A Threefold Cord
That the Christian faith is always fresh and new is both a wonder to consider and a necessity in the life and the history of man. We should not weep because the times are bad, but rather because men are bad, and we are men. Yet the door to a world reborn has been thrown open to us, and though in each age the approach to that door may seem different, sometimes strewn with roses, sometimes with thorns, now thronged with gentle guides to lead us astray, then with laborious saints to urge us to our salvation, the door is the same, because Christ is the same.
Turn with me, then, to Paris in 1468. The French royal family have mostly rid themselves of threats and territorial claims from their cousins in England, but the land has suffered from outbreaks of war, war from England and from within, for more than a hundred years, and it was a depleted and exhausted population that the plague had settled down among, with varying degrees of virulence from year to year. The mood of many of the rabble in that city cannot have been far from what the peddler, brawler, frequenter of whorehouses, and poet François Villon expressed when he sang the refrain to his most famous song, “Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?”—“Where are the snows of yesteryear?”
But among the prostitutes and thieves, and the lords and ladies of the royal court, and tradesmen and grocers and porters and footmen, there went a Franciscan friar, Jean Tisserand, preaching from one church to another for a month at a time, about whose sermons it was said that not the hardest of heart could resist them. Under Tisserand’s direction, two hundred young women repented of their ways and formed a new order, the Filles Rendues—the daughters, we may say, who have surrendered themselves to God.
Swift & Powerful
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Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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