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Sacred Modernities: Rethinking Modernity in a Post-Secular Age

18 September 2009

Katherine Davies (Manchester Metropolitan University)
The Aesthetic-Ethical Self and the Catholic Self: Aporias in Charles Du Bos’s Catholicism, 1923-1933

French Catholicism enjoyed a golden age during the interwar years at the vanguard of intellectual and cultural life. Scholarship on this renouveau catholique has focused on the ways in which an explicitly ‘modern’ Catholic identity was forged, but this paper explores instead the tensions involved in the reconciliation between Catholicism and modernity. The intellectual and spiritual life of Charles Du Bos (1882-1939), lauded literary critic and Catholic convert, provides an especially pertinent lens through which to address the aporias in the enterprise of Catholic rapprochement with modernity. During the interwar years French intellectuals became increasingly preoccupied with formulating a new humanism in response to demands born of the experience of the War. Catholic involvement in the humanist enterprise manifested itself as a concern for how value can be assigned to the notion of the ‘person’, that is, human heterogeneity, within the realm of faith. This paper addresses how the relationship between Du Bos’s intellectual and spiritual commitments before his conversion in 1927 and his Catholic faith crystallized around the problematic relation between the person and the soul. The exchanges between Du Bos and his interlocutor in the humanist debate, the literary critic, Ramon Fernandez, illuminate the problems of passivity and volition and the essential unity or divisiveness of the person and the soul. These difficulties are explored further in terms of the tension between Du Bos’s aesthetic-ethical self and his Catholic identity, by examining his intellectual engagement with André Gide. Du Bos’s conversion to Catholicism had its roots in the metaphysical quest for the soul in his literary criticism: the phenomenology of his conversion can be described as a shift from the beautiful to the good, and from the good to the sacred. Whilst this trajectory demonstrates continuity in terms of deference to a transcendent self, the transition from aesthetics and deism to theism and finally to Christ, was also the cause of long-term anxiety and aporia. Du Bos’s struggle with Gide rested fundamentally upon the tension he experienced between what he called ‘ultimate’ humanism, incarnated in Gide, and Catholic ‘integral’ humanism.

Dr Katherine Davies was awarded her PhD in November 2008, from the University of Manchester – entitled “Three Voices of the Interwar French Catholic Revival: Jacques Maritain, Charles Du Bos and Gabriel Marcel and the Tensions of Reconciliation with the World” – and has recently taken up a post at Magdalen College, Oxford. Her research interests are focused broadly on the history of ideas and religion in modern France, and more especially the formation of intellectual identities and their contexts. She is currently editing an article for publication in the Journal of the History of Ideas, “The Third-Way Catholic Intellectual: Charles Du Bos, Tragedy and Ethics”, and preparing an article for The Historical Journal, entitled “The Aesthetic-Ethical Self and the Catholic Self: Ramon Fernandez and Charles Du Bos Read André Gide”.

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