By Stéphane Chaudier. (Recherches proustiennes, 2). Paris, Champion, 2003. 549 pp. Hb €85.00. A reservoir of potent symbolic referents, religious vocabulary is deflected by Proust onto such secular contexts as society, love, sexuality, and literary creation. The tensions born of this juxtaposition of sacred and profane lie at the heart of Stéphane Chaudier's far-reaching analysis. Sensitive close textual readings illuminate the mechanisms of this ‘détournement’ of religious terms in the first part of the study. Playing with the hierarchy of sublime and trivial, high and low styles, Proust's often ludic handling of this intertext is interpreted as a means of transcending one's own universe, of perceiving its comic strangeness. Yet Chaudier rightly detects no anti-religious philosophical system in Proust's work, discovering instead, in his desacralization of religious terms, a stylistic transgression of social and linguistic norms and, more generally, an ironic perspective on all forms of cultural domination, whether organized religion or, as Chaudier persuasively discusses, a social orthodoxy. Examining the beliefs — akin to, but prevailing over religious convictions — that support the shifting edifice of social hierarchies, the study demonstrates how social power, in Proust, is based on ‘la gestion de biens symboliques’ (pp. 14–15) such as aristocratic prestige, wit, or the expression of avant-garde aesthetic opinions. Proust's presentation of this socio-religious hegemony is ambivalent, however, for, as Chaudier's analysis shows, Proust both recognizes, even admires, the strength of social groupings and simultaneously reveals social power to be hollow. Ontologically ‘empty’ signs such as Mme Verdurin's laugh are revealingly examined here. Reflecting the subtleties of Proust's position, Chaudier ultimately defines society as a ‘néant’, but a captivating one, and if idealization is followed by reality, ‘croyance’ by ‘savoir’, the former is not entirely negated by the latter — poetic truth remains. The study consistently foregrounds the material world, recognizing that the body is the conduit for experience. The role of religious metaphor in conceptualizing the erotic thus provides the focus of one part of the analysis. Presented in these terms, the erotic also becomes a metaphor for knowledge and creativity: Sodom, for example, offers a vision of fruitful union in terms of aesthetic — if not physical — creation, whilst Gomorrah, as the epitome of alterity, is the poetic principle that threatens language with extinction, that assigns its limits. Chaudier's subsequent examination of the function of Judaeo-Christian references within aesthetic reflections identifies the body as the artist's means of encountering the world rather than as an obstacle to the act of creation. Sensual and spiritual are thus reconciled: the artist-demiurge creates matter from nothing by an act of the spirit. The metaphor of the novel as cathedral is also teased out in all its intricacy — at times stable and coherent, at others vacillating and contradictory. Like the work of art, it is the incarnation of the infinite within the finite; ultimately, however, Proust's profane cathedral is a godless one. The study ends with a series of useful indexes and an extensive bibliography of French-language criticism. Opening up many new perspectives, it represents a valuable addition to recent English-language scholarship in this field.