BAIL, LOUIS. – Theologian and ascetical writer, born at Abbeville in 1610, died in Paris in 1669. Doctor of the Sorbonne in 1628 and parish priest at Montmartre, in 1661 he was elected superior of the two monasteries of Port-Royal in Paris and Port-Royal des Champs, though he was received by the nuns with hostile distrust. He immediately undertook the official visitation, subjecting the religious to very severe interrogations concerning their doctrines, and concluding with a favorable testimony regarding their orthodoxy and observance of the rule.
The work that brought him considerable fame is La Théologie affective en s. Thomas en méditations (4 vols., Paris 1638–50; many reprints; the latest, revised, annotated, and updated, in 12 vols., Montrejeau 1903–1906), in which, following the Summa of St. Thomas, he expounds its articles in the form of affective meditations. This corresponded to the sentiments of devout people in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who, weary of the scholastic aridities of the period, desired a theological Summa capable of filling souls with greater affection and of enabling them to know Jesus Christ with piety and unction. Of his many other works, the following deserve mention: Les consolations du coeur affligé tant par les peines corporelles que par les peines spirituelles (Paris 1661), consisting of 36 consolations suited to as many afflictions of life; the eighteenth, on children who died without Baptism, is original, maintaining that one should not lament for them as though they were damned to hell; the nineteenth concerns the thorns of marriage; the twentieth concerns girls who do not find husbands, because many married women must “make a good face in bad circumstances”; De Beneficio Crucis (there 1653), against Jansenism; Sapientia foris praedicans (there 1666), a collection of passages from various preachers up to the seventeenth century, accompanied by brief notes on each; Summa Conciliorum (2 vols., there 1645).