Henri Brémond (31 July 1865 – 17 August 1933) was a French literary scholar and philosopher, Catholic priest, and sometime Jesuit. He was one of the theological modernists.
Biography
Henri Marie Brémond was born in Aix-en-Provence, the son of Pierre and Thomasine Pons Brémond. His father was a notary; his mother died when he was fourteen. Three of his brothers became priests, two of them Jesuits. A sister became a nun. He attended the College du Sacré-Coeur in Aix.[1]
At the age of seventeen, he joined the Society of Jesus. He served his novitiate in Sidmouth, Devon, and received orders in 1892. He then taught for two years.[2] In 1899, he became the editor of the French Jesuit review Études.
Brémond's early works, such as L'Inquiétude religieuse (1901) dealt with religion and spirituality. He left the Society of Jesus in 1904, but remained a priest. In the summer of 1909 he was suspended for an address he gave at the funeral of his friend, the modernist George Tyrrell. Brémond made a sign of the cross over Tyrrell's grave, for which he was temporarily suspended a divinis by Bishop Amigo, but his faculties to celebrate Mass were restored later that year.
Brémond's attention then turned to the subject of religious sentiment. The same month that he made his submission to the bishop, Brémond began a series of articles in the Annales de philosophie chrétienne, which were then published as Apologie pour Fénelon (1910). French historian of spirituality Émile Goichot sees an explicit "...parallel between Brémond's refusal to disown Tyrrell at his death and Fénelon's conduct in relation to [Madame] Guyon".[3]
Brémond became a prolific author of books on literary topics and Catholicism. Brémond's magnum opus was his Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France.[2] He wrote for Le Correspondant, Revue des deux mondes and the Revue de Paris. He had a permanent interest in English topics, e. g. public schools (Thring of Uppingham), the evolution of Anglican clergy (Walter Lake, J. R. Green) and wrote a study of the psychology of John Henry Newman (1906) (well before Geoffrey Faber's attempt).
Sainte Chantal, published in 1912, was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1913.[4][5] André Blanchet argues that the book's condemnation was not only due to Brémond's unconventional treatment of the relationship between Jane Frances de Chantal and Francis de Sales, but also because of his friendship with Tyrrell, and his portrayal of Fenelon's arch-critic Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet in Apologie pour Fénelon,[6] an opinion in which Alastair Guinan concurs.[7]
According to Keith Bosley, Henri Brémond helped revive interest in the ThomisticChristian poetry of sonneteerJean de La Ceppède, which was consigned to oblivion at the end of the Renaissance in France and remained so until 1915, when La Ceppède was mentioned in the first volume of Brémond's Histoire littéraire du Sentiment religieux en France. Since then, La Ceppède's poetry has experienced a revival. It has appeared in multiple poetry anthologies and several scholarly works have been written about its author.[8]
Works
L'Inquiétude religieuse. Aubes et lendemains de conversion (1901)
Âmes religieuses (1902)
L'enfant et la vie (1902)
Le Bienheureux Thomas More 1478-1535 (1904) as Sir Thomas More (1913) translated by Henry Child
Le charme d'Athènes et autres essais (1905) with Jean and André Bremond
Newman, essai de biographie psychologique (1906) and translations from J. H. Newman, as The Mystery of Newman (1907) translated by H. C. Corrance
Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France depuis la fin des guerres de religion jusqu'à nos jours (from 1916 to 1936) 11 volumes, as A Literary History of Religious Thought in France (1928) translated by K. L. Montgomery
Anthologie des écrivains catholiques, prosateurs français du XVIIème siècle (1919) with Charles Grolleau
