BOURDALOUE, LOUIS. - Jesuit, orator, b. at Bourges on 20 Aug. 1632, d. at Paris on 13 May 1704. After some years of teaching philosophy and moral theology he devoted himself to preaching, first at Amiens, Orléans, Rouen, until, having reached Paris in 1669, he remained there until his death, assiduously engaged not only in the direction of souls but in the ministry of the word, which earned him the title of "preacher of kings and king of preachers." Indeed, before the court he delivered five Lenten series and seven Advent series; he also pronounced many sermons for religious clothing and professions; panegyrics, funeral eulogies, homilies on the Gospels of Sundays (Domenicali); sermons on the feasts (Misteri), instructions, exhortations, and he gave spiritual exercises.
His doctrine is the traditional doctrine of the Church. In the dogmatic field there is no truth that he did not treat with clear mastery, especially when, in order to combat the errors or the rampant tendencies, he transformed himself into an excellent and profound controversialist. Famous are his sermons on faith, the Eucharist, the dead, devotion to the Virgin, against Protestant theories; on grace, predestination, Christian severity and the severity of penance, frequent communion against the Jansenists; on ordinary and active prayer against Quietism. Against Gallicanism he proclaims the infallibility of the Church and its universal power; but, saying nothing of the infallibility of the Pope and speaking cautiously of his indirect power over kings, he lays himself open to the accusation made against him of a shadow of Gallicanism in his doctrine (A. de Bil, p. 145). The field, however, in which B. triumphs is morals, remaining unsurpassed in the analysis of the human heart, in the full knowledge of the wounds of conscience, in depicting the various characters of vice; a dialectician par excellence, he left his hearers no way of escape; mention should be made of the sermons on impurity, on ambition, on the thought of death, on forced vocations, on the forgiveness of injuries. To the success and the extraordinary efficacy of his preaching, his perfect oratorical technique also contributed greatly: two exordiums, one more general and the other descending more to the particular; three points (exposition of the doctrine according to Scripture and the Fathers, the rules deriving from it, comparison with current practice), each subdivided into three parts. This may give the impression of heaviness and mechanism; but B. knew how to handle his art with perfect balance; showing at the same time that he sought neither virtuosity nor applause, but was guided by a pure and transparent love for souls and their salvation. B. wrote nothing on ascetics; nevertheless many passages of his moral sermons, or for clothing and professions, and above all his Pensées and the Retraite offer an almost complete picture of Christian perfection and of the different ways of attaining it up to the highest degrees. However, as an expert director he warns against the easy confusion of ideas that can arise from the pretentious ambitions of inexperienced souls.
That he preached with his eyes closed is one of the many legends that arose around his life, like the other that he directly challenged Louis XIV, for his adultery, applying to him Nathan's word: "Tu es ille vir" (C. M. Lauras, I, 208-10, 408-11).
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