The “Carmel-filled” Center of SJE
“Did the writings of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross have any impact on St. John Eudes spirituality?” asks one of our readers by email.
The ties between St. John Eudes (SJE) and the Carmelites seem to have been quite strong, although I’ve yet to find anyone who’s written about it.
The most visible link is through SJE’s spiritual director, Cardinal Bèrulle. In the early 1600s Berulle founded two orders:
The Congregation of the Oratory in 1611
(SJE was a member of the Oratory from 1623 until he left to found the Eudists in 1643).The Order of Discalced Carmelites in France.
Allow me to ‘splain that second one.
As you might know already, the Carmelite reform in Spain had been approved in 1593 as the “Order of Discalced Carmelites.” It was still a new current of spirituality when Berulle caught wind of it, but he was deeply impacted. After extensive correspondence with the Carmelites, Berulle traveled to Spain in 1604 and brought back six nuns to establish a convent in Paris (one of those six was Bl. Anne of St. Bartholomew, who had been the personal secretary of St. Teresa of Avila). Berulle’s cousin became the seventh nun in the new convent (now beatified as Bl. Marie of the Incarnation).
So –long story short– by the time SJE became a member of the Oratory in 1623, his superior Berulle had already been in charge of the French Carmelite convent for 19 years. Berulle read the work of both Carmelite Doctors of the Church extensively and was responsible for them being translated into French. I imagine that the Spanish current of spirituality was fairly deeply intertwined into the French School of Spirituality by that point.
SJE himself had visible links to the Carmelites as well.
He was chaplain for the Carmelite cloister in Caen, France for the majority of his life and had a very close relationship with the nuns there. In his last will and testament, he bequeaths the Heart of Jesus and Mary to his spiritual children:
to the Congregation of Jesus & Mary (the Eudist priests & brothers),
to the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity (also founded by SJE),
and to the Carmelite nuns in the convent at Caen.
(Eudes, Letters and Shorter Works, p.328 in the PJ Kennedy edition from the 1940s)
So he seems to consider his relationship to those Carmelites to be as close as his relationship to the orders he founded himself. That type of spiritual intimacy wouldn’t happen without:
a definite affinity between the Carmelite spirituality (still no more than a generation removed from Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross) and
a certain amount of “cross-pollination” if you will. An intertwining of the Spanish into the French current of spirituality.
To put one’s finger on where, precisely, those areas of influence would appear is more difficult. I haven’t yet found any references to John of the Cross in SJE’s work, but he does mention Teresa of Avila explicitly in The Admirable Heart (p.207).
“Also belonging particularly to the Heart of Our Lady was St. Teresa, together with the entire Order of Discalced Carmelites. In addition to the writings of St. Teresa herself, I have seen a book published in Milan by one of her followers, Venerable Father John of St. Joseph, which gives a most beautiful exposition of the ardent love and union of the Heart of the Mother of God with the Heart of her Divine Child.”
The context of the quote is essentially a bibliography, where SJE lists the places where he’s drawn inspiration for his theology relating to the Heart of Mary. The Admirable Heart is SJE’s magnum opus, it’s the work of his entire life (published the year before he died), and it’s clear that within that context he has significant respect for the writings of Teresa and the continuing Carmelite tradition. Unfortunately, neither the quote or its context point to any of Teresa’s specific works or ideas.
So there it is. The answer to your question is yes. He was steeped in Carmelite ideas coming just second- or third-hand from the horses’ mouths. I just couldn’t say how without doing more research.