Salesian Literature

2. Slow Steps to the Priesthood (1588-1590)

 

francois de sales was just under 21 when in the summer of 1588 he completed his university course in Paris and returned to his homeland and his parents. During those last months, the special quality of his spiritual outlook, discernible in his childhood and teens and patent to everyone once his priestly vocation had begun, seems to have been affected by the crisis he went through. We know, for example, that he was deeply moved by the decision of Henri de Joyeuse to become a Capuchin. "God calls us by that way," he was heard to say.

 

Henri de Joyeuse's career was characteristic of a period when Spiritual heroism could shoot like a meteor before the eyes of men content with the superstitions, vanities and barbarities of the age. The Joyeuses had been raised by Henri III to the highest eminence in the kingdom, sharing among themselves titles like Admiral of France, Cardinal and Marshal.   Henri himself had been appointed Master of the Royal Wardrobe at the age of 17.   He was a close favourite of the monarch, and after a brilliant marriage it seemed that France itself was at his feet.   Yet one day as he was driving in Paris with the King, he noticed two Capuchins in their coarse habits trudging in the mud near their recently founded convent in the rue Saint-Honore. This sight made the deepest impression on him, and when his wife died shortly after, he surprised and shocked the King when he told him that he too was resolved to throw over the glories of the world to join those two friars. It is touching to think of the last Valois, a decadent spoilt child, yet by no means without courage and principle, reconciling himself to the loss of his friend by begging the Capuchin Provincial to keep Frere Ange, as Joyeuse was now called, in Paris and writing to his old favourite to help him "save his soul, hate sin and embrace virtue." Joyeuse's entry into so austere a religious life did not prevent him leaving the Order for a time, with full canonical permission, in order to take a command in the religious wars as a Marshal of France. Vice, virtue, worldliness, sanctity, the temporal and the spiritual, they were curiously intermingled in those fin-du-seiz.ième-siècle days. The great Joyeuse, turned from one day to the next from the splendour of the Court to the ton­sured head, the rough habit and the bare feet of a Capuchin, was an impressive sight for the ardent de Sales who used to watch out for the times when Frere Ange was serving Mass in the Capuchin Church.

 

It seems likely that at Saint-Honore de Sales also met two notable English Capuchins. The first was William Fitch of Canfield, to be known in history as Benet of Canfield; the second, a cadet of the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke, who became Pen Archange in religion. Benet of Canfield embraced the Catholic faith in London in 1585 and entered the Capuchins at Saint-Honore in 1587. He was to become a leading figure in the I7th century mystical revival, writing the famous and controversial book, the Rule of Perfection. De Sales would meet Pere Archange again towards the end of his life in connection with the future Jansenist, Angelique Arnauld, who at that time was under the Bishop of Geneva's spiritual direction. It may have been that de Sales's life-long interest in the conversion of England was stimulated at this time by his relations with these two English friars.[1]

 

Under this Capuchin influence Francois de Sales began to undertake heavy mortifications in the way of fasting, hair-shin and discipline, a habit he was to continue for some time, and it is a reasonable guess that he was thus preparing himself to join Joyeuse. Possibly because he dared not face the wrath of his father at such an outrageous step or, more probably, because he would do nothing in a hurry and could sense that his own true vocation was something very different, he had quietly returned home with Deage.

 

His parents were now living in the chateau of Brens, near Geneva, and the homecoming, after six years' exile, must have been as wonderful for him as for his father, mother and the flock of children, Gallois, Louis, Jean-Francois, Gasparde, of whom he would have memories.    Three others had been born while he was away, Bernard, Melchior and Janus, toddlers and a baby, such as he always loved.   What stories he must have had to tell them all of the distant dream world of famous Paris, of that great Day of the Barricades when Henri de Guise and his Catholic League had entered the capital in armed insurrection against the authority of the hesitant King; of the famous Joyeuse turned friar; of the Lorraines and the Mercoeurs and the fight for the faith. He was the treasured son and heir who had successfully climbed the first step up the ladder which would lead to a career worthy of the family, even though, regretfully, not a military one.

 

But if de Sales rightly judged that his vocation was not to be monk, friar or Jesuit, we are left in some perplexity about why he did not now make known to his parents and family his secret resolution to enter the Church as a secular priest.   Can we believe that it was sheer fear of his father or even a reluctance to hurt him?   After all, his father, however domineering, was a perfectly good Catholic and presumably capable of understanding what a religious vocation must mean to so serious and devout a young man, now coming of age.   Nor were the Sales so grand a family as to feel, even in those times, that a priestly vocation for their eldest son was below the family's social status.  It appears more likely that he himself was not as yet certain that God really I wanted him to be a priest. If so, this would make the biographers' rather simpliste account of his early years even less convincing. Perhaps what finally decided him not to say anything was his father's decision that the next educational step for his clever son was a doctorate of law at Padua, a university then scarcely less famed than Paris. De Sales might well have thought that this degree would be of value if and when he became a priest, for as a priest, he would inevitably receive quick preferment because of his birth and connections.

 

So in the autumn of 1588, after only a short time with his family, de Sales and Deage set off for Italy, accompanied by the young Gallois, aged 12, who would do his studies at the Jesuit school in Padua.

 

The atmosphere in Padua was very different from Paris. Here it was the atmosphere of Shakespeare's comedies with stories of picturesquely dressed young bloods roaming the streets at night to pick a quarrel, serenade a pretty girl, or rag incautious passers-by. De Sales was up to all this, and we know that on one occasion, when attacked by some students, he drew his sword and gave as good as he got. We are also told that some friends of his managed by a trick to lure him into the house of a prostitute from which he decamped in double quick time. Such stories serve to show that Francois de Sales at Padua was no hermit, no spoil-sport where the sport was tolerable.

 

He was fortunate enough to find in the University a remark­able man, eminently fitted to guide him along the way which was to be peculiarly his own: the pursuit of an heroic personal sanctity consistent with his affectionate nature and feeling for the social graces of life and the intrinsic value of culture and learning. This was the Jesuit, Antonio Possevino, who had lately been appointed to lecture on theology. De Sales, though never tempted to become a Jesuit nor ever feeling that the Jesuit way quite squared with his own personalist and very individual outlook, immensely admired the Society of Jesus, and Possevino would become a lifelong correspondent of his. Though not so extraordinary in his religious career as Joyeuse, Possevino was nevertheless a man whose career reflected the curious nature of the times. No more than an ordinary priest, he had been appointed Papal Legate for the reconciliation of John III of Sweden to the Church and had been Nuncio and Vicar-Apostolic in that country. He was then made Papal Legate to the Tsar Ivan the Terrible with a mission of reconciliation between Russia and Poland. For these diplomatic tasks, which made him the most distinguished Papal diplomat of the day, he wore secular dress. An ardent advocate of Christian reunion about which he wrote treatises, he was generally unable to obtain the backing of Rome for his own advanced views, and Padua was doubtless something of a come-down. De Sales was also attracted to him because of his acquaintance with Savoie where, before ordination, he had preached in the Calvinist Chablais. It is said that in Italy he preached on one occasion to 14,000 people. Possevino and the young student must have talked together about reunion and the conversion of the heretics, thus remotely preparing de Sales for one of the most spectacular accomplishments of his life.

 

Possevino was thus eminently fitted to give spiritual guidance to de Sales at this particular stage of his formation. His first advice was to ask him to forget all about his great spiritual trouble in Paris and wait until he had the opportunity of thoroughly studying these difficult questions. Meanwhile he was to see in his normal university work and life the means of spiritual progress. After careful reflection and some delay, the Jesuit approved the bodily mortifications which de Sales had been practising. The latter was, however, not yet to be entirely freed from his worries about predestination, and once more he came very near dying.

 

A severe epidemic broke out in Padua in the summer of 1590. Forty-two of the French students, as de Sales wrote on July 26 in the second of his letters which have survived, contracted what seems to have been typhoid or paratyphoid. He caught it too, and was unable to shake it off. By January, everyone thought him a dying man. His tutor even asked him for instructions about his funeral. Always original, de Sales's answer contained a be­quest that must have been rare in those days. " As for my body," he said, " let it be given after my death to the medical students. Seeing that it has been useless during my lifetime, I should like it to be of some use after my death. I am happy to think that I may be able in this way to prevent one at least of the fights and killings to which students resort when they are trying to get hold of the corpses of the executed for dissection." Stealing recently buried bodies from cemeteries, à la Burke and Hare, was then another common way of solving the problem. When we think of the pomp and ceremony with which nobles were interred at" that time, de Sales's bequest is all the more remarkable. Spiritually, de Sales on his death-bed, as everyone took it to be, was content to put himself without any qualifications into the hands of God.   But after receiving the Last Sacraments from Possevino, he slowly began to recover.

 

This complete trust in God expressed itself once more when his studies threw him again into the seemingly insoluble problem of predestination.   By this time, the Jesuit or Molinist solution had been put forward as an answer to the too often misunderstood teaching of St. Augustine and St. Thomas, and Francois found relief in it.   But with his usual grace, he threw himself at the feet of the great doctors of the Church to ask them pardon for his in­ability to take them at their word.    "Kneeling at the feet of St. Augustine and St. Thomas," he wrote, "I am ready to know nothing that I may know Him who is the Word of the Father, Christ Crucified. I stand by what I have written because I can see nothing that raises a serious doubt about it.  Yet I do not understand everything and I know this deep mystery to be such as to blind my human eyes, conditioned to darkness.  If then in the future I should find myself seeing things differently (I do not think this will ever happen)—still worse, if I were to see myself damned (which God avert) by that Will which Thomas attributes to God that God may manifest His justice, I would bow my head in my horror and, looking up at the Supreme Judge in astonishment, I would from my soul say with the Prophet: 'Shall not my soul be obedient to God ? Amen, Father, since it seems good to you, may your will be done.'   And I shall go on saying this in the bitterness of my heart until the day when God will alter my life and change his verdict with the answer:   'Take courage, my son, I do not wish the death of the sinner, but rather that he repent and live.   The dead will not praise me, nor those who go down into hell.  I created you, as I created everything else, for Myself.  Even the sinners doomed, through their own fault, to the day of perdition I created for Myself.   My will is but for your sanctification and My heart has no hate for anything which it has brought into being . . .   You are not dead, but sleeping . . . Courage, little son, in my service—you may be worth little but you are faithful.    Since you still hope in Me, put your trust in My mercy.'"

 

Later, as we shall see, Francois de Sales was to be called upon to play an important part in settling the great controversy between the Jesuits and Dominicans over Predestination and Freedom in the De Auxiliis Congregation in Rome. But Maritain, the great Thomist writer of to-day, has said: " It is not, however, a course of theological science that we should ask of him, de Sales. The human-divine dynamism of the life of grace in us, of which St. Thomas Aquinas is the great doctor and which he has analysed better than any theologian, is hardly touched upon by our Bishop of Geneva; there is little to warrant the claim that he even tried to penetrate the central intuitions of the Angelic Doctor in their profound exactitudes."[2]

 

Meanwhile, under cover of a normal student's life, Francois, apparently resurrected from the dead, would conceal his personal practice of spiritual perfection according to the precepts contained in a little book which greatly influenced him: Lorenzo Scupoli's Spiritual Combat.

 

The book had only just been published anonymously. Scupoli Was a member of the Theatine Order who, at about this time, Was in Padua, living privately because of a grave accusation laid ftgainst him, but completely unjustly. It is likely that the two men met and that Scupoli himself gave de Sales the copy of the book.

At a period when exceptional spirituality was usually measured by strict enclosure and the practice of great bodily mortifications, the Spiritual Combat made a great impression.

 

In the opening chapter Scupoli points out that " fasts, vigils, genuflections, sleeping on the bare earth and other similar austerities of the body " are in themselves by no means the perfection of Christian life.    They may well be the instruments of the devil.   Where it is a case of people finding holiness in them, the devil "gleefully refrains from interfering" ... "experiencing with this certain spiritual stirrings and consolations, such people begin to imagine that they have already reached the state of angels and feel that God Himself is present in them . . . however, anyone can see clearly how sinfully such people behave and how far they are from true perfection, if he looks at their life and character.   As a rule they always wish to be preferred to others; they love to live according to their own will and are always stubborn in their decisions; they are blind in everything relating to themselves, but are very clear-sighted and officious in examin­ing the words and actions of others. If another man is held by others in the same esteem, which in their opinion they enjoy, they cannot bear it and become manifestly hostile towards him; if anyone interferes with them in their pious occupations and works of asceticism, especially in the presence of others,—God forbid!— they immediately become indignant, boil over with wrath and become quite unlike themselves." One has met them!

 

" I will tell you plainly," wrote Scupoli at the very beginning of his book, "the greatest and most perfect thing a man may desire to attain is to come near to God and dwell in union with him."[3]

 

Here were a freedom, a commonsense and an insight into human psychology which anticipated points which Francois de Sales would, in rather more kindly fashion perhaps, exploit in his own spiritual direction and in the most popular of his books, the Introduction to the Devout Life. Meanwhile, Scupoli, with Possevino's practical help, led de Sales to set down for himself a Rule of Life.

 

Much of it followed the post-Reformation ordering of the day with careful preparation by thought and prayer, daily attendance at Mass, weekly Communion, with spiritual considerations from time to time. He had known it all from the Jesuits at Clermont. But certain unusual points stand out. He writes of a " forward examination " rather than of the more usual retros­pective examination of conscience. He was more interested in arming himself against the dangers to come than in inviting scruples through dwelling too much on what is over and done with. Then he makes much of what he calls " a sacred sleep." The phrase suggests something resembling the " prayer of quiet " of the contemplatives: a wordless and simple attending on God by a gentle act of the will. But this " sacred sleep," as he describes it, reads more like a meditation on the holy mysteries and considerations about the foolishness of living one's life inworldly dissipation—the term " sleep " being used to indicate spiritual rest for the mind during the working day by analogy with the body's need for sleep during the night. But the use of the word, so contemplative in its nature, is significant of the future when Jeanne-Francoise de Chantal would encourage him towards a truly contemplative " sacred sleep."

 

This Rule is also marked by a spiritual optimism.    Better to think of the attraction of virtue than to dwell on the evil of sin which is " unworthy of a well-born person equipped to under­stand true values."   And, anyway, sin is offensive to God—that is enough.   But as for virtue, it is virtue  "which makes the inner and outer man into something beautiful.    It makes him wonder­fully pleasing to God.   It suits man extremely well, because it is man's proper state.   How much consolation, delight, true pleasure it always brings him.    Christian virtue sanctifies him, turns him into an angel, makes him a little god, takes him into heaven, even on earth."   For de Sales the honnête homme of the humanist ideal inevitably becomes the man enlightened enough to pursue sanc­tity within the world.    Appropriately, therefore, much of his rule of life concerns his relations with the world.    There is charm in the simple gravity with which he lists his maxims for conduct:

 

" I shall never despise anyone, nor altogether avoid him. The more so in that it would give the impression of being proud, haughty, severe, arrogant, critical, ambitious, dominating....

 

" I shall talk little, but well so that others may enjoy meeting me again rather than think how boring this would be....

 

" I must always use judgment and prudence, for every rule has its occasional exception, save only the foundation of all rules: nothing against God . . .

 

" So in life's intercourse I shall always be modest without insolence, free in manner without austerity, gentle without affec­tation, flexible without contrariness, unless reason require otherwise; welcoming without dissimulation, for men like to get to know those with whom they have to do business....

 

" Since we must often have relations with persons of different qualities, I must be ready to put before some of them only what is exquisite, before others only what is good, before others still only what is indifferent; but never what is evil before any.

 

" If I am obliged to be with the great, I shall remain carefully on my guard—they are like fire, approachable but not too close. A good deal of modesty is necessary in their presence, but it must be an open and sincere modesty. Great people generally like to be loved and respected, and love demands some freedom, respect some modesty. A certain ease is therefore no bad thing in their company so long as respect is not forgotten and yet does not destroy that ease. As between equals ease and respect are just as necessary. With those of lower station we may well be freer and show less respect, but with those of higher station and with our superiors it is much more important to be respectful than to be too free."

 

In other words, if the honnête homme should, like any other man, be a saint, the saint should concentrate also on the virtues of the honnête homme in the worldly-wisdom and etiquette of the society in which he is born. To do so would always be second nature to de Sales, but his love of God and his neighbour would never allow him to let convention, etiquette and worldly-wisdom stand between himself and the human person, of whatever class, with whom he had to deal.

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Francois de Sales spent just over three years in Padua, leaving it at about the same time as Possevino with a brilliant doctorate of law which led the celebrated professor, Pancirolo, to foresee for him a career which would make him the " luminary of his cen­tury." His old father was at last so delighted with his eldest boy that he had been quietly collecting a legal library with which to greet a son who confessed that in Padua he had only studied law to please his father and had given all the time he could to theology to please himself.

 

No young man of his class would have missed the opportunity of a grand tour in Italy before returning home to settle down to his life's career, and de Sales had devotional reasons for returning to Savoie by a very circuitous route. He wanted to visit the Holy House of Loretto on pilgrimage of thanksgiving for his preserva­tion from death and he naturally wanted to see Rome. When Deage asked him on the eve of leaving Padua whether he would not wish to pay a visit to the lady who had nursed him in his illness and thank her, he answered with his usual delight in any play on words: " Quite right, I will go and thank the Lady who gave me the most help during that time." But we may be sure that he did not fail to say goodbye to the lady of Padua before setting off to thank the Lady of Loretto.

 

Francois, Gallois and Deage sailed from Venice to Ancona, just north of Loretto. But the disturbed state of the Papal States after the death of Gregory XIV forced them to return to Padua for the winter of 1591.

 

Among the crop of stories of providential protection during journeys which in those days were indeed perilous, there is a very different story which at least brings out de Sales's sense of fun even at his own expense. On board a little vessel he lost his hat in a high wind. Apparently to be hatless in those days was as socially awkward as to lose one's trousers today. So poor Francois could do no better than wear his night-cap to the enormous amusement of the sailors and passengers. When they landed at a small town, Deage, who certainly had no sense of humour and treated his charge like a small boy, refused to buy him a new hat. So the party, with the gentleman in the night-cap, caused as much laughter among the townsfolk as among the visitors. In the end, the victim grew a little tired of the joke and begged Deage to procure him a new hat. Perhaps it was too late in the evening—perhaps (as the story has come down to us) the tutor implacably told him to make the best of the mortification and wait until they reached Venice. Related thus by Charles-Auguste de Sales, Francois's nephew who wrote his uncle's life 12 years after his death, as an edifying tale, we need little imagination to see it also as an evening's lark which Francis enjoyed no less than the rest of the company.

 

What journeys on the stormy Adriatic could mean is vividly enough depicted in a letter de Sales wrote some years later to a novice in a Paris convent who asked for his spiritual advice. " Imitate those who are suffering from distress and stomach troubles at sea," he wrote, doubtless recalling these days. " After they have lurched up and down the ship, their minds and bodies more than they can bear, they seek what alleviation they can get and finally put their arms around the mast, tightly clinging to it to overcome the giddiness they suffer. True, the relief is both short and uncertain. So you, if you grasp the foot of the Cross with humility, may not, it is true, find much remedy, but at least your patience will there feel sweeter and your troubles more bearable."

 

The grand tour made a fresh start in January, 1592, this time by road and on horseback, and one would dearly like to know what impression cities like Ferrara, Florence, Perugia, Assisi and Rome itself made on the young man. But at no time in his life did Francois de Sales describe or record his views on art and architecture, and this suggests that they made little impression on him. Certainly, his real love, as illustrated so continuously in his writings, was lor the wonders of nature and the hand of God always directly at work in it, providing men with endless lessons about Providence and human nature. In this respect, at least his native Savoie meant much more to him than the man-made wonders of Paris, Padua, Venice and Rome itself.

 

The final family reunion took place at La Thuile to the south of the lake of Annecy, where the family had now settled because of the fighting taking place in the Chablais. Complete happiness in the reunion was marred by the tragedy that his mother, who was only just over forty, was beginning to lose her sight. As for his father, what delight for him in the certainty that his handsome and brilliant son and heir, now named Seigneur de Villaroget, would make a fine marriage and sweep upwards to the highest positions in the magistrature and government of Savoie. When his time came, he would die happy in the knowledge that the greatest glories of his family were yet to come. He was quite right, but in a way of which he had not the faintest conception.

The time had now obviously arrived when Francois must disclose the secret he had so carefully and mysteriously guarded since early childhood. Yet even now, at 25—almost a late voca­tion—, he seemed to wait on events rather than to confront them.

 

Imprudently, in view of his secular hopes for his son, M. de Boisy took the young man, already ruddily bearded, we may suppose, to pay a formal call on the Bishop of Geneva, the Benedictine Claude de Granier whose episcopal residence was in Annecy.[4] Granier, a holy man, was much impressed by the young de Sales and jokingly said to him, as he pointed to some episcopal vestments on a chair: " If you want to become a priest, there's a mitre ready for you." Later, his guest, because he had taken his Padua legal degree, was called in consultation on a point of canon law. His judgment seemed so learned and helpful that Granier said to some bystanders: " What do you think of this young lord? I believe he will become great and a pillar of the Church, and succeed me in this See." Such stories get exaggerated in the telling, but Granier evidently discerned the priestly vocation and the inevitable preferments for so worthy a candidate.

 

M. de Boisy's plans were very different. He must get his son married as soon as possible. The lady of his choice (the father's, not the son's) was a neighbouring heiress, Francoise Suchet de Mirebel, the 14-year old daughter of a counsellor of the Due de Savoie. A first meeting was arranged with the company eagerly watching for the young suitor's smile, the change in tone of voice, that would indicate that all was going well. Francois was indeed prodigal of excellent manners, but he showed no deeper feelings. Mile, de Mirebel understood, for before the next meeting was arranged, she had turned her attention to another suitor.

 

By no means best pleased, M. de Boisy had been pursuing his second and much easier plan—to have his son named to the bar of the Savoie Senate in the expectation that he would soon be made a senator.   But the one solid fruit of de Sales's journey to the capital, Chambery, was the first step in the life-long friendship with the 10-year older senator, Antoine Favre, one of the most I' distinguished lawyers of his day and the author of the internationally celebrated Codex Fabrianus.

 

Mysterious in different meanings of the word was the next event. Riding back from Chambery with Deage, de Sales on three occasions was unseated from his horse, and each time his sword fell to the ground and, slipping from the scabbard, lay crossed by it. Once or even twice this sign of the cross might be accident. But a third time? De Sales was so impressed that for the first time in his life he told the ever-present Deage the whole story of his vocation. Incredibly, Deage had never suspected. The mystery was not only a mystery of the three crosses, but a mystery why Francois de Sales should require a miracle to bring him to the disclosure even to Deage, now a Canon, of what must have been the very basis of his life. Nor did he at once act on the sign from heaven.

 

Even now, it seems, no one dared break the news to M. de Boisy, and one may reasonably suppose that by leaving it so late, de Sales had only made things harder for himself. De Sales con­sulted his cousin, Canon Louis de Sales, who promised to help. Unknown to Francois, Canon Louis talked to the Bishop, and with his consent put forward Francois de Sales's name to the Holy See for the Provostship of the diocese, which happened to be vacant. While Francois, as Seigneur de Villaroget, continued to lead the life of a studious country gentleman, everyone but he waited for Clement VIII's answer. At last in May, 1593, the Bull nominating Francois de Sales as Provost of the Chapter of the Geneva-Annecy See arrived. Since the Provostship was next in rank to the Bishop himself, it was felt that the old man would not object to this sort of ecclesiastical career for his eldest son.

 

When de Sales was told the extraordinary news that he was named Provost, he was so stupefied that he could only take it as another and final Providential sign that he must now act. At last, he showed his father the Papal Bull, explaining that Provi­dence, entirely without his own knowledge, had thus arranged things to confirm his long-standing vocation for the priestly state. Even so, M. de Boisy was far from pleased, though it is much to his credit that he gave way because his son's future work would keep him near his parents and family rather than because of the brilliant prospects which this appointment to a layman held out. It is not altogether surprising that the episode of the projected marriage and the trick of the Provostship were exploited by Protestant writers unable to forgive de Sales his future conversion of the Chablais. As late as 1878, an Anglican clergyman, the Rev. L. Woolsey Bacon, seeking to prove de Sales to be a dis­honest person, argued in Macmillan's Magazine that he had first returned the affections of Franchise de Mirebel and then jilted her in order to take up the Provostship which he had secretly procured.[5]

 

One would scarcely bother to mention this completely un­founded version, but for the fact that it picks out the one puzzling episode in a life so singularly above even prima facie reproach. De Sales, argued Mr. Woolsey Bacon, was clearly the sort of person who would later use dishonest methods to convert Calvinists. But the only puzzle is why de Sales kept his vocation so absolutely secret. In the absence of any surviving letters for the period, there is no satisfactory answer. We know from his own testimony that from the age of twelve he felt called to be a priest. We know, too, that he was never to hurry the great decisions of his life, whether for himself or for others. We are left therefore to suppose that what with the great trial in Paris and the somewhat unnatural opposition of his father to any but a brilliant secular career, he came to the conclusion that he must wait for God to manifest His will in His own time. The unexpected Provostship, even more than the three crosses, would then be taken without further question as the signal from on high to act. Even so, this explanation seems over-simple and suggests that we know too little of what went on within him during these early years of his life.

 

However this be, the course was now definitely set for what today would be a rather late vocation, but which in those days was time enough since no special theological training was then required in the Geneva diocese for the priesthood, least of all for a graduate of two great Universities.

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[1] Aldous Huxley in Grey Eminence gives an interesting and essentially accurate account of Benet of Canfield and his spiritual teaching.

[2] The Spirit of Love by C. F. Kelley, p. x.

[3] One day Francois was to write a letter of spiritual advice which echoes Scupoli's words.   "When we see a person in ecstatic prayer, rising away from and above himself, yet far from ecstatic in his life, in other words, not leading a life raised in God and united with Him by turning away from worldliness and mortification of natural will and desires, by inner meekness, simplicity, humility and, above all, love – then we may deduce that all these ecstasies are very doubtful and dangerous. . . To be above self in prayer and sink below self in life and work; to be an angel in prayer and a beast in one's relations with men, that is to go lame on both legs " [Quotations from Scupoli are taken from Unseen Warfare, translated by E. Kadlou-bovsky and G. E. H. Palmer, pp. 77-9.]

[4] The bishop and chapter of Geneva had had to leave their cathedral city in 1534 in the face of the political and religious risings which were to establish Calvin's authority. Two years later, they settled in Annecy. The loss of the rightful episcopal city of the diocese would always be a sorrow and a challenge to de Sales.

[5] Dublin Review, January 1883.

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