His
mysticism is of a kind peculiar to himself. His _Cathechisme chretien
pour la Vie interieure_, which is scarcely ever read outside
St. Sulpice, is a most remarkable book, full of poesy and sombre
philosophy, wavering from first to last between Louis de Leon and
Spinoza. Olier's ideal of the Christian life is what he calls "the
state of death."
"What is the state of death?--It is a state during which the heart
cannot be moved to its depths, and though the world displays to it its
beauties, its honours, and its riches, the effect is the same as if it
offered them to a corpse, which remains motionless, and devoid of all
desire, insensible to all that goes on.... The corpse may be agitated
outwardly, and have some movement of the body; but this agitation
is all on the surface; it does not come from the inner man, which is
without life, vigour, or strength. Thus a soul which is dead within
may easily be attached by external things and be disturbed outwardly;
but in its inner self it remains dead and motionless to whatever may
happen."
Nor is this all. Olier imagines as far superior to the state of death
the state of burial.
"Death retains the appearance of the world and of the flesh; the dead
man seems to be still a part of Adam. He is now and again moved; he
continues to afford the world some pleasure. But the buried body is
forgotten, and no longer ranks with men. He is noisome and horrible;
he is bereft of all that pleases the eye; he is trodden under foot in
a cemetery without compunction, so convinced is every one that he is
nothing, and that he is rooted from among the number of men.
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