Fr. Jean-Pierre de Caussade

Jean-Pierre de Caussade was born in 1675 in the region of Quercy, in the diocese of Cahors in southwestern France, and entered the Society of Jesus at Toulouse in 1693. Ordained a priest, he spent his life in the ordinary labors of a Jesuit of his time: teaching grammar, physics, and logic, preaching parish missions across the south of France, and serving as a retreat master, confessor, and rector of the Jesuit colleges at Perpignan and Albi. From 1729, with an interval of some years, he was spiritual director to the Visitation nuns of Nancy in Lorraine, and it was for them that he wrote the letters and gave the conferences on which his renown rests. He died at Toulouse on 8 December 1751. He has never been canonized and no cause for his beatification has been introduced; the Church honors him simply as one of the great spiritual writers of the French school.

Only one book appeared during his lifetime, a volume of spiritual instructions published in 1741 defending contemplative prayer in the light of Bossuet's teaching. The work by which he is now universally known, published as Abandonment to Divine Providence, or Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence, was assembled from his letters and conferences to the nuns of Nancy and first printed in 1861 by the Jesuit editor Henri Ramière, more than a century after his death. Its textual history is genuinely debated: scholars differ over how much of the text reproduces Caussade's own words, how much comes from notes taken by those who heard him, and how far Ramière reshaped the material he received, so that his direct authorship of the book as it now stands cannot simply be assumed. What is not in doubt is the doctrine it carries. Its teaching on the sacrament of the present moment, that the will of God reaches the soul through the ordinary duties and unforeseen events of each hour and that holiness consists in receiving them with trustful surrender, has made it one of the most widely read works of Catholic spirituality of the modern era.