Christocentrism in the French School: Revisiting Charles-Louis Gay

[The present article is a preparatory sketch for a talk to be given, somewhat extemporaneously, at the 2026 meeting of the Sacra Doctrina Project, in St. Louis.]

Because Charles-Louis Gay is not a household theological name, it will be useful to begin with some biographical remarks. For the remainder of the paper, I will then trace my own itinerary—my still-inchoate interaction with his thought—within a broader context that I hope offers something like an insertion point for your various interests. In other words, I will merely gesture, by way of exhortation both to myself and to all of you, toward someone to consider reading over the coming years.

Born on October 1, 1815 in Paris, Charles-Louis Gay was raised in a tepid, bourgeois Catholicism.¹ By the age of fifteen he had lapsed into a complete indifferentism and ceased practicing the faith altogether. A romantic by temperament, he took up the study of music, counting Franz Liszt among his contacts. During this period, he began to take an interest in certain religious matters, but what proved decisive for him was the preaching of Lacordaire in his famous Lenten conferences of 1835. That encounter would bear fruit in a general confession in the spring of 1836 and, eventually, in his ordination to the priesthood in 1845 at the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice. At his first Mass, Lacordaire himself assisted. Owing to fragile health, Gay had no settled parochial ministry for a number of years, though he lived a quasi-religious life in community with several fellow priests—among whom multiple sources take care to note the later bishop Gaston de Ségur, a prolific author of devotional works. During this time, he gradually became a preacher to Carmelite religious as well as in a variety of Lenten sermon series at Limoges, Paris, Moulins, and Poitiers.

Through a process of discernment that included a visit to St. John Vianney in September 1856, he responded to an invitation from the bishop of Poitiers, the later Cardinal Louis-Édouard Pie, to serve as vicar general of the diocese, specially charged with directing the confraternities and women’s religious congregations. This led to close relations with the Carmels of Poitiers and Dorat, the latter of which he assisted during its founding years. He became a close collaborator with Pie, thereby manifesting a change that had gradually taken place in his thought, away from the liberalism of Lacordaire and toward the resolute anti-liberalism of the era. Despite their divergences in matters of politics, Gay retained a profound piety toward the man who had played so important a role in his youthful reconversion to the faith. Writing to Lacordaire in an 1858 letter, Gay commented: “When I was still very young, you, as no one else did, spoke to me of Jesus Christ; you made me love Jesus Christ. Later, you did far more: you enabled me to see how greatly you yourself loved Jesus Christ. This is an incomparable gift, and I shall never forget it.”²

An orator of the first rank, Gay directed his preaching to lay men and women as well as to the religious under his care. An inheritor of the so-called “French School” (Pierre de Bérulle, Jean-Jacques Olier, St. John Eudes, and the broad Catholic culture under their influence), he was a man of wide formation, drawing amply—and perhaps a bit eclectically—upon scriptural, patristic, scholastic, and ecclesiastical sources. His preaching and direction gave rise to seven volumes of correspondence (five of them letters of spiritual direction), volumes of sermons for the various seasons of the year, instructions (Entretiens sur les mystères du saint Rosaire, Instructions en forme de retraite à l'usage des âmes consacrées à Dieu et des personnes pieuses, Instructions pour les personnes du monde, Conférences aux mères chrétiennes), a two-volume theological exposition on the Psalms, and a two-volume series of “elevations” on the life and teaching of Christ, gathered from addresses he gave over the course of his ministry.

Most important, however, is his two-volume masterpiece De la vie et des vertus chrétiennes considérées dans l'état religieux, a work arising from his ministry to religious but extending in scope to the whole of the faithful. (It was translated into English by the Trappist Abbot Bernard Burder.³) This last work, a kind of ascetic-mystical treatise, sold ten thousand copies in its first eighteen months and would eventually go through twenty-six editions printed up to 1936, with many further smaller editions and extracts besides. The work is faithful to the Christocentrism associated with the French School, though clearly in his own tone. As he remarks in its opening:

What we have above all sought is to make Jesus Christ present upon every page of this book. Our most ardent wish is that the words, substance, and, as it were, the whole of this book should be Jesus Christ alone.

The person of Jesus must never be isolated from His doctrine. If the whole of His doctrine is life, this is because it emanates from Him who is the Life and because, through the holy words He speaks, the precepts He lays down, the counsels He suggests, the allurements he displays, the overtures he makes, the aids that He extends, and in what He pledges to us, He always strives to communicate life to his beloved creatures—namely, that life which consists in a real, intimate, consummated, and eternal union with His own true, sovereign, and absolute life. We can never repeat this often enough: the end of the whole moral law, and therefore of all our duties, the end of our labors and our progress, the sum of our perfection and our holiness, is our living union with Jesus.⁴

It is a theme reiterated in so many ways throughout the work and which is summed up well in a late remark in his Élevations:

The supernatural life, which is the entrance into the mystery of Christ, consists first of all in believing and confessing that this Christ is “the Son of the living God.” This confessed faith is what so ennobled Simon bar-Jonah and merited for him to become Peter. This same faith is what saved the good thief and justified the centurion. It is what opens the gates of heaven to all who are admitted there. When God adopts us through grace, this adoption is, as it were, an extension and an appropriation of the hypostatic assumption of human nature accomplished by the Word. We are sons through a communication of the divine sonship of Jesus—sons through the Son and in the Son. So much is this the case that, through this identity in origin and life, all the adopted are one in Christ, all the members one in the head; and thus too, even though God has the countless multitude of the faithful as His children, nonetheless, He has but one Son, his Jesus, whose body we are.⁵

Read with contemporary eyes, the passage cannot but strike us: already in the 1870s—on foundations laid in conferences decades earlier—we find a very clear statement of the universal call to holiness, resting upon an explicitly Christocentric foundation.

Now, for a group like the Sacra Doctrina Project, a question naturally arises: why should we care about this author? How does one connect such a figure with the concerns of a broadly Thomistic group like this one? The answer, in my case, comes only by way of the itinerary I now wish to trace.

I never thought I would find myself saying that the bridge to any figure could run through Pierre de Bérulle. The founder of the French Oratory and fountainhead of the so-called “French School” of spirituality—of such immense influence through the Sulpicians—is not someone I was prepared to engage positively. My own introduction to his thought, admittedly, came through a late essay of Maritain's concerning the particular priestly spirituality associated with the line of Bérulle. This is a spirituality that, by way of a certain misunderstanding of the nature of the priestly character, risks proposing the priesthood as a configuration to Christ lying almost in the very line of His hypostatic union—to the point of calling for a kind of annihilationism, by which the priest-instrument would become entirely transparent to Christ, whose alter the priest would be only as a very diaphanous film. The truly exalted vocation of the priest thus became a kind of super-Christian form of existence, though not without difficulties in establishing a theology and spirituality of the priesthood, caught between a priestly vocation that would formally derive from the hypostatic union itself and a priestly life lived by a finite man, capable of imperfection and of mortal sin.⁶ On such foundations, Maritain held, one might build a “piously delirious theology.”⁷ Yet, the foundation will be shaky to the degree that one does not sufficiently articulate the nature of the specific priestly character and its subject of inherence (often replacing the developed theology of the character, as a qualitative capacitation of the practical intellect,⁸ with a rhetorically inexact gesture toward “ontological change”).⁹

These particular—and admittedly thorny—questions concerning the specific character and grace of the priesthood can be set aside for our purposes.¹⁰ I raise them only to indicate why I was rather leery of the “French School.” Being a Byzantine Catholic, I was also somewhat disincentivized from reading texts so clearly belonging to a Western European, post-Tridentine period of reform.

It was during a strange coalescence of my own independent thought with that of Columba Marmion that I began to suspect I should take another look at the French School. At some point I had run across the assertion that, in the post-Reformation era, the authors in this line—whether Bérulle himself or writers like Jean-Jacques Olier and St. John Eudes—were comparatively unusual in retaining the theology of the mystical body at a time when such language risked association with Protestant ecclesiology. Whether or not the attribution was correct, I stored it away as an interesting thought.

Last year at the SDP, I made some remarks about how my teaching of moral theology had changed over the years, especially during my years at the Byzantine seminary in Pittsburgh. The details can be found online, so I will not repeat them here.¹¹ What had emerged, in effect, was an understandable focus on the connections between divinization, soteriology, and Christology. The connections are, of course, ancient. But within the framework of the Secunda Pars, they began to introduce certain points of tension into my presentation.

In my own popular-level writing—the little book I published with Ascension Press, Made by God, Made for God—I realized that some of the fruits of these changes were playing out in my scriptural preparation as well. The volume was planned as something like a tracing of the Secunda Pars. Structurally, however, there emerged a kind of centrality of incorporation into Christ, on a Pauline and Johannine model. Truth be told, it was not a planned affair; at most it arose from my own lectio divina and writing, influenced doubtless by the gradual changes in my pedagogy, which at the time were not as marked as they are now. I then thought it generally in line with certain remarks in Ambroise Gardeil, who had planned to place Christ as efficient cause of grace relatively early in a never-completed work of ascetical theology, the fragments of which come to us in The True Christian Life.¹²

Where things crystallized—in ways that still surprise me a good deal—was in a course I taught online for Holy Apostles, in which I added, to the readings on the “treatise on grace,” a section on life in Christ and on the relationship between our grace and the capital grace of Christ. I assigned my students several readings from Bl. Columba Marmion's Christ: The Life of the Soul and Christ in His Mysteries. I still saw no explicit connection to the French School, but I was quite taken by his theology of our life in Christ. This impression only deepened as I read the admirable studies of his thought by Fr. Marie-Michel Philipon, OP (The Spiritual Doctrine of Dom Marmion) and the lengthier volume, heavily relied upon by Philipon, by Marmion's own secretary Dom Raymund Thibaut (Abbot Columba Marmion: A Master of the Spiritual Life).

It was in these studies that I began to grasp the point of dependence between Marmion and the French School. Indeed, it was in the very introduction to Philipon's volume that I was roused from my anti-Bérullian slumber:¹³

It is to him that we owe in great measure this return to that primary truth of the Christian faith: Christ, the model and sole source of life for us. He had some admirable precursors in this revival of Christo-centric religion: Scheeben in German-speaking countries, Fr. Faber in England, Mgr. Gay, steeped in the teaching of the French School; but none of these attained his world-wide influence.¹⁴

In speaking of Marmion’s novitiate, Philipon writes:

Two months later, we find this striking note: “On the feast of the Sacred Heart, I felt that we are pleasing to God in proportion as we are conformable to Jesus Christ, especially in His interior dispositions.¹⁵ That is why a childlike confidence in prayer, in spite of our sins, is so pleasing to God. ‘I know that You always hear me,’ said Jesus. We are the adopted children of God, and we should always, in all simplicity and humility, treat Him in the same way.”

We have here in embryo the dominating idea of the spirituality of Dom Marmion. The whole of sanctity consists in our identification with Christ by the grace of adoption. In this note we see a reflection of this central idea.

A “fine passage” from Mgr. Gay gives him “great lights” on the manner of praying in the name of Jesus and he copies it out in full, adding in his notes: “I find Mgr. Gay's chapters on hope and confidence full of light and grace. I hope often to read them.”

In the works of Mgr. Gay, who is, on this point, a disciple of the French School, the Person of the Word Incarnate occupies a place of primary importance. It is not surprising, therefore, that Dom Marmion, when asked by one of his spiritual daughters how she could learn to know Jesus Christ, replied: “Read St. Paul and Mgr. Gay.”¹⁶

Yet, as an important point of attestation, one should also heed the remarks of Dom Thibaut, who explicitly weighs the degree to which Marmion would have been influenced by the specific lineaments of the seventeenth-century French School itself. To this Thibaut answers that Marmion had indeed read them, but that when he leans upon their formulae, he does so solely “because they are in keeping with his mentality, nothing more; he is much more human than Bérulle, and has his own personal manner. For his Christology he took St. Paul as his great master to whom he ever returned because he was the first of his masters according to date.”¹⁷ Yet the same Thibaut names only three modern spiritual authors of significant influence on Marmion: Fr. Frederick William Faber, Bishop John Hedley, OSB, and Bishop Charles-Louis Gay.¹⁸ One suspects that, beyond the general influence of the French School upon priestly formation, Gay was a vector for at least those resonances that led Marmion to find the seventeenth-century authors’ formulae congenial.

I am less concerned, however, with the specific historical influences than with the general lights that might be shed upon the spiritual theology of divine filiation, under the tutelage of a Marmion whom Philipon called the “doctor of divine adoption.”¹⁹ The connections among divine adoption, ecclesiology, and the French School (critically appropriated) were well deployed by Journet in his lengthy treatment of Christ the Head of the Church in The Church of the Word Incarnate. They are quite structural for Marmion as well, who has a keen sense for the texts of Thomas concerning our unity quasi una persona with Christ our head.²⁰

My interest, however, is not to indicate the point of connection one finds in Journet, but rather to encourage us all to consider deepening our reading of Marmion and, above all, of the source so influential for him, Bishop Charles-Louis Gay. I would hope, of course, that a group like the Sacra Doctrina Project might bring the insights of Journet, Jean-Hervé Nicolas, the Salmanticenses, and others to bear in a way that would sufficiently “Thomisticize” what must be corrected in the French School—and in Gay, who works openly under the influence of the Scotist accounts of Christological primacy. But before taking up that critical task, engaging the beloved sources of a Blessed monk—of a kind of “doctor of divine adoption”—would yield spiritual fruit for a fuller reckoning with the way we are all called to live as members of Christ quasi una persona mystica. This is a theme dear also to St. Josemaría Escrivá, who would go so far as to speak of the baptized Christian as Christus ipse.

I have long been interested in overcoming narratives that would partition ecclesial life into heterogeneous zones, such that this or that era or spirituality becomes a kind of “flyover territory.” In turning to Charles-Louis Gay, I am admittedly trying to build a bridge between the themes of Christocentrism dear to me²¹ and the earlier world of Western spirituality that has, until recently, remained relatively foreign to me. Gay represents, in the nineteenth century, an important vector of a spirituality which shows that the twentieth-century themes of the mystical body and of the universal call to mysticism and holiness did not spring de novo from the heads of reformers recovering the past in a vacuum.²² With others in the mid-nineteenth century, Gay played a real role in that recovery of mystical theology so often associated with the early twentieth century.²³ In the interest of such bridge-building—and, admittedly, of some polemical narrative-destruction—I propose him to you as a figure for your engagement and, I hope, your spiritual edification.

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1. The details of the present survey are taken from Yves Marchasson, “Gay (Charles-Louis)” in the Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, ed. Marcel Viller, Ferdinand Cavallera, Joseph de Guibert et al., vol. 6 (Paris: Beauschesne, 1967), cols. 159–171; Matthieu Brejon de Lavergnée, "Charles Gay. Portrait de l’artiste en jeune bourgeois romantique (1815-1839)," in Mgr Charles-Louis Gay (1815-1892): Un artiste au service du Christ, ed. Séverine Blenner-Michel and Emmanuel Pénicaut, 27–59.↩︎

2. Cited in Lavergnée, "Charles Gay,” 49.↩︎

3. See Charles-Louis Gay, The Christian Life and Virtues, Considered in the Religious State, trans. Abbot Burder, 3 vols. (London: Burns and Oates, 1878). Available online at https://archive.org/details/TheChristianLifeAndVirtuesV1/page/n5/mode/2up, https://archive.org/details/TheChristianLifeAndVirtuesV2/page/n5/mode/2up, and https://archive.org/details/TheChristianLifeAndVirtuesV3/page/n5/mode/2up.↩︎

4. Charles-Louis Gay, De la vie et des vertus Chrétiennes, vol. 1 (Tours: Alfred Mame et Fils, 1930), xlii–xliii↩︎

5. See Charles-Louis Gay, Élévations sur al vie et doctrine de notre-seigneur Jésus-Christ, vol. 2 (Paris / Poitiers: Oudin, 1879), 452–3. I am drawing this from the original, though it is cited in Marchasson, “Gay (Charles-Louis),” col. 166. I note that Gay here transfers to the grace of union what most Thomists would say of capital grace, though, one should recall the way that Christ’s personal grace (which is really one with His capital grace) results from the grace of union after the manner of a natural property. On this, see Journet, Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 2, trans. Matthew K. Minerd (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2025), 132, 263, 274, 406–7, and 539.↩︎

6. At the core of much of these questions is the theological question of what formally constitutes the priesthood of Christ (i.e., the hypostatic union or His capital grace), as well as the nature of the sacramental character.↩︎

7. Maritain, “Apropos of the French School,” in Untrammeled Approaches, trans. Bernard Doering (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 435. For recent work on the influence of Bérulle on post-Reformation theologies of the priesthood, see Clare Mcgrath-Merkel, Berulle’s Spiritual Theology of Priesthood: A Study in Speculative Mysticism and Applied Metaphysics (Münster: Aschendorff, 2018).↩︎

8. This is, admittedly, the particularly Thomist position on these matters.↩︎

9. I must admit, such inexact excesses—pious and well-meaning, but theologically dangerous to the degree that they are speculatively inexact—do not seem to be far from a certain kind of priestly spirituality that remains operative, even if only among more conservative, orthodox circles of Catholicism. Yet, I say this without wishing to deny the need to recognize the eminent sanctity demanded of priests, as well as the unique graces that God extends to His priests so that they might exercise their priesthood in a way worthy to their calling.↩︎

10. For a position that I believe is very balanced, written in view of Maritain’s essay (critically receiving it), see Jean-Hervé Nicolas, Catholic Dogmatic Theology, vol. 3, trans. Matthew K. Minerd (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2024), 705–717. A fuller treatment of the grace and character of orders can be found in the first section of Emmanuel Doronzo, De Ordine, vol. 3 (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1962). Also see Journet, Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 2, 253–260.↩︎

11. See “Thomistic Thoughts on Christology, Moral Theology, and a “Principled Return” to the Topics of the Secunda Pars” and “Thoughts from a Byzantine Thomist.”↩︎

12. See Ambroise Gardeil, The True Christian Life, trans. Matthew K. Minerd (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022), 9. Perhaps, also, though coming a little later in my own reading, is the structure of Jean-Hervé Nicolas, Les profondeurs de la grâce (Paris: Beauchesne, 1969).↩︎

13. Indeed, too, even one of our own very learned members of the Sacra Doctrina Project was not aware of Marmion’s connections to the French School, when we discussed this topic on our podcast, “The Life and Work of Bl. Columba Marmion,” Sed Contra: A Podcast of Catholic Theology, Jan. 11, 2024. In view of this conversation, I have thought it best to present Gay in the way that I have in the present paper, so as to show his connections with an author (Marmion) who is more known quoad nos.↩︎

14. Marie-Michel Philipon, The Spiritual Doctrine of Marmion, trans. Matthew Dillon (Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1957), 11.↩︎

15. Journet rightly shows how this spiritual attention to and union with the interior states of Christ, though not erroneous is, nonetheless, not as deep as what is offered by a fully Thomistic account of our incorporation into Christ and participation in his life. He explains this explicitly against a Bérullian background (which perhaps is able to be applied to others in the French School’s line), though with appreciation for Bérulle’s insights where they are well founded. See Charles Journet, Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 2, 179–191 and 319–323.↩︎

16. Philipon, The Spiritual Doctrine of Marmion, 36–7.↩︎

17. Dom Raymund Thibaut, Abbot Columba Marmion: A Master of theSpiritual lIfe (1858–1923), trans. Mother Mary St. Thomas (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1932), 375–6.↩︎

18. Thibaut, Abbot Columba Marmion, 376.↩︎

19. Philipon, The Spiritual Doctrine of Marmion, 219.↩︎

20. See Columba Marmion, Christ: The Life of the Soul, trans. Alan Bancroft (Bethesda, MD: Zaccheus Press, 2005), 107–129.↩︎

21. See some of the source cited in the works mentioned in note 12 above. Also, in addition to the spirituality connected to Cabasilas’s The Life in Christ, the particular Christocentrism of St. Maximus, the soteriological arguments offered Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, and others, one might consider the various works of former-Jesuit George Maloney, who died as Orthodox. Above all, however, I am interested, however, in showing how the insights of the East and West are deeply united and mutually enriching concerning this ancient soteriological theme.↩︎

22. One can also interpret him as representing one of the vectors of spiritual continuity from the French School and the spirituality of the little way of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. See Antoinette Guise-Castelnuovo, “Mgr Gay : l’homme du Carmel?,” Mgr Charles-Louis Gay (1815-1892): Un artiste au service du Christ, 135–168 (here, 153–4).↩︎

23. Such a recovery was, admittedly, necessary, due to certain residual but influential western concerns in the wake of the quietism controversies of the 17^th century (e.g., Molinos, Fénelon, Guyon, et al.).↩︎