IN THE FOREGOING chapter I have painted in some detail the religious setting, historical, contemporary and personal of Father Joseph’s life. It was against this fixed back-drop of an intense Catholic devotion, partly mystical, partly imaginative and emotional, that the episodes of his political career were acted out; and it was in relation to it that they had to be explained and justified in his own mind.
During the first years of his life as a Capuchin, Father Joseph’s activities were exclusively religious. His career began, as we have seen, with a year’s novitiate at Orléans. After his profession in Paris he was sent to the Capuchin seminary at Rouen. Here the course of studies ordinarily lasted four years; but the new pupil was already so far advanced that he was altogether excused the preliminary year of philosophy and one of the three subsequent years of theology. His reputation at the seminary was that of a young religious graced with notable spiritual gifts, fervent in prayer, indefatigable in good works, burning with the holy ambition to become a saint. He practised supererogatory austerities in the matter of food and labour; he kept such a careful watch over pride that he was never heard to speak of his past life, his present wishes or his future projects; he was eager in all circumstances to do more than his duty. That Spartan taste of his for the uncomfortable and the strenuous continually manifested itself, sometimes in the oddest ways. For example, it was his custom, during certain of the prescribed periods of prayer, to worship standing, bare-footed on the flagstones. When sleepiness overtook him (which it sometimes did, as he was in the habit of shortening his nights with contemplation) he would combat it by standing on one leg. The practice was not generally approved of in the seminary; but when warned of the dangers of excess, the need of discretion even in matters of piety, Father Joseph would answer that the Kingdom of Heaven is taken by violence, and continue his prayers to the accompaniment of excruciating muscular strain.
All this was a sign of most commendable zeal; but what chiefly interested his superiors was the fact that their new pupil seemed to have a definite gift of orison. Father Benet had taught him the theory and practice of his own kind of modified Dionysian mysticism; and the young Capuchin had brought to his devotions that obsessive, hallucinatory preoccupation with the sufferings of Calvary which had haunted his mind from earliest childhood. The result was a type of mental prayer which his superiors described as an orison of ‘seraphic and crucified love’. Intensive practice of this form of contemplation (to which the young seminarist gave many more hours than the two which the Capuchin rule prescribed for mental prayer) led not infrequently to ecstasy and the seeing of visions. If we add to all these the fact that he had eloquence and a talent for religious controversy and religious exhortation, we shall not be surprised at the extraordinarily favourable judgment passed upon him by Ange de Joyeuse. ‘Father Joseph,’ he declared in 1601, when the young man was still at the Rouen seminary, ‘is the perfect Capuchin and the most consummate religious of his province, indeed of the whole order.’
Benet of Canfield was at this time lying in an English prison, from which he was not delivered until 1602. But though absent, his influence over his young pupil’s mind was still strong. How strong we may judge from the books which Father Joseph read most. The list begins with St John’s Gospel and the Epistles of St Paul, goes on to St Augustine’s Confessions and Soliloquies, Dionysius the Areopagite’s Mystical Theology and Divine Names, the mystical writings of Hugh and Richard of St Victor and St Bernard, and ends with Ruysbroeck and two lesser contemplatives of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries respectively, Henry de Herp and the Benedictine Abbot, Blosius. It is a little library of the purest mystical tradition.
Father Joseph’s superiors expressed their high opinion of him by acts no less than words. In 1603, a few months after he had left the seminary, the young man was appointed reader in philosophy at the convent of the rue Saint-Honoré. His career as a theologian and man of learning was cut short, after only a year, by an aggravation of that progressive defect of vision which advanced throughout his life until, at the end, he was nearly blind. Henceforward the scholar’s world of books was closed to him; but the world of men lay still wide open.
In 1604 he was ordained, received his licence to preach and was sent to take charge of the novices at the Capuchin house of Meudon. Here he set to work, with an energy always tempered by tact and skill, teaching the new-made friars those arts of mental prayer which he himself had learned from Benet of Canfield only a few years before. To help his pupils, he reduced the essence of the spiritual life, with its three stages of purgation, illumination and union, to a series of thirty-six rhymed quatrains; and for each novice he wrote out a set of spiritual instructions specially designed for his individual needs.
To his work within the convent he added another labour – the re-evangelization of the neighbouring countryside. Meudon and, along with it, all the other villages in the neighbourhood of Paris had suffered extemely during the wars of religion. Not content with despoiling the people’s farms and shops, the marauding soldiers had pillaged and often wrecked the churches. In some communities all organized religious activity had come to an end; and of the parish priests who remained many had succumbed to the influence of their anarchic surroundings and were leading lives of a far from edifying character. With the approval of his superiors, Father Joseph set himself to recover this spiritually devastated area for the Church. His missionary efforts were crowned with immediate and startling success. Wherever he preached thousands would come from miles around to listen to his impassioned eloquence. Churches and convent chapels were too small for such congregations and soon he was speaking in the open air. Many of his listeners went through the crisis of conversion, and everywhere the habits of traditional piety were re-established. So great, indeed, was the throng of those desiring to be confessed and take communion that additional friars had to be sent for from Paris to cope with them. Well practised in humility, Father Joseph displayed no personal satisfaction at his triumph, which he regarded as a particularly good opportunity for practising the ‘active annihilation’ of self in the divine will. Preaching, he tried to remain continuously aware that he in himself was nothing and God, everything; that this eloquence, which made the people groan aloud in fear of hell, weep for their offences, raise supplicating hands towards the mercy seat, was not his eloquence, but the word of God finding utterance through him, the utterly unworthy instrument of God’s will. From the active annihilation of preaching, he would retire at night to his cell and there, in the dark silence, would give himself up to passive annihilation in an act of mental prayer. A few hours of sleep, and he was at work again, strong in powers and energies not his own, at peace and happy in the conviction that his true vocation had been revealed to him. The service to which he was called was that of an evangelist and missionary.
This was now obvious, not only to himself and his companions, but also to his superiors. So obvious, indeed, that, in the autumn of 1605, he was relieved of his teaching at Meudon and appointed Warden of the Capuchin house of Bourges. Here, he would have relatively little to do within the convent walls and would therefore be able to devote the best part of his energies to the work of evangelization outside.
At Bourges, he was no less successful with an educated, urban audience than he had been among the peasants of Meudon and the neighbouring countryside. At the request of the city fathers he delivered a series of addresses which were so well attended that he had to move from the conventual church to a much larger building. The subject of these addresses, which generally lasted two hours, was the art of mental prayer. In the succeeding years we shall find him returning again and again to this topic. By word of mouth and in written summaries, which he left with his auditors to be copied and circulated in manuscript, he urged upon all Christians the desirability, nay, the absolute necessity of the mystical approach to God. In one such summary written at about this time he says emphatically that ‘a man who neglects his duty of orison is blind indeed, not knowing his friends from his enemies. One can never sufficiently regret the loss entailed by this slothful neglect, a loss of the inestimable graces to the soul by conversation with God.’ Even during the years when he was acting as Richelieu’s coadjutor, he still remained, with one side of his being, the faithful pupil of his first master, Benet of Canfield.
Father Joseph was not allowed to remain for long at Bourges. His talent for preaching was too valuable to be lavished on a single congregation, and in the early spring of 1606 he was called to preach the Lenten sermons in the cathedral of Le Mans. Nothing remarkable happened here, except that a hysterical woman heard him preach, and conceiving a violent passion, tried to seduce him. For a man who regarded uncloistered females as wild beasts and horrific mysteries, the temptation was not too serious; and after having converted his fair assailant, Father Joseph proceeded to Angers, and from Angers to Saumur. To be chosen to preach at Saumur was a very special honour; for Saumur was one of the walled cities assigned by the Edict of Nantes to the Huguenots. Under the administration of its very capable and active governor, Du Plessis-Mornay, it had become a centre of Calvinist illumination. An academy had been founded not long before, where young men were taught by eminent professors, recruited not only from among the French Huguenots, but from every part of Protestant Europe as well. Saumur also had a seminary for the training of future ministers, and a well-equipped press, where Protestant controversialists – Du Plessis-Mornay himself among them – could print their books and pamphlets.
In this thriving Calvinist city (later to be ruined and half depopulated by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes) a Catholic minority enjoyed liberty of worship and had its church assigned to it. Here Father Joseph preached and gave addresses on the art of orison; and here, as was his custom, he wrote out the substance of these addresses to serve as a handbook for his listeners, when he should be gone. In the intervals of preaching and instructing, he consulted with the more influential members of his flock about the possibility of founding a Capuchin convent in their city. Hitherto Du Plessis-Mornay had refused to admit the friars into his Calvinist preserves. Father Joseph did not yet know how this formidable opposition was to be broken or circumvented; but he was determined that, somehow or other, Saumur should get its Capuchins. At the meeting of the Chapter of his province, which was held that same summer in Paris, he broached the subject in a speech. His colleagues and superiors approved his design and, at the end of August, he left Paris with the new post of warden of the convent of Rennes and a commission to take appropriate steps for establishing the friars at Saumur.
For the young Capuchin, this commission was to have profound and far-reaching consequences. The pious plot to get the better of Du Plessis-Mornay was the first link in a long chain of unforeseeable circumstances that drew him at last to the very pinnacle of political power. It all began with his visit to the Abbey of Fontevrault. Fontevrault was the parent house of a twelfth-century order of monks and nuns, all of whom were under the rule of its Abbess. The order was immensely rich, had scores of subsidiary houses all over the country and recruited its nuns from the most aristocratic families. The Abbess was one of the great dignitaries of the Gallican church. As befitted the holder of so important a position, ‘Mme de Fontevrault’ was almost never below the rank of a duchess and frequently above it; for the profitable charge was often given to princesses of the blood. The incumbent in 1606 was an elderly aunt of Henri IV, called Eléonore de Bourbon. Her exalted rank and the fact that Fontevrault was distant only a few miles from Saumur made of Mme de Bourbon the obviously fitting person to deal with Du Plessis-Mornay. To her, then, Father Joseph was sent. She listened favourably to his request and wrote at once to the governor of Saumur. Du Plessis-Mornay disliked the friars; but he could not afford to offend a close relation of the king’s. He gave his consent to the founding of a Capuchin house at Saumur; but followed up this action by privately doing everything in his power to prevent his consent from doing the Capuchins any good. All the obstructive machinery of the law was set in motion, and for three long years the royal edict, which granted the Capuchins a right to found a convent at Saumur, failed to obtain the necessary registration from the local Parlement. But the friars were persistent, and at last, in 1609, the foundation stone of the new convent was solemnly laid. Father Joseph had triumphed. But he was not to enjoy this triumph. What he had hoped and expected from his enterprise at Saumur was the privilege to serve as a missionary among the heretics. What it actually led to was a very different kind of career.
Mme de Bourbon was very favourably impressed by the young friar who had been sent to see her. His zeal and piety were exemplary, his judgment was no less remarkable than his ardour; and, what was more, under the ragged habit and the unkempt beard, he was an aristocrat, consummately well educated and of the most polished address. Once a gentleman, always a gentleman; nothing could disguise the fact that Father Joseph had been the Baron de Maffliers. Great nobles, ministers of the crown, princes and princesses of the blood – with this particular friar such people felt at home. He was ‘one of us’, a member of their caste. Besides, in the words of a contemporary, ‘his conversation was ravishing, and he treated the nobility with infinite dexterity’. Mme de Bourbon was as much ravished as all the rest of them. When the business on which he had been sent was finished, she consulted the young man about her own troubles. These were not inconsiderable. Without being scandalous, life in Fontevrault and its dependent houses was exceedingly worldly. These convents were like very exclusive country clubs for women. Of the three monastic vows, that of chastity was observed in them scrupulously; that of obedience, only grudgingly, and that of poverty, not at all. The nuns enjoyed their own private incomes and lived surrounded by their own possessions and domestics. Mme de Bourbon was pious in a vague sort of way, and would have liked to do something about her order. But what? But how?
Father Joseph discussed the matter with the Abbess and her coadjutrix and niece, Mme Antoinette d’Orléans. Much more intensely and deeply religious than her aunt, this princess had long dreamed of creating within the order of Fontevrault, or outside it, a congregation of pure contemplatives. This young mystic, with his energy and his gift for business, was exactly the counsellor and helper she had always hoped to find.
Father Joseph worked out two ‘plans, one of mild reformation for Mme de Bourbon and the more worldly ladies of Fontevrault, the other, radical, for Mme d’Orléans and such nuns and novices as might wish to share with her a strictly cloistered life of contemplation. With these genuine enthusiasts for a mystical and ascetic religion like his own, Father Joseph was able to co-operate enthusiastically and with the greatest satisfaction. Not so with Mme de Bourbon and the worldly party. The young man desired only one thing, to go on being an evangelist and an apostle of mysticism; and now, by an unfortunate concatenation of circumstances, here he was, inextricably involved in a labour which he found peculiarly distasteful – the reformation of nuns who didn’t want to be reformed, even in moderation, and who were rich and powerful enough to hamper their reformer at every turn. But the talents he displayed in the performance of this ungrateful task were so conspicuous, that he was never allowed to throw it up and return to his missionary labours. Warden successively of the convents of Rennes, Chinon and Tours, he was constantly recalled to Fontevrault. There, among those great ladies in religious fancy dress, he strove heroically to annihilate the last traces of his own personal feelings towards the task that had been assigned to him. It was God’s will that this task should be accomplished and he was merely the instrument of God’s will. Daily and hourly he renewed his resolution to do that will – actually, uniquely, willingly . . .
Meanwhile, the fact remained that the job of reforming Fontevrault was peculiarly difficult and delicate. Two heads being better than one in such affairs, Father Joseph turned for assistance and advice to the bishop of the neighbouring see of Luçon, a young man still in his twenties, but enjoying already a high reputation for ability and reforming zeal. The name of this precocious ecclesiastic was Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu. The two men met, discussed the immediate business at hand, exchanged views on matters of more general interest, and parted as admiring friends. Another link in the chain of Father Joseph’s destiny had been forged.
The work of reformation dragged on for years. In 1610 Father Joseph was transferred from the province of Paris to that of Tours, in order that he might be more continuously at Fontervrault, and from this time until 1613 he lived for months at a stretch in one or other of the convents of the order, assisting Mme d’Orléans in the creation of her little community of contemplatives, and trying to persuade the members of the Fontevrault country club to behave a little more like the nuns they were supposed to be. The problems with which he had to deal were suddenly complicated by the death of old Mme de Bourbon. The appointment of her successor belonged to the crown, and the crown at this moment was represented by the regent, Marie de Medicis, who chose the Duchesse de Lavedan. Before and after this appointment the Queen-Mother sought the advice of Father Joseph and, like everyone else who met him at this time, conceived a very high opinion of his virtues and abilities – an opinion which she retained until that day in 1630 when her flight to Brussels finally removed her from the French scene. Once again, circumstances were conspiring to draw the missionary away from his preaching into the world of high politics.
It would be unprofitable to describe in detail the work which Father Joseph accomplished at Fontevrault and the neighbouring abbey in which Mme d’Orléans had installed those nuns who genuinely desired a life of austerity and orison. Suffice it to say that thanks to him the behaviour of the worldly ladies became more decorous and that finally, in 1617, the community founded by Mme d’Orléans was promoted by a papal bull, to the rank of a new and independent order, the Congregation of Our Lady of Calvary. This last labour was carried to a successful conclusion in the teeth of the most determined resistance on the part of the new Abbess of Fontevrault, who was jealous of her authority and hated a reform, however intrinsically excellent, which threatened to deprive her of any of her subjects.
Of the two founders of the Calvarian order, Mme d’Orléans died in 1618, only a few months after it had been declared independent of Fontevrault. Dying, she bequeathed to Father Joseph the task the steering the new congregation along the road which together they had mapped out. It was the road which, from the time of his first entrance into religion, the Capuchin had chosen for himself – the road of mortification, mystical orison and the intensive, hallucinatory practice of the passion of Christ. For almost as long as he could remember Calvary had filled his imagination; and it was to Calvary that the new congregation was dedicated. To imagine themselves in the position of Mary at the foot of the cross, to feel themselves into her thoughts and the emotions she had felt during her son’s long agony – this was to be the principal devotion of the nuns; for the rest, they were to practise the art of mental prayer as systematized by Father Joseph out of the writings of Benet of Canfield. To their guidance, their spiritual and even their intellectual education, Father Joseph gave henceforth unstintingly of his time, his talents and his energies. Even at the height of his political power and under the heaviest pressure of business, he never neglected the Calvarians. Whenever he was in Paris or in one of the other towns in which a Calvary had been established, he found time to give at least one day in every week to the instruction and encouragement of the nuns. He composed for their use a small library of treatises on prayer, on morals, on philosophy, on theology, besides a great number of letters on the day-to-day problems of the spiritual life. Much of this material still survives, but has never been printed. According to the computations of the only modern scholar who has had access to them, Father Joseph’s treatises and spiritual letters to the Calvarians would fill, if published, thirty octavo volumes of five hundred pages apiece. Most of this great mass of material was composed at a time when the Capuchin was acting as Secretary of State of Foreign Affairs and Apostolic Commissary for Missions – two whole-time jobs, to which he added this third, of spiritual director to an entire congregation of religious. Vicariously, in these cloistered contemplatives, he was able to give himself to that life of orison which Father Benet had taught him to love, but which Richelieu and the affairs of state made it impossible for him to lead in person. The glory of France, the humiliation of the House of Austria – these meant a great deal to a patriot who was convinced that a triumph for his country was also a triumph for God. But the spiritual well-being of his nuns and their progress in the art of mental prayer were of no less moment in Father Joseph’s eyes. To the very end, the power politician tried his best to remain a mystic.
While engaged on his delicate and distasteful business at Fontevrault, Father Joseph was appointed to be coadjutor to the Provincial of Touraine; and a little later, when he had won his freedom from the worldly ladies and had only Mme d’Orléans and her contemplatives to think of, he became Provincial. The Capuchin province of Touraine included not merely the district around Tours, but the whole of Poitou and much of Brittany and Normandy as well. As overseer of this great domain, Father Joseph regarded it as his duty to become acquainted personally with every friar within its borders. The frequent journeys of the preceding years gave place to an almost continuous wandering, by forced marches, back and forth across the face of the country. During this period of his life he must have walked literally thousands of miles. And what miles! In our minds the name, ‘France’, calls up visions of a beautifully tidy country of well-tilled fields and well-trimmed woodlands, covered with a network of admirable roads and dotted with substantial villages and towns. At the beginning of the seventeenth century this France was far removed in the yet unrealized future. The country was dark with great forests, hardly less wild than those which Caesar had traversed during the Gallic wars. Wolves abounded; and in some parts of the country bears were still met with, and beavers. Of the open land, outside the forests, much was still undrained. Great areas which are now under the plough were then malarious swamps, waterlogged during all but the dryest months of the year. Such roads as there were partook of the nature of the ground they traversed and, in wet weather, were impassable for wheeled traffic and difficult even for horsemen and foot passengers. The owners of the land lived in castles and fortified manors, many of which are still standing, but those who actually cultivated it were housed in mud and wattle huts so flimsy in their squalor that most of them have disappeared without leaving a trace of their existence. The ordinary poverty of the peasants under feudal lords had been made acute by the devastations of the civil wars; but now, with the return of peace under Henri IV it was reverting to the merely chronic condition then regarded as prosperity. Of the men who had done the fighting in those civil wars, many were now unemployed and had taken to pimping and thieving in the towns and highway robbery in the country. The decaying bodies of some of these malefactors dangled conspicuously from wayside gibbets. But more were still at large, and travellers went armed and, if possible, in considerable bands. Father Joseph was fortunate in possessing nothing except the Capuchin’s reputation for active charity and an austere life. He might be set upon by wolves, might contract malaria or typhus, might be drowned while trying to cross a flooded river; but it was very unlikely that he would be killed by bandits. The treasures which the Provincial of Touraine was laying up, as he visited the monasteries under his charge, were not of the kind that would buy anything a highwayman was likely to desire.
To Father Joseph these interminable cross-country marches were less fatigues to be dreaded than welcome opportunities for meditations, which it was legitimate to prolong from the moment of his departure at dawn to the end of the day’s journey at sunset.
Among the friars of his province Father Joseph had a reputation for firmness in action tempered by an extraordinary gentleness and humility of manner. Abuses were promptly corrected, discipline enforced, the necessary reprimands and punishments unfailingly administered, but always with mildness, always with an insight into character almost amounting to that attribute of the saints which is technically called ‘the discernment of spirits’.
In such intervals as were left between his journeys, Father Joseph continued to preach and write. It was at this time that he composed, for the novices of his province, that Introduction to the Spiritual Life of which we have already spoken and in which he set forth most fully his theory and practice of the mystical life. We have seen that he had written similar treatises in the past; but this was by far the most complete and elaborate – for the good reason that this alone was intended for publication.
During this period of his life, Father Joseph had time to practise his peculiar method of mystical and imaginative orison with more than ordinary persistence. He experienced in consequence a renewal of the phenomena that had accompanied his early devotions at the Rouen seminary. He saw visions, received revelations, passed into ecstasy. There were times when he could hardly speak of the sufferings of Christ without falling into a rapture. On at least one occasion this happened to him in the pulpit. Mentioning the crucifixion, he was so much moved that his senses left him, he fell down in a faint and remained for some time afterwards in a state almost of catalepsy.
Such physical symptoms are generally regarded by experienced mystics as signs, possibly of divine grace, but certainly of human weakness, and probably also of inadequate training in, and injudicious practice of, the art of orison. At the same time, of course, they testify to the intensity of the experience which produced them. About Ezéchiely there was nothing lukewarm or half-hearted.
Of his psychic experiences, Father Joseph spoke little; but there is no doubt that he attached great importance to them. In later years, he made use of visions and revelations – sometimes his own, more often those of the Calvarian nuns under his charge – as significant factual data, to be taken into account in framing policies and conducting military campaigns. He might have spared himself the trouble. These apocalypses neither made him infallible nor detracted from his native sagacity as a politician. It is worth remarking that Father Joseph’s all too human and anthropocentric attitude towards such by-products of the religious life was not universally shared by his contemporaries. Here is the judgment which was passed upon them by Jean-Jacques Olier, founder of the seminary of Saint-Sulpice and a worthy pupil of Bérulle’s greatest disciple, Charles de Condren. ‘Revelations,’ he writes, ‘are the aberrations of faith; they are a distraction that spoils simplicity in relation to God, and that embarrasses the soul, making it swerve from its directness towards God, and occupying the mind with other things than God. Special illuminations, auditions, prophecies and the rest are marks of weakness in a soul that cannot suffer the assaults of temptation, or bear anxiety about the future and God’s judgment upon it. Prophecies are also marks of creaturely curiosity in a being towards whom God is indulgent and to whom, as a father to his importunate child, he gives a few trifling sweetmeats to satisfy his appetite.’ How far this is from Father Joseph’s or, for that matter, from Pascal’s hungry craving and superstitious reverence for signs and miracles! Olier had achieved a degree of intellectual austerity, of annihilation, as Father Benet would have put it, to which these others were far from having attained.