Ten Meditations for Catching and Losing One’s Breath
Kalos
Wipf and Stock Publishers
2024
Paperback
126
Reviewed by: Dr Angelo Bottone
(Dublin Business School)
In Ten Meditations for Catching and Losing One’s Breath, Jean-Louis Chrétien (1952-2019) focuses on ten ordinary words which are also “decisive in the spiritual tradition,” as he explains in the Preface. Each word is a path, and in questioning them, Chrétien does not seek to master or define them, but rather to let them speak, to allow their resonance, their biblical, philosophical, and poetic echoes to unfold. The act of meditating on these words becomes a form of attentive listening, where language itself is received as a gift and thinking takes the form of response.
Originally published in 2009 under the title Pour reprendre et perdre haleine: dix brèves méditations, this is the first time the work has been translated into a foreign language.
The ten terms Chrétien explores are: breath (souffle), way (chemin), temptation (tentation), attention (attention), recollection (recueillement), blessing (bénédiction), peace (paix), gentleness (douceur), abandonment (abandon), and wound (blessure).
Each meditation may be read in isolation, but Chrétien suggests considering them as a progression that moves from the most general, breath, which also inspires the book’s title, to the most specific, wound, a theme he has explored in other works such as La joie spacieuse (2007). The trajectory is not linear or developmental in the traditional sense, but contemplative and intensifying: beginning with the elemental experience of breathing, Chrétien gradually draws the reader deeper into the vulnerabilities of human existence, until reaching the wound as the place where all previous themes converge. The wound, in Chrétien’s thought, is never merely a mark of suffering; it is a place of encounter, where fragility becomes the threshold of transcendence. Chrétien approaches these words with reverence and vulnerability, seeking not to explain them from without but to dwell with them from within, allowing the voice of tradition and the fragility of human existence to illuminate their hidden depths.
Chrétien’s style in these ten meditations (“brief meditations” in the original title Pour reprendre et perdre haleine: dix brèves méditations, published in 2009) is deliberately slow, poetic, and resonant. It resists systematic exposition and instead unfolds through a kind of contemplative circling, like a long-breathed conversation, in a low voice. This stylistic choice is not incidental; it mirrors the very rhythm of breath that structures the book: the inhalation of silent attention, and the exhalation of praise, surrender, or poetic invocation. Chrétien writes with what might be called a phenomenological lyricism. His prose blends philosophical reflection with scriptural allusion, patristic echoes, and poetic imagery, weaving a polyphony of voices such as Saint Teresa of Avila, Malebranche, Silesius, Dante, Kierkegaard, and above all Augustine, into a living tapestry of meaning. The result is a form of writing that is as much addressed to the heart as to the intellect. It invites not just interpretation, but inhabitation. One reads slowly, contemplatively, letting the words breathe rather than submitting them to conceptual closure. In this way, the style itself becomes a spiritual exercise: the reader must pause, attend, and receive, echoing the very structure of prayer that the book so gently evokes.
Chrétien’s dialogue with Augustine is particularly vital. Augustine is not merely cited but becomes a kind of subterranean guide. Chrétien draws on Augustine’s notion of the inner word (verbum mentis) and the dilated heart of Psalm 119 to articulate a theology of interiority oriented toward generosity and praise. The voice, for both Augustine and Chrétien, is where the soul becomes manifest, and the dilation of the heart signals the soul’s readiness to respond to God. In this way, Chrétien’s meditations do not simply echo Augustine; they translate Augustinian insight into phenomenological attentiveness.
“This book aims to be European,” Chrétien specifies in the Preface. In fact, each term is often explored in its semantic variations across major European languages, primarily French, but also Latin, German, Spanish, English, and Italian. Chrétien is attentive not only to etymology but to the spiritual and poetic nuance each linguistic tradition carries. For example, in the meditation on attention, the resonance of the Latin attendere (to stretch toward) contrasts subtly with the modern English “to attend,” which has lost its meaning of “waiting” while retaining that of vigilance and assistance. This philological sensitivity is never merely scholarly; it serves Chrétien’s larger spiritual and phenomenological aim: to illuminate how words, when listened to with care, become sites of lived experience and theological depth. Through this multilingual, intertextual weaving, Chrétien constructs a space that is unmistakably European in its cultural lineage, yet open to the universal dimensions of spiritual life. The small book thus positions itself not only as a contribution to philosophy or theology, but also as a work of cultural memory, echoing the shared breath of Europe’s literary, mystical, and philosophical traditions.
Although Ten Meditations for Catching and Losing One’s Breath is among Chrétien’s more lyrical and accessible works, it remains firmly grounded in the philosophical commitments that shape his wider corpus. At the heart of Chrétien’s thought is the idea that human existence is fundamentally structured as response: we are not self-originating subjects but beings addressed by the world, by others, by God, and constituted in our capacity to answer. This response is not reducible to verbal or intellectual articulation; it is enacted through the body, and especially through the voice, which Chrétien in his La Voix nue (2007) has described as the site where interiority is exposed, offered, and made vulnerable. The voice is not a neutral instrument of expression; it is the manifestation of the self in its vulnerability. Unlike writing, which can be revised or deferred, the voice is immediate, ephemeral, and exposed. It gives the speaker before any content is communicated.
Breath, then, is not only physiological but metaphysical; it is the silent precondition of all voice, all responsibility, all praise. Each meditation in this volume can be seen as a variation on this theme: the human person as appelé à répondre, called to respond. Whether in attention, abandon, or blessing, the author emphasizes that we do not initiate meaning or mastery; we listen, receive, and offer ourselves in return. His phenomenology resists the ideal of sovereign subjectivity in favor of a relational approach in which being human means having been addressed first. This commitment aligns him with other figures associated with the so-called “theological turn” in French phenomenology, but Chrétien distinguishes himself by placing emphasis not on concepts like the invisible or the saturated phenomenon, but on the embodied, voiced, and prayed experience of being touched by transcendence. In this sense, Ten Meditations does not diverge from his more explicitly theoretical works as it enacts them, allowing his philosophy to take on a liturgical and poetic form.
The book does not fit neatly into any single genre or discipline. It is neither a philosophical treatise nor a theological tract; neither a devotional manual nor simply a collection of essays. It is all of these and more. Rooted in phenomenology, it adopts the stylistic cadence of spiritual writing. Its rigor lies in fidelity to lived experience, not conceptual closure. For this reason, it resists easy classification but rewards deep attention. Like the best of the mystical and poetic traditions from which it draws, its authority arises not from argument but from resonance.
A particularly illuminating insight into Ten Meditations for Catching and Losing One’s Breath comes from Andrew Prevot[1], who proposes that Chrétien’s meditations are not merely about prayer but are themselves a form of prayer or, more precisely, a text that invites the reader into a posture of prayer. According to Prevot, Chrétien’s style of writing, with its peculiar rhythm, tone, and theological poetics, functions analogously to lectio divina, the traditional Christian practice of slow, meditative, receptive reading of Scripture. Chrétien’s prose does not proceed by systematic demonstration or argumentative clarity; instead, it unfolds contemplatively, circling around key spiritual words such as souffle (breath), recueillement (recollection), bénédiction (blessing), and blessure (wound). These meditations are phenomenological in method, but liturgical in spirit, drawing the reader into a rhythm of interior attentiveness and affective response.
This rhythm is not incidental. As Chrétien makes clear in the opening meditation, which is also the one that inspires the title, breathing is not only a biological act but a spiritual posture. To breathe is to receive life from beyond oneself, to exist in openness, exposure, and dependency. The movement between catching one’s breath and losing it is not merely physiological, but theological: it names the structure of spiritual existence, in which one receives (grace, word, silence) and responds (in prayer, love, or abandonment). Chrétien’s meditations unfold this structure across ten variations, each tracing a movement from interiority to gift, from attention to response, from wound to song. His words operate in this sense not only as analysis but as invitation: the reader is called not to evaluate them critically from a distance, but to enter into them, to pray them, to let them reorder one’s breath.
Prevot highlights this feature with remarkable clarity: “Chrétien’s works are also spiritually edifying. They invite one not merely to think but to pray with them. Indeed, I believe it would be possible to turn to Chrétien as a spiritual guide, to go on a personal retreat structured by his books (perhaps especially the ten meditations in Pour reprendre et perdre haleine)”.[2] What Chrétien offers, then, is not simply a theory of prayer, but a form of philosophical praying, a writing that breathes with the cadences of invocation, silence, and praise. The language of the book is saturated with Scripture, poetry, and theological resonance, but it is never dogmatic or didactic. Instead, it is polyphonic and contemplative, weaving the reader into a web of listening. For Chrétien, as Prevot stresses, prayer is not a private act but a choral response to divine excess. This choral dimension is crucial: to pray is always to pray with others, even in solitude. Chrétien’s prose, by echoing voices from biblical characters, medieval mystics or modern poets, places the reader inside this community of response, and asks them to breathe in its rhythm.
This makes Ten Meditations for Catching and Losing One’s Breath a unique and remarkable work in the phenomenological tradition. It is a book that not only interprets spiritual experience, but that becomes spiritual experience, a kind of literary liturgy, a textual prayer. It does not aim at conceptual mastery but at spiritual transformation, leading the reader gently but insistently toward a more attentive, wounded, recollected, and surrendered existence. To read it, as Prevot notes, is to discover that “Chrétien has given us the gift of thinking prayer and praying thought.” The text breathes, and invites the reader to breathe with it—to catch one’s breath in wonder, and to lose it in love.
The rhythm named in the title – to catch and to lose one’s breath – is more than a poetic flourish; it is the structural and spiritual heart of the book. Chrétien uses this double movement to articulate a phenomenology of contemplation and self-gift. Reprendre haleine, to catch one’s breath, names the moment of interior gathering, a pause of attention and recollection in which one prepares to speak, to listen, or to act. This inhalation is not idle; it is a way of opening the self to receive what is given: from language, from others, from God. It is the very posture of prayer, of philosophical meditation, of poetic readiness. But Chrétien does not allow this moment to close in on itself. Each meditation ultimately gestures toward perdre haleine, losing one’s breath, which signifies not exhaustion but generous expenditure, surrender, and praise. The breath that is recollected in silence is given back in song, in blessing, in abandonment. The highest breath, Chrétien suggests, is not the one we keep, but the one we offer. This rhythm animates the entire progression of the meditations, from the elemental fragility of breath to the sharp exposure of the wound. Contemplation is not the opposite of action; it is its condition and its source. In this light, the book’s structure mirrors the logic of the gift: what is most interior becomes most truly itself when given away. In this, Chrétien articulates not only a phenomenology of prayer, but a vision of human existence grounded in receptivity and generosity: a life lived between the breath we receive and the breath we return.
It is fitting that the final meditation in the series is dedicated to blessure (wound). If souffle (breath) introduces us to our dependence, our need to receive life and meaning from beyond ourselves, blessure brings that vulnerability to its highest intensity. The wound is where the breath falters, where speech breaks, and where the self is opened, often involuntarily, to what exceeds it. Chrétien does not romanticize suffering, but neither does he treat the wound as merely a deficit to be healed. Rather, he sees in it a site of revelation and transformation. The wound is the mark of having been touched by love, by grief, by God, and it is often in the wound that the deepest form of prayer emerges: the silent cry, the sigh, the breath that can no longer be held. This final meditation gathers all the others by showing that every moment of attention, recollection, and blessing ultimately leads to a place where we are undone, not annihilated, but rendered porous to grace. The breath we have received and given finds its limit here, but also its completion. In the wound, Chrétien suggests, we are most exposed and most available to the divine. This is not the culmination of a dialectic, but the intensification of a rhythm: breath given, breath lost, self offered. The meditation on blessure thus brings the reader to the edge of voice, where silence is no longer absence but a form of communion—a shared fragility that opens onto transcendence.
Ten Meditations for Catching and Losing One’s Breath is not only a work by Jean-Louis Chrétien. It is also a translation of his work by Steven DeLay, a novelist and philosopher himself. Translating Chrétien is no small task: his prose is dense with theological, philosophical, and poetic resonances; his style favors nuance, rhythm, and allusion over clarity and conciseness. Yet DeLay manages to preserve the contemplative cadence of the original French while rendering the text in an English that is both faithful and fluid. His translation succeeds not only in accuracy but in tone, and it breathes with the same reflective pace and reverent attention that mark Chrétien’s voice. Moreover, DeLay’s editorial presence enhances the volume in subtle but significant ways. His editorial footnotes, which were absent from the original French edition, serve to clarify linguistic choices, point the reader to relevant works by Chrétien, and provide essential theological or philosophical context where needed. These notes are never intrusive; rather, they assist the reader in navigating Chrétien’s references and concepts without disrupting the meditative flow. Importantly, in the Translator’s Introduction, DeLay recounts how this project began with Chrétien himself, who, the first time they met in 2017, among almost thirty published works, selected Pour reprendre et perdre haleine as the book he most wished to see translated by DeLay. This personal invitation adds a layer of fidelity and responsibility. DeLay is not only the translator, but the one entrusted by Chrétien to carry this particular voice across into English. In this sense, DeLay’s work goes beyond translation: it is a form of interpretive accompaniment, making the text more accessible to Anglophone readers while preserving its depth and integrity. In doing so, DeLay not only brings this important work into the hands of English-speaking readers, but also contributes meaningfully to the growing reception of Chrétien as a central figure in contemporary phenomenological theology, one whose voice, now more audible across linguistic boundaries, continues to challenge, console, and inspire.
The volume also includes a brief but illuminating foreword by Emmanuel Housset, one of Chrétien’s closest students and collaborators. Housset situates the book within the broader arc of Chrétien’s life and thought, and reads it as a “reminder of philosophy’s indebtedness to words. For it is in words that we think, it is also words that make us think”. (p. ix)
Taken as a whole, Ten Meditations for Catching and Losing One’s Breath is not a loosely connected sequence of spiritual essays, but a tightly woven theological and phenomenological meditation on what it means to live a life of attention, receptivity, and self-offering. It exemplifies Chrétien’s distinctive voice within the landscape of French phenomenology, a voice that insists on the primacy of response over initiative, of listening over mastery, of vulnerability over control. More quietly than his overtly theoretical works, this book nonetheless enacts many of the central motifs of Chrétien’s philosophical project: the structure of call and response, the exposure of the self through the voice, the liturgical nature of human embodiment, and the ethical demand that arises from being addressed. The meditations are phenomenological not because they analyze phenomena as such, but because they dwell in the phenomena of prayer, praise, recollection, and fragility without reducing them to abstract categories. In doing so, Chrétien gives us a rare kind of writing, at once philosophical and poetic, theological and personal, rigorous and prayerful. It is a book that does not merely speak about the breath; it breathes. And in doing so, it invites us to breathe with it, to catch our breath in silence and contemplation, and to lose it in love and praise.
Bibliography
Chrétien, Jean-Louis. La Voix nue: phénoménologie de la promesse. Paris: Minuit, 1990.
Chrétien, Jean-Louis. La Joie spacieuse: essai sur la dilatation. Paris: Minuit, 2007.
Chrétien, Jean-Louis. Saint Augustin et les actes de parole. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002.
Bloechl, Jeffrey. Fragility and Transcendence : Essays on the Thought of Jean-Louis Chrétien. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.
Gonzales, Philip John Paul, and McMeans, Joseph Micah (eds). Finitude’s Wounded Praise: Responses to Jean-Louis Chrétien. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2023.
Peruzzotti, Francesca. “Human Spirituality: Jean-Louis Chrétien and the Vital Side of Speech” in Religions n. 7, vol .12 (2021), p. 511.
[1] Andrew Prevot, “Praying with Jean-Louis Chrétien,” in Geffrey Bloechl (Ed.) Fragility and Transcendence, Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 117-129.
[2] Ibid, p. 118.
