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’Orleans 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, water logged 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 VI 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 treasure 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 Ezechiely 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 Berulle’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.
CHAPTER V The Approach to Politics
Now that Fontevrault had been reformed, it looked as though Father Joseph might be able to get back to the work he loved best, the work of which he could not but feel that it was his true vocation. There were so many things to do heretics to be won back to the Church, lukewarm and complacent Catholics to be awakened from their fatal apathy, and everywhere a minority of the devout to be taught the true art of mental prayer. So many things to do; but, at the head of a whole province of friars, how much he might hope, with God’s help, to accomplish ! He rejoiced at the thought of all that it might be granted to him to do and suffer in this missionary service.
But again destiny intervened and, because it corresponded to one of the sides of his double nature, because it was intrinsically like the Tenebroso-Cavernoso in him, proved too strong for the Franciscan evangelist. In the persons of Richelieu and the Queen Mother, high politics had already distantly beckoned to him. Now, suddenly, in the last weeks of 1615, they were all around him. Without warning, he found himself in the midst of a civil war and in the position to negotiate a settlement. The murder of Henri IV had left the government of France in the hands of his widow, who ruled as regent during the minority of Louis XIII. The portraits of Marie de Medicis reveal a large, fleshy, gorgeously bedizened barmaid; and the records of her administration prove her to have been even stupider, if that were possible, than she looked. With this unintelligence there went an almost abnormal coldness of temperament. Her only strong passions were for power, which she was incapable of exercising, and for the expensive bric-a-brac, especially jewels, for which she indebted herself and the national
