Method in Prayer

Abstract

There is little of the mystical attaching to Port-Royalist piety, which inherited from Saint-Cyran a tradition of simplicity and unpretentious openness to God in prayer, a tradition soon coloured by the widespread seventeenth-century reaction against illuminism which followed upon the troubles over the Alumbrados of Spain. A notable figure, however, was Mother Agnés Arnauld. Her little Chapelet secret du Saint-Sacrement, composed in 1627, is a pious but somewhat obscure effusion in which she meditates after the manner of the Oratorian Condren on the wretchedness and nothingness of fallen man. When the work came to light it was attacked at the Sorbonne for, among other things, turning souls away from the practice of the virtues of faith, hope and charity - a charge which was commonly brought against works suspected of quietism. Seven years later the Chapelet secret was successfully defended - or its excesses explained away - by Saint-Cyran who insisted on the need for personal knowledge of spiritual authors and familiarity with the strained language peculiar to mystics if their work was to be interpreted aright. It is remarkable that Nicole’s first published observations on the topic of mysticism are in praise of Saint-Cyran’s defence of the Chapelet secret. These observations were made a quarter of a century later still, in a note to the sixteenth of the Provinciales in Nicole’s Latin translation under the name Wendrock.