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 extremely 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 eyangelist 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 at 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 this 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 brought 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, De 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 -De 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; hut 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 Eleonore de Bourbon. Her exalted rank and the fact that Fontevrault was distant only a few miles from Saumur made of Mme de
