Decadence, Conversion, and Tradition

There is a surprising connection between decadence, conversion, and traditional Catholicism which some people might find a little shocking or, even, a cause for scandal. Others, however, understanding the relationship between decadence and conversion, will simply rejoice that so many leading figures of the Decadent movement became Catholics.

Before looking a little closer at the place of the Decadent movement in the Catholic cultural revival, it might be helpful to survey the whole revival from a panoramic perspective. Broadly speaking, the revival can be said to have had five distinct periods: the neo-medieval period from 1798 to 1845; the Newman period from 1845 to 1890; the Decadent period from 1890 to 1900; the Chesterbelloc period from 1900 to 1936; and the Inklings period from 1937 to 1973.

The neo-medieval period was marked by the morphing of Romanticism into various neo-medievalist movements, such as the Gothic Revival, the Oxford Movement, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Newman period was the period from Newman’s conversion until his death; the Decadent period was marked by the conversion of several Decadent writers and artists to Catholicism in the decade of decadence sometimes called the “naughty nineties”; the Chesterbelloc period takes its name from the dynamic duo of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, whose indomitable presence in the first four decades of the 20th century served as a catalyst for the conversion of thousands of souls to the Faith; and, finally, the Inklings period takes its name from the group of friends, led by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, whose great work continues to evangelize the culture with Christian truth.

The importance of Newman, Chesterton, Belloc, Tolkien, and Lewis to the Catholic revival is not in question. (Irrespective of the fact that Lewis never became a Catholic himself, there is little doubt that his work has ushered many into the Church.) But what about the writers of the Decadence in the 1890s?

What about poets Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson, or the artist Aubrey Beardsley, all of whom lived dissolute and desolate lives of moral dissipation—and all of whom were received into the Church? And what of Oscar Wilde, whose private life and literary work were a cause for scandal but who was received into the Church on his deathbed? Can we be comfortable with such bedfellows?

In order to confront these questions, especially if we are affronted by them, we need to go a little further back in time; and we need to cross the sea to France. Oscar Wilde was greatly influenced by the French Decadence, the leading figures of which were at least as decadent as he would become. Charles Baudelaire outraged the moral sensibilities of his contemporaries with his poems, his fleurs du mal, his sick and evil flowers; but he repented of his vices and was reconciled to the Church on his deathbed. Paul Verlaine, another Decadent poet, converted to the Faith while serving a prison sentence for shooting his homosexual “friend.”

And then there’s the great Decadent novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose novel À rebours (Against Nature) described the decadent lifestyle with shocking candor. Oscar Wilde read this novel on his honeymoon in Paris and considered himself to have been “poisoned” by it. Huysmans recoiled in horror from the decadence he depicted in his novel and converted to the Faith. His spiritual journey is fictionalized in a series of later novels in which the protagonist descends into the hell of satanism, emerges into the purgatorial light of religious truth, and is then received into the Church.

These three novels, Là-bas, En route, and La Cathédrale, parallel Dante’s Divine Comedy in describing the protagonist’s infernal descent, purgatorial ascent (and assent), and, finally, his reception into the Mystical Body of Christ. They also parallel Huysmans own journey from decadence to conversion. In a fourth novel in the series, L’Oblat (The Oblate), the protagonist becomes an oblate in a monastery, as Huysmans himself had become in the Benedictine Abbey at Ligugé, near Poitiers.

It is Huysmans, the Benedictine oblate, who appears somewhat surprisingly in the Little Liturgical Catechism, recently published in a new edition by Os Justi Press. Huysmans wrote a foreword to the 1896 edition of this delightful guide to the Traditional Mass, which is included in the Os Justi edition. More than that, he was responsible for rediscovering it after the original edition, which had been published in 1860, had been largely forgotten and had fallen out of print. Huysmans discovered it in a second-hand bookshop and oversaw the publication of the new edition as a much-needed remedy for the “ignorance of the Sacred Liturgy” that he had observed among the faithful. Needless to say, the book is as needed today as it was then—and for the same reason.

As for Huysman’s tour de force of a foreword, it illustrates the decadent convert’s love of tradition:

Truly, those who, for want of the slightest effort, remain ignorant of the science of prayer and rite can scarce imagine the enduring enchantment, the deep and lasting emotion they would experience were they but to follow, day by day, the admirable year of the Church. For they must be told: there is no monotony in the workings of our Mother. All in her worship is full of meaning; nothing is left to hazard; no detail, however minute, is without purpose. Ah, the Church! She has known how to condense whole symbolic systems into a single sign, and also how to unfold in vast cadences, in the most eloquent proses, the least gesture of the Son preserved to us by the Gospels. She is unchanging and yet ever varied! Behold her Proper of Time, the marvelous diversity of her sequences and hymns, and consider what she offers us, if only we understand: the ability to live, minute by minute, the very life of Christ, to walk beside Him, and, however unworthy we be, to become the diligent companions of God!

And is not the admirable Liturgy the very soul of consecrated buildings, which without her would be lifeless bodies of stone? Is she not, further, the melodic incense and vocal perfume of the Church herself? Is she not, finally, the echo of Our Lord’s own voice?

Seldom have words so beautiful been offered in homage to the sacred liturgy of the Church. Seldom has the ageless Mass of the ages been praised with such lucid eloquence. In the light of such beautiful poetic prose, can anyone be unthankful for the Decadent converts who have graced the Church with their defense of tradition? Should such ingrates and curmudgeons exist, should they still prefer not to dine with publicans and sinners, let them be likened to the scribes, Pharisees, and hypocrites who condemn the splinter in their brother’s eye while ignoring the plank in their own.

Let them be reminded that the Lord does not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. He came to call Decadents like Baudelaire, Verlaine, Huysmans, and Wilde to repentance. They answered His call. May God be praised in the words that they wrote in praise of Him!