Teaching at the University of Budapest one semester each year brings one in a quasi-immediate contact with the intellectual-political establishment. In this respect, Hungary is like France, where the intelligentsia is near-compact, a republic of letters where everybody knows everybody else. This does not mean, again like in Paris, that people are friendly to each … Read more
Gerard, a young Frenchman from the Midi, became a Benedictine monk at one of France’s well-known houses. It was in the early 1950s. He would have prayed and worked till his dying days if the winds of novelty had not blown some dark clouds over his abbey. One day, in 1968, his Abbot declared to … Read more
In the last fifteen years, Hungary has made impressive strides toward a western-style society—which it had never ceased to be, except in the economic area. In the last two years a foreseeable catastrophe struck: people, with their expectations and efficiency, have been ready to effect the final push for a dynamic and modern economic structure, … Read more
Reports that the western novel is in good health are grossly exaggerated; the truth is that sometime at mid-century the novel ceased to be the main carrier of the fictional imagination. And why not: storytelling (Bergson’s fonction fabulatrice, the human impulse to tell stories) seems in every century to choose a new form in which … Read more
In Latin countries and well beyond, Georges Bernanos fills today a role similar to that of C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton in the Anglo-Saxon world. Books by the two Englishmen have prompted innumerable soul searches and conversions — lucid and intelligent conversions, since in the last two decades new Catholics had no illusions about the turmoil … Read more
The turmoils, conflicts and internal quarrels of the Church of France are not new in the twentieth century, nor the independence claimed historically by the French hierarchy, in which they were backed by the rulers, from Philip the Fair to Louis XIV to Napoleon. Gallicanism has been an historical force, and so has been Ultramontanism, … Read more
This semester I give a seminar course in the Department of Religious Studies (not to be confused with the Divinity School) at Yale University. The title of the seminar is “The Pagan Temptation”, and it is useful to specify that last spring, 1982, I gave a lecture under the same title before a Yale audience … Read more
It would be wrong to assume, after the Polish example, that Catholics of neighboring satellite countries would likewise rebel now as a cohesive religious front. Cardinal Mindszenty was as much, or more a Catholic symbol and charismatic personality in Hungary than Karol Wojtyla in Poland, yet the nation’s resistance in 1956 did not crystallize around … Read more