Letters on the Practice of Abandonment to Divine Providence
The second part of the work published by Fr. Henri Ramière in 1861: one hundred and forty-eight spiritual letters of Fr. Jean-Pierre de Caussade, S.J. (1675-1751), most of them to the Visitation nuns of Nancy, arranged in seven books in Ramière’s order: esteem and love of abandonment, its exercise, its obstacles, then the successive trials of souls (dryness, sufferings, fears, agony and mystic death). The text of the 7th edition of 1874 in French, with the editor’s notes, and E. J. Strickland’s 1921 English, which keeps Ramière’s books and letters one for one. The authenticity of many of the letters is now disputed: J. Gagey’s 2001 edition accepts only thirty-two as genuine. Ramière’s Appendix (a dissertation, texts of Bossuet, Surin and Francis de Sales) is not included.
Contents
Source: The 148 letters of the seven books with their addressee, summary and date, and the editor’s notes. The Avant-propos, the Première partie, the approbations, the tables and the Appendice of t. II are not imported. Running heads, page numbers and line-end hyphens were stripped and recurrent OCR misreadings corrected from a vocabulary check against the corpus’s French books (about 125 word-level fixes); some residual OCR slips and a few footnotes cut at a page break remain. Year digits in the headings are as printed; where the OCR was garbled the English heading was followed. · The Second Part, Letters on the practice of abandonment, seven books and 148 letters, with Strickland’s titles, addressees and dates and her two footnotes. Strickland’s indexes and the CCEL link lists are left out.