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  • God’s Mirror: Renewal and Engagement in French Catholic Intellectual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century ed. by Katherine Davies and Toby Garfitt
  • John Flower
God’s Mirror: Renewal and Engagement in French Catholic Intellectual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century. Edited by Katherine Davies and Toby Garfitt. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. vii + 350 pp.

The essays in this volume illustrate in various ways a period when Catholicism in France was ‘in transition’ (pp. 105 and 127), essentially from the 1920s to the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). In broad terms they reflect the impact of the major shift from the traditional and rigid neo-Thomism, which had dominated Catholicism since the mid nineteenth century, to a more open, socially and often politically engaged Catholicism that developed from the mid 1930s and became known as ‘la nouvelle théologie’. Michael Kelly’s opening chapter, reminding us of the intellectual climate of the early years of this period, usefully sets the scene and highlights the significant contributions made by Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, and Gabriel Marcel. Thereafter, chapters focus on individuals or, in one case (Chapter 9), on a Quebecois periodical, La Relève. The result is a mixed bag. In some essays we never lose sight of the individual’s complex relationship with the shifting intellectual climate. This is especially true of Paul Gifford’s piece on the ‘anti-clerical humanist’ Paul Valéry with his withering dismissal of the ‘dogmatism and intellectual dishonesty of the God-convinced’ (pp. 56 and 65), and of Florence de Lussy’s one on Simone Weil and her rejection of the ‘totalitarian’ power of the Church (p. 79). Increasingly, however, chapters concentrate on private dilemmas rather than the broad scene. Toby Garfitt’s essay on Jean Grenier, whose opposition to ‘ideological orthodoxies’ is well known (p. 91), essentially treats the ‘anguish of the pure intellectual’ (p. 100), while Katherine Davies concentrates on Charles Du Bos’s ongoing search for sincerity and his unresolved attempt to balance ‘the concrete and the supernatural’ (p. 128). Stephen Schloesser’s over-long chapter (and notes) on Olivier Messaien and his music is almost entirely biographical with long asides on, for example, Daniel-Rops, the Abbé Jean Viollet, or Aquinas, and extensive quotations. Schloesser’s evidence for the mystical qualities of Messaien’s work is based on libretti; comments about the music are almost non-existent. In a more focused chapter Brian Sudlow revisits Bernanos’s claim that Christianity had been ‘deformed by ideological control’ (p. 180). He summarizes current interpretations of the author’s polemical pamphlets, proposing a new reading of some of them with reference to René Girard’s later theory on mimetic desire and especially his work on violence. Brenna Moore shows how a major contribution was made to ‘la nouvelle théologie’ in her exploration of the lives and work of Marie-Madeleine Davy and three other women whose specialist work on pre-modern Christianity and non-Christian religions contained a fundamental challenge to traditional scholastic teaching. Inevitably their work was largely overlooked and aroused ‘the defenses of a male-only clergy’ (p. 208). The two remaining chapters, Anthony O’Mahony’s on Louis Massignon and Joseph Dunlop’s on La Relève, are both essentially biographical and historical and insufficiently focused on the book’s main theme. The editor’s comprehensive Introduction leaves no doubt about the complexity of this period. It is a pity, however, that there is nothing specifically on the Maritains, for example, or on the conservative (integrist) reactions already voiced in the Second Vatican Council. [End Page 138]

John Flower
Paris
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