lookingland (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lookingland) wrote2005-10-03 09:06 am
lookingland) wrote2005-10-03 09:06 am
Entry tags:
ah the french ~
started reading Stendhal's The Red and the Black last night (why i torture myself with anti-clerical 19th century french literature is anybody's guess).
i only got about 40 pages in before sleep bludgeoned me, but what struck me most peculiarly is that thus far it's Gormenghast, which makes me look a wee cockeyed at at mr. mervyn peake.
but there it is: instead of Steerpike, we have Julien ~ harshly abused by his manly sawmill-operating father, sensitive intellectual Julien is thrashed for reading on the job and then thrown out like so much garbage to become a Latin tutor to the three children of the mayor. Julien, who loves all things military and yearned for a career in the army, having found himself unsuitable for such, decides instead that the real profit lays in the Church. Once he is in the embrace of the mayor's house and patronage he begins his rise to power. the mayor, of course, is a dupe, a conservative religious man who will naturally fall for Julien's fake piety and then the games will begin.
while the circumstances are very different than from Steerpike being evicted from the kitchens, just to read the books suggests so many similarities ~ right down to the familial narrative voice (chatty and intentionally intrusive).
Stendhal evidently embraced Jansenism (a rather Calvanistic heresy worming around in the Church in that era ~ very inclined toward predestination and the "elect") and, predictably, seethed with animosity toward "Jesuitism" which, then, was considered a rigid ultramontane hypocrisy so embedded into the Church heirarchy as to corrupt it entirely (yet another case of Jesuit education gone bad and its recipient spending a whole lot of energy trying to "get even"). i find this stance so interesting, really, because Jansenism is positively anti-Liberal when you get down to it, and the harsher of the two ideologies in terms of Christian theology. so i'm not really sure why Stendhal defends it ~ perhaps only because it's a form of protestantism and anything against the Church is good for him?
at any rate, i am sure this book will be an adventure. i am not in love with Stendhal's style. mirabeau and hugo are so much cleaner. he reminds me more of flaubert or de balzac: dense and warbling. i like a good dense warble now and then, but it's not exactly something you can rip through, so it'll take me a while before i get to the end of this book's tirade against the Church.
i will say this for the anti-clerical literature i have read thus far out of france: its villains readily admit that they are hypocrites. none of them believe they are doing as the Church bids (which is what makes mirabeau's Abbé Jules so intriguing, i think: Jules knows he's an evil man and struggles with it to his horrible death). so it seems to me that the real gripe against the priesthood in that era was not the Church so much as the sort of people who took advantage of the Church for their own gain (specifically men who became priests for the job and not the vocation). while i know most anti-Catholics don't bother to separate the Church from her imperfect clergy, i do find it rather interesting that the attacks at this time are almost purely political and have nothing to do, really, with the actual theology.
whereas today, you could say that attacks are purely emotional based on a misunderstanding of the theology. once the political threat of the Church was minimized (with the downfall of the papal states in the 1870s), the protestors needed a new reason to attack the Church. criticizing the newly promulgated Immaculate Conception and Assumption of the Blessed Virgin were easy targets in this climate and that's what you see mostly today: a lot of anti-Marian sentiment borne out of pure ignorance.
but i don't want to go off on a bender just now about all that. maybe later.
i only got about 40 pages in before sleep bludgeoned me, but what struck me most peculiarly is that thus far it's Gormenghast, which makes me look a wee cockeyed at at mr. mervyn peake.
but there it is: instead of Steerpike, we have Julien ~ harshly abused by his manly sawmill-operating father, sensitive intellectual Julien is thrashed for reading on the job and then thrown out like so much garbage to become a Latin tutor to the three children of the mayor. Julien, who loves all things military and yearned for a career in the army, having found himself unsuitable for such, decides instead that the real profit lays in the Church. Once he is in the embrace of the mayor's house and patronage he begins his rise to power. the mayor, of course, is a dupe, a conservative religious man who will naturally fall for Julien's fake piety and then the games will begin.
while the circumstances are very different than from Steerpike being evicted from the kitchens, just to read the books suggests so many similarities ~ right down to the familial narrative voice (chatty and intentionally intrusive).
Stendhal evidently embraced Jansenism (a rather Calvanistic heresy worming around in the Church in that era ~ very inclined toward predestination and the "elect") and, predictably, seethed with animosity toward "Jesuitism" which, then, was considered a rigid ultramontane hypocrisy so embedded into the Church heirarchy as to corrupt it entirely (yet another case of Jesuit education gone bad and its recipient spending a whole lot of energy trying to "get even"). i find this stance so interesting, really, because Jansenism is positively anti-Liberal when you get down to it, and the harsher of the two ideologies in terms of Christian theology. so i'm not really sure why Stendhal defends it ~ perhaps only because it's a form of protestantism and anything against the Church is good for him?
at any rate, i am sure this book will be an adventure. i am not in love with Stendhal's style. mirabeau and hugo are so much cleaner. he reminds me more of flaubert or de balzac: dense and warbling. i like a good dense warble now and then, but it's not exactly something you can rip through, so it'll take me a while before i get to the end of this book's tirade against the Church.
i will say this for the anti-clerical literature i have read thus far out of france: its villains readily admit that they are hypocrites. none of them believe they are doing as the Church bids (which is what makes mirabeau's Abbé Jules so intriguing, i think: Jules knows he's an evil man and struggles with it to his horrible death). so it seems to me that the real gripe against the priesthood in that era was not the Church so much as the sort of people who took advantage of the Church for their own gain (specifically men who became priests for the job and not the vocation). while i know most anti-Catholics don't bother to separate the Church from her imperfect clergy, i do find it rather interesting that the attacks at this time are almost purely political and have nothing to do, really, with the actual theology.
whereas today, you could say that attacks are purely emotional based on a misunderstanding of the theology. once the political threat of the Church was minimized (with the downfall of the papal states in the 1870s), the protestors needed a new reason to attack the Church. criticizing the newly promulgated Immaculate Conception and Assumption of the Blessed Virgin were easy targets in this climate and that's what you see mostly today: a lot of anti-Marian sentiment borne out of pure ignorance.
but i don't want to go off on a bender just now about all that. maybe later.