Salesian Literature

The Historical Context

Wendy M. Wright and Joseph F. Power OSFS

 

The time was the turn of the seventeenth century.  The place was eastern France and the neighbouring duchy of Savoy.  In the preceding three-quarters of a century Christian Europe had experienced the birthpangs of an entirely new era: the emerging nation states of the continent were torn in bloody warfare – nation against nation, king against prince, Roman against Reformed Christian, emperor against pope, peasant against ruler, family dynasties against each other; modern vernacular languages were in their adolescences; the scientific discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo were reshaping the mental map of western thought as were the philosophic ideas of Montaigne, Ronsard, and Rabelais; the powerful critique of Christendom levelled by Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and other reformers rocked the foundations of society; on the radical fringe of the magisterial reformation fresh attempts were made to realize the fullness of Christian community in sectarian terms; biblical exegesis was given a new direction through the infusion of the sense of historical perspective so congenial to the Renaissance mind; the Catholic consolidation at the Council of Trent gave energy to a new militant and reformed Roman Church; Ignatius of Loyola, Angela Merici, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Philip Neri, and Pierre de Bérulle put their formidable talents behind the creation of new religious communities destined to infuse the religious atmosphere of Europe with their vital spirits.

 

It was that hinge time, much neglected in English historiography, between the medieval and modern worlds. It was a time of violence motivated especially by religious intolerance, the era of what have become known as the “wars of religion.”  Into this world Francis de Sales and Jane Frances Frémyot were born.[1]  The country of his birth was Savoy, of hers, France.  He was the son of an aristocratic family claiming loyalty to the Savoyard duke and exercising limited but influential service within the duchy’s mountainous regions.  She was the daughter of a Dijonese lawyer, a member of the rising class of “nobles of the robe” who secured their place and imprint in French society through legal and diplomatic channels.

 

From 1567 and 1572 respectively until 1604 their two lived did not intersect.  Francis was the first-born child of Francis de Boisy and his young wife.  A much gifted boy, beloved especially by his mother, Francis was prepared for a distinguished career.  At the age of eleven he was sent to Paris to school.  He pressed his family to let him attend the Jesuit college of Clermont, an institution noted not only for its academic excellence but for the depth of the religious and moral vision it promulgated.[2]  There he followed the humanist curriculum, becoming instructed in the literary and communicative arts, reading philosophy, and perfecting his skills in horsemanship, fencing, and dancing.  Following his own bent, he also took courses in theology beyond his own curriculum.  He received the nourishment of the Greek and Latin classics leavened with the agent of Christian principles.  On his own initiative he began the study of Scripture, following the lectures of Gilbert Génébrard, who in 1584 was commenting on the Song of Songs.

 

It was in Paris between 1586-87 that he underwent a great spiritual crisis that eventually yielded to the religious insights that were to be formative in his thought for the rest of his life.  The issue was predestination, a theological topic hotly debated in both Catholic and Reform circles.  For the young de Sales the crisis over predestination presented itself as a personal dilemma.  Was he fated to be parted forever from the God, the good, he loved so ardently?  The pain of the crisis was particularly acute because from childhood he had enjoyed a radiant sense of loving and being loved by God.  The fear of separation from this most central and unifying focus of his life was devastating.  It has been suggested that his anguish arose from an interior conflict.[3]  Entranced by the charms of Parisian womanhood, urged on by the adolescent escapades of companions, the young Savoyard seems to have discovered within himself a leaning that was at variance with the morally disciplined life he had set out to cultivate.  This and a sudden recognition of human limitation may have fanned the fires of his doubt.  He plunged into a period of despair, fell ill, and was unable to eat or sleep.  The crisis came to a head as he came to perceive his God-given ability to love in the present.  The issue, felt at a deep emotional level, was the realization of radical human dependence.  Francis needed to abandon himself unconditionally to the mercy of God.  to do that involved accepting the idea that he might indeed, in some unforeseen future, be eternally damned.  Once he had done just this and cast away the anxious attention he was giving to protecting himself from such a fate, he was able to perceive the gift that was given. Now, regardless of what the future might hold, he was utterly free to love to the fullest of his capacity.  And love he would in joyous celebration of the potential of the present moment.[4]

 

But de Sales’ insight did not stop there.  The focus in his struggle had been wrongly directed.  He had laboured too much under the sense of his own inability to attain salvation.  He had failed to look to the God revealed in the figure of Jesus.  The theological dimension of his crisis came to the fore at Padua where the young Savoyard went in 1588 to continue his graduate studies.[5]  The university there was at the time the centre of Italian humanist currents of thought.  Students from all over Europe came to sit at the feet of the acclaimed faculty.  In accord with paternal ambition, Francis took up the study of law, a discipline which he found somewhat tedious.  Under the spiritual direction of Jesuit Fr. Possevin, he continued to immerse himself in private theological studies as well.  It was at this time that the predestination issue took on formal theological overtones.  Francis had been studying Thomas Aquinas and Augustine.  He regarded them as luminaries.  But on the issue of predestination he parted their company.  “Prostrating himself at the feet” of the two fathers he adopted a position which affirmed that the will of God was to save all of humankind.  In a heartfelt account he recorded his struggle to rest in conscience with this decision, proclaiming his intention to glorify and exalt the divine name which had revealed itself on the cross not as “he who condemns” but as “Saviour.”  Ready at any time to be informed about his possible error in this matter, Francis in fact worked out for himself a theological opinion that was in harmony not only with gospel teaching but with his experienced sense of the unconditional love of God that creates, sustains, and desires to redeem all humankind as well as with his felt sense of the freedom of the human will to choose or not to choose to respond to this love.

 

There is a way in which this second phase of the Savoyard’s crisis both confirmed and deepened the insight gained in the first phase in Paris.  The initial enlightenment involved grasping the truth of the freedom of the human person to love or not to love.  It involved seeing that his was a possibility at every moment.  It was a receiving of that gift.  It was also a recognition of the responsibility that this gifted state implied.  The next enlightenment came with the realization that, although this gifted freedom is real and expansive (thus emphasizing the power of human choice), the compassion and mercy of the divine life are prior to such freedom.  God’s love sustains, draws forth, and perfects all that is within the power of human beings to do.  And God’s mercy is ultimately greater than the choices the human person may make.  This dual knowledge – of human freedom and the loving will of God toward humankind – formed forever after Francis de Sales’ vision of the Christian life.

 

In fact, the theological point of view that de Sales adopted was the  position that was being worked out by the Jesuit Molina in his Concord of Free Will with the Gift of Grace, published in 1588, and taken up by Jesuit followers.  The emergence of this idea engendered several decades of heated debate, the first portion of which was carried on by Molinists and Thomists; the second was carried to the highest levels of Dominican and Jesuit theological dispute.[6]  The fracas was never settled in favour of either opinion but laid to rest by a firm papal warning to cease disputation issued in 1606. In fact, Francis de Sales, by then a noted churchman, was consulted in the process of papal discernment.

 

At Padua the young de Sales delved deeply not only into current theological controversy but into contemporary philosophy, especially the philosophy of beauty, which was so much a part of the intellectual climate of the Italian town.[7]  The writings of Marsiglio Ficino, Giovanni Della Casa, and Pierre Charron contributed to this climate.  They taught that inherent in the human soul was a longing for beauty and a love of the good.  The source of this longing, indeed the source of all beauty and goodness itself, is (for Ficino especially) God.  The contemplation of all that participates in beauty and goodness leads to the contemplation of God.  Thus there developed an entire aesthetic of the person which aimed at making the person beautiful through the cultivation of wisdom.  The excellence and perfection of humanity lay in the creation of a beautiful whole: interior, exterior, thought, action, and movement.  De Sales’ approach to Christian living, to the free response that the person made to the liberty and the prior love that came from God, was to be deeply indebted to this philosophy of beauty current at Padua during his years there.

 

Returning in 1592 to his parental home in Savoy, the youthful Francis expressed his desire to become a priest. This was not the career his father had in mind for his talented son but, with his mother’s persuasive aid, he was granted the familial blessing to thus dispose his life.  Despite the fact that he had never been in a seminary nor followed a programme of theology, it was felt that, because of his private study and close supervision by spiritual directors, he was ready for the priesthood.  He accepted the post of provost of the Church of St. Peter of Geneva (a more lofty first position than he would have preferred but one that satisfied his father’s ambitions).  He was assistant to the bishop, Claude Granier.  At this time the bishop exercised his diocesan functions not from the traditional seat of the diocese, Geneva, but from the mountain village of Annecy some fifty miles south.  Geneva had for some time been a Calvinist stronghold, recognizing a theocratic system of government that could not allow for religious pluralism or even the limited exercise of variant faith.  All Catholics had been banned from Geneva in 1568 and much of the territory traditionally under the administrative and spiritual influence of de Granier’s see no longer admitted Roman worship.  In his inaugural sermon the new provost pledged himself to the task of winning Geneva back to Catholicism, and he urged his fellow clergy to assist – not by force of arms, as would be attempted in the abortive “escalade” of 1604 – but by reforming themselves and by unleashing the power of love.

 

As a matter of fact a change in the political control of the Chablais, a region south of the Lake of Geneva, had prompted Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy to ask Bishop Granier to send missionary preachers into the area.  Francis immediately volunteered, and spent four difficult years there.  He preached, wrote, and witnessed to the faith he professed.  His manifest skills of persuasion aided the successful campaign.  De Sales saw himself in his missionary role as reconquering by love and as restoring rightful peace to a wartorn Christian family.[8]  While his persuasive efforts were often accompanied and reinforced by the less pacific encouragement of political maneuvers, he nonetheless carried out his own evangelization using only the weapons of pen and tongue.  As part of his activity he also travelled to Geneva to take part in several secret dialogue session with the noted Reformed spokesman, Theodore Beza, and he published his Defence of the Standard of the Holy Cross, a work representing the fruits of reflections forged while thick in the fray of Protestant/Catholic debate.

 

The provost desired to reconquer Geneva and restore the unity of the Christian faith within the confines of his diocese.  He also saw as his long-range tasks the application of the reforms of the Council of Trent and the building up of a wide community of “devout souls” who would live out the life of Christian perfection in all their varied states and vocations.  When he became bishop in 1602, it was to see the culmination of these desires that de Sales applied administrative pressure and persuasive skill.  All clerics in his diocese were to be theologically educated, morally sound, and function as true shepherds to their spiritual flocks.  They were to be resident at their posts and preach the gospel.  Monasteries were to observe the purity of their rules and, reforming their sometimes decadent practices, become springs of spiritual sustenance for the entire community.  Francis de Sales himself took these obligations most seriously.  He preached, often and with charismatic fervour.  He administered the sacraments.  He taught, personally attending to the instruction of children.  He wrote voluminously for the instruction, edification, and reformation of Christian community.

 

All men and women were encouraged to become authentic Christians, to realize the gospel with their lives.  One means by which this was to be done was through spiritual direction.  Francis became director for many individuals yearning to realize authentic Christian lives.  He also encouraged others to direct and to seek direction.  Exemplary of those he came to direct was Madame de Charmoisy, wife of a courtier at the decadent French court.  This young woman sought to live out her religious desires to realize a greater love of God and to live in accord with that love.  De Sales saw no obstacle to her, or any Christian for that matter, in achieving a life of authentic devotion and true love of God.  His Introduction to the Devout Life, which was soon enthusiastically received all over France, was a structured reworking of the letters he had written to Madame de Charmoisy and others like her who sought him out for direction.  He saw himself as building up the larger Church by giving wings to the religious aspirations of the laity, aiding in the creation of a community of true devotion that would animate the body of Christ.

 

In this desire to refresh the Church with new sources of life de Sales was very much a part of his times.  Europe and especially France was witnessing an era of profound renewal.  Laity and clergy alike were hungry for spiritual nourishment.  Devotional classics, newly translated into the vernacular, began to circulate freely.  New spiritual writers gained popularity.  There was a thirst for the ascetic, the mystical, and the visionary.

 

Representative of this atmosphere was the Parisian Salon of Barbe Acarie.  Madame Acarie was an aristocratic housewife who possessed rare spiritual capacity.  The luminaries of the religious elite of her day were drawn to her home, there to imbibe some of her own wisdom and to exchange ideas with each other.  Pierre de Bérulle, founder of the French Oratory, Benedict of Canfield, exponent of the French school of spirituality which taught a union of divine and human will through “anéantissement” (annihilation), and Francis de Sales were among those frequenting Madame Acarie’s salon.[9] 

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Following the death of Bishop de Granier, de Sales succeeded to the Episcopal post.  In his duties he continued to spend himself in the service of Christian unity, Tridentine reform, and the creation of a true community of devotion.  In March of 1604 he met Jane Frances Frémyot, baroness de Chantal.  She, a young widow, had come with her father to hear Monseigneur de Sales preach a series of Lenten sermons in Dijon.  Jane had, since the death of her beloved husband several years previously, been struggling with an emerging sense of vocation, of being called to give herself utterly into the service of God.  But with four small children and the responsibilities that her position as Baroness de Chantal entailed, she was floundering between desire and the painful and taxing facts of her daily life.  Born the second child of Bénigne Frémyot, a Dijonese lawyer, Jane had never really known her mother who died in childbirth when she was just eighteen months old.  She and her sister and brother (who survived the birth his mother did not) were raised by their supportive father and an aunt to be knowledgeable of practical, financial, and legal affairs, to retain a firm loyalty to the Catholic cause (her father was aligned with the Holy League which defended the Catholic succession to the French crown in opposition to the claims of Protestant pretendants) to be a wife and mother befitting her station in life.  She was married at twenty to Baron Christophe de Rabutin-Chantal, a handsome, somewhat high-living but reflective man only a few years her senior.  It was a happy match.  Jane was a devoted companion, a lively hostess, and she undertook the financial rehabilitation of the Chantal family’s troubled estates.  This she did with skill but not without initial trepidation and not without reaping the weariness that this long task wrung from her.

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The couple gave birth to six children, four of whom survived infancy: Celse-Bénigne, Marie-Aimée, Françoise, and Charlotte.  It was a mere two weeks after Charlotte was born that Christophe was killed in a freak hunting accident.  He had been at home for some time, on leave from his soldier’s duties, retired from royal service as a result of ill health and a public quarrel which effectively ended his career.  Jane had been nursing him back to health.  His unexpected death sent her into a grief process so deep and long that she was only beginning to emerge when she met de Sales several years later.  In her widow’s despair she had begun to discover new depths of religious aspiration, a new sense of hunger for God.  She began to sense that she wished not to marry again but to give herself wholly to a life of prayer and service.  During this time she was called by the capricious will of her father-in-law from the baronial estates where she had lived with her husband to the Chantal run properties where the old man resided.  Under threat of having her children disinherited, Jane took up residence there.

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It was during the loneliness of her widowhood and during his rise to public service and visibility that Jane and Francis met.  He became her director and began the process of enabling her to achieve spiritual liberty, that inner freedom that allows one to perceive and then to respond to the deepening layers of awareness of God’s constant and challenging presence.  The relationship of director and directee soon blossomed into a lasting friendship.[10]  This friendship, born of their common love of God, was nurtured by their shared delight in each other’s spiritual gifts and their mutual quest for perfection. Over the next six years the two of them discerned together both the future of Madame de Chantal’s spiritual aspirations and the shape of a new project that would speak to the dreams of both their hearts.  In 1610 they co-founded the Visitation of Holy Mary in Annecy in Savoy, a congregation for women who felt drawn to a life of religious commitment but who were not sufficiently young, robust, or free of family ties to enter one of the austere reformed women’s communities or who were simply not attracted to the physical austerity of these houses or to the lukewarm religiosity of the older lax religious orders.

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The Visitation offered to women such as these a home – simple and modest in its physical ascetic demands yet rigorous in its interior pursuit of authentic Christian charity – where they could flower and become “daughters of prayer.”  The women were to follow a simplified monastic routine, saying a shortened version of the daily office, engaging in modest work.  They were women called to great intimacy with God who would realize a community of true charity among themselves.  With graciousness, gentleness, and tender concern they were to lead each other to pure love of God.  Women who had completed the novitiate were to express their love of God to neighbour by making visits to the poor and infirm in the surrounding neighbourhood.  There was also provision made for a limited number of laywomen to come within the community for brief periods of refreshment and retreat.

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In part, the Visitation was one facet of de Sales’ programme for the building up of a society infused with the spirit of true devotion.  In part, it was the culmination of the widow de Chantal’s deepest personal longings to find a way to both uncompromisingly abandon herself to her religious impulses while still caring for the needs of her children and her extended family.  Her then-youngest daughter Françoise went with her and stayed within the community (Charlotte had recently died); her eldest daughter Marie-Aimée, recently married to Francis’s own brother, Bernard, resided nearby.  Jane was free to move in and out of the community cloister as her maternal duties required.  During the years that followed she was able to arrange for her son’s and daughter’s education and marriages and settle the estates left by her father and father-in-law, not neglecting these responsibilities but not having her religious aspirations set aside because of them.

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After the foundation of the Visitation, Jane de Chantal found her life as much defined by her position as superior of a budding community as her friend Francis found his determined by his role as bishop.  Both were considered spiritual leaders of their day.  Both were concerned with the continuing spiritual revitalization of their society.  Both to this end gave themselves in spiritual direction, wrote, spoke, and continued to grow in their own faith.

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Between 1608 and 1616 Francis de Sales worked on the most ambitious of his written works, the Treatise on the Love of God, a voluminous “history of the birth, progress, and decay of the operations, characteristics, benefits, and excellence of divine love.”[11]  This seminal work represented the fruit of its author’s theological reflection and spiritual penetration, drawing as it did upon the gathered wisdom of the Church’s contemplative tradition and contemporary religious thought.

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Indeed, it is almost possible to see in de Sales’ writing, especially in the Treatise, a reflection and synthesis of the entire wisdom of he Christian past.  His sources are many and eclectic.  He cited classical authors, appreciated Montaigne, was inspired by contemporary writer Honoré d’Urfé’s Astraea, was dependent upon the thought of his Benedictine mentor Génébrard in his profound insight into the Song of Songs.  De Sales read his fellow theologians, especially the Spaniards, venerated the mystical theology of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, knew by heart the maxims of medieval spiritual writers like Anselm, Bernard, and Bonaventure, always kept of copy of Laurence Scupoli’s The Spiritual Combat in his pocket, breathed the rarified air of the mystical theology of the Rheno-Flemish school of spirituality, knew the writings of Teresa of Avila that were then available in France, was formed in the spirit of Ignatius of Loyola when at Clermont and under the direction of Fr. Possevin and other Jesuit directors, and exhibited rare familiarity with the bible and the exegetical tradition of the Church.[12]

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The Treatise and the Introduction to the Devout Life were de Sales’ most popular works, those prepared most specifically for wide public circulation.  Both his other writings, most notably the Spiritual Conferences, compiled from informal conversations held with the Visitation community in Annecy in its year of infancy, are full of grace and insight.  Jane, too, produced written works but for the most part she did not write for publication.[13]  Nor did she care to sit down and write a formal statement of her teachings on any given topic.  Instead, she preferred to spontaneously answer questions put to her by her sister Visitandines who recorded by memory what she said.  It is in the letters that she wrote, as is the case too with Francis, that Jane’s living spirit is captured.  For the letters sprang naturally out of the duties and rhythm of their daily lives.  As a busy bishop Francis was often on the road travelling in the service of this or that Episcopal responsibility.  He served in the train of the French court and acted as arbiter in several public disputes both theological and political; he oversaw the reform of monasteries and other religious communities, restored pilgrimage sites, preached often outside his diocese and made constant rounds of his own diocese in regular pastoral visits.  He founded the Academy Florimontane (1607) with his friend Antoine Favre for the purpose of establishing an educational institution on the soil of Savoy which would provide an arena for the dissemination and discussion of current philosophical and theological ideas, drew up plans for Ursuline education of young girls to be introduced in his native land and developed a catechism for the Christian instruction of the very young.

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His day was always full – there was correspondence to attend to, officials who came on business, there were liturgical and pastoral duties at all times, and always the Genevan bishop received whoever wished to see him about personal spiritual matters.  His episcopal ante-rooms were always crowded with those seeking his advice.  He is reported to have received them all with equal concern: women, men, poor, rich, ignorant, learned, the spiritually impoverished and the richly endowed.  He wrote his letters during several hours in the early morning before the activity of the day closed in upon him.  Each letter was highly personalized; the directees were addressed exactly at the point where they found themselves, in the concrete circumstances of their lives and at the particular moment of their spiritual development.  For that was where, in Francis’s perception, one was met by God.

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Jane’s letters too reflect this understanding of the spiritual enterprise.  And she, like Francis, wrote to her correspondents amid the routine of her own day at the Visitation.  Ordinarily, that day was punctuated by the monastic rhythm of prayer – the community said the little Office of Our Lady daily; there were periods for work, for recreation, for individual prayer, for community interaction.  Jane penned her hasty letters often with the help of a secretary – especially for formal correspondence.  Letters of direction were generally written in her own hand, jumbling together bits of news, requests, informal advice, with what might be called more formal spiritual counsel.  Her life and the lives of her directees were embraced as one whole.  One went to God in the context of the events in which one found oneself.  Jane’s letters reflect this mixture of the banal and the practical with the highest ideals of Christian life.

The Mother Superior of the Community of the Visitation was not always within her monastery, however.  The vision that the two friends had for religious life also captured the imagination of French society.  During her lifetime Jane saw the establishment of over eighty houses of the Visitation.  The foundations of many of these she supervised herself.  This necessitated that she too travel extensively.  It also required that she utilize all the financial and administrative skills she ad learned in her father’s home, had tested while restoring the impoverished Chantal estates and had perfected when she arranged for hr own children’s futures and when she settled the affairs of her father and father-in-law after their deaths.

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All the busyness was not to her real liking but Jane accepted the burdens of responsibility gracefully.  There were many difficult times.  As early as 1615 when the Visitation first flowered on French soil – in Lyons – major obstacles were encountered.  The bishop of the diocese, de Marquemont, following the directives of the Council of Trent to the letter, perhaps not in their larger spirit, felt, among other things, that he could not allow a community of women who did not observe strict enclosure to reside under his jurisdiction.  In a long and eloquently debated correspondence he and de Sales went back and forth.  The original plan of the Visitandines had been to exercise two arms of charity – the love of God in prayer, and in service to others.  Now the community structure had to be modified to adapt to changing circumstances.  With the Lyons foundation the congregation became a formal order observing permanent and solemn vows and the excursions out of the cloister was curtailed in favour of practising charity within the house itself.  Nevertheless, the essential purpose and spirit of the community remained unchanged – to establish a place for women to be “daughters of prayer” and cultivate a deep interior intimacy with God even if, by temperament, age, or constitution, they might be prevented from joining already established women’s foundations.[14]

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There were many other difficulties that presented themselves to the burgeoning order.  Individuals were attracted to the Visitation who lacked an affinity for its spirit and who failed to understand the religious motives behind the Salesian “gentle” demeanour or who could not abandon themselves to the demands of charity lived in community.  Such a one was the young widow Marie-Aimée de Morville.  This woman’s escapades were many and notorious and the surviving letters to her that we have attest to the depth of the parental vigilance and solicitude that she wrung from Jane and Francis.  The letters of direction of Monseigneur de Sales and Madame de Chantal, rooted as they are in the specific daily experience of their directees, provide a glimpse into the complex world of seventeenth century society and religious sensibilities.  A case in point is Francis’s correspondence with Angélique Arnauld, the impassioned young abbess, whose name later became associated with Jansenism.[15]  These missives paint a picture of a religious climate in which the lines of distinction between what were to become the various strands of French spirituality were not yet clearly drawn.

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De Sales did not survive to witness the course of Angélique Arnauld’s history nor live to share the labours of creating a network of Visitandine houses throughout France with his friend Jane.  In Lyons in 1622, exhausted by the continual labours exercised in the service of the French court, he fell ill and died of apoplexy.  This was not before he met with Jane de Chantal one last time.  She too was on the road, seeing to the details of a new foundation.  The friendship they had begun in 1604 had blossomed over the years into a union of immense richness that led them individually and together to their full spiritual potential.  All the reserves of affection and desire of which they were capable had been exquisitely gathered up into their shared desire for perfect love of God.  The beauty of the correspondence they exchanged is witness to their bond.  It was not a bond without its aspects of suffering and denial, however.  In 1616 they underwent a change in what until this time had been primarily an experience of unity.  Still joined in their mutual quest to seek God they “let each other go,” releasing the other to depend utterly on God alone.  In 1622 at Lyons they had not seen each other for three years.  Their last interview was taken up in considering the business of the rapidly expanding Visitation order that they had given birth to twelve years before.[16]

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After Francis’s death, Jane de Chantal continued with her work of overseeing the large family of religious to whom she was chief spiritual mother.  This she did up until her own death.  In this work she relied on the counsel of many of the spiritual friends she enjoyed, notably Vincent de Paul who was for her a confidant and confessor.  Primary among her concerns was the continuation of the pristine spirit in the Visitandine houses, many of whose residents had never met their founding parents.  She called a first general chapter meeting of superiors in 1624 and helped to draw up a definitive Custom Book which would provide guidelines for practice within the diverse communities.  She wrote ardent letters to superiors, novice-mistresses and novices which reflect her struggle to institute a way in which the authentic Salesian spirit might come to be observed everywhere.

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In her letters of particular direction, where her concern is to stay close to the very Salesian spirit of beginning right where one is and with the facts at hand, Jane de Chantal continues to show herself, until her death, as a masterful director of souls.  She brought to this task her own particular life-experience and temperament.  The fact of her motherhood is chief among those experiences.  Since her youth she had been engaged in the art of biological mothering, since midlife she had exercised her spiritual maternity.  The correspondence she kept with the superiors of the Visitation reflects a self-conscious cultivation of attitudes and skills she believed congruent with maternal care.  Superiors were enjoined to be true mothers, tenderly attentive to the nurturing of their young, tolerant of their children’s weaknesses, encouraging their small steps, never overly ambitious for their advancement until they themselves grew into the maturity of spiritual wisdom.

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The task of cultivating and disseminating this spirit of motherly direction occupied Jane de Chantal for many years.  It was part of her long-term effort to ensure the survival, both institutional and spiritual, of the Salesian charism in its manifestation as the order of the Visitation.  Over the years, many challenges to this goal arose.  One specific challenge may serve as a case in point.  Ecclesiastical authorities tried for many years to press upon the communities the institution of apostolic visitations, a practice which she felt would severely compromise the autonomy from other than episcopal authority that was intended for the order.  Her long correspondence on this topic has survived and shows Jane as a persistent and far-seeing defender of the Salesian vision as she believed it should be lived out.[17]  She continued her labours in the service of this vision until her death in 1641.

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[1] The most accessible biographies of the two saints in English are, for Jane, Elisabeth Stopp, Madame de Chantal: Portrait of a Saint (London: Faber and Faber, 1962) and, for Francis, Michael de la Bedoyere, François de Sales (New York: Harper and Bros., 1960).  French biographies include Henri Bremond, Sainte Chantal (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1912), André Ravier, Un Sage et un saint: François de Sales (Paris: Nouvelle Cité, 1985) and E.M. Lajeunie, Saint François de Sales, L’homme, la pensée, l’action (Paris: Guy Victor, 1966, 2. vols.).  An English translation of this last work is Saint Francis de Sales, the Man, the Thinker, His Influence (Bangalore, India: SFS Publications, 1986).

[2] Cf. Elisabeth Stopp, “St. Francis de Sales at Clermont College” in Salesian Studies, 6 (Winter 1969) pp. 42-63.

[3] Ravier has a helpful treatment of the Paris crisis in his Preface to the Pléiade edition, Saint François de Sales, Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. xxviii-xxxiii.  It is Lajeunie, Vol. 1. pp. 138ff, who suggests that adolescent sexuality might have been part of Francis’s crisis.

[4] Francis’s own words about the crisis are reported by his earlier biographer on the testimony of his tutor and other witnesses in the canonization proceedings.

 

Will I be deprived of the grace of the One who has so kindly let me experience his delights, and who has shown himself so loving to me?… However that may be, Lord, at the very least let me love you in this life if I am not able to love you in eternal life – for no one praises you in hell (cf. Ps. 6:5).

 

Oeuvres, XXII, 18-19, A similar text is given, ibid., pp. 19-20.

[5] Cf. Ravier’s preface to the Pléiade edition, pp. xxxiii-xxxv, on the Padua crisis.

[6] Lajeunie shows that the position rejected by Francis is not that of Thomas himself but of his interpreters.  See Saint François, Vol. I, p. 153.

[7] Cf. James Langelaan, OSFS, Man in love with God: Introduction to the Theology and Spirituality of St. Francis de Sales. Unpublished paper, Hyattsville, MD, 1976.

[8] Francis as peacemaker is treated in E.J. Lajeunie, Saint François, Vol. II. Pp. 99ff.

[9] For a useful overview of Post-Reformation Catholic spirituality which includes sections on Bérulle and Canfield, see Louis Cognet, Post-Reformation Spirituality, N.Y.: Hawthorn Books, 1959.

[10] For a detailed treatment of this see Wright, Bond of Perfection.

[11] Oeuvres IV, 8: Treatise, Preface.

[12] Cf. Dictionnaire de Spiritualité ascétoique et mystique, article “François de Sales,” Vol. V. pp. 1057-1097 and Antanas Liuima, Aux sources du traité de l’amour de Dieu de St. François de Sales, 2 parts, Rome: Librairie Editrice de l’Université Grégorienne, 1960.

[13] Jane did, however, work over her Responses for several years and sent her manuscript to several superiors for comments before allowing to be privately printed.  The first edition is Responses de nostre tres honoree et digne Mere Jeanne Françoise Fremiot sur les Regles, Constitutions et Coustumier de nostre Orde de la Vistiation Saincte Marie (Paris, 1632).

[14] The original purpose in founding the Visitation is clearly outlined in the first edition of the Constitutions, cf. Oeuvres, XXV, 51-53.

[15] On Angélique Arnauld’s Salesian connections refer to Louis Cognet, La Mère Angélique et Saint François de Sales, 1618-1626 (Paris: Editions Sulliver, 1951).

[16] Refer to Wright, Bond of Perfection, pp. 159-98.

[17] See Roger Devos, “Le testament spirituel de sainte-Jeanne Françoise de Chantal et l’affaire du visiteur apostolique” in Revue d’Histoire de la Spiritualité, Vol. 48 (1972), pp. 453-76 and Vol. 49 (1973), pp. 199-266 and 341-66.

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