Let’s start with what, will be the focus of our attention: the letters of a nun who is known only by her letters.
These have not yet been the subject of any in-depth study. They were written in the years 1673-1674 by a nun of the Order of the Visitation of Sainte-Marie: Anne-Cécile Duhamel. All of them are addressed to Archangel Enguerrant, a religious whom Sister Anne-Cécile had as her confessor at the time. The latter belonged to the Recollet order – a reformed Franciscan order – and it was he who, when Anne-Cécile died in the late 1670s, took it upon himself to revise and disseminate a little more widely the texts of the woman he called a “victim of Calvary.” In fact, and even if this collection of letters does not seem to have ever known the press, the four copies preserved resemble a printed book in their appearance and they could not have failed to circulateFinally, Enguerrant added to the collection additions with precise indications: an introduction and a series of commentaries. In doing so, the first recipient of the letters took the precaution of guiding their reading, with the decision to broaden their audience, even if we will see that in reality he also took great care in the choice of this wider audience. Be that as it may, it is to this “publication without publication” that we owe access (even if indirect) to the traces of the writing activity of a simple nun, a seventeenth-century nun who wrote down her “sorrows” – to use a term put forward by manuscript
- Born in 1644 into a wealthy family in Rouen, Anne-Cécile was the eldest of seven daughters. In 1660, she entered the convent of the Visitation of Saint-Denis. It is probable that Father Enguerrant made his acquaintance in the years when he became prior in the same city, at the monastery of the Recollets (1670-1672), that he gradually took charge of his spiritual accompaniment and that he remained her director of conscience while he was already staying in Paris, and this until 1674 or 1675, when Anne-Cécile’s superiors put an end to this situation.
- As for the latter, she died on September 6, 1677 at the age of thirty-three, and this is – apart from the content of the letters – almost all we know about her. On the other hand, we have a little more information about their recipients.
- Archange Enguerrant (1631-1699) entered the Recollet order in 1647, spent three years in Italy in the 1660s, then, in all likelihood, stayed in Montargis for several months during which he introduced mysticism to the future Madame Guyon, the mystical protagonist of the quarrel over quietism. The latter writes in her Life that she addressed a letter to the Franciscan in which she painted a very striking picture of her sorrows, and that she was very surprised afterwards when she recognized her account in a sermon that Father Enguerrant had given shortly afterMadame Guyon met him again afterwards and when she was imprisoned in Vincennes (1695-1696), she hoped that he would be given to her as a confessor Enguerrant was also in contact with another leading mystical figure, Catherine de Bar, in religion Mectilde of the Blessed Sacrament, founder of the Benedictine congregation of the Perpetual Adoration of the Most Blessed Sacrament, an order for which he drew up rules in 1672 Arangel Enguerrant therefore seems to have been, during the last quarter of the seventeenth century, in contact with important representatives of French mysticism.
In her letters, Anne-Cécile described herself as “captive in chains, blind, powerless, suspended between heaven and earth, almost deprived of life,” surrounded by “precipices” or plunged into “darkness and obscurity so thick that [she] cannot discern at every step where [she] should put [her] foot.” Sometimes his “life is only a continuation of fears, doubts, perplexities and uncertainties”, sometimes his “soul is all drowned in a sea of etching[,] all imbued and deeply penetrated by the ne sai quoy which dissolves it, which undermines it, consumes it, pulverizes it with pains, tortures and discomforts [?] – sensations “which cannot be said or conceived, because God gives them a certain quality, and a certain efficacy proportionate to the quality of the soul and apt to make it suffer infinitely.”
This state, which she describes as “inexplicable martire”, she describes on page after page, and she exploits all the semantic possibilities offered by a rich and varied language to describe it, in particular when she paints, in a whole series of images that she seems to have drawn from the pictorial language of the Mass for the Dead or certain biblical passages, the terror with which her daily life is full – with, as the culmination of her tortures, the moments when she imagines, terrified, that God himself threatens to take away from her.
To learn more of this Visitandine here is a link to the source of this excerpt: “I suffer there that which cannot be understood or expressed” Sufferings of a mystic abandoned by God (1673-1674)