Monsieur Vincent by Henri Daniel-Rops

This was a quick read which told St. Vincent de Paul's story in manageable pieces. That's no small feat since he had an extremely full, action-packed life, such as when he was captured by pirates, sold into slavery, and convinced his owner to escape with him to Europe. As his eyes were opened to the plight of the poor, especially the countryside peasants, he began working to alleviate their distress, recruiting the wealthy to be Christ's hands. His realization of the overwhelming lack of catechesis for priests, and consequently their ignorance of the faith, led to a series of educational efforts which gradually turned into the first seminaries.

Henri Daniel-Rops* is one of my favorite authors, albeit largely forgotten nowadays, and he does full justice to this great saint. Despite the efficient story telling, there are moments where the story slows down for greater detail. I was often inspired and greatly moved.  It was fascinating to see how St. Vincent's path occasionally criss-crossed with that of the great St. Francis de Sales. He often wound up inadvertently  developing programs which de Sales was trying to get approved in Geneva but couldn't get permission for. Clearly, Christ's plan for the Church was headed in the direction that we see St. Vincent treading. 

As a member of The St. Vincent de Paul Society, I was also struck by threads which Frederic Ozanam picked up 200 years later to incorporate in the society's organization. And that doesn't even begin to cover such things as how groundbreaking it was to begin the Ladies of Charity, Daughters of Charity, and other groups which revolutionized the course of women serving the poor.

This is a wonderful stepping-stone which will have me looking for other in-depth books about this great saint.

* I see that I haven't reviewed any other of his books and must remedy that. However, here are some quotes I have featured which may give you a sense of his writing.

Abraham and the ineffable call

The revelation began formally on the day when a nomadic Semite in the neighborhood of Ur of the Chaldees heard an ineffable call and obeyed the supernatural command. What call? The call of the one God, the true God, of God. He whom the human spirit discovers, but can know only darkly, selected Abraham, son of Terah, as the messenger of his Word and ordered him to break with the errors and abominations of polytheism. We are confronted here with an essentially mystical and inexplicable fact, as mysterious in its essence and as tangible in its results as the mission of Joan of Arc, perhaps for France. How, why, in a world soaked in idolatry, did a small Bedouin clan, led by its chief, opt for the truth? The answer is obviously to be found in the will of God, already at work.

Henri Daniel-Rops, What is the Bible?

The Hebrew People and God's Special Protection

As human author of the Bible, the Hebrew people asserts that it is in receipt of spiritual assistance, inspiration; as an actor in biblical events, it declares that it enjoys God's special protection, the Covenant. To what extent does a historical view of the facts corroborate these two assertions?

From the purely literary point of view, there is a problem that is insoluble if we rule out divine intervention: how was this people without arts, philosophy, and any particular natural endowments able to produce this incomparable masterpiece, while people infinitely more advanced intellectually have left books full of gross moral and religious errors?

Fom the strictly historical point of view, how was this tiny people — in the time of Solomon's splendor, it never exceeded a million souls — able to exert such widespread influence? Persecuted, tortured, reduced in the dark days of the captivity "by the waters of Babylon" to fewer than a hundred thousand exiles, how was it able to survive right up to the present day, while mighty empires all around it have left us only ruins, inscriptions, and mummies? And why did the long trial that was its destiny lead it step by step, from suffering to suffering, ever upward toward revelation?

Henri Daniel-Rops, What is the Bible?

The most remarkable record a people ever left

So the Bible is in the first place a history. It is the record of a people, in fact the most remarkable record a people has ever left, for future generations, of all it did, suffered, believed, thought, and hoped. It is the record of a family, Abraham's, kept for about two thousand years, the record of a family that from the Patriarch to Jesus can be followed in its human destiny as well as in its providential mission. That is what gives unity to the Bible and all its heterogeneous parts.

Henri Daniel-Rops, What is the Bible?

The action of God in history and time

The lesson repeated over and over again in the books of the Bible — unlike the one suggested by Greco-Roman paganism — is that man, in the events of history, is not the plaything of a blind fate but in the hands of a Power, a Principle, a personal God on whom all depends and who wishes to lead him to his true goal.

This is what gives the Bible its very special meaning and what was already known by its inspired authors, who, in all they wrote, had but one purpose: to bring home to men the action of God in the world and in the dimension of time. To reproach them with lack of the famous modern "objectivity" is pointless. For them, history is written at God's dictation as part of His designs: the moral writings seek to elevate man to the likeness of God; poetry in its various forms exalts the glory of the Most High and furnishes believers iwth the means of associating themselves with His work through prayer; and the midrashim bring home the infallibility of His actions.

What give the historical study of the Bible its whole import and puts the Bible as a history book in a class by itself is that this slice of events cut out of time and space reveals the divine action; in fact, it is the divine action, directed toward revelation. An indissoluble union of human realities — some of them a painful, even a lamentable sight — and transcendent and divine realities; that is the very substance of the Bible; that is what constitutes its greatness, but also its difficulty.

Henri Daniel-Rops, What is the Bible?

A Unique and Inexhaustible Book

There is a unique and inexhaustible book in which all there is to say about God and man is said. God's presence pervades it and in it are revealed all those aspects of His mysterious being that we are allowed to glimpse; in it He appears, He speaks, and He acts. Man can also see himself in it, in all his potentialities, his grandeur and his weakness, from his sublimest aspirations down to those obscure regions of consciousness in which each of us bleeds from the wound of Original Sin. It embodies above all a religious doctrine, the doctrine of the revealed truth; but human knowledge and intellectual activity also find in it right and never-failing nourishment. It is as vain to claim to understand the principles of ethics and law as of sociology, economics, and even politics if we are unaware of the message contained in this book.

Henri Daniel-Rops, What is the Bible?

The most exhilarating aspect of the Bible

Very often the Bible compares God to a potter modeling human clay: "As clay in the hand of the potter," says Jeremiah, "so are men in the hand of God." Scripture is thus the story of this progressive refinement, of this patient work by the Creator on His creature to bring him to greater perfection. And just as a potter does not transform the lump of clay that he is modeling into a vase with skillful curves instantaneously, so God reveals Himself at work throughout the Bible and seems to enjoy displaying His alterations, His momentary defeats, His regrets, and His fresh starts.

This is perhaps the most exhilarating aspect of the Bible; it gives a constant sense of progress. "The historian receives an extraordinary impression from the Bible," writes Fr. de Lubac. "The contrast between the humbleness of Israel's beginnings and the power of the — explosives would be a better term — it bears within itself; the concrete and at first somewhat veiled form taken by its highest beliefs; then the majestic progress, the confident if mysterious march toward something vast and unforeseeable; nowhere else do we find anything even remotely resembling all this."

Henri Daniel-Rops, What is the Bible?

When the Bible was chanted by the heralds of God

Who thinks, as he thumbs the closely printed pages, of the time when these words and sentences were not fixed in cold print but chanted or intoned to audiences by the voices of the heralds of God? ...

To understand properly how the bible arose, we must forget the habits we have acquired as modern men and members of a paper civilization. Reading and writing have become such automatic operations that it is difficult for us to realize that some societies have been able to manage almost entirely without them. Our memory has become bloodless and barren, and our faculties of improvisation have more to do with mere words and rhetoric than with poetry and prophecy. In ancient Israel, right up to the time of Christ, it was very different. The ability to speak with fluency, art, and a gift for aphorism was the mark of those who today would be "writers." The trained memory was a superb tool. "A good disciple," said the Jewish scribes, "is like a well-made cistern; he does not let a single drop of his master's teaching escape."

Henri Daniel-Rops, What is the Bible?

What else exactly did God want?

Faithfulness, obedience; but what else exactly did God want? Slowly, gropingly as it were, Abraham's descendants sought the answer, through episodes rich in symbols. Isaac's marriage signified that the clan of Terah was to remain pure and not mix its blood with any other; Jacob, "wrestling with an angel" for a whole night by the River Jabbok, was obliged to come to grips with his human condition and choose between the flesh and the spirit, personal interest and his vocation.

Soon the whole people was confronted by this problem. In Egypt, where famine led them and Joseph settled them, Abraham's descendants perhaps thought that, surrounded by idols with animals' faces, they would easily be able to preserve their faith. The answer they received was persecution, suffering, and anguish. Obeying God is not easy. But the seal put on His people by the Lord genuinely protected it.

Henri Daniel-Rops, What is the Bible?