The action of holiness in history (4)
By Dom Prosper Guéranger | 6 November 2024
Extract from The Christian Sense of history, following “The action of holiness in history (3)”
The seventeenth century came, and although it had a lesser halo of sanctity than the preceding century, it still offered some particularly beautiful manifestations of the supernatural principle among men of God. Saint Francis de Sales deserves to halt the historian for quite some time. In him the Catholic Church was, so to speak, incarnate; by his inviolable faith, his boundless charity, and his unceasing struggle; the holiness of Saint Francis overflowed in the writings which revived and regulated piety in all Catholic nations, but especially in France. James I of England said to his Anglican bishops, showing them a copy of the Introduction to the Devout Life, “Make us some books like that.” This heretic prince had at that moment a sense of holiness; the sense that is recommended to the Christian historian. Any history is not complete if it is not, at the same time, a literary history to a certain degree. Our historian is advised not to omit the writings of the saints. Above all, let him not confuse them with ingenious inspirations and labours of piety. Pages written by saints have a particular savour which cannot be attained unless one is holy; it is known from experience that Saint Teresa, for example, moves the reader in quite a different way to that of the most vaunted spiritual writings of the seventeenth century.
France owes a great deal to Saint Francis de Sales, and it is right to regard him as one of the principal authors of the upward movement of the Christian sense with which our own nation was favoured for half a century. Thanks to this happy reaction, France was once again counted among the nations in which saintliness flourished during this period. It gave Christendom a Saint Peter Fourrier, a Saint John Francis Regis, a Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, a Saint Vincent de Paul; but these heroes exhaust the list of French saints in the seventeenth century. It ends in 1660 and, after that, France, glorious in so many ways, remained sterile in saints.1 Though it is precisely this period that is the most celebrated today, let the historian not fail to look into the causes of this perturbation of the Christian sense among us, in the very same era that people wrote with such eloquence on religious subjects. Perhaps he will be able to explain how, starting from the Régence in 1715, France was exploited, with great success, by a spirit of unbelief which nothing could stop. Evidently the supernatural sense was impoverished; Naturalism had quietly gained ground. There were still two servants of God, however, who, having shone in the last years of the seventeenth century, continued their careers into the eighteenth: Saint Jean-Baptiste de la Salle and Saint Louis de Montfort; but it must be added that they were unrecognised, persecuted, and charged with censures; and that, if God had not kept watch over the gift which he had given us in them, their reputation and their works would have died in contempt and oblivion. Besides, let one read the books written to revive Christian piety in the second half of the seventeenth century and see if there is frequent mention of the marvels of holiness bursting forth outside of France during this period. Did our fathers find, among authors of renown, any allusions to Saint Mary Magdalene de Pazzi or Saint Rose of Lima, who filled this same century with the perfume of their virtues and whose names were such common knowledge everywhere else? Can one conceive that the prodigies and even the name of Saint Joseph of Cupertino, known to the entire Catholic universe, took so long to cross the Alps; that a Duke of Brunswick, witness to the divine marvels which appeared in this servant of God, abjured his Lutheranism before him for this reason, thus renouncing forever the rights of his sovereignty; or that the marvellous instrument of this famous conversion, this personification of the holiness of the Church, living a few hundred leagues from Paris, was not invoked against the Huguenots, either before or after the Edict of Nantes? But all the channels were closed on this side. In the fifth century, Saint Simon Stylite, from the depths of the east and from the top of his pillar, recommended himself to the prayers of Saint Genevieve in Paris; in the seventeenth century, however, a miracle worker who surpassed most of the saints in marvels could live and die in a neighbouring country without anyone in France, other than the religious of his order, having taken the least notice of him! Can we therefore be surprised by the blasphemies and imbecilic laughter that were provoked by the publication of the Life of Saint Joseph of Cupertino? It bears repeating: our historian, if he wants to deepen Christian morals, as he ought, must concern himself with these strange phenomena.
The eighteenth century, in its turn, will reveal to him, through its most marked diminution in the number of saints, a general symptom of the weakening of Christian society. Never was the thermometer of holiness that we have already employed more exactly applicable. The century of Naturalism did not deserve that God should hurry to make a display of the supernatural. Some marvels, however, burst forth at the heart of the Church, where life can never die out. Saint Veronica Giuliani, decorated with the Stigmata of Christ’s Passion, encapsulated a great number of saints; Saint Leonard of Port-Maurice, Saint Paul of the Cross, Saint Alphonsus de Liguori; each merited more each day, by their heroic virtues, the honour reserved for them of one day being raised to the altars. France, among her children, no longer had anyone to show the world who seemed destined for such honours, until, from the bosom of the most corrupt court which our history has ever seen, two women of the blood of Saint Louis presented themselves successively to seize the palm of sanctity, which the Church, we hope, will confirm sooner or later. The first, a virgin and disciple of Saint Teresa, was Louise-Marie of France;2 the other, a wife and queen, was Clotilde of Sardinia.3 These two princesses — and a beggar, Benedict Joseph Labre4 — are the only manifestations of holiness which France seems to have produced in the whole course of the eighteenth century and, when they appeared, the nation was on the eve of being handed over to the enemies of the supernatural order, who would have reduced it to a heap of bloody ruins, if the merciful hand, which wanted to chastise and instruct us but not annihilate us, had not finally broken the oppressors of His people.5
This quite incomplete enumeration of the resources which the study of holiness in each century offers to the Christian historian, has taken too long; it can be summarised in a word: if the historian possesses the gift of faith, he will muster it in his accounts of supernatural events, when they are of notable significance to peoples; for they are the continuation and the application of the three great miracles on which the entire history of humanity revolves.6 If he wants to describe and portray the morals of Christian peoples, let him summarise the measure of holiness in each century; let him show that it is through the influence of holiness that the faith is sustained and morality preserved; in a word, let him give high priority to the saints in his writings, if he wants to pen a history such as God sees and judges it.
The Christian Sense of history is available to buy on the Voice of Family website.
Notes
- The end of the seventeenth century saw the illustrious Sister of the Visitation, Saint Margaret-Mary Alacoque, who is at the origin of the modern devotion to the Sacred Heart. But, at the time of the essay being written in 1858, her process of canonisation was far from being completed.
- Declared Venerable by Pius IX.
- Declared Venerable by Pius VII.
- Canonised by Leo XIII.
- At the time of Dom Guéranger, there was not yet any discussion of the beatification of the Martyrs of the Revolution. Though we may consider them as having already made up a part of the magnificent phalanx of the saints of the nineteenth century, Dom Guéranger’s judgment of on the end of the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century is, by and large, to be retained.
- Viz. the divine governance of the Hebrews, the conversion of the Gentiles and the preservation of the Church.
The Christian Sense of history is available to buy from Calx Mariae Publishing.