A Catholic Contribution to Modern Secular Culture: Henri Bremond, Jacques Le Brun, and the Idea of Pure Love

A Catholic Contribution to Modern Secular CultureHenri Bremond, Jacques Le Brun, and the Idea of Pure Love Peter J. Gorday (bio) Keywords Henri Bermond, Le Brun, Pure Love, Secular Society, Secularity, Catholic mondernism, Early 20th Century France Historians, sociologists, and philosophers have long argued that as the process known as secularization advanced in Europe and North America, beginning in the sixteenth century and accelerating particularly in the nineteenth, inherited religious beliefs and practices, while receding in popularity, did not necessarily disappear, but were often, in response to spiritual hunger, transmuted into a host of new and sometimes nonreligious forms. Charles Taylor, the Canadian Roman Catholic analyst of the history of social thought, contends that freedom from the authority of religious institutions has historically, in fact, produced at first a sense of liberation, and then for modern individuals over time an impoverished yearning, a psychologically debilitated sense of the morally grounded “self,” alienated from its spiritual sources. His argument is both subtle and powerful. The culprit in Taylor’s view is the heritage of Romanticism from which has come “instrumentalism,” that is, the idea that the individual can in freedom make or remake himself in any desired fashion, can acquire meaning and purpose, often in more-or-less spiritual terms, but without recourse to derided, often absolutizing, theological sources of perspective.1 On the other hand, and given the fact, [End Page 56] argues Taylor, that religion can no longer serve for the shoring up of “civilizational order” and shared meanings by means of sacred symbols, Romanticism can cut in the opposite direction as well: spiritual sources of meaning, often stripped of transcendental references, can, when desired, be reappropriated by “the heirs . . . of the Romantic period against the disciplined, instrumental self [which is] connected to the modern social order.”2 Which is to say that certain aspects of secularization, i.e., Romanticism engaging in self-criticism, may generate their own countercultural dynamic in which spiritual longings often push back against the very secularization that has spawned them in the first place. Individuals, trapped in Taylor’s instrumental self, question the values of the “rational,” bourgeois world that is the epitome of secular culture.3 Religious hunger reawakens, therefore, with subversive power.4 An intriguing case in point lies in the historical vicissitudes of the idea of “pure love.” My thesis here is that a particular strain of Roman Catholic thought, present derivatively in some Protestant traditions as well, a strain often dismissed in the past as a kind of theological quibbling, has in fact diffused a profound spiritual value into our spiritually hungry culture—a value that requires constant reclaiming. “Pure love” is defined as an utterly disinterested form of loving that seeks on the part of the lover absolutely no recompense, that has eschewed in a radical way the normal human desire for some satisfaction from the act of loving. The key terms here are “utterly” and “absolutely” and “radical.” In the classical, ecclesial debates about this kind of loving, the idea was illustrated forcefully by the “impossible supposition,” famously stated by St. Francis de Sales, in which that author, discussing our love for God, invited us “to imagine something impossible, [that] if the soul knew that damnation would be a little more pleasing to God than salvation, it would forsake salvation and run after its own damnation.”5 Such love of the Other, in Francis’s language, is “resigned” or “indifferent” (i.e., not a not-caring, but a calm acceptance) with regard to whatever the “good pleasure” of the divine Lover chooses to [End Page 57] give. If that divine Lover chooses (or seems to choose) to give nothing but endless suffering, then the human lover will persist, nonetheless. The central idea is that ordinary loving, whether of God or neighbor, always has an “impure” element, namely a self-serving interested dimension, whereas “pure” love, love devoid of all reward for the lover, is the “real thing.” An enormous quarrel about this kind of pure love—its nature, its possibility, its desirability—erupted in seventeenth-century France, at the court of Louis XIV, the chief disputants being François Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai, and Mme...

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