Jean Pierre De Caussade

1675-1751. French mystical writer and preacher. He joined the Jesuit order in 1693 and worked in Lorraine, Perpignan, Albi, and Toulouse. He was the last of the seventeenth-century mystical school, struggling to bring mysticism out from under the cloud induced by the condemnation of Quietism.* In Instructions spirituelles en forme de dialogue sur les divers états d'oraison (1741), he used the authority of J.B. Bossuet,* who had played the leading part in the condemnation of Quietism, in an attempt to rehabilitate the mystical approach. He also wrote L'Abandon à la Providence divine, an influential book concerned with “the sacrament of the present moment,” consisting first of his teaching and second of a series of letters of spiritual direction addressed to nuns of The Visitation of Mercy. His manuscript notebooks were passed from hand to hand, and the work was first published in 1867 (ET 1921). His work has a continuing influence.