François Mauriac: A Critical Study

By Michael F. Moloney Widely read, little understood—thus could be described the standing of François Mauriac among his fellow Catholics in the twentieth century. Indeed, as Michael F. Moloney writes, “no Catholic writer [was] the subject of more controversy among his co-religionists” than the 1952 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature. This study aims to set matters to rights with a critical analysis of Mauriac’s ideological and artistic influences; the philosophical structure of his literary world—the “metaphysic of love”; and to correct false impressions that his narratives and characters are defined by misanthropy and pessimism. Consider, O God, that we are without understanding of ourselves; that we do not know what we would have and set ourselves at an infinite distance from our desires…. (Saint Teresa of Ávila) The world of Mauriac “is the scene of an unending conflict between the claims of the temporal and the eternal, between flesh and spirit. It is…the world of perenn