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Keywords:

Arts & Humanities, Social Sciences, History, Language & Linguistics, Literature, Linguistics, 2003 Language Studies, 2005 Literary Studies, 4703 Language studies

Abstract:

The mystical revival in twentieth century Catholicism was of a paradoxical kind. One of its paradoxes concerned the emergence of the mystical body. It has been said before that, although new Catholic mysticism was constructed especially in writing, bodily practices such as feasting and bleeding played a key role in these literary representations. Following Stephen Schloesser, some have maintained that this bodily obsession brought along a "modernist" revision of tradition since it destabilized age old demarcations between (spiritual) holiness and (bodily) sin. It remained unclear, however, whether Catholic bodies were conceptually freed from the flesh, yet buried even deeper within it. In this essay, I will question the boundaries of twentieth century Catholic mysticism in confronting the neo-Catholic writing of Léon Bloy with Catholic hydropathy and so-called natural lifestyle (or life reform). This "medical" repertoire simultaneously referred to Hippocratic antiquity and the bathing rituals of Lourdes. Ascetic and sometimes painful procedures were to make the body "burn" in order to turn it into a vehicle for religious conversion. Especially in sexual discourse, however, this procedure could not take away the body's fatal power. Like Catholicism itself, the mystical body remained entirely localized within the sinful modern discourses from which so many had hoped to escape.