The Catholic Revival in Modern European Literature (1890–1945)

Enrique Sánchez-Costa

The Catholic Revival
in Modern European
Literature (1890–1945)

Translated by Dustin Langan

PETER LANG

New York • Bern • Frankfurt • Berlin

Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sánchez-Costa, Enrique, author. | Langan, Dustin, translator.

Title: The Catholic revival in modern European literature (1890–1945) /

Enrique Sánchez-Costa; translated by Dustin Langan.

Other titles: Resurgimiento católico en la literatura europea moderna

(1890–1945). English

Description: New York; Bern: Peter Lang, 2018.

Series: Ibérica; vol. 46 | ISSN 1056-5000

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017051098 | ISBN 978-1-4331-4187-4 (hardback: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4331-4188-1 (ebook pdf) | ISBN 978-14331-4189-8 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-4331-4190-4 (mobi)

Subjects: European literature—20th century—History and criticism.

Catholic Church—In literature. | Catholics in literature.

Classification: PN768 .S3613 2018 | DDC 809/.8921282—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051098

DOI 10.3726/b11751

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche

Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available

on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

© 2018 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

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All rights reserved.

Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,

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About the author

Enrique Sánchez-Costa has a PhD in humanities from Pompeu Fabra University, where he obtained the Extraordinary Award in 2012. He is Director of the Graduate Program in Spanish Studies: Linguistics and Literature at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (Dominican Republic).

About the book

From 1890 to 1945, Europe was shaken by political, social, and cultural revolutions brought about by the crisis of modernity. Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud stoked the yearnings of a convulsed era, devastated by the First World War. It was a time when all kinds of alternative and radical models of modernity were erected in pursuit of a new world: from the exasperation of communist and fascist totalitarianism to the frenzy of the artistic avant-gardes and biopolitics.

Hungry for transcendence and tormented by hope, this passionate age also gave rise in Europe to a Catholic revival in literature. Writers such as G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene in England; Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel, and Georges Bernanos in France; and Ramiro de Maeztu and José Bergamín in Spain found that Catholicism was the key to coping with the enigmas and paradoxes of modern man. At the same time, by injecting the political and artistic principles of modernity into the Christian tradition, they transformed a reactionary Catholicism into the paradigm of ultramodernity.

This book explores the intellectual history of a European cultural phenomenon that has thus far been left out of most works of criticism, despite its magnitude. Moreover, it does so through vibrant prose that makes this work of research read like a novel.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1. Introduction

Part I The French Renouveau Catholique

Chapter 2. Fin-de-Siècle Paris and the First Conversions

Chapter 3. Claudel and the Constellation of the Nouvelle Revue Française

Chapter 4. Gide and the Struggle Around the Nouvelle Revue Française

Chapter 5. The Maritain Constellation

Chapter 6. Maritain Among the Avant-Garde

Chapter 7. French Catholicism Faced With the Condemnation of Action Française ←vii | viii→

Part II The English Catholic Revival

Chapter 8. Newman and the Oxford Movement

Chapter 9. “Liquid Protestantism” and the Conversions of Robert Hugh Benson and Ronald Knox

Chapter 10. The Chesterton Constellation

Chapter 11. Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and the Holiness of the Anti-Hero

Part III The Catholic Revival in Spain

Chapter 12. Catholicism, Liberalism, and the Revolutionary Rhetoric of the 19th Century

Chapter 13. The Agonizing Christianity of Unamuno and the Lively Catholicism of Joan Maragall

Chapter 14. Antonio Marichalar, José Bergamín, and the Refreshing Catholicism of Cruz y Raya

Chapter 15. Ramiro de Maeztu: Witness to the Political and Spiritual Crisis of Modernity

Chapter 16. The Fascist Temptations of Rafael Sánchez Mazas and Ernesto Giménez Caballero

Chapter 17. Conclusion

Index←viii | ix→

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the people who made this publication possible: Dustin Langan, the translator of the book, for his excellent work; Ignacio Arellano, one of the most renowned Hispanists in the world, for presenting the manuscript to the publisher; A. Robert Lauer, for the great support that he gave the book and for admitting it to the “Ibérica” series that he directs; Meagan Simpson, my editor at Peter Lang, for her diligence and professionalism during the editing of the book; and Fernando Sánchez Marcos for his careful preparation of the Index of people who appear in the book, which is so valuable to its readers.←ix | x→ ←x | 1→

·1·

Introduction

Zurich, June 23, 1916, Cabaret Voltaire. The tavern was a hotbed of artists who had come from all of Europe, many of them fleeing the First World War, which thundered only a few kilometers away. Futurist, expressionist and Dadaist paintings were hanging on the walls. Attendees of the night show included the poets Tristan Tzara and Richard Huelsenbeck, as well as the painters Hans Arp, Marcel Janco and Sophie Taeuber. Right before the start of the performance, with the lights off, some people transported a contraption towards the center of the stage platform, together with two lecterns, on top of which a manuscript written in red had been placed. Once the lights were turned on, the strange figure was revealed to be a person whose legs and torso were crammed into brilliant blue cardboard cylinders. From the person’s torso, a cape made of cardboard appeared in the form of wings, scarlet on the inside and golden on the outside. The individual’s hands were covered with enormous grey gloves, mimicking the pincers of crustaceans, and he wore a hat on his head with bluish white lines, distinctive of a culinary chef or a head of the Church, meaning an archbishop.

As he flapped his wings, the cube-shaped man began to recite some strange verses: “gadji veri bimba | glandridilaulilonnicadorl | gadjamabim veri glassala.”¹ This was not any known language, but was instead an example of “poems←1 | 2→ without words” or “phonetic poems,” in which, as its author would write the next day, “we totally renounce the language that journalism has abused and corrupted. We must return to the innermost alchemy of the word, we must even give up the word too, to keep for poetry its last and holiest refuge.”2 The word had been sullied by armies of Kafkaesque state civil servants, commercial advertising and the deceitful rhetoric of the warring powers. It was paramount to restore to words their original magic, as the shamans and druids intoned them in their spells, thereby eluding their conventional meanings, ossified and worn down through pragmatic use. In face of the utilitarian and rationalistic civilization, this ungrammatical poetry sought to awaken the purest, deepest and most irrational layers of humanity.

This rigid reciter uttering sounds that shocked him and much as they astonished the audience was the German-born Hugo Ball (1886–1927), one of the founders of Cabaret Voltaire and with it, European Dadaism. A student of philosophy in Munich and Heidelberg, Ball would soon get involved in theatre, working in Berlin between 1910 and 1914 as a stage director, actor and playwright. There he met Emmy Hennings, a cabaret actress and poet who would soon become his partner and whom he would marry in the early 1920s. During those years, Ball became acquainted with the works of Nietzsche, but also with the political anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin and with the religious anarchism of the Anabaptist leader Thomas Müntzer. With that experience and in opposition to the German invasion of Belgium, Ball landed in Zurich in May 1915. There, in a space not too far from Lenin’s house, he founded Cabaret Voltaire one year later, proposed the term “dada” (found randomly in a dictionary) as a name for the new artistic movement and wrote the Opening Manifesto of the First Dada Soirée (1916). That same year, he also presented the first Dadaist phonetic poem, Karawane, which articulated phonemes with no apparent meanings.

For Ball, as he wrote in his diary during those years, the Dadaist cabaret “is a gesture. Every word that is spoken and sung here says at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect.”³ It was a protest against an absurd war, but more profoundly, it was also a rejection of an entire mechanistic and soulless era whose constitutive ideas had become bankrupt. The tanks could not be stopped, but perhaps the people could be awakened and moved beyond partiality and nationalism. In “his” understanding, “art is only an occasion for that, a method”⁴ to awaken the Europeans from a dream that was increasingly taking on the contours of a nightmare. He also saw it as “orgiastic devotion to the opposite of everything that is service←2 | 3→able and useful.”5 In this sense, Ball did not distinguish himself much from symbolist and decadent concepts, which in opposition to the noted prosaicism of naturalistic art, exulted beauty for beauty’s sake, the “uselessness” and spirituality of art. Hence the celebration of useless objects (a bibliographic rarity, a perfume or a dilapidated musical instrument), to be admired only as an aesthetic or spiritual enhancer.

As Ball wrote in 1914, “Ideals are only labels that have been stuck on. Everything has been shaken to its foundations.”⁶ The sense of crisis and decadence in modernity was not exclusive to the founder of Dadaism. There are many thinkers, writers and modernist artists who clearly perceived the sinking of the principles on which modernity had been founded. Paul Valéry, for example, began his work The Crisis of the Mind (1919) with the words: “We later civilizations… we too now that we are mortal.”⁷ It was not possible to continue patching up a reality that demanded not only specific repairs, but a complete overhaul. The absolute certainties of the past (Christian ones as well as those that emerged from the philosophical rhetoric of enlightened modernity) had collapsed. Égalité and fraternité—whether recognized or not—had been erected from the base narrative of Judeo-Christian tradition. But how could people carry on as brothers when their common Father had “died”? How could they continue to recognize the equality of humans that had lost their status as children of God and were now, for many, mere evolved primates? Over the course of the preceding centuries, many had pondered the beauty of the modern edifice while ignoring the real state of its foundations.

This feeling of systemic exhaustion was amplified by profound social inequalities that were exacerbated during the second half of the 19th century, as well as by the outbreak of the First World War, a nationalistic and ultra-technological conflict that had torn the modern myth of progress asunder. Any sensitive examination would have seen cruel inequalities in Europe before and after the war, including poverty and hunger. Spiritual asphyxiation prevailed in many literary, artistic and intellectual circles, along with the solid conviction that pragmatic positivism had choked off any possible transcendent experience, constrained the world to a techno-material dimension and truncated the human community, replacing it with a cold and atomized society. Kandinsky strongly asserted this in 1911: “Our minds, which are even now only just awakening after years of materialism, are infected with the despair of unbelief, of lack of purpose and ideal. The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip.”⁸←3 | 4→

Modernity was guilty, it was said. It had to be condemned and overcome. Scientism, rationalism and liberal parliamentarism should yield to new ways to achieve the fulfilment of humanity and overcome social collapse. It was often believed that to construct a new world, the old one had to be destroyed. Nietzsche, the paradigm of modernist philosophy, defined himself in Ecce Homo (1889) as “dynamite,” that is, an explosive charge that was going to blow up the Christian metaphysical ground and modern scientism as well: “everything that had been believed, demanded, and hallowed so far.” Thus, “my name will be linked to the memory of something monstrous, of a crisis as yet unprecedented on Earth, the most profound collision of consciences.”9 Meanwhile, after criticizing the utilitarian objectives that were hidden in the great speculative constructs of Kant (“to make the drill ground possible”), Fichte (“to raise the Ego above the world”) and Marx (“to calculate profit”), Ball summarized the downfall of modern worldviews in a true anecdote: the discovery in a shop, of a shoe cleaning product called “The thing in itself.”¹⁰

Since as Ball wrote, “everything is functioning; only man himself is not any longer”¹¹; “what we are celebrating is both buffoonery and a requiem mass.”¹² And we already know that in European courts, the court jester was the only one who was allowed to shout the truth, the only one who between taunts and jokes could denounce that the emperor had no clothes. Unlike Tzara and the other Dadaists, Ball’s stance did not seek out the nihilistic or the playful. His art was aimed at helping humanity, with his histrionics serving both as a denouncement of the philosophical and moral frailness of modernity and as a pro defunctis liturgy lamenting “the modern necrophilia. Belief in matter is a belief in death.”¹³ In fact, by lacking supernatural hope, positivist literature and science had shown a morbid interest in the spectacle of death, as illustrated by articles appearing in the printed press, the macabre description of the death of the protagonist of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) and other events that would provide material for the stories of Edgar Allen Poe. Every time the process of secularization seemed to be reaching its final stages and positivism and determinism had sealed all spiritual cracks, Ball wrote that “we live in a universal Good Friday […]; that the church calendar is disrupted, and God is still dead on the cross even at Easter.”¹⁴

In light of this decline of philosophy and religion, new impulses would come, first from the arts, elevating artists to the level of “prophets” of a new era. As Ball confessed: “When we said Kandinsky and Picasso, we meant not painters, but priests; not craftsmen, but creators of new worlds and new paradises.”¹⁵ And if prophets are those who see the future after contact with su←4 | 5→perior spiritual entities, in the early decades of the 20th century, painters and sculptors would not only seek a source of inspiration in art, but also in non-Christian forms of transcendence like theosophy, anthroposophy, spiritualism, the Eastern religions and different forms of magic. Some would even confer an almost religious status to vegetarianism and nudism: practices that, from their point of view, enable a more primitive and original communion with nature. This primitivism would also be reflected in art, such as the African masks that Picasso used as references to sketch the human faces in Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907).

If I stress this envy that Nietzsche felt for Christianity (the four parts of Zarathustra mimic the four Gospels), it is to underline the nature of his philosophy as a new religion, which together with the philosophy of Marx would serve as the basis of the new political religions of the 20th century: totalitarianisms. Nietzsche referred to Christianity as the great stretcher of the bow of European civilization, who would use the tension to shoot the arrow towards a further target. “It is time that mankind set themselves a goal. It is time that mankind plant the seed of their highest hope.”16 He thereby appealed to a great longing, to a new tomorrow, to a remote country (that of the children) that had yet to be discovered. It was time to tighten the sails towards the←5 | 6→ future, where new origins and dawns awaited; where future natural springs waited for those who, though a dangerous life, might be capable of reaching them. Among those new philosophers and people of the future, he obviously counted himself:

The now and the past on earth is what is most unbearable to me. And I would not know how to live if I were not also a seer of that which must come. A seer, a willer, a creator, a future himself and a bridge to the future (…) I walk among human beings as among fragments of the future; the future that I see.17

It is no accident that the text is titled “Of Redemption,” as this is what Nietzschean philosophy would do: redeem the past and the present through a future goal and a future project (using the willful affirmation: “I will it thus! I shall will it thus!”).¹⁸ The Übermensch, able to surpass contemporary man, would be the man of the future, able to destroy the Christian “single goal” and to replace it with Nietzsche’s “single goal,” which would return hope to humankind. The German thinker understood the power of hope all too well, which “is a great deal more powerful stimulans to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be.”¹⁹ Nietzschean hubris revolts against all dependence and against any received gift. The prophet of the new hope, who cannot stand receiving gifts and only wants to give them (and not out of charity, but out of the pride of being able to give), would order to his disciples: “You should make it up in your children that you are the children of your fathers; thus you should redeem all that is past!” One liberates oneself from the past by producing children and future values. Faced with the Christian preference for acceptance (acceptance of natural life and the supernatural realm of priests and God), Nietzsche advocated the primacy of the factum: doing and being able to do.

Zarathustra ends his prophetic dialogues exclaiming: “This is my morning, my day is beginning: up now, up, you great noon!”²⁰ Night should give way to the new dawn, to the Übermensch who wants and can do all, and who arrives “glowing and strong, like a morning sun that emerges from dark mountains.”²¹ The advent of the Übermensch (who mimics the second coming of Christ) would take place at the expense of the weak and those trapped in the necessary upheavals for establishing the “new peoples.” That egalitarian mass of men should be “sacrificed to the prosperity of the one stronger species of Man—that would be a progress.”²² Any socio-political utopia needs the convergence of all efforts going toward the realization of the project, which ends up infringing the most elemental individual rights. No one or anything can impede the “progress” of humanity—of all humanity or a few superior←6 | 7→ individuals—towards the envisaged socio-political paradise. It is the reason that the first decades of the 20th century, so entrenched with utopias (the progress of science, the proletariats or a specific nation or race), would also witness the birth of the perversion of eugenics, which is also found in Nietzsche.

The “highest self-contemplation”23 that Nietzsche offers to humanity supposes the imposition of the strong over the weak, applying the Darwinist principles of “natural selection” and “the struggle for survival” to society. This is a struggle that must also govern the geopolitical arena: “The time for petty politics is over; the next century will bring the struggle for the domination of the earth—the compulsion to great politics.”²⁴ It is true that since the start of the 20th century, some of Nietzsche’s thought was twisted to support the Second and Third German Reich, while his abundant criticism of Germanic culture and his ambivalent views of the Jews were also forgotten. Yet the connections between Nietzsche’s work and the subsequent German empires cannot be reduced to a few debated passages, but to important agreements of substance. In this sense, it serves well to remember that one of the ideological lines of thinking that would attempt to overcome the crisis of modernity began with Nietzsche (the Übermensch, the death of God and personal conscience, the violent imposition of the strong over the weak, etc.) and led more or less directly to Hitler’s Nazism.

In 1917, Ball wrote that he often met “with a Utopian friend,” Ernst Bloch, “who induces me to read [Thomas] More and Campanella, while he studies Müntzer and the Eisenmenger.”²⁵ One year later, Bloch published his well-known The Spirit of Utopia and his Thomas Müntzer as Theologian for the Revolution appeared in 1921, partially due to Ball’s influence. Meanwhile, the Dadaist author published Critique of the German Intelligentsia (1919), some of the ideas of which came from discussions with Bloch and another friend that he would gain among the intellectuals that had taken refuge in Switzerland: Walter Benjamin. Highly praised by Herman Hesse, Ball’s book is an example of the utopian climate that could be breathed in pacifist Switzerland and is of interest in its connections between politics and utopian and spiritual principles, something also present in Political Theology (1922) by Carl Schmitt. In this sense, all the intellectuals exiled in Switzerland would closely watch the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, whose success, by the way, owed much to Lenin’s trip from Switzerland to Petrograd in April of that year.

As Ball wrote in 1913: “The most burning question day and night is this: is there anywhere a force that is strong enough and above all vital enough to put an end to this state of affairs? And if not, how can one escape it?”²⁶ Many←7 | 8→ would find that power in political authoritarianism, whether Communist, Fascist or Nazi. Faced with chaos and the relativism of modernity, totalitarianism would offer them order, unity and a totalitarian list of values. Though probably arbitrary, they were values nonetheless: a lifesaver to keep from sinking in the stormy sea of metaphysical uncertainties. Yet many would discover, much too late, that the lifesaver was not filled with pure air, but with shrapnel, and that it was not really a lifesaver, but a death trap. Others, unmoved by totalitarian temptations, would look into non-Christian spiritual and magical traditions, as we have seen, in which they would find a break from their working hours and an Orientalist escape from the drab societies of the Western metropolis. Ball wrote in his journal that “modern artists are Gnostics and practice things that the priests think are long forgotten.”27 This Gnosticism would combine both the vita esthetica and the vita contemplativa and its adherents, many of them artists, would seek “to free themselves from these times, even in the subconscious, and thus give the times their innermost form.”²⁸