Benet Canfield
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Father Benet or Benoit of Canfield (1562-1611), usually known as Benet Canfield, was an English Recusant and mystic. His Rule of Perfection fell under the disapproval of the Church in the early 17th century, and is therefore less well-known than Holy Wisdom by his contemporary and associate Augustine Baker. Both authors deal with the subject of contemplative prayer, the deep form of prayer followed in monastic orders.
Benet was born William Fitch at Little Canfield in Essex and studied as a lawyer before a discussion with a Dissenter convinced him that all Reformed theology was flawed (including that of his own Anglican Church). He therefore converted to Catholicism, then illegal in England, and went to study at the English Catholic college at Douai in Belgium, a major centre for English Recusants, or Catholics in exile, during the Elizabethan period. He entered the Capuchin order as a Friar in 1587.
His Way of Perfection began to circulate widely in manuscript and even more widely in unauthorised printed editions. Benet brought out official editions of the first two parts of his work, but unfortunately not of the third, because he sensed stirrings of criticism from orthodox theologians about the boldness of his teachings on the higher levels of prayer. As a result this third part is known only in its French and Italian translations, in which Benet had incorporated more conventional devotional elements to ensure its acceptability as an ascetical handbook. In this he failed as it was put on the Index of the Catholic Church after his death on the grounds that it came too close to the ideas of the Quietists who were then the subject of a major controversy, although it was not considered to be actually heretical.
The book was rediscovered by Aldous Huxley in the 1940s and summarised in his book Grey Eminence as an example of the common ground between Eastern and Western mysticism.
In the 1950s he came back to the attention of Catholics with the republicaton of The Lives of Ange De Joyeuse and Benet Canfield (1623), given as by Jacques Brousse, but actually containing a large part of Father Benet's autobiography.
