Abstract
In this paper we emphasize the persistence of the love of beauty in J.‐K. Huysmans's religious works, and we interpret his overall literary production as a systematic search for a new ethics by means of the aesthetic paradigm. Beyond a conversion from profane hedonism to Catholic faith, in the shift from A Rebours to La Cathédrale we see an oscillation between the religion of art and the art of religion, a tension between the attempt to make Beauty moral by legitimizing it through the rhetoric of religion, and the aestheticization of religion through the language of seduction. Even the saint's sacrifice in Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam is a powerful source of aesthetic pleasure.Nevertheless, not even in her mission of pain can Huysman's last aesthete find a new ethos and a new aesthetics. Actually, Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam reinstates, instead of exorcising, the specter of the “always already” which doomed Huysmans's previous works: even as an expiatory victim, the aesthete has arrived too late; Lydwine is just the epigone of a model — Jesus Christ — whose suffering had a greater moral impact upon mankind, and a higher degree of beauty.
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