BREMOND, HENRI. — Writer, born at Aix-en-Provence on 31 July 1865, died at Arthez d’Asson on 17 August 1933. He entered the Society of Jesus (1882), and after completing his studies in England was sent to Paris in 1889 as an editor of the Etudes. He soon acquired a reputation as a refined and penetrating writer and an excellent critic in literary and religious matters (L'inquiétude religieuse. Aubes et lendemains de conversion, 1st series [Paris 1901]; Ames religieuses [ibid. 1901]; L'enfant et sa vie [ibid. 1902]; Le b. Thomas More [ibid. 1903]). In 1904 he left the Order, but continued his activity as a writer with great intensity. In 1923 he was elected a member of the Académie Française (cf. Documentation catholique, II [1924], 1411–25, 1603–18).
In addition to his collaboration, from 1905 onward, with the Annales de philosophie chrétienne, he published a very large number of works, the principal ones being: Newmann. Essai de biographie psychologique (ibid. 1906), Gerbert (ibid. 1907), Gerbert, dernières conférences d'Albéric d'Assie (ibid. 1907), La Provence mystique au XVIIᵉ siècle (ibid. 1908), Apologie pour Fénelon (ibid. 1910). The much more extensive work to which he devoted the best of his energies, without succeeding in completing it according to his plan, is the Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, depuis la fin des guerres de religion (2 vols., ibid. 1915–33). In the intervals between one volume and the next, there appeared: Prière et poésie (ibid. 1926), L'abbé Tempête: Armand de Rancé et la réforme de la Trappe (ibid. 1926); Introduction à la philosophie de la prière (1929); Bossuet, maître d'oraison (ibid. 1931).
An incontestable master of style, a master of his pen to the point of making it render every most compelling nuance, he nevertheless provoked much controversy because of his ideas and his way of conceiving various aspects of spiritual theology (the prayer of petition, pure love, the various methods of prayer, the different ascetic exercises, the value of certain external norms, which he declares to be intolerable bonds upon the soul’s flight but which are instead restraints against its plunge into the abyss). In his Histoire too he exaggerates the notion of a violent and at times irreducible struggle between pure prayer and antimystical, that is, ascetic, prayer; and rather than adhere to the data supplied by the documents and weave an exact and objective history, he prefers to reconstruct a life using only a few features that he believes most revealing, abbreviating quotations, at times diverting them from their meaning, and placing in his subjects much of his own personal psychology: a humanist and intuitive psychologist, but neither an exact nor a learned theologian and metaphysician, he loved, as he himself put it, to orchestrate the magnificent texts supplied to him by the old spiritual authors.
He nevertheless deserves the great merit of having revived interest in mystical questions and of having revealed, by making himself read through the enchantment and power of his style, the magnificent treasures of life and sublime love of God contained in works that had been regarded as merely piously rhetorical and devoid of both originality and soul.
It should not be left unmentioned that his work L'abbé Tempête was judged unjust and offensive, and that his S. Jeanne Chantal (Paris 1913) was placed on the Index on 5 May of the same year.