Les Examens particuliers de M. Tronson: Essai sur la formation du prêtre “classique" (review)

Reviewed by: Les Examens particuliers de M. Tronson: Essai sur la formation du prêtre “classique" J. Michael Hayden Les Examens particuliers de M. Tronson: Essai sur la formation du prêtre “classique.” By Emile Goichot. Edited by René Heyer. (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg. 2005. Pp. 237. €18,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-868-20272-7.) Emile Goichot is best known for his work on Henri Bremond, the French historian of religious sentiment, the subject of his 1979 thèse de doctorat [End Page 370] d’Etat.Yet, throughout his career at the Université Marc-Bloch de Strasbourg from 1970 to 1990 and afterward, Goichot was interested in Louis Tronson (1622–1700), the senior spiritual director of the Seminary of St. Sulpice in Paris and, from 1676 until his death, superior of the Sulpicians. He was especially fascinated by the method Tronson developed to teach seventeenth-century seminarians about the virtues that should guide their lives. Goichot was dismissive about the importance of his investigation of the examens. However, as the editor of this posthumous book makes clear, the method of M. Tronson (as he is traditionally known in France), first published in 1690, influenced seminarians not only in France but also in Indochina and parts of Canada, the United States, and Africa well into the twentieth century. The book is divided into three sections, preceded by an introduction by René Heyer that provides the context for what follows. The first section is the first volume of Goichot’s 1971 thèse de troisème cycle, most of which has never been published. It is an analysis of the examens particuliers presented as an essay on the formation of future priests. The second part of the book reprints two of Goichot’s articles that discuss the publication history of the examens. The final part of the book is an excerpt from the examens on the virtue of modesty that is used to compare manuscript and printed versions of Tronson’s work. Not surprisingly, the first section will be of most interest to historians. It begins with discussion of Tronson’s life, the Sulpician form of spirituality, and the place of the examens in that tradition. This is followed by an analysis of the examens and then discussion of Tronson’s extensive correspondence, particularly after 1687 when he became to ill to travel. Tronson was formed by the twelve years he spent as a young man reading the Church Fathers and by his training in canon law, rather than philosophy or theology. The purpose of the method of examination and meditation he developed was to teach future priests how to make the virtues of Christ their own. This was accomplished by reading to them each day a set of reflections and questions that were meant to prod them to examine their consciences and consequently form good habits. He built on the work of the previous (first) generation of Sulpicians, but he directed his work not to a spiritual elite advanced in the way of prayer, but to ordinary seminarians. Tronson’s goals were to present “a sacerdotal spirituality founded on identification with Christ the Priest” and to create “a human type, a certain ‘clerical style’” (p. 21).This human type is what Goichot referred to in the title as the “classical” priest, a man who lived in the world, but was not part of it. In the seminary two things were essential for this person: obedience of the rules and submission to his spiritual director. After the seminary the most important virtues for a priest, in addition to faith, hope, and charity, were in descending order of importance: mortification, humility, modesty, penitence, [End Page 371] obedience, poverty, chastity, and patience. Like Christ, the priest “often does not drink or eat. When he drinks or eats he never does it for pleasure” (p. 45). As for women, as Goichot says, Tronson’s “images present woman as a diabolic person” (p. 79). Because Goichot presents Tronson’s method so effectively this book will be valuable for anyone interested in understanding what he called “le prêtre ‘classique’”—that is, a priest educated between the late-seventeenth century and Vatican II. J...

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