La Jouissance et le trouble: recherches sur la littérature chrétienne de l'âge classique (review)

This indispensable book is a compilation of twenty-three articles published over the last two-and-a-half decades (sometimes in relatively inaccessible places), and provides a compendium of scholarship concerned with the whole raft of topics indicated by its sub-title. The first of the broad themes that recurrently interest Jacques Le Brun is the foundation in the period of the science of Biblical exegesis and hermeneutics, in particular as it was practiced by Richard Simon, of whose impact he gives a magisterial account. Secondly, and relatedly, several articles touch on or are devoted to the implications of quietism, including a perceptive study of the movement in terms of archaism and modernity, and two incisive accounts of its controversial exponent, Madame Guyon, for whom the Bible, interpreted as 'une immense allégorie de l'intérieur', afforded a whole sequence of inspirational female role-models. A third group of studies concentrates on the impact of single figures (the English Catholic theologian Henry Holden, the Dutch Protestant Grotius, the influential pastors Pierre Jurieu and Jean Claude), or groups of texts (the spiritual output of Leibniz or the early writings of Bossuet), in the course of which some surprising elements of common ground between the Catholic and Reformed traditions are brought to light. Several chapters are of more general interest: the first of the book, for example, provides a formidably well-focussed definition of the governing term of 'Catholicism', within which the category of 'les chrétiens sans église' is already adumbrated; and its sequel, dealing with the vexed question of mystical experience, builds impressively on it. A similarly definitional chapter on dévotion, with its inbuilt risk of unorthodoxy, is again enlightening in its view of the phenomenon as a precursor of 'l'individualité moderne' (and Freud is a distant but significant figure on the horizon in a few of the pieces, notably when such issues as cas de conscience are foregrounded). Other chapters are less clearly linked to the general drift (Cardano on the interpretation of dreams, for example, or an annotated list of early eighteenth-century censors, or indeed the final excursus on the evolution of the concept of 'origin' into the twentieth century, for all its breadth of reference), and no part of the series is, in any stylistic or rhetorical sense of the term, literary in its emphasis. The erudition is impressive throughout, however, though not often lightly worn, and the presentation is unremittingly old-school: footnotes are many and long; a reading knowledge of Latin, German and Greek and, more rarely, Spanish and Italian is taken for granted (not of course a problem for readers of FS); and, as is likely to occur in this kind of publication, the independent chapters are only occasionally made to interlink. The remarkable exception is the trio of pieces devoted to Fénelon which, focusing on the Maximes des Saints, Télémaque and the correspondence with Guyon, discern the underlying thematics of the father's sacrifice of the son as the central issue in the prelate's exploration of heterodox theological premises under the cover of classical myth.