This year, the Congregation of the Oratory celebrates the 500th anniversary of the birth of its founder, St Philip Neri. Fr Jonathan Robinson, founder and superior of the Toronto Oratory, has just published a new book called “In No Strange Land - The Embodied Mysticism of St Philip Neri” through Angelico Press. We are grateful to Catholic journalist David Warren for offering us this review of it; Mr Warren is a regular contributor to The Catholic Thing, and has his own blog called Essays in Idleness.
Jonathan Robinson (founder of the Toronto Oratory) has written a remarkable book on the founder of the Oratorians. It is not a biography or hagiography, not history, not philosophy or theology, nor any established genre of academic research. There are strands from all these, however, and they are certainly wound together into a vivid portrait. In No Strange Land carries the subtitle, The Embodied Mysticism of Saint Philip Neri. The author of several outstanding previous works on the foundations of Christian life, Father Robinson has also drawn together his own life’s work in this latest volume.
The Saints are “like Christ” not in emulating this trait or that from the Gospel record, nor for what they “objectively” taught or achieved, in the service of the Church that Christ founded. The diversity of “flavours” is extraordinary. The more we learn of each Saint, the less he seems like any other Saint, the more sui generis. Keep up the study, and we come to realize that each is “like Christ” in a more radical or fundamental way; the very embodiment of something, not of his own making.
Saint Philip Neri was, for instance, a younger contemporary of Saint Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. It is hard to imagine two men of such contrasting backgrounds and personalities, yet in the service of the same larger cause -- Ignatius a late apostle, “to the world”; Philip, “to Rome.” Moreover, the Orders they founded, respectively, continue to this day to reflect the character of their respective founders. Even their faults correspond to their originating virtues, so that the “family resemblances” remain stark. This, if one stops to think of it, is something miraculous in kind, for secular organizations take on a life of their own, and “evolve” along lines that their founders could scarcely anticipate or any longer recognize, often within their own lifespan.
In his inquiry into the name and nature of Philip Neri, Father Robinson touches on such points. He is hardly writing an institutional history of the Oratory; he is focused entirely on the man himself; yet the story he is telling is also that Oratory story -- told from inside. The peculiar form and vocation of Oratory life is constantly expounded, and exemplified, right down to the wry humour and gentleness of tone, the instinctive respect for literature and “culture” in music and art, the strikingly independent sense of mission -- all conveyed in the texture of the book. It is warm, in a special Philip-Neri way; one is not so much in a uniformed hierarchy as among friends, bound together in a common adventure.
We speak of “trusting in God,” which is a reasonable expression, but in the life of Philip Neri as Father Robinson unfolds it there is a consistent movement to something much deeper. It is a movement of faith towards or into the embrace of Christ that goes far beyond mere “trust,” which can be reduced to an intellectual idea.
The Saints are “like Christ” not in emulating this trait or that from the Gospel record, nor for what they “objectively” taught or achieved, in the service of the Church that Christ founded. The diversity of “flavours” is extraordinary. The more we learn of each Saint, the less he seems like any other Saint, the more sui generis. Keep up the study, and we come to realize that each is “like Christ” in a more radical or fundamental way; the very embodiment of something, not of his own making.
Saint Philip Neri was, for instance, a younger contemporary of Saint Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. It is hard to imagine two men of such contrasting backgrounds and personalities, yet in the service of the same larger cause -- Ignatius a late apostle, “to the world”; Philip, “to Rome.” Moreover, the Orders they founded, respectively, continue to this day to reflect the character of their respective founders. Even their faults correspond to their originating virtues, so that the “family resemblances” remain stark. This, if one stops to think of it, is something miraculous in kind, for secular organizations take on a life of their own, and “evolve” along lines that their founders could scarcely anticipate or any longer recognize, often within their own lifespan.
In his inquiry into the name and nature of Philip Neri, Father Robinson touches on such points. He is hardly writing an institutional history of the Oratory; he is focused entirely on the man himself; yet the story he is telling is also that Oratory story -- told from inside. The peculiar form and vocation of Oratory life is constantly expounded, and exemplified, right down to the wry humour and gentleness of tone, the instinctive respect for literature and “culture” in music and art, the strikingly independent sense of mission -- all conveyed in the texture of the book. It is warm, in a special Philip-Neri way; one is not so much in a uniformed hierarchy as among friends, bound together in a common adventure.
We speak of “trusting in God,” which is a reasonable expression, but in the life of Philip Neri as Father Robinson unfolds it there is a consistent movement to something much deeper. It is a movement of faith towards or into the embrace of Christ that goes far beyond mere “trust,” which can be reduced to an intellectual idea.
