Holy Tears, Holy Blood:
Burton, Richard D. E. & Schloesser, Stephen
No pain, no gain Holy Tears, Holy Blood Women, Catholicism, and the Culture of Suffering in France, 1840-1970 Richard D. E. Burton Cornell University Press, $45, 291 pp. Stephen Schloesser n...
...Therese who set aside a God of "justice" for a God of "love...
...As he notes, vicarious suffering "may be said to have come into its own" between 1914 and 1918...
...Holy Tears, Holy Blood sets out to explore an extremely powerful pre—Vatican II world that seems incomprehensible to us today and has now practically vanished...
...But he fails to ask how the mainstream (that is, liberal republican) culture tried to make sense of such suffering...
...But Burton lacks Bynum's signature method...
...Before concluding her suicide pact with Jacques Maritain, Raissa Oumancoff, whose parents daringly rescued her from Russian Jewish pogroms, wanted to know whether "existence is an accident, an act of charity or of bad luck...
...Paul that there is still something lacking in the sufferings of Jesus Christ, and that this something must be made up for in the living members of his body...
...the suicides of Madame Bovary and Hedda Gabler...
...Perhaps the Catholic spirituality that turned such illnesses into a means of sanctification (of oneself and of others) was brutal...
...But one might ask: How loving (or hopeful) would such a God have been during what Roger Shat-tuck has called France's "banquet years...
...Jacques Le Goff's Birth of Purgatory provides a helpful corrective...
...Andre Malraux once put it succinctly: "Christ—and not God—delivers those who believe in him from the absurd...
...TON JESUIT SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY Cambridge, Massachusetts (Harvard Square 1-617-492-1960 admissionsinfo@wjst.edu Commonweal 2 5 September 24, 2004 Today's "reality TV" pales by comparison...
...Stephen Schloesser, SJ, is an assistant professor of history at Boston College...
...and Colette Peignot (one-time lover of Georges Bataille, high priest of violent eroticism...
...Melanie Calvat (the visionary at La Salette) is followed by ten others, including St...
...Burton's other main figures—Camille Claudel, Simone Weil, and Colette Peignotwere not Catholic, let alone venerated by the institution...
...Burton usually devotes a chapter to an individual figure...
...She alone, says Burton, saw that "God's forgiveness is freely given not earned," and therefore there can be "no punitive impulse in God...
...Their world—one predating antibiotics, blood transfusions, microsurgery, and protease inhibitors—is hard to read about and even harder to imagine...
...Perhaps if Burton had included a chapter drawing on the prewar writings of Theophane Venard and Charles de Foucauld (respectively decapitated and gunned down in the colonies), Pierre Olivaint (executed as a hostage by the Communards), Charles Peguy and Ernest Psichari (killed in the war's first weeks), and the letters home from count-less Catholic trench soldiers, the picture would look different...
...For example, the contraction of tuberculosis plays a recurrent role in these stories...
...They were influenced by the "doctrine of vicarious suffering" or of "mystical substitution," the idea that human beings so interpenetrate one an-other that the sufferings of one can "re-deem" (or more literally, "buy back") the life of another...
...Still, some readers—especially historians—will find Burton's work deeply unsatisfying...
...What about helping others to be more...
...Although his prose occasionally runs aground on jargon, it quickly recovers its fluidity...
...Burton describes in great detail this now seemingly bizarre form of piety...
...Join seekers from the world over to explore contemporary theological questions...
...Neither meaningless nor random, tuberculosis signified abjection in the secular culture...
...Catholic spirituality was of a piece with such popular appeals...
...Therese Martin (the "Little Flower...
...displays of dead bodies in morgue windows...
...Such was all human life before penicillin...
...Camille Claudel (Rodin's spurned lover and sister of the I Commonweal 24 September 24, 2004 famous playwright Paul...
...But what about being more...
...Paul Claudel, inspired by his sister Camille's tragic descent into insanity, wrote that "it is too hard to suffer and not to know for what purpose...
...Stephen Schloesser n the late nineteenth century, the social reformer and polemicist Leon Bloy applied the words of Paul's letter to the Colossians (1:24) to a peculiar strain of French religious culture: "We have learned from...St...
...Raissa Maritain (wife of the philosopher Jacques...
...It revivified the post-Enlightenment church, defying the commonplace prejudice that said it was impossible to be both Catholic and "modern...
...Second, Burton tends to equate what he terms "ultra-Catholics"—those who embraced this culture of suffering—with official "ultramontanist Catholicism...
...Poignant details such as these may be found throughout Burton's work, which overflows with riches that recover tragic lives now nearly forgotten...
...Insofar as many of these women "espoused, or were coopted by, ultra-royalist politics," they also "reinforced the patriarchal principle in operation both in the church and, more loosely and less obviously, in French society at large...
...What my husband for-got to do, I, who am a part of his body, shall willingly do in his place...
...The church reacted to them "with interdict, excommunication, and anathema...
...This authentic more, rinis M~agis, Is deeper than culture, status quo, the everyday...
...Therese, afflicted with tuberculosis, ascribed meaning to her life by holding that "suffering alone can give birth to souls...
...hair and head shaving...
...Then unimaginable advances in medical technology have made such a celebration of pain and contingency unacceptable and even repulsive to us...
...I am ready to become a recluse for him and to re-deem his sins from God...
...She always places practices and beliefs that seem incomprehensible to modern readers in their specific historical contexts, thus allowing her to suggest their possible meaning...
...A final chapter provides an overview of recurrent tropes: "mysteria," or the fin-de-siecle figure of the "mystical hysteric...
...In a time of gross economic injustice, Leon Bloy (who plays Burton's villain to Therese's heroism) attracted an audience from the antibourgeois right and left (people like Andre Gide...
...Along with alcoholism, madness, syphilis, and a host of other bourgeois terrors, tuberculosiswas explained by "mythologies of heredity" as a clear manifestation of familial "degeneration"—bad blood passed on from one generation to another with fatal necessity...
...Who reaped the benefits of this spirituality...
...Describing himself as "a stillbelieving liberal Catholic convert (lapsed)," Burton conveys his "respect, and sometimes much more, for the women themselves" even as he feels he must "recoil from the 'sanctification of sadness and pain'" that marks this world...
...First, the reader never senses the exhilarating liberation that came from Decadent celebrations of sickness, madness, and other perversions (or in-versions) of the merciless "Law of Nature...
...B re...
...Hence suffering could yield hope...
...This omission leads to two distortions...
...Standing firmly on the side of the poor (if only because he himself lived in abject poverty), Bloy embraced the Beatitudes' inversions, rewriting abjection as election...
...There Goff shows a thirteenth-century wife pleading to the pope on behalf of her deceased usurious husband: "I have been told, my Lord, that man and woman are but one and that, according to the apostle, an unbelieving man can be saved by his believing wife...
...Burton is clearly not happy with the way those afflicted assimilated their suffering to the Passion of Christ, thus giving it personal meaning...
...F inally, in an effort to make the doctrine seem aberrant, Burton overstates what he sees as the novelty of vicarious suffering in the nineteenth century...
...Men too walked the Via Dolorosa to Golgotha and beyond...
...Drive more...
...Burton's heroine is St...
...By contrast, Burton's analysis, which is largely literary and rarely historical, makes the behavior he describes seem absurd and simply cruel...
...urton is a retired professor of French and Francophone literature, and the Anglophone reader must be enormously grateful for the sheer volume of material he has made available by research and translation...
...Burton's assertion that "men did not go nearly as far along the Via Dolorosa as [women] did" also doesn't stand up...
...Hundreds of thou-sands of men went to their deaths at the behest of the Republic—a largelymeaningless massacre for which the survivors would later hold it account-able...
...Bloy's God was punitive precisely because (as Bur-ton notes) Bloy argued vigorously against the dominant liberal belief that "suffering is a simple accident of earthly life...
...Holy Tears, Holy Blood should be essential reading for students of late-modern religious cultures, French Catholicism, and French literature...
...In contrast, the Catholic doctrine of suffering, like the Beatitudes, inverted the oppressive world of nature: the lowly were raised up and the mighty cast down...
...In the end, though, Burton fails to comprehend why this "culture of suffering" appealed to so many women and men who would rather face a life of pain than of meaninglessness...
...As Burton notes, Melanie Calvat was indeed an "object of veneration on the part of many ultra-Catholics," but this was largely because they saw her as a martyr persecuted by the ultramontanist Catholic authorities...
...Most curiously (since his is a work of literary criticism), Burton devotes al-most no space to the Decadent movement...
...happy is he who suffers and knows why he does...
...The answer is stark and straight-forward: the men in their lives or, more generally, the male-dominated order of things...if only in the sense that they gave...inspiration, literary and/or spiritual, to men who did not go nearly as far along the Via Dolorosa as [women] did...
...fasting or "holy anorexia...
...His title seems intended to evoke Caroline Bynum's study of medieval women in Holy Feast and Holy Fast (which he cites...
...From his doctrine of suffering, as Burton rightly observes, "It follows that no suffering is wasted or without value...
...Burton's thesis is that Catholic women "betrothed themselves to suffering and had suffering as offspring," doing so "willingly, even enthusiastically, passionately...
...Faint of heart, be forewarned: Burton's translations of pornographic passages in the Bataille chapter pack the punch of the originals...
...It's what ignites your intellect and calls you to a life of service...
...The magisterium recognized Calvat's visions but not the visionary, and placed her apocalyptic writings on the Index of Forbid-den Books...
...newspaper photographs of bruised corpses...
...As in our own Gilded Age, this epoch was marked (in Shattuck's words) by "the untaxed rich" living "in shameless Commonweal 26 September 24, 2004...
...As the self-contradictions of liberal ideology made it collapse from within, the doctrine of vicarious suffering through self-sacrifice rescued widespread loss from being mere chaos, futility, or irony...
...Largely literary in expression, the "culture of suffering" described by scholar and author Richard Burton appealed to social and intellectual elites, attracting numerous converts to Catholicism...
...The spectacles were many: pleasure cruises through the new Paris sewer system...
...With only one exception, not a single woman "exhibiting one or another extraordinary phenomenon has been beatified," and of the "four leading saints of the period," "not one evinced signs of excessive fasting, unexplained bleeding or ecstasies, transverberation," and so on...
...The ideas of joining one's own passion to Christ's, of intermingling lives, and the ability to redeem others through one's own self-sacrifices have been Christian constants from its earliest epochs...
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...Her concluding distinction sums up the question at the heart of the culture of suffering: she could accept "a sorrowful life, but not an absurd one...
...Our Master of Theological Studies program gives you a thorough and practical theological foundation...
...blood, tears, and other bodily fluids...
...Their attempts to give that world some significance are poignant, but a sympathetic response requires historical horizons not found in the pages of Holy Tears, Holy Blood...
...In short, this Catholic exaltation of suffering provided an alternative world of meaning to that of the secular, positivist, materialist, and determinist ideology of France's secular republican liberalism, which re-garded suffering as mostly meaningless...
...Similar things happened to all the women...
...Burton could also have placed these stories within a more general proliferation of "spectacular realities," a wide-spread nineteenth-century fascination with new means of representing life's underbelly...
...luxury" and by the brutalization of the working masses...
...In addition, Catholicism's close relationship with homosexuality, which Burton nicely underscores, remains needlessly unexplained...
...Yet Burton's own text demonstrates that ultramontanists were not as comfortable with those who embraced the culture of suffering as he asserts...
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Vol. 131 • September 2004 • No. 16
