The French School of spirituality
Andrew Kuiper on the contribution of Cardinal Pierre de Berulle to western Catholic mystical theology and the emphasis on a God focused, subsumed life.
The early modern Catholics who came to be known as the French School embodied many of the distinctives, and all the contradictions, of Baroque piety and mysticism. Cardinal Pierre Berulle, Jean-Jacques Olier, Charles de Condren, St. John Eudes, and Bl. Marie of the Incarnation. And while St. Francis de Sales, St. Vincent de Paul, St. Louise de Marillac, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, St. Louis de Montfort should probably not be considered part of the French School proper, they all inhabited the same social and devotional world. In fact, many of them knew and admired each other in matters of piety and charitable service. At the same time, this was the France of Bossuet, Mazarin, and Richelieu, and the unsavory alliances of prelates and theologians with the royal absolutism fashionable at the time. Berulle himself was the chaplain to King Henry IV and was involved with courtly politics (often opposed to the geopolitical aims of Richelieu). In addition to the political wrangling of the time, Berulle was also embedded in the social and theological circles which became the source of the hyper-Augustinian pessimism known as Jansenism in France; he worked closely with Jean du Vergier de Hauranne and even Cornelius Jansen himself. Both spiritually and politically, the French School presents a complex portrait which is not above criticism. As Jacques Maritain cautioned, we should avoid a naive nostalgia for pre-Revolutionary France. What then, do we wish to salvage and hold up as a model for our times from these figures?
The most immediate gift the French School has to offer is their pronounced mysticism and theological realism concerning the Mystical Body of Christ–both as the true identity of the visible Church but also as the reality of the soul’s marriage to Christ. As the Jesuit theologian and historian Emile Mersch (1890-1940) noted, and recent scholarship has emphasized (Chapter 21 in the Oxford Handbook of Deification 2024), the French School played an indispensable role in reviving the language and theology of deification in a post-scholastic early modern context[1]. Here we see the patristic exposition of theosis given to us again in a profoundly modern imaginaire. The style and diction, the context and examples, are not from late antiquity but from an era that has the printing press and the century that would give us the telescope and microscope. The workshop of divinization is not simply always ancient, it is always new and requires the particular expression of this mystery from new souls.
Cardinal Pierre Berulle (1575-1629) deserves the most attention as both the most influential and theologically talented of the French School. Even on a purely human level, the energy and productivity of this priest was astonishing. Besides being active in the royal court and writing several major theological and spiritual volumes, he founded the French Congregation of the Oratory, a society for the secular priesthood based on St. Philip Neri’s Oratory at Rome. He even appears to have played a major role in the development of the Paris Polyglot Bible. Even though it was published in 1645, fifteen years after his death, it was made possible by his patronage of Guy-Michel Lejay. The publication of this compilation of texts constituted a major moment in the history of biblical studies as it was the first printed edition of the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Syriac Old Testament. Another tremendous achievement was his introduction in 1604, in collaboration with his cousin Madame Acarie (Marie of the Incarnation) of the Discalced Carmelites of Teresa of Avila into France. The unique combination of the mysticism of Teresa of Avila and the intense currents of Rhineland mysticism which were prevalent in the Acarie circle should be seen as the indispensable horizon for situating this strain of Baroque French spirituality–the fervor for union with Christ married to a powerful sense of creaturely nothingness (anéanti) or even annihilation (anéantissement) in Berulle’s formulation. This is surely some echo or reception of the profound discourse of Nichtung found in Eckhart, Tauler, and Ruusbroec. These powerful currents are what allowed Berulle to describe the union of creature with Creator as a kind of abyss.
“I adore you as the beginning and seek you as the end of my being and of all being. I adore you and I look upon you as my way. I rest in you as does every created being that proceeds from you as its origin, holds you as its center, and reposes in you as its subsistence and loses itself in you as in an abyss.”[2]
He often elaborated the mystical life as being one of complete identification of the personality with the personality of Jesus Christ. In the words of St. Paul I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who lives but Christ who lives in me. (Gal. 2:20) Even further, he advanced the somewhat dubious claim that since the human nature of Christ was completely emptied of personality and fully absorbed into the divine personality of the Second Person, so our human personalities must be completely absorbed into Christ. It is easy to see both the possibilities and pitfalls of such a formulation. In Berulle we see a powerful mind attempting to do full justice to the mystery of divine kenosis as it applies to the Incarnation and the concrete emotional life of Christ. It was important for Berulle that each experience of Christ was not merely a self-contained moment of His life trapped in the historical past; it must also function as a state (état) and a present living mystery which we can enter. Every moment of Christ’s life must be something which has the power to transform us right now. Under this conviction, Berulle writes:
“Mystical theology attempts to draw us, to unite us, and to lose ourselves in God … The grandeur of God separates us from ourselves and every created thing and draws us into God. His unity receives and unites us in himself. And his fullness loses us, empties us and drowns us in the immense ocean of his perfections just as the sea swallows a drop of water”
Berulle is a wonderful witness that the distinction between "Western" and “Eastern” mysticism is not a very stable one. The presentation of union with the divine as an experience where the sense of self disappears or is even annihilated has deeply Western sources (the Rhineland mystics) but is also characteristic of less exotic Scholastic authors. Think of the first section of the now ubiquitous post-communion prayer of St. Bonaventure:
“Pierce, O most sweet Lord Jesus, my inmost soul with the most joyous and healthful wound of Thy love, and with true, calm and most holy apostolic charity, that my soul may ever languish and melt with entire love and longing for Thee, may yearn for Thee and for thy courts, may long to be dissolved [cupiat dissolvi] and to be with Thee.”
Dissolution and absorption are traditional categories and expressions of the Latin West and those terms alone do not constitute something problematic. Whatever is lacking in his account of human personality, Berulle is crystal-clear on the significance of Christ’s human nature and the need for us to adore it as the instrument of our divinization. For this reason, he can call the Incarnation something even greater than the mysteries of “heaven”. The dust of the ground has been marked forever by the God-Man:
“Earth is honored by his presence, bears the imprint of his steps, is taught by his word, sprinkled by his blood and honored by his mysteries … Thus this God-Man, this new citizen of the earth honors the earth in which he is born, gives it privileges worthy of his birth and desires to perform greater works on earth than had been previously accomplished in heaven. He even repairs on earth what was lost in heaven…”[3]
And in a way which anticipates the devotion to the Sacred Heart, Berulle as himself devoted to the Sacred wound of Christ’s side–a wound which he named an “eternal wound” and “a wound of love”. And this wound was given to Christ in a way no other crucified man ever received “in order that we may abide in His Heart for all eternity.”[4]
As we enter the season of Pentecost, it is fitting to reflect on how the French School elevated the humanity of Christ and through this elevation discovered new depths in the mysteries of the Annunciation, the Ascension, and Pentecost. Jean-Jacques Olier (1608-1657), when he founded the Sulpicians, commissioned a massive image of Pentecost to hang over the main altar of his new seminary. Charles de Condren (1588-1641) also spoke of Pentecost as “the first feast of the Church”.[5] Raymond Deville even sees Berullian influence in St. Louise Marillac’s insistence on devoting herself to the “holy humanity” of Christ.[6]
In my estimation, the perduring legacy of the French School is precisely in this focus on the holy humanity, the divinizing flesh which ascended in order to secure our humanity in glorification. It lies in this extended meditation on the Church as the prolonged Incarnation of the Mystical Body through the mystery of Pentecost. Christ’s flesh has not gone–it is here now. Even in the sometimes troubling language of annihilation and absorption, there a possibility for a greater sympathy and understanding for Hindu and Buddhist experience and theological metaphysics, as well as an attentive rereading of the Rhineland mystics, Teresa of Avila, and the most daring of the thirteenth century female mystics: St. Angela of Foligno, Marguerite Porete, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Hadewijch of Antwerp. Perhaps the mystery of our annihilation in the abyss of God can only be discovered as a wound of love when we ask, like the Beloved in the Song of Songs: Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.
By Andrew Kuiper