'le christianisme est etrange' - Pascal, Pensees
Pascal's assertion that 'Christianity is strange', provides the
theme for Richard Parish's exploration of Catholic particularity,
as it was expressed in the writing of the French seventeenth
century. This was a period of quite exceptional fertility in a
range of genres: apologetics, sermons, devotional manuals,
catechisms, martyr tragedies, lyric poetry, polemic and spiritual
autobiography. Parish examines a broad cross-section of this corpus
with reference to the topics of apologetics, physicality, language,
discernment, polemics and salvation; and draws evidence both from
canonical figures (Pascal, Bossuet, Fenelon, St Francois de Sales,
Madame Guyon) and from less easily-available texts.
Parish aims to consider all those distinctive features that the
heritage of the Catholic Reformation brought to the surface in
France, and to do so in support of the numerous ways in which
Christian doctrine could be understood as being strange: it is by
turns contrary to expectations, paradoxical, divisive, carnal and
inexpressible. These features are exploited imaginatively in the
more conventional literary forms, didactically in pulpit oratory
and empirically in the accounts of personal spiritual experience.
In addition they are manifested polemically in debates surrounding
penance, authority, inspiration and eschatology, and often push
orthodoxy to its limits and beyond in the course of their
articulation.
This volume provides an unsettling account of a belief system to
which early-modern France often unquestioningly subscribed, and
shows how the element of cultural assimilation of Catholic
Christianity into much of Western Europe only tenuously contains a
subversive and counter-intuitive creed. The degree to which that
remains the case will be for the reader to decide.
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