In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

IMMANENCE VS. TRANSCENDENCE 289
ion: "They shared the supper, serving themselves, as in a mystical communion
of bull-worshippers. They broke a mint branch on the threshold
to flavor their tea ... They saw, through the open door, night slowly
descending. They heard, through the open door, the eternal sound of the
tide" (235). The extent to which Montherlant feels religiously and politically
committed to the ritual of the bullfight becomes apparent in his
public letter to Gaston Doumergue, the president of the French Republic-a
letter printed at the beginning of Les Bestiaires. After thanking
Doumergue for allowing bullfights to be reestablished in France and after
complimenting him on his birth in the southern provinces, "in the midst
of the bull religion," Montherlant, surprisingly, refrains from dedicating
his book to the president. He fears that such homage might endanger
Doumergue's life (7-8). Outside his own world view, of course, Montherlant's
gesture only shows how grotesquely he overestimates the importance
of the current French debate on the moral and spiritual legitimacy
of bullfighting. There are certainly greater threats to the president's life
than those coming from Montherlant's opponents. On the other hand,
his passionate commitment is a telling symptom of the emotional intensity
that characterizes the search for religion, mythology, and Transcendence
among French intellectuals.
In France, the renouveau catholique ("Catholic renewal"), the longing
for a new immediacy in Catholic theology and religious practice, far
outweighs the desire to invent new mythologies. An essay on the state of
French Catholicism in the German magazine Die Tat describes this
movement with unabashed admiration: "Without a doubt, Catholicism
is advancing; it is ... in the position of conqueror ... Its known followers
amount to at most 10 million, but these zealously spread the propaganda
and believe themselves to be fulfilling a mission. More and more,
Catholicism is becoming a movement with its own art, economic beliefs,
and responsibility for the world" (Hartmann, 886). Even a novel that
breaks as many moral taboos as Jouhandeau's Monsieur Cadeau Intime
cannot do without at least one protagonist who wishes to sanctify the
everyday world through acts of Christian charity: "Eliane devoted herself
entirely to God and to the sick. The community and the hospice saw
her as a saint that the Church would one day beatify: she loved God not
as 'a being' that one has heard about and whose existence one is supposed
to believe in, but as a being that one has met on earth, whose face
one has seen and whose voice one has heard in youth, with whom one