Jacques Bertot: directeur mystique (review)

If he is remembered at all, Jacques Bertot has survived into posterity as the director of conscience, late in his relatively short life, of Madame Guyon, and most historical references to him are to be found either in her autobiography and letters, or in the selection of his writings that she edited after his death, and that were published in four volumes in 1726 under the composite title of Le Directeur mistique (sic). His life is obscure, beyond the facts of his birth in 1622 in Normandy, where he trained for the priesthood and was appointed superior of a convent in Caen, and his subsequent move to the same position at the influential Abbey of Montmartre near Paris in 1675. He died in 1681. His writings and ministry establish a continuity between the mystical tradition of the early seventeenth century, as manifested in such figures as Jean de Bernières, and the dominant player in the movement that came to be known as Quietism (although the editor of this volume would challenge the helpfulness of such a label). Dominique Tronc is a scrupulous and sympathetic expositor of his subject, bringing out in particular the network of relationships that defined his field of influence, and foregrounding the authority and precision of his spiritual direction, as apparent in the written record that he left of its major tendencies. The substantial series of texts reproduced here in fact constitutes no more than a small portion of Bertot's tenuously surviving corpus, and is focused on three elements of his output: the letters of direction, patient and systematic, to Madame Guyon, who referred to herself as his 'fille aînée', and to other unidentified addressees both in France and, innovatively for the period, Canada; the Opuscules spirituels, three of which trace the path of mystical progress by means of a sustained analogy— with a garden, a navigator and a fledgling (and here the echoes of St François de Sales are strong if inexplicit); and the unappealingly named La Conclusion des retraites, to which Tronc prefers to give the more attractive and more accurate title of Les Degrés d'oraison, and which he sees as a forerunner, in a more succinct and less lyrical idiom, of Madame Guyon's notorious Les Torrents (although it could be argued that Fénelon's Explication des Maximes des Saints affords a closer point of comparison). This treatise stands out for the precision of its coverage of the whole range of mystical experiences, as of 'la définition des états et des critères de passage entre eux'. The whole affords a coherent exposition of the more restrained (and elitist) kinds of instruction in the higher forms of oraison that were promoted in the period and beyond, and provides a useful corrective thereby to certain of its more exuberant (and populist) advocates. The presentation is clear and informative, the editing meticulous, and a sequence of appendices provides chronologies of the principal figures and dates in the école du pur amour, alongside a bibliography of printed and manuscript sources.