Salesian Literature

13.  The ‘Treatise’ and the ‘Entretiens’ (1612-1616)

 

We have moved rapidly along during the years which brought the Bishop of Geneva to the fifties of his life, for François de Sales's very devotion, day in and day out, to burdensome and continuous episcopal duties lent a certain sameness to the days, months and years. Volumes-full of letters could indeed have been quarried for the story of these years, and these alone arc more interesting than the subject matter of many a biography, not excluding those of saints. But a choice has to be made, and we can most usefully go back a little to take up again the story of his relations with Mere de Chantal and his Visitation sisters and, most interesting of all, the account of his writing the one work of his life which he planned and settled down to work out as a professional author, the Treatise on the Love of God.

 

But the word "settle down" remains in his case a very relative expression, for settling down usually meant not a month or a week or a day, or even half a day, but the odd hour or half-hour which he could manage to squeeze in among the endless litany of a bishop's day as he saw it.

 

We have already noted that in 1609 he thought he would have-to give up his long-standing plan of writing a real book, in part inspired by the life and death of Pernette Bouthey, the La Roche shopkeeper. Booklets, he thought, would have to take the place of the book.

 

But a writer with something in his mind and heart that he must say is not so easily put off, and much more important, something new had happened. It had happened in the Galerie where Mme. de Chantal and her companions were living the Martha-Mary lives which their founder had offered them. As Bremond has put it: "His [the Founder's] ideas would have the force of law, but only so long as God Himself did not intervene. This divine intervention the Visitandines would reveal to their Founder, not in telling him what they thought, a matter of no importance to him, but simply by living under his eyes. So he watched them living with that intensity of affectionate and piercing observation which was his genius." It was what de Sales saw that urged him on with his work on the Love of God.

 

Mere de Chaugy has revealed to posterity what he saw: "By divine grace, many very soon were experiencing the prayer of quiet, the spiritual sleep of love, very high union with God. Others received extraordinary lights about the divine mysteries in which they found themselves absorbed. A few often experienced rap­tures and ecstasies so that they were joyfully fixed and held in God, receiving great gifts and graces from the divine bounty."

 

The Love of God was being revealed before his eyes in terms very different from his original conception of treating the subject against the background of the ten commandments.    His nuns would need guidance which his studies would help furnish, and so would many others, for there was no reason to suppose that the graces bestowed on those who had moved from the Devout Life to its logical end must be restricted to a community of nuns who had followed his teaching.  The Philotheas, thank God, abounded, and for them he had had no need but to edit what he had so long been teaching. Now he must write for a sterner, higher race which he called the Theotimes, men as well as women, as he underlined.  But it was the Theotimes of the Visitation – Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal above all—whom he had watched and studied as he gently, wisely guided them, himself learning infinitely more from their living realisation of his ideal than he had taught them.   What had they learnt from him and what had they taught him?

 

Mere de Chantal has told us. "I say that I realised that the quasi-universal attrait of the daughters of the Visitation is of a very simple presence of God by an entire abandonment of themselves and by exercising the virtues which leads to this."

 

As with all the greatest mystics, the final revelation seems almost commonplace. What writer, what poet, can improve the beauty of the rose which displays itself before every passer-by evoking such an infinity of reactions? But in the end the supreme as much as the vulgarest eulogy of the rose cannot alter, cannoi but bow to, that which we see: it cannot describe in itself, save in scientific terms, the rose itself. In much the same way, the nearer man comes to God, the less does language matter. Whole worlds lie behind such expressions as the "simple presence of God", "entire abandonment," "mortifying themselves," "exercising the virtues," and those worlds have to be travelled through, but finding new and grandiloquent terms for them will prove to be as meaningless as simple ones, compared with that which is experienced as the journey proceeds and when the journey is done. It was for François de Sales to map those worlds and guide souls across them, if grace beckoned them and courage measured up to the grace; but it was also François de Sales who described his own experiences during the journey a. experiences "so simple and so delicate that one can say nothing when they are over."

 

But the simpler and the more indescribable the goal, where the authentic could so easily be confused with the counterfeit of every sort of self-delusion, the more necessary was it to explore the long, true, arduous path towards it. Under de Sales's incomparable direction and in the light of the years of experience of their Mother—experience of frustration, desolation, temptation so fully revealed in François's guiding letters to her—the early Visitandines seem to have been wafted up towards mystical heights.

 

Here was the opportunity of cataloguing, analysing and gathering together in their proper order the elements that went to make up the story of how God's love for us should enable us to grow to supreme indescribable heights in our love for God. It had been de Sales's own life to return by his love for God God’s love for him, and this amidst the infinite distractions of an active episcopal life. He had seen his spiritual daughter subtly growing into his teacher. He foresaw how so many souls, whether in the Visitation, in other forms of religious life and in the world itself, would need to be guided from the state of Philotheas to that of Theotimes. No wonder that from 1612 onwards the busy Bishop, despite the growing fatigue of a none too healthy middle-aged man, treasured the moments when he could return to his study, his library and his pen which neatly and elegantly filled the folios with the large, sloping handwriting along lines so straight that they might have been ruled. It was a transfer of a life of love – of God and of his neighbour for God's sake – with all the spiritual history, philosophy and theology on which such a life would rest – to paper.

 

De Sales's letters occasionally give us a vivid glimpse of the way it was done.

 

"Bless God for the leisure He is giving me during these two days for higher prayer. His goodness has truly filled my mind with so much light and my poor heart with such desire to write in our dear book of holy love that I cannot imagine how I shall find words to express what I conceived unless the same God who gave me this experience enables me to bring it to birth."

 

A year later: "Alas, I assure you, dear Sir, that I am so Overcome by business, or rather by hindrances, that I can scarcely steal here and there quarters of an hour for these spiritual writings."

 

And on the next day, in a mood of aridity, or perhaps just the cold of a January day, he wrote to Mere de Chantal: "The fear and laziness of outer man must yield to the conquering will of our Master who wishes that however cold and frozen I may feel I should write of His holy love," and a little later: "If you need good paper to write, obtain some from M. Rolland, but ask for it for yourself, because if you ask for it in my name he will get angry for I have used too much this last week."

 

So much progress did he make in that year 1614 that in November he was writing "The book of the Love of God is finished, but I shall have to transcribe it many times before I can send it away."

 

His enthusiasm was making him excessively optimistic, for two and a half more years were to elapse before the manuscript could be sent to the printer Rigaud, and even then it would turn out to be, not so much a balanced and finished book, as the work of a born writer who never really had the leisure to write. Moreover, having at last as best he could got it off his chest, he could find no time to write the Preface so that poor Rigaud wrung his hands and threatened to go to Annecy to get it out of him. Finally, the Treatise on the Love of God was published at the begin­ning of August, 1616.

 

This long book, Bremond maintains, though too little read nowadays when so much literature on prayer is available, must be classed "as one of the more beautiful books of religious philo­sophy which the 17th century has given us, the most beautiful perhaps." But even more important, he holds, is its historical significance. "It was indeed a departure whose importance could not be exaggerated when the wisest and most authorised theologian and director of his day thus so publicly and strikingly adhered to the great mystical movement manifesting itself on all sides, not without causing anxiety to some good people... I am afraid that the originality and the boldness of such an under­taking are insufficiently realised."

 

What may seem to some the book's weakness was really its strength. It was not a book on contemplative prayer, nor a book written for one sort of reader only. It was, like the Devout Life, a book for all and it contained matter suitable for all in that it reflected the author's own development and experience which until a few years before it was written shunned the highest levels of prayer, hesitating to "leave the great broad road." The higher mystical parts were therefore organically linked with "the great broad road " the author had so long trod. Because of this it could be safely offered to "men of the world, men of the Court," as well as to privileged religious. There would be no danger of the reader imagining that the simple way was also the easy way, the soft way, as was to happen later with the spate of Moyens Courts.

 

In the book, Bremond points out, "one never knows where the ascetical part, properly so called, stops and where mysticism, properly so-called, begins. These elements, elsewhere so clear-cut, seem with François de Sales to be mingled together, and indeed are. His book has all the seduction of contemplative works without their danger.    And so we see spiritual directors, the least suspect of giving rise to illusions, and religious orders most on their guard, adopting without hesitation this mystical book."

 

On the other hand the book was to have the defects of its merits. Just because it was not written in a formal scholastic manner - "I have sought to soften and to avoid difficult lines " and because the mystical parts flowered, as it were, so splendidly from the tough, thorny plant, it would be possible later for Quietist leaders to quote François de Sales as their authority— and this despite the fact that the future Doctor of the Church "whose admirable doctrine in mystical theology shines forth," AS Pius IX's doctorate decree puts it, has himself never been suspected of any taint of quietism.

 

The Love of God was not destined to enjoy the "best-seller" success of the Devout Life, nor did its author for a moment expect that it would. "I much fear that it will not have the happy success of the former book, since I feel it to be written in a more taut and strong way." He also recognised in his preface that some would think it too long and with too many of the roots showing... "The first four books, and some chapters of the others, could be omitted by souls who are only looking for the practice of holy love." To modern readers, with so much at their disposal written in a more contemporary idiom, this advice is specially relevant.

 

The book, in fact, considering its nature, proved to be a great success, both in the actual demand for it and in its effects. It had to be re-edited at least five times in the few years which were left to François de Sales to live. Through the medium of religious orders, such as the Jesuits, not, one would have thought especially likely to appreciate a trend towards a wide expansion of the contemplative approach to prayer, it did its work in taking many the stage further after the Devout Life, and Saint Vincent de Paul recommended it strongly to his Vincentians not only for aspirants to perfection, but as "a universal remedy for the weak and spur to the lazy." It pointed the right way which, but for later 17th century misunderstandings and excesses, would have guided Christian piety through the trials of the 18th and 19th centuries.

 

Angelique Arnauld, whose friendship with de Sales is described in the next chapter, reported a conversation she had with him about the Treatise on the Love of God. She had suggested that the Holy Spirit rather than the Bishop of Geneva had really written the book. He—according to her report—answered: "It is true that I often found myself writing the book as though unconscious of what I was doing, so much so that I took up my pen again without knowing what I had written. Nevertheless the writing followed on logically."

 

As with the Introduction to the Devout Life, the Treatise was soon translated into different languages. The first of these translations was into English in 1630, by Fr. Miles Car, of Douay. Italy, Spain, Germany and Poland followed suit. Crashaw was much influenced by the book. "His mind was imbued with tin-language of Le Traite de l'Amour de Dieu" writes A. F. Allison. " He caught its inflection and borrowed its metaphor. In an age when poetic ideas were common currency he was one of the most derivative of poets, and he did not hesitate to rifle the rich store that St. François offered him."

 

In all the annals of the saints there is perhaps no more delight­ful and unforgettable a picture than that of François de Sales sitting of a summer's evening in the orchard of the Visitation by the lakeside, surrounded by the little company of eager sisters as they listened to him chatting to them of all that in the life of a religious community or indeed in any human life goes to make up a life of the love of God in response to God's love of us. In these informal talks, wherein surely François was personally happier than in any other of his manifold activities, he would find endless parables and similitudes from the scene in which the group was set: the distant heights, the lake at one moment so smooth, at another ruffled and threatening danger, the flowers at their feet, the clucking hens, the gentle, meditative dove, the bees and their hives so well-ordered with nature's own division of labour, the distracted and distracting butterflies, the vine climbing the trellis which gave them shade, the temptations of the golden apricots and swelling plums, the heedless child playing at the water's edge and the anxious eye of its mother watching lest harm come to it.

 

This scene, enacted again and again, especially in those early days of the Galerie when François forced himself to make time to be with the infant community, first three, then eight, then after two years ten, insistently recalls to the imagination the scene in Galilee where Our Lord taught the disciples as they walked together through the fields, finding in the pastoral scene around the images that would strike home with His followers and posterity ever since. Other founders of religious orders must have taught their first companions in the same intimate way, but has anyone come so near to Christ's own way as the Prince Bishop of Geneva with his gentle, intimate, spontaneous, simple and homely way, so full nevertheless of wisdom and deep human and spiritual love, talking of the love of God by the Annecy lakeside?

 

“Our holy Founder," Mere de Chantal was to write much later, "used often to visit us, heard our confessions every fortnight, and gave us little spiritual conferences to teach us true perfection, allotting to each of us the practice of some virtue according to each one's need, so that in this way that first year went by with much progress made in holy perfection. What consoled them was these frequent conferences given by our holy Founder. Even when it rained and snowed, he always came two or three times a week and even oftener." On such occasions, the Mother Superior's room or the gallery itself that linked the house with the orchards served as the informal meeting place.

 

It was by this means that de Sales's experimental mind built up many of the ways and customs of the Visitation sisters. A slight difference between two sisters, notified to the Founder, would prove the basis for the custom for a sister to ask pardon of another on her knees. Custody of the eyes in the refectory, the breaking up of the day into a succession of short duties—such ways were in the long tradition of community religious life, but here they seemed to be born anew as they were taught by François de Sales from the intimacy of those early experiences.

 

At first rather against the Founder's will, a sister began busily to take down his words, for the little community knew, as Mere de Chantal was soon to put it, "that holy soul always goes on sanctifying himself and moving forwards towards his wished-for eternity—nor will he stop before he is ranged amog those great and ancient Fathers and Prelates of the Church.” Every word of his was precious to them, to the communities which would grow from the Sainte Source, and to posterity. Happily another of the early sisters had an exceptionally good memory, and she was able to record even a day or two after the Founder had been speaking the words he had used. What he had to say to them in his conferences, he assured the Sisters, would all be found in the book he was writing, his Treatise on the Love of God. Occasionally the conferences had to be suspended so that the poor conferencier could find time to continue his Magnum Opus. It is not therefore surprising that the same spirit and teaching expressed itself in his talks and in his more thought-out writings.

 

In both it is the evangelical spirit that dominates: inner strength, courage and complete self-sacrifice within a gentle, sensible, fully human framework. Whether in regard to François de Sales himself or with the reputation of the Visitation order, so often regarded as the "easy" way out as compared with the Poor Clares or Carmelites, the mistake so often has been made of supposing that it was just a case of easy, soft religion, when it was in fact the crucifying means to the most dedicated form of sanctity, "Be ye perfect."

 

Dom Mackey, in his long preface to the Entretiens has explained it in the following words: "A pupil of the Jesuits, the Founder of the Visitation knew and appreciated the dexterous strategy of St. Ignatius; but he did not introduce it into his Institute. For him, the surest way of perfection was to destroy self-love, not by declaring open war on it, but in despising its attacks. It is less important to overthrow the obstacles to it than humbly and simply to turn away from them—less important to conquer one's enemies in battle formation than to infiltrate through their lines. This is what the Saint means when he talks of disliking one's dislikes, contradicting one's contradictions, declining one's inclinations and averting from one's aversions.  In inner worries his advice is to divert the mind from what Dubles and pains it, to 'press nearer Our Lord and talk to Urn of something else.'   Do we feel a dislike for our neighbour: ‘the one remedy, as in every sort of temptation, is a simple diversion, that is not to think of it.'"

 

This practice of avoiding the romantic, full-blooded spirituality that can lead to scruple and self-regard is carried by François de Sales to lengths that can seem at first sight almost contradictory. "We must never cease to make good resolutions, even though we know that as we are we shall not keep them and even quite clearly see that we shall not be able to put them into practice when the time comes."    We should do this because we should also be thinking that "though it is true that I shall not have the strength to do or stand that thing by myself, yet I am even glad of it because it will be God's strength which will do it within me." On another occasion, surely on some warm spring day when the twittering, cooing and chirping of birds filled the air around them, he explained how the dove sat on her nest, while her mate, with marvellous patience attended to her needs, even bringing a drop of water in its beak to quench her thirst.    "How pleasant, and profitable the law which tells us to do nothing but for God and to leave to Him all the care that we need… this is so true for the spiritual progress of our souls in perfection.   Do you not see how the dove thinks only of its beloved and the wish to please him, never stirring from her eggs?  Yet she lacks nothing, while he, rewarding her faith in him, completely looks after her? How happy we should be if we did the same for our beloved Dove, the Holy Spirit.  He would take every care of us, and the greater our sense of confidence as we rested in His providence, the more ample the care He would take of us in all our needs."

 

Talking to the nuns, he would constantly apply the practice of the Love of God to the simplest aspects of their lives, and do it with a rare commonsense. Speaking of their relations, the one with the other, he said: "The second reason why we should not show more friendship for one than for another is that we cannot judge as to which are the more perfect and virtuous. Outward appearances are often very deceptive. Often those who seem the more virtuous are not so in the eyes of God who alone is in a position to recognise virtue. It can well be that a sister who always seems to be committing many imperfections is really more virtuous and more agreeable to God than another with many virtues, natural or acquired. It may be because the first is most cour­ageous even amidst her imperfections and refuses to become worried and anxious even though so subject to failing; it may be she is growing in humility and in love because of her failings. The apparently perfect one may have less trouble and less to do, needing therefore less courage and humility than the other so subject to failing."

 

But commonsense was always brought in to avoid mere acting and insincerity in the quest for perfection. "I have said that we must try and love the Sisters equally, the same for one as for another—but only in so far as we can. For it is not in our power to have so much feeling of love for those with whom we have less natural sympathy. But this means nothing. The love of charity must be general, and the outward signs of our love must be the same, if we wish to be true servants of God."

 

This was said just after one of those lighter interpolations which must have so delighted the nuns. "You ask me, my daughter, whether you ought to laugh in choir or in the refectory when something odd happens and the others laugh? I must tell you that in choir there is no need to add to the amusement of others. It is not the place and such a thing should be sternly corrected. But as for the refectory, if everyone were laughing, I would laugh with them. But if a dozen or so were not laughing, then I should not laugh and would not be worried by the though I that I should be accused of being too serious."

 

The spirit—and perfection—of François de Sales's spirituality is perhaps expressed as well as anywhere else at the beginning of the conference entitled "On Asking Nothing and Refusing Nothing."

 

"My Mother, I have already answered your request elsewhere.   You asked whether one should ask leave to go to Communion and mortify oneself more than the Community.   I told you that if I were a religious I would never ask for singularities - neither extra Communion nor hairshirts, extraordinary fasts and disciplines, being content to follow the Community.    If I were strong I would not eat four times a day, but if I were told to eat four times a day I would do so and say nothing. If I were weak and told only to eat once a day, I would do so without amusing myself thinking whether I should be so doing or not. I have very few desires, and those I have, I have for God. There is little I want, and if I were to be born again, I should like to have none. If God came to me to favour me by the sense of His presence, I would go to Him to accept and correspond with His grace. But if He did not wish to come to me, I should stay where I was and not go to Him—I mean that I should not seek out the sense of His presence, but would be perfectly happy with the simple apprehension of Faith."

 

This is a classical expression of the fruits of the teaching of the great mystical tradition of "indifference" (François de Sales's word, as it is also St. Ignatius's) or "abandon" or "detachment" (the commoner words today) from self in order that nothing shall obstruct the will's blind clinging to God. As Dom John Chapman put it: "I pray that you may get the grace of not minding whether you feel the love of God or not, or whether you feel commotions or rebellious or not; but that you may feel that to cling to God in absolute detachment is all you care for in this life" – and again : "when we have no comfort in God, but want it more than everything, then we are probably more united to Him than at any other moment. Saint John of the Cross's doctrine is austere, but Saint François de Sales teaches exactly the same in a more cheerful manner."

 

We began this chapter by suggesting that the scene of so many of the Annecy entretiens, in which François de Sales's teaching reflected in a more homely way the doctrine of his greater works, vividly recalled in manner the teaching of Our Lord.   We may end it with two quotations – the first from Camus, the second from St. Vincent de Paul – which suggest the same as regards matter.

 

"François had a great idea of the blessing of a simple, com­mon life, nor would he permit the Sisters of the Visitation to practise any extraordinary austerities as to fasting, clothing or sleep. He regulated these matters by the laws which are common to all who seek to lead a Christian life in the world. In this way he considered that he could best teach his spiritual daughters to follow the example of Jesus Christ, His holy Mother and His apostles. He always left latitude to their spiritual guides as to any extraordinary mortifications which might be beneficial to individual character or requirements. Not that François under­valued bodily austerities, but he thought that they needed to be judiciously used, so as to be the means of controlling the flesh without damaging health. In a word, he preferred following the life of Our Lord rather than St. John the Baptist."

 

Very shortly, as we shall see in the next chapter, François de Sales was to meet in Paris the young "Monsieur Vincent," St. Vincent de Paul. For a few months their contact was to be close. Nearly forty years later, St. Vincent would testify at the Paris beatification process in the following words. "Mgr. de Sales ardently wished to imitate the Son of God. So closely did he model his life on Our Lord, as I myself saw, that many a time I asked myself with astonishment how a mere creature could reach so high a degree of perfection, given human frailty… Recalling and meditating on his words, I felt them to be so admirable that I could only see in him the person who most nearly reproduced the Son of God living on earth. I recall how, when in the grip of six years' illness, the thought constantly came to me: 'How great is God's goodness... How good you must be, O Lord, since there is so much of tenderness in your creature, Mgr. François de Sales!'"

 

The Founder's most personal and intimate words to his daughters in religion were naturally copied, recopied and distributed to the thirteen Visitation convents established during his lifetime. After his death they were considered even more precious, and the question of giving them to the world in a version edited for that purpose was soon considered by Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal.

 

But before anything was done the manuscripts were stolen by some unknown person and six years after François's death published without the consent of the Order. When she read this edition, Mere de Chantal wrote: "We have had the false Entretiens read at table to find out what they are. We have all been much scandalised at discovering that the spirit of our holy Founder and the questions asked him have been audaciously distorted. Because of this I ask you to burn everything or to use the sheets to wrap up parcels or to stick the window-panes. It is a book without merit and which should never be read."

 

Her view was, it seems, rather exaggerated and, apart from a mountain of deforming misprints she was most irritated by the outside world being given all the intimacies of the relationship between the Founder and his daughters. The result was that in 1629 the Vrais Entretiens were published for the Visitation, though in fact this true version was only a shortened edition in which the conferencier's natural talking manner was improved for the edification of the general public. Soon editions were appearing all over France and within three years an English Benedictine nun of Cambrai translated them for a Douay edition. Today in the Annecy edition of François de Sales's works an incompatible respect both for Mere de Chantal and for textual accuracy has caused the Visitation version to be printed with the differences from the original given at the foot of the pages.

​

Back to Top

​