Review: Martin Lockerd, Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism (London: Bloomsbury, 2020)

Abstract

The study of decadence and Christianity generates powerful and difficult contradictions. To focus in detail on any part seems always to risk misrepresentation of the whole. It forces the tradition’s major intellectual currents into open (and seemingly unresolvable) confrontation. To stress a Baudelairean aesthetic of original sin and evil is to edge out a Paterian aesthetic of relativism, with which it is almost completely irreconcilable. To stress the framework of Christian beliefs, symbols and rituals on which much decadent literature so clearly draws is to risk ignoring the tradition’s equally clear debts to a frequently anti-Christian Hellenism (a relationship for which it is very difficult to find a satisfactory conceptualization, save the old get-out ‘paradoxical’). To focus on theology dries decadent Christianity out, makes it too scholarly; but to ignore it makes it not scholarly enough, just another brand of subversive whimsy. And, of course, even to ask the question of whether decadent religion is ‘sincere’ or ‘insincere’, ‘serious’ or ‘aesthetic’ (and these types of question still unquestionably haunt the roots of this field) lumpenly enshrines the very hierarchies that decadence sets out to destabilize.