Salesian Literature

10.  ‘Introduction to the Devout Life’ (1607-1609)

 

With the turn of the century, as we have seen, peace had come to France and Savoie, and with peace the beginnings of recon­struction and stability in all aspects of social life.

 

In particular, the insurgence of a harsh and defiant Protes­tantism, excusable, no doubt, in its origins, but often its own worst enemy in its combativeness and methods of proselytism, had been contained. In this connection, it is not easy to disregard the witness of François de Sales himself whose constant insistence that the heretics should be approached and treated with nothing but Christian love was combined with his belief that so many of their ministers were "the most obstinate liars and sly fellows in the world."

 

Reaction to the Protestant peril and the cruelty of much of its creed had been to give to the Counter-Reformation in France a fresh and most attractive spiritual quality. Where devout humanism under the enfeebled, sensation-loving Valois had been a mixture of Renaissance scepticism, extravagant outward pieties and first-aid to the Church threatened in every field, under the tolerant peace of the easy-going, political-convert Henri IV there had been opportunity to take religious breath again and, with a new sense of assurance, to cultivate the inner strengths of Catholicism. That was why the monarch was so deeply anxious to uproot de Sales from his rough mountains and give him a position of eminence in France and Paris. De Sales, gentleman, reformer, preacher, spiritual director, manifestly saint, seemed to the King to be exactly the kind of person who could do for religion in the new France what he wanted to do for his country in all other aspects of its life. Peace, prosperity, culture, a better deal for the poor, these should grow under the sun of a true human, as well as humanist, devotion.

 

De Sales himself, in one part of his complex personality, was certainly attracted by the idea, the more so in that he was apt to find the surveillance of his own ducal sovereign in Savoie rather oppressive. De Sales's friendship with Henri IV, his constant business with France over Gex and the French part of his diocese, his growing international reputation—such matters irritated Charles-Emmanuel as he grew older, and made him suspicious and jealous of a prelate in fact unusually faithful to the obscurity of his native land. Writing to his old friend, des Hayes, in 1609 de Sales said: "These obediences and mortifications which cause one not to dare to be free even though one is not a serf, are they so very different from the state of those who are not free because they are serfs? Still, we must put up with them, and as quietly as possible—that is what is important. How happy I was in that little shadow of hope of finding myself in Paris with you, as I so often dreamt."

 

Nor did the Savoie Duke make things happier for him in taking umbrage at an incident like de Sales's famous adventure in riding through Geneva in his episcopal dress. The Duke could not conceive how de Sales could have risked this without prior negotiations with the people of Geneva which had been kept secret from him.

 

Whatever de Sales's hopes of finding himself in his beloved Paris again and at the heart of the spiritual revival there, the prospect of a change in his fortunes, which he invariably saw as subject to the hand of God "for my soul has no resting-place but in God's providence," was brought to an end by Ravaillac's dagger plunged into the King's heart in 1610. It was not from a great See in France that François de Sales was called upon to play his part in the beginnings of the 17th century revival of Catholic spirituality. He was called upon to do this in a humbler way, perhaps, but a far more subtle and enduring one. It was also the one which manifestly resulted from his own absolute obedience to the will of God, for it grew naturally from the kind of work which came his way and which he was brilliantly suited to carry out.

 

We have already had a glimpse of the Paris world in which a Mme. Acarie and a Bérulle became the centre of high mystical dedication in close association with the spiritual lead of Saint Teresa and the Spanish Carmelites. The Carmelites had already spread from Paris to Pontoise and from Pontoise to Dijon, Jeanne de Chantal's country. From the Dijon Carmel, Mme. de Chantal had learned much of the teaching of St. Teresa and the methods of higher prayer from the Prioress of the Dijon Carmel, Louise Gallois, known in religion as Louise de Jesus. She was the first Frenchwoman to hold this office.

 

From Annecy, de Sales's letters poured into Burgundy. He was watching from afar, encouraging, cautioning, exchanging spiritual experiences. "I only ask you to learn all you can about the foundations of all this, for, to speak clearly to you, last summer, having put myself into the presence of God without preparation and special intent, I found myself very close to His Majesty with a single very simple and continuous feeling of a love that was almost imperceptible, yet very sweet—but I would never leave the plain high road [of ordinary prayer] to look upon this as something normal... I do not say that when one has made one's preparation and, in prayer, feels attracted to this kind of prayer, one should not go forward with it. But I find it hard to accept the view that preparation is not normally necessary, just as it is necessary not to come away from prayer without thanks­giving, offering and actual normal praying… Nevertheless (I speak in all simplicity before Our Lord and to you to whom I can speak quite simply and candidly) I do not pretend to know enough not to feel very very happy to give up my feeling about this and to follow those who, in all reason, know more than I do. I do not only mean that Mother (Teresa), but many lesser people."

 

Those Carmelites of Dijon were clearly strongly attracting the pious widow, but de Sales, who had other plans for her, kept her ardour for the mystical heights in check, while learning all the lime himself about the varieties of spiritual experience which would be useful not only to himself, but to the growing number of very different souls whom he was guiding. For himself, he was content, slowly and quietly, to accept the will of God rather than to imagine himself called to any kind of spiritual pre-eminence in the way of religious austerity and mystical contemplation. These grew from within; they were not imagined and theoretical ideas to which he must live up. In a sense, then, neither in his slow climb to the priesthood from the cultured world of his day nor in his episcopal rank did his vocation differ sharply in its spiritual quality from that of every Christian, priest or lay-person, to lead a truly Godly life. What he could do, as priest and bishop, in the way of living a holy and devout life, others, whether priests, bishops or simple laity, could also do according to their state of life. Yet this logical, commonsense view of de Sales's that the way of Christian perfection was open to all, lay-people just as much as priests, was completely novel at the time. The way of perfection was then considered to be something for the few—those, whether clerical or lay, who had the clear vocation to enter monasteries and convents. And, alas, as we have seen, there were few of these which had emerged from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and through the Reformation in a state suited to the practice of self-dedication to God through continual prayer and penance.

 

François de Sales, as ordinary priest and over-busy, active, pastoral bishop of a difficult diocese, had steadily moved forward along the way of perfection, without theories or rare ambitions. He had found—to put it bluntly—in the hard, largely business job which God had allotted him the school of sanctity. What was there to prevent others doing exactly the same within the secular and even worldly lives which God had allotted to them? Such, it would seem, is the perfectly simple basis of the spiritual direction he constantly gave to others. So simple—and yet at the time so revolutionary, because nearly everything that was written in the way of the practice of Christian perfection was written against the background that this ideal necessarily demanded great austerities and complete retirement from the evil world.

 

What de Sales could not foresee was the enormous response to something that seemed so natural and inevitable to him. What he had to offer was being offered at a moment of spiritual transi­tion when so many people were looking for some genuine spiritual self-fulfilment after the quarrels, wars, abuses, controversies and challenges of the Renaissance and the Reformation. They wanted religion, the relation of the individual soul to God, not just its abused and so often travestied name.

 

We have had occasion to quote from his letters to Mle. de Soulfour, to Rose Bourgeoise, Abbesse du Puits d'Orbe, and to her sister, Mme. Marie Brulart. None of these women were very much out of the ordinary. Mile, de Soulfour did not persevere in her vocation. Rose Bourgeoise, to whom de Sales did not dare long entrust the care of his sister Jeanne, was a rather wayward religious of the old school, with poor health and much stubbornness. One is surprised to hear the Bishop telling her that "you must keep the cloister and the dormitory closed to men," 3 and complaining of her not answering his letters. Yet just because she trod on low levels, while desiring to rise, we owe to her advice like the following: " I am happy that you do often miss the spiritual exercises I have prescribed for you, for this shows that your faults do not come from infidelity, but weakness. Weakness is not a great evil so long as a faithful courage sets it right little by little."

 

Her sister, Marie Brulart, seems to have been an over-introspective, scrupulous soul, more troubled about the means and modes of prayer than its purpose. "What matter," he writes to her, "whether we are with God by one means or by another? In truth, since we only seek Him and find Him as much in mortification as in prayer, especially in times of illness, the one way is as good as another . . . Do not worry about not being able to serve God in your way, for in making the best of your troubles you will serve Him in His way—and that is better than yours."  In one of the letters to Mme. Brulart one finds the kind of senti­ment so frequent in de Sales's correspondence which seems to jump the barriers of time altogether. Speaking of her son's First Communion, he approves an early date "for the children of this age seem to know more at ten than we did at fifteen." How often must that have been said before and since!

 

But it was not the Bourgeoises and the Brularts who were destined, except indirectly, to make François de Sales a world figure as the apostle of perfection for people in the world. It was Louise du Chastel, wife of a cousin of de Sales, Claude de Charmoisy.

 

As a child Louise had been a maid-of-honour of Catherine of Cleves, widow of the 3rd Due de Guise. After her marriage in 1600 at about the age of 14 with Claude de Charmoisy, she settled in the grandeur, deadly dull as compared with the Paris of her childhood, of one or other of the Charmoisy residences in Savoie. She was not at that time a woman of any special piety, but one rather who pined for a gayer social life than Annecy and its surrounding mountain country could offer. Her husband and de Sales were old friends as well as cousins, the apostle of the Chablais having found refuge in the Charmoisy home near Thonon. But it was not for a year or two after Louise's marriage that she took special notice of the new Bishop de Sales.

 

As with Jeanne de Chantal later the contact was made in church. The Bishop was preaching in January 1603, and Mme. de Charmoisy, sitting among the congregation in front of him, strongly felt that the sermon was specially meant for her, a young woman of good will, but without spiritual zeal. After the sermon, she spoke with him in the confessional. From then onwards they met socially and as relations, but there was no recurrence of the special spiritual contact.

 

It was not until May 1606 that an accident gave de Sales the excuse to write to her at some length. He made little disguise of his marked spiritual interest in her and he stated plainly that God desired something special in the way of devotion from her. Even so, nothing happened for nearly a year. At last in Lent of 1607 "the fish I have wanted for four years has come into our sacred nets," as de Sales put it in a letter to Mme. de Chantal. With so little to go on and so much to come, de Sales showed a remark­able power of discernment of spirits when he said in his letter of this latest fish: "She is a lady, sterling throughout and infinitely suited for the service of our Saviour. If she perseveres, she will do so with fruit."

 

Mme. de Charmoisy had finally put herself in de Sales's hands because she would have to go to Chambery in connection with a lengthy law-suit and she feared the worldliness of the city and its Court. The Bishop wondered what he could do to help her in these circumstances. His spiritual direction to a number of different persons had to some extent been made easier by his Writing little treatises or exercises on spiritual subjects, copies of which he could enclose, bidding the recipient pass it on to others. A piece of writing on "the perfection of life for all Christians " was enclosed in a letter to Mme. de Chantal "not for you, but for some others, nevertheless you will see if it is of any use to you." 'He was now also helping Mme. de Charmoisy with a similar exercise, as he told Mme. de Chantal in March 1608. "I want to send you an exercise which I have got ready and asked Mme. de Charmoisy to practise, as I do not want to do anything without telling you . . . She is a good soul and admirable in the way she avoids being over-eager. She has never written about her soul except these last days." Rereading this letter, de Sales must have become worried at the thought that Jeanne dc Chantal with her many letters might have taken this as a criticism of herself. He added "I do not say this to praise her, for I like people to write to me and often ... I say this so that you will not think that you must not write to me as often as possible in order to avoid too much eagerness."

 

One way and another, then, Mme. de Charmoisy was able to take with her to Chambery quite a number of the Bishop's writings on the practical road towards spiritual perfection for people in the world [many of them hastily despatched while preach­ing Lent]. When she reached the Savoie capital, she showed them to Pere Fourier, the Rector of the Jesuit College and de Sales's own spiritual director, "my great friend to whom I often gave account of my actions," as de Sales wrote to the Archbishop of Vienne, his own Metropolitan. "It was he who pressed me so hard to give publicity to this writing, and after having hastily revised and pieced them together with some little arrangements, I sent it to the printers."

 

In fact, luck would have it that de Sales was preaching the Lenten sermons of 1608 in the peaceful little town of Rumilly, a few miles west of Annecy, when these papers were returned to him for revising and editing. With time for once on his hands and the ardour of the born writer who cannot waste a minute that might be devoted to writing, he would seem to have virtually rewritten at far greater length the substance of the notes he had given to Louise de Charmoisy, who in the famous Introduction to the Devout Life has been immortalised as "Dearest Philothea." The little book was published by Pierre Rigaud in Lyons by the end of the year.

 

The demand for the first spiritual book especially written "to instruct those who live in towns, in families and at court . . . obliged to lead outwardly at least an ordinary life" proved to be sensational. Rigaud had to reprint twice, and as quickly as he could. It was selling impelled by its own wings, the Archbishop of Vienne said.

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Within two months of publication, de Sales was explaining to the Archbishop that he lacked the means for writing long books. "Perhaps there is no bishop within two or three hundred miles from here who is so much caught up in business affairs as I am. I live in a place where there are no books or the means of getting any. Because of this, leaving great plans to great writers, I have planned certain little books less heavy to under­take and yet suited to the condition of my life which is vowed and consecrated to the service of my neighbour for the glory of God."

 

Despite these protests, he was soon hard at work preparing the second edition of the Introduction. He wrote to Jeanne de Chantal for "all the letters and memoirs I have ever sent you, if you still have them." Now seventeen new sections or chapters were added and the whole divided into five, instead of three, parts. Alas, Rigaud accidentally forgot three of the original chapters and so the third and definitive edition of his lifetime had to be brought out before the end of 1609 to be finally revised in 1619.

 

Soon it was being read all over France and pirate editions were being printed in half-a-dozen French towns. Translations followed quickly, the first English translation appearing in 1613. The Queen, Marie de' Medici, sent a copy in a jewelled binding to James I who carried it with him for six weeks so much did he relish it.[1] The delighted printer changed his sign from "A I'Horloge" to "A la Fortune," and though the author would at first take no money, Rigaud did in the end persuade him to accept a sum to be used as a dowry for a suitable poor girl wishing to enter into a convent.

 

It is unnecessary in these pages to analyse or summarise a book of practical spiritual devotion which has proved to be one of the real "best-sellers" of devotional literature, not only among Catholics, but among Christian people of all Communions. It is ft book that is always in print and therefore always easily access­ible. Hardly less important, it is a book that is extremely easy to read, for the author in addressing an individual and real person also personally addresses every fresh reader across the centuries, leading him by the hand as he gradually builds up the practice Of a full Christian life within the conditions of normal lay life.

 

Nevertheless certain observations about it may briefly, yet Usefully, be made.

 

We have already shown in extracts from François de Sales's letters and other writings that one may easily get a very wrong picture of the type of person he was and of the nature of his spiritual teaching. François de Sales, we believe, was the most human of the saints—certainly the most consistently courteous and understanding in his personal relations whether with his family, his friends, those whom he personally directed in their spiritual lives, those with whom he had to do business of every kind, and, not least, those of his own flock, whether powerful or weak, rich or poor, noble or peasant. So intimate could this personal relationship be, so clearly a relationship always of "I – Thou," never "I - He," that one sometimes has to make a slight effort not to be shocked.

 

How could a man of flesh and blood, one is tempted to ask oneself, attain such personal intimacy without some touch of baser emotion that seems inconsistent with the nature of his spirituality, of his vocation and of his office? So much was he a man, so much was he a man of good sense, that his spiritual teaching constantly reflects a humanity and moral commonsense that is enormously appealing to the ordinary reader who has no pretensions to being above the average. His are words of wisdom, not of spiritual fire, one feels. Consider the following passage in the Introduction. "My advice, Philothea, therefore, is that we should either not utter words of humility, or else use them with a sincere interior sentiment, conformable to what we pronounce outwardly. Let us never cast down our eyes except when we humble our hearts. Let us not seem to desire to be the lowest, unless we desire it with all our heart. I hold this rule to be so general that I do not admit of any exception to it ... A man who is truly humble prefers that another should tell him that he is miserable and that he is nothing and that he accomplishes nothing than that he should say it himself." Thus, in a few words, de Sales debunks nine-tenths of what passes as Christian humility. To read such words is to feel a tremendous sense of relief at truth penetrating through the current hypocrisies of respectable piety. Just because of this, de Sales seems not only an attractive, but an easy, teacher. But the impression is totally false.

 

De Sales, as we have said, was no theorist of spiritual teaching. Just as his personal character was a rare combination of immense natural toughness, of rushing activism, recalling the furious spate of the mountain torrents among which he was brought up, with a deceptive charm, slow methodicalness and contemplation as still and deep as the lake near which he lived, so his spiritual teaching combined deceptive commonsense and ease with terrifyingly high ideals. He has been called the most mortifying of all the saints. The teaching simply reflected the man as he was and as he lived himself.

 

That is why the Introduction, designed, as we have seen, to help the ordinary lay person towards spiritual perfection—and revolutionary at the time in so doing—may well strike us to-day as a strange combination of delightful and immensely appealing spiritual sense with, at times, a rigorous and frightening ideal, well out of the range of what we have grown accustomed to think of as a decent spiritual life for the man or woman of the World. To some extent we must allow for the change of period. De Sales, though writing for the lay person, was still probably thinking of the relatively few willing to face the struggle of personal reform in a Christian world of great anxiety, ignorance and apathy. Today, not only have ascetic, moral and spiritual values to some extent been modified in their application, but the Christian, if he takes his religion at all seriously, lives it more faithfully and more intelligently. From this level, we discern more readily than was possible in the 17th century a variety of stages along the upward path consonant with the great variety of people who, without being Philotheas in de Sales's sense, at least wish to live better and more fruitful Christian lives. But for these, too, the Introduction can offer the greatest help.

If the modern generation is apt to find some of the teaching too rigorous, some of his contemporaries thought it altogether too lax. One preacher tore the book to pieces in the pulpit in protest against the writer's tolerance of dancing as a pastime indifferent in itself and of "good conversation" which allows of "certain good-humoured, jesting words, spoken by way of modest and innocent mirth . . . We must be careful, however, not to pass from honest mirth to scoffing. Scoffing excites laughter in the Way of scorn and contempt of our neighbour. Mirth and banter cause laughter by an unaffected liberty, confidence, and familiar freedom, joined to the sprightly wit of some conceit."

 

Two years before his death, François de Sales, in connection With the Italian translation of the book, wrote an amusing letter to the translator, the Jesuit father, Antonio Antoniotti. "Some Italians say that the chapters in which I deal with games, dances, flirtations and similar amusements and pastimes . . . suit the frivolity and freedom of the French people, whereas the reserve and natural gravity of the Italians have no need about such things. I leave the matter to Your Paternity's judgment, only adding that in certain parts of Italy, those nearest to Germany and France, like Piedmont, people do dance and people do play and people do make love. Besides, the little book has been translated without expurgations in Spain, even though there they make a great thing of outward gravity. The wise must be patient when one addresses in books like these the less wise. It is to the stupid as well as to the wise that I owe something when a work is addressed to people of the world, to courtiers and others."

 

Another feature of the book which many modern readers find unattractive is one aspect of its style. This difficulty is the defect of de Sales's method: to write simply and easily for one individual person whose character and tastes he knew. The wife of a rich and highly-placed nobleman of Savoie in the early 17th century was someone very different from any person alive 350 years later. De Sales was a painstaking person, never missing a chance of usefully spending the odd moment of leisure. Among the products of such moments was a list of similitudes, gathered from his reading, in this imitating Pliny the Elder himself whose Natural History was a favourite source for him. And just as Pliny searched nature to support his own Stoicism, so de Sales searched it as the rich exemplar of the ways of God, every journey and walk in the hills and valleys of his beautiful country offering him endless examples and object-lessons which he could put to good use in his sermons and his writings.

 

Writing almost pedagogically for Mme. de Charmoisy, he wanted to illustrate every point by examples and similitudes from God's revealed word in Scripture, from natural reason as echoed in pagan writers and from God's creative fertility in the endlessly changing pattern of nature. In doing this, he may have made his book more tedious to read for later and more sophisti­cated generations, but he earned an immortal place in the evolution of French literature as a transition writer from the desultory and unformed charm of Montaigne's Essays to the regular, self-conscious classical periods of the age of Louis XIV.

 

The Introduction was clearly an unpremeditated and unprepared book, the casual consequence of his delight, as well as spiritual zeal, in writing long letters of spiritual direction, and it was an accident of time and place that Mme. de Charmoisy, to whom he wrote little and with whom he would have little to do later, should have been the occasion for the few weeks of con­centration which, at Pere Fourier's instance, he gave to the rewriting and shaping of his spiritual advice.

 

But de Sales, whose facility in writing was in marked contrast with his self-consciousness and shyness in speaking, could not but have at the back of his mind the serious preparation for what he would have thought a very different kind of book. The trouble was to find the time. Talking to Jeanne de Chantal of his writing plans months before he dreamt of the Introduction, he gave himself away, saying that he did it "to enjoy himself and to spin his thread also on the distaff." Two years earlier, in 1605, when he had been preaching the Lent in La Roche, the Bishop had been deeply struck by the holiness of a local shopkeeper, called Pernette Bouthey, who was to die that same summer. We know little about this short spiritual friendship, but it reminds us that though the famous Philotheas were women of birth and culture, de Sales was no pastoral snob. One recalls Jacqueline Coste at Geneva.

 

It was the memory of the life and death of Pernette Bouthey which in 1607 was inspiring him to write a real book. He had arranged for the facts of her life to be recorded and he himself would turn them into a book. From this village saint, filled with the Love of God, to sanctity itself which is the Love of God— such was the theme. "When I have a quarter of an hour's rest, I spend it writing a life, admirable indeed, of a saint of whom you have never heard and I beg you not to breathe a word about it," he wrote to Jeanne. "But it is a long-term project which I would not have dared undertake if some of my closest friends had not urged me on. I will show some substantial parts of it when you come here. And within it I can find a little place for our village saint, for it will be twice as long at least as the big life of Mother Teresa [Ribera's]."

 

Lack of leisure, however, made it impossible for him to carry out this rather ambitious plan, for it was exactly two years later, just after the appearance of the Introduction, that he wrote to the Archbishop of Vienne that he could not undertake major works. "That is why I am thinking of writing a booklet on the Love of God. I shall not treat the subject speculatively, but just to show how that love is put into practice in obeying the first table of the Commandments. After this I will write another booklet dealing in the same way with the second table. The two could be published together in a handy volume. I am thinking also of bringing out a little calendar and daily guide for the way of life of a devout soul in which I will show Philothea how to fill the weeks of the year with devout occupations."  And he goes on to describe projects of an introduction to preaching and a book on how to preach to heretics.

 

Such were the writer de Sales's plans just before and just after the startling success of a book which was given to the world almost by accident. But de Sales, the writer, continued to be thrust aside into the rare quarter of an hour of leisure by the pastoral and business activities of the bishop and the spiritual direction of the father-in-God which was to yield such rich fruits. It would be many months before François de Sales's next and greatest book, the Treatise on the Love of God, would be written, nor would it have much in common, save the name, with the first of the booklets which he was planning at the beginning of the year, 1609.

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[1] The 1613 translation into English was by an anonymous translator " I. Y." The initials have been identified with either John Yakesley or John Yarborough. According to Mr. A. F. Allison, of the British Museum Library, there is little substance in these attributions. "I have not yet succeeded in identifying the translator," he lion written to the present writer, "but I can say definitely that Yakesley is very doubtful and Yarborough almost certainly a fiction."

The 1637 English edition was called in by proclamation and publicly burned, on the grounds that certain passages, excised by the censor, had been reinserted. The Introduction was to be a favourite spiritual book of the Old Pretender.

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