Of the many thousands of sermons preached in the churches of seventeenth-century Italy, a small handful were thought worth printing, and fewer still worth keeping. Paolo Segneri’s Lenten course, the Quaresimale, is one of the few that has never gone out of print in its own language in three hundred years. Italians have kept it not only as a book of devotion but as a monument of their tongue, cited by the lexicographers of the Accademia della Crusca as a standard of good prose. What the English reader has never been able to do, until now, is read the whole of it. This volume offers, for the first time, a complete English translation of all forty sermons.
The preacher
Paolo Segneri was born at Nettuno, near Rome, in 1624, and entered the Society of Jesus as a boy. He might have passed his life quietly as a teacher of rhetoric, for which he had an evident gift, had he not conceived a different ambition: to spend himself in preaching missions to the ordinary people of Italy. For the better part of three decades he did exactly that, travelling on foot from town to town through Tuscany, the Romagna, and the states of the north, preaching in the open squares as often as in the churches, doing public penance before the crowds he came to move, and refusing the comforts that his growing fame would easily have secured him. Only late in life was he drawn to Rome, where Pope Innocent XII made him preacher to the papal household and a theologian of the Apostolic Penitentiary. He died there in 1694.
He was, by the common judgement of his own age and of the ages since, the foremost sacred orator Italy produced in the seventeenth century. His influence ran forward as well as back: Saint Alphonsus Liguori, whose Manna of the Soul the present publisher has issued in English, drew on Segneri as a model, and it is worth the English reader’s knowing that the two devotional writers stand in the same line. The Quaresimale was the work by which Segneri was chiefly known, and it is the work by which he still deserves to be known.
The book
A quaresimale is a Lenten course: a sermon for each of the preaching days of Lent, from Ash Wednesday to the octave of Easter. Segneri’s runs to forty. Thirty-eight of them follow the days of the season in order, and the last two, on Saint Joseph and on the Annunciation, he appended at the end, having no fixed day of their own. Read straight through, the forty make a single sustained campaign upon the conscience of the hearer. They open with the shortness of life and the certainty of death, press through the whole anatomy of sin and its remedies, rise to the Passion on Good Friday, and end in the light of Easter and in the protection of the Mother of God. It is a course designed to be lived through once a year, and the reader who takes it slowly, a sermon at a sitting, will feel the shape of it as its first hearers did.
The Baroque sermon, and Segneri’s reform of it
The reader coming fresh to a seventeenth-century sermon should know what he is holding, because it is not quite like anything preached today. Segneri wrote in the age of the Baroque, when the pulpit, like the painting and the architecture of the time, delighted in ingenuity: in the surprising image, the witty turn, the elaborate conceit spun out to its last thread. At its worst this manner grew hollow, a display of cleverness for its own sake, and the churches of Italy had heard a great deal of it.
Segneri’s distinction is that he took the whole apparatus of Baroque eloquence and bent it back to its proper end. He kept the vivid image and the sustained conceit, but he made them serve, not the preacher’s reputation, but the salvation of the hearer. He did not want to be admired; he wanted the man in the square to leave the sermon a different man. Everything in his art is subordinated to the movement of the will. This is why his sermons, for all their learning and ornament, do not finally feel ornamental. The wit is in earnest.
That earnestness is the thing to hold on to, because the ornament can at first be distracting. Segneri reasons by images, and he ranges for them across the whole of his reading: Scripture first and always, but also the Fathers of the Church, the poets and historians of Greece and Rome, the naturalists, even the astronomers. A single sermon may set Coriolanus beside King David and the habits of the vine beside a text of the Canticle. To a modern reader this can look, at first, like a bewildering parade of names. It helped his hearers, who shared that culture; it can hinder us, who do not. The remedy is at hand in this edition, and is described below.
How to read a sermon of Segneri
Each sermon has the same bones, and once the reader can feel them the rest comes easily.
It opens with a single verse of Scripture, the theme, which is the seed of everything that follows. Then Segneri takes up one governing idea, very often a single image, and drives it without mercy to its furthest consequence. Consider the sermon on the world (the thirtieth). His whole argument is that the world is a traitor, and he will not let the figure go: the world’s lavish promises are the very mark of the traitor; its gifts are fair apples, each with a dart hidden in it, pleasure and riches and glory every one carrying its own concealed arrow; it fails a man unforeseen, and always at his best; it is heavier to serve than Christ, binding with chains of iron while it pretends to caress. By the end the hearer has not been given an argument about the world so much as made to see it, once and for all, as a thing that means him harm. That is Segneri’s method: not to prove a proposition, but to fix an image so deep that the hearer cannot afterwards unsee it.
Most of the sermons fall into two parts, the second often turning from teaching to direct appeal. And nearly all of them close in the same way: the preacher lays down the argument, turns to his hearers or to God, and prays. The last movement is always toward the will and the heart. If the reader keeps the end in view, the learning along the way falls into its place as a means, not a display.
To make that learning transparent, this edition supplies more than the bare text. Each sermon is followed by a Synopsis, a plain section-by-section map of its argument, so that the reader may see the whole road before walking it, or find his place again if he loses it. The many quotations, Scriptural and classical and patristic, are keyed by small numbers to notes at the end of each sermon, where every source is identified and every Latin phrase given; in most reading devices a tap on the number brings the note to you and returns you to your place. And at the back of the book three indexes gather the Scripture Segneri cites, the Examples (the histories and similitudes with which he illustrates), and the Matters (the subjects he treats), so that the volume may be used as well as read. A reader who wants only the sermons may ignore all of this; a reader who wants to follow Segneri into his sources will find the way marked at every step.
One word of counsel about the idiom of his age. Segneri preaches in the manner of the seventeenth-century Catholic pulpit, and now and then, above all in the two closing sermons on Saint Joseph and Our Lady, he rises to a height of praise that a modern reader, even a devout one, may find bold. This is the warmth of Baroque devotion, not a lapse of doctrine; it is meant to be received as the hearer in the square received it, as the overflow of a love straining at the limits of speech. Read in that spirit, it is among the most moving matter in the book.
This translation
No complete English Quaresimale has existed before this one. A Victorian translator, Henry Ford, put a portion of the sermons into English in 1869, but the greater part of the forty has remained, until now, locked in Italian. The present version renders the whole.
The aim throughout has been faithfulness in a readable English. Segneri’s own prose is dense, periodic, and swift; the translation follows his sentences closely rather than breaking them up into modern shortness, so that something of his movement survives. Scripture is given in the words of the Douay-Rheims Bible, the English of the Catholic tradition, and set off in quotation so that the reader can always tell the voice of the Book from the voice of the preacher. In this Reader’s Edition, Segneri’s own words have been put throughout into plain modern English; the older thou and thee are kept only in the Scripture he quotes, which is given in the Douay-Rheims. A fuller account of these choices, and of how the citations are handled, will be found in the Note on the Translation that follows.
What remains is to begin. Segneri asked of his hearers not that they should think him eloquent, but that they should think of their own souls. The best way to honour him, and the surest way to enjoy him, is to read him as those hearers did: slowly, one sermon at a time, and with the question always before us that he never let his own congregation forget.