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Reviewed by:
  • Modernists and Mystics
  • Brenna Moore (bio)
Modernists and Mystics. Edited by C.J.T. Talar. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009. 152 pp. $44.95

The term "Catholic modernist" typically conjures images of turn-of-the century marginalized pariahs, fixated on the Church's relationship with critical exegesis, philosophy, or science. C. J.T. Talar challenges such narrow view in this edited collection by drawing attention to the investment-associated thinkers (ca. 1890-1920) had in late-medieval and early modern Christian mysticism. Contributors to this [End Page 267] volume show how would-be-modernists were indeed concerned with Catholicism's rapprochement with modernity. They also demonstrate the historical commitment to reaching back to classic mystical texts where one could encounter traces of the living, inner reality of religious experience. Moreover, the chapters of Modernists and Mystics do more than merely offer this corrective. They push the conversation beyond a unified nostalgia or a singular ressourcement impulse, so often cited in histories of twentieth-century Catholicism. They offer glimpses into a series of fascinating disputes, showing how, in late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, mysticism emerged as a crucial touchstone for a range of philosophical and ecclesial debates.

Along with William L. Portier, Talar expands on this framework in an introductory essay, "The Mystical Element of the Modernist Crisis," and subsequent essays (two of which are also written by Talar) take up Friedrich von Hügel, Henri Bremond, Maurice Blondel, Albert Houtin, and Alfred Loisy. The volume's contributors explore not only the lives and writings of these five individuals, but also their interactions with a whole range of their (mostly French) contemporaries, bringing other men and women to life throughout the book. Among the most notable are Henri Bergson, far too often excluded from discussions of modernism, and the understudied, controversial Mère Cécile Bruyère (1845-1909), who served as first abbess of the French Benedictine Abbey Solesmes. Modernists and Mystics is a product of the Roman Catholic Modernism Group of the American Academy of Religion, and this is the fourth book-length project to emerge from this scholarly community.

One striking if under-theorized debate surrounding la mystique that shines through the volume is how gender and men's/women's spiritual authority played out among the modernists' deployment of mysticism. From Friedrich von Hügel's book on Catherine of Genoa, to Bremond's defense of Madame Guyon, explored in chapters 2 and 3, most modernists extended the longstanding Christian practice of clerical fascination with female ascetics and mystics. In an excellent chapter on Henri Bremond's abiding commitment to the seventeenth-century mystics associated with the Quietist controversies, Talar cites Henri Bremond's own explanation for this: "[W]hen it is necessary to resign oneself to not feeling within oneself God's presence and action, one searches instinctively about oneself for some privileged soul in whom this action and presence is reflected" (46).

Of course, suspicion accompanied such fascination with the often-female holy figures, whose illuminations suggested a direct access to God that men admired. For modernists, it seems, their contemporary female spiritual teachers did not fare as well as those from the medieval or early modern past. Talar's superb analysis of the lesser-known friend of Loisy, Albert Houtin (1867-1926), for example, reveals a modernist with an abiding investment in the spirituality of premodernity accompanied by deep skepticism about its possibilities for the present. As Talar tells it, Houtin's text, Une grande mystique, Madame Bruyère, is a lengthy exposé of the troubles plaguing the Solesmes monestary, which had in Houtin's mind strayed too far from its fifth-century Benedictine roots. According to Talar, Houtin lays the blame squarely at the feet of the first abbess of Solesme, Mère Cécile Bruyère, who was seen by some as spiritual teacher and "the greatest saint of modern times." Unconvinced, Houtin, draws upon prevailing psychological theories of heredity to trace in Bruyère a sordid legacy of nervous disequilibrium and hysteria as the [End Page 268] source of her divine illumination. Houtin's disenchantment—with Bruyère and, due to his...

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