Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence: Book Review

I had expected this to be a straightforward book review. Instead, one sentence sent me down a bibliographical rabbit hole.

I loved Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence. It is short, severe in places, wonderfully freeing in others, and very similar in spirit to St. Alphonsus Liguori’s Uniformity with God’s Will. Its central message is simple: if God is really our Father, and if His Providence really governs our lives, then Christian peace cannot depend on everything going according to our own plans.

That message has stayed with me. I am giving the book 5/5 stars.

But there is a rather strange problem with the authorship printed on the cover.

An Oddity I Could Not Ignore #

The modern English edition is normally attributed to Fr. Jean Baptiste Saint-Jure, S.J. and St. Claude de la Colombière, S.J. Saint-Jure lived from 1588 to 1657. St. Claude lived from 1641 to 1682.

Yet in the section attributed to Saint-Jure, the book quotes St. Alphonsus Liguori twice, once while discussing sickness and once while discussing death.

There is one rather obvious problem: St. Alphonsus was not born until 1696.

Saint-Jure had been dead for nearly forty years.

So Saint-Jure certainly did not write those lines as they now appear.

Initially I wondered whether the attribution on the book was simply wrong. The truth is more interesting.

Who Actually Wrote Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence? #

The book we now call Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence was not written as one book by Saint-Jure and St. Claude. It is a later compilation.

The introduction to the English text says quite openly that the first part was extracted from Saint-Jure’s much larger work, De la connaissance et de l’amour du Fils de Dieu, Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ, and that a further extract from the writings of St. Claude de la Colombière was added afterwards.

Saint-Jure’s original work appeared in the seventeenth century. The Providence material is found in Book III, Chapter VIII. By the nineteenth century this chapter had taken on an independent life as a little devotional book. The French introduction recounts that Auguste Marceau encountered it at Nantes in 1842 and later had it reprinted at Lyon. A Jesuit bibliographical record for 1899 describes an edition of Saint-Jure’s De la divine Providence as a “4e édition, retouchée” — fourth edition, retouched. Editors were openly polishing the text a century before TAN existed.

That same French introduction is candid about what it did. It says the pages were extracted “almost textually” from Book III, Chapter VIII, and that the editors had introduced “quelques légères modifications plutôt matérielles” — a few slight, chiefly practical changes, with clearer divisions than earlier editions. We are not dealing with a photographic reproduction of a seventeenth-century manuscript. We are reading a devotional text that passed through generations of extraction, rearrangement, light editing, translation and republication.

The composite form is older than TAN, too. A French edition entitled Confiance en la Divine Providence: Secret de paix et de bonheur already contains everything we find in the English book: the Saint-Jure extract, the Alphonsus quotations, the Claude section and the closing exercise. It carries a Nihil Obstat from 1940 and an imprimatur from Sherbrooke dated 9 January 1954.

By 1961 an English translation by Professor Paul Garvin was being published by Alba House under the title The Secret of Peace and Happiness. The familiar TAN edition followed after a few stops in Canada:

Year	Edition
1961	Alba House, The Secret of Peace and Happiness, tr. Paul Garvin
1978, 1980	St. Raphael Editions, Sherbrooke, Quebec
1983	Issued in cooperation with TAN Books
1984 onward	TAN, under the familiar Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence title

Bibliographical records still list Garvin as the translator.

So the names on the cover are not fraudulent, but they are liable to give the wrong impression. Saint-Jure and St. Claude are the principal spiritual sources. They did not sit down together and write the present book.

There Is Even A Misattributed Chapter #

This became still more interesting when I compared the modern book with an 1877 edition of Saint-Jure’s larger work.

In Book III, Chapter VIII, Saint-Jure has a Section X entitled Exercice particulier envers la Providence divine, or “A Particular Exercise Concerning Divine Providence”. It teaches the very exercise found in Chapter V of the modern English book: acts of faith in Providence, hope and confidence, esteem and love, followed by complete abandonment into the hands of God.

Yet the modern table of contents places Chapter V, “Exercise of Conformity to Divine Providence”, under Part Two: St. Claude de la Colombière.

In other words, at least one chapter in the modern arrangement is assigned to the wrong author. Chapter V is substantially Saint-Jure.

This is more than a theoretical question about bibliography. It tells us how the book reached us. What we possess is an edited devotional anthology whose internal boundaries became blurred during transmission.

I found no evidence of some hidden or mysterious authorship behind the book. The paper trail is far more ordinary than that. It leads through a seventeenth-century Jesuit work, later Catholic extracts and reprints, an English translator, and modern publishers. The problem is untidy editorial history, not a secret author.

So Who Put St. Alphonsus Into Saint-Jure’s Text? #

I cannot tell you with certainty.

What can be said with certainty is that Saint-Jure did not do it. The dates make that impossible. And the interpolation was not introduced by TAN’s English edition either. The French tradition from which the English descends already contains the same lines — “Pour moi, dit saint Alphonse…” — so the Alphonsian material entered the little Providence booklet somewhere in its French editorial history, most likely during the nineteenth century, when the booklet was being extracted, reprinted and “retouched”. I have not found an accessible edition that lets me identify the exact editor and year. I would rather leave that question open than invent an answer.

There is, however, a lovely historical irony here. The influence appears to have originally travelled in the opposite direction. Research into the sources of St. Alphonsus’s Visits to the Blessed Sacrament has identified his use of an Italian version of Saint-Jure’s work. The Bibliothèque nationale de France catalogue even notes Saint-Jure’s text among the source materials published with a scholarly edition of Alphonsus.

So Saint-Jure influenced Alphonsus, and then at some later date an editor seems to have put Alphonsus back into Saint-Jure!

Does The Book Make God The Author Of Evil? #

This is the part of the book that can trouble people most.

Saint-Jure uses extraordinarily strong language about receiving misfortunes from the hand of God. Read quickly, some passages can sound as though a murderer, a thief, a persecutor or even the devil is merely a puppet, and that God Himself is therefore morally responsible for whatever evil takes place.

That would be contrary to Catholic teaching.

But it is also not what the book actually says when read as a whole.

Only a few paragraphs after some of its strongest statements, the book asks directly: How can God will or allow evil? It then says that God “is not and cannot be the author of sin” and distinguishes between the physical act itself and the moral evil introduced by the creature’s will. The sinful intention belongs to the sinner, not to God.

This is very close to the traditional distinction made by St. Thomas Aquinas. God is the first cause of the creature’s existence and power to act, while the defect which makes a freely chosen act sinful comes from the created will. Saint-Jure uses the old example of a man walking with a damaged leg: the power of movement is real, but the defect in the movement comes from the damaged leg.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church is especially helpful here:

God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil.

It immediately adds that God permits moral evil because He respects the freedom of His creatures, and that in His Providence He knows how to bring good from it.

Both truths have to remain together.

God is not the author of sin. Yet sin does not create a hole in the sovereignty of God through which Providence suddenly disappears.

“You Meant Evil Against Me, But God Meant It For Good” #

The best explanation is already in Scripture.

Joseph’s brothers freely chose to betray him and sell him into slavery. Their action was sinful. They were responsible for it. Yet years later Joseph could say to them: “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20).

Notice that Joseph does not say their evil intention was secretly good. He calls it evil. Neither does he say that because they sinned, God had therefore lost control of the story.

The Catechism uses precisely this example when explaining Providence. It then points to an even greater one: the Crucifixion. The rejection and murder of Jesus Christ was a terrible moral evil caused by human sin. Yet through that very event God brought about the redemption of the world.

The same pattern is visible in Job. Satan is really Satan. The men who raid Job’s property are real human agents. Their actions are not morally transferred to God. Nevertheless Job can look beyond these secondary causes and say, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

This, I think, is the key to reading Saint-Jure properly.

If another person sins against me, saying that I receive the suffering under God’s Providence does not mean the other person is innocent. It does not mean God approves of the sin. It does not mean evil has become good.

It means that the sinner is not sovereign.

A man’s malice cannot finally place me outside the care of my Father. Even the devil is not God’s equal. The Catechism teaches that Satan can cause grave harm, but his activity is still permitted by Divine Providence.

That is a much more comforting doctrine than the idea that God is merely watching helplessly while His plan for my life is wrecked by somebody else’s sin.

Surrender Is Not Passivity #

There is another possible misunderstanding worth clearing up.

Trustful surrender does not mean that we should refuse medicine, stay silent about abuse, ignore injustice, decline lawful help or sit around doing nothing while evil occurs.

Saint-Jure himself says this.

When speaking about sickness, the book tells us to accept what God permits while at the same time doing “all that is reasonable in our power to get well again”. The reason given is wonderfully simple: because God wishes it so.

This is not fatalism. Christian abandonment still requires us to perform our duties, use the means God has placed before us, protect those entrusted to us, resist sin and act with prudence. What we surrender is the final outcome.

I can go to the doctor and surrender to Providence. I can defend somebody from injustice and surrender to Providence. I can report a crime and surrender to Providence. I can pray desperately for a particular outcome and still finish, with Our Lord, “not my will, but Thine, be done.”

That is much harder than passivity.

Why I Give It 5/5 #

The editorial history is messy. I would prefer TAN, or any future publisher, to explain much more clearly which passages come from Saint-Jure, which come from St. Claude, and which were added by later editors or translators. The Alphonsus references especially ought to be footnoted rather than quietly left inside a seventeenth-century author’s text.

None of that has made me value the spiritual teaching any less.

In fact, understanding the Catholic theology behind it has made me appreciate the book more. It is not teaching that evil is good. It is teaching that evil is not sovereign. It is not asking us to call a sinner innocent. It is asking us to believe that even another person’s sin cannot frustrate the Providence of God.

That is the book’s great strength.

Most of my anxiety comes from a quiet assumption that if I do not control events, everything may go terribly wrong. Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence attacks that assumption at the root. God is not merely present when life goes according to plan. He is still God when the plan collapses, when prayers seem unanswered, when somebody treats us unjustly, when illness comes, and when we simply cannot understand what He is doing.

This does not remove the Cross. It tells us whose hands the Cross is in.

I would happily recommend this alongside St. Alphonsus Liguori’s Uniformity with God’s Will, with one qualification: read its deliberately forceful language in the light of the Church’s teaching on Providence, human freedom and the permission of evil.

★★★★★ 5/5