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  • Dialogues posthumes sur le quiétisme (1699)
  • Emma Gilby
Jean de la Bruyére: Dialogues posthumes sur le quiétisme (1699). Texte établi et présenté par RICHARD PARISH. Grenoble, Jérôme Million, 2005. 246 pp. Pb €22.00.

These nine Dialogues posthumes sur le quiétisme represent a magnificently satirical vulgarization of the debates surrounding the theory and practice of Quietism at the end of the seventeenth century. Quietism, which has its most influential and controversial French exponent in Mme Guyon, encourages passivity and inaction in a form of Christian ataraxia. The Quietist gives him or herself over to contemplation, neither fearing God nor hoping for salvation, but simply awaiting divine inspiration. If Fénelon concludes that there is a profound humility in this, Bossuet, with the weight of the Church behind him, judges the abdication of human responsibility (and concomitant indifference to, for instance, the sacramentals) to be abhorrent. The author of these dialogues, on the other hand, finds the whole business conducive to comedy; and creates a cast of characters centring around the figure of a naïve 'pénitente' who is to be instructed in the ways of Quietism by her 'directeur de conscience'. Her efforts to come to terms with the religious practices in question, her grapplings with the vocabulary of self-abnegation, are a vehicle for burlesque imagery ('Comme un corps mort?' 'Et enterré, ainsi que je me l'imaginais'); her dealings with her recalcitrant family provide some good early modern mother-in-law jokes. The gently erotic language of Mme Guyon's 'pur amour', often lovely in itself, is cruelly subverted here, as the 'pénitente' strives with her 'directeur' to attain the status of 'une femme tout-à-fait perduë', 'une parfaite abandonnée'. Richard Parish has rescued these dialogues from relative critical obscurity. In a preface which manages to be at once learned and attentive to the humour of the text, he covers the debate about authorship (the first seven Dialogues are widely attributed to an aged Jean de la Bruyère, the remaining two to Louis-Ellies du Pin, theologian at the Collège royal); the writings of Guyon, 'embastillée' in 1695; and the complexities of the Bossuet-Fénelon debate. Vitally, he unites the main body of the Dialogues with the extensive contemporary annotations of Du Pin, absent from the Pléiade edition. There are other bonuses: the état présent of what existing scholarship we have on the Dialogues; the succinct summary of their content; the fact that Parish is extremely well placed to comment on their similarites with and differences from Pascal's Lettres provinciales. Readers will enjoy the vivacity of both the text and its presentation. [End Page 514]

Emma Gilby
Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge
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