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.

In 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. 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."

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. 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. It revivified the post-Enlightenment church, defying the commonplace prejudice that said it was impossible to be both Catholic and "modern." 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 regarded suffering as mostly meaningless. Burton describes in great detail this now seemingly bizarre form of piety. (Then unimaginable advances in medical technology have made such a celebration of pain and contingency unacceptable and even repulsive to us.) Holy Tears, Holy Blood should be essential reading for students of late-modern religious cultures, French Catholicism, and French literature. 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.

Burton's thesis is that Catholic women "betrothed themselves to suffering and had suffering as offspring," doing so "willingly, even enthusiastically, passionately." They were influenced by the "doctrine of vicarious suffering" or of "mystical substitution," the idea that human beings so interpenetrate one another that the sufferings of one can "redeem" (or more literally, "buy back") the life of another.

Who reaped the benefits of this spirituality? "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." Insofar as many of these women "espoused, or were coopted by, ultraroyalist politics," they also "reinforced the patriarchal principle in operation both in the church and, more loosely and less obviously, in French society at large."

Burton usually devotes a chapter to an individual figure. Melanie Calvat (the visionary at La Salette) is followed by ten others, including St. Therese Martin (the "Little Flower"); Camille Claudel (Rodin's spurned lover and sister of the famous playwright Paul); Raissa Maritain (wife of the philosopher Jacques); and Colette Peignot (one-time lover of Georges Bataille, high priest of violent eroticism). A final chapter provides an overview of recurrent tropes: "mysteria," or the fin-de-siecle figure of the "mystical hysteric"; fasting or "holy anorexia"; blood, tears, and other bodily fluids; hair and head shaving.

Burton 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. Although his prose occasionally runs aground on jargon, it quickly recovers its fluidity. (Faint of heart, be forewarned: Burton's translations of pornographic passages in the Bataille chapter pack the punch of the originals.) Describing himself as "a still-believing 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.

Still, some readers--especially historians--will find Burton's work deeply unsatisfying. His title seems intended to evoke Caroline Bynum's study of medieval women in Holy Feast and Holy Fast (which he cites). But Burton lacks Bynum's signature method. 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. By contrast, Burton's analysis, which is largely literary and rarely historical, makes the behavior he describes seem absurd and simply cruel.

For example, the contraction of tuberculosis plays a recurrent role in these stories. Burton is clearly not happy with the way those afflicted assimilated their suffering to the Passion of Christ, thus giving it personal meaning. But he fails to ask how the mainstream (that is, liberal republican) culture tried to make sense of such suffering. Along with alcoholism, madness, syphilis, and a host of other bourgeois terrors, tuberculosis was explained by "mythologies of heredity" as a clear manifestation of familial "degeneration"--bad blood passed on from one generation to another with fatal necessity. Neither meaningless nor random, tuberculosis signified abjection in the secular culture. 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. Perhaps the Catholic spirituality that turned such illnesses into a means of sanctification (of oneself and of others) was brutal. Such was all human life before penicillin.

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. The spectacles were many: pleasure cruises through the new Paris sewer system; displays of dead bodies in morgue windows; newspaper photographs of bruised corpses; the suicides of Madame Bovary and Hedda Gabler. Today's "reality TV" pales by comparison. Catholic spirituality was of a piece with such popular appeals.

Most curiously (since his is a work of literary criticism), Burton devotes almost no space to the Decadent movement. This omission leads to two distortions. First, the reader never senses the exhilarating liberation that came from Decadent celebrations of sickness, madness, and other perversions (or inversions) of the merciless "Law of Nature." (In addition, Catholicism's close relationship with homosexuality, which Burton nicely underscores, remains needlessly unexplained.) Second, Burton tends to equate what he terms "ultra-Catholics"--those who embraced this culture of suffering--with official "ultramontanist Catholicism." Yet Burton's own text demonstrates that ultramontanists were not as comfortable with those who embraced the culture of suffering as he asserts.

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. The magisterium recognized Calvat's visions but not the visionary, and placed her apocalyptic writings on the Index of Forbidden Books. Similar things happened to all the women. The church reacted to them "with interdict, excommunication, and anathema." 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. Burton's other main figures--Camille Claudel, Simone Weil, and Colette Peignot--were not Catholic, let alone venerated by the institution.

Burton's assertion that "men did not go nearly as far along the Via Dolorosa as [women] did" also doesn't stand up. As he notes, vicarious suffering "may be said to have come into its own" between 1914 and 1918. Hundreds of thousands of men went to their deaths at the behest of the Republic--a largely meaningless massacre for which the survivors would later hold it accountable. 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 countless Catholic trench soldiers, the picture would look different. 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. Men too walked the Via Dolorosa to Golgotha and beyond.

Finally, in an effort to make the doctrine seem aberrant, Burton overstates what he sees as the novelty of vicarious suffering in the nineteenth century. Jacques Le Goff's Birth of Purgatory provides a helpful corrective. 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. What my husband forgot to do, I, who am a part of his body, shall willingly do in his place. I am ready to become a recluse for him and to redeem his sins from God."

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. Burton's heroine is St. Therese who set aside a God of "justice" for a God of "love." She alone, says Burton, saw that "God's forgiveness is freely given not earned," and therefore there can be "no punitive impulse in God." But one might ask: How loving (or hopeful) would such a God have been during what Roger Shattuck has called France's "banquet years"? As in our own Gilded Age, this epoch was marked (in Shattuck's words) by "the untaxed rich" living "in shameless luxury" and by the brutalization of the working masses.

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). Bloy's God was punitive precisely because (as Burton notes) Bloy argued vigorously against the dominant liberal belief that "suffering is a simple accident of earthly life." 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. From his doctrine of suffering, as Burton rightly observes, "It follows that no suffering is wasted or without value." Andre Malraux once put it succinctly: "Christ--and not God--delivers those who believe in him from the absurd."

Hence suffering could yield hope. Therese, afflicted with tuberculosis, ascribed meaning to her life by holding that "suffering alone can give birth to souls." 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 ... happy is he who suffers and knows why he does." 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." 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."

Poignant details such as these may be found throughout Burton's work, which overflows with riches that recover tragic lives now nearly forgotten. Their world--one predating antibiotics, blood transfusions, microsurgery, and protease inhibitors--is hard to read about and even harder to imagine. 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.

Stephen Schloesser, SJ, is an assistant professor of history at Boston College.