BREMOND, HENRI. - Writer, b. at Aix-en-Provence on 31 July 1865, d. at Arthez d'Asson on 17 Aug. 1933. Having entered the Society of Jesus (1882) and completed his studies in England, he was sent in 1889 to Paris as an editor of the Etudes. He soon won for himself the reputation of a refined and penetrating writer and of 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 he continued his activity as a writer intensively. In 1923 he was elected a member of the Académie française (cf. Documentation catholique, II [1924], 1411-25, 1603-18).
Besides his collaboration, from 1905, with the Annales de philosophie chrétienne, the works he published are very numerous; the principal ones: 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 far larger work, to which he devoted the best of his energies, without managing to complete it according to his design, is the Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, depuis la fin des guerres de religion (11 vols., ibid. 1915-33). In the intervals between one volume and another 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, so much in command of his pen as to bend it to render all the most gripping nuances, he instead stirred up many controversies for his ideas and for his way of conceiving various points 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 unbearable bonds on the soul's flight and which are instead brakes against the precipice). Even in his Histoire he exaggerates the idea of a violent and sometimes irreconcilable struggle between pure prayer and antimystical, that is, ascetic, prayer; and rather than keeping to the data provided by the documents and weaving an exact and objective history, he prefers to reconstruct the life with only a few traits that he believes more revealing, abridging quotations, sometimes diverting them from their meaning, putting a good deal of his own personal psychology into his characters: humane, an intuitive psychologist, but not an exact or learned theologian and metaphysician, he loved, as he himself put it, to orchestrate the magnificent texts that the old spiritual authors provided him.
There remains, however, the great merit of having revived the taste for mystical questions, of having revealed, by making himself read with the enchantment and power of his style, the magnificent treasures of life and of sublime love of God contained in works that were esteemed merely piously rhetorical and without either originality or soul.
It should not be passed over in silence 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.
Bibliography3 works
Celestino Testore