Portland State University PDXScholar Dissertations and Theses Dissertations and Theses 1986 The spirituality of Pierre de Berullé Steven Percy Poitra Portland State University Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds Part of the European History Commons, and the History of Religion Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Poitra, Steven Percy, "The spirituality of Pierre de Berullé " (1986). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 3630. https://doi.org/10.15760/etd.5498 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: [email protected]. " AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF Steven Percy Poitra for the Master of Arts in History presented July 16, 1986. Title: The Spirituality of Pierre de Berulle. APPROVED BY MEMBERS OF THE THESIS COMMITTEE: Michael F. Reardon, Chairman Charles A. Le Guin Franklin C. West The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries witnessed a revival of spirituality throughout Europe. Positive theology emerged as both an instigation to and instrument for Christian humanists in their endeavor to redress the Church's fundamental relationship to the laity. The early efforts for reform in France were discouraged by Gallicanist sympathies. Further, growing numbers of Calvinists combined with the possibility of a Protestant king led to thirty·five years of sporadic civil war. 2 From the 1580's and 90's, French spirituality began a period of renewal and growth. At the heart of the French experience was the famous Acarie circle among whose members was Pierre de Berulle. Berulle eventually rejected the abstract mysticism of the Acarie circle and elaborated his own spiritual doctrine. Berulle's achievement was a synthesis of theocentrism, inherently opposed to humanism's anthropocentrism, and Christian humanism. Berullian spirituality was the culmination of the Reformation of the French Church. This achievement, however, is largely ignored by historians of Christianity. The object of this thesis, therefore, is to describe the historical context of Berullian spirituality and to examine the spirituality itself so as to confirm or deny the claims of the handful of French historians who have resurrected the memory of Berulle. At the end of this process of description and examination, causes for the disparagement of Berulle, of his spirituality and of his congregation will be suggested. THE SPIRITUALITY OF PIERRE DE BERULLE by STEVEN PERCY POITRA A thesis sub~itted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in HISTORY Portland State University 1986 TO THE OFFICE OF GRADUATE STUDIES AND RESEARCH: The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Steven Percy Poitra presented July 16, 1986. Michael F. Reardon, Chairman Charles A. Le Guin Franklin C. West APPROVED: Betnard V. Burke, Head, Department of History Bernard Ross, Dean of Graduate Studies and Research PREFACE To uncover the ties between an historical phenomenon and the cultural reality in which that phenomenon has appeared, is a primary task of the historian. By cultural reality is meant the social, political, economic and intellectual forces that, in a matrix of relationships, form or comprise what may be called the social problematic. It is from this matrix of relationships, this social problematic, that rises the very culture, the very way of life, even the habits of thought, in short, the cultural reality, of a specified people within a specified period of time inhabiting a specified geographical area or territory. A cultural reality is a conceptual construct that may be as broad as the whole of Western Civilization from Ancient Greece to the present time or as narrow as Post-Reformation France under the regency of Marie de Medicis. For practical reasons, the parameters of an historical investigation are limited purposely in one way or another. Choosing a specific historical phenomenon and showing its relation to the milieu in which it was born and upon which it worked an effect, is one such purposeful delimiting. At first, the historical phenomenon to be investigated in this thesis was the congregation of priests officially instituted by papal bull as the Oratory of Our Lord Jesus r iv Christ, commonly known as the Oratory of France of the Ancien Regime. In the course of my research, however, this earlier object gave way to something less ambitious but also of greater historical significance. Specifically, I discovered that a thorough re cons true t ion of the es tab 1 i shment of the Oratory was quite impossible if one were limited to the relevant primary materials available in the United States and Canada. Though certainly available in this country, the few histories of the Oratory that have been written are nearly exclusively by Oratorians. So marked by polemic are these, that were one ever to attempt to re cons true t the story of this group, access to pertinent archival collections would be essential. A simple illustration of this is provided by the words of two Oratorians themselves. In the preface to Leherpeur's L'Oratoire de France, Mgr. Baudrillart, not only of the Academie Fran<;aise but the Bishop of Himeria and Rector of the Institut Catholique in Paris, as well as an Oratorian, writes: Historien moi-meme, et avide de sincerite, je ne craindrai pas d'approuver la franchise, pour ne dire pas la hardiesse, avec laquelle vous abordez les questions les plus delicates et vous faites justice de legendes erronees et tendancieuses dont d'autres ont charges notre histoire.l l"An historian myself, and eager for truthfulness, I will not fear to approve the frankness, so as not to say the daring, with which you tackle the most sensitive issues and refute the erroneous and tendentious legends with which others have encumbered our history." Lettre-Preface of S. G. Baudrillart in Leherpeur, L'Oratoire de France, p. vii. v He goes on to mention specifically the three erroneous and tendentious legends which Leherpeur has tackled with such frankness: that the Oratory, in accepting the direction of colleges, allowed itself to be diverted from its original and proper vocation of seeing to a reform of the secular clergy through the direction of seminaries only; that the Oratory, either in its entirety or only partially, depending upon the writer one reads, came to embrace the Jansenist heresy; and, lastly, that Oratorians were among the first and constituted the most numerous group of priests to apostatize in taking the oath of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in revolutionary France. For himself, Leherpeur, thus praised for his fitting straightforwardness, revealingly writes of the first of these myths that he encounters in his narrative: Le respect de la verite historique cree !'obligation de ne pas passer sous silence cette lutte entre oratoriens et jesuites, si la charite impose le devoir de n'en parler qu'avec le souci de ne fas << rallumer le feu de ces vielles querelles >>. The admonition to bear in mind one's responsibility for not relighting the fire of old quarrels, coupled with the ardent desire for defending the Congregation against what are seen as deliberately biased accounts of episodes in its past, 2"Respect for historical truth creates an obligation to not pass over in silence the struggle between Oratorians and Jesuits, though charity imposes the duty only to speak of it with concern to not 'relight the fire of old quarrels'." Leherpeur, M. L'Oratoire de France. Paris: Editions Spes, 1926, p. 23. vi produces a curious style of writing. In nearly all histories of the Oratory these conflicting interests combine to produce circumspect accounts in which only the most careful reader is able to discern the background tableau that constituted the impulse to compose the history in the first place but which now is not to be treated directly. It would be inaccurate, more so in the case of some than in others, to accuse these historians of deliberate obfuscating. Still, the effect is the same. Between the Oratory of the Ancien Regime (1611-1790) and the Oratory as reconstituted in 1852, a revolution had been effected. The history of the earlier Oratory became a matter of great concern to those who had labored for its reconstitution. Thus they undertook to discover what that earlier history had been both for their own internal uses in terms of being able to adhere more closely to the practices of their forebears and, as noted above, to combat legends. Hence, the histories dating from the mid-nineteenth century up to and including the early twentieth century are thinly veiled apologies. Whatever definition of truth one may ascribe to, the anecdotal treatment of the ever pious Berulle and his saintly work contained in these histories is the stuff of hagiography. Most probably since re, these priest/historians were not above creating legends of their own so as all the better to combat those other, less flattering ones. vii From the second decade of the twentieth century to the opening years of the 1930' s, the eleven volumes of Henri Bremond's history of French religious sentiment were published. Approximately three volumes were devoted not to the Oratory but to the spirituality with which the Oratory and several other religious groupings were imbued. From Bremond' s monumental work, the history of the Oratory gave way to historical treatments that revolved around Pierre de Berulle. These studies of Berulle's spirituality and of the spirituality of those whom he influenced have been conducted by a mere handful of French historians, Louis Cognet, Jean Orcibal, Jean Dagens and a few others.