CHAPTER X

FRENCH SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MYSTICISM MADAME ACARIE—PIERRE DE BERULLE—ST. FRANCOIS DE SALES—ST. CHANTAL—MARIE DE L’INCARNA- TION—PASCAL—BROTHER LAWRENCE—FENELON— THE QUIETISTS
We can hardly say of France, as of England and Spain, that its chief contributions to mystical history fall within a single century. Still, the amazing period which opens with the career of Madame Acarie (1566-1618) and fades away with that of Madame Guyon (1648-1717) does form a well-marked and peculiarly interesting epoch in the spiritual history of the French Church. In spite of the apparent worldliness and corruption of the time, a network of spirituality, knotted and sustained by great and saintly personalities, ran through it; and the vivid and intimate accounts of these great personalities which have survived enable us to get far nearer to them than we can do in the case of the medieval mystical saints. France in the seventeenth century seems to have been full of mystics of all types, from the simplest to the most sophisticated. Asin fourteenth-century Italy and Germany, each gathered disciples ; forming small groups devoted to an intensive 187
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spiritual culture, in and through which the science of the inner life was studied and spread. These groups were closely related, and certain great souls and influences affected them all. Seldom indeed has the social aspect of the contemplative life been more richly developed.
Besides this, there are three other characters specially distinctive of this school. First, the fact that, historically speaking, French mysticism faded away into quietism represents the one-sided exag- geration of a trend present in it from the first ; that tendency to place the whole of religion in an unconditioned self-yielding to God, which easily glides into the cult of passivity. Yet this, after all, was a noble error: the shadowy side of that turn- ing of the religious consciousness toward pure adoration and away from mere self-consideration, which is the glory of all the great French mystics. This “‘ theocentric spirituality ”’ is taught again and again by those spiritual directors of genius who were produced in such abundance at this time ; we may look upon it as one of the three essential characters of the school.
Secondly, French mysticism, if not the child, is at least the god-child of St. Teresa, and witnesses to the life-giving character of her career. ‘The appearance in France of her writings, and the estab- lishment in Paris of Carmelite nuns whom the saint had herself trained in the science of prayer, were decisive factors in its development. Directly or indirectly, all the great personalities of this epoch came into touch with Carmel and were salted by its salt ; and we cannot doubt that the active,
concrete, very Christian character of Teresian 188
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mysticism was a powerful check on the quietistic tendencies of the French religious mind.
Thirdly, though sooner or later many of the great French mystics entered or formed religious communities, the leadership was frequently in lay hands. The “ prophet ” was recognized and valued as well as the “ priest.”” Madame Acarie, M. de Berniéres—the most widely-read of mystical writers —Madame Guyon, and many others instructed and directed souls, and it was thought right and natural that they should do so. No one found anything strange in such a career as that of the farm-servant Barbe of Compiégne, “for fifteen years directed solely by Christ,’’ who formed and supported the inner life of the saintly and exquisite Antoinette de Jésus (born 1612), and became the acknowledged centre of a spiritual group visited by the celebrated Pére Condren. Madame Guyon has been cruelly described as a “ director of duchesses’’ ; and the immense influence exer- cised by the Carmelite lay-brother Lawrence, who began his life as a footman and spent much of it as the monastery cook, is well known.
From the crowded history of this immense mys- tical movement it is only possible to pick out a few significant names ; and looking into the facts, it becomes apparent that some of the most important are those which are now least known. The French religious renaissance owes its first mystical impulsion in a great degree to the influence of a forgotten Englishman. William Fitch (1520-1611)—known in religion as Benedict Canfield, from the Essex village in which he was born—was converted in middle age from a worldly life, and migrated to
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France, where, at the age of sixty, he became a Capuchin friar. A mystic of the Franciscan type, ardent, speculative and poetic, he was during the last twenty years of his life one of the chief spiritual influences of the time. He taught the elements of contemplative prayer to Pierre de Bérulle, the founder of the Oratory, and to Madame Acarie. He directed the inner life of the Benedictines of Montmartre, whose convent became a forcing- house of spirituality. His widely distributed book, A Rule of Perfection, was used by two generations of mystics. ‘Thus he touched the religious life of the century at all points, and in considering its mystical side we are largely concerned with his spiritual descendants.
This mystical side, complicated by the large number of names of importance and the interaction of its various groups, is best studied in three divi- sions, First there are those mystics who flourished in the first quarter of the century; all deeply influenced by Madame Acarie, and often members of her spiritual circle. Here the great and creative personalities are Madame Acarie herself and her Carmelite daughters; Bérulle and his disciples and associates, among whom we must place St. Vincent de Paul (1581-1660) and Charles de Condren (1588-1641); St. Francois de Sales (1567-1622) and his pupil St. Chantal (1572— 1641.) Next, in the middle of the century, Pascal (1623-62) and the school of Port Royal; and certain isolated mystics of the first rank, of whom the most interesting are Marie de 1|’Incarnation (1599-1672), who has been called ‘‘the Teresa of France,” and Brother Lawrence (1610-91).
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Finally the period closes on the Quietist movement, now chiefly remembered in connection with Madame Guyon (1648-1717) and the unfortunate contro- versies which her teaching aroused. This time of declension is relieved by the great name of Fénelon (1651-1715), one of those inspired directors of souls who are characteristic of French religion at its best.
Madame Acarie, whose vigorous and_ saintly influence colours so strongly the first period of this astonishing epoch, refutes by the mere facts of her life those charges of incapacity and abstrac- tion from practical life which are still brought against the mystics. ‘Though she had as a child wished to become a nun, this desire was repressed ; and she married at sixteen a jovial and extravagant _ worldling, whose entangled affairs were a perpetual charge upon her care. She had six children.
Her mystical genius showed itself when she was twenty-two, and took at first a pronounced ecstatic form. But her long trances and other abnormal experiences, greatly as they impressed her friends and disciples, do not constitute Madame Acarie’s chief claim upon our interest and reverence: they were merely the external signs of an absorption in God so intimate and complete that all her acts and _ words were controlled by invisible guidance, and made the instruments of an invisible Power. She always sought to hide these external signs from others. ‘‘ Her deep and solid humility,” said a contemporary witness, ‘‘ was the veil which covered the sancta sanctorum of her soul.”
According to those who knew her, she “ hardly ever dealt with anyone, at least on matters of
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importance, unless with an inward vision wholly recollected and present before God ; and if this vision failed her she stopped short, seeming not to know where she was, and without caring what those with whom she dealt might think of it.” Here was the source of that practical genius for the direction of souls, that irresistible spiritual contagion which was felt by all who came within her influence ; and which made of Madame Acarie, though she never wrote a line or sought to enlarge her sphere of action, one of the great creative personalities of her time.
Tormented by ill-health, walking on crutches, and forced to give much time to exacting domestic duties and the management of her husband’s affairs, she yet became “‘ the conscience of Paris ”’ —a magnet towards whom for more than thirty years all who desired the life of the spirit inevitably found their way. She directed and stimulated a large group of disciples, and thousands of conver- sions were attributed to her. The exquisite and urbane Frangois de Sales, coming as a young man to her house, there received his first definite impul- sion towards that interior growth which made a delightful ecclesiastic into a man of mingled prayer and common sense, fit to guide and understand the soul of St. Chantal.
Constantly visiting the convents of Paris, where fervour and austerity of life were mostly at a low ebb, she everywhere roused a fresh ardour for God; and her influence can be detected behind every incident of the spiritual revival in seventeenth- century France. Yet this great soul, who received from all that tribute of awe which only the saints
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can evoke, and whose countless good works were simply the continuance in action of her interior life -with God, would always break off her ecstasies to join in her children’s games, and never failed to be interested in every detail of the lives of those surrounding her.
When the life and works of St. Teresa were first translated into French, Madame Acarie—destined to introduce Teresian ideals into France and so give French mysticism a temper it has never lost— was not greatly impressed. This is perhaps easier to understand when we remember that much which is described in them was already a commonplace of her experience. But in two of those dream-like visions which influenced critical periods of her life she believed that St. Teresa appeared in person and announced that it was God’s will that she should bring the reformed Carmelites to Paris. Encouraged by Francois de Sales, Bérulle, and other members of her circle, Madame Acarie there- fore launched a movement for the establishment of a Carmelite convent. She also took into her house, and trained for several years, a group of postulants, who afterwards became the first French Carmelite nuns. Chosen and formed by this truly Teresian mystic, who yet continued to live as a married woman in the world, none of St. Teresa’s own novices exhibited in greater perfection that union of sanctity with practicality on which she laid such stress.
After endless difficulties six Spanish nuns, of whom two had been the companions of the saint, were brought to France in order that perfect continuity with the actual method and spirit of Teresa might be assured ; thus exhibiting again
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that historical character which has always marked the genuine mysticism of the Christian Church. The first house was opened in Paris in 1604 ; and when Madame Acarie died, fourteen years later, France possessed seventeen convents of reformed Carmel- ites, where the mystical life was lived in its purity and its secrets were disseminated, not only among the novices, but to all who came to the parlours and talked to the experts behind the grille.
The establishment of these convents meant far more than a mere multiplication of religious houses for women. It meant the appearance within the French Church of real homes where the life of the spirit could be cultivated, and whence its light could spread : the life-giving life of St. Teresa bear- ing fruit in a new sphere. The coming of the Carmelites, so closely connected with the sanctified wisdom and indomitable will of Madame Acarie, was the next phase in that spiritual revival which had its first home in her sa/on, and its first expression in her immense personal influence on souls. ‘The last four years of her life, after her husband’s death, were spent in the humble position of a lay-sister under the authority of one of her own daughters ; an end witnessing more surely to her greatness of soul than the ecstasies and activities for which she is generally known.
All Madame Acarie’s three daughters became Carmelite nuns. The youngest, Marguerite, was perhaps, of all the mystics of this period, the one who best translated the spirit of St. Teresa into French terms. Gay, frank, vivacious, those who knew her declared that her simple manner and breezy speech, her hatred of religious ostentation
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and intensity, concealed a contemplative experience and supernatural intuition even exceeding that of her mother. Her remark to a nun who had tried to assume an appropriately severe appearance— “There is no sin in being thought silly, but there may easily be sin in trying to look so correct. Do let yourself be natural !”” would have delighted St. Teresa; and proves better than any ecstasy, any ferocious austerities, that the spirit of the Foundress was re-born in the Carmelites of France. “The interior life,” said Mother Marguerite, “consists 1n very few words, and a very great tendency to God.”
It was from the French Carmelites of Dijon that St. Chantal received her first mystical education. Thus her Order of the Visitation, a capital creation of French mysticism, traces one line of its descent from St. Teresa, and the other from the pure Gallican school as represented in Pierre de Bérulle (1575-1629) and in its co-founder, St. Frangois de Sales. Bérulle, the creator of the Oratory and for long the director of Madame Acarie, wrote little ; but was, through his work as a religious founder, and as trainer of countless individual souls, one of the most influential personalities of the century, touching every great mystic of the time. He best represents the doctrinal side of French mysticism, saturating and transforming dogmatic theology with his own intense conscious- ness of God.
It was largely due to Bérulle that this move- ment became and remained so profoundly theo- centric in character. Where many teachers of the contemplative life begin with the human soul, its
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purification, growth and enlightenment, Bérulle always begins with God. For him, adoration is the primary spiritual act ; and the state of perfect adherence to God, is all that is really asked of men. This pure and lofty teaching, free from all taint of religious self-interest, produced beau- tiful and saintly characters wherever Bérulle’s influence reached ; and continued, long after his death, to give its colour to French theology. To him, in a great degree, we owe the formation of the exquisite yet ever active St. Vincent de Paul (1581-1660); that pattern of practical mystics, of whom it has been well said that he was charitable because he was a saint, not a saint because he was charitable. For St. Vincent de Paul, intimate with St. Francois de Sales and St. Chantal, Bérulle— who has received no aureole from the Church— was yet “ one of the holiest men I have known... of a solid sanctity which you will hardly find else- where !”’ Such words make us realize the frank and intimate relations existing between these great French mystics, whose diverse natures and voca- tions all served one end.
So close, indeed, were these relations, that in studying one we are obliged to study all. ‘Thus the spiritual experience of Jeanne-Francois de Chantal (1572-1641), Foundress of the Visitation, emerges from that of the French Carmelites and is affected by Bérulle ; whilst her long and intimate connection with St. Francois de Sales—- himself, perhaps, hardly to be called a mystic, though incomparable as a controller and educator of mystical souls—provides one of the most inter- esting and subtle of studies in spiritual relationships.
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The elements which contributed to the making of this mystic, and so of her Order, witness in a remarkable manner to the interaction of human spirits working towards a hidden goal.
_ Madame de Chantal was a well-born and attrac- tive woman, warmly affectionate and naturally pious, in whom a pronounced mystical genius was bal- anced by a touching dependence on those human friendships which adorned the whole of her life. Married at twenty to a man whom she adored, and widowed at twenty-eight, her ardent tempera- ment poured itself into the religious channel. After a period of much spiritual suffering and unrest she came first under the influence of St. Francois de Sales, which remained for nearly twenty years the governing fact of her personal life ; and then, when she was thirty-four, under that of the Carmelites of Dijon, at this time ruled by the austere and holy Anne of Jesus, the com- panion of St. Teresa.
This double guidance was perfectly adapted to her needs. Whilst the Carmelites trained her emerging contemplative faculty, and explained to her the adventures of her soul, the prudence and psychological skill of St. Francois, his gentle yet steady insistence on complete self-conquest as the - onething needful, gave her that background of sane asceticism which the mystical life always requires. The Carmelites showed her the way up the moun- tains: he trained her spiritual muscles for the ascent. ‘To the end he continued the firm schooling of her soul and character. ‘‘ What does it matter whether God speaks to us from among thorns or flowers?’’ he says in 1607, when she has been
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three years under his direction ; and, twelve years later, when the “‘ very dear daughter ’’ has become the Rev. Mother Superior of the Visitation, this most gentle of directors, who requires “all to be done by love and nothing by force,” continues on the same bracing note to urge on her those last renunciations so difficult to her very human heart. ‘Do not think any more either of the friendship or the unity God has made between us, nor of your children, your heart, nor your soul—in fact, of anything whatever, for you have given a// to God.” In return for this faithful discipline and support, St. Chantal opened up to her director reaches of spirituality he could not have achieved alone, and made the author of 4x2 Introduction to the Devout Life capable of writing the Treatise of the Love of God.
Their long and intimate friendship, one of the most beautiful in religious history, brought into existence the Order of the Visitation—so perfectly representative of the ideals of both. In this Order, intended to provide a home for those who were drawn to the spiritual life of the Carmelites, but were not capable of their physical austerities, the gentle moderation and insistence on essentials, which characterized the teaching of St. Francois, leavens the mystical ardour of St. Chantal. “I desire,’ said St. Francois, ‘to give daughters of contemplation to God.” ‘‘ Our Institute,” said St. Chantal, “‘ is wholly based on the inner life ”— but in such a manner that “no great harshness should turn the weak and infirm from joining it, there to devote themselves to the perfection of Divine Love.”
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This separation of the spiritual life from the externals of asceticism was thought almost comic by the pious persons of the time, who accused the founders of setting up ‘‘a nursing-home rather than a religious house.” It marked, as a matter of fact, a genuine forward movement in the corporate expression of Christian mysticism ; and the origin- ality and importance of St. Francois and St. Chantal consists in the fact that they realized and gave form to this ideal. At first the Visitandines divided their time between contemplation and active works of charity, visiting the sick and poor ; but they gradually found themselves drawn more and more to a life of complete retirement and prayer, and in 1615 became definitely enclosed. Our opinion of this change will depend on the social worth which we attribute to an existence wholly concentrated on God.
The work of St. Francois on The Love of God, representing by declaration the fruits of his com- munion with the first Visitation nuns, is a vivid picture of the secret life of the Community. Under his wise direction, that which might easily have been a hot-bed of feverish religiosity became a true home of contemplative prayer.
Our blessed Father (said one of the early Visitandines) wished that, to increase humility, our Sisters should take turns with the cooking and domestic work. Our blessed Mother (St. Chantal) never excused herself, save for illness, from being cook in her turn. . . . It is true, that which he chiefly cared for and loved best was to ground his daughters well in the true inward life of the Spirit, to which all were much drawn; so that they sought nothing for themselves but mortification, recollection, silence, and hiddenness
in God.
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life of mingled homeliness and loftiness, is shown to us by St. Chantal herself, when she declares, in a phrase that sums up the essential attitude of the mystic :
The almost universal tendency of the daughters of the Visitation is to a very simple practice of the Presence of God, by an entire self-abandonment to His holy Providence.
These words inevitably bring to mind one of the best known and loved of the French mystics— Brother Lawrence, of the Practice of the Presence of God—who was born in the year in which the Visitation was founded. His little book is some- times described as “‘simple,’’ but its simplicity is that of the heights. Brother Lawrence reveals hardly anything of the stages and disciplines which are so prominent in the lives of most mystics. He tells us of the sudden conversion when he was eighteen, which detached him once for all from the world and self-interest, and filled him with the love of God ; how he was by profession a footman, “a great awkward fellow, who broke everything,” and, becoming a Carmelite lay-brother, expected to suffer much for his faults ; how for four years he endured great trouble of mind, and thence passed to a “‘ perfect liberty and continual joy,” which upheld him equally during his work in the monas- tery kitchen (which he naturally disliked) and during set times of prayer. So much indeed were action and contemplation interfused, that he ceased to perceive much difference between them.
Such freedom and suppleness of soul—a charac- teristic on which Francois de Sales and Lawrence lay equal stress—means in practice a level of
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complete, than the entranced contemplations of the ecstatic withdrawn from active affairs. St. Teresa leaving her enclosure to found houses of religion all over Spain, Madame Acarie emerging from rapture to join the children’s games, Lawrence without any turn for business” going into Bur- gundy to buy wine for his convent “‘ without un- easiness, saying to God it was His business he was about... and afterwards finding it very well performed,” witness in their various ways to a real transfiguration of human personality, completely transfused by the Divine power and love.
The letters of Brother Lawrence, mostly written in old age to those who asked his advice—for like all the mystics of this rich period, so hungry for the spiritual life, his quality was recognized and he attracted many disciples—testify to the fullness with which this life had been established in him.
He is now (he says of himself) so accustomed to that Divine Presence that he receives from it continual succour upon all occasions. For above thirty years, his soul has been filled with joys so continual and sometimes so transcendent, that he is forced to use means to moderate them and to prevent their appearing outwardly.
If sometimes he is a little too much absent from that Divine Presence, which happens often when he is most engaged in his outward business, God presently makes Himself felt in his soul to recall him. He answers with exact fidelity to these inward drawings, either by an elevation of his heart towards God, or by a meek and loving regard to Him, or by such words as love forms upon these occasions, as, for instance, My God, behold me, wholly Thine; Lord, make me according to Thy heart. And then it seems to him (as in effect he feels it) that this God of love, satisfied with such few words, reposes again and rests in the depth and centre of his soul. The experience of these things gives him such an assur- - ance that God is always deep within his soul, that no doubt of it can arise, whatever may betide.
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Another mystic, hardly known to modern readers, yet with far greater powers of expression, exhibits perhaps even more clearly this gradual remaking and final emancipation of the self. Marie Guyard, or Martin, afterwards known as Marie de 1’Incar- nation (1599-1672), was born at Tours, of the commercial class. She was married at eighteen, and at twenty-one was left a widow with one child. It was at this time that her first great mystical ‘experience took place: an overwhelming sight of her own sin and imperfection, which filled her with remorse and love. She now lived for ten years a busy practical life, helping in the family business, yet always, like Lawrence, ‘“‘in the presence of God ”’—or, as she expresses it with her customary struggle for exactitude, in a state of “‘ tendency ” to Him. This represents the first stage of her mystical growth. It was succeeded by a period of intense emotional rapture, from about her twenty- seventh to thirtieth year; marked by two great ecstatic experiences, by violent alternations between contemplation and desolation, and by a lyrical joy which often found outward expression, reminding us of Richard Rolle’s “‘ state of song.”
It was towards the end of this spiritual adoles- cence that Madame Martin yielded to her longing for a definitely religious life, and became an Ursuline nun ; going nine years later at the head of a small band of Sisters to Canada as an educa- tional and religious pioneer—a heroic adventure for a woman of her time. ‘There, beset by constant anxieties and exacting work, the rest of her life was spent ; and there she achieved that supple maturity of soul which has earned for her the name
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of “the Teresa of France.” As with her great prototype, her ecstatic experiences practically ceased when this, the constructive period of her life, began. She developed instead a steady and quiet state of union with God, which persisted through the
innumerable and apparently distracting activities that filled her days.
Her descriptions of this interior evolution deserve
to rank with those of the greatest contemplative saints :
My spirit (she says) became more and more simplified, making fewer and fewer inward or outward acts which could cause feeling. But my soul in its depths said continually these words: ‘‘ Oh my Love, be ‘Thou blessed”; or even these alone, “ My God, my God!” These fundamental words filled me with sweet food, but without any feelmg. Our Lord also took from me the great transports and violent seizures, and since then my soul has dwelt in her centre, which is God, and this centre is in herself where she is above all feeling. ‘This is so simple and delicate a thing that she cannot express it. One can read, write, work, do what one will, and nevertheless this fundamental occupation always abides, and the soul never ceases to be united to God. Even the immensities of God in no way divert her; but without stopping at them, she remains attached to God in her simplicity.” ...
When I go about the house or when I walk in the garden, I feel my heart constrained by continual impulses of love; and sometimes it seems that this heart must rush forth and as it were leave its own place. But although the inferior part suffers much, the superior part feels more vigorous, and more able to act with greater purity and delicacy ; because she is not involved with anything that hinders her, and sends nothing to the senses but keeps all in her own depths. 9 «
This third state of prayer is the most sublime . . . the senses are in it so free, that the soul which has attained it can act in it without distraction in all the employments her condition requires. It is a permanent, or better a continuous state, wherein the soul remains calm in such wise that nothing can distract her... .
If business, either necessary or indifferent, brings certain objects
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before the imagination, these are only little clouds, like those which pass before the sun and only take away the sight of it for an instant. And even during this moment God shines in the deeps of the soul, which is as it were waiting, like a person who is interrupted when she speaks to another and who nevertheless still looks at him to whom she spoke. She is as it were waiting in silence, and presently returns to her intimate union.
These quotations, chiefly from letters to her son and biographer, Dom Claude, are given at length because they mark so well the broadening and deepening of spiritual outlook, the increased, tran- quil understanding of the relation in which con- templation should stand to the whole complex of Christian life, which the Church owes to the great mystics of this time. They take up the science of prayer where the medizval saints left it, and bring out its richest implications. They are “ psy- chologists ” in the true sense of that ill-used word. Marie de l’Incarnation ves that two-fold life of “adoration and adherence” in which Bérulle had declared the whole duty and joy of a spiritual man to consist ; her life and his doctrine sum up the gift of this school of mystics to the Church. In their English Catholic contemporaries, the Bene- dictine contemplative Augustine Baker (1575- 1641) and his pupil Dame Gertrude More (1606-33), we again find this balanced outlook ; and through the writings of these mystics, whose religious life was chiefly lived on French soil, the genius of French mysticism touched and affected later generations of English contemplatives. The teachings of Augustine Baker, collected in the book called Holy Wisdom, still provide one of the best of all pilot books for unskilled voyagers on that which Ruysbroeck called “the vast and stormy
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Sea of the Divine.’ Medieval fervour and Bene- dictine wisdom are here blended, and infused by that talent for the ‘‘ discerning of spirits”? and directing of souls which was a special character of French spirituality.
The mysticism of the mid-seventeenth century represents a development of the doctrine taught on the one hand by the first Oratorians, especially Bérulle and his great disciple Charles de Condren (1588-1641) and by Olier (1608-57) of St. Sulpice ; on the other by St. Francois de Sales. Its best known expression is found among the contemplative souls who were attached to the famous Abbey of Port Royal. The story of this hot-bed of personal religion is too well known to need repetition here. Its puritanical rigorisms were sweetened by a real mystical passion, which took its colour from the great French masters of the contemplative life ; again demonstrating the close social solidarity which united in this period even the most diverse of the seekers for reality. The Jansenism of Port Royal was, largely, an unbalanced exaggeration of that vivid sense of the soul’s respon- sibility and realness, which is natural to the mystic ; and St.-Cyran, its most celebrated and unfortunate representative, seems in his secret life to have been an uneasy contemplative, who sought without much success to model himself on St. Francois de Sales.
The really mystical side of Port Royal is seen in two sharply contrasted personalities. The beauti- ful spirit of Mére Agnes (1593-1671) fed by the teachings of Bérulle and his followers, continues the best traditions of French spirituality, its lofty theocentricism, its tendency to abstract contempla-
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tion. At the opposite extreme, Pascal (1623-62) escapes from the attacks of his self-tormenting nature and his intellectual unrest by way first of the ecstatic experience recorded in the celebrated Amulet; then of the impassioned Christocentric devotion which finds expression in the exquisite Mystere de Fésus. ‘These are the two great moments of his mystical life. In the dmulet or Memorial —that scrap of parchment, so fortunately pre- served for us, which he wore on his person from 1654 until his death—we have the stammering hrases in which he had tried to recapture the “Certitude and Joy” of an overwhelming reve- lation of God : a revelation satisfying in full his thirst for that living Reality, that “‘ Universal Being ’’ which, as he says in the Pensées, “ it is the nature of the heart to love.”
From about half-past ten in the evening (says the Memoria/) till about half an hour after midnight: Fire! God of Abraham. God of Isaac. God of Jacob. Not of philosophers and scholars . . . the world has not known Thee, but I have known Thee. Joy, joy, joy; tears of joy!
In the meditation called the Mystére de Fésus intimacy and love complete the work of adoration. The very heart of Christocentric mysticism is here unveiled to us by means of a few curt sentences, of which the holy magic owes nothing to literary art. ‘‘ We know many things more sublime,” says Brémond of this tiny masterpiece, “‘ but nothing more contagious.”’ In virtue of this gift and its influence Pascal—who might from one point of view be regarded as a lonely intellectualist—wins a place among the creative mystics of the Church.
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gradual fading away of this great mystical epoch : and, as in most periods of decadence, it was in the unbalanced exaggeration of certain essential char- acters, the suppression of others, that its progressive disintegration was shown. Quietism, the charac- teristic religious movement of this time, represents the excessive stressing of that passive element which had always been present in French mysticism, its abstraction from the complex of tendencies which together make up a healthy spiritual life. Now best known in the work of Madame Guyon (1648- 1717), that busy lady is, as a matter of fact, far from being the typical Quietist. This parody of the contemplative life had appeared early in the century in the wrong-headed fervour of Antoinette Bourig- nan (1616-80) and was continued by her disciple, Peter Poiret (1646-1719), and by Malaval, the blind cleric of Marseilles. Behind Madame Guyon is the tragic figure of the Spanish priest Molinos (1640-97), executed for the real or supposed moral errors which his doctrine of passivity was believed to involve.
In spite of its manifest exaggerations, Quietism has considerable historical importance. It influ- enced, though not always to their advantage, such differing religious temperaments as those of the © early Quakers and William Blake. In it the rich spiritual movement which had formed Beérulle, Francois de Sales, and their contemporaries became thin, precious, self-conscious. Its most celebrated exponent, the unfortunate Madame Guyon, pro- vides one of the most instructive caricatures of true sanctity to be found in the whole history of the Church—a caricature which is all the more effective
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because it approaches so closely to its model at many points. But for her persistent self-occupation and her lack of common sense, Madame Guyon might actually have become the mystical saint she supposed herself to be ; and since her best known book, 4 Short and Easy Method of Prayer, is still much read and admired, and its author commonly classed among the great Christian mystics, it seems worth while to draw attention to some features in her career and doctrine which are commonly over- looked.
Madame Guyon was a well-born and very beautiful woman, full of charm, who grew up in the period following that of the great French mystics; a moment in which they were widely read and admired, and the fatal inclination to copy the contemplative life in cheaper materials had already appeared. Her natural religious enthusiasm had therefore plenty on which to feed. An un- happy marriage increased her inclination to piety. She practised ferocious mortifications ; and, having learnt from a monk to whom she went for direction that simple “‘ prayer of interior silence”? which has been so greatly used by the saints, she promptly elevated it into the whole substance of the mystical life. The result was a cult of passivity and self- abandonment, so excessive that it was inevitably condemned by all religious teachers in touch with the realities of the human soul. At the height of her development Madame Guyon insisted on a “holy indifference’ which left no room for any exercise of the will, which did not admit of con- trition, and did not even prefer heaven rather than hell. This level of absurdity, however, was only
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gradually achieved, and represents the uncriti- _ cized exaggeration of a doctrine which was in its beginnings of a harmlessly traditional sort.
Left a widow at twenty-eight, the career of St. Chantal suggested to her what her own future might be; and unfortunately she found in the Barnabite Pére La Combe, the person who seemed destined to play in it the part of a second St. Francois de Sales. ‘The new saints, however, felt an intense interest in themselves and each other, which their models would hardly have approved. It was not long before Madame Guyon, who was greatly venerated by the pious aristocracy, came to believe that she was the new corner-stone of the Church and the Woman clothed with the Sun of the Apocalypse; whilst her interior union with Pére La Combe became so perfect that she declared herself unable to distinguish him from God. There is no need to continue the elabora- tion of this story ; but its main features must be remembered when we try to estimate the value of Madame Guyon’s spiritual works. These run to forty volumes, of several hundred pages each ; and some at least were written, by her own account, in an ‘“‘inspired ” or automatic state. The Method of Prayer which is alone familiar to modern readers, is at once the shortest and most sane.
It was not until 1688, when she was nearly forty and at the height of her religious reputation, that Madame Guyon came into contact with Fénelon, with whose soul, unfortunately, she “found that hers was in perfect harmony.”’ It is one of the puzzles of religious history that this well-meaning, but certainly self-deluded, preacher
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of mysticality managed to persuade the exquisite scholar and skilled director of souls that she was indeed a prophetess and a saint. Possibly the absence on both sides of a strong sense of humour contributed to this disastrous situation and its results. Though the Quietism defended by Féne- lon in his celebrated Maxims, and afterwards con- demned by authority, is a very innocent form of passivity—going indeed little beyond that principle of loving and unlimited surrender to God which has been practised and taught by the greatest mystical saints—the notoriety of Madame Guyon’s more extreme utterances, her ever-increasing volu- bility, and, above all, the painful atmosphere of controversy which now surrounded all these ques- tions, prevented its true bearing from being under- stood. More gentle methods proving useless, Madame Guyon and Pére La Combe were im- prisoned. Fénelon, whose generous advocacy had been both misunderstood and exploited, was broken and disgraced.
Yet this, the apparent death-agony of a great mystical epoch, had in it the seeds of life. From the retirement in which his last sixteen years were spent, Fénelon, spiritualized by adversity, wrote the greater number of those “letters of direction,” full of wise and skilled advice on the life of love and prayer, by which he still continues his influ- ence on souls. Through these the noble spirit of French mysticism was preserved and bore fruit, in times and places where its major products were unknown. Thus Fénelon reached and affected the eighteenth-century Quakers, the leaders of the Evangelical revival, the Tractarians ; and, in his
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own country, taught, and still teaches, those who continue the great Gallican tradition of the spiritual life.
ILLUSTRATIVE WORKS
Brémond, H. Histoire Littéraire du Sentiment Religieux en France. 6 vols. Paris, 1923. St. Chantal. Paris, 1912. Chantal, St. Jane Frances de. Her Spirit as shown in her Letters. London, 1922. Fénelon. Spiritual Letters to Men. ‘Translated by Sidney Lear. London, 1880. Spiritual Letters to Women. ‘Translated by Sidney Lear. London, 1906. Spiritual Letters to Ecclesiastics, Religious, etc. London, 1892. Frangois de Sales, St. Introduction to the Devout Life. Translated by Rev. A. Ross. London, 1925. Treatise of the Love of God. Edited by W. J. Knox Little. London, 1901. Spiritual Letters. Translated by Sidney Lear. London, 1892. Guyon, Madame. A Short and Easy Method of Prayer. London, 1900. Autobiography. Translated by T. Allen, 2 vols. London, 1897. Huvelin, Abbé. Quelques Directeurs d’Ames au XVII Siécle. 3rd edition. Paris, 1923. Lawrence, Brother. ‘The Practice of the Presence of God. London, 1906. Pascal. Pensées, Fragments, et Lettres. Paris, 1897. Sanders, E. K. Fénelon, his Friends and Enemies. London, 1901. Angélique of Port Royal. London, 1905. Vincent de Paul. London, 1913. St. Chantal. London, 1918.
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