Richelieu's "Treatise on Perfection"

As any reader knows, one book leads not only to another, but to a new appreciation of connections and insights. So when I received an email from TAN Books about a new translation of Cardinal Richelieu's Treatise on Perfection, I immediately thought of Marie de Vignerot, whose biography I'd just read.

Bronwen McShea mentions this book first on page 21, recounting how the then Bishop of Luçon, Armand du Plessis, "labored intensively over a Catholic catechism to ground and fortify the faith of the clergy of Luçon. It would be published in 1621 under the title Instruction du Chretien and reissued in various editions thereafter."

The book is mentioned again on page 175, when McShea (citing a different first date of publication, 1620), describes how "the duchesse secured authorization to republish the work under a new title, Traitte de la Perfection du Chretien par l'Eminentissime Cardinal Duc de Richelieu" in 1646. The gentlemen Vignerot selected updated the spelling and syntax of the original to the current fashion so that readers "encountered, therefore, a deceased Richelieu who was reverent, scholarly, pastoral, even saintly--but not old-fashioned."!

McShea also highlights the frontispiece that Vignerot commissioned by Claude Mellan, which is in the Public Domain.

The TAN Books description:

For many people, the name of Cardinal Richelieu will immediately call to mind the ambitious and cynical villain of Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers and its many cinematic adaptations. But the real Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu (1585–1642), was a very different person than this fictional portrayal. A prelate of great sanctity, learning and wisdom, and an ardent devotee of the Mother of God, he lived in a profoundly turbulent era, when all of Europe (including France) was shaken by religious and political unrest. This man of God and servant of the people labored tirelessly to ensure the flourishing of the Catholic Church and the Kingdom of France, both of which he loved dearly.

Cardinal Richelieu, who was a close friend of Pope Urban VIII and a key proponent of the reforms of the Council of Trent, was also an extremely popular spiritual author in his day. His timeless but long-forgotten masterpiece the Treatise on Perfection, presented here in English for the first time, overflows with wise insights and helpful guidance for nourishing a fruitful and sustainable spiritual life, particularly for those who are trying to balance prayer and devotion with complex and demanding secular responsibilities (as he himself did so successfully.) Cardinal Richelieu believed that the humble and diligent fulfillment of one’s proper and legitimate duties in society is the single most important moral responsibility of the Christian, and also often the most effective form of prayer.

This work also outlines the nine tortures of hell according to Saint Augustine, the joys of heaven, distractions at prayer, twenty spiritual counsels, and much more. Here is a book that will stir your heart to love God above everything by cultivating piety, virtue, and moderation in whatever state of life you are called to. Here is a book that pulls wisdom from some of the greatest saints to help you become a saint.

According to the Translator's Introduction, Father Robert Nixon, OSB used primarily the Latin edition, Tractatus de Perfectione Christiani, published in 1651, with occasional reference to the 1646 French edition for clarification and nuance, so Richelieu's niece's efforts to promote his memory endure.

I'm thinking of adding this to my wish-list for the New Year!

Fruits of the EDI Symposium: The Friendship of Christ

I have read and reread Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson's historical novels of the English Reformation and blogged about them (The King's Achievement, By What Authority, Come Rack! Come Rope!), but this is first of his books of spirituality I have read. The Scepter edition which I bought from Eighth Day Books at the Eighth Day Institute's Eighth Annual Symposium, features a foreword by Ignatius Drostin from the 1991 Thomas More Publishing edition (with a little mistake: The Lord of the World is not an historical fiction novel!).

From the publisher (an excerpt from the book):

It is at once the privilege and the burden of Catholics that they know so much of Jesus Christ. It is their privilege, since an intelligent knowledge of the Person and the attributes and the achievements of Incarnate God is an infinitely greater wisdom than all the rest of the sciences put together.

To have a knowledge of the Creator is incalculably a more noble thing than to have a knowledge of His Creation. Yet it is a burden as well; for the splendour of this knowledge may be so great as to blind us to the value of its details. The blaze of the Divinity to him who sees it may be so bright as to bewilder him with regard to the humanity. The unity of the wood vanishes in the perfection of the trees.

Catholics then, above all others, are prone -- through their very knowledge of the mysteries of faith, through their very apprehension of Jesus Christ as their God, their High Priest, their Victim, their Prophet and their King -- to forget that His delights are to be with the sons of men more than to rule the Seraphim, that, while His Majesty held Him on the throne of His Father, His Love brought Him down on pilgrimage that He might transform His servants into His friends. For example, devout souls often complain of their loneliness on earth. They pray, they frequent the sacraments, they do their utmost to fulfil the Christian precepts; and, when all is done, they find themselves solitary.

There could scarcely be a more evident proof of their failure to understand one at least of the great motives of the Incarnation. They adore Christ as God, they feed on Him in Communion, cleanse themselves in His precious Blood, look to the time when they shall see Him as their Judge; yet of that intimate knowledge of and companionship with Him in which the Divine Friendship consists, they have experienced little or nothing.

They long, they say, for one who can stand by their side and upon their own level, who can not merely remove suffering, but can himself suffer with them, one to whom they can express in silence the thoughts which no speech can utter; and they seem not to understand that this is the very post which Jesus Christ Himself desires to win, that the supreme longing of His Sacred Heart is that He should be admitted, not merely to the throne of the heart or to the tribunal of conscience, but to that inner secret chamber of the soul where a man is most himself, and therefore most utterly alone.

This was a very successful book, based upon sermons preached in Rome in the Church of St. Silvestro-in-Capite, during the year of 1911. Some of them were also preached in the Carmelite Church in Kensington in 1910, and first published in 1912.

The contents:

Part I. Christ in the Interior Soul

I. The Friendship of Christ. [General] Gen. ii: 18
II. The Friendship of Christ. [Interior] Gen. ii: 18
III. The Purgative Way. Psalm l: 4
IV. The Illuminative Way. Psalm xvii: 29

Part II. Christ in the Exterior

V. Christ in the Eucharist. John vi: 35
VI. Christ in the Church. John xv: 5
VII. Christ in the Priest. John i: 17
VIII. Christ in the Saint. Matthew v: 14
IX. Christ in the Sinner. Luke xv: 2
X. Christ in the Average Man. Matthew xxv: 40
XI. Christ in the Sufferer. Colossians i: 24

Part III. Christ in His Historical Life

XII. Christ Our Friend Crucified [The Seven Words]
XIII. Christ Our Friend Vindicated [Easter Day] John xx: 17

Although this is book based on sermons describing crucial progress in the spiritual life, Benson brings many of his talents as a writer of fiction to his examples. He sketches the character and life of men and women wanting to know and love Jesus with as much skill, although on a simpler scale, as he does the men and women of Tudor England. The chapters on the Seven Words of Christ from the Cross and on Easter Day would be perfect reading for Good Friday and Easter Sunday morning, as Benson leads the reader to meditate deeply on the victory of the Cross and Resurrection.

This was, indeed, the perfect book to read the week after a weekend of prayer and consideration of the meaning of friendship in the Christian life. I enjoyed spending several hours each day in the company of good friends, hearing some great speakers, and thinking about how important friendship is in my life. My late parents often said two things about friendship: 1) that your spouse should be your best friend as well as your lover and companion, and 2) that you will have only a few very good friends whom you can count on and who should be able to count on you, and I suppose a third thing, 3) that you have to work on friendship. Monsignor Benson outlines how to work on friendship with Jesus, remembering that even that desire to work on our friendship is a grace that only God can give:

Human friendships usually take their rise in some small external detail. We catch a phrase, we hear an inflection of a voice, we notice the look of the eyes, or a movement in walking; and the tiny experience seems to us like an initiation into a new world. We take the little event as a symbol of a universe that lies behind; we think we have detected a soul exactly suited to our own, a temperament which either from its resemblance to our own, or from a harmonious dissimilarity, is precisely fitted to be our companion. Then the process of friendship begins; we exhibit our own characteristics; we examine his: in point after point we find what we expected to find, and we verify our guesses; and he too, no less, follows the same method, until that point is reached (as it is reached in so many cases, though not, thank God! in all), either in a crisis, or after a trying period, when we discover either that we have been mistaken from the beginning, or that we have deceived the other, or that the process has run its course; the summer is come and gone, and that there are no more fruits to gather on either side.

Now the Divine Friendship -- the consciousness, that is to say, that Christ desires our love and intimacy, and offers His own in return -- usually begins in the same manner. It may be at the reception of some sacrament, such as we have received a thousand times before; or itmay be as we kneel before the Crib at Christmas, or follow our Lord along the Way of the Cross. We have done these things or performed those ceremonies dutifully and lovingly again and again; yet on this sudden day a new experience comes to us. We understand, for example, for the first time that the Holy Child is stretching His arms from the straw, not merely to embrace the world -- that would be little enough! -- but to embrace our own soul in particular. We understand as we watch Jesus, bloodstained and weary, rising from His third fall, that He is asking our own very self in particular to help Him with His burden. The glance of the Divine Eyes meets our own; there passes from Him to us an emotion or a message that we had never before associated with our own relations with Him. The tiny event has happened! He has knocked at our door, and we have opened; He has called and we have answered. Henceforth, we think, He is ours and we are His. Here, at last, we tell ourselves, is the Friend for whom we have been looking so long: here is the Soul that perfectly understands our own; the one Personality which we can safely allow to dominate our own. Jesus Christ has leapt forward two thousand years, and is standing by our side; He has come down from the painting on the wall; He has risen from the straw in the manger -- My Beloved is mine and I am His. . .

II. The Friendship has begun then. Now begins its process.

The essence of a perfect friendship is that each friend reveals himself utterly to the other, flings aside his reserves, and shows himself for what he truly is.

My review is perforce incomplete, because anyone reading the book is led to think of her own progress, or lack thereof, in becoming a true friend of Jesus. Although Monsignor Benson published this more than 100 years ago, his book of sermons convicts the reader today.

An Earlier Second Spring? Dom David Knowles on Father Augustine Baker

I purchased a copy of this book at Eighth Day Books last year and have dipped into it every so often, reading one or two of the essays. (There is another copy available at EDB.) It contains essays on Aelfric of Eynsham, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, The Cloud of Unknowing, Dame Julian of Norwish, St. John Fisher (by E.E. Reynolds), St. Thomas More, Father Persons, SJ, Father Augustine Baker, Bishop Richard Challoner, Cardinal Newman (two--one by Dessain), Cardinal Manning, Father Faber, John Chapman, Monsignor Ronald Knox, and "Spiritual Reading for Our Times".

Dom David Knowles writes about Father Augustine Baker in what seems to have been the introduction or review of an edition of Baker's great work the Sancta Sophia. In establishing the context of Baker's lifetime, Knowles refers to a "Second Spring" of English Catholicism--and when I think of the Second Spring of English Catholicism, I think of Blessed John Henry Newman's 1852 sermon. Nevertheless, Dom Knowles makes a good argument for his use of that term:

The life of David (in religion Dom Augustine) Baker covered almost exactly (1575-1641), the period between the final break with Catholicism in the early years of Elizabeth I and the beginning of the civil disturbances which were to put to an end any hope there might have been of a massive re-establishment of the old religion as a powerful minority among all classes in the country.

Knowles is referring to the Northern Rebellion and various plots against Elizabeth, blaming them for the alienation of many Catholic nobles and landowners for fear of being aligned with traitorous plots.

Seen from another viewpoint, it was the period in which the new Catholicism, that of the Council of Trent, of the Jesuits, and of the Counter-Reformation, made its impact on England; it was a time of anguish and persecution; and yet it was a very real Second Spring, in which the first newcomers from the recently founded seminaries and colleges fired their relatives and converts at home with a zeal that had been lacking in the generation that had lost the faith, and that peopled monasteries and convents in France in the Low Countries with religious in exile; it was also, unhappily, a time of feuds and quarrels and mistakes, and of a clash of aims and hopes and ideals that ultimately did as much as the spirit of Puritanism to check the spread of faith in this country. David Baker had experience of all this.

In this long sentence, Knowles balances the achievements and the failures of the Catholic missionary project, referring to the conflicts for example between the Jesuits and the Appellants, etc. He also refers to "the generation that had lost the faith": the generation during the reign of Henry VIII that let Thomas More, John Fisher, and other martyrs of that time bear the burden of the faith while they compromised and plundered.

Knowles had a remarkable ability, probably through great effort and practice, of summing up historical trends. In those two sentences, he provides extraordinary insights into not just the lifespan of one man's life (66 years) but an age in England's history.

A Novena for the Ordinariate

The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham begins its "Called to Be Holy" novena of prayers and spiritual writings from the English tradition tomorrow:

For the nine days of the Called to be Holy Novena, we have made a selection from the many holy men and women who form part of the heritage of English Christianity. The fact that they are all 'English' does not, we hope, exclude those in Wales and Scotland who will be praying this Novena. Indeed we intend by means of this website to explore the spirituality (the genuine Celtic stuff) from the northern and western parts of the British Isles at some future date.

The daily provision of this booklet may be used in many different ways. Some will pray it formally, using the Short Office provided on the inside front and back covers. Others may wish to incorporate the material into their own daily prayers, or at the end of the Divine Office. Some will carry the booklet with them, to read on the bus to work or during their lunch break. We hope that we shall all be inspired by our great tradition of English spiritual writers across the centuries.

If you wish--as I do--to join in on the prayers, you could download or even print the novena booklet from the Ordinariate website. Among those English writers chosen you'll find Blessed John Henry Newman, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Julian of Norwich, and Anglicans Launcelot Andrewes, Thomas Ken, and Evelyn Underhill.

You could also follow the Novena each day on the website here.

Firmly I Believe and Truly, It's My Birthday!

And here is my birthday present from my husband!

"The Spiritual Tradition of Catholic England, An Anthology of Writings from 1483 to 1999" is obviously not a book to be read straight through, but to be dipped into, sampled, and surveyed often. I want to read the Introductions to the three parts first and then consult some of the extracts from both familiar and new writers.

[BTW, his other gift to me is a DVD of Kung Fu Panda 2, in which Po searches for inner peace!]

Coming Soon from Oxford University Press!

Firmly I Believe and Truly: The Spiritual Tradition of Catholic England -- Edited by John Saward, John Morrill and Michael Tomko!

It is "An Anthology of Writings from 1483 to 1999"


From the Oxford University Press website:

Firmly I Believe and Truly celebrates the depth and breadth of the spiritual, literary, and intellectual heritage of the Post-Reformation English Roman Catholic tradition in an anthology of writings that span a five hundred year period between William Caxton and Cardinal Hume. Intended as a rich resource for all with an interest in Roman Catholicism, the writings have been carefully selected and edited by a team of scholars with historical, theological, and literary expertise. Each author is introduced to provide context for the included extracts and the chronological arrangement of the anthology makes the volume easy to use whilst creating a fascinating overview of the modern era in English Catholic thought. The extracts comprise a wide variety writing genres; sermons, prayers, poetry, diaries, novels, theology, apologetics, works of controversy, devotional literature, biographies, drama, and essays. Includes writings by:

John Colet, John Fisher, Thomas More, Robert Southwell, Philip Howard, Anne Askew, Edmund Campion, John Gother, John Dryden, Mary Barker, Alexander Pope, Richard Challoner, Alban Butler, John Milner, Elizabeth Inchbald, Nicholas Wiseman, Margaret Mary Hallahan, A. W. N. Pugin, John Henry Newman, Henry Edward Manning, Frederick William Faber, Bertrand Wilberforce, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Vincent McNabb, Hilaire Belloc, Maurice Baring, G. K. Chesterton, R. A. Knox, J. R. R. Tolkien, Caryll Houselander, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, John Bradburne, Cardinal Hume.

Find the complete Table of Contents here. It's a who's who of Catholic England, that's for sure!

The book's features, per OUP:

~~Brings together a diverse array of writers from the last five hundred years to celebrate the English Roman Catholic tradition

~~Includes authors who maintain a high profile today and reintroduces key figures whose writings have recently been neglected
~~Provides authoritative introductions to each author
~~Chronologically ordered with a clear three part structure to aid navigation
~~Thoughtfully illustrated with images relevant to each part of the anthology

The only sting: the price--$65.00! OUP says it is available in October; Amazon in mid-November. Looks wonderful!