Abstract
ABSTRACT There are longstanding debates regarding the extent to which Descartes’s Meditations can be connected to the genre of devotional meditations popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this article, I follow Guéroult and Ariew in maintaining that the Meditations is distinctly Augustinian because of its emphasis on withdrawing from the senses and use of the intellect. I add support to this reading by arguing that the Meditations can be specifically linked to St Francis de Sales’s immensely popular Introduction to the Devout Life and Treatise on the Love of God. I also consider in detail Christia Mercer’s thesis that Descartes owes a significant debt to Teresa of Avila for exposure to – and adoption of – the meditational genre. While there is good reason to believe that Descartes does indeed owe this debt, I nevertheless argue that his Meditations shares stronger methodological and epistemological similarities with that of de Sales’s canonical works. I do this by drawing attention to passages in Teresa’s Interior Castle in which she explicitly addresses and rebukes the Augustinian mode of meditation (a mode shared by de Sales and Descartes), and instead features an Ignatian-style meditation in which the items exemplified in the mind are images of awesome Christian scenes.
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