'' Imitation of Christ as a Christian Lifestyle-Disembodied Fiction or ...

through his seei!l~ the imita(io Chris# ~san imitation b£ the. hidden
life o~ Jesu~ at Nazareth. The evdlutionrOf De ·Foucauld's thought
on. thts subject was equally comp~ex and lengthy, but. the essential
pOintS are aS fo,U~WS: he ?egan With the assumption that the three
st~g~s of Jesus l~f~ (the htdden Y.ea~s, the temptations and the public
mmts~ry) ha~ legttm~~ted thre~, d~stlnct and mutu~lly ~xclusive types
of rehgtous life (the Nazareth life of contemplation m cont ct with
one's immediate neighbours, the strictly contemplative life of the
desert, and the life of priests and apostles, respectively), and that
God had called him to the first of these.
Later on, he realised two thing.>. The first was that these three
lives did have certain things in common, such as poverty, chastity,
obedience, contemplation, and practice of the inward virtues, chief of
which were spiritual poverty and humility, and that just as Jesus
moved from one to the other, so God might call De Foucauld to do
the same. The second thing he realised was that in any case, Jesus'
life was a unity maintained by his unwavering will to love, to serve
and to save. This motivation was more important than the outward
form of his life, and none of its three stages made any sense unless
-seen in terms of redemption and the cross. Consequently, whilst
De Foucauld felt he was called to imitate the outward aspects -of
Jesus' life as well as the inner, he came to see that the -latter haCi
priority, and the whole was to be seen in a context of love and concern
for the salvation of man.
•
Thus the "Nazareth" life did not have to be lived either in Nazareth
{as De Foucauld believed while he was in the Holy Land, 1897-1900),
or as a contemplative life apart from men (as he believed until much
later on, up to 1904, near the end of the first stage ,of his life in the
Sahara). So, whilst the "Nazareth" ideal always ~nshrined two
aspects of De Foucauld's life, contemplation and eucharistic devotion
(adoration of the blessed sacrament being seen as analogous to worshipping
with the Holy Family), it did not remain a permanent justi-
1ication of his wish for enclosure. He came to realise that if he
modelled his contemplative life on tqe life of Jesus at Nazareth, it
would involve more than occasional or casual contact with his neighbours.
Not only should they be allowed to come to him,)but in the
name of love and in imitation of his Master, he should make positive
~fforts to go out to see them.
Facing Practical Realities: Beni-Abbes (1901-1905)
So, the monk who had wished to spend the rest of his life in a cave
when he was converted, who had then joined the Trappists as much
for the security of monastery walls as for their strictness and poverty,
who later lived in a garden shed in the enclosure of the Poor Clares
.at Nazareth, and who on returning to North Africa had deliberately
established his.dwelling in a little pocket of ground near but out of
.sight of the ~rench garrison he was ~i~terin_g to, found he had to
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