Jean-Pierre de Caussade was born at Cahors in southern France in 1675 and entered the Society of Jesus at Toulouse in 1693. He taught in Jesuit colleges and became a preacher and spiritual director in the south of France and in Lorraine. In the 1730s he directed the nuns of the Visitation at Nancy, and in 1741 he published a defence of contemplative prayer, in the form of dialogues, drawing on the teaching of Bossuet.
In his later years he was rector of the Jesuit colleges at Perpignan and Albi and then director of the theological students at Toulouse, where he died in 1751. More than a century later, in 1861, the Jesuit Henri Ramière published Abandonment to Divine Providence under his name, edited from manuscripts kept by the Visitation nuns. The book's attribution to Caussade rests on these notes as Ramière edited them, and modern scholars debate how much of it is his own.
Jean-Pierre de Caussade in the library (1 work)
- Jean-Pierre de Caussade: Abandonment to Divine Providence — 18th century; translation 1887
The sacrament of the present moment: finding God's will in whatever each moment brings.