Catholic/Protestant: The Tensions of Transdenominational Prayer

Significant aspects of the theory and practice of devotion in the sense of prayer and divine worship can be agreed on among Christian denominations, as numerous translations and adaptations of popular devotional literature prove. There are, however, also crucial differences in the modes of prayer and the types of rituals that depend on the worshiper's denomination. Both the similarities and the differences can be traced in the international reception of one of the most successful devotional manuals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Catholic bishop François de Sales's Introduction à la vie dévote (1609). It was designed for the French Catholic female lay reader. Its training program was supposed to fit into an otherwise busy secular schedule so as to transform the reader's whole mind and daily life. The author emphasizes repeatedly that he is not just teaching the devotee how to pray, but also how to live a life of devotion, i.e., how to master the "virtue of devotion which is most amiable and acceptable in the divine sight," translating the benefits of prayer into a life fully designed to answer all the demands of her worldly tasks in the most conscientious and charitable manner possible.¹ Only when she achieves this synthesis of worldly and spiritual, interior and exterior, life in a cheerful manner with a grateful heart, can she claim to live a truly devout life. The nature of devotion, the manner of its working, and its effect on the devotee is represented by de Sales through a number of metaphors, such as the high flight of eagles, a flame, "the true spiritual sugar which takes away what is bitter in mortification," "dew in summer," emphasizing the extraordinary power it conveys and the essential needs to which it answers.²

In this sense, devotion relates to all aspects of human life, including marriage; it needs to be embraced gladly and fulfilled diligently in daily existence. This aspect of the text is translinguistic, transnational, and transdenominational. The mental bridge that spans the gap between prayer and work is the spiritual nosegay: de Sales advises the devotee to take two or three particularly fruitful thoughts from her morning devotion, like scented flowers, over into her household duties, so she can smell them and be reminded of her good resolutions.

When we come to the specifics of prayer training, however, concepts of correct devotion differ between Catholics and Protestants. Clearly, features like de Sales's sacramental bias or his references to devotional objects such as the rosary would not find their way into these versions, but the tailoring of the text to Anglican audiences goes beyond such elisions. The most prominent adaptations in English are by Henry Dodwell, distinguished lay humanist scholar, theologian, and non-juror, and William Nicholls, the theologian and author of an influential commentary on the Book of Common Prayer.³ Both editors were prolific writers who took an active part in the theological and administrative debates of their day, so both would have taken the doctrinal implications of de Sales's work very seriously.

The changes in the front matter from the French source text to the English Protestant adaptations include not only title pages, the elision of de Sales's emotional dedicatory prayer to Jesus, and new prefaces with anti-Catholic propaganda, but also frontispieces, which no longer show the Pietà or portraits of Saint François de Sales with the sacred heart of Jesus. Broadly speaking, devotion in these adaptations is de-emotionalized, rationalized, and re-focused on God alone, away from Mary, Angels, and Saints. Nicholls explicitly warns that an increase of affection weakens judgment, so that many faults in publications by Catholics run the risk of being overlooked by readers. From the text proper, each Anglican editor cuts what he deems improper, Nicholls more than Dodwell. The comparison between the two adaptations shows that devotion is not only easily compartmentalized into the broad distinctions of Catholic and Protestant but also subtly nuanced within Anglicanism: how the borders between Anglican and Catholic worship are negotiated depends on the individual's personal theological and...