May 1989
Spiritual Letters of Jean-Pierre de Caussade
By
Publisher: Morehouse-Barlow
Pages: 148
Price: $6.95
Review Author:
By contemporary American standards, Fr. Jean-Pierre de Caussade, an 18th-century French Jesuit, suffered from severe psychic imbalance. Just listen to this afflicted soul: “Annihilate yourself continually!” “Oh, what a precious state is that state of nothingness!” “I am delighted that the thought of your wretchedness and weakness…is your usual inward preoccupation!” This is, well, so unhealthy. A vast mental-hygiene apparatus exists to “cope” with this sort of thing — to bolster self-confidence, to improve one’s assertiveness, to banish nagging pangs of inadequacy, to make one feel good about oneself. Poor de Caussade. If only he had had the benefits of a battalion of American mind-curers.
Fr. de Caussade’s call to spiritual heroism will repel those who seek to suspend themselves in the Jell-o of psychic ease and well-being. Even for more hardy folk, his message is not easy to accept. He preaches nothing less than total abandonment to God; his renunciation of the swollen ego is so radical that it takes one’s breath away. “Wretched pride and human vanity” — the source of all our vaulting ambition, urgent need to achieve, and compelling lust to act and do — must be “extinguished.” To what end? “Heaven,” de Caussade writes with utter simplicity, “is worth all these battles.”
You May Also Enjoy
Lies are easier to spread than in the old days, when there were many more farmers than there were scholars, and farmers were harder to fool.
Enforced silence is not the same as acceptance. Silence often breeds contempt; contempt, then, breeds anger; and anger can breed violence.
In the January issue of the NEW OXFORD REVIEW, Dale Vree levels a serious charge…