‘Mon Frère,’ he wrote, ‘I know you love me. I am infinitely obliged to you for it; but in order to make this obligation extreme and to give me a great contentment, let me beg that neither now nor in the future (as I am sure that you will not refuse so just a request) shall Frère Ange, whom I hold as dear as if he were myself or my own child, stir from the convent of Paris; and I implore you with all my heart, give me this joy, which will be extreme, that I may still see him and recommend myself to his prayers.’ The Provincial doubtless obeyed; but the unhappy king had all too little time in which to recommend himself to his friend’s prayers. A year after the letter was written, the Duc de Guise was assassinated at Blois, and before another year had passed, the League took its revenge and the last of the Valois kings was lying dead, with Friar Clement’s knife in his bowels. His favourite, meanwhile, was happily begging his bread, preaching, nursing the sick and learning the art of mental prayer from Father Benet of Canfield.
In so far as the Capuchins meddled in politics, they were, at this time, supporters of the League against the new and not yet Catholic king. It was in his capacity as member of an illustrious family of Leaguers that Père Ange was chosen, in 1592, to carry out a strange political mission in Provence, the Lyonnais and Languedoc. He was to try to persuade the governors of the southern provinces (all of them more or less closely related to him) to form a new political federation, independent of the rest of France and under the suzerainty of the Pope. Several months of negotiation had convinced him that the scheme was unworkable, when the news came that his brother, the Governor of Languedoc, had lost his life in an unsuccessful operation against the royal forces. Antoine Scipion was the last lay Joyeuse. Of the two surviving brothers, one was a Cardinal, the other a Capuchin -neither of them available for military service.
But the people insisted on having a Joyeuse to lead them. Enormous crowds surrounded the Capuchin’s headquarters at Toulouse, shouting ‘We want Père Ange, we want Père Ange’ and (a touch so true to mob psychology as to be positively Shakespearean) threatening to burn down the convent if they didn’t get him. Rome was consulted; dispensations procured; and at last the day came when, in solemn ceremony, Cardinal de Joyeuse received his brother, dressed all in black in sign of inward mourning for his change of condition, and, in the presence of a great congregation, buckled to his side the sword he had abandoned five years before. Père Ange had been transformed into the Duc de Joyeuse and Governor of Languedoc. For the next few years he governed his province and did battle against Henri IV. But with Henri’s conversion and the pacification of France under a Catholic monarch, the League lost its reason for existence. Like other governors of provinces, the Duc de Joyeuse made his peace with the king. Henri IV, who knew how to choose his servants and collaborators, confirmed him in his titles and estates and created him a Marshal of France.
Popular clamour had dragged Père Ange from the convent, and now it looked as though royal favour would keep him out. But the mourning garments he had put on in 1592 were the emblems of a genuine regret; and meanwhile his friends in the convent of the rue Saint-Honoré were not idle. ‘Where is that unitive and ecstatic life,’ Father Benet of Canfield wrote to him in an impassioned letter, ‘where the coarse habit, the thick cord, the patched cloak, where are the fasts, the disciplines, the meals of bread and water, the humilities of kissing the ground and sweeping the house? The mirror of France, is it spotted ? Is he fled from the battle, that valiant captain among the Friars Minor? Is he slain, that child of St. Francis and the seraphic rule? Can it be that Frère Ange is dead? I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan …
‘And as for this, that on the outside of this letter I style you de Joyeuse, and within I call you my brother -be not surprised thereat; for it is only without and externally that you are de Joyeuse, but inwardly you are Frère Ange. And not only ought you to be Frère Ange, but also you cannot ever be anything else, even with the Pope’s dispensation.’ Father Benet spoke truly; having once tasted of’ the unitive and ecstatic life,’ Henri de Joyeuse could not now be anything but Brother Angel. After seven years as Governor, commander, duke and courtier, he returned to the order. That was in 1599), the year of François Leclerc’s novitiate. In 1600, as we have seen already, it was the newly revived Père Ange who officiated at the reception of the newly created Father Joseph.
CHAPTER III The Religious Background
In all that concerned his personal religion, Father Joseph remained to the end of his life the faithful disciple of Benet of Canfield. If we would understand the pupil, we must familiarize ourselves with the teachings of his master. But in order properly to evaluate these teachings, we must first know something about the mystical tradition on which they are based and from which they significantly diverge. In literary form, the mystical tradition makes its first appearance in the Upanishads, the earliest of which are supposed to date from about the eighth century before Christ. In these Hindu scriptures we find a certain metaphysical theory of the universe and of man’s relation to it. This theory is summarized in the phrase Tat tvam asi-thou art that. Ultimate reality is at once transcendent and immanent. God is the creator and sustainer of the world; yet the kingdom of God is also within us, as a mode of consciousness underlying, so to speak, the ordinary individualized consciousness of everyday life, but incommensurable with it; different in kind, and yet realizable by anyone who is prepared to ‘lose his life in order to save it.’
This metaphysical theory was an attempt to explain a certain kind of immediate experience, and in India it was always taught in conjunction with certain technical instructions regarding the ethical and psychological means whereby men might come to that experience, or, to use the language of the metaphysical theory, might realize the Brahman or ultimate reality latent within them. Among the early Buddhists, the metaphysical theory was neither affirmed nor denied, but simply ignored, as being meaningless and unnecessary. Their concern was with the immediate experience, which, because of its consequences for life, came to be known as ‘liberation’ or ‘enlightenment.’ The Buddha and his disciples of the southern school seem to have applied to the problems of religion that ‘operational philosophy’ which contemporary scientific thinkers have begun to apply in the natural sciences.
‘The concept,’ says Professor Bridgman in his Logic of Modern Physics, ‘is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations.’ ‘A question has meaning, when it is possible to find operations by which an answer can be given.’ Assertions which do not lend themselves to operational verification are neither true nor false, but without meaning. Buddha was not a consistent operationalist; for he seems to have taken for granted, to have accepted as something given and self-evident, a variant of the locally current theory of metempsychosis. Where mysticism was concerned, however, his operationalism was complete.
He would not make assertions about the nature of ultimate reality because it did not seem to him that the corresponding set of mystical operations would admit of a theological interpretation. Mystical operations, he believed, yielded a sufficient answer to such psychological questions as What is liberation? or What is enlightenment? They did not, in his opinion, yield a sufficient answer to the questions What is Brahman? or What is God?
Christianity accepted as given a metaphysical system derived from several already existing and mutually incompatible systems. Jesus seems to have taken for granted the existence of the personal deity of the Old Testament; but at the same time he seems to have used a purely mystical approach to the kingdom of God which he actually experienced within his soul. These two elements, the traditionally Hebraic and the mystical, with its insistence on immediate experience, were also present in the doctrine of St. Paul, together with others which have added further complications to Christian theology. Of mysticism in the early Church we know very little. Such psycho-physical phenomena as rapture, glossolalia, visions and revelations were common among the early Christians, and highly esteemed.
These manifestations often occur in individuals whose religion is the very reverse of mystical; on the other hand, it is a fact of observation that they sometimes occur as by-products of a genuine mystical experience. We shall probably be fairly near the truth if we guess that there was, in the early Church, much corybantic revivalism and a little mystical contemplation. By the fourth century, as Cassian bears witness, a well-defined mystical philosophy and discipline had been developed among the solitaries and coenobites of the Egyptian desert. Cassian’s dialogues with the Egyptian fathers were known to the medieval contemplatives and influenced their theories, habits of life and methods of devotion. Much more influential, because written by one who was a consummate literary artist as well
