La méditation au XVIIe siècle: Rhétorique, art, spiritualité (review)

The authors of the articles presented in the volume La méditation au XVII^e siècle: Rhétorique, art, spiritualité undertake to analyze the various meanings attached to the term meditation in the seventeenth century without striving to provide an overarching concept of meditation. Christian Belin's introduction to the volume, which collects papers originally presented at a conference on the subject (Université "Paul-Valéry, " Montpellier, 2000), emphasizes the volatility and the slipperiness of this notion in the seventeenth century, during which Christianity continues its fragmented existence and, having lost its power to organize the entire French society, continues to hold sway over the individual subject who "interiorizes faith" and engages in meditative exercises (8). The essays in the volume attest to the variety of the exercises of meditation in works as diverse as d'Aubigné's Meditations sur les pseaumes; in Pibrac's and Du Vair's parliamentary orations; in the spirtual exercises of the Jesuits; in Bossuet's and Fénelon's polemical speeches; in Descartes's philosophical Méditations and Malebranche's Méditations chrestiennes; in both pious and profane baroque poetry by Goudet, Desmarets, Durand, Sorel, and others; in tragedy and in early novels, paintings, and music.

The analyses derive their rigor from an attentiveness to the practice of meditation as a rhetorical topos rooted in Philo's distinction between the "interior word" (logos endiathetos) and the "exterior word" (logos prophorikos) (13, 239), and thus provide additional materials to the humanist Christian tradition of oration analyzed by Marc Fumaroli (L'École de silence [1994]). Another crucial study on the subject of meditation and spiritual exercise, Pierre Hadot's extensive analysis of spiritual exercise in classical philosophy and in early Christianity, figures, regrettably, only as a tangential point of reference in this volume (Qu'est-ce que la philosophie antique? [1995]). The analyses presented in the volume nonetheless show that meditation in the seventeenth century is tied to the emergence of spaces of mental closure, to the folding of the self upon itself, which render the claustrum animae known to medieval monks accessible to publics as various as are the genres discussed.

Véronique Ferrer argues that the rhythm of d'Aubigné's prose in his Meditations, which is rich in parallelisms, alliterations, and phonic recurrences, is precisely such an exercise in which reader and author participate. Malebranche's Méditations chrétiennes, as Huguette Courtès's analysis shows, wrench the status of certainty away from truths culled both from the sciences and from the Bible in order to transform them into points of departure for a process of reflection. Anne Le Pas De Sécheval's article argues that the increasing permissiveness in the Catholic Church toward the use of material images allows for the emergence of aids for meditation helping the average pious person to engage in the practice. The articles of Anne Piéjus and Maya Suemi Lemos show that music can serve as the material basis for guiding the mental exercise of meditation, for example, through the abundant use it makes of contrefactum.

The volume offers a rich array of materials for anyone interested in the conjunction of rhetoric, literature, arts, and spirituality in the seventeenth century, but it provides no clues as to why this boom of meditative practices immediately precedes the eclipse of interest in this form of spirituality that occurs in the eighteenth century. An unexplored aspect of meditation in the seventeenth century is its relation to an emerging new interest what Michel de Certeau has called "the ordinary," whose anchorage in repetition he underscores. Especially noteworthy is, in this respect, Nathalie Grande's remark that spiritual autobiographies, those modeled upon Theresa of Avilla's Life, combine romanesque elements with spiritual guidance. Thus these meditative exercises figure in the seventeenth century not only...