Catholic Thought discussion

Chapter 5 – First Step into the World: The French School

In the seventeenth century the French School of Spirituality was inspired by Pierre Cardinal de Bérulle (1575–1629). They devoted much time to Jesus’ time in the womb. Bérulle is quoted throughout the chapter.

A ‘Copernican’ Christology

The most marked feature of the theology of Bérulle is its Christ-centeredness. Pope Urban VIII called him “the Apostle of the Word incarnate,” and one of his successors as superior general of the French Oratory, Fr. Bourgoing, suggested he had been sent by God “as a new St. John to point out Jesus Christ.”2 Bérulle worked a ‘Copernican revolution’ in the sacred sciences. He attempted in theology what his older contemporary Galileo achieved in astronomy.

“One of the outstanding intellects of this age has tried to maintain that the sun, and not the earth, is at the center of the universe. . . . This novel opinion, little followed in the science of the stars, is useful and must be followed in the science of salvation. For Jesus is the sun, immobile in his grandeur and moving all things. . . . Jesus is the true center of the world, and the world must be in a continual movement towards him. Jesus is the sun of our souls, from whom they receive all graces, lights, and influences.”

The Lodgings of the Son of God Like the Syriac theologians, Bérulle compares and links the diverse lodgings (séjours) of Jesus: the bosom of God the Father, the womb of the Blessed Virgin, and the altars of the Catholic Church.

“There are three states of Jesus that deserve singular and daily consideration: in the womb (sein) of the Father as Son of God, God from God, consubstantial and equal with his Father; in the womb of the Virgin as Son of Man, both man and God, the Mediator of God and men; in the womb of the Church, which is his centre and altar, as Lamb of God and victim of praise and propitiation, which she [the Church] presents to the eternal Father.”

The marvel of the Incarnation is this: it enables God to worship God. God the Son in his humanity adores God the Father, with whom, in his divinity, he is coequal. What is more, this filial worship of the Father begins at the first moment of the Incarnation and has its first sanctuary in the Virgin’s womb.
[…]Bérulle follows St. Thomas’ teaching that, from the first moment of his conception, Christ has the use of his human free will and at the summit of his soul enjoys the beatific vision of God.
“He is living in the Virgin, and he is life itself. He is holy by the grace of the hypostatic union, which is the grace of graces. He is in glory by the state of his soul, established at the very hour of its making in the vision of God.

The Unborn State of Christ

The Christology of Bérulle is a doctrine of état, “state.” […] Bérulle uses état in the latter sense to revive St. Irenaeus’ theology of recapitulation and the Thomist doctrine of Christ’s headship. As man, but because he is God, Christ is “the head of human nature.” In assuming a complete and concrete human nature, the eternal Word in some way unites himself to all men, and, by living a complete human life from conception to the last breath, he touches and hallows every stage of every man’s journey through this world.

“By this high, divine, and lofty counsel, we do not just have a Man-God, which is what the Incarnation gives us. We have an infant God, a mortal God, suffering, trembling, weeping in a cradle; a God living and walking on earth, in Egypt, in Judaea. . . . God wants us to have all the miseries, conditions, and lowlinesses of our nature relieved by the divine subsistence and personality, a God suffering and dying on the cross, a God dead in the tomb, for he who took our nature by the mystery of the Incarnation wanted to take all these states and conditions of our nature and to honour them with the divine subsistence, what the ancient Fathers of the Church call the economy and dispensation of the divine mystery. For the Incarnation of the Word is the basis and foundation of a supreme dignity, in other words, not only of the sanctification but also of the deification of all the states and mysteries that share the life and wayfaring condition of the Son of God on earth.”

The human conception of the Son of God and his life in the womb have a redeeming purpose. The virginal and miraculous character of his conception and his perfections as a human child in the womb are intended “to repair the ruins of our pitiful entry into the world as sinners.”

“Seeing that he wanted to be an infant on earth, in order to consecrate and sanctify human infancy contaminated by Original Sin, could this infancy have been better restored than by a Virginal Conception, a miraculous birth, a light of glory before the light of the world, a divine power in the powerlessness of the Child, the use of a holy and perfect life with God his Father and the Virgin his Mother before the use of his senses and the force of nature?”

“But we see sensibly that in this present state she is more close and more conjoined, while he is in her, while he is part of her, while she lives for him, and he lives by her, and he is in a continual state of dependence and even of indigence with regard to her.”

The Visitation

The Visitation, says Bérulle, is the only visible work reported by Scripture that Jesus and Mary performed during the nine months the divine baby was in his Mother’s womb.
“God has become a child, and so he wants first to be known and adored by a child, and this is one of the first emanations of the childhood of God, manifesting himself to the universe. God is a child, the world ignores, heaven adores, and a child is the first person in the universe to recognize and adore him, and he does so by the homage and secret operation of God himself, who wants to act upon children. He wants to honour himself as child by giving the first knowledge of himself to a child in the world, making him his prophet in the universe. Thus, the Infant-God is recognized and manifested, not by an angel, but by a child. His first prophet is a child, just as shortly his first martyrs will be children.”

Jesus in Mary: A Union of Hearts

Between any expectant mother and the child in her womb, there is more than a merely physical presence of the one to the other, of the one in the other. The bodily closeness is the basis of an intimacy of knowledge and love, a union of hearts. This natural bond is wonderfully strengthened by the unique fullness of grace with which the God-man and his Mother, each in their own way, are endowed.
“All her senses are directed at him, for this is a sensible mystery, a mystery that is sensible in her. And the whole of human sensibility owes homage to its God made sensible for human nature. All her spirit is applied there. . . . The grace infused into the Virgin, grace so excellent and exalted, applies and absorbs all the senses, all the faculties, and all the spirit of the Virgin. . . . Thus grace and nature conspire in her to establish an excellent disposition, one that enraptures her heart and her soul in Jesus her Son and her God.”

The French Poet Paul Claudel expressed it in this way:

At the end of this third month after the Annunciation,
which is June,
The woman who is God’s has heard the tune
Of heartbeats under hers and felt the movement
of her Son.
Within the sinless Virgin’s womb commences a new era.
The Child who is before all time assumes time in his
Mother of his Mother,
And in the primal Mover man’s breathing is begun!
She moves not, speaks not a word. She adores.
She withdraws from the world. For her, God is not
outdoors:
He is her work, her Son, her Baby, borne as her All!
Satan rules and the whole wide world offers him incense
and gold.
God penetrates like a thief in this Eden of death
overbold.
A woman was once deceived, and now a woman
cheats hell.
O God, in a woman hid! O Cause, in this bondage
bound!
Jerusalem knows naught; even Joseph sees darkness
profound.
The Mother alone with her Child feels his ineffable
moving.

For nine months, says Bérulle, Mary is the only person on earth who worships the mystery of the Incarnation. It takes place “on the earth, for the earth, and yet is not known by the earth.” For the benefit of the whole world, Mary alone in the world worships Jesus.

The Graces of Mary’s Womb Burden

Jesus . . . in his states and mysteries is himself our portion, and, while giving us a universal share in him, he wants us also to have an individual share in his diverse states depending on the different ways in which he has elected us and we are devoted to him. Thus, he shares himself with his children, making them partakers of the spirit and grace of his mysteries, appropriating to some his life and to others his death, to some his infancy, to others his power, to some his hidden life, to others his public life. . . . In all these different states and conditions he gives himself to all. He gives us his heart, his grace, and his spirit.

The infancy of the Son of God is a passing state. Its circumstances have passed away. He is no longer a child. Nevertheless, there is something divine in this mystery that continues in heaven and that effects a similar kind of grace in the souls who are on earth, whom it pleases Jesus Christ to affect and to dedicate to this humble and first state of his person.

The Good by God the Christ an Embryo

From which His conceiving we may conceive His great love to us-ward. Love, not only condescending to take our nature upon Him, but to take it by the same way and after the same manner that we do, by being conceived. That, and no other better beseeming way. The womb of the Virgin is surely no such place, but He might well have abhorred it. He did not; pudorem exordii nostri non recusavit, saith Hilary; “He refused not that ourselves are ashamed of,” sed naturae nostrae contumelias transcurrit, “but the very contumelies of our nature (transcurrit is too quick a word) He ran through them”; nay, He stayed in them, in this first nine months. I say the contumelies of our nature not to be named, they are so mean. So mean indeed as it is verily thought they made those old heretics I named, and others more who yet yielded Him to be Man, to run into such fancies as they did; only to decline those foul indignities as they took them, for the great God of Heaven to undergo. . . . This sure is matter of love; but came there any good to us by it? There did. For our conception being the root as it were, the very groundsill of our nature; that He might go to the root and repair our nature from the very foundation, thither He went; that what had been there defiled and decayed by the first Adam, might by the Second be cleansed and set right again. That had our conception been stained, by Him therefore, primum ante omnia, to be restored again. He was not idle all the time He was an embryo—all the nine months He was in the womb. . . . This honour is to us by the dishonour of Him; this the good by Christ an embryo.

“Oh Wonderful and Incomprehensible Dependence of God”
St. Louis-Marie On Jesus in Mary’s Womb

Jesus is at present, as much as he ever was, the fruit of Mary, as heaven and earth tell him a thousand times every day, “And blessed is the fruit of thy womb.” It is certain that, for every human being in particular who possesses him, Jesus Christ is as truly the fruit and the work of Mary as he is for the whole world in general, so that, if a faithful Christian has Jesus Christ formed in his heart, he can boldly say, “Great thanks to Mary, what I possess is her fruit and her work, and without her I would not have him.”

I found this surprising:

In the history of the Church, no school of theology and spirituality has given Jesus’ life in Mary more attention than the seventeenth-century French School, of which Pierre Cardinal de Bérulle (1575–1629)…was the chief inspiration.

I suppose that’s true. Until this book I had not realized there had been much contemplation of Jesus inside of Mary’s womb.

I hadn’t either, Manny.

This book is the first time I've come across it. It's pretty clueless, but I never really gave much thought to it.

Manny wrote: "I found this surprising:
In the history of the Church, no school of theology and spirituality has given Jesus’ life in Mary more attention than the seventeenth-century French School, of which Pierre Cardinal de Bérulle (1575–1629)…was the chief inspiration."

So interesting, Manny. I'll look into it. I think my wife has a book on French Catholic Church spirituality.

So Kerstin sent me an email last night that she has to rush to Germany to be with her mother. Kerstin’s mother has been fighting cancer and perhaps a critical situation has come up. Let’s hold Kerstin and her mom in our prayers. I will now take over moderating this book to its completion.

Oh no! We'll pray for her

If you email her, Manny, please let Kerstin know of our concern and our prayers.

Frances wrote: "If you email her, Manny, please let Kerstin know of our concern and our prayers."

OK. I will. She'll eventually see these comments I'm sure.

I found this passage in chapter 5 fascinating and worth deeper meditation.

The marvel of the Incarnation is this: it enables God to worship God. God the Son in his humanity adores God the Father, with whom, in his divinity, he is coequal. What is more, this filial worship of the Father begins at the first moment of the Incarnation and has its first sanctuary in the Virgin’s womb. Bérulle, who had a thorough knowledge of the Greek Fathers, repeats what Cyril, Proclus, and Andrew of Crete had recognized before him—namely, that the Virgin’s pure womb, unshadowed by any sin, containing the divine Word himself, is “the holy or sacred temple where Jesus reposes, the true Ark of the true Covenant . . . and the Virgin’s heart is the first altar on which Jesus offered his heart, his body, his spirit, as a victim of perpetual praise.” When Christ comes into the world, he surrenders his new human body and will to the service of the Father: “Lo, I have come to do thy will, O God” (Heb. 10:5–10; cf. Ps. 40:6–8).

That God the Son adores God the Father is evident in John’s chapter seventeen when Jesus gives His farewell discourse and great final prayer.

When Jesus had said this, he raised his eyes to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come. Give glory to your son, so that your son may glorify you, just as you gave him authority over all people, so that he may give eternal life to all you gave him. Now this is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ. I glorified you on earth by accomplishing the work that you gave me to do. Now glorify me, Father, with you, with the glory that I had with you before the world began. (Jn 17:1-5)

I’m surprised Seward doesn’t allude to it, but here God worships God, the Father the Son and the Son the Father. I guess one could see this worship beginning in the womb with the Incarnation. John’s passage is a statement of the hour of His glory, when at the altar of the cross Jesus will offer Himself in sacrifice. Bérulle see the Virgin’s heart as the very first altar.