Robert Bellarmine SJ, On the Eternal Happiness of the Saints

ON THE ETERNAL HAPPINESS OF THE SAINTS, originally published in Latin in 1616 is one of five specifically devotional writings of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621), Jesuit, theologian, saint and doctor of the church. This book will itself make clear some of the reasons for which Bellarmine was highly esteemed also as a spiritual director and why all five of those books enjoyed long-lasting popularity. As he develops his subject Bellarmine draws widely on Holy Scripture, especially on St. Paul, and easily and aptly quotes from the Fathers of the Church, especially St. Augustine. His bold metaphors, his similes, and comparisons are true to the Baroque age in which the book was written; some of them will startle the modern reader. But what pervades the book are Bellarmine’s sympathetic understanding of human nature and, as one of his admirers has said, how he makes heaven thoroughly desirable where, to use one of Bellarmine’s own images, “We shall enter into a great sea of divine and eternal joy, which will fill us within and without, and surrounds us on all sides.” The translator: Charles S. Kraszewski teachers at King’s College in Pennsylvania. His specialty is Comparative Literature. His most recent book, Irresolute Heresiarch: Catholicism, Gnosticism, and Paganism in the Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, was published by Cambridge Scholars Press (UK).

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