Understanding Rance: The Spirituality of the Abbot of La Trappe in Context (review)

To political historians of France, the seventeenth century is well known for its culture of absolutism. What has not been so thoroughly explored, perhaps, is the way in which the spirit of absolutism penetrated all life: marriage, family, the workplace, the Church—and spirituality. David Bell argues that for people of that century, good was good and evil was evil to an absolute degree that our shades-of-grey generation finds difficult to appreciate. As for the spirituels, that elite group who so heroically outpaced run-of-the-mill Catholics, their radical view of the economy of salvation may strike us as a totally foreign language. Whereas we (in general) are naturally optimistic about the human race, they (in general) were pessimistic, seeing mankind as helplessly corrupt and deserving of damnation, able only to weep incessantly for its sins. "The whole tenor of seventeenth-century French spirituality was penitential," in imitation of Christ, the Great Penitent (p. 89). Furthermore, this spirituality was informed by "a sharp, almost violent, contrast between that which is of the world and that which is not" (p. 98). Since the world was so much at odds with the heavenly kingdom, it followed logically that flight from the world into the monastic life was the surest way to serve God and secure salvation.

This is the context in which Bell presents his protagonist, Armand-Jean de Rancé, the reforming abbot of la Trappe (1626–1700). To use Bell's metaphor, the above spirituality was the ground on which Rancé's feet were planted. "We today may not much care for the ground . . . but it was unquestionably familiar ground to all his seventeenth-century compatriots" (p. 230). However, Rancé took the spirit of penitence to an extreme. Between his youth as a worldly priest and his later years as a Cistercian of the Reform lay a painful conversion experience. The resulting "conversion spirituality," Bell suggests, helps to explain his stark understanding of monasticism. "You have two choices, God or the world. You cannot have both. If you choose the former you must reject the latter. If you reject the latter, you reject it completely, and from then on you are dead to the world. But dead means dead, not just moribund, and the only thing you have left which you can call your own are your sins" (p. 193). At la Trappe, death to the world would be sought through prayer, penance, and humiliation, until the final death of the body.

But extreme at it seems to us, Rancé's monasticism was not out of keeping with current spirituality. What, then, explains the strong antagonisms which he elicited in many contemporaries? His was a personality both combative and hypercritical. His way was God's way, so he believed and often proclaimed, making no bones about what he saw as other people's weaknesses. He was ready to criticize, equally ready to take umbrage. In this, again, Bell tells us, "he was a man of his times," in an age of violent and public passions. The man and the age fit well together.

Bell confesses at the outset that he doesn't expect to persuade people who do not like Rancé to start liking him. The same might be said about the seventeenth century as a whole: we of the twenty-first are unlikely ever to take it to our hearts. But 'understanding' it, and him, is another matter; and for help with this, the book is warmly recommended.