La Conversation intérieure: la méditation en France au XVIIe siècle (review)

Christian Belin's fine study succeeds in situating a tightly focused examination of a particular manifestation of seventeenth-century Catholic writing and practice within the broader context of Christian spirituality in the period, and indeed within the intellectual climate of the age. He opens his survey with a wide-ranging exposition of the background, starting with the figure of Job in the Old Testament, and presenting his subject both as a means of re-assessing the relationship between the self and the world, and as the christianization of an essentially philosophical pursuit. He moves thereafter to an exceptionally full survey of the various traditions of meditation (distinguished in this study, as it was in the seventeenth century, from the higher and less systematic practice of contemplation) from which his chosen period inherits: Scripture, St Augustine ('premier interprète de l'inquiétude spirituelle de l'Occident'), the monastic orders, with their discipline of lectio divina, the Imitation of Christ and, closest in time and strongest in influence, the writings of the Spanish Carmelites and the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola, synthesized in France in the early seventeenth century, according to Belin's entirely convincing interpretation, in the works of St François de Sales. The individual writers he studies in more detail thereafter might appear to be rather eclectically chosen, but they compositely illustrate the range and variety of the phenomenon in the period, and situate meditation, in Belin's phrase, 'au cœur des grands débats religieux du siècle'. The first sections are devoted to two strongly contrasted poetic voices: La Ceppède, with his intense concentration on the physicality of the Passion; and Claude Hopil, who takes language to its limits in his dizzying evocations of the mystery of the Trinity. Belin next turns to three central texts: the Discours of Bérulle, the Élévations of Bossuet and, perhaps less conventionally, the Pensées of Pascal, showing in the process how forms of digression and repetition are fundamental to the activity in question, and thus to the writing of which it is both cause and effect. In some respects more surprising again are the following chapters on two works by Descartes and Malebranche, justified by their crucially differentiated titles (Méditations métaphysiques and Méditations chrétiennes et métaphysiques). Yet these analyses carry full conviction in exposing how Descartes follows the conventions of meditation in his attempt to 'associer les lecteurs à l'élaboration progressive d'un itinéraire mental', before showing in turn how Malebranche combines mysticism and rationalism in 'le décalque philosophique d'un modèle emprunté à la littérature dévote'. Belin concludes this remarkable book, memorable throughout for its elegance and density of expression, with three chapters: on meditation and interiority, in which he traces a tendency in the period towards the internalization of spiritual experience, above all in the laity; on meditation and mysticism, touching in particular on the controversies surrounding Quietism and its adherents; and, in a vertiginous peroration inspired in many respects by Pascal, on meditation, time and eschatology, continuing and contributing thereby to the very tradition that has been his field of study.