The literature which describes the techniques and experience of prayer and religious meditation is in French primarily in the Roman Catholic tradition, though heterodox, Protestant, and non-Christian traditions are present. Devotional literature may take many forms: autobiographical texts, journals, texts teaching how to meditate, verbal prayers, poems, etc. [see also Sermon].
1. Middle Ages and Renaissance
The most widespread text is surely the Imitation of Christ (c.1418) by Thomas à Kempis; many versions and translations of it exist in France from the 1460s on, often entitled L'Éternelle Consolation. The origins of devotional literature were, however, in the Bible and the early Church Fathers. Before the Renaissance it was mostly written in Latin, and even with the Renaissance the major authors influential in France—Ruysbroek, Ignatius Loyola, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross—were foreigners. It is difficult to speak of a specifically ‘French’ school of spirituality except in the 17th c.
Spiritual writing in France can be traced back as far as the 2nd c. It develops considerably during the medieval period, when individual, personal piety, including private prayer, increasingly supplements the collective, communal worship of the early Church. The great monastic foundations were the prime source of much of this spirituality. De diligendo deo of Bernard de Clairvaux is perhaps the first major treatise on mysticism written in France; in proclaiming that God must be loved purely and solely because he is God, he initiated the tradition of ‘pure love’ which was to be so strong in France. Richard of St Victor (d. 1173), is representative of another tradition: that the contemplation of the order and beauty of creation can lead to a consciousness of the divine.
While manuals of devotion for the laity exist from the 9th c. on, hagiography and liturgically inspired iconography or drama [see Medieval Theatre] probably played a more important role until the 13th and 14th c., when the need to combat heresy led to the forming of the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Carmelites, and a renewal of spirituality among regular clergy, secular clergy, and laity, with an appropriate literature. The spiritual ladder, the beatific vision, the adoration of the Child Jesus and of the Sacred Heart, of the Compassion of Mary and her seven sorrows, became widespread, but the distinctions between prayer, meditation, and reading are still not clear-cut.
15th-c. France had one major spiritual author, Gerson. His La Montagne de contemplation (1400), Dialogus de perfectione cordis (1417), and Tractatus super Cantica Canticorum (1429) reject nominalism's excessive rationalism in favour of a return to the tradition of mysticism stretching from the 5th-c. Pseudo-Dionysius to Ruysbroek in the 14th c. By the end of the century printed books had become widespread, including livres d'heures and devotional manuals, generally quite Christocentric.
The 16th-c. humanistic concern with the study of the Bible and the Church Fathers [see Evangelicals] led to an increased familiarity with the traditions of mysticism. And the Counter-Reformation also produced a spiritual renewal. The founder of the Minims, Francis of Paola, and others of the Franciscan tradition emphasized devotion to the humble Jesus, silence, humility; Béda's Internelle Consolation (1542) is perhaps the most representative text of this internal piety. In 1529 the Jesuits arrived in Paris bringing Ignatian meditation, where the movement of the imagination is intellectually guided towards a sympathetic identification with the major scenes of the Bible, leading to a reshaping of the individual soul.
2. Seventeenth Century
The struggle against the Protestant reform led to a real ‘interior crusade’, marked not only by renewed catechetical zeal but also by the publication of a mass of devotional tracts, selections of prayers, etc., including the chapbooks of the Bibliothèque Bleue. This ferment of activity, together with the translation of such major authors as Luis of Grenada, Catherine of Sienna, John of the Cross, and Teresa of Avila, explain in part the rich French flowering of the 17th c. The Englishman William Fitch (in religion, the Capuchin Benedict Canfield, 1502-1611), who spent his religious career in France, prepared the way by propounding the necessity of dying to the self and of total abandonment to God, as did Richelieu's ‘éminence grise’, Joseph Tremblay, with his adaptation of Loyola in the Introduction à la vie spirituelle par une facile méthode d'oraison (1616).
France was to become for a period the centre of mystical activity and literature. A major instigating role was played by Madame Acarie (1566-1618) who, deeply moved by the translation of the autobiography of Teresa of Avila (1601), founded the reformed Carmelites in France and, after the death of her husband, entered the order in 1613, taking the name of Marie de l'Incarnation; before that, her salon exercised a seminal influence, especially on Bérulle, the founder of the French Oratory. Bérulle reflects the Augustinian influence and the Christocentric orientation which characterizes the great French spiritual writers of the age.
Of these, the greatest was surely
Bérulle and François de Sales were followed by a noted generation of mystics: Charles de Condren (1588-1641), strongly marked by Augustine, emphasized complete abandonment and self-annihilation. Jean-Jacques Olier (1608-57), the founder of the Saint-Sulpice seminary, believed that we must annihilate our humanity as Christ does his sacred humanity in the sacrifice of the mass. Jean Eudes (1601-80), the founder of the Eudists, together with Marguerite-Marie Alacoque (1647-90), popularized devotions to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. Alacoque wrote a remarkable spiritual autobiography and Eudes Le Cœur admirable de la mère de Dieu (1670) and La Vie et le royaume de Jésus (1637). Mention should also be made of Marie Guyard (Marie de l'Incarnation), first superior of the Ursulines in Quebec, whose Retraites (1682) and L'École sainte (1684) are the primary works of French-Canadian spirituality, and of Nicolas Herman (Frère Laurent de la Résurrection) (c.1605-1691), who spent his life working in the kitchen of his monastery; his posthumously published Maximes spirituelles (1692) and Maximes et entretiens (1694) are among the best manifestations of the passive tendency of French spirituality (he was much cited by Fénelon). Finally, the remarkable Jesuit Jean-Joseph Surin (1600-65), an exorcist at Loudun whose spiritual autobiography recounts his own ‘possession’ or madness and his eventual restoration to grace and sanity; his Fondements de la vie spirituelle (1667) and Dialogues spirituels (1704-9) are exemplary of the quest to lose oneself in the presence of God.
Much of the later 17th-c. spiritual writing is marked by the quarrels over Jansenism and Quietism. Pascal expresses the Jansenist concern with man's tragic situation between grandeur and misère, which can only be ameliorated by faith centred on the person of Christ. Both the enemy of Quietism, Bossuet, and its defender, Fénelon, wrote spiritual as well as didactic, polemic, or historical literature; Bossuet's Élévations sur les mystères and Méditations sur les Évangiles are masterpieces of spiritual prose, as is Fénelon's Explication des maximes des saints, with its careful delineation of the differences between true and false mysticism.
Such delineation was necessary by that date because of the writings of two profuse, if not always gifted or orthodox authors, Madame Guyon and Antoinette Bourignon (1610-80). Guyon, best known for her Moyen court et très facile de faire oraison, wrote an autobiography and some 30 other volumes. Bourignon, born at Liège, also wrote extensively (including two autobiographies), and shifted from Quietism to Pietism; she broke with the Church in 1661, proclaiming herself ‘the woman clothed with the sun’ of the Apocalypse.
3. After 1700
As a result of these excesses and quarrels, the mystical tradition in France fell somewhat into disrepute during the first half of the 18th c. Two notable exceptions were Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort (1673-1716), whose Traité de la vraie dévotion à la Sainte Vierge was only published in 1842, and particularly Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1675-1751), a Jesuit whose Instructions spirituelles en forme de dialogue sur les divers états d'oraison (1741) and L'Abandon à la divine providence (published 1867) provided an orthodox, acceptable statement of what was best in the Quietist tradition, often quoting Bossuet to that end. Late in the century the heterodox, Illuminist tradition found its most gifted French exponent in Saint-Martin.
Late 18th- and 19th-c. French spirituality has been less studied. Much scarred by the Revolution, the Church did produce, particularly among the exiled clergy, some devotional writers of quality, but whose emphasis on the value and meaning of suffering, whose intense and graphic style, may seem somewhat extreme. Devotions to the Sacred Heart, the Sacred Wounds, Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, mark the period. Exemplary are Jean-Nicolas Grou (1731-1803), author of L'Intérieur de Jésus et de Marie (1815), and Jean-Baptiste Lasausse (1740-1826), author of Le Chrétien brûlant d'amour pour Jésus-Christ crucifié (1825), whose title is revelatory of content and emphasis. Translations and republications of the classics, including Thomas à Kempis and Teresa of Avila, are numerous, but even the movement centred on Lamennais produced little in the way of properly spiritual literature, the notable exception being Philippe Gerbet (1798-1864), whose Eucharist-centred Considérations sur le dogme générateur de la piété chrétienne (1829) was much appreciated by George Sand. Ulrich Guttinguer provided a Christianized version of Saint-Martin, and Eugénie de Guérin wrote a deeply spiritual Journal. There was, above all, a transfer of the techniques and vocabulary of mysticism into poetic practice, often marginal in its relation to Catholicism: the paganism of Maurice de Guérin, or the various meditations, elevations, contemplations of Lamartine, Hugo, even Baudelaire. The turn of the century did see two great mystical writers: Thérèse de Lisieux (1873-97) continued the Carmelite tradition with her Histoire d'une âme (1898), an autobiography recounting no extraordinary grace, but a pure oblation to merciful love as it can be known by a simple soul; and Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), who left the Trappist order to lead a hermit's life in Algeria, where he met martyrdom after bearing witness to his faith by a life of ecumenical charity (see his posthumous Écrits spirituels, 1923). He was influential on Louis Massignon, who pioneered the task of introducing Muslim mysticism to France.
Authors such as Simone Weil, Lanza del Vasto, and Teilhard de Chardin have followed the spiritual way in a deeply Christian sense, but showing a limited debt to the traditional techniques of meditation. Indeed, the emphasis of contemporary Catholicism on common, especially liturgical, participatory worship is not always propitious to the introspective pursuit of the mind's road to God. The masterpieces of devotional literature are often published and appreciated only posthumously, however, and the French mystical tradition remains the subject of scholarly and critical work by such scholars as Jean Orcibal and Michel de Certeau.
[Frank Paul Bowman]
Bibliography
- H. Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, 12 vols. (1916-36; repr. 1967)
- J. Orcibal, M. de Certeau, A. Rayez, et al., Histoire spirituelle de la France (1964)
- J. Aumann, Christian Spirituality in the Catholic Tradition (1985)
