 119–124. 269. Ibid., 120. 270. Ibid., 123. For Gombrowicz’s response, see Witold Gombrowicz, ‘Przeklęte zdrobnienie znowu dało mi się we znaki (Obrońcom poetów w odpowiedzi),’ Kultura 7/57 and 8/58 (1952): 32–8. See also Czesław Miłosz, ‘Pięćdziesia ̨t lat później,’ in Witold Gombrowicz, Przeciw poetom. Dialog o poezji z Czesławem Miłoszem, introduction Francesco M. Cataluccio (Kraków: Znak, 1995), 69–98. 271. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Nie,’ Kultura 5 (1951): 7. 272. Tischner, 89. 273. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (London: Penguin, 2001), 7. 274. Ibid., 8. Emphasis in the original. 275. Ibid., 75. 276. Ibid., 75. 277. Ibid., 207. 278. Czesław Miłosz, Witness of Poetry: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1981–82 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 31. 279. Miłosz, ‘Reflections on T. S. Eliot,’ in To Begin Where I Am, 390. 280. Ibid. 281. Ibid., 392. 282. Ibid., 395. 283. Ibid., 398. 284. Ibid. 285. Miłosz, Witness of Poetry, 25. See also Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz, ‘A Few Words on Poetry,’ in The Noble Traveller, ed. Christopher Bamford (West Stockbridge, MA: Lindisfarne Press, 1985), 414. 286. Ibid, 81.

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Bibliography Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, revised by Daniel J. Sullivan, vol. 1, First Part. London: William Benton, 1923. Archutowski, Roman. Historja Kos ́cioła katolickiego w zarysie, 9th edn. Warszawa: Ksia ̨żnica, 1928. Areopagite, Dionysius. On the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology. Translated by C. E. Rolt. London: SPCK, 1920. Baring, Edward. Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Bauchrowicz-Kłodzińska, Magdalena. ‘Ksia ̨dz Ch. w cieniu apokaliptycznych znaków: Sensy i symbole poetyckiej wizji eschatologicznej Czesława Miłosza.’ Pamiętnik literacki 4 (2014): 25–40. Bernacki, Marek. ‘Problematyka żydowska w twórczości Czesława Miłosza— rekonesans.’ Konteksty Kultury 10, no. 1–2 (2013): 116–125. Bremond, Henri, and Robert Souza. La poésie pure avec un débat sur la poésie. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1926. Bremond, Henri. Prayer and Poetry: A Contribution to Poetical Theory. Translated by Algar Thorold. London: Burns, Oats & Washbourne, 1927. Bremond, Henri. Prière et poésie. Paris: Grasset, 1926. Brzozowski, Stanisław. Idee: Wstęp do filozofii dojrzałoscí dziejowej. Lwów: Księgarnia polska B. Połonieckiego, 1910a. Brzozowski, Stanisław. Legenda Młodej Polski: Studja o strukturze duszy kulturalnej. Lwów: Księgarnia polska B. Połonieckiego, 1910b. Caldwell, Paul R. Yves Congar, O.P.: Ecumenicist of the Twentieth Century and the Theologian of Vatican II, PhD thesis. Marquette University, 2012. Chwin, Stefan. Miłosz: Interpretacje i s w ́ iadectwa. Gdańsk: Tytuł, 2012. Deploige, Simon. Saint Thomas et la question juive. Louvain: Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1897. Drużbacka, Anna Danuta. Moralne oblicze kwestii żydowskiej w s w ́ ietle nauki s w ́ . Tomasza z Akwinu. Katowice: Księgarnia i Drukarnia Katolicka, 1937. Fiut, Aleksander. The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czesław Miłosz. Translated by Theodosia S. Robertson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Franaszek, Andrzej. Miłosz: A Biography. Translated by Aleksandra and Michael Parker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Głowiński, Michał. ‘Gombrowiczowska diatryba.’ Pamiętnik literacki 91, no. 4 (2000): 63–81. Gombrowicz, Witold. ‘Against Poets.’ In Diary. Translated by Lillian Vallee, 264–273. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Gombrowicz, Witold. ‘Przeciw poetom.’ Kultura 10, no. 48 (1951): 3–11.

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Gombrowicz, Witold. ‘Przeklęte zdrobnienie znowu dało mi się we znaki (Obrońcom poetów w odpowiedzi).’ Kultura 7/57–8/58 (1952): 32–8. Gorday, Peter J. Pure Love, Pure Poetry, Pure Prayer: The Life and Work of Henri Bremond. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2018. Hart, James G. ‘Blondel and Husserl: A Continuation of the Conversation.’ Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 58, no. 3 (1996): 490–518. Herlth, Jens, and Edward M. Świderski, eds. Stanisław Brzozowski and the Migration of Ideas: Transnational Perspectives on the Intellectual Field in Twentieth-Century Poland and Beyond. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2019. Heydel, Magda. ‘“Somewhat Weird Reading”: Czesław Miłosz and T. S. Eliot.’ In International Reception of T. S. Eliot, edited by Elisabeth Däumer and Shyamal Bagchee, 226–42. London: Continuum, 2007. Hügel, Friedrich von. ‘Letter to Marian Zdziechowski, 27 April 1905.’ The Collection of Marian Zdziechowski (Marijanas Zdziechovskis), Vilnius University Library, F33-452. Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław. Dzienniki 1911–1955, edited by Agnieszka i Robert Papiescy. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 2010. Jarzyńska, Karina. Literatura jako ćwiczenie duchowe: Dzieło Czesława Miłosza w perspektywie postsekularnej. Kraków: Universitas, 2018. Kiebuzinska, Christine. ‘Witkacy’s Theory of Pure Form: Change, Dissolution, and Uncertainty.’ South Atlantic Review 58, no. 4 (1993): 59–83. Kiślak, Elżbieta. ‘Rue d’Assas i ulica Wolność. Miłosz i środowisko “Verbum.”’ In Warszawa Miłosza, edited by Marek Zaleski, 136–155. Warszawa: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2013. Kosicki, Piotr H. Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and ‘Revolution,’ 1891–1956. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Kossert, Andres. ‘Founding Father of Modern Poland and Nationalistic Antisemite: Roman Dmowski.’ In In the Shadow of Hitler: Personalities of the Right in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Rebecca Haynes and Martyn Rady, 89–104. London: I. B. Tauris, 2011. Kraszewski, Charles S. Irresolute Heresiarch: Catholicism, Gnosticism and Paganism in the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012. Lechoń, Jan. O literaturze polskiej. New  York: Wydawnictwo “Tygodnika Polskiego”, 1946. Lenin, V. I. ‘Party Organization and Party Literature.’ Collected Works, vol. 10. Translated by Andrew Rothstein, 44–49. Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, [1960]. Lewandowski, Tadeusz. ‘Młodopolskie spotkania z modernizmem katolickim.’ In Problematyka religijna w literaturze pozytywizmu i Młodej Polski, edited by Stanisław Fita, 197–252. Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, 1993. Maritain, Jacques. Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry. Translated by Joseph W. Evans. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974.

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Milosz, Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz. ‘A Few Words on Poetry.’ Translated by John Peck. In The Noble Traveller, edited by Christopher Bamford, 414–418. West Stockbridge, MA: Lindisfarne Press, 1985. Miłosz, Czesław, and Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław. Portret podwójny, edited by Barbara Toruńczyk and Robert Papieski. Warszawa: Fundacja Zeszytów Literackich, 2011. Miłosz, Czesław. ‘Foreword.’ In Aleksander Hertz, The Jews in Polish Culture. Translated by Richard Lourie, ix–xi. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Miłosz, Czesław. ‘Jews—The 1920s.’ Translated by Agnieszka Marczyk. In Against Anti-Semitism: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Polish Writings, edited by Adam Michnik and Agnieszka Marczyk, 3–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Miłosz, Czesław. ‘Nie.’ Kultura 5 (1951): 3–13. Miłosz, Czesław. ‘Niedziela w Brunnen.’ Kultura 3/77 (1954): 40–51. Miłosz, Czesław. ‘Pięćdziesia ̨t lat później.’ In Witold Gombrowicz, Przeciw poetom. Dialog o poezji z Czesławem Miłoszem, introduction Francesco M. Cataluccio, 69–98. Kraków: Znak, 1995. Miłosz, Czesław. Człowiek ws ́ród skorpionów: studium o Stanisławie Brzozowskim. Paryż: Instytut Literacki, 1962. Miłosz, Czesław. Kontynenty. Kraków: Znak, 1999. Miłosz, Czesław. Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942–1943. Translated by Madeline G.  Levine. New  York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005. Miłosz, Czesław. Miłosz’s ABC. Translated by Madeline G.  Levine. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Miłosz, Czesław. Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition. Translated by Catherine S. Leach. London: Penguin Classics, 2014. Miłosz, Czesław. New and Collected Poems 1931–2001. Translated by Czesław Miłosz, Robert Hass et al. London: Penguin, 2001a. Miłosz, Czesław. Przekłady poetyckie wszystkie, edited by Magda Heydel. Kraków: Znak, 2015a. Miłosz, Czesław. Przygody młodego umysłu: Publicystyka i proza 1931–1939, edited by Agnieszka Stawiarska. Kraków: Znak, 2003. Miłosz, Czesław. The Captive Mind. Translated by Jane Zielonko. London: Penguin, 2001b. Miłosz, Czesław. The Witness of Poetry: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1981–82. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Miłosz, Czesław. To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essay, edited by Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline G. Levine. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001c. Miłosz, Czesław. Wiersze wszystkie, 2nd edn. Kraków: Znak, 2015b.

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Modras, Ronald. ‘The Catholic Press in Interwar Poland and the “Jewish Question”: Metaphor and the Developing Rhetoric of Exclusion.’ East European Jewish Affairs 24, no. 1 (1994): 49–69. Newman, John Henry. Apologia pro Vita Sua. Edited by Ian Ker. London: Penguin Classics, 1994. Newman, John Henry. Przys ́wiadczenia wiary. Translated by Stanisław Brzozowski. Lwów: Księgarnia polska B. Połonieckiego, 1915. Parkes, James. An Enemy of the People: Antisemitism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945. Porter-Szűcs, Brian. Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity and Poland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Przybył-Sadowska, Elżbieta. Triuno: instytucje we wspólnocie Lasek, 1911–1961. Kraków: Libron, 2015. Rogalski, Marian. Producenci margaryny?: Marian Zdziechowski i polski modernizm katolicki. Kraków: Universitas, 2018. Scheler, Max. On the Eternal in Man. Translated by Bernard Noble. Hamden: Archon Books, 1972. Skoczyński, Jan. Pesymizm filozoficzny Mariana Zdziechowskiego. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1983. Skoczyński, Jan. Wartosć ́ pesymizmu: Studia i szkice o Marianie Zdziechowskim. Kraków: Uniwersytet Jagielloński, 1994. Storm Jameson, Margaret. Journey from the North, vol. 2. London: Collins and Harvill, 1970. Suchodolski, Bogdan. Ska ̨d i doka ̨d idziemy? przewodnik po zagadnieniach kultury współczesnej. Wilno [Warszawa]: Inst. Wydawniczy [Tow. Wydawnicze Załoga] 1939 [1943]. Szymik, Jerzy. Problem teologicznego wymiaru dzieła literackiego Czesława Miłosza. Katowice: Księgarnia św. Jacka, 1996. The Czesław Miłosz Papers, GEN MSS 661, Beinecke Library, Yale University. The Marian Zdziechowski (Marijanas Zdziechovskis) Collection, F33, Vilnius University Library. Tischner, Łukasz. Miłosz and the Problem of Evil. Translated by Stanley Bill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Tomasik, Paweł. ‘Wyprawa myślenicka 23 czerwca 1936 roku.’ Kwartalnik Historyczny 96, no. 3/4 (1989): 139–159. Tyrrell, George, Lex Credendi. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906. Walicki, Andrzej. Stanislaw Brzozowski and the Polish Beginnings of ‘Western Marxism’. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Witkiewicz, S. I. ‘Pure Form in the Theatre.’ In The Witkiewicz Reader. Translated and edited by D. C. Gerould, 147–152. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992.

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Witkiewicz, S. I. ‘On Pure Form.’ Translated by Catherine S. Leach. In Aesthetics in Twentieth Century Poland, edited by J.  G. Harrel and A.  Wierzbiańska, 41–65. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1973. Zach, Joanna. Biologia i teodycea: Homo poeticus Czesława Miłosza. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2017. Zaleski, Marek. ‘Miłosz: piosenki niewinności i doświadczenia.’ Teksty Drugie 7/8 (1991): 81–95. Zaleski, Marek. ‘O “grzechu anielstwa,” czyli historia pewnego nieporozumienia.’ Teksty 4–5 (1981): 77–92. Zdziechowski, Marian. O okrucieństwie. Kraków: Krakowska Spółka Wydawnicza, 1928. Zdziechowski, Marian. Pestis perniciosissima: Ein Beitrag zur Charakteristik der modernen Strömungen im Katholizismus. Wien: Karl Gerolds Sohn, 1905a. Zdziechowski, Marian. Pestis perniciosissima: Rzecz o współczesnych kierunkach mys ĺ i katolickiej. Warszawa: E. Wende i Spółka, 1905b. Zdziechowski, Marian. Pesymizm, romantyzm a podstawy chrzes ́cijaństwa, 2 vols. Kraków: Drukarnia Czasu, 1915.

CHAPTER 8

Epilogue

Russia, America, and the End of Europe Theological modernism, though hitherto largely neglected by scholars of literary modernism, had a profound impact on the cultural landscape of early-twentieth-century Europe and the United States. The aim of this book has been to re-establish the place of theology within modernist studies and to show that literary responses to contemporary religious controversies were an integral part of the cultural landscape of the early twentieth century. The issues that defined the debates between modernist and neo-­ scholastic thinkers informed contemporary philosophy, cultural criticism, print culture, and literary production. The writings of authors such as Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Czesław Miłosz reveal genuine engagement with the questions that were at the heart of the theological controversies of the time and can be read as literary responses to contemporary theologians’ and philosophers’ attempts to reconcile religion with modernity. What lay at the root of the modernist controversy was a view that the Christian religion was in crisis, and the way to overcome it was to rethink Christianity’s relationship with the modern world. Attempts to provide frameworks through which the relationship between religion and modern culture could be realigned were on top of the agenda of both modernist thinkers, such as George Tyrrell, Friedrich von Hügel, Alfred Loisy, and Marian Zdziechowski, and neo-scholastics such as Jacques Maritain and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Rzepa, Modernism and Theology, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61530-7_8

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Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange. The same questions shaped much of the poetry and prose writings of Rilke, Eliot, and Miłosz. A careful unravelling of the contexts in which they originated challenges the standard perception of cultural and aesthetic modernism as an exceptionally secular movement. Furthermore, the ways in which each poet reconfigured the tension between key terms of the theological debates—including the seemingly binary oppositions between the sacred and the secular; dogma and individual experience; spiritual freedom and authority—were shaped by the ongoing geopolitical developments, including the Russian Revolution, the two World Wars, and the Cold War. In the 1900s, Rilke looked hopefully to Russia as a land that could bring about a religious revival in the West. Renouncing his Catholic upbringing, he endorsed the religiosity that he found in Russia, which provided him with a new ‘direction of the heart’ and a fresh way to conceptualise creativity and its spiritual dimension.1 For Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Russia was the symbol of youthful, fertile, ripening spirituality. The hopes that Rilke, and religious philosophers such as Vladimir Solovyov and Nicolas Berdyaev, attached to Russia and its messianic mission did not come to fruition. After the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, Moscow lost its appeal of the third and ultimate Rome and Russia came to be seen as the land of communist godlessness. For Rilke, the Soviet system stood for the abuse of freedom, which prevents one’s spiritual growth.2 This view of Russia was shared by Christian writers and intellectuals across the political spectrum, from neo-scholastic Maritain and modernist Maude Petre, to conservative Eliot and socialist-leaning Miłosz. Communism came to be seen as a new religion that employs quasi-religious rituals in the service of political ends. In his 1932 talk on ‘Christianity and Communism’, Eliot argued: ‘If you have any doubt that your problems and their solution must bring you to matters of religion, you have only to turn eastward—towards Russia. […] for Russian communism is a religion, and a religion which is not mine.’3 In a similar vein, in The Captive Mind Miłosz wrote of communism as ‘the New Faith’ whose ‘dictatorship over the earth and […] transformation of the human species depend on the success with which it can channel irrational human drives and use them to its own ends’.4 This kind of idiom was by no means a product of Eliot’s or Miłosz’s idiosyncratic thought. Comparisons of both fascism and communism to religious systems were common during and after World War 2 and used widely in anti-Soviet propaganda during the Cold War.5

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On 6 March 1946, a day after the UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, in which he announced that an ‘iron curtain has descended across the continent’, the US President Harry S.  Truman spoke about the ‘forces of evil’ that were at work to destroy religion and democracy across the globe.6 The only way to confront them, he argued, was to ‘call for a moral and spiritual awakening in the life of the individual and in the councils of the world’.7 He argued that ‘it has been truthfully said that the greatest discoveries of the future will be in the realm of the spirit’, asserting that ‘[i]f the civilized world as we know it today is to survive, the gigantic power which man has acquired through atomic energy must be matched by spiritual strength of greater magnitude’.8 This kind of language served to solemnise the confrontation with the Soviet Union and to position the United States as the defender of religion that was not afraid to take a stand against the godless communist regime. Interestingly, Rilke, Eliot, and Miłosz remained sceptical about America’s capacity to bring about a global spiritual revival. Rilke, who had never travelled to the United States, harboured strongly anti-American sentiments. In 1912, he wrote from Spain: Now there is a boundless indifference here, empty churches, forgotten churches, chapels dying of starvation,—really one should no longer sit down at this cleaned-up table and hand out as nourishment the finger bowls that are still standing about. The fruit is sucked dry, so now, to put it crudely, one just spits out the rinds. And then Protestants and American Christians keep making another infusion with these tea dregs that have steeped for two millenniums […].9

What Rilke saw as ‘tea dregs’ that American Christians mistook for the real fruit fits well into the image of America as a land of soulless mechanisation that recurs in his writings. In his view, one of the most serious threats to religion was the ongoing industrialisation and urbanisation. For Rilke, America symbolised capitalism and mass production—the ills of modernity that were systematically killing the human spirit. He considered products of mechanised labour to be devoid of meaning and made only for profit, which led to a growing sense of spiritual alienation in a modern society. In 1925, he complained to his Polish translator Witold Hulewicz:

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Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life… A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a grapevine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers… Live things, things lived and conscient of us, are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last still to have known such things.10

In Rilke’s writings America stood for mass produced culture that instead of enabling one’s spiritual transformation, alienated people from the world surrounding them. Miłosz’s reflections on the US, recorded in 1947–1948 when he worked for the Polish Consulate in New York and then served as a cultural attaché in Washington, DC, were much in line with Rilke’s. Both in his private correspondence and in the accounts he published in the weekly Odrodzenie, he was dismissive of the ‘intellectual apathy’ and spiritual shallowness that he viewed as the defining features of American culture.11 He saw the United States as: A land of many religions and numerous churches, yet completely pagan, because here religion is merely a ritual of social interaction, something in which one is expected to participate, just like one is expected to attend football matches. Religion as charity work, the church as a place where neighbours socialise […]. None of the most scathing European atheists would be able to bring about such a complete destruction of metaphysics.12

Similarly to Rilke, Miłosz puts the blame on technological development and the mechanisation of American life. He contends that the technological revolution ‘broke the spine’ of America, leading to a loss of beliefs, traditions, and feelings.13 Industrialisation promoted practical solutions and pragmatic ways of thinking, discouraging philosophical speculation and religious belief. Miłosz goes as far as to argue that America left Western civilisation and became a ‘technological civilisation’, which—viewed from a European perspective—is without precedent.14 Miłosz’s later American essays, penned in the 1960s, when he was a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, are more nuanced in their evaluation of American culture, but nevertheless repeat the tropes of spiritual alienation and America’s profound denial of religion. The country promotes existence that ‘includes estrangement from oneself and those close to one’, and living in California, Miłosz feels that like others, he

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‘drink[s] the elixir of perfect alienation’ on a daily basis.15 What he refers to as the American way of life is for him a culture of appearances in which ‘the multitude of extremely well organized churches, and their financial power, keeps the situation opaque’.16 For Miłosz, mass media and technology create an environment that is increasingly hostile to intellectual and spiritual development. ‘Every day of my life, with its swarm of perceptions’, he contends, ‘trains me in anti-religion, and I am unable to find any intelligible purpose in gigantic neon signs proclaiming “Jesus saves” in a sinister landscape of concrete coils, crushed scrap iron in automobile graveyards, factories, peeling shacks’.17 Eliot, hailing from St Louis, Missouri, was more positive about religion in America, though he also had his qualms. Discussing Will Herberg’s study Protestant—Catholic—Jew (1955), he praised the author’s informed probing into the meaning behind the increased number of Americans who self-declared as religious. Herberg’s conclusion, which Eliot found compelling enough to present to the All Souls Club in 1960, was that ‘the secularism that permeates the American consciousness is to be found within the churches themselves and is expressed through men and women who are sincerely devoted to religion’.18 In his reflections on Herberg’s thesis, Eliot attempts to draw a ‘cautionary lesson’ from the American situation as he points to Herberg’s ‘needful warning, that the religion we profess and the religion we live by may not be the same; and that “secularism” may be most dangerous when it is found in men and women who sincerely believe themselves to be religious’.19 Cautious about the meaning and long-term implications of mass-scale religious revivals, such as Billy Graham’s ‘crusade’ evangelism, he expressed concern about ‘the lack of Godcentredness’ that such movements may unwittingly generate.20 Rilke died in 1926 and did not live to see World War 2. For both Eliot and Miłosz, the war signalled an end to a certain vision of Europe. In 1939, Eliot announced that he was closing down the Criterion. Citing ‘a depression of spirits’ caused by contemporary political developments, he admitted that it was no longer possible to run the literary review whose mission statement was to ‘provide in London a local forum of international thought’.21 Eliot conceded that the ‘“European mind,” which one has mistakenly thought might be renewed and fortified, disappeared from view’.22 Throughout the war, Eliot gave talks and penned articles that emphasised the need to keep alive the idea of Europe that offers unity in diversity. His particular concern was with the responsibility that writers, artists, and public intellectuals had to save European tradition and culture

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from decline. In the address ‘The Classics and the Man of Letters’, delivered in 1942, he argued: They will be those also who appreciate the need, if the present chaos is ever to be reduced to order, of something more than an administrative or an economic unification—the need of a cultural unification in diversity of Europe, and who believe that a new unity can only grow on the old roots: the Christian Faith, and the classical languages which Europeans inherit in common. These roots are, I think, inextricably intertwined.23

Eliot emphasised that the task of writers and intellectuals was to rebuild the networks and collaborations that the war put an end to. As he pointed out in 1944, ‘we should know, after the mutual isolation of these five years, that no one language, and no one literature, of Europe, can maintain itself in full health and vigour when cut off from communication with the others.’24 To understand the true value of those channels of communication, one ought to conceptualise European culture as a tree that grows organically from its classical and biblical roots. In a 1946 lecture, Eliot made a distinction between ‘the material organisation of Europe, and the spiritual organism of Europe’.25 ‘If the latter dies’, he contends, ‘then what you organise will not be Europe, but merely a mass of human beings speaking several different languages’.26 He points to Christian tradition as the common feature of European cultures, emphasising that ‘[i]f Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes’.27 Thus, the task of an intellectual in times of war and ‘material devastation’ is to preserve ‘the legacy of Greece, Rome and Israel’ and save the ‘spiritual possessions’ of European culture.28 Miłosz, who spent much of World War 2 in occupied Warsaw and directly experienced the horrors of warfare, was more pessimistic in his reflections on Europe’s future. He saw the year 1945 as a caesura. As he later recalled: ‘In 1945, in Cracow, I experienced the end of Europe. It even amazes me that that acute consciousness of the end was registered so inadequately by me and by others.’29 According to Miłosz, the war and its aftermath exposed European intellectuals’ inability to offer hope and lead the work of reconstruction. In his view, Europe’s decadent culture, which was fuelled by the crisis of religion, saw World War 2 as a self-fulling prophecy. After the war, the ‘European spirit hated itself, turned against itself, and derided the institutions it had elaborated’.30 Looking back at the years 1950–1960, which he spent in France, Miłosz speaks disparagingly

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of ‘fashionable discourses on la nausée, the absurd, alienation’.31 Instead of paving the way towards cultural and political reconstruction, the European mind capitulated, dabbling in existential nihilism and unfruitful philosophical pursuits, Miłosz argues, and when ‘the fall finally occurred and power shifted to America and Russia, it looked like a fable with a moral’.32 In the wake of World War 2, both Eliot and Miłosz saw the future of European culture as dependent on its spiritual strength. They both had to concede, however, that rebuilding a Christian society was no longer possible. In Miłosz’s view, the shift of power to Soviet Russia and capitalist United States marked the beginning of ‘an increasingly cybernetic civilization’ in which the loss of religion will lead to an ever increasing number of people suffering from spiritual homelessness and ‘quiet desperation’.33 For Eliot, the question of whether it might be possible to plan for and maintain a Christian society was of vital importance throughout World War 2, when he penned and delivered many talks on the topic in relation to the postwar reconstruction of Britain.34 By 1948, he seemed to have conceded that ‘religious faith cannot be restored to the mass of mankind by any methods based on observation of the causes of its decline’, pointing out that ‘[o]nly to the same extent as that to which this decline of religion has come about through deliberate apostasy, can a revival come about through deliberate evangelism’.35 While he acknowledges that resolving the religious crisis by initiating a spiritual revival is a utopian project as ‘the New Jerusalem will not be built by setting up a Ministry of Heaven-and-Earth Planning’, he nevertheless refuses to accept ‘the prescription of despair’, pointing to the Christian ‘commitment to a doctrine of Grace’.36

Reading the Signs of the Times: Religion and Modernity in the 1950s–1960s World War 2 brought about important changes in the mood dominating the Catholic Church. The late 1930s and the 1940s saw a vigorous development of the so-called nouvelle théologie (new theology) in France. While some neo-scholastic theologians, including the influential Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange, viewed it as another incarnation of the modernist heresy, for others it signalled a breath of fresh air that would offer an alternative to the neo-scholastic system of thought.37 Just like the modernists in the 1890s–1910s, new theologians such as Henri de Lubac, Henri

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Bouillard, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Yves Congar, and Jean Daniélou aimed to ‘retrieve traditions of thought earlier than the neoscholastic, in order to correct the rationalism of the latter and confront the growing challenges of modernity’.38 History seemed to repeat itself when Pope Pius XII condemned the nouvelle théologie, and in the encyclical Humani Generis (1950) warned against theologians and philosophers who are ‘desirous of novelty’ and ‘want to reduce to a minimum the meaning of dogmas; and to free dogma itself from terminology long established in the Church and from philosophical concepts held by Catholic teachers’.39 Furthermore, the encyclical emphasised that ‘these advocates of novelty easily pass from despising scholastic theology to the neglect of and even contempt for the Teaching Authority of the Church itself, which gives such authoritative approval to scholastic theology’.40 The pope’s censure of those tendencies resulted in the loss of teaching posts and publication bans for several ‘new theologians’, including Marie-Dominique Chenu, Louis Charlier, Réne Draguet, and Henri de Lubac.41 The parallels between the theological projects of modernism and the nouvelle théologie, and the censure they both met with, led Gerard Loughlin to dub the nouveaux théologiens ‘the mid-twentieth-century Modernists or neo-Modernists’.42 They advocated ressourcement (a return to the sources), which meant a return to pre-scholastic tradition including the patristic canon, a more contemplative understanding of faith that pays close attention to individual experience and the mystical tradition, and a historicised view of the church tradition. To Thomists such as Garrigou-Lagrange or Maritain, this looked not unlike what they had previously condemned as relativism, subjectivism, and anti-intellectualism manifest in the work of the modernist theologians.43 However, despite the opposition it faced in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the movement laid the foundations for the work of theological renewal that took place at the Second Vatican Council. When Pope John XXIII called for a council on 25 January 1959, just three months after his election, his announcement came to many as a surprise. The aim of the council was to bring the Catholic Church up to date with the modern world. This direction was defined by the term aggiornamento (modernisation, updating). In his opening speech to the council, John XXIII announced that the church ‘must ever look to the present, to the new conditions and new forms of life introduced into the modern world that have opened up new avenues to the Catholic apostolate’.44 The Second Vatican Council brought together more than 2200 bishops, 484 theological advisors (Latin periti), and almost 100 ecumenical observers

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who met in four periods from 1962 to 1965. It produced four constitutions, nine decrees, and three declarations, covering topics from liturgy, ecclesiology, pastoral theology, ecumenical relations, through the role of the laity, missionary work, Bible translations, to mass media and education.45 Among the deepest issues underlying all considerations, as John W.  O’Malley points out, was the question of ‘the circumstances under which change in the church is appropriate and the arguments with which it can be justified’.46 The subject of change recurred during the council, and the understanding of doctrinal development as a process that takes place in history informed many of the conciliar documents.47 In this sense the insights of both modernism and nouvelle théologie were exonerated by and incorporated into the work of Vatican II.  Some of the theologians censured in the 1950s, including Marie-Dominique Chenu, Yves Congar, Jean Daniélou, and Henri de Lubac, were appointed periti and advised bishops working on the conciliar documents.48 Theologically, the council initiated a new phase of openness by putting an end to the authoritative hegemony of scholasticism and opening the door to theological pluralism. On the liturgical level, it introduced the use of vernacular languages instead of Latin, and on the pastoral level, it gave more agency to the Catholic laity. The implementation of the conciliar documents led to significant changes in how the global community of Catholics practised their faith. Some of those changes, such as the move away from Latin in liturgy, came to many as a shock. Miłosz, commenting on the liturgical reform in a letter to the American Trappist Thomas Merton, wrote that ‘the mass in English [is] a mistake’.49 He complained: ‘Why to “protestantise” the Church in those aspects which are the least valid? Why not leave the mass in Latin in those countries which are used to it.’50 He expanded on the question of religious language in a later essay, providing a reflection on the consequences of the clergy’s embrace of the vernacular: After Vatican II the clergy shed not only their robes and Latin but also, at least here, where I write this, the language of centuries-old formulas which they had used in their sermons. When, however, they began speaking in the language of newspapers, their lack of intellectual preparation was revealed, along with the weakness of timid, often unprepossessing people who showed deference to ‘the world,’ which we, the laity, had already had enough of.51

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The clergy’s attempts to make Catholicism speak to the modern believer seemed to Miłosz an inadequate and misconceived project. ‘It is hard’, he argued, ‘not to notice that this sudden zeal is an attempt on the part of the theologians to adapt themselves to shifts in the collective imagination, which occurred outside the church, without its participation, and against its intent.’52 In Miłosz’s view, while the modernist theologians’ project of reinventing Catholic theology at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, considering the depth and scope of the reconceptualisation of Catholicism it proposed, showed imagination, ambition, and courage, the 1960s reforms came belatedly and misread the mood of the time. In 1968, reflecting on the long-term implications of Vatican II, Miłosz speculated: ‘My prediction—and I wish I were wrong—is that the number of homeless religious minds will be rapidly increasing.’53 Miłosz’s concern with the detrimental impact of ‘the language of newspapers’ spoken from the pulpit and the religious idiom aligning itself with contemporary mass culture was shared by Eliot. When Vatican II was deliberating on the questions of Bible translation and the use of vernacular languages in liturgy, the Protestant churches in the United Kingdom were working on a joint project of a new modern translation of the Bible. In 1961, the Joint Committee on the New Translation of the Bible, chaired by Donald Coggan, Archbishop of York, published a modern translation of the New Testament. The New English Bible (NEB), which aimed to provide English readers with a translation ‘in the language of the present day’, was an ecumenical project jointly sponsored by several churches, including the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, the Methodist Church of Great Britain, the Presbyterian Church of England, and the Society of Friends.54 It brought together biblical scholars and linguists from across the United Kingdom, whose objective was to offer a modern alternative to the King James Version, which—as they believed—‘had now become more definitely archaic and less generally understood’.55 The Joint Committee started work in 1947  in collaboration with Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, and by 1961 the translation of the New Testament was published. The introduction, written by Professor C. H. Dodd, explained that the principle that the translators followed differed from those adopted in the Revised Edition of 1881. While the Revised Edition aimed to ‘introduce as few alterations as possible’ to the Authorised Version, the translators of the New English Bible ‘were to make the attempt to use consistently the idiom of contemporary English’ and offer a ‘faithful rendering of the best available Greek text into the

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current speech of our time, and a rendering which should harvest the gains of recent biblical scholarship’.56 On its publication in 1961, the translation met with ambivalent reception.57 Eliot, who contributed eight letters and a review piece to the discussions that ensued, was unimpressed. In a review published in The Sunday Telegraph in 1962, Eliot questioned the ‘requirement of contemporaneity’ that the translators of the New English Bible were expected to endorse.58 He argued that adopting the contemporary idiom rests on the assumption that language change is a positive phenomenon and ought to be embraced rather than resisted. Eliot asserted that ‘change can sometimes be for the worse, and that it is as much our business to attempt to arrest deterioration and combat corruption of our language, as to accept change’.59 Furthermore, he complained that no definition of ‘contemporary’ English was given, and it was not explained what level of literacy had been assumed. The conclusion of his scathing review reflects on the implications of the liturgical use of the new translation: ‘So long as “The New English Bible” was used only for private reading, it would be merely a symptom of the decay of the English language in the middle of the 20th century. But the more it is adopted for religious services the more it will become an active agent of decadence.’60 Eliot’s passionate condemnation of the New English Bible can be surprising if one considers the fact that it comes at the time when he himself participated in the Anglican Commission to Revise the Psalter chaired by Donald Coggan, Archbishop of York. The commission comprised six people, and included two bishops, a Hebrew scholar, an expert in congregational singing, and Eliot and C. S. Lewis as literary critics. The work to be carried out consisted in a revision of the Coverdale Psalter that was part of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer since 1662.61 The Commission met nineteen times between 1959 and 1963, with Eliot in attendance at seven meetings. As the Psalter was being revised at the same time as the work on the New English Bible was being carried out, and Coggan chaired both the Joint Committee in charge of the NEB translation and the Commission to Revise the Psalter, the latter was able to receive the proofs of the NEB translation of the Psalms prior to the publication of the Old Testament in 1970. This allowed the Commission to ‘incorporate advances in the understanding of the Hebrew language and stay in touch with the group that was translating the Old Testament’.62 On the surface, the aim of the translators and editors working on the NEB and the Revised Psalter seemed similar, as the latter was tasked to produce ‘a revision of the text of the Psalter designed to remove obscurities and serious errors of

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translation’.63 However, what made the work on the Revised Psalter acceptable to Eliot and what evoked his contempt for the NEB translation were two radically different approaches to modernising the biblical texts. While the NEB translators aimed to render the Bible in contemporary English, the members of the Commission to Revise the Psalter ‘were told to keep [Coverdale’s] words where possible’.64 The editors strove to maintain the idiom and style of the sixteenth-century translation. ‘We have brought our renderings into the closest accord that our skill could achieve with Coverdale’s vocabulary, syntax, and rhythm’, they explained, ‘our aim has been “invisible mending”’.65 Occasionally, this approach led to tensions between commission members, with Lewis complaining that there were instances where the commission avoided making necessary changes and attempted ‘preserving what they knew to be a mistranslation’.66 The two radically different approaches to biblical translation exemplified by the NEB and the Revised Psalter relied, on the one hand, on dynamic equivalence, which aimed to bring the biblical text closer to the contemporary reader (the NEB), and on the other, on formal equivalence, which aimed to preserve the verbal integrity of the Coverdale translation (the Revised Psalter).67 Eliot unequivocally endorsed the latter position, maintaining that the modernisation of biblical language would lead to the NEB becoming a source of corruption of the religious idiom and imagination. Ironically, while the NEB was not intended for liturgical use, it was soon adopted by churches for use at services. The Revised Psalter, on the other hand, which was published with the explicit aim to address the needs of congregations and choirs, as Joel Heck observes, was not well received and could not compete with the Coverdale translation. Eliot’s rejection of the modernising tendency of the New English Bible, which after Vatican II was co-sponsored by the Catholic Church in Great Britain, reveals his urge to stabilise religious language and maintain certain standards that he believed were crucial to the preservation of appropriate religious idiom. These standards, however, seem to have already shifted, which became evident in the lack of success of the Revised Psalter. In 1985, the theologian Gabriel Daly in his discussion of Catholicism’s attempts to come to terms with modernity through modernism, nouvelle théologie, and finally Vatican II, identified ‘the partial collapse of language as an agreed currency in religious thinking’ as the most challenging problem that contemporary Christianity had to address.68 He argued that Christian theology cannot thrive in a situation when ‘theologians are constrained to work with words that have grown tired, concepts that have

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become flaccid with constant bending, and images that are now tarnished with age and indiscriminate use’.69 Daly contended that ‘[i]t is not God who has died but rather the human power to name him’, adding that the ‘linguistic collapse may be a necessary and chastening experience’.70 Rilke, Eliot, and Miłosz would have likely concurred with Daly’s evaluation of the idiom of contemporary theology. Rilke compared it to a fruit that has been ‘sucked dry’.71 Eliot spoke critically of ‘theology and philosophy which cease to be nourished by the imagination [and] descend into verbalism’.72 Miłosz complained that ‘the language of theology’ had responded to the most essential questions in life ‘by turning out perfectly rounded balls, easy to roll but impenetrable’.73 That, however, did not mean that religion no longer had any role to play in the modern world. As Daly suggests, while discursive theology might have historically reached its limits, the imaginative and experiential dimensions of faith, which moved beyond the frameworks circumscribed by speculative intellect, could still thrive. In a position paper written for the Moot, Eliot defined Christian imagination as ‘capacity for […] spiritual experience’ and argued that the contemporary disintegration of that imagination ‘is manifest by the separation between those people who cultivate the arts (both as producers and as consumers) and those who cultivate the religious sensibility’.74 Miłosz shared this view, and with hindsight concurred that he ‘lived at a time when a huge change in the contents of the human imagination was occurring’.75 He claimed that to ‘write on literature or art was considered an honorable occupation, whereas any time notions taken from the language of religion appeared, the one who brought them up was immediately treated as lacking in tact, as if a silent pact had been broken’.76 Both Eliot and Miłosz diagnosed the changes in the collective imagination as a growing split between the language of religion and the language of literature. They observed that while the writing on religion tended to adopt a seemingly scholarly framework, analysing the subject matter within the discourses of theology, sociology, or anthropology, there was little imaginative engagement with the vital questions raised by religion. In ‘Revival of Christian Imagination’, Eliot remarked that ‘[i]t is not perhaps an accident that instead of great devotional writers, we have rather distinguished writers about devotional literature’.77 Eliot’s emphasis on spiritual experience and devotional writing as opposed to theological analysis of that experience and writing about devotional texts brings to the fore the performative and experiential aspects of religion. This is echoed by Miłosz, who in his essay ‘If Only This Could Be Said’ observes that his

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contemporaries ‘tend to exaggerate the difficulty of having faith’, which is increasingly conceptualised as a purely intellectual consent to a certain set of beliefs.78 This kind of thinking about religion obliterates its experiential and imaginative aspects, which for Miłosz are at least equally important. He asserts: Not inside the four walls of one’s room or in lecture halls or libraries, but through communal participation the veil is parted and for a brief moment the space of Imagination, with a capital I, is visible. Such moments allow us to recognize that our imagination is paltry, limited, and that the deliberations of theologians and philosophers are cut to its measure and therefore are completely inadequate for the religion of the Bible.79

The emphasis on the performative dimension of religious ritual, which allows one to transcend the limits of theological ‘deliberations’, is what Rilke considered of particular value in the religious rituals he witnessed in Russia. In a letter from St Petersburg, he described the worshippers whom he observed venerating the icon of the Iberian Madonna: [They] all create their God with the same kneeling power, again and again, presenting him and singling him out with their sorrow and with their joy (little indefinite feelings), raising him in the morning with their eyelids, and quietly releasing him in the evening when weariness breaks the thread of their prayers like rosaries.80

Rilke considered the imaginative potential of the ritual that exceeded words and engaged the body of the individual as well as the community to be so powerful that he adopted it in his own creative practice. As he reported to his wife, Clara: ‘I kneel down and rise up, every day, alone in my room, and I will consider sacred what happened to me in it: even the not having come, even the disappointment, even the forsakenness’.81 He further explained: For haven’t I known with such great conviction ever since Russia, that prayer and its season and its gesture passed on reverently and unabbreviated was the condition God made and that of his return to this person and that, who scarcely expected it and only knelt down and stood up and was suddenly full to the brim…?82

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For Rilke, prayer that engaged one experientially and holistically as opposed to intellectual speculation that relied on discursive reasoning alone opened the door to the creative aspects of religion. Ultimately, all three poets, though in different degrees, shared in the modernist theologians’ conviction that religious imagination was shaped through language and that that language was always already insufficient and in need of renewal. Their poetry testifies to the value of the creative interface between literature and theology, at the intersection of which one might find ‘a middle place’ that Miłosz speaks of in ‘A Theological Treatise’: I apologize, most reverend theologians, for a tone not befitting the purple of your robes. I thrash in the bed of my style, searching for a comfortable position, not too sanctimonious, not too mundane. There must be a middle place between abstraction and childishness where one can talk seriously about serious things.83

Notes 1. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letter to Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss, 28 December 1921,’ in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 2, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1948), 277. 2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe zur Politik, ed. Joachim W. Storck (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1992), 463-9. See also Egon Schwarz, Poetry and Politics in the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. David E. Wellbery (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981). 3. T. S. Eliot, ‘Christianity and Communism’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4, ed. Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber, 2015), 424. 4. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (London: Penguin Classics, 2001), 207. 5. See Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979); Religion and the Cold War, ed. Dianne Kirby (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and James C. Wallace, ‘A Religious War? The Cold War and Religion,’ Journal of Cold War Studies 15, no. 3 (2013): 162-180. 6. Winston Churchill, ‘The Sinews of Peace (Iron Curtain Speech)’, 5 March 1946, International Churchill Society: https://winstonchurchill.org/ resources/speeches/1946-­1963-­elder-­statesman/the-­sinews-­of-­peace/

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(accessed 20 August 2020); Harry S. Truman, ‘Address in Columbus at a Conference of the Federal Council of Churches’, 6 March 1946, Harry S.  Truman Library and Museum: https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/ library/public-­papers/52/address-­columbus-­conference-­federal-­council-­ churches (accessed 20 August 2020). 7. Truman, ‘Address in Columbus’. 8. Ibid. 9. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letter to Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-­ Hohenlohe, 17 December 1912,’ in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 2, 76. 10. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letter to Witold von Hulewicz, 13 November 1925,’ in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 2, 374-5. Emphasis in the original. 11. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Życie w USA [XIX]’, in W cieniu totalitaryzmów: Publicystyka rozproszona z lat 1945-1951 oraz teksty z okresu II wojny sw ́ iatowej, ed. Aleksander Fiut et  al. (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2018), 365. 12. Ibid., 366. 13. Ibid., 368. 14. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Notatnik [I]’, in W cieniu totalitaryzmów, 504. 15. Czesław Miłosz, ‘A Certain Illness Difficult to Name’, in Visions from San Francisco Bay, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982), 40. 16. Czesław Miłosz, ‘On the Turmoil of Many Religions,’ in Visions from San Francisco Bay, 76. 17. Ibid. 18. T. S. Eliot, ‘Religion in America’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 8, ed. Jewel Spears Brooker and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber, 2019), 401. 19. Ibid., 402. 20. Ibid. See also Billy Graham: American Pilgrim, ed. Andrew Finstuen, Grant Wacker, and Anne Blue Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 21. T. S. Eliot, ‘Last Words,’ The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 5, ed. Iman Javadi, Ronald Schuchard, and Jayme Stayer (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber, 2017), 660. See also Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Jeroen Vanheste, ‘The Reconstruction of the European Mind: T.  S. Eliot’s Criterion and the Idea of Europe’, Journal of European Periodical Studies 3, no. 2 (2018): 23–37. 22. Eliot, ‘Last Words,’ 661. 23. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Classics and the Man of Letters,’ The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 6, ed. David E. Chinitz and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore

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and London: Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber, 2017), 308. 24. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Responsibility of the European Man of Letters’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 6, 542. 25. T. S. Eliot, ‘Die Einheit der europäischen Kultur,’ in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 6, 717. Emphasis in the original. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 719. 28. Ibid., 720. 29. Czesław Miłosz, A Year of the Hunter, trans. Madeline G.  Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 238. 30. Ibid., 118-9. 31. Ibid., 119. 32. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Emigration to America: A Summing Up’, in Visions of San Francisco Bay, 212. 33. Czesław Miłosz, ‘The Agony of the West’, in Visions of San Francisco Bay, 121. 34. Steve Ellis, British Writers and the Approach of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 17–65; Roger Kojecky, T.  S. Eliot’s Social Criticism (London: Faber, 1971), 126–97. 35. T. S. Eliot, ‘Views and Reviews: “Our Culture”: A review of Our Culture: Its Christian Roots and Present Crisis. Edward Alleyn Lectures 1944, ed. V. A. Demant’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 7, ed. Iman Javadi and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber, 2018), 108. 36. Ibid., 109. 37. Gerard Loughlin, ‘Nouvelle Théologie: A Return to Modernism?’, in Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology, ed. Gabriel Flynn and Paul D. Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 36-50. 38. Ibid., 36. 39. Pope Pius XII, ‘Humani Generis’, in The Papal Encyclicals, ed. Claudia Carlen, vol. 4 (Washington, DC: McGrath, 1981), 176. 40. Ibid., 178. 41. Jürgen Mettepenningen, Nouvelle théologie—New theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II (London: T & T Clark, 2010); Jon Kirwan, An Avant-garde Theological Generation: The Nouvelle Théologie and the French Crisis of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 42. Loughlin, 40. 43. Aidan Nichols, ‘Thomism and the Nouvelle Théologie’, The Thomist 64 (2000): 7.

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44. Quoted in John W. O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 38. 45. Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1975), and Vatican Council II: More Post Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1982). 46. O’Malley, 8. 47. Marcellino D’Ambrosio, ‘Ressourcement Theology, Aggiornamento, and the Hermeneutics of Tradition’, Communio 18 (1991): 534–6. 48. See Gerald O’Collins, ‘Ressourcement and Vatican II’, in Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology, 372-91. 49. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Letter to Thomas Merton, 31 December 1964’, in Thomas Merton and Czesław Miłosz, Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czesław Miłosz, ed. Robert Faggen (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 163. 50. Ibid., 163. 51. Czesław Miłosz, ‘If Only This Could Be Said’, trans. Madeline G. Levine, in To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays, ed. Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline G. Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 324. 52. Miłosz, ‘Emigration to America’, 222. 53. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Letter to Thomas Merton, 15 January 1968’, in Striving Towards Being, 173. 54. The New English Bible with the Apocrypha (London: Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, 1970), v. See also About the New English Bible, ed. Geoffrey Hunt (London: Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, 1970). 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., v-vi. 57. The New English Bible Reviewed, ed. D. E. Nineham (London: Epworth, 1965). See also Bruce M. Metzger, The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001), 132-7. 58. T. S. Eliot, ‘T. S. Eliot on the Language of the New English Bible [VIII]’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 8, 533. 59. Ibid., 534. 60. Ibid. 61. The Revised Psalter: The Final Report of the Commission to Revise the Psalter Appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York (London: SPCK, 1963). 62. Joel D.  Heck, ‘C.  S. Lewis the Churchman: His Work on the Anglican Commission to Revise the Psalter’, VII: Journal of the Marion E.  Wade Center 36 (2019): 106. 63. The Revised Psalter, vii.

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64. Heck, 108. 65. The Revised Psalter, ix. See also G. A. Chase, A Companion to the Revised Psalter (London: SPCK, 1963). 66. Heck, 108. Emphasis in the original. 67. See Eugene A.  Nida and Charles R.  Taber, The Theory and Practice of Translation: With Special Reference to Bible Translating (Leiden: Brill, 1969). 68. Gabriel Daly, ‘Catholicism and Modernity’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53, no. 4 (1985): 791. 69. Ibid., 792. 70. Ibid., 791. 71. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letter to Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-­ Hohenlohe, 17 December 1912,’ in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 2, 76. 72. T.  S. Eliot, ‘Revival of Christian Imagination’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 6, 242. 73. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Theology, Poetry’, in The Road-side Dog, trans. by the author and Robert Hass (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 21. 74. Eliot, ‘Revival of Christian Imagination’, 242. 75. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Why Religion?’, in The Road-side Dog, 105. 76. Ibid. 77. Eliot, ‘Revival of Christian Imagination’, 242. 78. Miłosz, ‘If Only This Could Be Said’, 323. 79. Ibid., 326. Emphasis in the original. 80. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letter to Frieda von Bulow, 7 June 1899,’ in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 1, 32. 81. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letter to Clara Rilke, 29 June 1906’, in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 1, 224. 82. Ibid. 83. Czesław Miłosz, ‘A Theological Treatise,’ trans. by the author and Robert Hass, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 2, no. 2 (2002): 194, part 4, lines 1-6.

Bibliography Chase, G. A. A Companion to the Revised Psalter. London: SPCK, 1963. Churchill, Winston. ‘The Sinews of Peace (Iron Curtain Speech).’ March 5, 1946. International Churchill Society: https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/ speeches/1946-­1963-­elder-­statesman/the-­sinews-­of-­peace/ (accessed August 20, 2020). D’Ambrosio, Marcellino. ‘Ressourcement Theology, Aggiornamento, and the Hermeneutics of Tradition.’ Communio 18 (1991): 530–55.

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Daly, Gabriel. ‘Catholicism and Modernity.’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53, no. 4 (1985): 773-796. Eliot, T. S. The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, edited by Ronald Schuchard et al, 8 vols. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber, 2014-2019. Ellis, Steve. British Writers and the Approach of World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Finstuen, Andrew, Grant Wacker, and Anne Blue Will, eds. Billy Graham: American Pilgrim. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Flannery, Austin, ed. Vatican Council II: More Post Conciliar Documents. Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1982. Flannery, Austin, ed. Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents. Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1975. Harding, Jason. The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-­ War Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Heck, Joel D. ‘C. S. Lewis the Churchman: His Work on the Anglican Commission to Revise the Psalter.’ VII: Journal of the Marion E.  Wade Center 36 (2019): 105-122. Hunt, Geoffrey, ed. About the New English Bible. London: Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, 1970. Kirwan, Jon. An Avant-garde Theological Generation: The Nouvelle Théologie and the French Crisis of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Kojecky, Roger. T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism. London: Faber, 1971. Loughlin, Gerard. ‘Nouvelle Théologie: A Return to Modernism?’ In Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology, edited by Gabriel Flynn and Paul D. Murray, 36-50. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. McLaine, Ian. Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979). Merton, Thomas, and Miłosz, Czesław. Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czesław Miłosz, edited by Robert Faggen. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. Mettepenningen, Jürgen. Nouvelle théologie—New theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II. London: T & T Clark, 2010. Metzger, Bruce M. The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001. Miłosz, Czesław. ‘A Theological Treatise.’ Translated by the author and Robert Hass. Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 2, no. 2 (2002): 193–204. Miłosz, Czesław. A Year of the Hunter. Translated by Madeline G.  Levine. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Miłosz, Czesław. The Captive Mind. Translated by Jane Zielonko. London: Penguin Classics, 2001.

8 EPILOGUE 

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Miłosz, Czesław. The Road-side Dog. Translated by the author and Robert Hass. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Miłosz, Czesław. Visions from San Francisco Bay. Translated by Richard Lourie. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982. Miłosz, Czesław. W cieniu totalitaryzmów: Publicystyka rozproszona z lat 1945-1951 oraz teksty z okresu II wojny swiatowej, ́ edited by Aleksander Fiut et al. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2018. Nichols, Aidan. ‘Thomism and the Nouvelle Théologie.’ The Thomist 64 (2000): 1–19. O’Malley, John W. What Happened at Vatican II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Nida, Eugene A., and Taber, Charles R. The Theory and Practice of Translation: With Special Reference to Bible Translating. Leiden: Brill, 1969. Nineham, D. E., ed. The New English Bible Reviewed. London: Epworth, 1965. Pius XII, Pope. ‘Humani Generis.’ In The Papal Encyclicals, edited by Claudia Carlen, vol. 4, 175-184. Washington, DC: McGrath, 1981. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 2 vols. Translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M.  D. Herter Norton. New  York: W.  W. Norton and Co., 1945-8. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Briefe zur Politik, edited by Joachim W. Storck. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1992. Schwarz, Egon. Poetry and Politics in the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke. Translated by David E. Wellbery. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981. Truman, Harry S. ‘Address in Columbus at a Conference of the Federal Council of Churches.’ March 6, 1946. Harry S. Truman Library and Museum: https:// www.trumanlibrar y.gov/librar y/public-­p apers/52/address-­c olumbus-­ conference-­federal-­council-­churches (accessed August 20, 2020). The New English Bible with the Apocrypha. London: Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, 1970. Vanheste, Jeroen. ‘The Reconstruction of the European Mind: T.  S. Eliot’s Criterion and the Idea of Europe.’ Journal of European Periodical Studies 3, no. 2 (2018): 23–37.

Index

A Action française, 8, 9, 62, 63, 104, 105, 309, 368 Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum (encyclical), 14, 97 Adelphi, 6, 168, 172, 292, 296, 302, 312 Aeterni Patris (encyclical), 30, 33, 279 Andreas, Friedrich Carl, 207 Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 3, 7, 16, 17, 197–249, 408 The Erotic, 241 on femininity, 232–247 ‘Harnack and the Apostolic Creed,’ 200 ‘The Human Being as Woman,’ 239 ‘Jesus the Jew,’ 198–201 Looking Back: Memoirs, 239 and the Orthodox icon, 219–232 and psychology of religion, 17, 199–206, 247–249 on religious experience, 199–206 and Russia, 206–219

‘The Russian Holy Icon and Its Poet,’ 221 ‘Russian Poetry and Culture,’ 237 and the ‘Russian soul,’ 207–219 Andrewes, Lancelot, 297–300 Andrzejewski, Jerzy, 7, 360, 366, 367, 372, 377, 378 Antisemitism, 13, 14, 63, 103, 106, 120–122, 338, 365, 368–372, 374, 389 in the interwar period, 109–115 Aquinas, Thomas, 29, 30, 33–35, 62, 92, 104, 112, 138, 197, 210, 213, 280, 305, 306, 339, 355, 363, 365, 366, 368, 370, 371, 380, 389 Archutowski, Roman, 339 Auden, W. H., 385 Augustine, Saint, 276, 340 B Babbitt, Irving, 271, 308 Baczyński, Krzysztof Kamil, 377

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Rzepa, Modernism and Theology, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61530-7

429

430 

INDEX

Barnes, Ernest William, 60, 61, 290, 294 Baroja, Pío, 39 Road to Perfection, 39–41, 165 Barth, Karl, 95, 96 Bataille, Georges, 47, 48 Inner Experience, 47 Battaini, Domenico, 50 Bell, Clive, 62 Benda, Julien, 105, 106, 304 The Treason of the Intellectuals, 105 Benedict XV, Pope, 14, 97 Benois, Alexander, 227, 228 Berdyaev, Nicolas, 3, 6, 107, 167, 168, 211–213, 215, 216, 229–232, 242, 246, 368, 408 on art and co-creation, 219–232 on God and androgyne, 242 The Meaning of the Creative Act, 219–232 on modernism, neo-Thomism, and Russian Orthodoxy, 212–213 ‘Russia and the West,’ 212 and Russian Orthodoxy, 206–213 Bergson, Henri, 34, 39–48, 59, 66, 91, 157, 158, 160, 161, 177, 284, 285, 295, 306, 349, 352, 354, 360 Creative Evolution, 39–47, 354 Bernanos, Georges, 5, 95 The Diary of a Country Priest, 95, 165 Bethune-Baker, J. F., 290 Blake, William, 380, 384 Blennerhassett, Charlotte, 50 Blok, Aleksandr, 211 Blondel, Maurice, 6, 29, 30, 36, 39, 42, 62, 66, 105, 149, 343, 345, 354, 357, 360, 361, 363 The Letter on Apologetics, 29 Blumenthal-Weiss, Ilse, 117

Bonomelli, Geremia, 149, 343 Bradley, A. C., 8, 169, 170 Bradley, Francis Herbert, 285 Bramhall, John, 309 Branford, Victor, 55 Bremond, Henri, 6–8, 15, 18, 30, 39, 41–43, 49, 50, 100, 138, 149, 167–178, 197, 201, 248, 268, 287, 296, 302–305, 307, 308, 310–313, 317, 318, 338, 374–388 critical reception of, 165–178, 302–317 Prayer and Poetry, 168–178, 248, 297, 303, 304 and ‘pure poetry,’ 8, 168–179 Breton, André, 92, 93, 96 Briggs, Charles, 39, 54 Brzozowski, Stanisław, 3, 18, 50, 167, 337, 352–360 on human labour and creativity, 354–358 on modernism, 355, 357 on neo-scholasticism, 355 Bulgakov, Sergei, 211, 246 Bullock-Webster, George Russell, 60 Buonaiuti, Ernesto, 36, 149, 153 C Cambridge Heretics Society, 61–63, 167 Campbell, Reginald John, 53, 56, 62 Chagall, Marc, 226, 227 Chesterton, G. K., 6, 61–63, 65, 110, 111, 370 and antisemitism, 110–112 on heresy, 61 Chomski, Leopold, 339, 340, 342 Churchill, Winston, 109, 409 Coggan, Donald, 417 Cold War, 408

 INDEX 

Communism, 9, 103, 116, 118, 121, 309, 361, 363, 364, 366, 367, 369, 388, 408 Congar, Yves, 364, 414, 415 Conrad, Joseph, 163 Costello, Harry T., 274 Criterion, 6, 13, 16, 18, 41, 52, 65, 107, 160, 161, 168, 173, 176, 268, 292, 295–297, 302–305, 411 D Darwin, Charles, 45, 349 Davidson, Randall, 61, 89 Dawson, Christopher, 104 Decurtins, Caspar, 6, 7, 146, 147 Deploige, Simon, 112, 370 Der Gral, 141–143, 145, 148 Descartes, 98 De Wulf, Maurice, 33 Divino Afflante Spiritu (encyclical), 106 Dmowski, Roman, 368, 369 Doboszyński, Adam, 369, 370 Dobrée, Bonamy, 308, 309 Dodd, C. H., 416 Dogma, 5, 18, 40, 50, 137–139, 155, 165, 200, 223, 234, 235, 269, 280–282, 284, 287–289, 294, 297, 307, 317, 408, 414 Döllinger, Ignaz von, 50 Drużbacka, Anna Danuta, 370 Durkheim, Émile, 271, 349 E Ehrhard, Albert, 6 Eliot, Charles William, 55 Eliot, T. S., 3, 7, 15–17, 19, 28, 107, 110, 153, 172, 267–318, 362, 384, 385, 388, 389, 407–409, 411, 413, 416, 419

431

After Strange Gods, 118, 161–164 and antisemitism, 109–119 ‘The Burnt Dancer,’ 275–277 ‘Christianity and Communism,’ 408 ‘The Clark Lectures,’ 296, 306 ‘The Classics and the Man of Letters,’ 412 and Criterion (see Criterion) ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus,’ 269, 274–278 on dogma, 286–291, 318 his early interest in mysticism, 269–275 ‘East Coker,’ 318 ‘The Function of Criticism,’ 293 on heresy, 161–164, 291–297 The Idea of a Christian Society, 118 ‘The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual,’ 271 and John Middleton Murry, 172–176, 291–298 ‘Journey of the Magi,’ 269, 297–302, 313 For Lancelot Andrewes, 267, 312 ‘Marina,’ 269, 302–317 and modernism, 2, 15, 267–269, 278–286, 308, 318 and neo-scholasticism, 153, 278–286, 318 on the New English Bible (NEB), 416–418 and philosophy of religion, 269–275 and politics, 8, 9, 107, 109–119, 308–309, 407–421 ‘Popular Theologians: Mr. Wells, Mr. Belloc and Mr. Murry,’ 295 and the ‘pure poetry’ debate, 165–173, 302–317 ‘Relation between Metaphysics and Politics,’ 284 ‘Religion without Humanism,’ 307 on religious imagination, 419–421

432 

INDEX

Eliot, T. S. (cont.) review of Conscience and Christ by Hastings Rashdall, 282–286 and The Revised Psalter, 417–418 The Sacred Wood, 307, 310, 312 as a student at Harvard, 269–275 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ 289, 292 translation of Maritain’s ‘The Frontiers of Poetry’ (‘Poetry and Religion’), 173–176, 305 on Unitarianism, 270 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 311 The Waste Land, 16, 275, 384, 385 Ellis, Havelock, 165, 274, 277 F Fascism, 9, 103, 106, 107, 121, 309, 338, 352, 361–367, 371, 408 Fernandez, Ramon, 6, 8, 52, 167, 176, 303 Fik, Ignacy, 376, 377 First Vatican Council, 35 Florensky, Pavel, 223–226 ‘Reverse Perspective,’ 223–232 Fogazzaro, Antonio, 7, 14, 138, 148–153, 165, 178, 342 The Saint, 148–153 Franco-Prussian War, 37 Freud, Sigmund, 239, 248, 349, 361 G Gardner, Percy, 52 Garrigou-Lagrange, Réginald Marie, 306, 363, 370, 408, 413, 414 Godrycz, J., 279 Goldstein, Julius, 39 Gombrowicz, Witold, 168, 386, 387 ‘Against Poets,’ 386

Goncharova, Natalia, 226 Gore, Charles, 61 Graham, Billy, 411 H Haecker, Theodor, 50 Handel-Mazzetti, Enrica von, 7, 14, 138–148, 153, 178 Jesse and Maria, 139–142, 153 Hardy, Thomas, 163, 164 Harnack, Adolf von, 16, 31, 32, 200, 201 Harrison, Jane, 61, 166 Herberg, Will, 411 Heresy, 59–66 See also Cambridge Heretics Society; Modernism, theological Herling-Grudziński, Gustaw, 374, 375 Hlond, August, 363 Hochland, 6, 50, 139, 143, 144, 147, 148, 168 Hügel, Friedrich von, 3, 6, 13, 30, 38, 39, 41, 42, 45, 49, 53, 54, 66, 100, 149, 197, 201, 206, 248, 287, 304, 308, 317, 342, 343, 407 The Mystical Element of Religion, 49, 248 Hulme, T. E., 3, 6, 15, 138, 154–165, 167, 168, 178, 179 ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry,’ 154–155 ‘Romanticism and Classicism,’ 155–164 on romanticism and modernism, 154–164 Humani Generis (encyclical), 414 Huxley, Aldous, 4, 5

 INDEX 

I Inge, William Ralph, 42, 52, 53, 272, 294, 296 Ivanov, Vyacheslav, 211 Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław, 365, 372, 377 J James, Henry, 163 James, William, 34, 39–48, 59, 66, 103, 158, 197, 199, 200, 248, 270, 272, 284, 340, 349, 352, 363 The Varieties of Religious Experience, 43–48, 272, 340 Jameson, Margaret Storm, 16, 384, 385 Janet, Pierre, 272 Joan of Arc, 3, 62–65, 67 John XXIII, Pope, 414 Jourdain, Philip, 287 Joyce, James, 163 K Kandinsky, Wassily, 226, 227 Knight, G. Wilson, 312, 313, 317 Knox, Ronald, 34 Korniłowicz, Władysław, 168, 363, 364, 368, 369 Kozłowska, Feliksa (Maria Franciszka), 236 and the Mariavite movement, 237 Kralik, Richard von, 141–146, 148 Król, Jan Aleksander, 374 L Laberthonnière, Lucien, 36, 63, 105, 149, 213, 345 Lallement, Daniel, 364, 380

Lamentabili Sane Exitu (decree), 35, 147 Landy, Teresa, 369 Larionov, Mikhail, 226, 227 Lawrence, D. H., 163, 164 Lechoń, Jan, 377 Leclère, Albert, 362 Lemius, Jean Baptiste, 1–2, 38 Catechism on Modernism, 38 Lenin, Vladimir, 353 Leo XIII, Pope, 30, 33, 235, 279, 306, 339 Le Roy, Édouard, 287 Le Sillon, 8, 36, 43, 105 Leskov, Nikolai, 207, 220, 221 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 271 Lewis, C. S., 417, 418 Lewis, Wyndham, 3, 15, 138, 153–161, 165, 172, 176–178 Men Without Art, 160–164 Time and Western Man, 153–160 Lilley, Alfred Leslie, 39 Loisy, Alfred, 6, 13, 17, 30–32, 35, 36, 39, 49, 54, 59, 66, 106, 149–151, 205, 206, 213, 216, 279, 287, 349, 357, 407 The Gospel and the Church, 31, 287 Luther, Martin, 63, 97, 98, 367 M Major, Henry D. A., 52–54, 60, 287, 291 A Resurrection of Relics: A Modern Churchman’s Defence in a Recent Charge of Heresy, 291 Malevich, Kazimir, 226, 227 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 374

433

434 

INDEX

Marian devotion, 140, 141, 144–146, 232–237 and Kulturkampf, 144–146 and laity, 236 Marian apparitions in the 19th and 20th c., 145, 235 miracle-working Marian icons, 235–236 and Sophiology, 232–242 Maritain, Jacques, 5–8, 15–18, 63, 66, 98, 120–122, 139, 161, 167–178, 213, 268, 302–318, 338, 363–370, 375, 376, 379, 381–384, 389, 407, 408, 414 and antisemitism, 111–121 Art and Scholasticism, 173–176, 364 A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question, 114 ‘The Frontiers of Poetry’ (‘Poetry and Religion’), 173–176, 305 ‘The Mystery of Israel,’ 112 and the ‘pure poetry’ debate, 173–178 Saint Thomas Aquinas, 104 Three Reformers, 63, 98, 104, 364 The Twilight of Civilization, 107 Martin, Grover, 58 Marxism, see Communism Marx, Karl, 353, 357 Massis, Henri, 90, 104, 365 Mathews, Shailer, 56 Maurras, Charles, 9, 62, 104–107, 309, 368 McGiffert, Arthur C., 278 Mercier, Désiré, 33 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 211 Merton, Thomas, 337, 415 Miłosz, Czesław, 7, 15, 16, 18, 19, 28, 337–389, 407–413, 415, 419, 421

and anti-American sentiment, 410 on antisemitism, 360–374 ‘Ballad of Levallois,’ 347 ‘The Boundaries of Art,’ 379 The Captive Mind, 388, 408 ‘Campo dei Fiori,’ 373 ‘On a Certain Book,’ 367 ‘Coming down to earth,’ 375 ‘Dedication,’ 358, 359 ‘A Defence of Things Unacknowledged,’ 375 ‘The Experience of War,’ 348 ‘To Father Ch.,’ 340 ‘Father Ch., Many Years Later,’ 340 ‘Flatlands,’ 350 his early interest in religion, 338–340 his translations of English literature, 384–386 on heresy, 338–340 ‘Journey,’ 351 Legends of Modernity, 360–368 ‘Letter to Gombrowicz,’ 387 ‘The Lie of Contemporary “Poetry,”’, 374 Native Realm, 338, 342, 371 ‘Nativity Story,’ 351 on neo-scholasticism, 18, 337–338, 360–368 on modernism, 18, 337–338, 360–368 on Polish People’s Republic, 387 and politics, 9, 352, 360–374, 407–421 ‘A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto,’ 373 ‘The Poor Poet,’ 382, 384 on ‘pure poetry,’ 374–387 ‘Reflections on T. S. Eliot,’ 389 on religious imagination, 419–421 Rescue, 358, 385

 INDEX 

‘The River,’ 349 on Second Vatican Council, 415–421 ‘A Semi-Private Letter About Poetry,’ 358, 385 ‘On Silence,’ 375 ‘The Sun,’ 374–382, 384 on technology and spiritual alienation, 410, 413 and T. S. Eliot, 384–386 ‘In Warsaw,’ 358, 359 Witness of Poetry, 389 on World War 2, 360–368, 412–413 ‘Zdziechowski’s Religiosity,’ 342, 349, 361 Miłosz, Oskar, 389 Mit Brennender Sorge (encyclical), 106 Modern Churchman, 52, 60, 289, 291 Modern Churchmen’s Union, 268, 289 Modernism modernism as a term, 9–11, 28–29 See also Modernism, theological Modernism, theological, 5, 27–67, 109, 120, 197, 199–201, 205, 247, 267, 278–286, 337–338, 407–421 in the Church of England, 48–66 condemnation of, 27–39 definition, 28–29 as heresy, 6, 13, 27–39, 65–66 historical legacy of, 407–421 and John Henry Newman, 48–52 and literature, 5–9, 137–179 and mysticism, 39–48 and philosophy, 39–48 and politics, 5–9 and print culture, 56–59 in Protestant churches, 52–61 in the Roman Catholic Church, 27–39

435

as a transnational movement, 6, 37–39, 48–59 Modernist controversy, see Modernism, theological Moot, 107, 118, 419 Moral Rearmament, 108 Moses, Josiah, 272–274 Murri, Romolo, 6, 36, 43, 50, 149 Murry, John Middleton, 3, 6, 7, 17, 94, 96, 139, 162, 167, 168, 172, 173, 176, 268, 278, 286, 288, 291–298, 302–307, 309, 312, 313, 317, 362 ‘Christ and Christianity,’ 292 ‘On Fear; and on Romanticism,’ 292 The Life of Jesus, 294–302 and the ‘pure poetry’ debate, 171–178, 302–307 and T. S. Eliot (see Eliot, T. S., and John Middleton Murry) Musil, Robert, 91, 92 Muth, Karl, 139, 141, 143, 144, 146–149, 168 Mysticism, 15, 17, 40–43, 47, 61, 62, 64, 91, 93, 96, 103, 105, 110, 137, 155, 159, 167, 171, 172, 177, 179, 199, 248, 268, 272, 273, 275, 280, 281, 286–288, 293, 296, 303, 308, 311, 312, 317, 346, 371 theological modernism and the mystical revival, 39–48 N Nationalism, 14, 62, 101, 102, 104, 105, 109, 121, 338, 364, 365, 368, 371 National Socialism, 103, 106, 116 Nazism, 102, 107, 108, 116, 118

436 

INDEX

Neo-scholasticism, 1, 8, 14, 15, 17, 18, 29–36, 38, 43, 51, 62–64, 92, 98, 104, 109, 111, 112, 122, 137, 144, 151, 153, 155–161, 163–165, 168, 173, 176, 178, 213, 225, 267, 280, 283, 284, 286, 305–310, 312, 313, 317, 338, 339, 343, 347, 355, 363–371, 374, 375, 380, 382, 383, 389, 407, 408, 413 and aesthetics, 173–178, 302–317 and interwar politics, 104–109, 360–366 in literary criticism, 153–164, 302–317, 374–387 modernist critique of, 29–39 as a transnational movement, 37–39, 363 and the Vatican, 27–39 Neo-Thomism, see Neo-scholasticism New English Bible, 416–418 Newman, John Henry, 5, 13, 18, 48–52, 169, 212, 345, 346, 357 early-twentieth-century reception of (see Modernism, theological, and John Henry Newman) Nicholas II, Tsar, 226 Non Abbiamo Bisogno (encyclical), 106 Nordau, Max, 273 Notre Charge Apostolique (encyclical), 105 Nouvelle théologie, 413–415, 418 O O’Dwyer, Edward Thomas, 51 Ogden, C. K., 61 Orthodox iconography, 219–232 and the Russian avant-­ garde, 226–232 Ovid, 276

P Parkes, James, 120–122, 374 Pascal, Blaise, 302, 310 Pascendi Dominici Gregis (encyclical), 1, 13, 27, 30, 32, 35, 36, 38, 45, 51, 52, 55, 66, 146, 147, 154, 174, 179, 279, 287, 288, 293 Petre, Maude, 3, 30, 39, 408 Piasecki, Stanisław, 368, 371 Picciotto, Cyril M., 167 Pius X, Pope, 1, 13, 14, 27, 29, 32, 35, 37, 51, 62, 97, 105, 141, 147, 179, 237, 279, 293, 342 Pius XI, Pope, 105, 148, 309 Pius XII, Pope, 234, 414 Pound, Ezra, 286 Praz, Mario, 41, 172, 173, 303 Pujo, Maurice, 63 Pure Form, 19, 374–389 Pure poetry, 8, 15, 18, 168–178, 268, 304, 307, 308, 310, 318, 338, 374–387, 389 R Rashdall, Hastings, 39, 52, 53, 281–283, 285 Conscience and Christ, 282–286 Philosophy and Religion, 281 Read, Herbert, 164, 176, 177, 302, 308 Phases of English Poetry, 176 Reformation, 54, 98, 104, 141, 142, 339, 369 Rerum Novarum (encyclical), 33 Richards, I. A., 62, 303, 312 Rickaby, Joseph, 279, 280 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 6, 15–17, 19, 110, 197–249, 407–409, 411, 420 and anti-American sentiment, 409

 INDEX 

and antisemitism, 109–121 The Book of Hours, 17, 206–233, 242–247 ‘The Letter of the Young Worker,’ 204, 214, 245–246 Letters to a Young Poet, 246 The Life of Mary, 17, 233–247 ‘Modern Russian Art Movements,’ 221 and the Orthodox icon, 219–232 and politics, 9, 213–219, 407–421 on religious ritual, 419–421 and Russia, 206–219 ‘Russian Art,’ 221–222 and the ‘Russian soul,’ 207–219 Stories of God, 17, 206–219, 232–247 Two Stories of Prague, 210 and the Virgin Mary, 232–247 Visions of Christ, 199–204 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 98, 104, 155–157 Royce, Josiah, 270, 271 Royden, Maude, 296 Russell, Bertrand, 62, 270 Russian Orthodoxy, 17, 206–249, 408 Russian Revolution, 214, 408 S Sabatier, Paul, 287 Sangnier, Marc, 36, 43, 105 Santayana, George, 62, 271, 286 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 47, 48 ‘A New Mystic,’ 47 Scheler, Max, 94, 96, 100, 103, 356 Schmitt, Carl, 102, 104 Scott, John F., 58 Scott-James, R. A., 2 Second Vatican Council, 13, 414–416, 418 Semeria, Giovanni, 149, 343

437

Shakespeare, William, 312, 313, 315, 316, 384 Shaw, G. B., 3, 62–65, 165 Sheppard, Hugh R. L., 296 Sinclair, May, 4, 5, 93 Small, Albion, 55 Smyth, Newman, 54, 151 Solovyov, Vladimir, 167, 210, 228–232, 241, 242, 246–248, 408 on art and spiritual transfiguration, 219–232 ‘Beauty in Nature,’ 230 The Crisis of Western Philosophy, 211 ‘The Meaning of Art,’ 230 and Russian Orthodoxy, 206–213 and Sophiology, 232–242 Three Encounters, 247 Starbuck, Edwin, 273, 275 Storr, Vernon, 27, 28 Streeter, B. H., 165, 294, 387 Strong, Thomas B., 53 Swieżawski, Stefan, 369 Synthetic Society, 53, 54 Szymański, Antoni, 368, 369 T Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 90–93, 96 Temple, William, 287 Theology and aesthetics, 16, 165–178 and antisemitism, 109–115, 369–374 language of, 178–179, 415–421 and literary criticism, 14, 153–164 and modern philosophy, 30, 39–48 and politics, 89–90, 97–109, 360–368, 407–421 See also Modernism, theological; Neo-scholasticism Tribus Circiter (encyclical), 237

438 

INDEX

Truc, Gonzague, 104 Truman, Harry S., 409 Tübingen School of Theology, 5, 97 Tyrrell, George, 2, 6, 13, 27, 28, 30–32, 35, 36, 39, 42, 43, 48–51, 53, 59, 66, 100, 149, 151, 165, 166, 201, 206, 216, 224, 225, 279, 287, 304, 342–344, 349, 357, 407 U Underhill, Evelyn, 41, 93, 96, 167, 248, 272, 273, 288, 289, 293, 317, 387 Mysticism, 41, 167, 248, 288 Practical Mysticism, 93 V Valéry, Paul, 137, 171, 374 Vasnetsov, Viktor, 221 Verbum, 168, 363, 364, 368, 369 Voegelin, Eric, 102–104 Volynsky, Akim, 207, 220, 221 Voronin, Helene, 221, 232 W Ward, Mary, 3, 59 The Case of Richard Meynell, 59, 60 Ward, Wilfrid, 53 Washburn, George F., 56 Weil, Simone, 107, 108 Wells, H. G., 165

West, Rebecca, 62 Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy, 19, 338, 374–389 Woodruff, Douglas, 9, 107, 108 Woolf, Virginia, 62 World War 1, 13, 14, 66, 67, 89–97, 107, 121, 167, 236 interwar politics and religion, 104–109 and religion, 89–90, 121–122 and religious propaganda, 97–105 World War 2, 14, 16, 47, 103, 106–109, 111, 115, 118, 122, 338, 348, 360, 367, 377, 389, 408, 411–413 and Christian antisemitism, 97–105, 120–122, 369–374 and religion, 97–109, 121–122 Y Yeats, W. B., 3, 138, 153, 160, 163, 166 Z Zdziechowski, Marian, 3, 6, 18, 38, 39, 50, 149, 152, 167, 337–352, 360–362, 366, 407 On Cruelty, 343, 345 on evil, 343–352 on neo-scholasticism, 343–347 Pestis perniciosissima, 38, 152, 342, 343 on theological modernism, 343–347