Between the years 1894 and 1914 in France, ‘modernity’ - understood in the political realm as laicism and in the cultural-intellectual realm as the Sorbonne's positivism/historicism - grew to be imagined as the dualistic opposite of Catholicism. Catholicism versus culture, religion versus realism, faith versus fact, eternal versus historical - such pairings represented two radically incompatible and mutually exclusive modes of envisioning the world. If we are to understand why the Great War came as a trauma in a particular way for Catholics, we must see what an inversion of imagination it entailed. As late as Easter 1914, a young...

France’s 1914-18 ‘sacred union’ of the Republic’s monarchist right and socialist left was only the first of various ‘impossible’ reconciliations that the war would effect. As the conflict dragged on into 1915-16, France’s traumatic encounter with chaos necessitated making new meanings out of an increasingly senseless situation. A process of mourning would involve recovering and reconciling elements that peacetime’s luxury had allowed to be disregarded. If the war would be traumatic for the nation as a whole, it was from its outbreak particularly so for Catholics. Only yesterday they had been fighting against the Republic; today they were fighting on...

For the postwar generation, the keyword was ‘realism’: the attempt to strip away what was false and ornamental and to grasp a sure and lasting reality. And yet it was a complicated realism, for perhaps the most distinctive self-expression of this postwar epoch wassur-réalisme- a hybrid of waking reality and a more authentic reality: the world of dreams, hopes, and hallucinations. And though surrealism was the most prominent, there was a broad array of such attempts to forge various hybrid realisms: neoclassicism, magical realism, socialist realism, and dialectical images. This cultural project of forging dialectical realisms marks what...

In Jacques Maritain’s landmarkArt and Scholasticism(1920), two personified virtues - Art and Prudence - represented forces previously thought incompatible: modern artists and neo-scholastic philosophers, immoralists and men of order, bohemians and bourgeois, culture and Catholicism. The work’s title nicely summarized Maritain’s appeal to a culture in chaos: the reconciliation of former foes. To a ‘realist generation,’ he offered three tantalizing propositions: first, privileged and infallible access to what is real: that is, certain, unchanging, and eternal forms. Second, he showed that what is real not onlycouldbut evenoughtto be clothed in avant-garde matter, the most...

Jacques Maritain’s ability to make anti-modernism seem ultramodernist owed a debt to his reading of Cocteau’s own ordered anarchism. Through unforeseen circumstances, he would meet Cocteau himself in 1924, and this joining in real life of what had been before personified virtues (Prudence and Art) would extend the reach of a universalist Catholicism into previously unanticipated regions. But thisentente cordialewould engender anxiety in Cocteau and Maritain as well as their critics: the appeal of Catholic revivalists to homosexuals for their legitimating ‘modernity’ might mean they were only ‘passing’ as moderns; or, conversely, the panicked sense that they truly...

The aesthetics entailed by the Maritains’ neoclassical Catholicism nicely accounted for works of art that tended towards formalism and abstraction - Picasso, Severini, or Stravinsky. But could it account for the other dominating strain of postwar art emphasizing nervous anxiety and emotional pathos - that is, the expressionism of Max Beckmann or Arnold Schoenberg?² The friendship between Maritain and Georges Rouault was mutually beneficial: Maritain’s celebrity would help disseminate Rouault’s work; conversely, Rouault’s work would help Maritain refine his formalist aesthetics so it could include a broader canvas of twentieth-century artistic practices. Before the war, no critics - not even...

In the first week of April 1926, Maritain’sRoseau d’Orpublished Georges Bernanos’s novelUnder Satan’s Sun as the series’seventh volume. For supporters and opponents, the work would become a site in which a newly constructed Catholic dialectical realism could be discussed and refined. More singular efforts would be made to promote the ‘Catholic novel’ or ‘mystical novel’ by writers such as François Mauriac and Émile Baumann, the (not yet converted) philosopher Gabriel Marcel in theN.R.E,the Sorbonne literary professor Robert Garric inLa Revue des jeunes(which Garric also directed), and Victor Poucel in the JesuitÉtudes....

Charles Tournemire’s monumental organ work,L’Orgue Mystique(composed 1927-32; published 1928-36) contributed to a radical reversal of religious musical values. Whereas plainchant in the nineteenth century had been revived in order to stand over and against the fleeting world of passionate music, Tournemire imagined the musical devices representing ‘passion’ - chromaticism, polytonalism, and the perceived resulting ‘dissonance’ - as the most appropriate material carriers of the ‘eternal’ and unchanging Latin forms. Images of dress abounded as ancient chants were imagined to be ‘clothed’ in ‘modern’ musical fashions. This musical hylomorphism shared the same general aims as musical neoclassicism and surrealism...