Decadence and Catholicism Author:Ellis Hanson Ellis Hanson traces the intersections of the aesthetic, erotic, and religious in the decadent literature of the late nineteenth century. The decadents--including Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, J. K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, and Paul Verlaine--found in the Catholic Church a peculiar language that gave them a means of artistic and sexual expressi... more »on. Hanson shows how Catholicism offered both the hysterical symptom and the last hope for paganism amid the dullness of Victorian puritanism and bourgeois materialism.« less