ORATORIAN SPIRITUALITY
by Jean Gautier
Director of the Seminary of Saint Sulpice



THE FOUNDERS

There are certain striking portraits, such as Vasari's portrait of Lorenzo 
the Magnificent, or Savonarola's in Saint Mark's museum in Florence, before 
which we instinctively pause. It may be the intensity of expression or 
something indefinably mysterious in the tormented lines of the face that 
makes us stop.

In the gallery of French spiritual authors of the eighteenth century there 
are men whose original character, powerful personality and uncommon 
holiness attract our attention. But it takes time to become intimate with 
men like these, to plumb the depths of their thoughts and of their 
doctrines. Courage, too, is needed, perhaps because such men are so great 
and so completely impregnated with divine secrets, they do not at once 
yield themselves to those who wish, not only to understand but also to love 
them. The contrasts of their nature are disconcerting. At the same time 
speculative and practical like Berulle, contemplative and almost 
virgorously active like Olier, or like Jean Eudes distinguished in speech 
and writing, when they do not allow themselves to slip into a negligent 
style, their very complexity makes them seem elusive. They move in a world 
of light and shadow and it is hard for us to follow them. But brightness 
prevails and once the darkness is scattered, it illumines all things, 
especially their souls.

Berulle, Condren, Olier, Saint John Eudes, these four "great" founders of 
the French school of spirituality were men of many contrasts. It takes time 
to discover beyond their grand composure, their infinite tenderness of 
heart. Their doctrine which is drawn from Sacred Scripture and Christian 
dogmas is not easily understood. But to those who make it their own, it 
becomes a source of light, strength and perfection. Those who embrace this 
teaching, especially priests, are rapidly transformed. The faithful, too, 
who have to struggle in the world derive real profit therefrom.

An attempt will be made to prove this in a simple and much too short study 
of a deep and complex doctrine. Let us first meet the authors.


BERULLE

Pierre de Berulle, the founder of our school of spirituality was born in 
the Chateau de Serilly, near Troyes, February 4, 1575. France was then 
entering upon an era of grandeur. Soon Henry IV would come and put an end 
to the devastating civil wars. Little by little society would be 
transformed, manners would become more gentle and refined. A new age would 
dawn in which the arts would lose some of their exuberance and letters 
would be enriched by the heritage of the Renaissance.

This was a privileged epoch: its most grandiose monuments have been 
preserved for us in the etchings of Israel Sylvestre whose magnificent 
lords and tattered beggars have been engraved with so much verve by Callot. 
This was a spiritual epoch, "alive and picturesque, enjoying a freedom of 
advance destined too soon to slow down under the Sun King's gaze".

The young de Berulle manifested from his earliest years all that was 
characteristic of his time: a lively exuberance united to a strength that 
disciplined impetuous desires. While a student at the College of Boncourt, 
he worked as hard as he could all day and then stole from his night's rest, 
several hours of prayer. And how strange was the prayer of this adolescent 
losing himself in the contemplation of the divine attributes at an age when 
sensible pleasures usually have a much stronger appeal than the austere 
joys of metaphysical pietyl Later this attraction for the most elevated 
speculations was to distinguish de Berulle and g*e his life as well as his 
doctrine a singular grandeur and perfect unity. But this gravity which 
seems to us precocious was won only at the cost of struggle. The fruits of 
this struggle were precious. Pierre, purified, was able to give peace to 
others. At twelve, he brought consolation to one in great sorrow. A few 
months later he quickly outlined a detailed plan of life for a fervent soul 
who had been much afflicted

Everything helped to prepare him for God's service. He placed himself under 
the direction of the Jesuits; he followed courses at the Sorbonne. Between 
times he converted heretics, exposed alleged saints, went often to the 
hotel Acarie where he met very famous mystics, and at the insistence of Dom 
Beaucousin he prepared his "Bref Discours de l'abnegation interieure," a 
kind of adaptation of the "Abrege' de la perfection" which had been written 
in Italian about 1550 by Isabelle Bellinzaga. Finally, he was ordained on 
June 5, 1599 in the chapel of the residence of the Archbishop of Paris.

That same year, on December 16, Henry IV conferred on him the title of 
honorary chaplain. This obliged him to appear at the court but he went 
there as little as possible, believing that he had better things to do 
elsewhere because he was consumed with zeal. Like Saint Francis of Sales 
(they were great friends), he was a renowned director of souls

Addressing himself to advanced souls, his direction was dogmatic in tone. 
His great concern was to give souls living principles. The Bishop of 
Geneva, on the contrary, wrote for all kinds of people, begirmers as well 
as those who had made some progress and his direction was psychological and 
moral, rather than dogmatic. He taught men right living rather than right 
thinking.

Berulle's direction was for the mind, Francis of Sales' was for the heart. 
One brought light in order to kindle warmth, the other kindled souls in 
order to enlighten them. The ISrst method is more profound and seldom 
follows beaten tracks; the second is clearer, more attractive and less 
didactic. In conclusion we might say that if de Berulles eems less austere 
than Francis, both basically make the same demands: the Berullian 
"disappropriation" matches the Salesian "holy abandonment".

To enlighten the souls of his penitents Berulle resolved to give precise 
expression to his views in the various works which form a magnificent summa 
of spiritual theology. Let us cite merely the "Elevations" which were 
composed between 1611 and 1613; the "Traite' des Energumenes;" the 
"Discours de L'Etat et des Grandeurs de Jesus,"  intended to be a complete 
doctrinal study as an answer to attacks; the "Elevation sur sainte 
Madeleine;" the "Narre des persecutions souleuees par les voeux;" the 
"Memorial de direction pour les Superieurs;" the "Opuscules de piete" and 
lastly a delightful "Vie de Jesus" which unfortunately was never finished.

To the publication of these many works he added much exterior activity. The 
monarchy entrusted him with several important diplomatic missions. France 
is also indebted to him for the arrival of the Carmelites. Above all she 
owes to him the foundation of the Oratory, and as a resuk the major 
seminaries which were to renew the spirit of the clergy.

So many good works united to great virtue deserved a reward. It took the 
form, in 1627, of the cardinalate which he accepted only with humility. It 
took the final form of a consoling and happy death. Berulle had asked that 
he die at the altar. This is, in fact, what happened on October 2, 1629. He 
left behind him his spirit, and disciples.


CONDREN

The first of his disciples, in point of time, was Condren. He, too, was a 
precocious child. "He seemed to have had the spirit of the Oratory... from 
his cradle". Destined for a military career, he neglected ballistics for 
theology. He could be seen going off to the country a musket on his 
shoulder and Saint Augustine under his arm. Out of his father's sight he 
put down his weapon and opened his favorite author. But eventually he had 
to go back to Monceaux, to his family. "On the way home", Amelote relates, 
"he shot a full bag of game so that at his return his father smiled 
comfortably at the thought of the military future of so expert a hunter".

This skillful hunter was soon to place himself under the peaceful staff of 
M. de Berulle. He absorbed his master's teaching, making it his own in his 
own way. His attraction led him to meditate, above all, on the priesthood 
and sacrifice of our Savior. Quesnel has given us his views in the book 
entitled: "L'Idee du Sacerdoce et du Sacrifice de Jesus-Christ."  Here he 
shows that the sacrifice of Jesus is to be found in every part of His life 
and that the priest, "another Christ on earth" will be truly worthy of his 
character and his function only if he makes his life a perpetual holocaust 
to the glory of the Father.[1]

Condren was to succeed Berulle as superior of the Oratory. His remarkable 
spiritual conferences inspired the writings of his disciples: the "Tresor 
spirituel" of P. Quarre, the "Nouvel Adam" of P. Saint Pe, the "Royaume de 
Jesus" of Saint John Eudes. We are also indebted to him for needling M. 
Olier for the foundation of the major seminaries. When he died in 1641 he 
left behind him several ecclesiastics filled with his spirit. The most 
celebrated was Jean-Jacques Olier.


MONSIEUR OLIER

It was in Paris, in a fine home on the rue du Roi de Sicile, that Jean-
Jacques Olier was born on September 20, 1608. His father, a great court 
official of France, was one of those men wholly devoted to the monarchy, a 
forthright and simple man with whom it is not wise to jest. The future 
founder of Saint Sulpice inherited the paternal energy but not his crushing 
rudeness.

Destined for the priesthood, he had acquired several benefices after 
receiving the tonsure when he was eleven years old, but his lively 
character made his parents uneasy.

They consulted Saint Francis of Sales who reassured them and even went so 
far as to predict that this spontaneous and troublesome child would become 
a great churchman. This prediction was to be realized but for some time the 
young cleric continued to lead with several priests of his own rank a life 
that was dissipated without being dissolute.

"Very soon grace pursued him. He surrendered, and placed himself under the 
direction of Saint Vincent of Paul who prepared him for his ordination in 
1633 and almost immediately wanted him to be made a bishop".

Desiring to flee from an honor of which he judged himself to be unworthy, 
he consuked Father Condren, who agreed with him, told him to refuse and 
then, after initiating him into the spirituality of Berulle, sent him to 
the missions of Auvergne to exercise the zeal that devoured him. He 
accomplished marvels. At the close of the second mission, a trial, at once 
supernatural and neuropathological, almost destroyed his ministry. In this 
crisis it is rather difficult to distinguish nature and grace, and to say 
where one began and the other ended. The trial ended almost abruptly at 
Chartres. Grace triumphed completely. Priests working with M. Olier then 
noticed in him a truer humility, a more convincing manner of speaking and a 
more ardent devotedness to the care of souls than in the past. The fire of 
interior purihcations had consumed the last encumbering dross and his 
generous soul was transformed and ready for his triple role of parish 
priest, founder of a seminary, and spiritual author.

What the parish of Saint Sulpice became under his direction is well known. 
At that time the parish covered a lot of territory. He divided it into 
sections, for each he made two men responsible. He himself repeatedly 
visited every home. He reorganized the catechism classes for children and 
adults, public criers announcing each class. He gave new impetus to 
workers' associations. He founded thirty-four parish schools and several 
libraries for the circulation of spiritual books. He introduced preparatory 
retreats for engaged couples and those about to be married. He enhanced the 
splendor of church ceremonies, worked against the custom of dueling, 
procured tools for poor workers, arranged for aid to be given discretely to 
those who were ashamed of their poverty, restored several convents, erected 
suitable buildings for communities of priests and clerics, began the 
construction of a huge church, wrote rules of life for different social 
classes and commentaries in French for the more fruitful reception of the 
sacraments, made good use of the help of lay people. Our Catholic Action, 
three centuries later, could not invent anything much better. Let us add 
that M. Olier's zeal, together with that of the Franciscans and Jesuits, 
extended as far as Canada which owes to him, even in our own times, the 
vitality of its faith.

Nevertheless, Jean-Jacques Olier is above all known, with Saint Vincent of 
Paul and Saint Jean Eudes, as one of the three principal founders of our 
French seminaries. Inspired by the counsel of Father de Condren, he 
succeeded there where so many powerful men had failed. But he was not 
satisfied with giving his young clerics an intellectual formation, he 
wished them to receive a spiritual and sacerdotal doctrine that we hnd 
condensed in his various works: the "Traite' des Saints Ordres"  published 
in 1675 and which has contributed to the sanctification of so many priests, 
the "Journee chretienne" (1665) was a collection of prayers and formulae of 
adherence and adoration designed to help us to perform our daily actions in 
union with Christ, the "Catechisme chretien pour la vie interieure" (1656) 
gives, in the form of questions and answers, an analysis of the need of 
dying to self in order to be reborn spiritually with Jesus; the 
"Introduction a la vie et aux vertus chretiennes" contains further lessons 
in the practice according to the spirit of Our Lord of virtues best 
calculated to weaken the virulence of our evil passions. Let us recall some 
other works written or inspired by him: "Lettres" richly doctrinal, the 
"Pietas Seminarii, ('Esprit d'un Directeur des ames," the "Explication des 
ceremonies de la Grand Messe," the "La vie interieure de la Tres Sainte 
Vierge." These texts have been arranged and in many cases mutilated by M. 
Faillon.

Exhausted by apostolic labors and probably by his austerities as well, M. 
Olier did not resist the illness that carried him off on April 2, 1657 at 
the age of 48. He had the consolation of being assisted on his death bed by 
Saint Vincent of Paul.


SAINT JOHN EUDE;S

With Saint John Eudes we come to the last of the founders of the French 
school. This saint--the Church canonized him in 1925--was born in the 
diocese of Seez in 1601. After studying with the Jesuits at Caen, he 
entered the Oratory in 1623. For reasons which we need not go into here, he 
left the Oratory twenty years later and founded the Congregation of Jesus 
and Mary. He shares with Saint Vincent of Paul and M. Olier the title of 
Founder of French seminaries.

This title, noble though it be, might not have sufficed for his glory had 
this Norman saint by word and pen not spent himself without counting the 
cost for the service of souls. He preached many missions, converted his 
province, took charge of repentant young girls for whom he founded the 
Congregation de NotreDame de Charite, which was later to lead to the 
establishment of the Good Shepherd at Angers, and at the same time he 
introduced the faithful to devotion to the Sacred Heart.

In 1611 he conceived the idea of paying public honor to the Heart of Our 
Lady. In 1648, he published at Autun the first edition of his Office of the 
Heart of Mary. In 1670 after various changes, the Saint who had united the 
Heart of Jesus and the Heart of His Mother in the same veneration, 
definitely separated these two cults, leaving February 8, the feast with an 
octave of the Most Pure Heart of Mary and he prepared a proper Office and a 
Mass for the solemnity and octave of the divine Heart of Jesus. In 1672 
this feast was celebrated in several dioceses of France.

In this way Father Eudes, even before the first revelations had been made 
at Paray-le-Monial in 1673, had instituted the liturgical cult of the 
Sacred Heart and deserved to be proclaimed by Pius X as the Father, the 
Apostle and the Doctor of this devotion whose whole theology he had 
developed in the Office and in his many books. Among these writings let us 
cite "La Vie et le Royaume de Jesus" which is the most carefully composed 
of his works; two treatises on "L'Enfance" and the "Coeur admirable, Le Bon 
Confesseur et le Predicateur apostolique," the "Memorial" and the 
"Constitutions."

Saint Eudes died in 1680. Pius XI in canonizing him paid homage not only to 
the saint himself but also to the School of Spirituality to which he 
belonged and many of whose great intellects he influenced such as Bossuet, 
Bourgoing, Thomassin, or apostles like Saint Vincent of Paul, Saint Grignon 
of Montfort, Saint John Baptist of la Salle, Father Libermann, Fathers 
Guillore, Faber, Giraud, Lhoumeau, and Mgr. Gay.



SPIRITUAL DOCTRINE[2]


Guiding Principle.

The French School is based on the principle that we are created by God and 
made in His image so to Him must we return (this is Augustinian 
Exemplarism); that, here below, we ought to begin to be what we will be 
eternally in heaven: a host in adoration of the three divine Persons, and 
that there is no better way of fulfilling this spiritual program than by 
"adhering to Jesus, the Father's perfect adorer and religious" whose 
thoughts, wills and virtues we must reproduce, "Vivere summe Deo in Christo 
Jesu" "To live entirely for God in Christ Jesus."[3] In the Incarnation the 
holy humanity of Jesus is without any human personality of its own. It has 
"no self-interest. It does not act for its own sake but for the heavenly 
Father whom it considers in all things". So we must become "annihilated in 
regard to our own plans and have only those of Jesus Christ who is in us in 
order to live for His Father".[4]


THE TRINITY

To adore the Trinity and with Christ to pay Him all we owe Him ought then 
to be the Christian's preoccupation. Although the fundamental thesis of the 
French School is to place the mystery of the Incarnation "at the center of 
history as well as at the center of every Christian life", as Louis Cognet 
rightly observes, the scope of his thought can only be truly understood by 
considering the basis of his ideas about the Trinity. The importance of 
these ideas has not always been clearly understood, yet they are the 
keystone and, as it were, the ontological substructure of his ideas.[5]


The Trinity considered in itself.

Berulle and his disciples turn to theologians when they wish to receive 
some lights on this divine mystery. But they take the abstract ideas they 
find in treatises and in their heart they transmute these lights into heat.

God the Father, they say, pronounces a word similar and equal to His own 
being, this living and essential word is the Logos. Seeing this Logos, this 
word which is His image, His thought, His glory, a splendor equivalent to 
all His perfections, the Father loves Him with a love without limits; and 
the Son returns a similar love, equally infinite and eternal, a love that 
is unique though mutual, living and subsistent, the embrace, the ineffable 
kiss which consummated them in the unity of the Holy Spirit.

With this unity of nature in a trinity of Persons, God possesses all the 
perfections that constitute His attributes: aseity, wisdom, beauty, 
immortality, justice, power... It is clear that He suffices for Himself and 
that if He communicates Himself "ad extra," it is only through pure 
goodness and without any necessity.

He may well remain within Himself for all eternity. To be happy He has 
merely to contemplate Himself. He sees His word, His portrait, His image; 
He sees His Son, God like Himself... He is happy, eternally happy.[6]

But the enthusiasm of the poet of the French School, Jean-Jacques Olier 
grows still greater because God, possessing so intimate a happiness wishes 
to share with us this happiness, to manifest to us in some way His 
perfections and to ransom us by giving us His Word. Far better, "although 
the initiative of the Incarnation comes from the Father, the Son 
spontaneously concurs ", not through necessity but by a kind of attraction 
(propension) which is His own and which Berulle stresses in his "Opuscules 
de piete".[7] Be this as it may Olier sings joyfully at the thought of the 
Word who did not disdain to clothe Himself in human nature and who 
"recapitulated" in His Person all mankind and carried it back to its source 
after restoring in man the image of God lost by sin.

The founder of Saint Sulpice had good reason to marvel when he considered 
the designs of Providence and his admiration and wonder matched that of 
Saint Augustine, Saint Ambrose, Saint Bernard, of all the doctors and 
mystics who have magnified throughout the centuries the good and the power 
of the Father's decree of the Incarnation. Through this mystery the three 
Persons have made themselves nearer, more adorable, more accessible. Before 
the Incarnation God was above all to be feared and admired. Now He is to be 
loved.



Trinity, creation and grace.

If the Incarnation which was decreed within the Trinity, is to use 
Berulle's phrase, "God's great work", then the creation of the world with 
all the consequences that this entails also reveals, to anyone who knows 
how to decipher the book of nature, infinite power and the divine 
attributes. The higher we rise in the ladder of creatures, the more 
brilliant these appear. With the Bishop of Hippo, the French School sings 
the canticle of the steps:

We ought to be like those men who looking at the ocean, see the sun and the 
stars reflected in this polished crystal as in a fair mirror on which these 
luminous astral bodies impress their beauty, their motion, their light. So 
on earth we ought to see the heavens and the Creator in the creature.[8]

We will see this Creator, first, "within inferior nature", in mountains, in 
the noise of the torrents--these show His power and invisible strength. 
Then we will see Him "within living nature", in birds with all their 
brilliant plumage, in their songs which "reveal His beauty". Thus speaks M. 
Olier, a Virgil made wise by the "Confessions" and the metaphysics of M. de 
Berulle. In some of his words, for example in "La Journee Chretienne" and 
in certain pages of his "Memoires" he gives the impression that these birds 
magnify their Author and that the flowers whisper in prayer. Has it not 
been said that a poet ought to be hidden in every Sulpician soul? Whatever 
may be the value of this statement, we ought to see the Creator "in man in 
whom God has placed His mark and His image".

It goes without saying that our resemblance with the Trinity, already 
indicated in the order of nature, for we are endowed with memory, 
intelligence and will, becomes more perfect in the order of grace. This is 
a manner of being, a quality inherent in the substance of the soul which 
makes us, according to the energetic expression of Saint Peter, 
"participants of the divine nature". Saint John adds that it enables us to 
enter into communication with the Holy Spirit, in "society with the Father 
and the Son".

It does not make us equal to God, it does make us deiform. It does not give 
God's life, which is essentially incommunicable, but it does give us a life 
like His. In this way our soul, little bylittle,becomes a living image of 
the Trinity, a kind of miniature portrait engraved by the Holy Spirit 
through the merits of the Word Incarnate who died out of love for man. The 
higher the grace, the more exact the resemblance. Now this grace is at its 
highest point in the Savior's humanity, it is diffused, according to each 
individual measure, in the soul of Our Lady, of the saints and of the 
faithful.

But, if this means that we hnd the Trinity and His action in every level of 
the natural and supernatural world--let us notice in passing that the 
trinitarian concept of spiritual men of the French School is derived most 
of all from the Greek Fathers-- it follows that we must adore and pay honor 
to the Trinity everywhere. What are we to understand by this often repeated 
term: adore, adoration?


ADORATION

Cardinal de Berulle's first disciples always glorified their master, not 
without a filial exaggeration for which we must forgive them, because he 
restored a virtue often ignored, the virtue of religion.

Bourgoing wrote:

"Our very revered Father renewed in the Church, as far as he was able, the 
spirit of religion, the supreme cult of adoration and reverence. .. It is 
this spirit that he resolved to establish amongst us, this spirit that 
possessed and transported him, this spirit that appears in all his prayers, 
in all his writings, in all his devotions."[9]

This same spirit of adoration manifested itself among all Berullians. It 
must be seen as an habitual state of soul, a tendency that gives to the 
spiritual life its formal aspect and distinctive characteristic.

In this act of adoration our two major faculties share: intelligence and 
will. Every act of religion, in fact, supposes an act of knowledge. That is 
why inanimate nature does not adore God in the proper sense of the word.

Nature cannot see, she shows herself; she cannot adore, she leads us to do 
so; and this God whom she cannot know, she will not allow us to ignore... 
But man, a divine animal, full of reason and intelligence, capable of 
knowing God through himself and all creatures is also pressed by himself 
and by all creatures to pay Him adoration... This he does by acknowledging 
that God is a perfect nature, that God is a sovereign nature, that God is a 
beneficent nature... and we are naturally drawn to revere what is 
perfect... to unite ourselves to what is beneficent, to adhere to what is 
good.[10]

Adoration consists, therefore, first in acknowledging the greatness and the 
divine goodness. An intellectual sight that in turn draws the will that 
abases itself before the supreme majesty. It humbles itself as a creature 
before the Creator. This is elementary justice that existed in the 
hypothetical state of pure nature as it exists in our world of grace.

Berulle says:

"To adore is to think lofty thoughts of the object of our adoration and to 
subject our wills made submissive and supple to the excellence and dignity 
it contains."

But the French School does not stop at the order of nature. The God whom it 
adores is the same God who bestows grace and who looks on creatures with a 
father's tenderness. All the infused supernatural virtues enter into an act 
of adoration, and the most important of these is love. The act becomes 
love's first expression and gains in complexity and sweetness. It adores 
God more deeply, both in His somewhat forbidding magnificence and in His 
infinite mercy, because "if He is remote in His grandeur, His charity 
brings Him very near " He is "infinitely elevated and infinitely concerned 
with created being, infinitely exacting and infinitely delighfful".[11]

It is in this light that love's role is considered in the spirituality of 
the French School. Let us look at it in God, or in the creation He unifies, 
rules and transforms. In God love unites the august Persons and leads them 
to stoop over us.

God is love, infinite love. He is the love of complacency and benevolence. 
He finds infinite complacency in Himself... But this adorable complacency 
of God does not stop in Himself, it extends to the creature who becomes a 
subject of delight and eternal beatitude.

And Berulle makes clear that it is this same love that leads souls to 
contemplation and enables them to give God "interior and perfect 
adoration".[12]

Love it is that effects the junction of God and man. A junction all the 
easier because man already possesses in the natural order, in this 
Berulle's disciples follow Saint Francis of Sales, a touch stone, a kind of 
instinct that orients man toward the supreme good whose precise term he 
cannot conceive. This movement f nature finds in grace gratuitously offered 
a beginning of adaptation. By grace God takes possession of a heart already 
unconsciously orientated toward infinite love. Then it is that the 
supernatural takes possession of nature, perfects it by elevating it, and 
the Creator acts in certain souls:

"With such efficacy and power that they (i. e. the creatures) are not able 
to endure the operations of His love... He takes His delight in these 
hearts and at times during this operation they seem strong enough to 
destroy a thousand worlds."[13]

If no obstacle is voluntarily opposed to this love it becomes transforming. 
It fashions true adorers, places on their lips perfect praise, prostrates 
them before the divine perfections which they do not tire of magnifying in 
prayer, praise, deed. It is truly, as has been said elsewhere, "an adoring 
love" or "an adoration of love" but to express it one probably would not 
borrow the passionate effusions of medieval mystics. Adoration, even at its 
summit will be restrained by the thought of the presence of God, but this 
will make it only deeper and will support it without ever coming to an end.

Now, perhaps, will be understood what our Masters mean when they use the 
word: to adore. Adoration is a spirit that permeates Christian life to its 
depths, a state which is expressed in acts at times only interior, at times 
ritual, an unending oblation, a surrender expressing the love and praise of 
the whole being before the Creator.

The virtue of religion thus understood acquires great value in the realm of 
spirituality because it becomes as it were a synthesis of all the virtues 
which in it play their conjoint roles. Far from weighing us down, and 
"crushing us under the weight of its formal solemnity" as has sometimes 
thoughtlessly been written, it becomes for the Christian a fruitful source 
of unspeakable joy which from the earth overflows, growing ever greater, 
into the heart of God.

But let us not forget, our means are limited, and our adoration however 
fervent it rnay be, however lyrical it may appear, will always remain 
inadequate. Our knowledge of God is incomplete, His intimate life escapes 
us, His mysteries bring with them darkness, His transcendence is far beyond 
us and we stammer when we try to express His greatness. And what impurities 
in our soull If love has checked our selfishness it has not been able to 
complete the work of destruction. Our passions take on new life, they burn 
and overflow like a river of fire. Mystical life itself, fairly frequent in 
its beginnings, so rare in its highest forms, supposing that we enjoy it in 
some form, has not transformed all... Must we resign ourselves to offer God 
only love that is a jest, and praise that falls short of true praise?

Berulle gives us the answer. We have in Jesus Christ, he says, "the 
supplement of our adoration", the "perfect Adorer", the "true religious by 
state". It is up to us to join ourselves to Him and offer Him to the 
Father.


JESUS CHRIST THE PEREECT A DORER

From all eternity there had indeed been a God who is inhnitely adorable but 
there had never been an inhnite adorer... Now, O Jesus You are this adorer, 
this servant inhnite in power, in quality, in dignity. You can fully 
satisfy this obligation. You can render this divine homage.[14]

It is, in fact, easy to understand how the adoration of the Word Incarnate 
leaves nothing to be desired because it embraces "all possible 
obligations". It pays such honor to "all God's various qualities and His 
greatness that not a single attribute is left without the honor which is 
its due."[15]. Adoration, total, adequate, transcending the capacity of 
angels and the limited natures that are ours, "adoration by state" because 
by His mere mode of being, by His constitutive being of Man-God, the 
Incarnate Word, masterpiece of the Father, totally "referred" to His 
Father, who finds in Him His delights, is able to render infinite praise.

Adorer "by state", Jesus is also the term and means of adoration.


Term of adoration

On this point the views of the French School are in no way very original. 
They have value only because of the richness of their expression. What 
Berulle's disciple contemplates in Jesus, is, above all and this is part of 
the logic of his system: "the divinely human and the humanly divine life" 
of the Son of God, the union of the two natures united by "a bond so dear, 
so close, so intimate as the unity of the same person". He never tires 
adoring as he singles out the divine perfections which he perceives beneath 
the veil of the Savior's humanity. He praises this humanity because the 
"invisible God is made manifest in the flesh that He has united with an 
eternal nature. O marvel! O greatness."!


Means or Mediator of adoration

Jesus is a means of adoration, a mediator of religion, as He is already its 
principle and term. So it is through Him that our praise ought to pass the 
more effectively to reach the Father. He is the "way, truth and life", the 
center to which all things converge. And this role of mediator, the Word 
who, according to every hypothesis, would have become incarnate so as to be 
"the supplement" of our praise, and the crown of creation, even if man had 
never sinned.[16] But man did in fact sin and this involves reparation. 
Mediation of reparation will therefore precede the mediation of praise, 
although they are one in practice.

Jesus is mediator of reparation by His priesthood and His sacrifice. Priest 
and victim dedicated to the Father's glory, He has been since His birth 
when He reunited, in His Person, the power that makes it possible for Him 
to sacrifice and the dependence that makes Him a victim. He draws the power 
from His divine nature, the dependence from His human nature. Condren has 
richly orchestrated this theme.

Jesus is a mediator of praise, in all things, always and everywhere. This 
He is by "state". All that He says as doctor, all that He does as wonder-
worker, as legislator, as savior, as pontiff or according to whatever be 
the title, He does for the glory and love of the Father. He does it without 
altemative, without return, without the possibility of repentance. Not only 
what He does one day, He does always, but committed as He is, He cannot 
even not do it. He is bound by His state, and this bond is His state 
itself. He belongs to His hypostatic union as the stem is bound to the 
root.

So it is through Jesus that we must pass. So it is to His praise that we 
must unite our own, or better, it is His praise that we must make ours so 
that it will be pleasing to the Father.

Jesus is also and finally the means of adoration because He is the head of 
mankind, the head of the mystical body of which we are the members. 
Christ's life alone introduces us into the life of the Trinity. His praise 
alone deserves to be received in its fulness and infinite resonances. To 
it, therefore, it is imperative that we adhere.


ADHERENCE TO THE INCARNATE WORD

We best adhere to the Word Incarnate by sharing in His Mysteries.

"To be a perfect Christian it is necessary to share in all the mysteries of 
Jesus Christ, this lovable Redeemer purposely experienced them in His 
Person so that they might be most abundant sources of grace."[17]

These mysteries are the incidents of our Savior's life. Through them the 
Church received "sanctifying grace and various states and special graces 
that each mystery pours into our souls."[18]

What are we to understand by the word "state" that is traced so often by 
our masters' pen? We are told "to communicate in the states of Jesus", "to 
bind" ourselves to His states, to adore them and to adhere to them.

For a real understanding of this term we must distinguish between the 
exterior and the interior of Christ's mysteries. The exterior is transitory 
and consists "of the actions that Christ performed during His mortal life"; 
it follows that they belong to the past and cannot be repeated. The 
interior, on the contrary, is permanent. These are "our Lord's dispositions 
and sentiments in each of these mysteries". These dispositions remain in 
Jesus because they are inherent to the Incarnation. There is something 
stable about them, they produce graces throughout the centuries and are in 
this way made eternal; they are a "state" by way of contrast with "the act" 
that passes and vanishes the moment it is performed:

"The mysteries of Jesus Christ are in a sense over, and in another sense 
they continue and are present and perpetual. As far as execution is 
concerned they are over, but in their power they are present and their 
power never passes, nor does the love pass with which they were performed. 
The spirit of God through which this mystery was elected, the interior 
state of the exterior act, the efficacy and the virtue that makes this 
mystery living and operative in us, this state and virtuous disposition, 
the merit through which He won us to His Father and merited heaven... even 
the actual pleasure, the living disposition in which Jesus performed this 
mystery is still living, actual and present to Jesus."[19]

May I be forgiven for this long quotation that explains so well that it is 
one and the same spirit that inspired the Word Incarnate and the members of 
His Mystical Body. The divine Spirit produced these permanent dispositions 
in Christ's soul and these dispositions are present in "Christian souls so 
all are made to share in the same sentiments as long as they are in 
sanctifying grace, and they open themselves to, apply themselves to, 
communicate with", and "adhere" to the virtue of the mystery and to Him who 
lived this mystery: our Savior Jesus Christ."[20]

Therefore we ought

"to treat the things and the mysteries of Jesus not like things over and 
done, but like things living and present, even eternal, from which we also 
are to draw fruits that are present and eternal."[21]

In this way, by adhering to the Word Incarnate, by communicating with His 
intimate dispositions, we can make His spirit our own, according to our 
providential attraits. This spirit is the spirit of childhood drawn from 
the mystery of the crib; the spirit of religion drawn from the whole course 
of His life, particularly from His life of prayer and from His eucharistic 
life; the spirit of sacrifice and expiation flowing from the mystery of the 
Redemption. Surely Jesus is no longer a child and He can no longer suffer, 
but Berulle insists that there is something divine in these mysteries which 
continues to exist in heaven and which produces a kind of similar grace.

"in souls on earth... We even see that Jesus has found a way of 
establishing part of His Passion in His glorified state for in it He keeps 
His wounds... but what He keeps of His Passion, in body and soul, is life 
and glory... and this is what remains in Him of His mysteries and forms on 
earth, a form of grace to which souls are united in order to be able to 
receive it.[22]

Now we see how it is that if historically Christmas is forever past, if the 
Passion is a far off event, nevertheless for the Christian, Christmas and 
the Passion continue to exist because they do not cease to be efficacious. 
In their relations with our Lord, Christians are not only destined to be 
His members and to share in His life, they are also called to reproduce in 
themselves His different mysteries, to clothe themselves with their graces 
and to manifest the incomprehensible perfections hidden in each one."[23]

If we ought to adhere in this way to all Christ's mysteries, there are two 
which are stressed by the French School (this teaching follows closely that 
of Saint Paul), to these mysteries we ought specially to bind ourselves and 
we ought to reproduce them in our persons. These are the mysteries of death 
and resurrection. "To rise with Christ", we must "die with Him".

This necessity cannot be avoided if we would ensure not only our salvation, 
but also the perfection of our praise and the efficacy of our religion, 
because it is to the extent that we are dead to ourselves and living in and 
through Christ that we attain the end for which we were created: to give 
God as much glory as possible.

This is indeed the transformation of the Christian that concerns us here. 
It begins with baptism which incorporates us in Jesus, cleanses us of the 
original stain, gives us sanctifying grace with its cortege of virtues and 
gifts. These truths become clearer if we recall the symbolism of baptism by 
immersion as it was conferred in the primitive Church. The neophyte 
immersed himself completely in the water, the better to signify his death 
to sin. He emerged with but one desire: to live a risen life with Jesus, a 
life purified and truly Christian.[24]

The transformation we experienced in baptism is then very real, but it is 
not definitive and it is not without the possibility of any return. 
Christ's life must be lived. It may be lived more or less. We have clothed 
ourselves with Christ but to this act there are many degrees, we must 
clothe ourselves with Him still more. The "old man" made up of all the 
inclinations released by original sin and uncontrolled by intellect and 
will, must die again and again so that "the new man" may again and again 
rise and grow.

The life of the newly baptized is a drama in two acts. Death prepares life 
and life must vanquish death. The flesh must struggle against the spirit 
and seek to crush it, grace fights against rebel nature and wants to 
triurnph over it. But let us not separate the two phases of the drama 
because, although the Christian must until his last breath "strip" himself 
of the old man, this stripping must develop in him, by correlation, the 
life of the new man. Each renunciation produces an increase of grace, each 
effort of the faithful soul is matched by an advance of Christ, just as 
each increase of grace leads to a new renunciation.

So there is not first and necessarily abnegation, then adherence to Jesus, 
but these two acts complement one another and are intimately united. In 
practice, they must necessarily be distinguished. Soon Jesus grows in the 
soul, His personality becomes dominant, overflowing and radiating. And this 
progressive domination made Saint Paul say these astonishing words, so 
often repeated by the Spirituals of the French School: "It is no longer I 
that live, but Christ that lives in me".


ABNEGATION OR DISAPPROPRIATION
WAYS OF ADHERENCE

Abnegation or disappropriation

We have just seen that abnegation and adherence are two concomitant acts 
which logic obliges us to distinguish. Let us first speak of abnegation. 
Jesus will live in us only in the measure in which, corresponding to grace, 
we shall have known how to renounce ourselves, "disappropriate" ourselves. 
Room must be made in our faculties for Jesus. By adhering to His mysteries 
and to His virtues, especially to His virtues of penance and obedience to 
the will of the Father, Christ Himself will help us to prepare this 
emptiness.

We must hold nothing in as much horror as the proprietorship which deprives 
us of the plenitude of the Word of His life and His operation... That is 
why Jesus in His Gospel laid down abnegation as the first step to be taken 
in Christian life: 'If anyone wants to come after Me let him renounce 
himself', because this proprietorship and fullness of self hinders Jesus 
Christ's entrance into us and... it is an unending source of all evils."[25]

This is true because our nature, without being vitiated in its essence was 
wounded by original sin. According to the French School, original sin not 
only deprived us of preternatural gifts but produced in us a state of 
weakness, of lust, that Saint Paul designates under the name of sin or of 
"flesh".

Flesh is all that is contrary to the spirit of man regenerated by grace, or 
to the Spirit of God. "Caro concupiscit adversus spiritum."  We can never 
completely destroy the flesh but we must try to weaken it and subject it to 
Jesus Christ. Grace aiding, we must plunge the red-hot iron into the. 
wounds of our pride, and of our desires for riches and pleasure. In short, 
we must "disappropriate" ourselves of all we hold most dear, of the "me" 
that blocks my way to God.

M. Olier is so firmly persuaded of the necessity of all this that he 
prepared for the use of his disciples some thirty aphorisms more or less 
based on Saint John of the Cross, giving a picture of the wicked results of 
proprietorship and the corresponding advantages of interior dispoiling:[26]

1. The owner stays within                      1. The Christian goes out of
   himself.                                      himself.

2. The owner is full of                        2. The Christian is empty of
   self.                                         self.

5. The owner thinks well                       5. The Christian despises
   of self.                                       self.

6. The owner wishes to                         6. The Christian withdraws
   appear and to show                             and hides himself.
   himself.

The stripping away of all personal good seems painfill to nature and ought 
to crush it under the weight of perpetual constraint. The truth is not at 
all like this. The "disappropriation" restores the creature, subjecting it 
to grace, freeing it from its miseries, and bringing it joy and peace.

28. The owner is always                       28. The Christian is always
    agitated and restless.                        equable, tranquil and at
                                                  peace.

29. The owner is usually sad,                  29. The Christian is joyful,
    cast-down, abstracted.                         open, and his mind is
                                                   active.

Social relations become easier. Having nothing to lose because he has given 
everything away and separated himself from himself, the Christian has no 
susceptibilities.

30. The owner becomes ill                    30. The Christian is never
    tempered at the slightest                    disturbed, he endures all
    word, he takes all amiss                     things with patience it
    he is suspicious and                         never occurs to him that
    thinks every word and                        anyone intends to hurt
    act is aimed at him.                         him.

To complete this disappropriation and to help to drive out "the old man", 
four crucifying virtues must be practiced: at Saint Sulpice these virtues 
are called "the arms of the Cross".

Pride will be combatted by obedience and humility, the desire for riches by 
poverty, sensible pleasures by chastity. Olier, in his "Introduction a la 
vie et aux vertus chretiennes"[27] gives us a concrete and practical code of 
these fundamental virtues.

Perhaps one might be tempted to say that this idea of dispossession is a 
little too austere, or that our spiritual writers hold somewhat pessimistic 
views about human nature. But we must remind ourselves of the teaching of 
theologians that the humanity of Christ could not have been united 
hypostatically to the Word had it not been deprived of any personality of 
its own. It follows, Berulle says, that if the Christian must reproduce 
Jesus, our nature "should have no other subsistence than in the Incarnate 
Word--here we must understand the word subsistence in the broad sense of 
the word. This state, considered in all its parts, obliges us strictly and 
very constantly to die to self".[28] Olier will add that we ought to 
annihilate ourselves somewhat in the same way that the substance of the 
bread disappears in the eucharistic consecration.

The French School theologians tended to exaggerate the evil consequences of 
original sin. In this there were disciples of Saint Augustine who 
emphasized, if not the decadence of nature, at least the power of grace by 
way of reaction against the voluntarist theses of Pelagius, and desired in 
addition to combat the obvious excesses of the many humanists of their 
times who gave free rein to their instincts. Yet we must note that when 
they discoursed, in rather hard terms, about the disturbances caused in 
human nature by this sin, they always did so in opposition to the concrete 
state of primitive justice. They never made any comparison with a 
hypothetical state of pure nature. Consequently their ascesis is based, 
perhaps, more on the notion of creation than on the notion of original sin. 
This sin deprived us of grace, our own faults increase our weakness and 
depravity but despite this fall we are still "capacities for God". Nothing 
is lost definitively. Our misery may help to reestablish us and to make us 
great. So true is this that what might, at times, be called the pessimism 
of the French School can be transformed into magnificent optimism.

Sin has darkened our intellect and lessened the strength of our will, yet 
it has not destroyed our ruling faculties. Aided by grace, they can 
recognize, be reunited with, and possess their Creator. This was Berulle's 
thought and he expressed it in this magnihcent definition of man which, it 
is claimed, inspired Pascal himself. Man's misery without God. Man's 
greatness with God. What, then, is man?

"Man is made up of entirely different parts. Part miracle and part 
nothingness. He is in part heavenly and in part earthly. He is an angel, he 
is an animal, he is a nothingness, he is a miracle, he is a center, he is a 
world, he is a god, he is a nothingness surrounded by God, he is God's 
pauper, he can receive God, he can be filled with God--if he so wishes."[29]

Let us pay special attention to the last six words: "filled with God if he 
wishes". Means of adherence, uniting us closely to Jesus, make it possible 
for us to realize this wish.


MEANS OF ADHERENCE

These means are many. To name the principal ones: Prayer, Mass, Communion, 
Particular Examen, Visits to the Blessed Sacrament, Spiritual Communion and 
the performance of the duties of one's state in a spirit of religion and in 
union with Jesus.


PRAYER

This is an important exercise because it makes easy our adherence by 
evoking and recalling to mind different mysteries of the Savior's life. It 
enables us to share in the grace attached to each mystery and to recreate 
in us the sentiments, motives and dispositions of the Incarnate Word.

M. Olier,[30] following Berulle, distinguishes three parts of prayer: 
adoration of God or of Jesus in each mystery or in one or other of His 
splendors or of His virtues; communion or participation in the mystery or 
in the virtue; cooperation which is nothing else than effective 
correspondence with the graces received during the exercise. These three 
parts may be summed up in these words: to keep Jesus before our eyes, in 
our hearts, in our hands.

The first part (Jesus before our eyes) consists in watching Jesus just as 
the gospel, tradition or theology present Him to us. We contemplate Him as 
our divine model and we pay Him our homage of adoration. The second part 
(Jesus in our hearts) consists in drawing into our soul, by the realization 
of our powerlessness and by the repeated calls of grace, the virtue 
contemplated in Jesus and which we lack. The third part (Jesus in our 
hands) becomes the object of a resolution, because every consideration 
ought to be transformed into adoration and effective action. The hands are 
the symbols of activity. We must look at Christ, and live in Him, but we 
must also imitate Him.

The method, so lacking in complexity, supposes, as we have already 
indicated that we take for the subject of our meditation a divine 
perfection, a mystery of virtue, a word of the Word Incarnate. M. Olier, 
while he does not exclude all moral themes, does not recommend them. Such 
themes, instead of carrying the soul directly to God and leading it to 
adoration and love, throw it back upon itself and keep it predominantly 
occupied with itself and its own interests. He does not want our prayer to 
be limited to the consideration of the Christian virtues in themselves; 
this he finds too abstract. He wishes us to consider them always in their 
relation to the Word Incarnate.

He understands the practice of Christian virtues to be theclosest possible 
participation in the virtues of Christ, or the Gospel teachings which are 
lessons from His own lips, or the examples of the saints for these examples 
are the fruit of His sanctifying action in each one. The disciple of the 
French School will not consider humility, to take only one example, 
speculatively and coldly; he will not try to convince himself with all 
kinds of philosophical considerations of the necessity of being humble--of 
this he could not be unawarebut he will recall the humility practiced and 
lived concretely by Jesus in His Incarnation, agony and death on the cross. 
He will look for Jesus annihilated even in the chaste womb of Mary or in 
the praetorium of Pilate. He will stand on the doorstep of the workshop in 
Nazareth, watching Jesus perform His humble tasks, or he will see Him, 
during His active ministry, complying with the demands of those about Him. 
To these transitory states of Christ, eternalized by the grace they have 
merited, he will unite himself in mind and heart, he will adore their 
manifestations and will ask, insistently, to share in them in a manner 
mysterious but real.

This supposes that we already possess a certain knowledge of the Gospel 
story, whence comes the necessity of the assiduous reading of Sacred 
Scripture, so recommended by M. Olier. This also supposes that in the 
course of the meditation, we do not attribute to Jesus ideas that are our 
own. Let us make an effort at the beginning to give up our own ideas so as 
to rediscover Christ's simple thought just as He knew it and understood it. 
This requires of us a kind of "sympathy". We must surrender our heart and 
soul to the dispositions of the heart and soul of Jesus. It does not 
suffice to "know" the emotion experienced by Jesus when he pronounced a 
certain word or performed a certain act. We must be moved by the same 
emotions. For example when in prayer we say: "Jesus loves", our spiritual 
experience ought to enable us to seize, better than any word, the 
sentiments of Christ in which we ought to communicate, so as to make them 
our own.

Another characteristic, too little noticed, of this prayer is that it 
corresponds to the petitions of the "Pater," the prayer "par excellence."

By adoration we praise our Father who is in heaven and we ask that His name 
be blessed; communion makes us ask that His kingdom come in us and in 
others; by cooperation we take tbe resolution of assuring in our souls the 
triumph of His will.

Finally the method of prayer, as M. Olier develops it, gives an important 
place to the affections. The initial adoration (Jesus before our eyes) and 
communion, which is in reality only the repeated call for grace, leave 
little room for detailed consideration. No doubt the will is a blind 
faculty which requires the light of the intellect before it can choose the 
good. But after having performed their preparatory role, these inte]lectual 
views ought to give place to the movements of the heart. Meditation does 
not consist as much in knowing as in loving and we know that in the realm 
of grace, love can transcend the intellect in extent and intensity 31 
Meditation is not study but prayer. We must "seek light (about God) through 
reverence and love rather than through light about His love."[32]

Meditation made in this way can, by its very simplicity, disturb souls 
accustomed to long discursive reasonings and numerous considerations on the 
beauty of virtues, the necessity of their acquisition, the horror of vice. 
Souls accustomed to elaborate compositions of place and the use of the 
imagination in the reconstruction of Gospel incidents with all their 
details, will also be somewhat disconcerted by Olier's method.

To remedy this uneasiness and, let us also add, to conform with the 
antimystic trend of his day, M. Tronson, then fulfilling the charge of 
third superior general of the Company, completed M. Olier's method by 
adding a preparation (this was taken in part from the Ignatian form of 
meditation) and a body of prayer (inspired by Berulle, including a great 
number of acts) and a conclusion borrowed from Saint Francis of Sales).

It would take too long to explain the method, known as the "Sulpician 
Method of Meditation." Instead we will give a synoptic table, omitting all 
reference to remote, proximate or immediate preparation because the meaning 
of these terms is familiar to all.


BODY OF THE MEDITATION

1st point:                      1) To consider the subject of our
Adoration:                         meditation in God,in our Lord, in one of 
Jesus before our eyes              the saints: the sentiments of His
                                   heart,His words, His actions.

                                2) To offer our homage: adoration or 
                                   veneration, admiration, praise,
                                   thanksgiving, love, joy or compassion.

2nd point:                      1) To convince ourselves of the necessity
Communion:                         or the importance of the virtue
Jesus in our heart.                through motives of faith, through
                                   reasoning or through a detailed
                                   examination.

                                2) To reflect on our conduct with
                                   sorrow for the past, confusion for 
                                   the present, desire for the future.

                                3) To beseech God to grant us the virtue
                                   on which we are meditating. (It is 
                                   chiefly through this prayer that
                                   we participate in the virtues of our
                                   Lord). To pray also for our other 
                                   needs, for those of the Church and of
                                   those for whom we ought to pray.

3rd point:                      1) To form a resolution: particular,
Cooperation:                       present, eflicacious, humble.
Jesus in our hands.              
                                2) To renew the resolution of our
                                   particular examen.

CONCLUSION

1) To thank God for the many graces he has given us during the meditation.

2) To beg His pardon for our faults and negligence during the meditation.

3) To beg Him to bless our resolutions, the coming day, our life, our 
death.

4) To select some striking thoughts that impressed us in order to remember 
it during the day and thus recall our resolutions.

5) To confide ourselves and the fruit of our meditation to the Blessed 
Virgin by reciting the "Sub tuum praesidium."

Highly intuitive and affective souls, and those who are more advanced will 
probably prefer the simple method first formulated by M. Olier. Beginners 
can make good use, especially during the first months of their spiritual 
life, of the method perfected and made more precise by M. Tronson, without 
feeling obliged to perform all the acts. Each one will be guided by the 
needs of his soul, his attractions and the inspirations of the Holy Spirit.


MASS AND COMMUNION

Mass. Berulle, Condren, Olier did not want to discuss "ex professo" the 
essence itself of the sacrifice. However, we know from an examination of 
Condren's teaching, at least those laid down in "L'Idee du sacerdoce et du 
sacrifice de Jesus Christ" that our Masters of the French School never 
separated the oblation of Jesus on the altar from the permanent oblation 
begun at the Incarnation and destined to be completed in the oblation of 
heaven,[33] passing through the principal mysteries of our Savior's life: the 
crucifixion or immolation of the victim, and ascension and resurrection 
which mark His entrance into divine glory.

From the reality of Christ's oblation on the altar, Condren concludes to 
the reality of the Eucharistic sacrifice. The constitutional oblation of 
the sacrifice of the Mass would be the prolongation of the Savior's 
oblation but, as M. Lepin says: "hidden under figures", clothed with 
"signs", therefore a sensible and ritual oblation that consists precisely 
in the double consecration in which the body appears "given to God" and the 
blood actually "poured out for the apostles".[34] The offering of an 
immolated victim obviously derives its value from the sacrifice of the 
cross and Christ's oblation throughout the whole Passion gives the 
sacrifice its formal value.

Saint Eudes, Bourgoing, Bossuet, Thomassin accept, in varying degrees, this 
theory of sacrifice and each stresses certain aspects. For example Saint 
John Eudes and Bossuet insist on the share we must take in Christ's 
oblation in His Eucharistic sacrihce. Jesus, they say, does not offer 
Himself alone to the Father, He offers Himself with all His members. So, 
all the members, in their turn, ought to "adhere" to the sacrifice of their 
head in order to glorify God, to thank Him for His benefits, to ask His 
grace, to appease His justice. In this broad sense, all share in the 
Savior's priesthood. Let them, therefore, offer the sacrifice of the altar 
"with the same dispositions as those of Jesus Christ and victim."[35]

With this opinion Olier agrees. He takes delight in speaking of the 
Eucharistic Sacrifice.[36] But he becomes eloquent when he reaches his 
favorite subject: Holy Communion. This he explains is the most perfect 
means of adherence.

Holy Communion. If, as has been said, Berulle magnified the glories and 
abasements of the Word Incarnate; if Condren has devoted himself to His 
Holy Sacrifice; Olier, above all others, has praised His Eucharistic 
presence. It is the reception of the Sacred Host that enables us to share 
closely in the religion of Jesus for His Father. Jesus has, he tells us

"an inconceivable longing to spread everywhere the knowledgc of, and 
respect for His Father. He would like to sacrifice Himself in every heart 
to honor His dominion. It is with these sentiments that He presents Himself 
in the admirable Sacrament on our altars... His desires will never be 
satisfied until He has enkindled in every creature the fire of His charity 
and transformed each one into a burning furnace of love and praise. What 
happiness that Jesus, the divine host, deigns to come to us so that we can 
share His religionl How admirable a paradise is the Christian's heart!"[37]

Communion, understood in this way, can transform a soul because Jesus, 
living in the host, has the sentiments that were His on the evening of the 
Last Supper, the sentiments of a victim who was to die on the Cross the 
next day. Eucharistic Communion gives us this two-fold spirit. A spirit of 
life, because the Incarnate Word is present in the host with all the 
perfections of His humanity, the infinite graces of His divinity and His 
multiple virtues. A spirit of death and of "annihilation", writes Condren, 
because the host is, so to speak, the fruit of the Mass which is in itself 
the mystical reproduction of Calvary's bloody sacrifice. Let us unite 
ourselves to this double spirit, let us try to make this spirit our own 
since it is through death that we attain to life and since this life 
produces, in its turn, detaching graces in our soul.

Let us not stop to examine M. Olier's ideas on the advantages of Holy 
Communion considered as a means of tightening the fraternal bonds binding 
Christians, the members of the Mystical Body. Such teachings are 
traditional in the Church since the days of the Fathers. Jean Jacques Olier 
is perhaps less classic--and without any doubt less happy--when he wishes 
to show us (Thomassin is to follow him along this path) that all the 
mysteries of Jesus are in the same manner recalled and represented in the 
Eucharist.[38] Was this "statio fixa" of all the mysteries really and equally 
in our Lord's direct intention when He instituted His Sacrament of Love? 
No, Grimal answers (we think correctly), because "tradition according to 
Saint Paul acknowledges only a memorial of the Passion in the first and 
direct intention of Eucharist" (1 Cor. 1 1: 26). In fact sacramental 
symbolism and the words of consecration speak only of the death of the 
Savior. Therefore when I relive the Passion of Jesus under the Eucharistic 
species I unite myself to an objective memorial, that is one that is 
entirely independent of any personal suppositions.

On the contrary, it is only a supposition as far as all the other mysteries 
are concerned. It is not Jesus who has in fact showed them to us, it is we 
who have conjured them up by a pious effort of the imagination. If we place 
the Incarnation, the Nativity and the Passion on the same level in 
meditating on the meaning of the Eucharist, and if we see in exactly the 
same way on our altars, Jesus Infant and Youth, Jesus poor, humble and 
humbled, and Jesus sacrified on the cross--do we not run the risk of 
veiling the memorial of His death which the Savior Himself instituted at 
the last hour, the night He was betrayed in order to incorporate us in the 
Sacrifice of salvation?[39]

This reserve must be made because it answers an objection often raised. Out 
of love for the Blessed Sacrament, M. Olier has, on this point, sinned by 
excess. This ardor should not be held against an apostle and a spiritual 
writer whose works contain so many remarkable pages consecrated to the 
praises, the splendors and the delights of the Sacrament of love and union.


THE FULFILLMENT OF THE DUTIES OF ONE'S STATE IN UNION WITH JESUS

The Masters of the French School recommended that their disciples perform 
their professional obligations in a spirit of adoration and union with the 
Incarnate Word. In our acts, it is the charity informing them and the 
intention directing them that has value, and not exterior appearances, be 
these more or less drab or brilliant.

Jesus Himself did not perform only deeds capable of arousing the crowd's 
enthusiasm. He did not only calm storms and walk on water. He did not 
deliver a daily sermon on the mountain nor fulminate anathemas on all 
occasions, but at Nazareth for a number of years he led a workman's humble 
life, in which everything happened, at least in appearance, with the 
monotony of colorless water flowing under the old bridges of a dead city. 
It was His lived union with the Father in the Holy Spirit and the intention 
that was the soul of these actions which gave them their incomparable 
value.

We shall be judged on the duties of our state. To perform them with Jesus 
in a union of adoration and love will be all the more easy because our 
life, like His, unfolds in mysteries, that is to say in incidents and acts 
in which we express our thoughts, our will, sometimes our whole selves. 
Besides these mysteries of our life resemble those of Jesus: we work and we 
rest just as He did. Like Him we suffer and we are glad.

There is a close resemblance between the life led by a layman and by 
Christ. But what shall we say of the resemblance with that of an apostolic 
man or a priest! Their acts have exactly the same purpose as Christ's acts: 
God's glory and the world's salvation. The inspiration of their thoughts 
and the direction of their wills are identical. It follows that their 
anxieties and their sufferings, their hopes and their joys all have the 
same causes. Their work makes the same demands; it requires their holiness 
and the gift and sacrifice of self.

Their occupations are specihcally the same. They must pray, teach adults 
and children, visit the afflicted. Finally our gestures and words, if we 
are priests, are often the gestures and the very words of Our Lord. How 
often with the sentiments of Jesus we have to speak the words of Jesus to 
souls who are exactly like those with whom Jesus spoke, who have absolutely 
the same needs. It is with the grace of Jesus that we continue the work of 
Jesus. .. because although the landscape may be different, the anguish of 
mothers, the grief of sinners, the remorse of prodigal children, the fever 
of the sick--all these never change.[40]

It is to help us to perform the duties of our state in union with the Word 
Incarnate in a spirit of adoration, sacrifice and the apostolate that Saint 
John Eudes in his "Kingdom of Jesus" and M. Olier in his "Journee 
Chretienne," well aware that only the intensity of the life of Jesus in us 
assures the efficacy of our action, composed a series of elevations and 
formulae of adherence for every possible situation. They are for our use 
when we rise, eat, go out, work or "sit in the corner near the fire". They 
are well worth examination. They lack neither beauty, nor piquancy. Each 
one is free to modify, simplify and adapt these formulae according to his 
attractions, needs or whims.

From these considerations it is obvious that our adherence to the Incarnate 
Word might definitely be expressed exteriorly in acts. Does this mean that 
in a given "Gospel situation" the spiritual conduct of a disciple of 
Berulle will in every way resemble, for example, the conduct of a 
Franciscan or Jesuit? No, as a rule, probably not. In traditional 
spirituality there are several different ways of expressing this work of 
union with and assimilation to Christ. This book is the proof of this 
statement.

At first sight two ways seem to oppose one another. Saint Francis of Assisi 
asks that the unglossed Gospel be followed literally. Saint Ignatius agrees 
and adds some exceptions in the practical order. Berulle on the contrary, 
and his school invite us to adhere to the states of the Incarnate Word. In 
this, is there radical opposition?

True opposition does not exist, quite correctly writes Pere de Guibert, 
since all teach, each after his own fashion,

"that man must be conformed to Christ, the Exemplar, Mediator and Head; 
they all teach that conformity consists essentially in thc internal 
dispositions of the soul, with the Savior's soul, just as they all also 
teach that this conformity cannot be realized without the help of grace and 
our own cooperation, and that it will not be true unless this conformity 
pass in some way from our interior to our exterior conduct.

Therefore, it would be to deceive ourselves seriously, were we to represent 
Franciscan or Ignatian imitation as a purely exterior imitation of Christ's 
deeds or to represent the adherence recommended by Berulle as pure 
passivity."[41]

This is an acknowledgment that a difference exists that is not merely 
verbal. The French School is concerned less with Christ's actions as they 
were once performed than with the interior dispositions of which they are 
the manifestations.

The members of that School contemplate the states of the Incarnate Word not 
as much by the minutious analysis of the Gospel accounts as by the 
teachings and deductions of the speculative theology of the treatise on the 
Incarnation.

On the other hand the disciples of Saint Francis and Saint Ignatius insist 
more on mental prayer made on a Gospel text, whose meaning has been plumbed 
by affective considerations, so that they may imitate more closely (in this 
they have been accused of being excessively literal) the examples left by 
the Lord during His earthly sojourn.

These two tendencies, P. de Guibert concludes (I quote from memory) are 
good and fruitful. Both have advantages, provided that they do not become 
exclusive and that no false claims are made that the Berulle tendency is a 
form of lazy idleness or that it is purely speculative and without any 
influence on life, provided that the Franciscan or Ignatian method is not 
presented as a way more accessible to the majority but which lacks 
greatness and cannot lead souls to the summits of interior life.

Further, let us add, neither Berulle, nor Ignatius were themselves 
exclusive. Berulle often pauses to contemplate and comment about the most 
touching and tiniest details of the Gospel text. Examples of this abound in 
his writings. Ignatius was not always satisfied with merely watching what 
Jesus did in order to imitate His actions more closely. So let us not be 
more exclusive than these men were themselves, yet let us reserve for 
ourselves the right of preferring one or other of these methods of 
spirituality according to our intellectual inclinations or the needs of our 
hearts.


The Particular Examen.

Souls familiar with the particular examen of Saint Ignatius will be 
surprised, if not disconcerted, when they learn the form that M. Olier, and 
following his example, M. Tronosn, gave to this exercise which becomes, 
according to their spirit, a means of adherence and adoration rather than a 
method of introspection.

We know that the examen devised by the founder of the Society of Jesus has 
for its object the correction of a selected fault. To this end several 
rules are given regarding the choice of the subject and the way the 
exercise should be performed. The sin is first attacked, in its exterior 
manifestations, then its interior cause. Not to stop with this somewhat 
negative aspect, care must be taken at the same time to cultivate the 
virtue opposed to the fault that is being eradicated.

The examen is made at three different times: the first is a very brief 
examen of prevision, as it were, made at the moment of rising; the second 
is made after dinner; the third after supper. God's grace is then asked so 
as to be able "to recall how many times we fell into such or such a sin," 
then we ought to run through "each of the hours of the day which can be 
divided into several periods of time according to the order of our 
actions". Finally, failures are recorded in a special little book so that 
from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, progress or 
regress may be observed in our advance towards God.

This unrelenting pursuit of the least weakness on a determined point is a 
means of incomparable growth. But the Masters of the French School have an 
entirely different idea of the particular examen. The Ignatian method has 
no place in their doctrinal pattern. They count on securing their personal 
sanctification by offering themselves by repeated acts to Christ's grace 
and the powerful virtues it brings, rather than by coming to grips with 
such and such a vice, or by making a frontal attack against a determined 
fault.

Olier, too, realizes that every Christian anxious to advance in perfection 
must make an examen each day. But this will consist first in the 
consideration of some virtue (preferably one which we lack) as it is 
realized in a concrete way in our Lord. It will consist in seeing "how we 
have made use of Jesus Christ", how we have imitated Him, and in asking the 
grace of a more profound adherence and a more perfect imitation.

It is taken for granted that the examen understood in this way will embrace 
three principal points which correspond to the three points of Sulpician 
prayer: adoration (or, Jesus before our eyes), communion (or, Jesus and His 
virtues drawn into the heart and animating us with His life), cooperation 
followed by resolution (or, Jesus in our hands).

By way of documentation let us give several extracts from a particular 
examen prepared by M. Olier for his disciples. Its subject is Christian and 
ecclesiastical virtues.

Having read "on one's knees with uncovered head" a passage from the Gospel 
and having adored Jesus and invoked the help of the Holy Spirit, the 
following questions are to be answered:

1. Have I walked all day in the presence of Jesus Christ "keeping always 
before my eyes His interior, so as to adore it and form it within me?"

2. Was I faithful in recollecting myself at the beginning of every act?

3. Did I live according to faith holding all things with the sentiments and 
the esteem which Jesus Christ has for them?

4. Did I make Jesus Christ appear in my conduct? Did I show His gentleness, 
His humility, His patience, His charity, His obedience, His attitude toward 
others? Have I, among other virtues, practiced the special virtue of 
clerics, that is modesty?

5. Did I live in the spirit of the host?

6. Have I failed against love of the cross?[42]

Then we must take suitable resolutions that will help to reform our life 
the better to conform it to the life of our Lord with which we must 
constantly make a comparison.

Many of these examens are to be found in the collection made by M. Tronson. 
Several are devoted to a general subject such as the manner of exercising 
apostolic zeal in imitation of our Savior. Others deal with the perfecting 
of the theological or moral virtues, such as charity, humility, patience. 
Still others treat the acquisition of natural virtues or such matters as 
communication with our neighbor, walking in public, correct deportment at 
table... after the example of our Lord and the saints.

In addition to their practical content these examens also possess, thanks 
to the concision and purity of their style, a literary interest to which 
illustrious writers like Bourget and Bazin were not insensible.

Here we shall not speak of "Confession" or "Spiritual Reading" so 
recommended by Saint John Eudes under a form of meditated reading capable, 
in certain instances, of replacing meditation, nor shall we discuss the 
"Visit to the Blessed Sacrament." All these exercises are considered by the 
French School as means of "dilating" in us the Spirit of Jesus and of 
glorifying God more perfectly. We do not want to be repetitious.

Let us say a few words about the sentiments we ought to have when God calls 
us to perform, whether we wish to do so or not, the Ihnal act that will 
bring our life to a close and mark the final degree of our detachment and 
adherence. The ideas of the French School about death are both original and 
splendid. Let us follow Bossuet who was profoundly inspired by them and who 
has written magnificently about them in "Reflexions sur l'Agonie de Notre 
Seigneur."

The Christian who has lived his whole life "in Christ" must die in Christ. 
Like Jesus, he will make his death fruitful. He will unite his death to the 
death of his Savior. He will make his own the sentiments that were His 
divine Master's when He was nailed to the cross. These were the sentiments 
of a victim, of a priest accomplishing His sacrifice. Death, understood in 
this way, gives salvific and meritorious power to a sacerdotal act.

It is hard to find so lofty, so serene, so satisfying a manner of 
envisaging death among spiritual writers who preceded Berulle. Read, for 
example, what Saint Francis of Sales has written on this subject. He makes 
excellent observations about the uncertainty of our last day, about the 
farewells that must then be made to kinsfolk and friends, about the 
destruction of the body and the necessity of abandoning one's self to God. 
All this is wise, sensible, practical but, in the last analysis, rather 
banal.

Bossuet, the kindly disciple of the French School soars on eagle's wings 
above such considerations.

"We must", he tells us, "imitate Jesus in His death, who at that moment 
took upon Himself not only the sins but also all the interests, obligations 
and duties of His true mystical members. He distinctly saw their agony with 
the eyes of His heart, as He hung on the cross.... Who could comprehend the 
extent and strength of the charity with which He regarded their agony as 
inseparable from His own? All that He did at that time, He did on behalf of 
what they would owe and as a supplement for what they would be unable to do 
at that time.... He offered His children's agony and all its consequences 
in an act of love that He at that moment communicated to them.... All this 
He transferred to them in the presence and in the bosom of His Father to 
make up for their powerlessness, if their darkened minds prevented them 
from actually entering into these dispositions."

Bossuet has just shown how, even in His death, Christ remains the 
"supplement" of our religion. He goes on to show how through our adherence 
to Jesus in His agony, we become one with Him as priest and victim.

Until the end of time, one of the great uses for the sacrifice of Jesus 
Christ will be to renew and perpetuate His sacrifice, not only in the 
mystery of the Eucharist but also at the death of all truly faithful souls. 
It is in this spirit that we ought to receive viaticum. At that moment the 
Christian by uniting himself not only with the adorable Body of Jesus 
Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, but also with His Spirit and with His 
Heart, accepts through submission and adherence all the divine designs and 
wills to dispose of his being and his life as Jesus did when He made His 
great sacrihce. In this way the Christian at death bceomes a priest with 
Christ and completes during this final moment the sacrifice for which he 
was consecrated at baptism and which he continued throughout his life.

We have just described the death of a disciple of the French School. Let us 
now make a rapid review of what would have been during the course of his 
life the principal devotions which we would consider to be means of 
adherence.


DEVOTIONS

What we have already said about the Blessed Sacrament makes it unnecessary 
to consider this devotion here. We will limit ourselves to devotion to the 
Christian childhood, to the Interior of Jesus, to the Sacred Heart, to our 
Lady, to the angels and to the saints.


Christian Childhood.

We are tempted to smile or "groan" when we examine the voluminous 
contemporary literature that describes the way of childhood as a discovery 
of our century. There is nothing new under the sun, or rather there is 
nothing new since the Gospel which is a sun to minds and hearts. Throughout 
the ages we could cite a vast concourse of souls devoted to Christian 
childhood.

Their devotion varies with different temperaments and it has taken many 
forms. There is the simple and at times somewhat detached consideration of 
the abasements of the Child Jesus. There is the most passionate tenderness 
for the charms and ingenuousness of the Babe in the Crib or of the Youth of 
Nazareth. Devotions like these are a source of austerity for some, of 
interior joy for others, of confidence and holy abandonment for all.

The French School holds an important position in the history of devotion to 
Christian Childhood, but in this Childhood it stresses the austere side 
which it integrates with its idea of abnegation and to which it adds a note 
of gladness. Is not the state of childhood " the lowest and most abject 
state, next to death? "It was for this reason that Jesus chose it, finding 
no other state more fitted, by reason of the law of contrasts, to give 
"glory to the splendor of the Eternal Father;" no other state containing as 
many examples to help us "to overcome our pride" or "to show us the way of 
indifference and abandonment into God's hands."

M. Olier made himself the fervent apostle of Christian Childhood. This 
attraction led him gradually to a great detachment:

"I feel", he wrote, "that the Child Jesus has given me the grace to be like 
a small child, without any will of my own. He has also given me the grace 
of joyful abandonment and so abandoning myself to God, I place all my trust 
in Him. To put it all in a single sentence: I am as carefree as a child. 
Finally He has given me the grace of a confident obedience to a director 
who guides my steps along spiritual paths."

In the state of childhood M. Olier can discern a path of ligbt.

"Because Our Lord in His childhood made profession of His weakness, God, to 
reward Him gave Him the grace to enlighten... those who had recourse to Him 
in this state. This disposition of Providence appeared in the mystery of 
the Visitation when Saint John the Baptist was sanctified by the Child 
Jesus and received all at once the fullness of the Spirit."

Childlikeness and childishness are not to be confused. So we find that 
great saints "like Stephen, John the Evangelist, Thomas of Canterbury, and 
Sylvester possessed this virtue."[43]

M. Branlo, in his solid little book, "Enfance Chretienne," synthesized his 
master's doctrine. Just like M. Olier, he sees in every child

"littleness of body and dependence on others", without, however ignoring 
"the grace and simplicity" which are the charms of this age. He applies 
Berulle's principles to this state of childhood and he teaches that "it 
honors God by the humility it supposes; its subjection glorifies the divine 
liberty; its temporal silence, eternal silence; its abandonment, the 
Creator's paternal providence."

Then Branlo lists the virtues of childhood: purity, sweetness, 
trustfulness, innocence.

This is the way of childhood as taught by the French School and which was 
so popular in the seventeenth century. Basically it is the same as the way 
lived by Saint Therese of Lisieux but it is presented by a theologian in a 
more direct fashion and as part of a whole doctrinal synthesis. It cannot 
be denied that it has the same rich fruitfulness, although "the flowers" 
are lacking.


Devotion to Jesus and to the Interior of Jesus.

Everything in Jesus is adorable because all His acts are the acts of a God. 
Their power and their perfections are infinite. Within every word and deed 
are to be found an emotion and a thought which rise from a profound source. 
This deep inner source is the soul of the Incarnate Word. From the e%erior 
we ought to penetrate to the center, from effect to cause, from the 
transitory to the etemal, from the mysteries of Jesus to thc mystery of 
Jesus. It was to honor this Savior and to make Him known in all His 
greatness that Berulle wanted to establish in his congregation

"a feast of Jesus Christ that would be general and universal and which was 
focussed on the beloved Lord and not on any special mystery of His life but 
on everything in His divine Person and in His two natures that are 
inseparably united by the Incarnation."

Berulle prayed:

"O God, who willed Your only Son to espouse human nature for our sakes, 
grant that we may celebrate becomingly the ineffable life of the Word in 
mankind and mankind in the Word, so that we may be animated by His Spirit 
on earth while awaiting to rejoice in His possession in heaven."

The need of unifying our devotion accounts for the introduction of the 
feast of Jesus. In 1668 Cardinal de Vendome, legate "a latere" approved the 
feast of the Interior Life of our Lord. This feast used to be celebrated in 
all Sulpician houses. It, too, owed its introduction to the desire of 
honoring the Incarnate Word in the perfection of His humanity and divinity. 
It was an attempt to seize the motives behind the mysteries and to 
understand the sentiments that filled the Savior's soul. Let us make these 
sentiments our own. "I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me."


The Sacred Heart.

The one mystery of the Incarnate Word that can explain all the other 
mysteries and give their railon d'eAtre is the mystery of love. That is why 
the French School quite normally arrived at devotion to the Sacred Heart. 
We use the word "normally" and not "necessarily", believing that Bremond 
errs when he chooses the latter word because there are several intermediate 
stages between devotion to "the Interior of Jesus" and devotion to the 
Sacred Heart. First, it was needful to subsume the whole interior of Jesus 
in terms of love; then, "love had to be considered as it is in itself, 
prescinding from any special mystery; lastly, love had to be considered in 
relation to the heart of flesh".

To Saint John Eudes belongs the honor of taking these steps and as we have 
already said, three years before the hrst revelation of Paray-le-Monial, 
the Norman apostle had instituted a special feast, richly theological, in 
honor of the Heart of Jesus. The proper of the Mass and the Office were 
celebrated by his two congregations and he tried to extend their use far 
and wide.

Let us not stop to prove that the cult paid by Saint John Eudes to the 
Savior's Heart of flesh is closely related to the devotion that was later 
to enjoy so spectacular an ascent at Paray-le-Monial. This we have already 
done elsewhere.[44] since then others have done the same thing better and at 
greater length.[45] All this shows that this cult is in harmony with the 
teaching of tradition and with the mind of the Church. Nevertheless John 
Eudes could never forget the Berullian formation that he had received 
during his twenty years at the Oratory and this probably explains why the 
place given in his devotion to the "Spiritual Heart" seems to impinge on 
that accorded to the Heart of flesh. We do not say this by way of 
complaint, because devotion to the Sacred Heart, thus understood, is all 
the more eminent. Thus the Heart becomes a symbol representing the very 
Person of Christ, with His "interior" and the "higher part of His soul", 
with all the plenitude of His natural and supernatural perfections: His 
memory, intelligence, will and fulness of grace and virtue; and with His 
admirable life of which His Person is the principle.

The "spiritual Heart" leads us to the "divine Heart", one of the elements 
of the Eudist cult that is most neglected, at least under this form. The 
"divine Heart" and the Holy Spirit are identical. It is in fact the divine 
Spirit who places in Christ's soul the perfect dispositions which we so 
much admire: love for men, love above all for His Father. Because the 
charity of the Incarnate Word does not only come down to us: "Behold this 
Heart that has so loved men", it also rises to the Blessed Trinity with its 
tribute of love.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart, understood in this way, makes possible a rich 
synthesis in which are harmonized the glory due the Creator and the 
interests of the creature. In the Eudist cult, theocentrism and 
anthropocentrism, to use terms now in vogue, have embraced each other in a 
kiss of peace. From the Heart of Christ, the love and praise of humanity 
rise purihed and sanctihed to the Father; from the Father, in their turn, 
descend grace and charity for men, through the Sacred Heart of His Son.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart as proposed by John Eudes is more complicated 
than that of Margaret Mary and it could not win, in a few years, the world 
wide popularity enjoyed by the cult of Paray. The masses, it has been said, 
are instinctively attracted to the most simple devotions and, as at Paray 
"preference in the devotion to the Heart of the Man-God is given to what is 
human", so it is not surprising that the faithful as a whole are drawn by 
the Paray form of the devotion. Here, again, let us seek to unite rather 
than to divide.


Devotion to Mary

It is claimed that devotion to Mary leads to the cult of Jesus. The 
opposite is equally true. The French School, so devoted to the Word 
Incarnate, could not be unmindful of His Mother. It sees Mary in Jesus and 
goes to find Jesus in Mary. In this way Berulle's principles are given a 
new practical application.

Jesus, M. Olier has said in substance, following M. Condren, lived in His 
Mother in three different ways: physicaly during the nine months within her 
virginal womb; sacramentally, by the Eucharist, and this presence ceased 
with Mary's last communion on earth; finally, He continues to live in her 
mystically, by grace, in a higher degree because our Lady holds a 
privileged place in the Mystical Body of which her Son is the head. The 
Holy Spirit is constantly at work in Mary in order to communicate to her 
dispositions similar to those which He effected in the soul of the Savior.

Nevertheless Jesus dwelt in Mary not only to sanctify her, but also to 
sanctify, through her, His Mystical Body. And M. Olier, developing Saint 
Bernard's thought, claims that our Lady is indeed the aqueduct through 
which we receive graces merited for us by Christ. What sweeter and more 
pleasing offering, "can we then make to Jesus than to seek Him in the place 
of His delights, in the midst of this furnace of burning love for the good 
of all men?" These few lines are an early indication of the future cult of 
Mary Mediatrix.

It will also be remembered that M. Olier composed the well known prayer, "O 
Jesus, living in Mary", to help us to find Jesus in Mary. It was Pere de 
Condren who supplied the basic elements of this prayer:

"O Jesus living in Mary, 
come and live in Your servants, 
in the spirit of Your holiness, 
in the fullness of Your power, 
in the perfection of Your ways, 
in the truth of Your virtues, 
in the fellowship of Your mysteries; 
rule over every adverse power 
in Your Spirit for the gfory of the Father."

Let us add that it always pleased the founder of Saint Sulpice to consider 
the Virgin-Mother as a pre-figuration of the holy Church whose role it also 
is to give Jesus to the world. It was only one step more to reach the 
conclusion of the priesthood of Mary but Olier did not take this step. He 
said that our Lady was "filled with the plenitude of the spirit of the 
priesthood, but did not herself possess the character and consequently 
could not herself exercise the functions".

Therefore, there was nothing of the priesthood about her, in the 
sacramental sense of the word. Yet if Mary "never exercised these functions 
in a visible and sensible manner... yet she did so in a manner befitting 
her state, her sex, her quality and her condition as mother".

Thus she shares with God the Father and the Holy Spirit in the temporal 
birth of Him who was to be both priest and host, and whom she was to offer 
at the Presentation and on Calvary. What the priest does exteriorly and 
sensibly, Mary does interiorly. Only in this sense can we speak of a 
priesthood of our Lady flowing from her maternity and mediatorial activity. 
In this sense Mary also becomes the model of priests and the protector of 
the Catholic hierarchy. The French School does not seem to know "the 
complementary priesthood", that some claim to discover in the "Catechism of 
the Council of Trent."


Devotion to Angels and Saints.

The principle that shapes the French School's devotion to Mary is likewise 
evident in its devotion to the angels and saints. Their value, of course, 
is measured by God's life in them.

"God, inaccessible in His light, impenetrable in His splendor, reveals 
Himself and rejoices in His angels and allows Himself to be adored and 
admired in them. He is like a king who opens his robe or his cloak so that 
all may see and marvel. The angels may be compared to many organs, each one 
according to its state and magnificence yielding God's holy music, some 
more, some less. Each one honors Him in its own degeee and in all the 
fullness of its bdng, so that its whole being seems to find expression in 
His praise."[46]

This text from the pen of M. Olier with all its charming poetry may be 
felicitously applied to devotion to the saints, as he does. Jesus' life in 
their souls was intense. In them He left the imprint of one of His virtues. 
The saints are therefore mirrors of the Word Incarnate. Let us follow their 
example and correspond, as they did, to grace.

Among the favorite saints of the French School must be cited those who came 
very close[47] to the Incarnate Word and became His intimates: Saint Joseph 
holds an eminent place; Saint Mary Magdalene and the Apostles.


DIFFERENT STATES OF LIFE

The French School speaks of three states of life: the priesthood, the 
religious state, the marriage state.


The Priesthood.

The masters of the French School intended not merely to found seminaries, 
they also wished their disciples to receive a sacerdotal spirituality. Here 
we can give only the essentials of their teaching.[48]

It was the hypostatic union that made Jesus the priest par excellence. In 
becoming man, the Word gave human nature an unction that consecrated Christ 
priest forever. From this ineffable unction flows the priestly character 
that the priests of the New Law receive at the moment of their ordination, 
with this difference: our title of priest is adventitious, that of Jesus is 
not. Jesus is priest by essence; the priest of this world acquires this 
quality, keeping, at the same time, his first personality. Christ did not 
become a priest. He always was one. Yet, despite this difference which we 
must always keep in mind, our sacerdotal character confers upon us with its 
special graces, all Christ's sanctifying powers. So true is this that it 
can be said: "The priest is another Christ". "Sacerdos alter Christus."

Now, Jesus in virtue of His priesthood, writes Bourgoing, has three 
principal intentions which he calls His three-fold regard. He looks "to God 
the Father to glorify Him; to self for sacrifice; to souls for their 
sanctification."[49]

To glorify God was the constant preoccupation of Jesus the priest. The 
glory of the Father and the desire for our redemption moved Him to come on 
earth to endure the loneliness of the hidden life, the fatigues of the 
public ministry, the sufferings of the cross. In giving us His body in the 
Eucharist, He wishes to transform us, after His example, into a host of 
praise for time and eternity. The priest must make his own this death and 
this praise, in his fervent celebration of holy Mass, in the attentive 
recitation of divine office offered in the name of the Mystical Body, in 
the punctual performance of liturgical functions.

If Jesus the High Priest turns first to the Father to glorify Him, He turns 
next to Himself "to sacrifice Himself". This is the celebrated theory of P. 
de Condren that Christ's whole life was a sacrifice comprising the five 
phases he deemed necessary.

This sacrifice continues even in heaven where Jesus, interceding for us, 
offers His Father the marks of His wounds. It continues in a mysterious 
manner each day on our altars. So the priest, continuing Christ's work, 
must make his life a perpetual holocaust. He carries out this suffering 
program by accepting solitude and chastity, by mortifying himself for the 
sake of those who give themselves without restraint to the pleasures of 
this life, by sacrificing himself for the souls entrusted to him.

Finally, like Christ, the priest must turn "to souls in order to santify 
them."[50] Love of God begets love of souls. A man is not a priest for 
himself, but for others. Therefore the priest must be expendable, that is 
to say, free from all attachments and disposed to fulfill without a murmur 
all the ministries ecclesiastical authority may confide to him. He ought to 
go to all souls, without making any distinction, place himself at their 
disposition, spend himself without reserve, adapt himself to every 
situation, accept all restrictions and never forget that his apostolate 
will be truly fruitful inasmuch as it is a true expression of his interior 
life.

Such is the sacerdotal spirituality of the French School-- a summary far 
too brief because of limitations of time and space.


Religious Life.

Although religious life is on a plane lower than that of the priesthood, 
because it does not enjoy a sacramental character and the powers of Christ 
himself, Berulle writes that it is one of "the most delightful parts of the 
Church".[51] He is so convinced of the truth of this statement that he spent 
much time and overcame many difficulties to bring about the establishment 
of the Carmelites in France and the reformation of many convents. Later he 
devoted many leisure hours to the daughters of Saint Teresa whom he brought 
from Spain. He guided them personally; and in letters he explained his 
ideas about religious life.

This life has two aspects, depending on whether it is predominantly active 
or contemplative. If contemplative life is superior to active life, the 
latter is not to be despised, as is sometimes the case.

"They deceive themselves who hold too lowly an opinion of active life and 
of the work of Martha. God is great... and what He looks at becomes 
great."[52]

Furthermore, it must be remembered that for many years the active life was 
the life of our Lady herself. Yet contemplative life ranks higher because 
in it the soul is concerned with Jesus directly and not merely with ways of 
serving Him. If exterior work helps to increase our accidental reward, as 
far as the essential reward is concerned, merit grows with charity. It is 
also a sign, and one of greater significance than to be comp]acent because 
one has renounced everything that concerns this present life for divine 
contemplation, the total gift of self. That is why Berulle, then confined 
in a holy retreat, writing to Pere Coton said: "I take upon myself, as I 
must, the occupations of Martha, but I honor the more Magdalene alone and 
one with Jesus, as He is in heaven".

In fact Berulle is convinced that the ideal is to unite active and 
contemplative life, one helping and strengthening the other. We act in 
order to love better. We love in order to act better. He agrees with Saint 
Thomas that to give light to others is more perfect than to keep it for 
one's self. For this reason he wishes those contemplatives, who can give no 
exterior form to the exercise of their zeal, at least shall have an active 
prayer embracing all the universal Church's great interests. He would 
banish self-occupation and a feverish desire for perfection in which 
refined egoism so often hides.

Religious should unite mortification and prayer because the cross must be 
well known by those who serve and daily adore a crucified God."[53] Without 
the cross it would be impossible to divest one's self of self in order to 
put on Christ. Yet this is the ideal to which the consecrated soul must 
tend. Her consecration orients her to Jesus and to the Father. Her vows cut 
her off from the world and from herself; mind, will, heart, life, strength, 
time--she has given them all. Her role, as her name indicates, is to link 
earth with heaven. To contemplative souls, Berulle gives for a model Jesus 
in the Eucharist.

He writes: "Jesus is more cloistered there than are many religious". His 
obedience is manifested when He goes

"to a definite spot, at the word of a priest, contenting Himself with the 
place He is given, never making any change of His own accord... He makes 
profession of poverty in many places where He is treated in so lowly a 
fashion that it is evident that He is the same God who was born at 
Bethlehem in a stable... As far as purity is concerned, of this He makes 
special profession, keeping perfectly free from all things of sense... In 
regard to his interior occupation it is ceaselessly turned to God."[54]

Strengthened by the Eucharist, formed by Jesus along these lines, occupied 
in His praises, the consecrated soul attains its goal. It ceases to be, 
according to the fine words of a disciple of the French School, anything 
but a heart to love God, an intelligence to understand Him, a will to serve 
Him, an eye to look at Him, a hand to grasp Him, a tongue to sing in 
adoration of all His splendor and mercy.


The Marriage State

This state is often ridiculed yet it is holy for it represents the union of 
Christ with His Church. For this reason it should not be lightly embraced 
and Saint John Eudes lists fifteen causes of unhappy marriages. Here, as 
elsewhere, he claims that he has limited himself only to the most 
important. In addition to the bad points, he makes a list of the good. 
These number twelve. Let us recall what are, or seem to us to be, the most 
important.

Before marriage, time must be given to "prayer, spiritual reading, 
almsgiving... invocations to our Lady, consultations with prudent advisors 
and with one's own heart". Contrary to the custom of his day he disapproved 
of marriages for money, position or those in which there was too great a 
difference in age between the two parties. Finally, he declared that one 
must make haste slowly and get off to a good start if one wishes to come to 
the end of a married life with hands filled with happiness and the soul 
filled with merit.

A chaste courtship, neither too long, nor too short, should precede a 
marriage whose "ceremony should be very simple" "without a magnificent 
bridal party (whose only purpose is vain display) and a wedding banquet 
excessive in quantity and duration."

Husbands and wives must observe decorum in their relations with one 
another, free from false shame and immodesty. They must substitute no 
shameful purpose for the primary end of marriage: the procreation of 
children.

The baptism of these little ones should not be delayed; their education 
should be careful, neither severe nor indulgent; their instruction in the 
Christian faith should be thorough. Later, they must be advised about a 
career or a vocation, but this must be done "prudently, lest they be 
constrained against their will". In this matter parents "ought not claim an 
authority that belongs to God alone, neither should they dissuade those who 
have received this vocation."[55]

Saint Jean Eudes also counsels young married couples as to the best means 
of guarding and increasing their happiness: being attentive to each other, 
ignoring or gently correcting each other's faults, never giving rude orders 
to one another, obeying with alacrity but without servility. He wishes 
women to avoid anything that might seem exaggerated or negligent in their 
dress.

Knowing the emptiness of a childless home, he urges young couples without 
children to treat the poor with tenderness. Lastly, and on this point modem 
medical experience would be in agreement, he discouraged the hasty 
consummation of a marriage contracted after excessive emotion or 
stimulation.

All this bears the mark of wisdom. Yet the writings of the French School do 
not contain the wealth of material on this subject that is found in the 
various works of Saint Francis of Sales. M. Olier and even the serious-
minded Tronson allude in their letters to happy and unhappy marriages and 
to the duties of husband and wife. But these men merely give some 
principles and do not always make applications. They agree, however, with 
the Bishop of Geneva on many points and they do not fail to disapprove of 
those who "live in the world more severely than they would in a cloister 
and who multiply spiritual exercises incompatible with their position." 
With Moliere, too, they agree that even in the state of marriage, and above 
all in this state, devotion should be "humane and agreeable."[56]


CONCLUSION

The French School of Spirituality is basically scriptural and dogmatic, of 
this the preceding pages are proof. It is the application of the inspired 
teaching of Saint John and Saint Paul. It exploits, as they did, with the 
additional light of great theologians, the doctrine of the Mystical Body 
which is, with good reason, so dear to our contemporaries. This explains, 
what we may call, the School's moderation, vigor, security and the 
elevation--a little aristocratic, we must admit--of its views.

The preceding pages will also have shown that Bremond is correct when he 
claims that this spirituality is not only "theocentric", because this is 
true, is it not, of all forms of Catholic spirituality? It is also 
"Christocentric", or if the term be preferred, Christological. Everything 
depends on Christ who is the foundation, the cornerstone and the pinnacle. 
Were we to suppose, by way of hypothesis that the Incarnation had never 
taken place, the spiritual doctrine of our masters would lose its meaning 
and would become unthinkable. To them, Christianity is not so much a 
system, nor a deduction of philosophical principles, nor is it in origin 
deistic and more or less profane, but it is a Person: Jesus Christ.

For this to be true Christ's Spirit must prevail. We have seen that all the 
exercises of piety have this as their goal. It is this that gives singular 
unity to spiritual life. No fragmentation, no small or strange devotions, 
nothing that does not flow directly from Scripture or dogma. It is just 
what Thomas Aquinas wished: a great current, carrying everything wholly to 
Jesus.

Why the daily practice of prayer? To watch Jesus live and to make His 
virtues our own. Why Mass and Communion? To realize the antithesis of life 
and death, as Saint Paul points out, which leads to the conquest of the 
"new man", that is to say the gradual establishment in our soul of the 
spirit and sentiments of the Incarnate Word who dies and is risen. Why 
union with Christ in thc duties of our state? To perform them perfectly for 
God's glory, as Jesus would, were He in our place and still living on 
earth. Why mortification? To "divest" ourselves, to prepare an inner 
emptiness and make room for Jesus. Why the particular examan? To regulate 
our adherence, the "use" we have made of Jesus, the way we imitated Him and 
modeled our exterior conduct on His. Why confession? To restore in us the 
image of Jesus, if it has been effaced by sin and to make it shine with 
greater brilliance if we have not lost grace.

Why this love for our neighbor and for the apostolate? Because Christ 
dwells in every man, or at least every man is potentially "a capacity of 
God". If Jesus lives in my brother by grace, I ought to honor Him; if His 
life there is growing weak, I ought to try to arouse my brother from his 
tepidity; if mortal sin has driven Him away, I must try to bring Him back 
by word, example, prayer and sacrifice. Why finally suffering and death? To 
enable us, as Bossuet explains, to renew for ourselves the drama of 
Calvary.

Through suffering and death Jesus had to pass to perform His priestly act 
and return to His Father. Through suffering and death, the Christian 
reproduces and prolongs Christ's life on earth, following in His footsteps 
so as to continue amid the delights of heaven, His adoration and praise of 
the Father.

Everything, in fact, must lead to the Father, everything must be done "by 
Jesus, in Him, and with Him" in endless adoration. Coming from the Father, 
it is to the Father that mankind must return. The world of souls is on the 
march and no one should ever forget that men, all men, guided by their 
pastors, having eaten Christ's body, having drunk His blood, animated by 
His Holy Spirit, in all their divine glorv must form an immense host that 
will at last be offered to the glory of the adorable Trinity.

Nothing then is impossible to the man who gives Himself without reserve to 
Christ.

What, then is man? Let us recall the definition given by Berulle.

"Man is an angel. He is an animal. He is a miracle. He is a center. He is a 
world. He is a god. He is nothing surrounded by God. He is in need of God. 
He is capable of God and filled with God, if he wishes.

If he wishes! It is up to us to wish this."

In the school of our spiritual leaders of the seventeenth century, is this 
really so difficult?


ENDNOTES

1. Condren's "neantisme" is sometimes exaggerated. However, it must be 
admitted, as Louis COGNET points out (La Spiritalite franfaise au XVIIe 
siecle) that Condren pays much less attention than does Berulle to the 
vestiges remaining in man of his lost greatness and he often speaks of 
sacrifice where Berulle speaks of adoration. Because the creature, "a 
nothingness" of nature and grace, according to Condren, he can give glory 
to God only in annihilating himself. "Annihilation is meant in the real and 
strict sense in regard to the 'old Adam' but this can be no true 
annihilation in regard to nature taken in itself, for this would be 
suicide... In fact it is a question of a metaphor which leads to the idea 
of depersonalization: we must cease to be ourselves so that the spirit of 
Jesus may live and act in us."

We also believe, with M. Cognet, that in minimizing the idea of 
"exemplarism", an idea dear to the founder of the Oratory, and in so 
stressing the idea of annihilation that he makes it the pivot of his 
system, Condren has, to a certain extent, shifted the axis of Berulle's 
system.

2. The extracts of Berulle are taken from the Migne edition, corrected when 
necessary by the edition made by Bourgoing. Olier is cited according to 
Migne and the chapters of his works are given; Saint Jean Eudes is usually 
cited according to the edition prefaced by P. Lebrun.

3. OLIER, "Pietas Seminarii," chapter 1.

4. OLIER, "Catechisme chretien," Part I, lesson 20.

5. COGNET, "La Spiritualite francaise au XVIIe siecle," p. 57.

6. OLIER, "Memoires," 85.

7. BERULLE, "Opuscules de piete," 37 and 38.

8. BERULLE, "Oeuvres," 926.

9. BOURGOING, "Preface aux oeuvres de Berulle," Migne, 102-103.

10. BOSSUET, "Sermon sur le culte de Dieu," Ed. Lebarq, 5: 105-108.

11. BERULLE, "Oeuvres," 1418.

12. "Oeuvres," 1210.

13. "Esprit de M. Olier," 110.

14. BERULLE, "Oeuvres," 183.

15. OLIER, "Traite des Saints Ordres," III Part, chapter 6.

16. On the motive of the Incarnation, Berulle holds the Thomist position, 
while most of his disciples are, at least implicitly, Scotists.

17. OLIER, "Catechisme chretien," Part I, lesson 20.

18. OLIER, "Introduction a la vie chretienne," chapter 3. 

19. BERULLE, "Oeuvres," 921.

20. OLIER, "Introduction a la via chretienne," chapter 3.

21. BERULLE, "Oeuvres," 1653.

22. BERULLE, "Oeuvres," 1053.

23. "Penses choisies," M. OLIER, p. 37.

24. Epistle to Romans, 5, 3-4.

25. OLIER, ""Introduction a la vie chretienne," chapter 11.

26. The complete text is given in chapter II, section 9, ibid.

27. "Introduction," chapters 5, 6, 11 and 13.

28. BERULLE, ""Oeuvres," 1164.

29. BERULLE, ""Oeuvres," 1137. Berulle here agrees with the humanist point 
of view. "It has been given to man to have what he wants and to be what he 
wished." (Picolo de la Mirandola, "Oratio de dignitate hominis," p. 116). 
The only divergence concerns the act of the will.

30. OLIER, "Introduction a la via chretienne," chapter 4. "Catechisme 
chretien," part 2, lesson 6-8.

31. "Summa Theologica" I; qu. 16, art I. BERULLE, "Disc. Grand" 2,1, p. 
170.

32. BERULLE "Disc. Grand" 2,1, p. 170.

33. We do not believe that it is possible to draw from the "Epistle to the 
Hebrews, the idea of "a true sacrifice in heaven", without doing violence 
to the test. The author of this epistle who so insisted on the unique 
character of the sacrifice of Calvary could not dream of a heavenly 
sacrifice truly distinct from the Cross. He believes simply that Jesus 
offered Himself "in an eternal spirit" (9: 14) and that His will to 
oblation remains forever. (cf.SPICQ O.P. "L'Epitre aux Hebreux," Collection 
Etudes Bibliques, Paris, 1952).

34. LEPIN, "Idee du sacrifice de la Messe," P. 462. On this complex 
question P. DE LA TAILLE, "Mysterium Fidei;" then examine the solid and 
provocative suggestions of J. GALY, "Le Sacrifice d'apres l'Ecole 
francaise" of which a summary is given in "Revue d'ascetique et de 
mystique" (October 1950.) (Tr. See also, E Walsh, "The Priesthood in the 
writing of the French School, pp. 107-112.

35. Saint JEAN EUDES, "Royaume de Jesus," p. 466.

36. Explication des "Ceremonies de la Grand-Messe de paroisse," Book 6, 
chapter 2; "Catichisme chretien," and part lesson 3, "Journee chretienne." 
"Occupations interieures pendant le Saint Sacrifice."

37. "Esprit de M. Olier," I pp. 183-285.

38. OLIER, "Pietas Seminarii," chapter 9.

39. "Le Sacerdoce et le Sacrifice "p. 335.

40. BRILLET, "Commentaire inedit de la priere: O Jesu vivens in Maria."

41. JOSEPH DE GUIBERT, S. J. "Theologia spiritualis ascetica et mystica," 
Gregorian University Press, Rome, p. 93. Cf. "The Theology of the Spiritual 
Life," translated by Paul Barrett, O.F.M. Cap., Sheed and Ward 1953.

42. OLIER, "Oeuvres" 1245.

43. "Esprit De M. Olier," 1, Chapter 2, article 2.

44. J. GAUTTIER, "L'Esprit de l'Ecole francaise de spiritualite" (Lib. 
Bloud et Gay.)

45. J. DECREAU, "L'Ami du Clerge," June 9, 1946.

46. M. OLIER, "Pensees choises," p. 166; "Oeuvres," Migne 1106; "Recueil 
Manuscript, p. 64; "Traite des Saints Ordersn PP. 664-666.

47. OLIER, "Sentiments sur les grandeurs au Saint Joseph," Migne, 1286 ff.

48. A far more complete explanation of the French School's sacerdotal 
spirituality may be found in M. POURRAT'S "Le Sacerdoce" and in our 
introduction to the new edition of "Traite des Saints Ordres" (La Colombe).

49. BOURGOING, "Preface des Oeuvres de Berulle," p. 103.

50. BERULLE, "Oeuvres," 1308.

51. BERULLE, "Oeuvres," p. 1114.

52. "Lettres," 1334.

53. "Lettres," 1345.

54. BERULLE, "Rapport de J. C. au Saint-Sacrement avec les principaux 
points de l'etat religieux," "Oeuvres," 1060.

55. JEAN EUDES. These wise recommendations are far in advance of their 
time. They appear in "La Vie du Chretien." Consult chapters 21 and 22.

56. "Tartuffe," act 1, scene 5.