More from our Correspondent in Geneva

Well, very excitingly (to me, anyway) today is St. Jane Frances de Chantal's day. It is exciting to me not just because I love her and her story, but because also this not only brings us back to Savoy (yikes! who would have thought!) and Geneva and all its Calvinists, and gets back to that issue of historicity that I snarkily mentioned a few posts back. Which I'll get to a few lines down, or a few posts down the road, but first: St. Jane Frances, or Ste. Jeanne Françoise, if you like your French names to stay in French.


She is sort of another St. Francis' St. Clare: his student, his peer, his friend, his spiritual companion, and his travel partner on a long and profound journey. This time, it is a François-Francis instead of a Francesco one, the sixteenth century instead of the thirteenth, the Renaissance rather than the Middle Ages, and a Francis born of Savoyard nobility rather than of wealthy Umbrian merchants. This Francis, Francis de Sales, was a carefree and competent student, then lawyer, and then a bishop, rather than an apathetic student turned playboy-dandy turned mendicant, and before joining and guiding Jane Frances on her spiritual journey, he set out like Francis of Assisi on a way of life quite unlike that his family had intended for him, turning his back on his wealth like Francis, but going over to Geneva to convert Calvinists à la St. Dominic instead of founding an order à la the Franciscan Francis.


Both St. Francis de Sales' and St. Jane Frances' stories are stories of waiting. Francis felt a strong vocation before he went to law school, but he waited and waited, wanting to make sure it was truly a vocation rather than his ego leading him. St. Jane was a young devout widow with children when she felt overcome with a desire to serve God more fully. When Jane asked the now Bishop Francis to undertake her spiritual direction, he counseled her to patience: 'I had to know fully what God himself wanted. I had to be sure that everything in this should be done as though his hand had done it.' Just as he had waited for his calling and for his Calvinists, and as he would later for his new sister's convent, Francis counseled Jane again to wait when she told him of her overwhelming desire to take vows: 'Be patient until you get the wings of a dove, and then you can fly. I am very much afraid that you are a little too ardent and headlong, that you pursue too many desires rather too eagerly. Courage, my dear sister; if our will belongs to God, we ourselves are surely His.'

And this moderation was an essential element of the institute, and then order, the two founded in 1610, the Order of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin. So that religious aspirants of older age or less robust health, 'strong souls with weak bodies,' might be able to fulfill their calling, Francis and Jane dispensed with the sort of physical austerities Poor Clares and other orders endured. St. Francis advised the community's new members and superior, 'Let your humility be boundless; let it be the source of your virtues; let it be manifested in all your actions, till gentleness towards your neighbor become natural to you by force of your frequent use of it.' Later, St. Jane described the charism of the order as essentially 'a spirit of deep humility before God and of great gentleness toward our neighbor.'

This gentleness was modeled already by Jane the wife and widow as she fed the town's poor and sick, and in the very gentleness of the rule itself: St. Jane accepted into the order a woman in her eighties and those young and old women whose infirmities would have barred them from religious life were it not for the inclusiveness of Salesian spirituality and its insistence that all people, regardless of health, wealth, status, occupation, age, or education, are called to love and holiness, and that we can manifest our love in small but profound acts of mercy and compassion. As Thomas Dailey said in Praying with Francis de Sales, 'Enabled and ennobled by this love, human beings are capable of much more than might well be imagined. They are capable of living a true life of devotion in the midst of worldly pursuits. They are capable of giving birth, through faith, to a new culture of life and of love.'

Also, unlike Savonarola, Francis de Sales in The Devout Life reveals that he thought games and jokes and dancing were okay, if in moderation: 'I am inclined to say about balls what doctors say of certain articles of food, such as mushrooms and the like--the best are not good for much; but if eat them you must, at least mind that they are properly cooked,' and 'if you would dance or play rightly, it must be done as a recreation, not as a pursuit, for a brief space of time, not so as make you unfit for other things.' I like anyone who has bad things to say about mushrooms.

St. Clare round two

And, because when she had become too ill to attend Mass, St. Clare would see it on the walls of her cell, she is the patroness of television and television writers. And EWTN was founded by a Poor Clare, Mother Angelica.

St. Clare

It's St. Clare's feast day today; here is a picture of her from a manuscript of Bishop Ugolino, a reluctant but eventual full supporter of Francis' and Clare's cause for the Poor Ladies of San Damiano/Poor Clares to be a truly mendicant order. Once convinced, the then Pope Gregory IX issued a privilegium paupertatis two years after Francis' death for the fledgling order and wrote these beautiful words: 'Neither does the want of necessary things deter you from such a proposal, for the left arm of your Celestial Spouse is beneath your head to sustain the infirmity of your body, which, according to the order of charity, you have subjected to the law of the spirit. Finally, He who feeds the birds of the air and who gives the lilies of the field their raiment and their nourishment, will not leave you in want of clothing or of food until He shall come Himself to minister to you in eternity.'

'Between soup and love,

the first is better.' -Spanish proverb

I couldn't disagree more, but then, other than a couple bisques and chilled consommé with fresh mint and lemon, I tend to find soup a rather terrifying proposition. However, whether we agree or disagree with old Spanish chestnut-writers, or old Spanish-chestnut writers (and I do make exception to my soup exception for a good chestnut bisque, I assure you), the degrees of separation between soup and love are not as numerous as may appear. They involve:


- Belle-Epoque Grandes Horizontales
- guilds
- lesbian thespians
- cured meats
- Jacobins
- gastronomic proto-Taylorism

----and Dominicans.

You think I can't pull these together; you suspect it could be done by no one. And it is a disparate list. But I can and I will, and it will further buttress my argument that just when you let down your guard and imagine it can't possibly happen here, you meet Dominicans in the strangest of places...

The august Auguste Escoffier is the name that unites this strange list. I was reading Kenneth James' absorbing biography of the chef (from which any names or numbers herein are taken), which briefly gives a summation of the state of restaurants and cuisine in France and England before Ritz and Escoffier launched the Savoy in London. There was very much in France (though by no means paralleled in England) by this time a tradition of haute cuisine; Escoffier's revolution on the Continent was the efficiency and systematization brought by his brigade system, and a substantial reduction thereby, in the name of modernization and productivity, of the number and severity of beatings of cooks delivered by chefs. Corporal punishment in a kitchen slows everything down, and Escoffier believed quality and speed could coexist.

Despite there being by Escoffier's time a short history of fine restaurants in France, this development could not have happened without the short history of the guillotine, a more severe form of corporal punishment than that used by successful chefs in their private reigns of terror in tiny, sweaty fiefdoms. The Jacobins had, amongst other things, succeeded in producing a class of ronin chefs, as prior to the Revolution the best cooks had always worked for the best families. Gourmandise took place on estates and in castles; eating out was, as it had been since the time of the ancient Romans, the province of travelers, who had no choice of entrée at the hostelry they stopped at, but rather partook of the same potluck pot au feu as the rest of the overnight guests.

An enterprising Parisian by the name of Boulanger twenty-some years before the Revolution conceived of offering a sit-down meal with a choice of options from a menu to city-dwellers wanting a meal but no room to go with it. The climax of his meal was always a soup, which he called a 'restorative,' or 'restaurant,' getting him in trouble with the guilds, who had continued to operate since the Middle Ages in various formulations and groupings as the sole source of takeaway items such as cured meats, cooked meats, bread, pastry, sausages and sauces. Specifically, the traiteurs (from traditor, one who delivers; from tradere, deliver; surrender; from trans + dare, to give; nothing at all to do with selling state secrets, as these fellows were masters of sealed lips and secret handshakes), or caterers, argued that his 'restorative' was in fact a ragoût, which they alone were licensed to sell. The traiteurs lost, M. Boulanger won, and by 1789 there were about 50 such establishments in Paris (p.26). The Revolution temporarily interrupted the revolution, but within ten years after the bloodletting stopped there were hundreds of the new restaurants in Paris.

Enter Escoffier, England, and César Ritz. The world of dining in Britain changed for the better with the opening of the Savoy: there was fine food, organization, modern menus, ambiance, and personalized service for the guests. All that remained was to coax well-to-do Victorians, with their armies of servants and cooks, out of the house on occasion for epicurean entertainment. While Victorian gentlemen were accustomed to dining out, they did so in the company of other men or with women other than their wives; it was considered unseemly for ladies to be seen eating in public. Thus one prong in Ritz' and Escoffier's campaign was to create an atmosphere that would welcome and enchant, rather than discomfit, wives and other ladies of virtue. To succeed in this would require banishing the other sorts of ladies, such as actresses, singers, and those more skilled in the companionship arts than the domestic. An evening dress-code stipulation eliminated some; barring single female diners left well-heeled-but-dateless demimondaines dining elsewhere.

One celebrity courtesan who lacked neither escorts nor evening dress and thus continued to patronize the Savoy was one-time Folies Bergère dancer Mlle. Liane de Pougy, born Anne Marie Chassaigne and later crowned Princess Anne-Marie Ghika of Romania, who despite two marriages and a Sapphic amour she described as the love of her life, renounced her past life of scandal and splendor and finished her days serving disabled orphans at the Asylum of St. Anne as a Dominican tertiary.

In (there's no way it wouldn't be, is there?) Savoy...

And you thought I couldn't do it.

Habitual Concerns

Alright, more on Merton, it seems, and nothing on Dominicans. Okay, not really so much on Merton, either, truth be told, but it starts with him.

In the same part of the same book, the Sign of Jonas, where Merton deals a bit with his struggle between intellect and something like what he construed as 'real work' or the 'right path' to communion with the Divine at the time, he mentions his correspondence with some Carthusians. For Merton the Trappist Cistercian, the spirituality and life of the Carthusians seems to have seemed higher, purer, better. At the time he wrote that particular entry, there was no Carthusian monastery in the US (by the early 1950s, however, there was a small Carthusian Foundation, followed by construction of the Charterhouse of the Transfiguration in Vermont, completed by 1960), and Dom Porion suggested to Merton from France that the idea of an American Carthusian charterhouse was an unlikely one at any point. The Carthusian rule is the most austere of all the orders, and Americans, well...

Echoing Merton's respect for the Carthusian charisms, Robert Speaight, visiting the monastery at the time for a performance, remarked to Merton that 'half the people he knew at at some time or other tried to become Carthusians.' Merton reflects upon Dom Porion's letter that 'I saw at once very clearly how literally the contemplative vocation is taken by the Carthusians...It reminded me of my own longing for solitude, interior purity, perfect silence, a life for God alone. I haven't prayed in months as I have been praying since I read that letter...but burning up with the desire of God and with shame at my unmitigated interior activity and the futility of so much that I do.'

Now, part of Merton's frustration would arise in anyone committed to any sort of a mission, whether religious or secular. He had to do all sorts of administrative things for his publishing and for the monastery, he had to proofread, revise, order books for his monastery, 'barter' books with other communities, and he had to read and answer fan mail, as the world's most famous Catholic, the world's favorite monk, and some kind of unintentional poster boy for religion and the contemplative way in the new age. And as he said, 'the theology of contemplation does not mix well with fan mail. Also it is difficult.' These are all rather worldly things, 'noisy' things - even the theology of contemplation - compared to the encompassing silence he wished to cultivate and live inside - a silence to which it seemed the Carthusians had more ready access.

And this is what I am getting to: this apparent human need to have a hierarchy, rather than an egalitarian taxonomy, of gifts. The Tibetan Buddhists are better than straight-up Mahayana, because theirs is a solidly monastic tradition. The priest is better than the devoted father of three, because he is celibate. A Poor Clare is better than a Franciscan sister, because she has renounced all possessions, not 'merely' embraced poverty. The choir nun is better than the lay sister, and Carthusians are better than Cistercians, who are better than Benedictines, who are better than Dominicans. And any religious who wears a habit is better than a religious who doesn't.

I see a lot of this, and a whole lot of the latter. Vocations are booming, too (okay, relatively speaking) in more 'traditional' orders part of whose tradition includes centuries-old garb. There are good and bad reasons to be drawn to orders part of whose rule includes habits, but as someone with a lot of experience with clothing, history of clothing, anthropology of clothing, psychology of clothing, and philosophy/semiotics (yes, there is such a thing) of clothing, I can understand and relate to feelings on both sides. In part this whole issue relates to the 'traditionalist' stream in Catholicism in general, and I'm not not going to get into that specifically. Everyone's spirituality is their own, and it's up to the individual and his conscience to figure out what his path is.

But there is a sound bit of logic on the part of apostolic or active (i.e., out in the world doing stuff; not solely contemplative) orders for not wearing 13th-century clothing. When the Franciscan and Dominican orders were started, the clothing reflected the clothing of the common people of the time. It was meant in part as a bridge between the brother or sister and the population they were called to serve among. Yes, a vow of poverty is indeed one of the vows of every religious, so even the many who came at that time from aristocratic backgrounds would have renounced their rich robes in favor of simple garments, but the aim is greater, and more communal, than that.

Clothing is on the surface (forgive the pun) completely trivial. It's just fabric and some fasteners, shoes, maybe some jewelry. But what we wear conditions how people perceive us. And it does so in an instant, rather than gradually, as through diction, accent, mannerisms, vocabulary. Clothing can also condition our own behavior: imagine just your own gait in an evening gown and heels versus in shorts, a baggy tee-shirt and 'flip-flops.' And the average person, consciously or no, does treat people differently based on their clothing. Whatever we might wish the ideal be, in reality clothing is always an easily readable declaration of something.

So, an ungreat reason for wanting the habit (and, certainly, for focusing overmuch on that aspect in assaying an order's 'worth' or level of spirituality) involves this declarative aspect. It can signify, and be read as, an unbridgeable distance between the person in it and everyone else, between the sister and the world. A habit neither confers nor proves holiness or inaccessibility, but it can easily be perceived that way, most particularly in environments hostile to or ignorant of, religion, religious life, or spirituality. For those populations, whether they are university students, counseling patients, or clients of a soup line, a habit can be a barrier to natural and vital human interaction, to a feeling of community - which is for anyone suffering any kind of trial what is most precisely and urgently needed.

Merton indirectly brings up another motive for desiring the habit. He talks in his later work about his juvenile and facile contempt for all things worldly, which he believed in his immaturity had led him to a larger contempt for the world, for everything outside obvious spiritual pursuit. I get the notion in some things I read that the habit provides for some this clear delineation between, or defense against, the things of the world: the truly hideous, the rightly renounced, rather than the merely mundane, as with Merton's jejune stance. It's not outward-directed, and it's not ego. Rather, it is maybe some psychological bulwark against worldliness, a prayer and hope in itself that the wearer remain true, a 'full-body sacramental' to aid the wearer in maintaining full-time devotion. From this perspective, it's more like a soldier's letters from home pressed against his heart than the suit of armor he wears on the outside.

Then, too, there is an interpretation that shares something in common with Queen Victoria's perpetual mourning gear after the death of her beloved husband. She would hardly have been inclined to go out dancing and carousing had she simply changed her clothes, but the widow's weeds she cleaved to for forty years linked her outer and inner life. Again, it's not so much meant as a barrier as an invitation: read this, know this - and you will know a great deal about who I am, what I am, today and tomorrow. The problem that arose with Victoria's extended mourning, however, was that many of her subjects had experienced a great many more deaths in their families than she had (Catholics can easily recall the family of Thérèse of Lisieux, who lived in the same period and were middle class, not underprivileged, and yet lost four children within just three years and for the first year of her life feared the sickly Thérèse was next). Victoria's focus on mourning rather than the 'pastoral,' public duties of a monarch, served to alienate her from her subjects. It's not a great parallel, since her reclusiveness was as great an obstacle as her arch attire, but my point is that for apostolic, active work that is not confined to religious or exigent circumstances, or serving the already-faithful alone, a habit can be confusing, distancing, and make the wearer seem more like a symbol than a rich, complex, fault-filled and human individual to whom the suffering and struggling can turn in a lonely moment of crisis and pain.

And I think any smart person will tell you that reaching out in love to the wounded and needy is the highest pursuit of anyone who even suspects there may be something greater than solecism and material gain to strive for.

There's no Escaping Them, Part II

So, as the last posting recounted, Thomas Merton the young Trappist had just become a sub-deacon, was undergoing troubles in his writing, and had come across an issue of La Vie Intellectuelle, which happens to have been written by a Dominican, a thinky Frenchman by the name of Sertillanges.

At this time Merton was struggling with something I, too, have always intermittently struggled with: essentially a distrust of la vie intellectuelle. It's not like Merton didn't read, and it's not as though I don't. But in certain people inclined that way there is a very real awareness of the aridity that can arise by being given overmuch to cerebration. Intellect can give rise to intellectualism. Philosophy can lead to sophism. One can know all there is to know about the first three years of the first plastics-manufacturing plant in Guangdong -- and know nothing about love, or living, or laughter. One can be esteemed by one's peers as the most brilliant and erudite exponent of ____, and yet remain a cripple in all other areas. In life, that is.

Merton seems always to have been terribly uneasy with his vocation as writer. He realized how many he touched, he realized it was a gift, and that he was thus obliged to exercise it - and yet his particular spirituality made the intellectual aspects of his writing hard for him to reconcile with his faith, his desires, his ideal of the man of God:

'Every book I write is a mirror of my own character and conscience. I always open the final, printed job, with a faint hope of finding myself agreeable, and I never do.

There is nothing to be proud of in this one (speaking of his Seeds of Contemplation), either. It is clever and difficult to follow, not so much because I am deep as because I don't know how to punctuate, and my line of thought is clumsy and tortuous. It lacks warmth and human affection. I find in myself an underlying pride that I had thought was all gone, but it is still there, as bad as ever. I don't see how the book will ever do any good. It will antagonize people, or else make them go around acting superior and stepping on everybody.

Laughlin tells me a book club is taking it and advertising it as a "streamlined Imitation of Christ." God forgive me. It is more like Swift than Thomas a Kempis.

...the book is cold and cerebral.'

Now, some of that can read to modern ears unfamiliar with the larger picture of Merton, as reminiscent of the self-flagellation in print of medieval saints, whose 'autobiographies' were constrained by social and ecclesiastical realities as much as by the lack of modern psychological perspective. Merton's auto-critique here is, taken in the broader context, about his fear of excessive intellectualism and its effects on others. He is trying to lead others into contemplation, a union with God in the heart, and he is scared his vital message will be obscured by 'cleverness' and rhetoric, which will have the opposite effect from that intended. He is humble, yes: no one in his right mind would wish to be called the 'new Aquinas' or 'this century's Aristotle,' but it's far, far from pathological insecurity. It is only recently that humility has come to be perceived as a vice.

Anyway, Merton finds much of sound value in the little book. It is in many ways a handbook; it's not, despite the similarity of titles, something like Hannah Arendt's A Life of the Mind. And, being by a Dominican/Catholic/Christian/believer, it views thinkiness and writing, for those thus endowed, as vocations, as a means of and responsibility toward using one's (God-given) gifts in service to God and man.

Which is something Dominicans and Jesuits are not just good at, but comfortable with and schooled in. Other orders, other faiths, people with different histories -- well, it can be a tricky road. Most ethical traditions teach the importance of giving, whether as corporal acts of mercy, or standing up in the face of injustice, or giving materially, as with traditions of philanthropy, alms, tzedekah, and zakat. Compared with, say, the extraordinary giving of Miep and Jan Gies or Mother Teresa or Dorothy Day, it can be difficult for some people to believe a philosopher, a thinker - or, for that matter, a Carmelite or Tibetan Buddhist monastic pray-er, might be as worthy as these individuals. In rigidly secular circles, the latter groups are dismissed altogether, as either charmingly benighted or possibly obscenely self-indulgent.

Which brings us back to Thomas Merton, who didn't want to be self-indulgent but feared that the nature of his work might always be thus. In his handbook, Sertillanges advises that the body is not inseparable from the mind, and insists (sounding rather Benedictine, I might add) that work, sleep, silence, and proper eating all play a part in cultivating the whole person necessary to such a pursuit. If one is properly to exercise this gift, one must exercise also other disciplines: detachment, simplicity, ample reflection, note-taking, etc. In Sertillanges' schema, right ordering of the whole of one's life and one's mind results in an intellectual life which is neither all-consuming, nor shallow, nor sterile, nor incompatible with spirituality or the contemplative life.

Merton, however, while seeing the great practical wisdom of the book, recoiled and wondered what John of the Cross would have to say about all this. He felt he could never reconcile the two -- but perhaps someone like Maritain (une vie intellectuelle, bien sûr!) might be able to. When Sertillanges decrees that the man who has just come from physical labor is like a wounded man, should be respected and cared for, Merton demands to know What about John of the Cross, and his 'labor' in prison in Toledo? Surely he emerged from his cell 'comme un blessé' - and with the Canticle and the Dark Night stuffed in his clothes!

His concern is largely, as I interpret it, the same as mine: a fear of losing humility in some sort of elegant proportion to using the intellect. Merton relents and admits the two paths may not be irreconcilable - but it seems that he still feels he would in some way be choosing to 'be' Jacques Maritain in a sense when what his heart really seeks is the direct mystical union between 'God in His Oneness and not broken up into all His shadows' of St. John of the Cross. He doesn't really feel he can have it both ways, but he confesses, 'the truth is, there is room for both. In what proportions is there room for them in my life? That'll work itself out in practice.'

The truth is, I love Merton. And ask ten different Catholics, ten different Buddhists, and ten different 'Buddhist' Whole Foods customers, what they believe about Thomas Merton, and you'll get thirty different answers, possibly. He can no doubt express it best:

"I will be a better Catholic, not if I can refute every shade of Protestantism, but if I can affirm the truth in it and still go further. So, too, with the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists, etc. This does not mean syncretism, indifferentism, the vapid and careless friendliness that accepts everything by thinking of nothing. There is much that one cannot 'affirm' and 'accept,' but first one must say 'yes' where one really can. If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic: and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it."

And I think it is this effervescent, radiant, expansive 'Yes' that is at the core of any true religious, and any true vocation. Merton was afraid of losing that Yes if he wandered too far into the cerebral, while at the same time he felt no risk to it by embracing the genuine beauty he could see elsewhere.

I still didn't get to the Dominicans and their intimidating 'balance' (which is my perspective, not their expression), but I'm sure they'll follow me again, if not to the next posting, then the one after the bit about vicious Australian reds that destroy the esophagus in one swallow...