Jardins spirituels - in english

Thérèse d’Avila

For Thérèse d’Avila (1515-1582), the garden is the soul that returns to God and, making itself a servant, works to green and embalm. The "bon maître" will be able to "se délecter dans ce jardin et se réjouir au milieu des vertus" (Libro de la vida, XI, 6-7). The intimacy of the inner garden, however, is open to the universality of the promise of salvation and renewal held out by the divine gardener.
The Carmelite reformer draws on this poetics in her various treatises. She evokes the verdant enclosures, surrounded by low drystone walls, that appear in the austere landscape of Castile. Le Traicté du chasteau ou Demeures de l'âme goes " au-delà des réalités visibles, il emprunte aux paraboles qui font de l’âme le jardin clos -  hortus conclusus – et du Christ le jardinier qui s’y promène " (Christine Mengès-Le Pape); Teresa of Avila invites us to "return to the garden or orchard" - "Aora tornemos a nuestra huerta, o vergel" - to stay with Christ in the garden of Gethsemane.
In this way, dialogue can be renewed between the human and the divine, in the serenity of the spiritual garden, with "des arbres qui fleurissent et portent des fruits et des fleurs et des œillets qui font de même pour le parfum".

Guillaume de Saluste du Bartas

The world is paradise, where Adam discovers the wonders of nature, in the verses of Huguenot and Gascon gentleman Guillaume de Saluste du Bartas (1544-1590), friend of Jeanne d'Albret and her son Henri IV. La Sepmaine ou Creation du monde (1578), a poem of scientific and theological truth, is both didactic and moral. It was to enjoy great success in print and translation, both in France and throughout Europe.
The author develops an aesthetic that is already Baroque, and celebrates the work of the Almighty through Creation. On the third day, God separated the earth and the waters, made the mountains rise, and already sketched out the garden "paré de fleurs / Enrichi de bons fruicts, et parfumé d’odeurs" (La Sepmaine, III, 537-538). In the corresponding figure from the 1611 edition of Du Bartas' Œuvres, the Creator's foot touches a flowerbed bordered by living waters. And it's the same passage that inspires a brilliant plastic interpretation of a large French glazed earthenware plaque where twenty-four verses from La Sepmaine frame an allegory of water.