Salesian Literature

1. Temptation in Paris (1567-1588)

 

François de sales, a young nobleman of then independent Savoie, had been sent by his parents from the backwoods of the lower Alpine ranges of his native country to complete his studies in Paris, the capital of worldly culture.

 

The boy, we are told, had begged his father to allow him to do his Parisian studies under the Jesuits in their fashionable University College of Clermont, near the Sorbonne, so modern, to sound, so brilliantly staffed by the most brilliant of the sons of St. Ignatius. They were eager to show that the very best contemporary learning could be effectively enlisted under the Standard of God and not be entirely appropriated by the Standard of Satan. Aristotle, Plato, Epictetus, Pliny, Vergil, Horace, Cicero, Seneca—those high-minded pagans could teach the good Catholic of the day a great deal worth fitting into Catholic philosophy, morals and spiritual doctrine. A perfect acquaintance with Latin and, maybe, Greek would help fashion the new look and style with which to present to a sinful and brutish world the " devout humanism " that could serve God's greater glory in an age of transition when new men, new ideas, new ways were quickly making themselves felt.

 

De Sales had been fifteen years old when in 1582 he had set out on horseback, accompanied by his private tutor, the testy Mid severe Abbe Deage, on the 250-mile journey from the Chateau de Sales by Thorens, a few miles north of Annecy. The young man—for development was quicker in those days—, strong, good-looking (but for a slight cast in one eye), secretly rather proud of his mass of wavy fair hair, had taken lodgings with his tutor, not in the college itself, but in a manner more befitting his rank in the hostelry of the Rose Blanche across the road from the tall Gothic buildings of Clermont.

 

Fashionably dressed—velvet cap, embroidered cloak, doublet, padded breeches, tight hose, a sword swinging from the hips— de Sales had not taken long to accustom himself to the social life of the capital. He had the entree to its great world, even to the Court of Henri III, whose queen was half-sister to the Due de Mercoeur, a cadet of the princely house of Lorraine and cousin of the ambitious Guise who did not despair of winning the throne for the descendants of Charlemagne, as he claimed himself to be. The Sales had for some generations been pages of the Mercoeurs. From them the young student heard highest-level talk of the fierce wars of religion and the plans of the Catholic Holy League to wrest the crown for the Cardinal of Lorraine and thus save Catholic France from heresy and the disastrous succession to the throne of the Calvinist Henri Bourbon of Navarre, first Prince of the Blood. The son of a brave soldier and brought up in the shadow of Geneva's Calvinist aggression almost to the doors of his own Savoie home, this serious and quiet student would listen eagerly to such conversations. Knowing the Calvinists and the way they had overrun Catholic lands near his home in Savoie, he did not take scandal at the reversion to barbarism which this terrible fighting, part social, part political and part religious, entailed. Yet he himself was all gentleness, all courtesy, already someone shaping towards a more cultured and polite age. He did not shun the social life and elegant manners of the men and women around him, for his own sense of the fitting and his father's wishes demanded proper attention to the formation of a gentleman of Savoie. Gravely and with dignity, for he never did things by halves, he would join in the dance, mix with the ladies, drink to the heroes of the day, just as he would devote the appropriate time to learn music, the art of fencing and equitation and other accomplishments necessary to a person of his rank. His tough childhood in Savoie had afforded him plenty of natural physical strength and suppleness.

 

But if the young de Sales, as he matured in Paris, accepted all this side of life with such good grace and sincerity, it certainly did not represent the real person, for the real person was governed by two passions. One of them was learning; the other was God. One catalogues them together, not because they were remotely on a par in his mind, but because each counted in itself, even though the second was infinitely the more important.

 

Let us say that au fond he was a terribly serious young man; but in saying this we must never forget that his seriousness could never destroy an exceptional human and social sensitivity and delicacy. "I am nothing, if not a man" he was to confess many years later, and those words were the key to his character and the quality of his ultimate sanctity. So if we call him a book­worm, we must also say that he managed to be that rare creature, an attractive and popular bookworm. Universities in those days were in any case no picnic. At Clermont daily life began at four o'clock in the morning, with the first lecture at five. After Mass and a petit pain, studies and lectures filled the greater part of the day and were resumed after supper. But even if the daily round had been less severe, de Sales would undoubtedly have seen to it that not a minute of his day was wasted. He was avid of knowledge of every kind—and for its own sake.

 

The truth is that a whole new world seemed to be opening out before that generation in Paris University. "The very walls and roofs seemed to be philosophising," de Sales was later to say when accepting his doctorate in law at Padua University. Educa­tion was passing from a mechanical memorising of a conven­tionally agreed syllabus to the use of the understanding and the imagination in the appreciation of the beauty in the French language, in the application of the classical tradition to the still unshaped flow of thinking and writing, in the fashioning of the renewed ideal of rounded, knowledgeable, measured, autonomous man: the ideal of the honnête homme. The University seemed like a protected enclave hardly touched by the decadence of the last Valois and the fury of the civil wars which had cut off the first glories of the Renaissance and reduced France to years of lawless­ness and anarchy. Knowledge, in a sense rather different from what we understand today, was felt to be power: power to live, to observe, to think for oneself, to shape a world in terms of reason, judgment, balance, harmony, beauty. De Sales, carrying about with him his neat notebooks, each page carefully filled with his close, clear script, set out on the page with a certain flourish of aesthetic satisfaction, was thus ardently absorbing and adapting the whole world of classicism and returning to Thomas Aquinas (the first "devout humanist"), making himself a master of Latin, a passable Greek scholar (Greek was frowned upon by the old stagers but encouraged by the Jesuits), tackling Hebrew for the Scriptures and, of course, improving his natural gift for writing which was to develop into such an effective instrument for the free and flexible expression of the delicate nuances of the relation of the soul with God. All his life he would have the gift of keeping notes and references in such good order that he would always have to hand what he needed for preaching and writing on any subject.

 

With a mind thus formed in the spirit of the day, he could the better appreciate the poetry of a Ronsard and the style of a Montaigne—Montaigne whom he readily recognised as a "beau esprit" but one lacking that seriousness, that sense of life's true purpose which in the case of this one student in the University during those six years of his course went far deeper than any love, however intense, of study and learning, any respect, however genuine, for the social graces of polite living.

 

The sense of life's true purpose—to understand something of what these words meant to this student from Savoie in his late teens, we must take a brief glance at his childhood. This is not very easy because it is the habit of biographers of future saints to write the wrong way round. They feel it necessary to allow the future sanctity to suffuse retrospectively every act and word from the cradle onwards. Francois de Sales, who was to die already acclaimed as a saint, has certainly been streamlined by hagiographers for that almost instantaneous flight to sanctity, but the characteristics of the little boy's precocious holiness, as too often described, simply do not square with the special and most attractive traits of his undisputed later character. Though self-centred priggishness is the caricature of God-centred sanctity, it is not always easy to distinguish the one from the other in saints' lives. But it should be possible to do so in any phase of Francois de Sales's life, for only an enemy could accuse the Apostle of the Chablais or the Bishop of Geneva of the remotest touch of prig­gishness or sanctimoniousness. He was the freshest, free-est, easiest of the great saints—and the most humanly attractive. The germ of all this must have been discernible in his childhood.

 

The picture is of a child living in a well-to-do, but for its station not wealthy, household of some forty people in the massively uncomfortable chateau of Sales. Its lands and sur­roundings were in a thickly wooded valley where deer, wolves and bears still roamed under the peaks of the Parmelan and the Sous-Dine. Francois was the eldest son, born when his mother was only fifteen. For some years he was to be the only child, as subsequent children died at or near birth. Had Francois been born in the winter of 1567 instead of the summer, he too might well have died.[1]

 

This household was ruled with a rod of iron, though justly and from the highest principles, by M. de Boisy, peppery old soldier and diplomat, nearly three times the age of his wife. All the decisions about this prized son and heir were to be his, and Usually against the secret wishes of his very pious and submissive wife who, after a few years, must have felt far closer in age to her son than to her husband. M. de Boisy saw Francois as a future soldier of fame in Savoie, and the last thing he dreamt of producing was a priest or a saint.    Mme. de Boisy, on the other hand, felt a deep spiritual kinship between herself and her unusually serious and devout little boy. The latter, as he grew up, secretly cherished the dream of one day becoming a priest, a notion the fantastic nature of which can be realised by the fact that he did not dare tell his father until he was 26. It does not seem clear whether he even told his beloved mother. Between them, however, mother and son did manage to get into the head of the father that his eldest boy would never make the soldier of his dreams. M. de Boisy had therefore to reconcile himself to the fact that if this disappointing boy would never bring glory to the family in his father's footsteps, he had better be trained for the law so that he might shine one day in the senate and govern­ment of Savoie.

 

It is hard to believe that Francois could have been entirely happy in his home governed by his martinet father, and the intensely affectionate nature of the future man may well have developed from his compensating adoration of his young mother and, later, the younger children. For many edifying tales of his earliest years the gentle testimony of his mother may stand substitute : "I often noticed that even when he was still quite young he was possessed of the blessings of heaven and breathed only the love of God . . . He never did anything to cause me sorrow and he was always a comfort to me."

 

The occasional story, however, possesses a special significance as a presage of the future man. One, in particular, we owe to Francois himself who related it in a letter to a nun three years before his death. The nun suffered from fear of "the spirits," and the writer, who told her that a convent was a hospital for the spiritually ill who wanted to be cured, explained that the fear of the Divine Spirit should drive out unworthy fears of any other spirits. "When I was a boy," he explained, "I used to suffer in the same way. To overcome this I forced myself step by step to go forward alone, strengthening my will by relying on God, into places where my imagination would play tricks on me. In the end I so strengthened my will that the darkness and the solitude of the night became a delight to me, making me feel the presence of God which is more strongly realised when one is alone like that."  One can see the boy, perhaps in the darker corners of the great rambling house or by the black woods in the deep shadows of the valleys, gritting his teeth as he slowly forced himself to get the better of the terrifying fancies of a lively imag­ination. It was an early start to that courage and self-discipline which goes far to explain the determination behind the gentle ways that he showed in later life. During those early years, the boy was hardened and made self-reliant in the bitterly cold winters and loneliness of the mountain country, acquiring the arts of a harsh country life, riding, hunting, fishing, snaring, rowing (of which to the surprise of a cardinal many years later he was to show himself a pastmaster). Such a school of discipline was also one of delight. Tougher for such a boy was the father's decision, in spite of the tears of his mother, to pack him off at the age of seven to the boarding-school of La Roche, some miles away. Later, when La Roche was endangered by the Due de Savoie's threats to drive the Calvinists out of the Chablais, he was put to school in Annecy.

 

Two other good stories of those days indicate the delicate values he was already acquiring.   On one occasion he was riding with a groom who had been told to buy him a pair of gloves. The deal was done with the usual gesticulating and bargaining, and the price was duly brought down before the purchase was made.  The glove-maker, of course, complained that he was being ruined.   When they left, the boy let the groom ride ahead so that he could slip back into the shop and ask how much the man stood to lose.   He paid him the difference.  On another occasion the boy was crossing a toll-bridge with a servant.  The servant refused to pay the toll, presumably because it was not enforceable on a nobleman.   The boy saw the unfairness of this and insisted on payment being made.

 

The life of the Sales, their kinsmen and their friends in that part of the country was always overshadowed and even threatened by the Genevese and Bernese Calvinists who had driven out the Catholic faith from the country north of the chateau up to the Lake of Geneva. The stories of the Calvinists and the ever-present threat of danger to land and religion made a deep impression on the boy. There is a splendid story of him as a little boy being told that there was a Calvinist visitor in the chateau— no doubt a relation, for the Reformation had divided families.

 

Furious at hearing that the enemy at the gates was actually being entertained by his father, François picked up a stick and drove the cackling hens up to the walls of the house, shouting at the top of his voice " Come on! Come on! At 'em, the heretics! " The Reformation was only half a century old, and his father had a way of telling people what he thought of these upstart reformers. " Good gracious me, I'm older myself than they are! Absurd to take their views seriously! They are just like mushrooms sprung up in the night.”  The boy's uncle and cousins lived in Brens, near Geneva, and there the boy could see for himself the evidence all around of the way in which the churches had been dese­crated and signs of the Catholic faith removed, bells, shrines and crosses.

 

What sort of boy was being formed by country life in that harsh and lonely land, by boarding schools where he lived and worked away from his young mother, by the sense of constant threat to his security, traditions and faith? Can it possibly have been the priggish goody-goody who seems too often to emerge from the biographies – the "sweet angel on earth " of the French tradition? It is incredible. It is at least admitted that he had a naturally quick temper, and peccadilloes, usually illustrating stubbornness, are related. But the tremendous charm, the iron will, the strong gentleness, the keen sense of humour, not least about himself, which characterised the later man sprang from something different.

 

We are told that he was popular in his boarding school at Annecy (where much later Rousseau at the seminary must have heard much of the saintly hero of the town) despite his meticulous piety and uprightness. This would have been impossible if there had been anything of the priggish or soft in his make-up. School­boys are not deceived about these things. The simple conclusion is that from his earliest years the will-power and faith in God, illustrated in the story of his fear of ghosts, was making him take definite, thought-out decisions of principle about how he intended to live his life. A temperament by nature pious, very affectionate, rather slow and plodding, with perhaps a natural timidity about a hard and uncertain world, was being chiselled into what would become a superb balance of strength and gentleness.

 

The popularity of the Paris university student and the respect for his spiritual earnestness had already made themselves felt in the tougher surroundings of school life. As schoolboy and student, he had the courage, one feels, never to allow any false shame to stop him from fairly and squarely putting first things first, while expressing quite naturally and spontaneously in his ordinary behaviour all that life had taught him in his country upbringing, sternly disciplined by his father but secure in the deep love and companionship of his young mother. As such he was paid the most eloquent of all compliments. His school and University friends accepted him for what he really was, and behaviour which in others they might have condemned and derided as priggish they appreciated as something for once to be respected, admired and loved. Certainly no one who begins to understand the grown man and saint can ever believe that in the boy and student there could ever have been anything of the self-centred play-actor, anything of the mawkish spoil-sport. Later, in Padua University to which he went after Paris, he had a rather dissolute friend. Of this friend de Sales was to write later: "He lived dissolutely. I did not. I used to give him some good scoldings and he took them in very good part." This sentence is like a flash of light on all his youth. It expresses, as François de Sales's own words were always to express, the perfect balance of a man who was deter­mined to follow life's true purpose and help others to do so, while being nothing if not human, in doing so.

 

But though we can guess at the continuous self-discipline which made this strengthening of his gentleness and humanity possible, the attainment of the final balance was not to be achieved without heroic cost. The social graces and the delightful studies of his years in Paris – during which he never returned home – were not enough. It was at the end of 1586, and he nineteen, that the great testing came so that for a critical moment he seemed to hover near spiritual collapse.

 

By this date he had long left the hostelry of the Rose Blanche, too noisy, crowded and near to the College to permit of the quiet concentration which he needed and enjoyed. With his tutor, Déage, who was himself studying for a doctorate of theology, he had taken lodgings where they would not be disturbed. By now François had reached the stage in his studies when he felt that the inquiry into the nature of being, of thinking, of moral values and aesthetics could no longer be divorced from the far superior consideration of God's revelation of the divine mysteries as these affected the destiny and way of life in man. Even though he was a layman, seeing little prospect of realising his desire to be a priest in opposition to his father's will, his deep inquiring mind, he felt, must not stop short just where learning would take on its full meaning in the sacred science of theology. In those days it was not rare for  the layman to study theology, while the great majority of priests had neither the learning nor the opportunity of doing so.

 

“That I may see… that I may see theology.”  With these words he had answered Déage who was asking him how he would wish to spend the carnival days of 1586.  The young man’s thoughts must have been far away, as he mumbled the words of the gospel of Quinquagesima Sunday, which opens carnival time on the eve of Lent, with the story of the blind man asking, “Lord, that I may see.”  “Only theology,” he insisted in the conversation that followed, “will teach me what God wants to reveal to me in my inmost soul.”

 

Unfortunately, in a life otherwise so fully documented by its subject's letters, only one student letter written in Paris has survived. It was written in November, 1585, and in it Francois makes but a single reference to political affairs. "I would be most willing," he wrote, "to give you our news here, but our news is only college news, and, anyway, the news we get is so uncertain (the prince de Conde has died a thousand deaths) that for this reason alone I feel I may be excused." Rumours must indeed have been flying in the quadrangles, for the Huguenot Conde's irruption against the League had come to grief within a few days and he was already in exile in Guernsey when de Sales wrote that letter. The second letter of his which has survived and which was written five years later from Padua refers with sorrow to the successes of Henri of Navarre. Worrying about the grave danger of the triumph of heresy in the kingdom of St. Louis must have been an important factor in prompt­ing him to study the Catholic theological answers to heretical doctrine.

 

And there was more to it than that. Recalling Paris days later, he was to say " I do not know what God will do with France, for its sins are very great." All around him in Paris was evidence of those sins. Piety and devotion went hand in hand with fanaticism and savagery. Reform jostled against laxity of every kind, massacres and assassination were considered by good Catholics (and Protestants) suitable means for settling not only public and private rivalries, but of promoting God's kingdom. Politically, the situation could hardly have been more effectively symbolised than by the fantastic culmination of the religious wars: Henri III personally arranging the hacking to death of the Catholic leader, Henri de Guise; Henri III in turn being mur­dered by the Dominican fanatic, Jacques Clement; and the eventual triumph of the heretic, Henri of Navarre, who thought "Paris worth a Mass" and established himself as Henri IV, the "Great," to mould the future strength of France.

 

Late 16th century Paris itself must have seemed like a corner of hell compared with the peace and beauty of Savoie where every meadow, every hill, every homestead would always seem to him a book of nature in which God's hand had written lessons of divine providence and ways.    Paris offered dark, arcaded, narrow, muddy, evil-smelling streets, awkwardly encumbered by the merchants' heaped-up stalls that made passage nearly im­possible for the crowds that were packed into its small area.   The constant chatter and shout, the endless bargaining, the swearing, the quarrels as likely as not to end in bloodshed, were an endless distraction to a man seeking the peace of God. The noblemen trying to pick their way in the sludge and spare their offended nostrils; the haughty pushing bourgeois lawyers and traders, thinking themselves with their new-found wealth a cut above the nobles, so often much poorer than themselves; the swaggering soldiers ogling the girls; the cut-throats, the cringing beggars, the endless sick and maimed—what a pitiful comedy of misguided humanity. Worst of all were the priests "whose very name had become shameful and infamous and hardly used save to describe an ignorant or debauched person," as Bremond quotes from Amelote, who, doubtless, was exaggerating a real enough evil; and the religious laxity, and, not rarely, vice, which existed within so many of the vast number of religious houses and nunneries. The Counter-Reformation, it must be remembered, took effect much later in France than in Italy. We cannot be surprised if the pain of mounting heresy and the moral degradation around him should have threatened the spiritual balance of a mind tired after five solid years of concentrated work. Yet the temptation itself was like a disastrous summer storm breaking out in a long period of beneficent weather, for neither before nor after was François de Sales to experience anything comparable.  It seems totally uncharacteristic.

 

What guarantee had he—he began to ask himself—that he himself might not be caught up in the massa damnata of heretics and sinners of which the world seemed full? He had evidently been studying the enigma of predestination and the mysteries of God's providence in the light especially of the teachings of the reformers. Brooding over the terrible and only too likely fate of much the greater part of mankind, and measuring his own state with the most delicate of measures where others were content with the roughest of scales, he asked himself whether, in the sight of an all-perfect God, the difference between his own feeble attempts to live well and the perversion which surrounded him could be anything but trifling. And if he could not but honestly judge that God had so far preserved him from grave sin, what security could he have in so evil a world that he would persevere in grace?

 

Alas, he was not, in that mood, reassured when he turned from the frightening teaching of the reformers to St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. These most orthodox of teachers seemed as uncompromising about God's foreknowledge and the consequent predestination of men. Those who are saved are saved through God's eternal disposition of the graces which will save them, said St. Augustine. From all eternity God has once and for all decreed those destined for glory in heaven, and this decree is prior even to God's foreknowledge of the merits of men. God has willed to show forth His mercy in those whom He predestines to salvation, His justice to those He predestines to damnation. St. Thomas was hardly more consoling even if he added that "this does not happen at the expense of human free­dom, for man's will remains the master of his choices, thus gaining merit where the choice is of the good and being responsible where it is of evil." Yet this choice or free consent must be the result of God's will that His grace should be effective. There can be no element in salvation that is exclusively ours.

 

There is no question of the degree of spiritual and moral anguish which the 19-year old student went through during those winter weeks, as 1586 passed into 1587, when, prompted by his own sense of the all-reality of God and of his own weakness and nothingness in the work of salvation, he found himself caught up, as though by a trick of the devil, in the logic of the heretics he so much disliked and disbelieved. His tutor put the truth most graphically when he said that if this went on his pupil would very soon be learning from personal experience whether he was pre­destined to heaven or to hell. The health of his body had collapsed with the illness of his soul.

 

The normal human reaction to the belief that one might have been predestined to hell by God irrespective of how one lived one's life on earth would be a kind of indignation and despair. One's deepest sense of justice would be outraged and the path from this to revolt against God or denial of His existence as a good God would be short; or one might somehow persuade oneself that one had been chosen from all eternity to be one of the elect, caring little for the fate of the massa damnata around one. Not so the saint who when he talks of the all-reality of God and the nothing­ness of the creature really means it because he has gained insight into the meaning of the word "God." In his darkest hour, François de Sales wrote: "Whatever happens, Lord, may I at least love you in this life if I cannot love you in eternity since no one may praise you in hell. May I at least make use of every moment of my short life on earth to love you."

 

This reaction of wholly disinterested love, which the average sinful mortal can scarcely grasp, a reaction spontaneously ex­pressed at the height of his anguish, shows that his danger had never been one of falling to the temptation of despair. There is no suggestion either that he could for a moment have entertained any temptation to seek in severe Protestant theology the answer to the lax teaching and practice which had so widely affected the Church before the Reformation, and which endured, not least in France, so long after it. His traditions and his nature instinctively recoiled from such a solution. Never weakening his conviction about the justice of God, it was the love of God which would nevertheless govern his spiritual life from beginning to end. It has been suggested that in this expression of pure, disinterested love there was a foretaste of the "mystical night," the "cloud of unknowing," which blots out understanding and relish of the divine among those called to the highest states of prayer. But his words appear to suggest a momentary loss of hope in God and this would be incompatible with an authentic mystical state. The simplest explanation would seem to be the most plausible one. His very tired mind, vexed by seemingly inscrutable prob­lems met with in the course of his studies, and overcome by the evidence of "the great sins " around him, failed temporarily to function properly. He was in such a state that he would not, it seems, trust any friend or spiritual adviser to help him out of his troubles.

 

If this is the correct explanation, it certainly brings out the fact that the temptation revealed the quality of this student's inner life, the infusion of his being by God, since in the darkness of his mind he could not but instinctively express his love of God even under the illusion that God might well repay that love by condemning him to hell for all eternity. It was as though God had allowed this student's terrible temptation to enable him to become fully conscious once and for all of a quality of love for God and an indifference to self which in fact were to be the key to his whole life and the foundation of his immortal spiritual teachings. Tempted by Luther, he clung to God instead of indulging in self-pity.

 

No wonder the denouement was as dramatic as the trial. Unable to endure it any longer, he turned one evening as he left the college towards the neighbouring little church of Saint-Etienne-des-Grès with its tall cornet-capped tower. In the Lady Chapel he fell to his knees and prayed in his continuing mood of love despite the apparent blighting of hope.

 

" Whatever happens, O Lord, you hold everything in your hands, and all your ways are just and true.   Though you have veiled my eyes before the eternal secret of predestination and re­probation, you whose judgments are unsearchable, you who are ever a just judge and a merciful father, I shall love you, Lord, at least in this life even if I am not allowed to love you in eternity.  At least I shall love you here below, O my God, and I shall always hope in your mercy.    Always I shall continue to praise you, whatever the angel of Satan may do to prevent me.    O Lord Jesus you shall always be my hope and my salvation in the land of the living.   And if it is inevitable that I must be damned among the damned who will never see your gentle face, let me at least be spared from the company of those who will curse your Holy Name."

 

As he finished his prayer, he noticed a prayer card on which was printed Saint Bernard's famous Memorare.   " Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help and sought thy intercession, was left unaided ..."   As he recited the words, his being seemed to change. He felt like a leper suddenly seeing the marks of his sores vanishing before his eyes. A delicious sense of spiritual and bodily peace came over him. He was cured in soul, mind and body.   God had permitted the trial and now He took it away.[2]

 

Thus was the saint of the Love of God schooled in a youthful passage of terror of the all-reality, the all-fearsomeness, of the Divine, a realisation in some degree at least necessary if religion is to be more than a superficial pious version of our inherent self-love.   "The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom."  But François also learnt from his experience the greater danger of allowing the righteous fear of God to blot out the mercy and love so clearly revealed in the life and teaching of the God-made-Man, on whom he was so closely and so instinctively to model himself. To those he was later to direct in their spiritual lives with such understanding his advice would always be to be wary of allowing fear to overcome faith, hope and love.    "My daughter," he wrote to the Abbesse du Puits-d'Orbe, a rather tiresome regular correspondent of his, "I beg you to see to it that those meditations of man's four last ends finish up with hope and trust in God, not with fear and fright.  When they finish in fear, they are dan­gerous . . . God is not so terrible for those who love Him . . . He asks little of us because He knows how little we have."

 

It was not sentimentality nor softness which was to make him the gentle and optimistic guide of souls, but the love that had cast out fear.

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[1] Confusion may be caused by the fact that his father and mother were called Monsieur and Madame de Boisy (not Sales), a name taken, as was then the custom, from a seigneurie or property belonging to the family.   François, before he became a priest, was for a short time to be called Monsieur de Villaroget.   In a Roman Missal I have seen him promoted to the rank of "Earl."   In fact, the family, though ancient and noble, had no title at that period.   One of Francois's brothers was to be made iron by the Duke of Savoie.

     Interesting to us today is the fact that the Holy Shroud of Turin, where the Duke of Savoie resided as Prince of Piedmont, was brought for veneration to Annecy at a time when François's young mother was hoping for a child.   Not long after praying before the Holy Shroud, François was conceived.   The devotion to this famous relic, for which François was always to have a great veneration, has been widely revived in modern times when photography has brought home the uniqueness and beauty of the relic.   Group-Captain Cheshire, V.C., one of Britain's most famous airmen, has centred a world-wide Christian apostolate on the Holy Shroud.

[2] The above events are known through accounts given by Deage and Pere Suarez, a professor at the College, as well as by what de Sales himself said to Sainte Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal and Jeanne de Creil and to which the latter testified at the beatification process.

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