Catholic Particularity in Seventeenth-Century French Writing: 'Christianity is Strange' (review)

This volume is based on the 2009 Bampton Lectures, inaugurated in 1780 'to confirm and establish the Christian Faith, and to confute all heretics and schismatics' (cited on p. 2). Richard Parish's take on this brief is a commentary on seventeenth-century French writing on Catholic Christianity: mainly Pascal, Bossuet, François de Sales, and Fénelon, but also witnesses such as Claude Hopil, Jean-Joseph Surin, Jean de La Ceppède, Antoinette Bourignon, and Madame Guyon. He sets out to show how they confronted the paradoxes of the Christian Incarnation in radically different ways while remaining in the barque of Peter. There are chapters on apologetics (mostly Pascal); physicality; language (though, in the pages on pulpit oratory, no mention of the towering figure of Bourdaloue); discernment; polemic (though, again surprisingly, in the overview of Jansenism, Calvinism, and Catholic orthodoxy there is no engagement with Leszek Kolakowski's God Owes Us Nothing); and salvation, which brings us in particular to Bossuet's linking of death and providence. The transition from lecture to book has also generated a valuable index and informative footnotes. Although the lectures had, self-evidently, sometimes to explain basics to a generalist audience (for example, for Pascal, man is great because he knows he is wretched), the resulting book is no easy ride, or not at least for those who are theologically if not syntactically challenged, as by phrases such as '[c]ertainly a hypothetically fideistic statement by the believer of a supernaturally accorded faith which defies reason will not convince the unbeliever, who can argue exactly the same thing for his belief ' (p. 16). Parish provides much food for thought, and, inevitably, some potential for debate. Thus, for instance, the examples of erotico-religious imagery he gives seem quite restrained compared to, say, Bernard of Clairvaux's sermons on the Song of Songs more than five centuries before, or the religious art of Titian or Leonardo da Vinci. It is also strange that Parish should have to work his way to the conclusion that 'Bossuet's teaching holds few if any surprises' (p. 205): from the guardian of Catholic orthodoxy and author of the Meaux catechism, the need to surprise would be surprising indeed. One wonders, too, what hard evidence supports the assertion that France in the seventeenth century was 'an increasingly dechristianized Christian society' (p. 160): 'dechristianization' is difficult to define (just religious practice?), and easier to assert than to prove. Finally, it is tempting to ask how much of the 'Catholic particularity' considered here was any more 'particular' in the French seventeenth century than elsewhere. Such a question is, of course, unfair, and supposes a comparative study beyond the author's deliberately restricted design. However, Parish does often beckon to the grand beyond, as in his conclusion that, in these writers, it is 'only through the despair of the Crucifixion that the Resurrection may in turn carry its full transformative potential' (p. 209). It is, of course, this fundamental of Christianity that has made it 'strange', in all ages. Different readers, according to their lights, will decide whether this book has illuminated its strangeness.