Essais sur la religiosité d'Honoré de Balzac (review)

John H. Mazaheri's book gathers together ten essays that explore selected aspects of Balzac's religious and ethical thought as glimpsed here and there in La Comédie humaine. In a brief foreword, written in English, Mazaheri makes it clear that he does not wish to provide a comprehensive or systematic account of his topic. It is perhaps for this reason that he does not give us an introduction, leaving it instead to Edgard Pich to contribute a general overview of the subject in the course of a preface given both in the French original and in Mazaheri's English translation (all subsequent material is given only in French). The collection ends not with a conclusion, but rather with a final essay on Vautrin and virtue that itself ends somewhat inconclusively. There is little attempt to connect the essays to each other and Mazaheri gives no particular sense of an evolution in Balzac's religious thought over the course of his long writing career. The texts selected for study – La Messe de l'Athée, Jésus-Christ en Flandre, Le Médecin de campagne (the subject of two essays), Pierrette, Le Curé de Tours, Le Lys dans la vallée, Ursule Mirouët, Le Curé de village and Le Père Goriot – are in any case presented out of chronological order, so that we pick Balzac up in 1836 and drop him off again in 1834. Mazaheri's chosen texts appear reasonably representative of Balzac's engagement both with Catholicism and with religion more generally, although other works might just as obviously have been fixed upon: the mystical Louis Lambert and Séraphîta are merely alluded to in passing, whereas L'Envers de l'histoire contemporaine, a more straightforwardly Catholic novel, is ignored altogether. The connection between Balzac's religiosity and his ostensibly Legitimist politics is touched upon but never explored in any depth, to the point where Balzac's engagement with the reactionary theosophy of Joseph de Maistre is never once explored. The issue of (Catholic) charity is raised at various points, most notably in the context of La Messe de l'athée, but Mazaheri does not go on to discuss it in relation to Eugénie Grandet or L'Envers, the two novels that foreground it most obviously. In other words, this is a book that, seemingly deliberately, frustrates any wish that its readers might have to arrive at a firm set of connections and conclusions. We do not learn a great deal about La Comédie humaine taken as a whole, but we are usefully reminded of the many idiosyncrasies of individual texts within it. Thus each of the essays takes the form of a meticulous close reading, either of a shorter text, or of a small portion of a longer work taken in isolation. The insights are rarely startling in and of themselves, but Mazaheri's restricted focus allows him to build up a series of detailed pictures that help us to identify the sometimes hidden ambiguities and ambivalences of Balzac's religious and ethical thought. In particular, Mazaheri works with existing scholarship to show us some of the many contradictions that attended Balzac's Catholicism: a Romantic Catholicism that flirts by turns with Illuminist, Protestant and anti-clerical rhetoric as it attempts to engage with a mysticism voided of almost all theological content and aligned with a series of other religions and pseudosciences (most notably Swedenborgianism and Mesmerism). Each essay adds something to our understanding of Balzac's diffuse religiosity, which he paradoxically likes to present as an important part of the unitary system of thought by which he hopes one day to explain and account for all of nature and society. Only that final essay on Vautrin's attempts to manipulate Rastignac in Le Père Goriot fails entirely to convince, perhaps because it is difficult to see just how Vautrin's cynical, sophistical and obviously self-serving moralizing...