Henri Bremond (1865-1933)

The historian of sentiment rather than dogma

Before Bremond, French religious history was told almost exclusively through defined dogmas, councils and the political struggles between Church and State. Bremond shifted the gaze: he wanted to know how Catholics had sensed God, prayed, loved and doubted — through their texts, letters and spiritual confidences.^[16] This method, which introduced into French scholarly vocabulary the very category of "spirituality" as an autonomous object of study, makes him the discreet founder of an entire discipline: the history of spirituality.^[17]

The priest who refused to abandon his friends

Bremond never broke, even at the cost of his own canonical situation, with the men Rome had struck down: neither with Tyrrell, who died excommunicated, nor with Loisy, cut off from the Church since 1908.^[18] This fidelity, questionable in a cleric, also says something essential about his temperament: he always held personal charity above institutional prudence, even at the cost of exposing himself to suspicion.

The inventor of "pure poetry"

By linking poetic experience to mystical experience, Bremond opened up in the 1920s a debate that reached far beyond Catholic circles: he showed that Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Poe and Valéry were, in his view, only rediscovering an intuition as old as prayer itself — that of a reality which escapes rational discourse and gives itself only in a kind of silent communion.^[19]

A Provençal childhood and entry among the Jesuits (1865–1882)

Henri Bremond was born on 31 July 1865 in Aix-en-Provence, into a family of local notables.^[20] He attended secondary school at the Collège du Sacré-Cœur in Aix, where he befriended — then durably fell out with — another pupil destined for a famous career opposite to his own: Charles Maurras, future theorist of the Action française, whose cordial youthful relationship with Bremond turned over time into frank mutual antipathy.^[21] On 24 November 1882, at seventeen, Bremond entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus.^[22] Since the religious congregations had been expelled from France by the decrees of 1880, it was in England, at Sidmouth in Devon, that he completed his novitiate and part of his formation.^[23]

Discovering religious England and Newman (1882–1899)

Bremond's English sojourn, far from being a mere administrative exile, became the intellectual laboratory of his entire career: there he discovered Cardinal John Henry Newman, whose work would exert a more decisive influence on him than any other.^[24] He devoted a series of studies to Newman — on the historian of the development of dogma, on the philosopher of the Grammar of Assent, on the preacher of the Oxford sermons — before publishing in 1906 his great synthesis, Newman: essai de biographie psychologique, in which he sought to reach, beyond doctrines, the intimate source of the English convert's soul.^[25] The historian Émile Goichot has shown that this interest extended to other great figures of nineteenth-century English Catholicism — Cardinal Manning, Cardinal Wiseman, Dr Ward — studied in the context of the Oxford conversions and English Catholic intellectual life, which earned Bremond the title of specialist of the "prophets from without" (prophètes du dehors).^[26] Ordained priest on 8 September 1892 at Mold, in Wales, he pronounced his final vows in the Society on 2 February 1900.^[27]

"[Bremond] seems to inscribe his English studies within the perspective opened up by [his discovery of Newman]" — Émile Goichot, "Trois 'Prophètes du dehors'. Henri Bremond et l'Angleterre religieuse", Revue d'histoire et de philosophie religieuses, 65th year, no. 1, 1985^[28]

Back in France, Bremond taught for several years in Jesuit colleges — at Dole, Moulins, Saint-Étienne and at Villefranche-sur-Saône, at the Collège de Mongré.^[29] It was at Mongré that he taught literature to a second-form pupil, a young Auvergnat destined for a resounding scientific career: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Bremond would remember him, some ten years later, as "a little genius sparkling with intelligence, first in everything, but desperately well-behaved", inhabited by "another passion, jealous, absorbing, which made him live far from us, the eternal beneath the pebbles".^[30]

Director of Études and break with the Society (1894–1904)

From 1894 onwards, Bremond contributed regularly to the Jesuit review Études; appointed editor in August 1899, he became its director from 1900 to 1903.^[31] His nonconformist temperament, his growing closeness to Modernist circles and a personal dissatisfaction with organised religious life led him to request his departure from the Society of Jesus: he left the Order on 2 February 1904, invoking himself an "incompatibility of temperament".^[32] He was received into the diocese of Aix by Archbishop M^gr Edwin Bonnefoy and remained a secular priest until his death.^[33] This departure in no way broke his priesthood: Bremond continued to celebrate Mass and to present himself as a priest — it was a departure from the religious state, not an abandonment of the priesthood.

Friendship with George Tyrrell

Bremond met the Irish Jesuit George Tyrrell on 10 July 1901; the friendship born that day became one of the deepest of his life.^[53] Tyrrell, a major figure of English Catholic Modernism, was expelled from the Society of Jesus in 1906 and then excommunicated in 1907 by the Bishop of Southwark, M^gr Peter Amigo, after publicly criticising the encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis condemning Modernism.^[54] Bremond also maintained a sustained and intense correspondence with Baron Friedrich von Hügel, met in London after his departure from the Society, a correspondence which documents this entire period of crisis in detail, day by day.^[55]

Tyrrell's funeral and the suspension a divinis (1909)

Tyrrell died on 15 July 1909 without having retracted the positions that had earned him his condemnation; Catholic burial was refused him and he was interred in the Anglican cemetery at Storrington, Sussex.^[56] Bremond accompanied the body to the cemetery, recited prayers and spoke a few words, then traced a sign of the cross on the grave.^[57] This highly symbolic gesture — it amounted to treating as a Catholic a man who had died outside the visible communion of the Church — earned him immediate suspension a divinis by M^gr Amigo; his faculties to celebrate were restored later that year, after he subscribed to a formula of adherence to the acts of the magisterium condemning Modernism.^[58] The episode, although it did not end his correspondence with von Hügel, durably altered its tone and reduced its frequency.^[59] A witness quoted by Goichot sums up the impression left by Tyrrell's passing: no other Modernist had "his stature" nor aspired to play his part, he who possessed "a great mind, a great soul, a great heart, with the enthusiasm of a martyr".^[60]

A clandestine fidelity to Alfred Loisy: Sylvain Leblanc (1931)

Twenty-two years after the Tyrrell affair, Bremond did it again, more discreetly. In 1931, under the pseudonym Sylvain Leblanc — a name found by his publisher's wife, Émile Nourry, and a style patiently stripped of anything recognisably "Bremondian" — he published Un clerc qui n'a pas trahi: Alfred Loisy d'après ses mémoires, a title that frontally answers Julien Benda's La Trahison des clercs.^[61] The historian Émile Poulat, having recovered the manuscript and the related correspondence among Alfred Loisy's papers kept at the Bibliothèque nationale, definitively established that Bremond was its author.^[62] The text defends Loisy — cut off from the Church since 1908 for his historical-critical exegesis — against the charge of betraying his faith and priesthood, and shows a genuine sympathy, though never made public in Bremond's lifetime, for the most radical positions of his exegete friend.^[63]

Ignispedia cannot read this clandestine text as the admission of a personal doctrinal adherence by Bremond to Loisy's theses on dogma and exegesis: published under cover of anonymity, never claimed, never submitted to the Church's judgement, it belongs first and foremost to a gesture of human loyalty towards a fallen friend — the same gesture, at bottom, that had led him to the Storrington cemetery in 1909. Bremond died a priest in good standing, himself never excommunicated nor cut off, and his great historical work was never condemned as a whole — only one particular book, Sainte Chantal, met with that sanction, for largely circumstantial reasons (see below).

Bremond and Maurice Blondel: another path through the crisis

Unlike Tyrrell and Loisy, Maurice Blondel — with whom Bremond also corresponded during those years — managed to pass through the Modernist crisis without ever being condemned or leaving full communion, while likewise defending the primacy of the lived experience of faith against a disembodied theological rationalism.^[64] The contrast between the two trajectories — Blondel's, a philosopher who remained integrally Catholic and was never sanctioned, and Bremond's, a faithful priest compromised by his friendships — illuminates the diversity of paths taken, at the same time, by Catholics who refused to reduce Christianity to a system of abstract propositions without thereby endorsing the properly heterodox theses of Loisy or the later Tyrrell.

Apologie pour Fénelon (1910): reopening the trial of pure love

Before his great historical work, Bremond made his name with a resounding plea: the Apologie pour Fénelon, published by Perrin in 1910, subtitled Une crise dans la vie intérieure de Bossuet.^[65] The book takes up the quarrel over pure love, which had set Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambrai, against Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, at the end of the seventeenth century, over the possibility of a wholly disinterested love of God — unmixed with hope of reward or fear of punishment.^[66] Pope Innocent XII had decided the matter in 1699, by the brief Cum alias, condemning twenty-three propositions drawn from Fénelon's Maximes des saints, to which Fénelon at once publicly submitted, correcting himself from the pulpit.^[67] Bremond, for his part, takes Fénelon's side and turns the accusation back against his adversary: he claims to detect, in Bossuet's very interior life, a spiritual crisis comparable to the one Bossuet condemned in Fénelon and Mme Guyon.^[68]

The work provoked an immediate scholarly critique. The reviewer Eugène Lévesque, in the Revue d'histoire de l'Église de France (1914), while acknowledging the skilfulness of the pen, at once set out the limits of the method: Bremond, he wrote, does not claim to be "a researcher patiently pursuing documents", but he "knows admirably how to use them when they are supplied to him, like a capable lawyer who conceals his client's faults and exaggerates the real or supposed wrongs of the adversary".^[69] This criticism — that of a plea rather than an inquiry — would accompany the entire scholarly reception of Bremond: brilliant, suggestive, but steered by a declared sympathy for the mystical figures he defends.

Sainte Chantal (1912) and the placing on the Index (1913)

Two years later, Bremond published Sainte Chantal, devoted to Saint Jane Frances de Chantal and her spiritual relationship with Saint Francis de Sales. The work was placed on the Index librorum prohibitorum in 1913.^[73] The Jesuit historian André Blanchet, in his study Histoire d'une mise à l'Index, la "Sainte Chantal" de l'abbé Bremond, showed that this condemnation did not rest solely on the unconventional treatment Bremond gave to the relationship between the two saintly founders of the Visitation: it was also explained by the climate of suspicion built up around the author since the Tyrrell affair of 1909, and by the resentment his Apologie pour Fénelon had aroused among the defenders of Bossuet's memory.^[74] In other words, the sanction targeted the suspect man as much as the book itself — a textbook case of how a compromised reputation can weigh, in ecclesiastical history, on the judgement passed retrospectively on a work.

Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France (1916–1933): the monument

The Apologie pour Fénelon was only a prelude. With it Bremond embarked, in his own words as reported by the critics, on a whole series of works devoted to religious sentiment, which would find their crowning in the enterprise of a lifetime: the Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France depuis la fin des guerres de religion jusqu'à nos jours, published in eleven volumes by Bloud et Gay between 1916 and 1933.^[75] The project does not claim to tell the history of doctrines or of ecclesial institutions, but the story of how French Catholics, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, lived and literarily expressed their relationship with God — from the devout humanism of Saint Francis de Sales to the posthumous trial of the great mystics of the Grand Siècle.^[76]

(A companion volume, the Introduction à la philosophie de la prière, had already appeared in 1929; a twelfth, posthumous volume — the alphabetical and analytical index drawn up by Charles Grolleau — completed the set after the author's death.)^[77]

The Encyclopédie Universalis stresses that Bremond thereby introduced into French scholarly vocabulary the very category of "spirituality" as a full-fledged object of study, centred on what one contributor called the "hunger for God" proper to French religious experience.^[78] The historian Émile Goichot, who directed the critical reissue of the work at Jérôme Millon in 2006, acknowledges that certain aspects of the original work have since been "vigorously contested or superseded", but that the whole "remains an indispensable working tool" for anyone studying classical French spirituality.^[79]

The address of 24 October 1925

Charged, as tradition requires, with the Académie française's annual public lecture, Bremond chose on 24 October 1925 to ask what he called "pure poetry", triggering a controversy that became one of the notable intellectual entertainments of the interwar years.^[80] In it Bremond argues that the properly poetic character of a poem lies not in what the poet meant to say — its rational meaning, narrative progression or direct sentimental effects — but in the presence of "a mysterious reality which we call pure poetry".^[81]

"Every poem owes its properly poetic character to the presence, the radiance, the transforming and unifying action of a mysterious reality which we call pure poetry." — Henri Bremond, "La Poésie pure", annual public lecture of the Académie française, 24 October 1925^[82]

"There are still, in poetry, certain ineffable things which cannot be explained." — Henri Bremond, "La Poésie pure", annual public lecture of the Académie française, 24 October 1925^[83]

Bremond places this "holy warmth" which transports the reader towards "a more than human presence" in the continuation of an ancient tradition rather than in a dangerous novelty: the modern theorists of pure poetry — Edgar Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Paul Valéry — would not, in his eyes, be the unsettling innovators they are sometimes taken for, but the heirs of an intuition as venerable as prayer itself.^[84]

Prière et Poésie (1926): mysticism and poetry, same source

Bremond developed his thesis in 1926 in Prière et Poésie, published by Grasset in the "Les Cahiers verts" collection.^[85] The guiding idea of the book is that poets and mystics draw, without always knowing it, on the same non-rational part of the soul — what Paul Claudel called the Anima, as opposed to the Animus, the intellectual activity reserved for abstraction and analysis.^[86] The argument belongs to a lineage Bremond traces back to Pascal: the conviction that the heart has its reasons, irreducible to those of demonstrative discourse, finds in him an unexpected aesthetic extension — true poetry, like true prayer, would escape discursive intelligence alone to touch directly a deeper faculty of the soul.^[87] Here we recognise an echo of Blaise Pascal and his famous "the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of", transposed from the ground of apologetics to that of literary aesthetics.

Valéry and the debate of the "roaring twenties"

The debate provoked by the Abbé Bremond's three volumes devoted to pure poetry became one of the most popular intellectual entertainments of the interwar period, animating reviews and literary salons for several seasons.^[88] In it Bremond found an unexpected ally in Paul Valéry, with whom he formed a friendship in Paris: the two men lived not far from each other, Bremond at 16 rue Chanoinesse, on the Île de la Cité, where Valéry frequently visited him.^[89] Valéry praised in his friend a singular "perspicacity" in the examination of texts, which he attributed in part to the priest's confessional practice, a daily exercise in listening to souls which is said to have sharpened in Bremond a rare intuition of human psychology.^[90]

Election to Monseigneur Duchesne's chair

On 19 April 1923, Henri Bremond was elected to the Académie française by seventeen votes against twelve for the historian Camille Jullian, to chair 36, left vacant by the death of M^gr Louis Duchesne, the great historian of the early Church.^[91] He was received on 22 May 1924 by the novelist Henry Bordeaux.^[92]

The 1924 reception: pleading for the critical historian

In his reception speech, Bremond devoted most of his remarks to defending the memory and method of his predecessor, Abbé Duchesne, whose critical erudition had been able to unsettle some Catholics of his time.^[93] He paid tribute to his gift for synthesis — "hardly has he been seen to set out than he already reaches his goal. A simplifying genius, he instinctively neglects the insignificant detail"^[94] — and defended, against those who reproached Duchesne with excessive severity towards certain pious legends, the full compatibility between the rigour of the critic and the fidelity of the believer:

"But the Church is always the Church. A mother may scold exuberantly, she is still a mother. She must be respected, loved all the same." — Henri Bremond, reception speech at the Académie française, 22 May 1924^[95]

This formula sums up Bremond's own position towards the institution rather well: a son at times anxious, at times suspect, but who never ceased to recognise himself as a son of the Church, even though some of his friendships and initiatives earned him the wariness of his superiors.

A faithful yet suspect Catholicism

Bremond illustrates a rare figure: that of a priest never struck by Rome with a personal doctrinal condemnation, but whose entourage, friendships and certain writings aroused, throughout his career, recurring wariness on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities.^[96] The 1909 suspension a divinis, the placing of Sainte Chantal on the Index in 1913, the clandestine publication of the Sylvain Leblanc text in 1931 trace the trajectory of a man who always refused to sacrifice his personal friendships to his reputation for orthodoxy — without ever breaking with the Catholic Church himself, in which he died a priest in 1933.

Sainte Chantal: at once a literary and a circumstantial condemnation

It must be restated precisely: Sainte Chantal was not condemned for a doctrinal error identified in the text itself, but for a treatment judged unbecoming of the bond between the two founders of the Visitation, aggravated by the climate of suspicion already established around its author.^[97] The distinction matters: it separates a disciplinary sanction, bound up with circumstances and a reputation, from a doctrinal condemnation in due form such as had struck, in 1699, Fénelon's own propositions.

The Sylvain Leblanc case: private fidelity, public prudence

The text published under the pseudonym Sylvain Leblanc in 1931 remains, to this day, the most delicate item in the Bremond file.^[98] It shows a man capable, at sixty-six, of still taking risks to defend the memory of a friend excluded from the Church — but also a man sufficiently aware of the gravity of the gesture never to sign it with his name. That very prudence — the mask, the corrected style, the anonymity kept until death — indicates that Bremond did not intend to erect his private sympathy for Loisy into a public position opposable to the Church's magisterium: it was a gesture of charity towards a man, not a theological profession of faith made public.

After his election to the Académie, Bremond spent little time in Paris and settled most often at Arthez-d'Asson, near Pau, at the foot of the Pyrenees, where he continued working to complete his Histoire littéraire.^[99] It was there that he died on 17 August 1933, aged sixty-eight, after several months of declining health, despite signs of improvement in his final days.^[100] He is buried in the Saint-Pierre cemetery in Aix-en-Provence, his native town.^[101] The eleventh volume of his great work, Le Procès des mystiques, appeared the same year; a twelfth volume, an alphabetical and analytical index drawn up by Charles Grolleau, would complete the set after his death.^[102]

A working tool still indispensable

Nearly a century after its publication, the Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France continues to carry authority. Its critical reissue in five volumes at Jérôme Millon (2006), enriched with complementary studies on Port-Royal, Ignatian spirituality, Quietism and Bremond's reception among twentieth-century Catholic writers, confirms the judgement passed by Émile Goichot: a work dated in certain respects, but still foundational for understanding French religious history.^[103]

The rue Chanoinesse plaque (1934)

On 9 June 1934, less than a year after Bremond's death, Paul Valéry unveiled a commemorative plaque at 16 rue Chanoinesse and on that occasion delivered his Discours sur Henri Bremond, the tribute of a poet who had remained outside the faith to a priest whose analytical finesse and friendship he had admired to the end.^[104]

Against a history of the Church reduced to councils alone, condemnations alone and acts of the magisterium alone, Bremond recalls that there is another history, equally real: that of the hearts of believers, of their prayer, tears and poetry — a history which deserves, no less, to be written with the same rigour as that of dogmas. Against the temptation to judge a man solely on his associations or on the suspicions of which he was the object, his case invites the nuance that all true intellectual charity demands: a priest can remain faithful to his priesthood until death while refusing, humanly, to abandon friends whom the Church had been obliged to sanction. His entire work, from the Apologie pour Fénelon to the Procès des mystiques, holds to a single wager: that religious sentiment, properly recounted, says things about the faith of Christians which neither theology nor controversy will ever be able to say alone.

• Fénelon (1651–1715) — the Archbishop of Cambrai defended by Bremond in the quarrel over pure love.
• Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704) — Fénelon's adversary in the Quietist quarrel, at the heart of the Apologie pour Fénelon.
• Maurice Blondel (1861–1949) — the philosopher who corresponded with Bremond during the Modernist crisis and passed through it without being condemned.
• Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) — whose intuition of the "heart" irrigates the thesis of Prière et Poésie.
• Paul Claudel (1868–1955) — whose Anima / Animus distinction structures Bremond's essay on pure poetry.
• Charles Péguy (1873–1914), Léon Bloy (1846–1917), François Mauriac (1885–1970) and Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) — other great figures of the French Catholic renaissance of the same generation.