Enciclopedia Cattolica

RAIMONDO GIORDANO

Raymond Giordano

Volume X · p. 301 · 1953

English translation · Testo originale italiano

Machine translation of the 1948–1954 Italian original. The original text is authoritative.

RAIMONDO GIORDANO. — French, canon regular of the Order of St Augustine, to which he adhered after a dissolute youth, “licentiatus in decretis,” provost of Uzès (Gard) in 1377 and later abbot of Selles-sur-Cher (Bourges), d. c. 1381.

Under the name of Idiota he published: Contemplationes de miserabili cursu vitae praesentis, in 5 treatises, and a wide series of other Contemplationes on various ascetical themes; the principal one being Contemplationes de amore divino. Among the earliest editions of these Contemplationes are those of Paris from 1519 and 1535.

Article illustration
RAIMONDO DA CAPUA, Blessed — The Bl. R. in the act of writing, fresco by F. Vanni (1563–1619) — Siena, church of St Catherine, chapel of St Catherine.

G. Heidenberg of Trittenheim (Trithemius, d. 1517), G. Genebrard (d. 1597) and other authors believed that the Idiota lived in the 9th–10th centuries; but it is now certain that he was still alive in 1381. His true name and age were discovered by the Jesuit Teofilo Raynaud (d. 1663), who was thus able to republish all the works of the Idiota under his true name in 3 successive editions: Lyons 1632 and 1638; Paris 1654.

BIBL.: R. Bellarmino, De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis, Lyons 1663, pp. 349–50; T. Raynaud, De Raymondo Jordanio, in Opera omnia, XI, ibid. 1663, pp. 37–66; P. Pourrat, La spiritualité chrétienne, II, Paris 1939, pp. 461–9; E. Piovesan, Un mistico ignoto del XIV sec. R. Jordanus, detto «l'Idiota», in Vita cristiana, 17 (1948), pp. 335–49, 429–39.