God's Mirror: Renewal and Engagement in French Catholic Intellectual Culture in the Mid–Twentieth Century

God’s Mirror

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

God’s mirror : renewal and engagement in French Catholic intellectual culture in the mid–twentieth century / edited by Katherine Davies and Toby Garfitt. — First edition.

        pages cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-8232-6237-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

   1.  Catholic Church—France—History—20th century.  2.  Catholics—France—Intellectual life—20th century.  3.  France—Intellectual life—20th century.  4.  France—Civilization—20th century.  I.  Davies, Katherine, Ph. D., editor.

    BX1530.G54 2015

    282'.4409043—dc23

    2014029445

Printed in the United States of America

17  16  15        5  4  3  2  1

First edition

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Katherine Davies and Toby Garfitt

1   Catholicisme ondoyant: Catholic Intellectual Engagement and the Crisis of Civilization in the 1930s

Michael Kelly

2   Paul Valéry and French Catholicism: Recognizing the Context of Renewal

Paul Gifford

3   A Strange Christian: Simone Weil

Florence de Lussy

4   Jean Grenier and the Spirit of Orthodoxy

Toby Garfitt

5   Charles Du Bos’s Catholicism and His Politics of Sincerity in Interwar France

Katherine Davies

6   From Mystique to Théologique: Messiaen’s "ordre nouveau," 1935–39

Stephen Schloesser

7   Rethinking the Modernity of Bernanos: A Girardian Perspective

Brian Sudlow

8   Into the Catacombs of the Past: Women and Wartime Trauma in the French Catholic Ressourcement Project (1939–45)

Brenna Moore

9   La Relève and Its Afterlife: A Current of Catholic Renewal in Twentieth-Century Quebec

Joseph Dunlop

10   Louis Massignon: A Catholic Encounter with Islam and the Middle East

Anthony O’Mahony

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the President and Fellows of Magdalen College Oxford for hosting and supporting, through their Annual Fund, the conferences held in 2010 and 2011, at which most of these chapters were presented, and to the Director of the Maison Française d’Oxford for hosting one of the sessions. Our thanks must also go to all of the participants at the conferences who provided important comments and such rich discussion, from which this volume benefited.

God’s Mirror

Introduction

Katherine Davies and Toby Garfitt

As body, man is a being whose condition it is always to be communicated; indeed, he regains himself only on account of having been communicated. For this reason, man as a whole is not an archetype of Being and of Spirit, rather their image; he is not the primal word, but a response; he is not a speaker, but an expression governed by the laws of beauty, laws which man cannot impose on himself. As a totality of spirit and body, man must make himself into God’s mirror and seek to attain to that transcendence and radiance that must be found in the world’s substance if it is indeed God’s image and likeness—his word and gesture, action and drama.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord

We understand that there is a dialectic of realism … such a realism consists not as a doctrine, but rather as an effort; and it purports less to resolve problems than to first see them clearly. It is the presence of this notion of a dialectic that explains … toward the concrete. The concrete will never be the given for the philosopher. It will be the pursued. It is only in the absence of thought that the concrete can reveal itself to us.

Jean Wahl, Vers le concret (Toward the Concrete)

The existential register unites what might only be seen as irreconcilable: the theological aesthetics of Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar and the philosophy of the concrete espoused by the Jewish-born agnostic philosopher Jean Wahl. Writing nearly thirty years apart in this instance, roughly at the beginning and the end of the period under study here, Wahl and Balthasar nevertheless emerge as particularly useful interpretive signs of Catholic intellectual culture in transition in mid-twentieth-century France in their respective encounters with the question of human existence.

Balthasar’s theological aesthetics represented a blow struck at the intellectualization and conceptualization of faith—neo-scholasticism being a prime target—which tended, he believed, to treat God as simply an object of knowledge. His approach provided the foundation for a theology that could do justice to the global experience of faith and the fullness of God’s glory, which the human ambition to know could not. Beauty answered Balthasar’s call for a more integral vision: Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendour around the double constellation of the true and the good in their inseparable relation to one another.¹ Beauty sanctifies and gives both truth and the good their power by engaging the holistic nature of faith. The primal and archetypal expression of beauty is God’s self-revelation in the world—the Incarnation of the Word.² It is this taking of form that is the focus of Balthasar’s theological aesthetics and, more especially, how we see the form of God, of revelation and faith, and how human beings, as forms, relate to created reality.

Faith is participation in the free self-disclosure of God’s interior life and light, just as the spiritual nature of the creature means participation in the unveiled-ness of all reality.³ Here, Balthasar’s contemplative seeing the form shows itself as leading to action. One is both a communicated body, a response, and expression and an active participant in God’s reality in one’s word and gesture, action and drama. Balthasar thus reengages the material and the embodied: His theology sacralises, through Christ, the historical and concrete, giving back soul to the historical and concrete.⁴

Toward the Concrete, Wahl’s 1932 work on Alfred Whitehead, William James, and Gabriel Marcel, called for a shift from idealism to a new realism: Inspired directly by Heidegger’s phenomenology, Wahl searches for the concrete in his emphasis on the immediate, immanent character of human beings’ encounters with the world—the sentiment of our existence in the midst of things.⁵ Wahl’s three case studies are all characterized by a dialectic between thought and its object that refuses to lose touch with the real:⁶ The dialectic expresses an active oscillation of elements (between, for example, transcendence and immanence) that does not suppress oppositions but rather maintains them.⁷

Although Wahl and Balthasar are clearly distinct from one another (not least in their different perspectives on transcendence), there is nevertheless a striking resonance between Wahl’s realism and Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, a resonance that speaks to a broad transition. An orientation rather than a doctrine, Wahl’s existential dialectic did not resolve problems but rather rendered them visible. It was characterized as a movement toward the concrete rather than attainment of the concrete—the concrete is not a given but the pursued. Wahl’s concrete reveals itself only in the absence of thought; in other words, he insists on the irreducibility of being to knowing.⁸ In a similar fashion, Balthasar’s concrete was that which was born through beauty rather than simply the logic of truth. What emerges is a shared concern for the aesthetic—the extraintellectual, the revelatory and transformative. Both Wahl’s realism and Balthasar’s aesthetics can be understood as subjective insofar as they reveal the life of feeling and objective insofar as this life of feeling is real.⁹

This volume brings together a series of impressions or snapshots of French Catholic intellectual culture in the mid–twentieth century caught up in its process of transition—whether by virtue of participation in, resistance to, or mediation of that transition—in which the drive for the human, for being, and for the concrete or real was so often crucial. This is the story of a transitional Catholicism that creatively managed the task of making oneself into God’s mirror.

Renewal and Engagement

Historiography on twentieth-century French Catholicism broadly follows a narrative that typically heralds the transition from a pre-1914 right-wing, antimodern, and theologically ghettoized Catholicism to a post-1945 progressive and intellectually avant-garde Catholicism.¹⁰ The present collection provides a new dramatization of French Catholic intellectual culture by exploring some of the many and varied modes and expressions of Catholic renewal and engagement during the mid–twentieth century and in doing so, casts a new light on the historiographical narrative of reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the modern world.¹¹ The focus is on unraveling the contours of a Catholicism that was in transition by investigating the subtleties of tensions and conflicts that were negotiated during this period and that constituted and informed typologies of renewal and engagement.

On a basic level, renewal refers to the constellation of efforts to revivify a Catholic culture, which have been lumped together under the label of le renouveau catholique. But here, renewal, as well as designating the fact of the flowering of Catholic thought and culture, is more especially explored in its form—is it a matter of renaissance, reappropriation, reimagination, or reconfiguration? For example, the late nineteenth-century renaissance of Thomism, instigated by Pope Leo XIII, was hardened into a profoundly antimodern enterprise by Pius X, who was attempting to circumscribe orthodoxy in the wake of the modernist crisis.¹² In this form, Thomism proved itself a powerful partner for the integral nationalism of Maurras’s Action française.¹³ The interwar years witnessed an unraveling of this collocation. Jacques Maritain’s intellectual and cultural enterprise, for instance, came to promote Thomism, especially after his move away from Action française, as explicitly modern in its inexhaustible fecundity and thus precisely in its ability to adapt to and contain the modern world. At the same time, Maritain’s particular strain of neo-Thomism faced competing renewals from transcendental Thomism, which broadly colluded with the legacy of Kantian metaphysics in its emphasis on the knower’s projection on the real, and the excavation of the historical Aquinas, which ultimately fed into a relativization of the neoscholastic Thomistic system.¹⁴ Renewal, then, also asks questions about the nature of its self-presentation in its relation with the modern world.

A purposely wide approach is taken to engagement, too, in terms of the object and subject of engagement and in terms of its form. The contributions here range in detailed focus from the engagement of individual Catholic thinkers to groups and periodicals or journals; from the connections and interactions between philosophical, theological, and cultural issues on the one hand, to social and political engagements on the other; and from engagement marked by adaptation and dialogue to resistance and aporia. Moreover, engagement is conceived hermeneutically in different ways. It may be in terms of the internalization of external debates within a distinct discursive space or in terms of the relationship between two discrete parties or identities; it may be read analogically insofar as a non-Catholic subject reflects and inflects Catholic thought and engagement, or it may be conceived as an affective mode of survival. Of course, we cannot conceive of engagement without an appreciation of its actors.

The Catholic intellectual has been the focus of a growing body of scholarship over the past fifteen years.¹⁵ While some tend to privilege the papal condemnation of the right-wing nationalist royalist Action française in 1926 as a decisive turning point for Catholics, others have placed the censure of 1926 within a broader trajectory of the birth of the Catholic intellectual. Philippe Chenaux presents the condemnation of Action française and the crisis it provoked as the Dreyfus affair for Catholics; the papal interdiction disentangled Catholicism from its traditionally right-wing identity and freed up a space ordained to pluralism within the church. Hervé Serry has taken a longer view: It was the separation of church and state in 1905 that created a specifically Catholic space for intellectual debate, and it was the continuous struggle—the stresses, strains, and adjustments that Catholic writers experienced in consequence of the tension between the liberty of literary creation and the pressures of the ecclesiastical hierarchy—and experimentation with positions involved therein that formed the Catholic intellectual. It was only in 1945, however, a year after the formation of the Christian democratic Mouvement républicain populaire, that the identity of the Catholic intellectual was structurally cemented, with the establishment of the Centre catholique des intellectuels français, whose objective was to create a community of thought between Catholic intellectuals and to diffuse their ideas through the newly created Mouvement international des intellectuels catholiques.¹⁶

The interrogation of engagement thus involves exploration of its conceptualizations, its methodologies and tools, its spaces, and its effects. The figure of the Catholic intellectual and the travails involved in its development inform the possibilities of Catholic engagement. The contributions to this volume are all broadly underpinned by a concern for how the Catholic intellectual reflects and takes a position on the relationship between the church, personal faith, and the world and on the necessarily problematic relationship between intellectuals and the magisterium.

Periodization

Cholvy and Hilaire, and Fouilloux, among others, have identified the period between the 1920s and the 1960s as a golden age of French Catholicism.¹⁷ Much of the scholarship specifically on Catholic intellectuals has hitherto tended toward a focus on the first three decades of the century, when the Catholic renewal had largely been seen as a success, or singularly on the postwar period.¹⁸ This volume offers something different in its particular periodization. It serves as a bridge by ranging from the twilight years of the 1920s and the political paralysis and crises of the 1930s, to the occupation years, and through to the postwar years of progressivism, Christian democratic efforts, and the run-up to Vatican II. Although there is certainly no claim to comprehensiveness or perfectly even treatment across these decades, the range of focus here illuminates the continuities and discontinuities during these critical years. Moreover, it interrogates the nature of change and how best to understand its makeup and processes, including consideration of the roots of such a transition, the tensions contained therein, and the role of political or social changes that may accompany, reflect, or contribute to theological, philosophical, and cultural shifts.

The late 1920s and, more critically, the 1930s were a rich time for the reconfiguration of Catholic identity and engagement and a reconfiguration of the forms of renewal of Catholicism. Historians have described the 1930s in France not only as a period of social, political, and economic crisis but also a time of cultural, psychological, and moral crisis. France faced a series of domestic and international crises: the economic depression after 1929 (France maintained relative immunity from the world crisis until 1931);¹⁹ the right-wing riots of 6 February 1934; entanglement in Mussolini’s Ethiopia conquest in 1935; the Spanish Civil War of 1937; disillusionment with the Popular Front government; the anguish of the Munich agreement; and the tragic slide toward war. Catholic intellectuals became as much embroiled as their secular counterparts in the turmoil of the 1930s, visible in their assent to political manifestos via the proliferating Catholic press, such as the Dominican La vie intellectuelle (1928), L’aube (1932), and Sept (1934).²⁰ This periodical and journal press was critical to the development of new Catholic political positions and specifically to an opening to the left, which included those progressives close to Communism, certain Christian democratic strains, and some of those in the amorphous group baptized as nonconformist, such as Emmanuel Mounier, who inaugurated his personalist revolution through the pages of his influential journal, Esprit.²¹ Mounier in particular nailed his colors to the mast in Catholic renewal by responding to the crisis of civilization. Critiquing the worn-out désordre établi (established disorder) of capitalism, bourgeois values, and materialism, he pushed for a spiritual revolution involving the rehabilitation of human beings and the community.

Moving into the German occupation years of World War II, scholars have identified Catholicism as a key structural factor that can explain the depth of the French crisis of 1940–44 and the subsequent debates over how the Vichy regime ought to be remembered.²² The ideological cleavages and complexities of collaboration and resistance are well-trodden scholarly terrain, but for Catholics especially, their relationship with Vichy was, to say the least, complicated.²³ The increasing split between democratic Christians and more conservative Catholics during the 1930s contextualizes the path of resistance chosen by some and the political acquiescence or active collaboration with Vichy chosen by others. Initially the great majority of Catholics followed the lead given by bishops and welcomed the Vichy National Revolution, grounded largely on Christian moral values. Former militants of the Fédération nationale catholique, such as Philippe Henriot, easily found official positions in Vichy, but Resistance leaders emerged from the Catholic youth and labor movements and also religious congregations, evidenced, for example, by the founding of the clandestine Jesuit journal Témoignage chrétien in 1941.²⁴ The postwar contours of Catholicism make sense only in the context of the war years and choices made at that time. On an immediate political level, for example, Catholic Resistance warranted integration into the new Fourth Republic, which was grounded on the shared antifascist struggle. The Christian Democratic Party (Mouvement républicain populaire, or MRP), which gained immediate electoral successes, arose from the French Catholic Resistance; Georges Bidault, who had been chairman of the Conseil national de la résistance, was a founding father of the MRP and held several high ministerial positions.²⁵ On a cultural level, it has been argued further by Michael Kelly, the Occupation was, in effect, the making of the French Catholic intellectuals; it was their making because Catholic intellectuals in the Resistance were not only revealing their dissent from Vichy but also dissenting from the teaching of their church.²⁶ Indeed, Fouilloux argues that the clerical and lay elite that emerged from the Resistance played a major role in the push for liturgical and ecclesiastical reform, contributing to the movement that eventually led to the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.²⁷ But it would be false to simply conflate the political and religious chronologies of the postwar period: If there was a degree of alignment between Catholic participation in the Resistance and the move toward the nouvelle théologie movement that took off properly after the war, there was certainly no guarantee of correlation between neo-Thomism and support for Vichy. For example, although the Roman neoscholastic Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange—dubbed the sacred monster of Thomism—was an enthusiastic supporter of Vichy, Maritain’s Thomism led him in the exact opposite direction of resistance.²⁸ Philosophical and theological differences (or resemblances) did not always correspond to those of a simple right or left political orientation; it is sufficient to say that the heterogeneity of Catholic intellectual engagement forged during the war is clear. The creation of the Centre catholique des intellectuels français (CCIF) in 1945 is testament to the vibrancy of postwar Catholic intellectual culture. The CCIF rendered faith in a secularized society intelligible. Fighting against a political and cultural context of exclusivism, the CCIF encouraged dialogue between Christians and nonbelievers and engaged in key debates of the fourth and fifth Republics, such as the construction of Europe, and its work was equally central to theological renewal in its defense of liberty of research and conscience, anticipating the efforts of Vatican II. In its own image, the CCIF presented Catholicism as open.²⁹

This particular periodization of Catholic intellectual culture allows for a more explicit exploration of the shifting norms and values of political and social commitments in relation to their cultural, theological, and philosophical fault lines and for a more explicit consideration of the ways in which change was effected.

Common Themes and Creative Tensions

A major part of the story told here is the relationship between French Catholicism and the modern world in the twentieth century. A great deal of scholarship has been devoted to the construction of a self-consciously modern Catholic identity. For example, Jean-Dominique Durand’s work on Les Semaines sociales de France, 1904–2004 (2006) examines the laic institution of Christian social education and its development of a model of engagement that mediated between Catholic adaptation to modernity and the Christianization of modernity, while Stephen Schloesser’s Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (2005) casts postwar Catholicism as the truest expression of modernity by virtue of the successful creation of Catholic modernisms or mystic modernisms in the literary, artistic, and musical realms. The present volume does not foreground the relationship between Catholicism and modernity so explicitly; moreover, this is not the space for adding to the cottage industry of scholarship on the conceptualization of modernity, the modern, and modernization. However, the traces of this confrontation underpin several of the contributions, especially in terms of the radical subjectification of reality in the secularization narrative, long acknowledged as a constituent element of modernization, and in terms of the new temporal quality of modernity.

Jürgen Habermas allows us to engage with some of the productive tensions Catholicism might entertain in its dialogue with the modern world. Habermas argues that modernity can be understood as a forward-looking consciousness that generates a reflexive awareness, a privileging of the present standpoint within the horizon of history as a whole that in turn accelerates the expectation of a future of difference because of the scarcity of time.³⁰ The distinctly modern self-consciousness of the desire for newness means that there is a need to differentiate modernity’s historical legitimacy from an orientation to past times: It has to create its normativity out of itself.³¹ Of course, on a basic level, modernity’s general rejection of tradition to authorize its identity naturally places it at odds with Catholicism. But delving beneath the superficial, the contributions here illustrate how the notion of reflexivity and the urgency of the present in fact become increasingly essential for many Catholic intellectuals not only to assert their relevance in the world but also to shape the possible ways in which modernity could be managed creatively; Catholicism was not a subculture but rather an active participant in the substantive intellectual landscape, and it could maintain this imaginative role by virtue of heeding the special relationship of the present to God, the embodied of the Incarnation, our human existence in time.

In dialogue with the modern world, Catholicism necessarily came face to face with the epistemological restructuring involved in the secularization process. Louis Dupré provides a useful framework to define this restructuring: first, the substitution of the explicitly modern idea of culture as humanity’s need to create its own nature for that of the ancient model of cultivating an already existing potential; second, the disruption of the analogy between God and people, whereby people are now left to claim meaning for reality; and third, the disappearance of transcendence—here modernity becomes arguably more than the sum of secularization motifs such as the decline in religious faith and/or practice and the retreat of religion from the public space.³² Historicizing the relation of modernity and Catholic intellectual culture during the mid–twentieth century, we perhaps see less a concern for secularization in terms of the separation of a temporal and supernatural realm and more an inflected concern for the often-unresolved tensions of the dialectic of immanence and transcendence and the fate of the deified Enlightenment subject, whose role was to constitute objectivity. The cluster of effects that make up a concern for authenticity of the self, for fragmentation, self-alienation, and disunity, could yet inform new typologies of Catholic renewal and engagement.

The contributions to this volume all share the same intellectual and cultural parameters. The tensions, resonances, and contradictions or confrontations within and between each dramatization operate in relation to the same problems to be solved and questions to be answered. Certainly, this level of commonality might well be said to derive simply from their shared historical circumstances—Catholic intellectuals were reacting to their context. But to take this view would be to overlook the reality that these manifestations of Catholic renewal and engagement were not simply hermetically sealed efforts (although Catholicism of course does have its own internal logic and is thus also not a simple reflection of culture in toto); rather, they were indicative of how Catholic intellectuals were creating, as well as participating in, the intellectual landscape.

Particular dimensions of this historicized Catholic imaginary repeatedly rise to the surface and can be rendered visible by a vocabulary. What follows is a—by no means exhaustive—sketch of those signs that capture something of the nature of the renewals and engagements. But these signs are uncivilized: They are uncivilized because not always traceable in linear, transparent, or logical fashion but rather often submerged, messy, and aesthetic in kind.³³ There is an intertextual or interdiscursive quality to the method of exploring this transitional Catholicism insofar as we might speak about how the recurrence of particular words, phrases, and practices indicates a familial relationship; they suggest shared iterations of theological, philosophical, political, and cultural determinants, which are themselves texts that wield transformative potential. Building up an image of French Catholic intellectual culture and the creative tensions at play, the volume offers a focus on those modifiers or hinges of Catholic faith and engagement.

The Human

In 1926 François Mauriac defended Christian humanism, the very example of a hyperhumanism, of which Christ was the emblematic figure.³⁴ A concern for the human or the person is a fundamental identifier for the renewal and engagements of Catholicism in transition in the mid–twentieth century.

From the vantage point of an unbeliever, we are invited to consider the relation of the human to religion. Paul Valéry performs something of an intellectual history or sociology of religion in his interrogation of how divine things are made tangible through people’s desire (as Gifford argues). In unraveling the divine through an anthropocentric lens, the human is given a particular power as the creative center. This reading raises, in acute fashion, the question of how the human positions itself in Catholicism.

Jacques Maritain is perhaps the clearest example, in terms of depth and breadth of influence, of a spokesperson for Christian humanism as elucidated in his Humanisme intégral (1936). Maritain’s personalism was founded upon the classic Thomist distinction between the individual and the person. Although individuation is required by existence, we are more than individuals; we are also human persons endowed with intellect and will and can transcend matter, and thus we are to be thought of as whole spiritual beings.³⁵ Individualism becomes a problem only when individuality does not submit to the person. Maritain’s attacks on the Cartesian spirit are familiar enough. In his work Religion and Culture, Maritain highlighted the poverty of modern humanism, which he defined as political and economic physicism, and he saw in it the estrangement of people from themselves: [Youth] is strolling in its own humanity as in a museum: it sees its heart in the show-cases … We are exotic to our very selves.³⁶ Maritain explained that the common good could be achieved only through the communication of human persons; dialogue cannot be entrusted to individuals shut off from one another but can be effected only through love, which is sourced in the metaphysics of personal intersubjectivity.³⁷ Kelly’s chapter delves into Maritain’s emphasis on the human and its efficacy for a new mode of engagement. The role of the Christian in the temporal realm was to ensure it was a place fit for fulfilling the potential of the whole human person, and this Christian humanism was later crystallized in Maritain’s development of human rights, albeit with a modulation of vocabulary. Further afield, Maritain’s humanism was a formative influence in the development of a vibrant progressive strand of Québécois Catholicism in the resituating of nationalism below the Christian notion of the person (Dunlop).

However, the human person as developed by Maritain was only one explicit, and conceptually rigorous, dimension of Catholic renewal and engagement. To unravel some of the more elusive appropriations and rejuvenations of the human, we must turn to the slippery questions raised by the notion of human subjectivity and its relation to ontology. In his 1934 work, Sept leçons sur l’être (Seven Lessons on Being), Maritain made a distinction between scholastic philosophers on the one hand, whose quest for the object of metaphysics operated on the level of intelligible intuition, and modern philosophers on the other hand—he makes specific reference to Gabriel Marcel here—who seek to constitute existential ontologies, insofar as being is the object of an experimental intuition of a concrete encounter, an affective experience that remains in the same category as the psychological or moral experience.³⁸ This distinction captures something of the different views of the role of the human in Catholic intellectual culture. The net must be cast wider, then, for examples of what the Catholic turn toward the human could entail. The human in protoexistentialist garb, which was opaque and experimental, signaled a shift away from a notion of the human that could be managed or contained by an intellectual schema, such as the neo-Thomism of Maritain. Garfitt’s and Davies’s contributions focus on the experiential problems of the human person and the implications for engagement and faith in the life and thought of Jean Grenier and Charles Du Bos, respectively, exploring the tensions that arise from a natural dependence on one’s psychological subjectivity rather than on the intelligible intuition of being. If epistemology is not a condition of ontology—realism is lived by the intellect before being recognized by it—as Maritain would have it, interior observation is left in abeyance.³⁹ But we see precisely a concern for what the subjective core must serve: Grenier’s truth has been commanded by a temperament, and Du Bos’s truth is his aesthetic-ethical self, mediated by his particular practice of sincerity.

Action

A fundamental point of debate of this broad intellectual preoccupation with humanism was the notion of action and its relationship between thought and being. The Weberian distinction between an ethics of conviction and an ethics of responsibility provides a particularly pertinent descriptor of a developing Catholic attitude of engagement. The former means that one feels responsible only for ensuring that the flame of pure conviction … should never be extinguished, whereas the latter designates a wider responsibility involving an account of the foreseeable consequences of one’s actions.⁴⁰ It is the rather more open-ended and ethically driven approach of responsibility that embeds Catholics in their actions; open-ended because it allowed for a flexibility of the nature and type of engagement in accordance with the changing circumstances and demands of the world, given that eternal values are embodied in material forms, and ethically underpinned precisely because fidelity to engagement was a fundamental fidelity to eternal values (Kelly). Reconciling a purity of means with efficacy in achieving one’s end was critical to the task, which can be conceived in terms of a type of sincerity and a type of ontological exigency. The embodied nature of the human person called for a coordination of one’s thoughts and actions to ensure that avowal matched real feeling, for instance (Davies), and in Gabriel Marcel’s terms, action was intrinsic to existence. Concrete situations, as a fact of human existence, necessitate choice, and we can choose to open ourselves up to being or to close ourselves off in any situation (Kelly). The role of action in Catholic intellectual engagement was thus indicative of how freedom of moral choice increasingly became the order of the day rather than assent to and approval of a preformulated set of rules and obligations. Although action for some of the intellectuals in this volume meant intervention in the political and social realms, for others, problems of ideological commitment and its lived reality necessitated a withdrawal from direct political action precisely in order to restore the spiritual meaning of action (de Lussy).

The Concrete

The Catholic (and indeed non-Catholic) protagonists in this collection are all directed, in their own particular ways, toward the concrete, to use Jean Wahl’s expression. Gabriel Marcel observed that there was something inexhaustibly concrete at the heart of human reality.⁴¹ Specifically, he understood the concrete to be the primacy of the existential over the ideal and related to "incarnate being, i.e. to the fact of being in the world.⁴² In Catholic terms, the concrete could be an emphasis on the embodied and the incarnational truth. Privileging of the concrete is problematic insofar as its meanings exceed containment by such a reference, but it is a useful descriptive term to indicate the many-sided postwar preoccupation with realism: Olivier Messiaen’s shift from the mystical to the theological register is an affective internalization of the uncertainty and disorder of the sociopolitical terrain and the corresponding desire for concrete stability that theological truth could provide (Schloesser); the concrete is harnessed in Georges Bernanos’s search for value that cannot be instrumentalized or reified following the horrors of the First World War (Sudlow), and the spiritual was sought in its concrete and more real form, which, for many, could be located on the left (Kelly). A Heideggerian-inspired philosophical turn to the concrete, denoting the self in the given world of things, which substantiated the life of feeling by virtue of its reality, was articulated in the Catholic realm in terms of a delicate attention to the concreteness of the present, a sacrament of the present moment (Davies’s Du Bos) and a self-surrender to live beyond oneself, each day (Garfitt’s Grenier). The concrete could also be an operation of grounding the self, not necessarily by facing the realities of war head-on but rather by drawing on and internalizing the mystical texts of the faith to coordinate and structure the self on the solid, real" ground of truth, precisely because it was spiritually and emotionally nourishing in its emphasis on the authenticity of faith (Moore).

Questioning Orthodoxy

For some, the theological orthodoxy of Thomism was precisely that which anchored the concrete by bringing a solidity and reality to the marvelous (Schloesser). However, for others, a turn toward the human and/or the concrete went together with a dissatisfaction or an unease with the straitjacketing of the conceptual, intellectualizing system of neo-Thomism. Many of the contributors identify this questioning of the unified metaphysics of Thomism as central to a revivification of Catholicism. The rigidity of form, the inflexibility of the citadel, was critiqued by many: according to Marie-Madeleine Davy Thomist theology was like "assisting at an