Whole Faith: The Catholic Ideal of Emilia Pardo Bazán by Denise Dupont

Abstract

Reviewed by: Whole Faith: The Catholic Ideal of Emilia Pardo Bazán by Denise Dupont Jennifer Smith DENISE DUPONT. Whole Faith: The Catholic Ideal of Emilia Pardo Bazán. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University Press of America, 2018. 242 pp. In Whole Faith: The Catholic Ideal of Emilia Pardo Bazán, Denise DuPont aims to give a comprehensive overview of the Galician author's spiritual beliefs. The book consists of a preface, an introduction, four chapters, and a two-page conclusion. In the substantial introduction, DuPont shows how Pardo Bazán's commitment to Roman Catholicism imbued her thinking on a wide array of topics from feminism and politics to artistic production. For the Galician writer, Catholicism also held promise as a path to national regeneration. She rejected socialism and anarchism as solutions to economic inequality and advocated for "the Catholic idea of charity as the only solution to poverty" (22). Furthermore, she viewed art, beauty, and aesthetics as both fundamental to Catholicism and life. Chapter one focuses on Pardo Bazán's Franciscan worldview, based mainly on her work San Francisco de Asís (1882). The Franciscanism she envisions is contemplative, socially active, feminist, and concerned with artistic beauty. The Third Order, to which Doña Emilia herself belonged, did not require a vow of celibacy or strict mendicancy and was, therefore, particularly attractive to women who did not want to sacrifice their family lives to follow the spiritual path. Pardo Bazán also argues that Franciscanism offers a solution to social inequality in its advocacy for the communal sharing of wealth. She claims that if society chose to eschew the path of Catholic charity, socialism and communism would gain ground as the only viable alternatives to address widespread poverty. Pardo Bazán's presentation of Leo Tolstoy's "anti-Franciscan" spiritual conversion is the subject of chapter two. She was particularly concerned with Tolstoy's renunciation of his craft as a novelist. She viewed it as a rejection of a charism, or gift, from the Holy Spirit. Moreover, by rejecting his literary talents, "[t]he Russian writer sacrificed aesthetics, luxury, and the arts and thus sinned against beauty and truth" (94). Pardo Bazán also criticized Tolstoy's condemnation of art, learning, and civilization as an erroneous exaltation of the man of nature in the vein of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Finally, she rejected the Russian author's condemnation of erotic love as unnatural and misogynistic and characterized his religious practices as rooted more in pride than in true spiritual humility. Chapter three explores Pardo Bazán's pilgrimage to Italy for Pope Leo XIII's jubilee, a journey initially recounted in installments on the pages of El Imparcial and later collected in Mi romería (1888), and her trip to Belgium chronicled in Por la Europa católica (1901). In the former work she recounts the pope's confirmation of her literary vocation as a gift from God and again portrays Catholicism's advocacy of social justice and charity as an antidote to the abuses of capitalism and as a moral alternative to socialism and communism. In the latter work, it is made clear that her embrace of Catholicism was not a repudiation of modernity. Instead, holding up Belgium as a model of an advanced Catholic nation, she asserts that Catholicism was uniquely equipped to unite a diverse and divided people and to move nations forward. Also of significant import in this work is her visit to the Ghent Museum that houses Van Eyck's [End Page 248] altarpiece the "Mystic Lamb" as it comes to represent the "poetic vision of her ideal: unity achieved by the body and blood of the Mystic Lamb" (173). Following up on this idea, the final chapter, chapter four, is titled "Toward the Lamb with the Lamb," representing Pardo Bazán's idea that every person should try to progress towards the lamb in spiritual perfection, while simultaneously accepting God's grace throughout the process. DuPont explores how Pardo Bazán emphasized this message in three plays Cuesta abajo (1906), El becerro de metal (1906), and Juventud (1905-06), in her praise of dancing charities such as "garden-parties," and in...