Robed in great cataracts of red silk, Richelieu kneels in the right foreground and rolls up his dark impassive eyes towards a heaven in which, in the top left-hand corner and at an altitude of about two hundred and fifty feet, the Holy Trinity and the Virgin look down from their soft cloud, considerably foreshortened, but with an expression of the liveliest benevolence. Poised only a foot or two above the Cardinal’s head, St. Fiacre descends, much bearded and in the ragged homespun appropriate to anchorites. One hand is raised in benediction, and in the crook of his other arm he carries his emblems -a slice of Brie cheese, a shillelagh and a miniature four-wheeler. From aloft, he is followed by a squadron of cherubs, nose-diving and banking above a delightful landscape where, in the distance, the siege of La Rochelle is in full swing.
Immediately above and behind the Cardinal, Louis XIII stands at the head of a flight of steps, his left hand on his hip, his right supported by a long malacca cane. Trailing pink draperies, Victory hovers over him, while the livid form of Heresy grovels in the middle distance. At the bottom of the canvas, immediately below the Trinity and a plane or two behind the nearest foreground, we see a group consisting of Father Joseph at prayer, Sacred Theology in blue and white satin and, representing Literae Humaniores, a young woman from Antwerp, with no clothes on, pointing at a marble slab, upon which we read a Latin inscription alluding to the foundation of the Academie Française … ‘ . But, alas, this splendid work was never painted; the bones of St. Fiacre were taken back to Meaux and the unhappy Cardinal continued to suffer the tortures of the damned.
The lowering effects of this and his other diseases were responsible in part for Richelieu’s failure of nerve in 1636. Father Joseph’s intervention helped the Cardinal to overcome the psychological symptom, but did nothing, of course, to remove its physical cause. After as before the crisis, Richelieu remained a sick man, much depressed by his ailments and in constant need of moral support, no less than of medical care. For the former he turned to Father Joseph, who combated his friend’s discouragement by frequent talks about religion and exhortations to a better way of life. Under the influence of these talks, Richelieu began to display an unwanted piety. He gave much money to religious institutions. He confessed often and regularly, and received communion every week.
Yet more surprisingly, he composed between 1636 and 1639 a Treatise of Christian Perfection, in which he advocated what Father Joseph and his master, Benet Fitch, called ‘active annihilation,’ and what Brother Lawrence and most other mystics have described as ‘ the practice of the presence of God.’ ‘It is enough,’ wrote Richelieu, ‘to establish oneself several times a day in the divine presence and to perform no action which can destroy it; for it is certain that the divine presence is held to persist until we perform an action contrary to it.’ It is to be presumed that, to some extent at least, he practised what he preached. The effects were evidently consoling; for, though the Cardinal had always been afraid of hell, he faced his death without a qualm and, in the evident conviction that he had done nothing that merited damnation.
The priest who attended him during his last hours admonished him to prepare his soul to meet its creator by forgiving all his enemies. From his death-bed, the Cardinal serenely answered that ‘he had never had any enemies, save only those of the State.’ There is something almost awe-inspiring about a self-complacency so enormous and expressed at such a moment. When the news of his passing was brought to Urban VIII, the old Pope sat for a moment in pensive silence. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘if there is a God, Cardinal Richelieu will have much to answer for. If not, he has done very well.’
Meanwhile the man to whom Richelieu had turned for moral support (‘ ou est mon appui?’ he cried when he was told of Father Joseph’s death; ‘j’ai perdu mon appui’) was himself in need of consolation. The effort to make the best of both worlds -to be simultaneously a power politician concerned to forward the interests of the Bourbons and a contemplative concerned to worship God ‘in spirit and in truth’ had failed, and he was becoming ever more acutely conscious of the failure. Because he was quite unaware of the true nature of God, Richelieu could blandly say that ‘it was enough to establish oneself several times a day in the divine presence and to perform no action that can destroy it.’ Father Joseph knew something about God and therefore that this was not enough, and that actions which might not destroy what a man like Richelieu fondly imagined to be the divine presence were absolutely fatal to the presence of reality as it is in itself.
He had tried to ‘annihilate’ his activities as foreign minister, negotiator, master of spies, political pamphleteer; but these activities had been too many and intrinsically of too bad a nature to suffer such annihilation. ‘In all the conditions of life,’ he had written twenty years before, ‘it is necessary that every individual should be able, at the height of the tempest, to cast his eyes, when the need arises, towards the sovereign good, as towards a flaming torch that beckons to him from afar and to which he strives to come by this act of union, not indeed as one of the perfect and not in their eminent degree-not with all sails set and on the open sea of total denudation, a complete abandonment of all the ordinary means, in the manner of the great ocean-going ships, but hugging the well-known shore, without giving up meditation and the other aids described in this Method, which lead to union.’
Well, he had been a beginner, hugging the shore of vocal prayer and discursive meditation; then, growing more proficient in pure contemplation, he had launched out further and further into the boundless sea of divine reality. And then Richelieu had appeared, and it had seemed his duty to do the exterior will of God by serving that instrument of Providence called the French monarchy. At the beginning he had not doubted his capacity to do his political duties and still remain at sea, in the presence of God. But as time went on he had found himself forced back towards the coast, and his glimpses of that bright torch of the sovereign good became more and more infrequent.
As a young man, he had described the experience of union with an eloquence whose passionate ardour seems to prove two things; first, that he had himself experienced union, and second, that that experience of union was not of the highest order; for mystical experiences of the highest order do not lend themselves to expression in terms of the violently emotional language employed by Father Joseph. ‘God designs,’ he had written, ‘to enter unto us and grants us the favour of entering into him by a mutual immersion and reciprocal flowing together, which is expressed in Holy Scripture, when God bids us open our mouth and promises to fill it.
This dilatation means that the soul should enlarge the whole capacity of her free will, that is to say, should produce acts of the greatest and most whole-hearted love she can conceive. And it is not enough to open one’s mouth in an ordinary way, as one does for eating, speaking and breathing; one must be like a man who, after having run long and violently after something he desperately longs to catch, stands breathless, opens his mouth and feels his heart beating, as though he were ready to die. Some open their will to God as if to eat, that is to say, as if they were to receive some inward sweetness; others as though to talk and make discourses of God ; others again as if to breathe, in order to give refreshment to a spirit suffocated by this world’s cares. To do this is not to love God perfectly.
One must expel the life of self-will in every panting breath, one must hunt down one’s nature in an implacable course towards perfection, to the end that one may exhale and infuse one’s whole being, open mouthed, into the mouth of God…. Thus the Scripture says, according to the Hebrew, that Moses died upon the mouth of God… Oh, sacred resting place of happy lassitudes, Oh, treasure of eternal repose, of which our soul bears within it all the depths and breadths, since God opens himself unto her to exactly the same extent as she is willing to open herself unto him.’
Only Father Joseph’s worldly side, only Tenebroso-Cavernoso was calm. Ezechiely, the religious side of him, lived in a kind of chronic passion, almost a frenzy of zeal. To Ezechiely it was the most natural thing in the world to talk violently about the prayer of quiet, to compare the contemplative to a frantically panting runner. All the practical mystics, including Benet of Canfield, have warned would-be contemplatives against an excess of zeal. Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength. Father Joseph himself speaks
