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The Human Condition: A Study of some Seventeenth Century French Writers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2024

Aelred Squire O.P.
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'We are like ruinous old houses that are falling down on every side. If you prop them up on one side, they fall down on the other. They must be supported in all directions, and renovated from the very foundations, for the whole thing is going to rack and ruin. We are all the same, the perfect and the imperfect alike. History is full of souls that have been lost by the abundance of their graces … Lucifer found the occasion of his ruin in heaven'.

These few phrases, which end with something that sounds like a reminiscence of Gregory the Great, are nevertheless as characteristic of their own author as they are of their period. They form part of an address given by Pierre de Bérulle2 at the opening of his visitation of one of those Carmelite convents for whose existence in France he, more than anyone else, was responsible

Type
Research Article
Information
Life of the Spirit , Volume 16 , Issue 184 , November 1961 , pp. 166 - 182
Copyright
Copyright © Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers. 1961

References

1 The substance of a lecture delivered in the autumn of 1960 to the French department of the Faculty of Letters in the University of Reading.

2 A photographic reproduction of Pere F. Bourgoing's fine editio princeps of the Oeuvres Completes du Cardinal de Béulle (Paris, 1644) has recently been printed at Montsoult (Seine et Oise). It is therefore to this edition by work and page that all references in this study are given. The opening quotation is from Oeuvres de piété CXVI (p., 972). These smaller works are hereafter cited as O.P.

3 My debt, in the purely historical sections of this paper, to the various studies Of M. I’ abbé Louis Cognet will be very evident.

4 Paris, 1960.

5 A. Adam, Sur le problème religieux dans la premiere moitiè du XVII siécle (Oxford, 1959), the Zaharoff lecture for that year.

6 Relation ècrite par la Mére Angèlique Arnauld sur Port-Royal ed. L. Cognet (paris, 1949), pp. 100 and 101.

7 Citations from the Introduction are cited in the translation of Allan Ross (London, 1924).

8 Part 2, chap. 4.

9 Letter 54 in Selected Letters of St Francis de Sales, ed. E. Stopp (London, 1960) may be cited as typical of this phase.

10 Bk I, chap. 10.

11 Bk I, chap. 12.

12 Bk I, chap. 15.

13 Bk I, chap. 18.

14 Bk II, chap. 7.

15 Bk IX, chap. 16.

16 Bk X, chap. 7.

17 The pioneer studies of Dom J. Huijben in the literature of this milieu, 'Aux source de la spiritualité francaise XVII siècle' (Vie Spirituelle, Supplément, Dec., 1930, Jan.-May, 1931) still have their uses.

18 Dagens, Bèrulle et les origines de la restauration Catholique (Paris, 1952).

19 O.P.XV, P. 767.

20 Discours, IV, 8 p. 222.

21 O.P. CXXI, p. 981.

22 p. 251.

23 O.P. CXXI, p. 982.

24 O.P. CXXXI, p. 998.

25 O.P. CXIV, p.969.

26 O.P. CLIII, p. 1031.

27 O.P. CXVIII, p. 976

28 O.P. CXLVI, P. 1023.

29 R. Bellemare, Le sens de la crèature dans la doctrine de Bèulle (Paris, 1959), p. 143.