The Mystic of Caen
Letters and Writings of Jean de Bernières (1602–1659)
Available Formats
ISBN: 978-1-971776-05-7 (Paperback) · 978-1-971776-06-4 (Hardcover) · 978-1-971776-07-1 (eBook)
Jean de Bernières (1602–1659) was not a monk, not a priest, not a theologian by profession. He was a French government official — Treasurer of France — with a hot temper, a fortune he would eventually give away entirely, and a prayer life so deep that those who lived with him called him one of the greatest contemplatives of his century. He built a house of prayer in the center of Caen where people came for days and stayed for months. The first Bishop of Quebec was formed there. The seeds of the Quietism controversy were planted there. The missionary enterprise of New France was funded from there. And through it all, Bernières wrote letters — honest, warm, sometimes startling letters about what happens when God takes everything from a person and fills the emptiness with something the person could never have produced alone.
For more than three and a half centuries, those letters have been locked in French. The only prior English edition was a 1684 translation of a posthumous reworking that stripped away Bernières' personal voice and turned private correspondence into an anonymous textbook. The original letters have never appeared in English. Until now.
The Mystic of Caen presents 88 letters selected from dom Éric de Reviers' landmark 2025 critical edition, organized chronologically across three periods that trace the arc of Bernières' interior journey. In the early letters, he is learning to surrender — fighting his own nature, struggling with dryness in prayer, asking whether God has abandoned him. In the middle letters, he is being stripped — teaching others while losing his fortune, his health, his certainties. In the late letters, dictated blind and impoverished, everything has been taken, and what remains is radiance. The arc is real. You will feel it.
Alongside the letters, the book includes 45 maximes, 16 dialogue exchanges with his spiritual director, a 70-page original biography, and a glossary of contemplative terms.
This book is offered deliberately across the Catholic-Protestant line. Bernières was a Catholic layman, but in 1728 a German Reformed mystic named Gerhard Tersteegen translated his writings into German and revised that translation four times over thirty years — the longest sustained engagement with Bernières by any single reader in history. Tersteegen recognized a voice that belonged to the whole Church. This translation is offered in the same spirit.
If you have ever wondered whether the interior life described by the great mystics is possible for someone who is not a monk — someone with bills, a temper, and no particular talent for silence — then Bernières is the companion you have been missing. He wondered the same thing. The answer he found cost him everything, and he would tell you it was worth it.
About the Translator and Editor
Jean de Bernières (1602–1659) was a French lay contemplative whose letters shaped seekers across the Catholic-Protestant line. Jarred Fenlason, D.Min., translated and edited this edition from the critical French text, bringing Bernières' original correspondence into English for the first time.
