This month marks the centenary of the death of the French novelist Marcel Proust, an occasion for looking at how his work was influenced by his father’s Catholic faith. Although formal religious instruction ended for Proust with his First Communion at age 12, his À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time) implies that Catholicism made a lasting impression.
One oft-recalled feature in that seven-volume novel is the episode of the madeleine, in which dipping a small sponge cake into his tea made childhood memories accessible for transformation into art. Another, almost as cherished by readers, is a magic lantern scene set in the narrator’s childhood about Geneviève de Brabant. She was a heroine of medieval fable described in The Golden Legend, a collection of saints’ lives; her morality tale about a virtuous wife falsely charged with infidelity incited the young Proust stringently to inspect his own conscience.
In addition to exemplary lives, Proust was exhilarated by houses of worship, organising a team of French translators to publish a 1905 version of John Ruskin’s Bible of Amiens, an ode to the cathedral of that Gallic city. Proust was also an admirer of Émile Mâle, a turn-of-the-century expert on medieval sacral art, iconography and religious allegory.
So it was unsurprising when, a year previously, Proust published La Mort Des Cathédrales (Death of the Cathedrals), a text decrying a proposed statute that became the 1905 French law separating Church and State. Weighing this prospective expression of opposition between Catholic and secular authorities, Proust regretted that in the village of Illiers, near Chartres, the local priest was no longer invited to prize-giving ceremonies at the secular provincial school.
Proust examined what would be lost if France’s awe-inspiring cathedrals ceased to thrive due to lack of government funding. His priorities were clear: “One might say that a staging of Wagner at Bayreuth is inconsequential compared to the celebration of High Mass at Chartres Cathedral.”
With a detailed account of liturgy for Holy Saturday, drawn from the writings of Mâle, Proust conveyed the drama and intense symbolism of ritual observance. The aesthete Proust even prioritised liturgical vitality over immortal artworks. Referring to the pillage of ecclesiastical buildings during the French Revolution, he observed: “Well: better to ransack a church than to decommission it. As mutilated as a church may be, as long as the Mass is celebrated there, at least it retains some life.”
This ardent defence of Catholic observance represented the second, and final, time Proust would take a public stance on current events; the first was when he defended the cause of the unjustly prosecuted Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish military officer. At that time, in 1896, Proust wrote to Count Robert de Montesquiou, excusing himself for not replying to a previous missive. Proust explained his hesitancy by the “simple fact that like my father and brother, I am Catholic, but on the contrary, my mother is Jewish. You will understand that this is a fairly good reason for me to abstain from this type of debate.”
Despite Proust’s self-identification as Catholic, most critics have relatively overlooked this element of his identity. Exceptions included a few eyewitnesses who knew him personally, like his housekeeper and secretary, Céleste Albaret, celebrated for her not-always-perceptive octogenarian reminiscences of her employer. Still another advocate of the Proust-as-Christian argument was Abbé Arthur Mugnier, a Pickwickian high-society cleric who jested that he dined out so often that he was planning to have table napkins woven into his shroud.
In addition to these diverting sources, writers with more serious literary credentials have associated Proust with Catholicism. In a 1934 article reprinted in Disjecta (Grove Press), Samuel Beckett discussed Proust’s purported association with quietism, a 17th-century heresy propounded by the Spanish mystic Miguel de Molinos and later by France’s Jeanne-Marie Guyon. Just as Proust retreated from active life to a cork-lined room to transfigure his experience into a literary monument, the quietists were charged with favouring intellectual stillness over vocal prayer and interior passivity over pious action.
For his part, the French Catholic author François Mauriac commented regretfully: “God is terribly absent from the works of Marcel Proust.” According to Mauriac, who had met and corresponded with Proust, this absence led to a lack of moral conscience and awareness of what it meant to be human in À la recherche. For Mauriac, Proust’s characters appeared to have neither scruples nor remorse, nor any desire to perfect themselves. This resulted in a shrunken, impoverished artistic universe. All of the Christian allusions in Proust’s novel, which Mauriac likened to a Bible of sorts, merely added up to a “sacred book, a pious work, but written sacrilegiously”.
So was Proust akin to a heretic, or merely sacrilegious? According to the Catholic novelist Muriel Spark in a 1953 essay, “The Religion of an Agnostic: A Sacramental View of the World in the Writings of Proust” – reprinted in The Informed Air (New Directions) – “in Proust can be detected all the attributes of a deeply religious writer, except the ‘indispensable’ ones of a moral sense and a faith”.
“Proust always writes with the insight of a gifted religious,” Spark added, “and the fid-elity of one devoted to a spiritual cause. He has the introspective enlightenment of a later St Augustine: one who, in his 36th year, withdrew from a flourishing life in society in order to contemplate its inner decadence … It will be clear to the Christian reader who knows Proust’s work that his thought repeatedly suggests, but does not coincide with, Christian doctrine. Proust was not a Christian, nor was the intention of his work religious.”
Nevertheless, Proust’s novel contains “something of a tremendous value to the Christian imagination, a sacramental view of life which is nothing more than a balanced regard for matter and spirit.” In Spark’s view, “lacking a redemptive faith, Proust’s attempt was to save himself through art. And in refreshing our vision from a writer like Proust, we are following the tradition whereby a great amount of the most fruitful thought of the Church is derived from the efforts of inspired pagans to save themselves.”
Spark concluded that although Proust did not explicitly discuss sacraments, the poetic beauty of his writing, necessarily lost in English translations of his work, can tell readers more about the nature of sacraments than any modern treatise on the subject. This viewpoint seems especially helpful, given a number of hastily-dismissive responses from other Catholic readers, including James Joyce and Evelyn Waugh. In a 1920 letter, Joyce divulged to a friend that after reading “some pages” by Proust, he had to confess: “I cannot see any special talent but I am a bad critic.”
Even more uninhibited was Evelyn Waugh, who wrote teasingly to Nancy Mitford in 1948: “I am reading Proust for the first time – in English of course – and am surprised to find him a mental defective. No one warned me of that.” Yet, as it turns out, Proust’s mind functioned exceedingly well, and it seems likely that Catholicism was at the wellspring of his inspiration.
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