Pierre Favre

by Michel de Certeau

L’elezione di papa Francesco ha contribuito a riportare l’attenzione su Pierre Favre, gesuita vissuto tra il 1506 e il 1546, molto amato dal Pontefice per la sua vicinanza a Francesco Saverio e soprattutto Ignazio di Loyola, fondatore della Compagnia di Gesù. Nel saggio introduttivo redatto appositamente per questo volume, Luce Giard ricorda come Favre formò con Ignazio «una coppia amicale e fervente» fi n dal 1525. Per Michel de Certeau, storico del pensiero religioso assai stimato da papa Francesco, Favre passa così «dall’infanzia spirituale alla maturità, e dal sogno di un mondo perfettamente puro alla pratica della carità». Attraverso l’applicazione della Regola gesuitica e degli Esercizi, egli trova finalmente lo sbocco anelato in una vita caratterizzata da un’accentuata dimensione mistica. Dal 1536 fi no alla morte svolge un’infaticabile attività predicatoria vivendo per anni come pellegrino fra i pellegrini sulle strade d’Europa e condividendo la quotidianità in un periodo di profonda crisi caratterizzato dalla diffusione del pensiero di Lutero. La sua vita, cominciata in un umile villaggio di pastori della Savoia, racchiude «il sentimento dell’Azione divina, le forme così varie in cui l’impulso, la realtà e l’attrazione divina si palesano», mostrando come questa unità non sia opera dell’uomo, ma un «dono che sempre meglio si può riconoscere».

409 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 8, 2021

About the author

Michel de Certeau, historian, cultural theorist, psychoanalyst, and theologian was one of the most multifaceted French intellectuals and scholars of the late 20th century. His concept of everyday life practices was of signal importance for the development of cultural studies in the Anglo-Saxon world. His use of space as a key category in the history and analysis of cultural practices has also influenced the later “spatial turn” in history and art history. Finally, his works on early modern mysticism constitute ground-breaking research in religious studies and theology. Interestingly enough, these studies on mysticism were less influential in the Anglo-Saxon world than they were in France or Germany, whence the distinction between the “American” (of the cultural studies) and the “European” Certeau (the historian of mysticism). In spite of the diversity of his oeuvre, Certeau saw his scholarly work as one, integrated, intellectual enterprise. Asked about his scholarly profession, this French Jesuit used to answer that he understood himself in the first place as a historian of spirituality. Understanding the meaning of Christian mysticism in an era in which it started to lose its self-evidence required a broader focus, embracing the most divergent and complex cultural developments up to his own time. The gradual broadening of his interest field also required new methodological directions, which he found in Lacanian psychoanalysis and in semiotics, resulting in his own topographical way of thinking. He became a public intellectual in 1968, after the publication of his La prise de la parole, a book in which he applied his insights on the role of the mystics in the 16th and 17th centuries to the protesting students in the streets of Paris. From that moment onward he started to develop his theory of everyday life practices, resulting in a number of different books, of which L’invention du Quotidien 1980 was the most elaborate.