The Great Age of Souls

Mazarin’s France was the France of Catholic reform. His years of power coincide with some of the most active and fruitful in that Europe-wide process for which ‘Counter-Reformation’, while defining one part, the unrelenting struggle against Protestantism, must be a wholly inadequate term. Brémond’s phrase, The great age of souls’, ¹ better conveys the heroic aspects of a flowering of French spirituality which was so diverse in insights, gifts, and works that it cannot properly be called a movement. Yet, from Madame Acarie, Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld ² and François de Sales, among early leaders, to Bossuet and Fénelon ³ at the end of the century, it so profoundly influenced successive generations that it cannot be treated simply as a single episode, or even phase, in the history of the church. Twenty-seven French men and women of the seventeenth century were to be canonised or beatified. It was an age of such extraordinary, path-finding personalities that the reader risks losing track of central themes in following the careers of certain individuals; yet he must, in order to appreciate a mental and spiritual ethos that is wholly intelligible in Christian terms, but remote from minds conditioned to see as irrational or ‘neurotic’ any behaviour which is seemingly at odds with the ‘normal’ impulses of nature. Faithful to the teaching of the Gospels about the denial of self and giving to others, seventeenth-century spirituality was grounded in the idea that chastity left one free to love many rather than one: agape promoted in place of eros.