Francis de Sales and the Introduction to the Devout Life

 

Annecy: 1610

 

In early 1610 the dynamic young bishop of Geneva, Francis de Sales, sat at his desk in the episcopal apartments located at the Maison Lambert in the village of Annecy, duchy of Savoy. The decor of his surroundings was remarkably simple and unadorned, especially considering that the era in which he lived, the Counter-Reformation, was one in which the office of bishop was greatly revered. Splendid religious ceremonies and beautiful vestments and all the accouterments of privilege were common to the Roman church hierarchy of his day. But the Genevan bishop preferred the simplicity of his modest dwellings. His apartments were located across the street from the Cathedral St. Pierre, where he exercised his episcopal ministry. In fact, the bishop's true cathedral church was in Geneva, fifty miles north of Annecy, but he could not preside there. This was the historical era of great conflict between the peoples of Christian Europe, who found themselves sharply divided in their religious loyalties. Barely a century before, Martin Luther had posted his famous ninety-five theses on the door of Wittenburg Cathedral, challenging, among other things, the sale of indulgences by the church. With the tap of his hammer Luther had unleashed the pent-up ecclesial, theological, and political tensions of Christendom, which exploded into what we have come to know as the Protestant Reformation. For the next hundred years all Europe was to reel from the bloody aftermath of the Reform. Most countries, provinces, or cities were either fiercely loyal to the church of Rome or tenacious adherents of the Reformed churches. In France, decades of battle between the two religious factions finally had produced an uneasy truce. Both Roman Catholics and the Reformed were legally allowed to practice their faith. But to the east in the city-state of Geneva, the Reform held sway. The Catholic bishop had been exiled from the city and all Catholic practice had been banned. The episcopal entourage had fled to the mountain hamlet of Annecy, just south of Geneva. By the time of de Sales' episcopal consecration in 1602, the bishop of Geneva had been in exile in the lakeside hamlet for nearly half a century.

 

Prelates accustomed to the elegance of church life in the great cities of Europe like Paris might have found Annecy something of a provincial backwater. But not Francis. He loved this quaint place, which he spoke of affectionately as "my dear Nessy." For him it was home. He had been born in 1567, just across Lake Annecy near the village of Thorens at the Chateau de Sales. His father was Francois de Boisy, a nobleman of some influence in local political affairs. Within the year before Francis' birth his mother, Francoise de Sionnaz, then a somewhat anxious young wife, had prayed fervently at the church of Notre Dame de Liesse in central Annecy, where the fabled Shroud of Turin was on display. She had prayed for a child. She promised that if her prayer was answered she would consecrate the child to God. It was and she did. These are some of Francis' deep roots in Annecy. He had frequented its narrow cobblestone streets as a boy, spending two years at the College Chappiusien and receiving his first commu­nion and confirmation at the Church of St. Dominic. Later, after receiving an education in Paris and Padua, Francis had returned to Annecy to be made provost and then coadjutor of the bishopric of Geneva. When his predecessor, Bishop de Granier, died, he was made chief shepherd of the diocese from which he had tome.

 

From the windows of his apartments, Francis could not see far beyond the cathedral edifice across from him except to peer down the tight winding streets that disappeared around the corner to his right and left. But he knew well where the curving avenues led. Annecy was not large and he generally moved through it on foot. A mountainside village, high in the Alpine regions, Annecy lay beneath the shadow of an ancient chateau perched on the side of the hills and above the shores of Lake Annecy. The town was crisscrossed by canals; lake water lapped gently at the feet of passersby and swirled under the town's many bridges. From his apartments it was not a long walk across the canals to the old prison, where he visited the imprisoned and condemned. Another short walk took him to the Saint Sepulcre quarter, one of the most destitute in the village, where he brought a message of consolation to the poor and those suffering from illness. The Street of St. Clare, just below the chateau, housed a convent of Poor Clare nuns where he often preached, as well as the Hôtel Favre, the dwelling place of his dear friend Antoine Favre, with whom he founded the Florimontane Academy, a center for intellectual and cultural exchange.

 

Francis frequently taught catechism to the children at the Dominican church down near the lakeside. From there he could easily round the edge of the lake to stop in at the Gallery House, where the widow Jane de Chantal and three other women were soon to begin an experimental community that they would call the Visitation of Holy Mary. Francis had dreamed for years of a community for such women: widows, the handicapped, and the frail, who felt a deep call to prayer and to give themselves to God and yet who could not find a welcome in any of the existing religious communities of the church. He had just the previous year made plans to establish the community with his friend Jane de Chantal, and the fledgling experiment was much on his mind.

 

In fact, there was hardly a corner of "dear Nessy" that had not felt its bishop's presence. Francis de Sales felt himself called to the formidable task of reforming his entire diocese according to the principles laid down by the recent Council of Trent. The church loyal to Rome was in the process of internal reform. Partly as a continuation of several centuries of foment within Christendom and partly as a response to the dramatic events of the Reform movement, church leaders had applied themselves to rethinking church policies, morals, doctrines, and institutions. At the core of Roman reform was the person of the bishop, the true shepherd of his flock, personally preaching the gospel, instructing the faithful, providing moral example, generously serving the poor, and encouraging dedication in religious life, zealousness in the priesthood, and piety among the laity. When he had been a law student at the University of Padua, Francis had been impressed by the spirit of the great Charles Borromeo, the bishop of Milan, which was so palpably present on the Italian peninsula. Like Bishop Charles, Bishop Francis gave himself unreservedly to the task of shepherding his people.

 

For Francis believed himself to be living in a unique period of the church's and Christendom's history. He saw the action of the Holy Spirit alive and working in the upheavals of his day. God seemed to be calling forth persons of generous, loving natures to respond to the divine initiative. From all walks of life and in all segments of society, God seemed to Francis to be rais­ing up "devout souls" whose religious enthusiasm and desire to serve God would act as leaven in the loaf of society at all levels. The Genevan bishop envisioned little less than a renovation of Europe transformed by the standard of Christ. In this he believed himself to be a participant. This vision of Christian renewal that he identified with a revitalized Roman church motivated everything Francis de Sales did.

 

On top of Bishop de Sales' desk at the beginning of 1610 was the recently published book that bore the title Introduction to the Devout Life. It was the fruit of the bishop's pastoral experience serving as guide and spiritual director to a number of women, most particularly Louise du Chastel, Madame de Charmoisy, the young wife of an attendant at the French court who had confided to the bishop her desire to live a life of Christian principles and devotion even within the luxury and decadence of court life.

 

Francis had first pulled the book together rather quickly between 1607 and 1608 in the midst of his busy schedule by reworking a series of memos he had written to Madame de Charmoisy and others like her. Because he often responded to people's requests for advice on the Christian life and because they often shared what he had to say with their friends, Francis had made it a habit to write, alongside his personal letters of spiritual guidance particularly tailored to respond to the needs of the addressee, more general memos of advice that could be circulated among a circle of acquaintances. He had reworked the memos sent to Louise de Charmoisy into chapter form and addressed them to an imaginary "Philothea," a feminine name that means simply "lover of God."

 

This little book, Introduction to the Devout Life, became an immediate success throughout the Europe of Francis' day. Both its popularity and the fact that after the first printing sold out, pirated and unauthorized editions were widely circulated, prompted the bishop to expand the work the next year. The version that lay on Francis' desk in 1610 was an enlarged five-part version of the original manuscript. In subsequent years he was to refine it even more, finally (in 1619) producing the work in the form familiar to readers well into the twentieth century. In the intervening three centuries the Introduction has gone through innumerable printings and been translated into dozens of languages, making it one of the most enduring of religious classics in the Christian tradition.

 

At the time of its first printing the book on the devout life filled a very real need in Catholic culture. Interest in the spiritual life was high among persons in all walks of life. Many of the classic works on prayer and spiritual practices were newly available in vernacular translations and people were hungry to read them. People were also seeking out guides to the spiritual life, and men like Francis, who had much to say on the topic, were in great demand. Yet because so many of the classic treatments on prayer were written for and by individuals in the monastic vocation and thus reflected a spirituality appropriate to a life of withdrawal, and because able spiritual directors were not easy to come by, there was a crying need for a book that could distill some of the collective wisdom of centuries of Christian experience and make it accessible to persons in various walks of life.

 

So Francis had responded to the need by gathering together his memos on diverse topics: thoughts on how to order one's day best to accommodate a life of devotion, perspectives on traditional Christian virtues like humility, ideas about what the life of "perfection" (usually, in those days, a life synonymous with vowed religious life) might mean "in the world," advice on widowhood, gentleness, and practices of meditation and prayer. These memos of advice became the backbone of the book.

 

The book began on a characteristically inviting note. Francis de Sales' writing, like his public speaking, affected people. And his writing reflected his personality, which was especially accessible. All sorts of persons — kings, courtiers, church officials, children, the poor, the handicapped, the simplest workers — flocked to see him, and each found an inviting presence and an empathetic ear awaiting him or her. Something about his message and the way he delivered it drew all these varied individuals. He had something to share that they were hungry to hear. He had assembled his memos into this little book that lay before him with the hope of reaching those he could not otherwise reach. His heart, moved by the love of God he experienced so deeply, was in those memos and in that book. He felt that if the desire he felt for God and the love of the kingdom of Christ he experienced could just be communicated, then others would be awakened to the deepest desires of their own hearts. The book began with a dedicatory prayer that came straight from Francis' own heart.

 

Dedicatory Prayer

Gentle Jesus, my Lord, my Saviour and my God, I prostrate before your divine Majesty and dedicate and consecrate this writing to your glory.  By your blessing give life to the words of this book so that those for whom I have written it may receive through it the holy inspirations which I desire for them.  May they be specially inspired to pray earnestly that may receive your infinite mercy so that while showing the path of devotion to others in this world, I may not be condemned (1 Cor. 9:27) and confused eternally in the next.  Rather, may I sing with them for ever, as a song of triumph, the words I utter with all my heart as a sign of my faithfulness among the dangers of this early life.

 

LIVE Jesus! LIVE Jesus! Yes, Lord Jesus, live and reign in our hearts for ever and ever. Amen.

 

Right away in the opening prayer, one becomes aware of the young bishop's earnestness as well as his perspective on religious devotion, rooted as it is in the religious ethos of his age. There is an assumption, which is characteristic of Christian spirituality from its earliest postapostolic origins, that the Christian life is, to put it in contemporary terms, countercultural. "This earthly life," as Francis deems it, is an arena of choice. One may choose to serve Christ and espouse the values that Christ would (for Francis those values were upheld in the Roman church of his day). Or one may choose to serve another master, which means that one would live under the influence of "the world," where pride, greed, and the lust for power, self-aggrandizement and luxury held sway.

 

The notion that the life of Christ and the life of the world are antithetical goes back to the origins of the Christian spiritual tradition when fervent ascetics of the fourth and fifth centuries fled the cities of Christendom to seek the solitude of the Egyptian, Palestinian, and Syrian deserts. There, they believed, they could truly cultivate a life transformed in Christ, slough off the "old creation" in the fiery forge of silence and solitude, and be remade as a "new creation" in Christ. To do this they had to "die to self," to let go of the interior dispositions that tied them to worldly values and become gradually transformed through humility, charity, purity of heart, and continual prayer.

 

This countercultural thrust within the tradition was evidenced well into Francis' day, although by his time the cultural context had changed and the zealous didn't go to the desert. They went into religious life or — and this is where Francis' thought is original — they lived those countercultural values in a modest, interior, and hidden way in whatever situation they found themselves. Not that "true devotion," as Francis named it, didn't have exterior fruits. But the emphasis was on a radically countercultural change of heart that would gradually transform the person from within, rather than a change of lifestyle effected from without.

 

At the core of this interior change was the person of Jesus. Bishop de Sales ends his dedicatory prayer with a phrase very characteristic of him, Live Jesus! The phrase is the leitmotif of his entire life and it was to become the motto for the Visitation community he and his friend Jane de Chantal founded. In Francis de Sales' words, to live Jesus was to have the name of Jesus engraved on one's heart. It was to allow that name to become one's own true name, to allow one's entire self—body, thought, affections, actions, decisions, work, devotion — to be animated by the person known by that name. To allow Jesus to live, one did not simply learn about Jesus or pray to Jesus or even imitate Jesus. One surrendered the vital center of one's being, one's heart — understood as the core of a person's energy — to another. Authentic human living was for Francis the continual and ever-present bringing to life of the living Lord who bears the name Jesus.

 

This astonishing vision of life transformed by Jesus the Christ undergirded the entire Introduction to the Devout Life. For bishop de Sales, it was a countercultural reality available to all people in all walks of life.

 

Preface by St. Francis de Sales

 

The flower seller, Glycera, had such great skill in arranging flowers, that with the same sort of flowers she would make a great variety of bouquets.  In fact, the painter Pausias wanting to make drawings of Glycera’s different bouquets was unable to do so, as he could not match his skill in painting to the profusion of bouquets she had prepared… [Continue…]

 

In his preface, Bishop de Sales speaks "heart to heart" with his readers, extending an invitation to them to embrace the de­vout life. You will notice two things right away. First, he had a certain flare for employing metaphor and image in his writing. Some contemporary readers find his "flowery" language off-putting. It seems too mannered for those who want their spiritual lessons taken straight with a shot of asceticism. But it is important to be mindful of the historical moment in which Francis de Sales wrote as well as his intent in using such language. On the one hand, communication in seventeenth-century aristocratic society was more formal, more self-conscious than that to which most twentieth-century readers are accustomed. And Francis wrote this piece mainly for women like Madame de Charmoisy, for whom genteel or colorful allusions, such as the story of the flower-seller Glycera, would be appealing. (That story, as well as the story of the tiger cubs and many other tales in the Introduction, comes from the Roman author and naturalist Pliny, whose Natural History Francis enjoyed quoting.)

 

In his creative use of metaphor and simile, which can be seen throughout his writing, Francis was not only appealing to the polite sensibilities of his female readers; he was employing the rhetorical skills he had learned as a student. The point of writing and of speaking in the classical rhetoric in which de Sales was trained was to move the hearts and minds of the reader/listener. His intent was to draw people's attention to their innate desire for God. So he used the language of desire to describe the spiritual journey. His aim was to capture the human imagination and stir up aesthetic sensibility — in other words the longing for beauty — by creating beauty. This was not mere device or artifice. Frances de Sales believed deeply that all human capacities had been given in order that human beings might return home to God. The arts, literature, music, and architecture of his day proclaimed this. Creativity of all kinds was employed to bring people to God. Put another way, Francis and many of his contemporaries in the Roman church believed that God created human beings with the longing and the capacity to be united with God. All life, especially human life, is infused with this divine restlessness, this ardent seeking. Human beings should call upon all their innate potential to realize their longings. So beautiful words, colorful images, and carefully turned phrases are to be employed to draw the imagination, the heart, and the mind toward their source and final end: God.

 

Second, you will notice that Francis is rather self-effacing about claiming he was not saying anything very original. By this he meant that he was basing much of what he said upon his wide reading of the spiritual classics. Versed in the Latin language, he was familiar with the writings of the luminaries in the tradition of prayer. Deeply steeped in Ignatian spirituality through his Jesuit schooling and continued contact with Jesuit spiritual directors, Francis also absorbed all the spiritual influences of his day. He was well acquainted with current trends. He carried about with him a copy of the Spiritual Combat, a popular Italian guide to the spiritual life. And he was conversant with the writings of the Spaniards Louis of Granada and Teresa of Avila, whose influence was being newly felt in France. It was an era, not unlike our own, of peaked interest in spiritual practice and the rapid dissemination of spiritual literature. When in Paris de Sales was a familiar visitor at the salon of Madame Acarie. Here the individuals who were to become the beacons of the French mystical renaissance were to be found.

 

So de Sales knew his tradition, both past and present. He knew that the bias in the tradition was toward monastic life or the life of withdrawal and that most of the classic literature of prayer was articulated from that perspective. He also knew that devotion was in fact possible in all walks of life. Certainly he was not the first person to suggest such an idea. The history of Christian spirituality is crowded with people and movements that experimented with different lifestyles for individuals and com­munities to realize the ideal Christ life. In his own day Francis de Sales was not unique in believing that vitally lived Christian commitment was not the prerogative of monks, nuns, and priests only. (The Protestant Reform was suggesting the same idea in a very different way.) But Francis was the person who articulated this idea and gave practical form to it most persuasively in seventeenth-century Roman Catholic circles. He had a knack for being able to pull out from the monastically oriented clas­sics the universal gems of wisdom that were hidden there and to integrate them into contemporary concerns and idiom.

 

At the forefront of this new mood in Christendom was the Society of Jesus — the Jesuits — founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540. The Jesuits were a group of men who took the traditional monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience but were not subject to the enclosure central to the monastic life. They embraced an active life of apostolic service, committing themselves to furthering the kingdom of Christ. By the seventeenth century one of their chief works was the operation of schools all over Europe. The Jesuits were educating many of Europe's young men, shaping them for various careers but always instilling in them a sense of mission — to further the values of Christ through all of their actions. Francis had attended one such school early in his educational career, the College of Claremont in Paris, and it had stamped him indelibly with its spirit.

 

Perhaps what formed him most was his experience of the Spiritual Exercises devised by Ignatius. In many ways the Introduction might be seen as Francis de Sales' adaptation of this process of prayer and affective reflection to the lives of aristocratic women in France and Savoy. For the object of the Exercises was the ordering of life and affection in the service of the kingdom of Christ. The bishop's description of true devotion that prefaces his little book makes this clear.

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