This dissertation considers the question of how spiritual friendships engage the problem of mysticism and morality in the context of seventeenth century French Catholicism. Even though a text as fundamental as Augusti...
This dissertation considers the question of how spiritual friendships engage the problem of mysticism and morality in the context of seventeenth century French Catholicism. Even though a text as fundamental as Augustine's Confessions has a shared mystical experience at the heart of its narrative, mysticism's relational aspect is generally subsumed in controversies concerning its solipsism, its selfishness. In a series of close readings of letters, personal accounts, and published writing, this thesis offers a study of three mystical pairs: François de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal, Jeanne des Anges and Jean-Joseph Surin, and Madame Guyon and François de Fénelon. In looking at these particular figures, from hagiographic accounts to narratives of mass demonic possession to theological controversy, I am also tracing the fortunes of a particular spiritual ideal – that of pure love, or amour pur. At the beginning of France's "century of saints," we find this apophatic formulation with its aim of annihilation of self–even to the point of indifference regarding salvation–at the heart of a spiritual revival that reached the royal court. By the end of the grand siécle, this teaching, condemned as quietist, sends Madame Guyon to the Bastille. The friendships that form the material for this investigation are founded on a mystical ideal that has been considered either unattainable, or worse, heretical. And yet, as this study argues, each of these pairs approaches this paradox of disinterested love by engaging a kind of shared mystical work that at once complicates our understanding of this deeply ascetic ideal and opens up new ways of thinking about mysticism in its relational, or ethical, aspect.
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