JOHN OF FÉCAMP. - Benedictine abbot and theologian, b. at Ravenna at the end of the 10th century, d. at Fécamp (Normandy) on 22 February 1078. Nephew of the famous abbot Bl. William of Volpiano, he soon became his favorite disciple in the abbey of St. Benignus of Fruttuaria. He followed his uncle when the latter went to France to found the monastery of St. Benignus of Dijon, and in 1017 he was made by him prior of the abbey of the Most Holy Trinity of Fécamp, of which he became abbot in 1028. From 1052 to 1054 he also governed the abbey of Dijon. It was precisely at that moment that Fécamp became the center of a Benedictine Congregation, to which the monasteries of Blangy, Saint-Taurin and Bernay subsequently joined. If in that fervent period of monastic reforms, led by Cluny, by St-Vanne and by St. Benignus of Dijon, there were no rivalries, the leaders nevertheless had to take part in the whole political-religious movement of the age and to submit to its clashes and its upheavals. G., a friend of the English king Edward III, was also acceptable to William the Conqueror, who gladly went to Fécamp; in contact with Fruttuaria, he did not lose his connections with Italy and the Empire; with the empress Agnes, mother of Henry IV, he had epistolary relations.
Endowed with strong sensitivity, in contact with the great he had much to suffer from the lack of understanding and the roughness of men. Small in stature (he was therefore called Jeannelin, a diminutive which G. did not disdain), of gentle spirit, he governed with that moderation which is the characteristic of the Rule of St. Benedict. Burning with divine love, he desired to pour his inner fervor into his monks. A hermit by desire, he was a forerunner of the tendency which in that same period was to spread widely through the work of St. Romuald and St. Bruno. A man of contemplation, he passed through the great offices carrying in his heart the consuming longing for solitude and the nostalgia for the "homeland." Under this religious pressure, his pen does not linger on human subjects, but like an arrow points toward heaven.
He wrote: Confessio theologica (PL 40, 909-36; new ed. by J. Leclercq - I. P. Bonnes, pp. 109-83 in three parts, Trinity, Redemption, the redeemed soul); Libellus et Scripturis et verbis Patrum, in four parts (Incarnation and divine perfections, love of Christ, contemplation, prayers); Confessio fidei (PL 101, 1027-98), in four parts (God One and Three, Incarnation of the Word, explanation of the Creed, Eucharist). Manuscript 245 of the municipal Library of Metz contains a compendium of the Confessio fidei, once attributed to Alcuin. These three writings are but different recensions of one and the same work, which can be considered a "prayed theology," from which were drawn the Meditationes, the Soliloquia and the Manuale attributed to St. Augustine and widely circulated down to our own times. I. Leclercq and I. P. Bonnes have edited new opuscules: Deploratio quietis et solitudinis derelictae (op. cit., pp. 184-97): a work of his maturity, perhaps the most personal; Lessus paenitentiae (ibid., pp. 221-228) and Pater mi (ibid., pp. 229-30): two spiritual short poems; four letters of spiritual direction (ibid., pp. 198-220) revealing the soul and the method of the author; the third is addressed to the empress Agnes. Migne (PL 147, 463-73) had already edited other letters of governance, in which G. shows himself calm but energetic. Wilmart has attributed various Meditationes and Preces (above all the prayers held to be of St. Ambrose, which the Roman Breviary reports at the end as proparatio ad Missam) to G., but Leclercq raises serious doubts about their authenticity.
These works, even in the simplicity of their style, in the repetition of concepts and in the redundancy of phrases made up of biblical and patristic borrowings, are endowed with a special virtus suasiva and at a distance of a millennium still have the freshness of a mountain spring. Wilmart has rightly considered them the best ascetic production of the Middle Ages before St. Bernard, and one may add that the eucharistic chapters of the Confessio fidei are among the most beautiful of the period. These writings, under the name of St. Augustine, have crossed the centuries, because they reflect the irrepressible yearning of the Christian soul toward Paradise.
Bibliography9 works
Antonio Piolanti