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Augustine Baker is the
fountainhead of the tradition of prayer at Downside,
even though he formally belonged to the monastic
community now at Ampleforth. Nevertheless he was
resident for many years at St Gregory’s, the parent
house of Downside, and had many followers there,
one of whom, Serenus Cressy, edited a compendium
of his teaching called Sancta
Sophia (1657) out of
the forty treatises Baker left behind him. |
Most
of these writings record the talks Baker had given
to the English nuns at Cambrai (now at Stanbrook)
who had been committed to his charge.
His doctrine can be summed
up in two over-riding principles:
first, we must be tenacious in keeping in sight and
striving after nothing less than our final objective,
which is union with God through the purest prayer
we are capable of, without allowing ourselves to
be held back by sticking to any images of concepts
of God which may well be a help to us at earlier
stages of our spiritual development; second, we have
the right to as much freedom of the spirit as possible
in choosing those means to this end that may be most
appropriate for us. In these principles, Baker shows
the utmost respect for the uniqueness of each individual
in his path to God and the most complete confidence
in the availability of the Holy Spirit to direct
his way. ‘Follow your call: it is all in all’ was
one of his catch phrases.
These principles stand
in contrast to the then prevailing currents of Counter-Reformation
spirituality. The desire to deepen one’s prayer-life
was very wide-spread, but the chief methods in use
were meditation by rigorously following some prescribed
scheme, the recourse to the imagination and the senses
to reconstruct scenes from Jesus’ life in order to
elicit in oneself an affective response that would
move one’s will to act in a more Christian manner,
to use one’s reason to draw conclusions that would
have a bearing on one’s spiritual life, and to submit
very closely to the guidance and judgement of a spiritual
director who would act as an external check against
any aberrations. Although he accepted the value of
these practices, Baker felt they had a limited value,
and that they should not be clung to when a person
felt a strong impulse to get beyond them to a kind
of prayer that is less dependent on words and thoughts,
where one puts oneself more simply in the presence
of God who may still be only very dimly perceived.
For growth in the spiritual life, a person needed
both liberty of spirit as well as sensitive discernment
of the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Baker’s map of
prayer indicated the various stages of delight and
darkness that can be expected, not to be a progress
chart but so that no one should be so elated by the
one or dejected by the other as to take his experience
of them as final and not to press on towards union
with God.
The single-mindedness
and sharpness of focus of this doctrine goes back
to John Cassian’s systematisation in the Fifth century
of the teaching of the earliest monks of Egypt. Baker,
also a synthesizer, found a harmony of doctrine between
contemplative writers of all ages including his own.
His great achievement in this was to reinstate the
English mystical tradition of the Fourteenth century,
expressed in such authors as Julian of Norwich, Richard
Rolle, Walter Hilton and the Cloud of Unknowing.
The wisdom of these writers was in danger of being
smothered by the more martial spirituality of a time
of religious conflict. Baker took extraordinary pains
to borrow and transcribe the manuscripts of these
writers whose survival was endangered by the upheavals
of the Reformation, but which are now easily available
to us as paperbacks.
It is true that Baker
had limitations of his own, which deny his works
the appeal of St Teresa of Avila or St Francis of
Sales. He had been a lawyer before becoming a monk,
and his writing is both exhaustive and exhausting
in its elaboration of every possible aspect of a
topic. His blind spots are not only stylistic. He
is notoriously indifferent to the Liturgy, which
he viewed as a possible distraction from the real
business of getting through to the imageless God.
The Bible too he treats rather as the dusty title
deeds of our faith, than as the source of nourishment
on the Word of God that the revival of lectio
divina teaches us. Finally, the whole cast of his mind is
an individualist one where the quest for personal
sanctification leaves little space for finding Christ
in the midst of community life. In all these respects
Baker was a man of his time, and should not be allowed
to detract from his achievement in laying his own
mastery of the mystical tradition at the service
of his brethren.
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