Kindred Spirits

Pius X’s condemnation of Modernism in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) cast a pall over Catholic intellectual life for much of the first half of the 20^th century. As Catholics seemed to retreat into their own intellectual universe, intellectual historians could once write general histories of the period with at most a passing reference to Jacques Maritain sufficient to cover the Catholic contribution to modern thought. Thankfully, that time has passed. Studies in recent years have recast Maritain in a broader, cosmopolitan intellectual milieu and drawn attention to the significance of lesser-known figures in the wide-ranging intellectual network centered on the salon he hosted with his wife, Raïssa.

Brenna Moore has already contributed to this reassessment of Catholic intellectual life through a study of the theme of suffering in the French Catholic revival. Her most recent book, Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edge of Modern Catholicism, continues this work of revision: first, by selecting figures either little-known in the English-speaking world or seldom studied in the context of Catholicism; second, by focusing less on the substance of their scholarly and literary writings than on their understanding of the relationships they developed in the course of pursuing their intellectual work, most especially a particular understanding of “friendship” rooted in medieval and early modern Catholic notions of “spiritual friendship” (16, 121).

Moore tasks the theme of friendship with the heavy burden of uniting an impressively eclectic group of “Catholic intellectuals” (and its various meanings): the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, the French Islamicist Louis Massignon, the French medievalist Marie-Magdeleine Davy, and the African-American novelist Claude McKay. Moore succeeds in showing the importance of friendship in the lives of these intellectuals, yet is somewhat less successful in communicating the significance of Catholicism to this story. All these figures have some connection to the Church and the Catholic intellectual tradition, and Moore claims she will give careful attention to the “distinctive nuances” of a “specifically Catholic particularity” in their lives (15). At the same time, Moore generally presents Catholic life and thought of the time as trapped within “simple binaries” that her intellectuals transcend. They do this by developing a new ethos of “mixed, cosmopolitan solidarities” that go beyond the Church and the Catholic tradition (5). In this regard, she presents the idea of friendship developed by these thinkers as an explicit rejection of the norms of family life, a privileging of “chosen” relations over “passive models of kinship” (4). In this, these thinkers anticipate our own time, in which western society seems to have moved beyond the nuclear family as a foundational social institution.

There is some truth to all this, but not a truth that illuminates any “specifically Catholic particularity,” as Moore puts it. In their constant, restless challenging of or indifference toward Church authority, it is hard to see what makes these thinkers Catholics beyond their attraction to things Catholic and willingness to be identified with the Church. Catholicism has long held an appeal for artists and intellectuals disillusioned with modernity. The decadent writer Joris-Karl Huysmans followed this attraction all the way to conversion, spending his last years as an oblate in a Benedictine monastery; for Ernest Hemmingway, it was not much more than an object on which to play out his existential ruminations. Moore’s figures are somewhere in between these extremes, but generally come off closer to the Hemmingway end of the spectrum, using Catholicism as fodder for their own idiosyncratic acts of self-creation.  

Intellectual historians are often drawn to unconventional figures who think outside the box of their times. Still, when that box disappears or simply cannot be taken seriously, much of the drama of the struggle to expand intellectual boundaries disappears with it. If only for the sake of drama, Moore should have provided a fuller sense of the boundaries of the box—not the Catholic tradition as a whole, but the specific tradition of spiritual friendship within which her thinkers placed themselves. This is particularly striking in her treatment of the medievalist Davy, who claims a deep attachment to medieval monks without seeming to share their deep attachment to Christ. Davy’s work, like Etienne Gilson’s, helped to reveal a complexity to medieval life that challenged the naïve piety of right-wing romantic medievalists; unfortunately, it did so only to fall into a left-wing romantic medievalism with roots in the decadent writers and branches in contemporary New Age spirituality.

In her concluding chapter, Moore notes how McKay constantly struggled against white intellectuals who imposed their various fantasies on the black experience and proved incapable of taking black life on its own terms. Much the same could be said of Mistral, Massignon, and Davey’s treatment of Catholicism. In her celebration of their emancipatory transgressions, Moore continues this tradition, presenting a usable past that is ultimately a mirror of contemporary, 21^st- century norms.

Christopher Shannon is an associate professor of history at Christendom College.

Christopher Shannon

Date Of Review:

July 26, 2024