Jacques Marchant wrote his work, “The Garden of Pastors,” at the instigation of his brother Peter, a Franciscan, at one time Commissary and Visitor-General of the Province of Britain, and afterwards Provincial of that of Flanders.
The Dean of Couvin was a man of very remarkable refinement of taste. His mind was eminently poetic, and there is not a subject which he touched, over which he has not cast a gleam of beauty. He handles his matter with the utmost tenderness, yet he holds it with the firm grasp of a theologian.
The glow of his fervent piety irradiates every page of his writings, and invests them with that peculiar charm which attaches to the works of the great mystic and spiritual writers of an earlier age. He is full of holy reverence and godly fear: with him there is none of that offensive trifling with sacred matters, none of that profane prying into solemn mysteries, which disgraced certain of the earlier preachers, who were only eager to exhibit themselves as well versed in the subtleties of the schools.
Marchant never approaches a sacred subject but with veiled face and the bow of reverence; never does he degenerate into buffoonery; “The wise man doth scarcely smile a little,”—and the smile of our author is inexpressibly sweet.
If St. Thomas Aquinas is to theology what Michael Angelo was to art, then Jacques Marchant may take his place beside Angelico of Fiesole.
And perhaps the reason of this spirituality is, that the Dean drew from the purest wells of living water, instead of letting down his pitcher in the polluted cisterns of a pagan antiquity. Profoundly learned he was not; his knowledge of the classics was but limited;—but he was well versed in the writings of the great Christian Fathers, and well trained in the science of the Saints.
His pure and loving spirit seems to have panted, like the hart, for the water-brooks of Divine wisdom, and to have turned instinctively from the dry and sterile land whither the men of his day were bending their steps. Yes; he left the satyr to dance in the desolate ruins of the olden world, that he might lie down in the green pastures of the Christian faith.
It is certainly remarkable that, whereas in his day men affected to quote the classic writers of Rome and Greece, and the study of these authors was reviving, Marchant passes them almost completely over[4]. The catalogue of his library I give, as it would be hard to find one more judiciously selected.
His commentators on Holy Scripture, in addition to the Fathers, are Jansenius, Titelmann, Jansonius Baradius, Viegas, Salasas, Ribera, and Cornelius à Lapide. His theological writers, after the great Thomas and Cajetan, are Bellarmin, Suarez, Clarius, Torres, and Malderus. The preachers whom he consults are Pepin, Louis of Granada, Diez, Stella, Vega, Iachinus, Stapleton, Osorius, Valderama[5], Coster, Labata, and Carthagena.
His spiritual authors are Thomas à Kempis, Blosius, Harphius, Platus, Aponte, Sales, Salo, Solutivo, Roderiguez, Bruno, and Baldesanus.