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On Prayer: Spiritual Instructions in the Form of Dialogues on the Various States of Prayer

Jean-Pierre de Caussade

The only book Jean-Pierre de Caussade, S.J. (1675-1751) published in his lifetime (Perpignan, 1741, anonymously): a set of dialogues, in question and answer, on the states of prayer according to Bossuet’s Instruction sur les divers états d’oraison. Book I defends the true mystics against the Quietist errors, drawing on Bossuet, Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal; Book II teaches the practice, the four purities, the rules of recollection, and advice for beginners, the advanced and those far on. Algar Thorold’s English of 1931 from the 1892-95 French text, with the Abbot of Downside’s (Dom John Chapman’s) Introduction, Thorold’s Note and Fr. Ludovic de Besse’s Preface. The French text could not be found in a clean edition, so this book has the English only.

Contents

Source: Introduction, Translator’s Note, Preface, and both Books (Book I: preliminary dialogue and sixteen dialogues; Book II: preliminary dialogue and ten dialogues, with the closing prayer) with the translator’s footnotes. The contents tables, the Bossuet appendix and the printer’s matter are left out. OCR corrected only by script: running heads and page numbers stripped, hyphenation rejoined, question and answer marks normalised, footnotes tied to their markers by page; quotation marks misread as digits or "£", some footnote markers and the notes that continue over a page remain imperfect, and one upside-down page in Book I, Dialogue XI is lost.