Abstract: Despite claims of “spiritual anemia”, Huysmans often uses the ternary Christian tradition of the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways as a model to describe the contours of the internal journey. But how linear was his own path? This article demonstrates the author’s sometimes highly personal reinterpretation of the sites of spiritual literature—and how in so doing, under the egis of apophatic theology, he brings it into literary modernity.
