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The Catholic Historical Review 88.1 (2002) 137-139



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Book Review

Sanctity and Secularity during the Modernist Period:
Six Perspectives on Hagiography around 1900 = Six perspectives sur l'hagiographie aux alentours de 1900


Sanctity and Secularity during the Modernist Period: Six Perspectives on Hagiography around 1900 = Six perspectives sur l'hagiographie aux alentours de 1900. Edited by Lawrence F. Barmann and C. J. T. Talar. (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes. 1999. Pp. xi, 187. EUR 35 paperback.)

Cultural change alters perceptions. Examination of perceptual changes, therefore, can open a window to underlying socio-cultural shifts, and vice versa. This rich collection of essays, two in French, four in English, focuses on the shifting perception of sanctity within the Roman Catholic Church during the Modernist period. The six figures studied are remarkably diverse: (1) Hipployte Delehaye, a Belgian Jesuit Bollandist (B. Joassart); (2) Albert Houtin, identified French Modernist, who left the priesthood and the Church (C. Talar); (3) Henri Bremond, French Jesuit friend of leading Modernists, left the Jesuits and devoted his life to studying sanctity (É. Goichot); (4) Friedrich von Hügel, the "lay bishop of the Modernist Movement" but deeply pious and committed to the Church, focused his scholarship on the nature of sanctity (L. Barmann); Paul [End Page 137] Sabatier, French Calvinist keenly interested in the issues of the Modernist Movement, best remembered for his biography of St. Francis of Assisi (C. Talar); and Joris-Karl Huysmans, French Catholic novelist, a leading figure in the Decadent reaction against rationalism and Modernism, found an antidote in the lives of saints (C. Talar).

The essays, uniformly strong and exceptionally well researched, will be of interest to historians and theologians alike. They chronicle an impassioned search for the meaning of sanctity during a particularly fractious era and show how ideology enthralls constructs for its own ends, even such a wholesome construct as "sanctity." Christian saints themselves may be victimized by ideology but are not co-opted by it; they are free. Canonizing them is another matter. They must pass muster before the canonizing institution. Enter ideology. These studies, particularly those by Joassart and Talar, show how during the nineteenth century, two schools of hagiography squared off: the école légendaire and the école critique, the former credulously accepting legends of miraculous events as hallmarks of divine validation, the latter attempting to ground legends in historical records and, while not discounting the miraculous, finding sanctity's superseding canon to be identification with Christ.

Delehaye, committed to historical critical methods, argued that "hagiographical legend" was a distinct genre from history; its aim was "before all else to edify," not to reveal "real facts" (p. 21). He therefore sought to deconstruct pious legends and devotions and leave historically authentic, edifying accounts intact. His argument led ecclesiastical authorities to fear that the Bible too would be seen as hagiographical legend to be deconstructed by historians.

In fact, Houtin validated antimodernists' worst fears by concluding that institutional agenda had so overlaid historically credible tradition that no recorded "revelation" could be trusted and thus that there was no revealed religion. As a foil, Talar holds up Duchesne, whose university-trained, more supple mind enabled him to engage in critical studies without concluding that church leaders had perpetrated fraud from beginning to end.

The next two essays on Bremond (Goichot) and von Hügel (Barmann) investigate the "democratization" of sanctity, a notion that made church authorities nervous, as it dehierarchizes authority. Bremond reasoned that if the catechism teaching, "God lives in us," is not "simply a pious metaphor... I must be able closely to observe in each Christian heart the wonders of [the Christian] life" (p. 73). Taking inspiration from Newman, he developed a religious psychology by which to discern God's presence in human lives. Sanctity, he argued, is not bound by dogma; its essence is in the heart, not in reason, or, in Newmanian terms, in the real rather than the notional (pp. 87-90). Thus he could claim sanctity even...

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