Modernists and Mystics

2. Mysticism and Modernism in Baron Friedrich von Hügel’s Life and Thought

2 Mysticism and Modernism in Baron Friedrich von Hügel’s Life and Thought Lawrence F. Barmann Whenever the name of Baron Friedrich von Hügel is mentioned, the context is nearly always that of the Modernist controversy within the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, of the dozens of books and articles written about him in the eighty years since his death, the vast majority have had to do with his role in that controversy. Yet a serious and systematic study of his life and writings unequivocally indicates that Friedrich von Hügel was a Roman Catholic Modernist precisely because he was a Roman Catholic mystic. Should this seem questionable to someone, the cause, most likely, would be that individual’s lack of a close acquaintance with the life and thought of von Hügel, or perhaps such a person’s uncritical acceptance of the defamatory caricature of all so-called Modernists in Pius X’s Pascendi dominici gregis, or even the fact that many who were called Modernists were not mystics. Or, perhaps all three! But to really understand Friedrich von Hügel one must not only study his mystical doctrine, but also the way in which his life and work were expressions of this doctrine. Born in Florence in the early years of Pope Pius IX’s long reign and into a family in which his mother was a convert from Presbyterianism and his father was only perfunctorily Catholic, the young von Hügel 23 24 Lawrence F. Barmann seems not to have found the Catholic practice which he experienced in his early years something to which he could wholeheartedly commit. When he was in his fifties and looking back on his early life in Italy, von Hügel remarked that it was the Italy of the early Renaissance and preReformation period, the Italy of Dante and the Florentine Platonists, which inspired him. It was, he said, a time “yet neither Protestant nor anti-Protestant, but deeply positive and Catholic.” Those early modern times, he continued, presented him with Men of the same general instincts and outlook as my own, but environed by the priceless boon and starting-point of a still undivided Western Christendom ; Protestantism, as such continued to be felt as ever more or less unjust and sectarian; and the specifically post-Tridentine type of Catholicism, with its regimental Seminarism, its predominantly controversial spirit, its suspiciousness and timidity, persisted, however inevitable some of it may be, in its failure to win my love. Hence I had to continue the seeking and finding elsewhere, yet ever well within the great Roman Church, things more intrinsically loveable.1 He wrote those words in explanation of why he had decided to write a book on the pre-Reformation Saint Catherine of Genoa and mysticism. But the years between his early life and Italy and his writing The Mystical Element of Religion in London were indeed years of seeking and finding in Catholicism something “deeply positive and Catholic.” When Friedrich’s father retired from his duties with the Austrian government, the von Hügels moved to southern England. Karl von Hügel ’s health was rapidly deteriorating and he decided to make one last trip to his beloved Vienna with his wife and eldest son. However, he died on the way in Brussels, leaving the eighteen-year-old Friedrich and his mother to take the body to the Austrian capital for burial.2 While 1. Baron Friedrich von Hügel, The Mystical Element of Religion As Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends, vol. 1, (London: Dent, 1908), v–vi. See also page 95, where he writes: “Catherine thus lived within a period which, in its depths, was already modern, but not yet broken up into seemingly final, institutionalized internecine antagonisms. And hence we can get in her a most restful and bracing pure affirmativeness, an entire absence of religious controversy, such as, of necessity, cannot be found in even such predominately interior souls as the great pre-Reformation Spanish Mystics. Her whole religion can grow and show itself as simply positive, and in rivalry and conflict with her own false self and with that alone.” 2. See Lawrence Barmann, “Baron Friedrich von Hügel and Mysticism: In Pursuit of the Mysticism & Modernism in Baron von Hügel 25 there Friedrich contracted typhus and was already suffering from nervous anxiety brought on by his father’s death...