En Route Reading Order

Why did Huysmans convert from Decadence to Catholicism?

Huysmans's conversion from Decadence to Catholicism between 1891 and 1895 is one of the most discussed events in French literary history, and his explanation of it — provided both in his novels and in letters and interviews — is essentially that the supernatural spiritualism he had encountered in the Satanist world of Là-Bas (1891) proved the existence of spiritual reality, and that Catholicism was the only available framework that could account for and contain that spiritual reality. In other words, Huysmans did not convert to Catholicism from materialism (the standard conversion narrative of the period) but from a position that already accepted the reality of the supernatural — what he needed was not the proof of the supernatural but the right institutional form for relating to it. Catholicism provided three things that the occult world could not: a historical continuity (the Church's two-thousand-year tradition), a liturgical beauty (the Gregorian chant, the Medieval Gothic architecture, the mystical theology of the Church Fathers) that satisfied the aesthetic demands of the Decadent who had cultivated beauty as a form of knowledge, and a moral framework that the occult world's moral anarchism could not provide. The result was a Catholicism that was intensely aesthetic in its focus — Huysmans was drawn to the Middle Ages, to Gothic architecture, to Chartres and its stained glass, to the mystical writers (Ruysbroek, John of the Cross) rather than to the popular piety of the Third Republic — and it is this aesthetic Catholicism that En Route, La Cathédrale, and L'Oblat document.