Treatise on the Love of God

 

In early 1610 Francis had the revised manuscript of his Introduction to the Devout Life on his writing desk before him. But this was not the only book he was in the process of writing. Nor was it the first of which he had dreamed. Long before he transformed his memos of advice to Madame de Charmoisy into a publishable piece of writing, Francis had been ruminating on a long-range project that lay very close to his heart. He had dreamed of composing what he originally called "The Book of Holy Charity," a work that would by the time of its publication in 1616 be titled Treatise on the Love of God. He had conceived of this work as an exposition on the spiritual life in its entirety, both theory and practice. And he had especially wanted to make such a work available in a small, manageable volume that could be both accessible and portable for the general reader. Where he had addressed the Introduction to "Philothea," the feminine form of a name meaning lover of God, he would address the Treatise to "Theotimus," a masculine name of the same meaning (with a disclaimer in his preface that asserted that the book was not written primarily for men but for "any human heart anxious to grow in the love of God").

 

The work had been gestating in the Genevan bishop for many years. During his student years in Paris he had been greatly impressed by the scholarly work of the Benedictine Genebrard, whose lectures on the Song of Songs he had attended. The older scholar had undertaken an exegesis of this scriptural book. Fol­lowing the medieval interpretive tradition, he had read the Song as a mystical document symbolizing the loving relationship between God and the human heart as well as between Christ and the church. The lectures electrified the young student. From that time on he was unable to conceive of the spiritual life as anything except the most beautiful of love stories between human and divine persons.

 

The erotic language of the Song of Songs became the lens through which de Sales viewed most of his own and others' religious experience. The actual book about Holy Charity had been growing in him for at least five years by 1610. In February of that year he wrote to his friend Jane de Chantal that he might find time to continue working on the project. The first mention of its existence is discovered in a 1607 letter, also to Jane, in which Francis related to her his excitement that he had drawn up an outline of a book he described as a "biography" of a little known saint, Holy Charity, which was to be twice as long as Teresa of Avila's Life, a popular work newly translated from Spanish into French.

 

No doubt his deep relationship with Jane as well as his other friends nurtured his desire to create this work. Certainly his contact with her and his other spiritual intimates gave him a rich source of reflection and experience to draw upon. We know in fact that a key portion of the Treatise (in Book Nine) is a direct reflection of Jane's own prayer experience. Further, the foundation of the Visitation in June of 1610, followed by his frequent visits to the Gallery House, where he lingered in the garden reflecting on the spiritual life with the sisters, fueled his creative spirit. Much of the Treatise would be written between then and 1614 when the manuscript's rough draft was completed.

 

The Treatise on the Love of God, which lay as an incomplete manuscript on another part of the bishop's desk, would become his most comprehensive work. The Introduction may claim the title of Francis de Sales' most popular piece of writing, but the Treatise represents more accurately the breadth and depth of his theological vision. It integrates Catholic dogmatic, moral, scriptural, philosophical, and mystical insights into one overarching narrative.

 

At root it is the story of a passionate loving God who has created humankind in the divine image and likeness and with the longing to be reciprocally in love with God. The opening sections of the Treatise deal with this cosmic vision. It begins by describing the structure of the human soul using the scholastic distinctions of the day and showing how the love of God reigns supreme over all faculties of the person. The entire argument is couched in the luxurious, tactile language of the Song of Songs. The segments included here employ the metaphor of the kiss to depict the intimate relationship of human and divine.

 

Our Natural Tendency To Love God More Than Anything

 

If human beings possessed the original perfection and original justice that Adam knew when God first made him, they would not only have a tendency to love God more than anything; they would be able to achieve it naturally without any other help from God than the ability he gives each creature to perform actions befitting its nature. [Continue ... ]

 

Love Seeks Union

 

Solomon gives a wonderful description of love between God and a devoted soul; so charming, his treatment of it. The work is called the Song of Songs. With the idyllic love of a chaste shep­herd and modest shepherdess for his theme, he gently lifts our minds to the spiritual romance between ourselves and God — the response of the human heart to God's inspirations. [Continue ... ]

 

The relationship between God and man

 

No sooner does a man take the trouble to give even a little thought to the godhead than his heart thrills with pleasure – a sure sign that God is God of the human heart.  Nothing delights the mind more than the thought of God.  Better to know a little about him than a lot about other things, says Aristotle, prince of philosophers.  Let some calamity befall us, we turn at once to God.  This goes to show that we recognize, though all other things betray us, he alone is faithful; that when danger threatens, only our supreme good can keep us safe and sound. [Continue ... ]

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Language of the Heart

 

For Francis de Sales the world is a world of hearts and of desire, divine desire graciously inclining toward creation and human desire reaching to God. His theological vision has been deemed optimistic in the sense that he affirmed the intrinsic goodness of the person and the human capacity to respond out of that goodness. Not that he ignored human limitation or what the tradition calls the legacy of original sin. He treats this topic at length in the Treatise. But he did have a positive view of human reason and potential and he emphasized the crucial role of human choice in all decisions. All this he would describe as being ultimately constellated in the heart, which he conceived as the dynamic core of the person where God-directedness was located.

 

The human heart mirrors the heart of God, which "breathes" in and out, creating out of love and calling back all creation into itself through love. Like its divine counterpart the heart of a per­son contracts and expands in a motion both receptive and active, drawing God's life into itself through inspiration and pouring out its aspiration through praise and service. The activity of the heart is at the center of the spiritual or devout life as de Sales imaged it.

 

For centuries the language of the heart had been one of the primary ways that the mystical life was given expression. Francis continued and considerably nuanced that tradition, ex­panding the metaphor beyond the human-divine relationship to describe the loving relationship of human hearts that, at the level of their deepest desire, long together to return home to God. Thus friendship, community, and human interactions of all kinds — including preaching, teaching, ministering, and care-taking — were potentially modes of encouraging the shared desire of hearts to become more intimate with the divine lover.

 

The Treatise on the Love of God  therefore dealt not only with the theoretical vision of God's love for creation and creation's reciprocal enamorment of God; it also concerned itself with the means by which love of God might be enhanced or obstructed. In his characteristically concrete and vivid manner, Francis enumerated the ways in which charity was to be practiced. One of the chief ways this was to be accomplished was by prayer.

 

The entirety of Books Six and Seven of the Treatise (there are twelve altogether) is concerned with prayer. In a masterly exposition the Genevan bishop synthesized centuries of wisdom from the church's contemplative tradition and gave it a twist of his own. His description begins with a classically formulated comparison between meditation and contemplation. It might be worthwhile to keep in mind that this clear-cut distinction, which dominated reflection on prayer and the spiritual life up until the middle of the twentieth century, was one that Francis inherited from mystical writers of the centuries just before him. It was not a distinction that was so clearly made earlier in the Christian tradition. Moreover, meditation (described as a primarily methodical process of imaging or thinking about the mysteries of faith of which all are capable) as compared to contemplation (described as a non-discursive enjoyment of the presence of God that is available only to a few select souls) is not normative throughout the entire tradition. Be that as it may, Francis provides his readers with wonderfully colorful depictions of these ways of prayer. He begins by observing that prayer is only one of the two chief ways people show their love for God; the other way is through service. He calls these ways affective and effective love.

 

Mystical theology – another name for prayer

 

We express our love for God chiefly in two ways – spontaneously (affectively), and deliberately (effective; or, as St. Bernard puts it, actively). In the first of these ways we grow fond of God, of what he likes; in the second we serve God, do what he enjoins.  In the first we find God pleasing, in the second he is pleased with us; by the first we become pregnant with virtue, through the second we give birth to it. [Continue ... ]

 

The second way in which meditation and contemplation differ

 

Meditation is a reflection in great detail, point by point, on those things which are capable of touching our hearts; contemplation, however, takes a single concentrated look at what we love – a concentrated reflection that has greater energy, greater power to move the will.  In meditation we tell over to ourselves, as it were, each of God’s several perfections which we see in any given mystery; but in contemplation we add them all together and view them as one. [Continue ... ]

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Discerning the Will of God

 

Books Eight and Nine, along with Books Six and Seven on prayer in its various manifestations (including mystical phenomena), form the nucleus of the Treatise on the Love of God. Book Eight bears the title "Love Compliant" (sometimes translated as "Love of Conformity"). Book Nine is referred to as "Love Submissive" (or "Love of Submission"). Together the books provide in extended discourse the Salesian answer to the question, "How do you know the will of God?" The books take us down a number of lengthy and intricate pathways of thought on the topic, so perhaps it might be best to summarize, in contemporary terms, the gist of de Sales' answer to the question that has occupied Christian thinkers from earliest times down to the present day.

 

Basically he taught that there are "two wills" of God or, rather, since God's own will in essence is unknowable from a human point of view, God's unified will is apprehended by persons in two distinct modes. The first he calls the signified will of God or, in the translation used here, the declared will of God. The second is referred to alternately as the will of God's good pleasure or as God's permissive will. What these refer to are, first, "God's will to be done," known through what God says, directs, and inspires. The individual, carefully discerning in his or her own heart and carried in the arms of the church community with its store of traditional wisdom, seeks to discover this signified will for his or her own life. The person makes choices based upon judgment sifted through the sources at one's disposal: Scripture, church teaching, devotional literature, private and corporate prayer, spiritual direction. Then he or she aligns with that "signified" will by observing and loving the indications received. This volitional response the bishop terms "compliant love."

 

Second is "God's will done," the events, facts, and existing realities of one's immediate situation. This permissive will of God is independent of human control. Where one finds oneself as well as where one feels one ought to be is revelatory of God's will. Especially difficult situations or events — both inner and outer — fall into this category. To follow the will of God in these instances is to exercise the "love of submission" by aligning oneself graciously to whatever is and trusting that God's gracious providence is ultimately at work. What "living between the two wills" means is that the totality of the will of God is not to be found either in individual discernment or in the factual, limiting situations that seem often to thwart that discernment. It is not that one is God's will and the other isn't, but that the human task is to live between those "two wills." To find the will of God is to maintain a creative tension that refuses to limit God to one expression or another. To follow God's will in this way is to live into the immensity and mystery of a God whose fullness cannot be contained in any one aspect of creation.

 

To grasp the subtlety and beauty of what seems to be the germ of de Sales' teaching can be a bit of a task when confronted by some of the texts of the Treatise. There are moments, in discussing God's permissive will especially, when he seems to be saying that the permissive will of God boils down to punishment for the individual sins of humankind. So if suffering is encountered, it is because someone has sinned and God is punishing him or her. However, the very title given to this expression of God's will, permissive, would belie that reading of the text. Being a seventeenth-century figure whose understanding of political, social, medical, and scientific theory was definitely not the same as ours, Francis would have seen poverty or hunger as part of God's providence, or as part of the human condition which is marred by the taint of original sin. Thus it is "God's will" that these conditions exist only to the extent that God allowed free human choice and, in the Fall, that choice was exercised and thus became part of what is encountered in the human condition from that time forward. But in reading the text one might get the impression that God punishes individual persons for specific sins by sending sorrow and misery their way. A more charitable and expansive reading of the text is required, for in our day the question of evil and suffering is differently posed. We tend to ask why bad things happen to good people. And we tend to assume that, with more sophisticated technology and more just economic and political structures in place, the evil and suffering that plague humanity would be reduced.

 

While it is well beyond the scope of this discussion fully to engage these issues in their contemporary form, I think the Salesian voice can be an edifying contribution to the general dialogue. What Francis is concerned with here is balancing human choice, creativity, and activity with the inevitable limits that constantly arise. We find ourselves between the immense reaches of our deepest dreams and hopes, which we rightly connect with God's own dreaming and hoping, and all that seems to negate, crush, or reverse them. What Francis seems to be saying is that God's gracious loving presence is in all of it, somehow accompanying us, somehow sustaining us. God is found in our well-laid plans and heroic undertakings as well as in disappointment, resistance, and seemingly random losses. The point of Books Eight and Nine is to explore the human response to both these wills. We must be willing to marshall all our faculties to respond energetically to God's signified will, and willing also to surrender graciously to the permissive will of God.

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Love Compliant: Union of the Will with God's Declared Will

 

Initially, de Sales wrestles with the nature of discernment, especially the various "inspirations" that feed into one's ultimate decision-making process as well as the freedom with which the process of conscientious discernment should be undertaken.

 

How to comply with God’s will declared by inspirations; their various kinds

 

The sun’s rays give both light and warmth together.  Inspiration is a ray of grace bringing light and warmth to our hearts: light to show us what is good; warmth to give us energy to go after it.  The Holy Spirit is infinite light; he is the living breath we call inspiration.  Through his Spirit God breathes into us, inspires us with the desires or intentions of his heart. [Continue ...]

 

A short way of knowing God’s will

 

God’s will is made known to us, says St. Basil, by what he disposes, what he commands.  This calls for no deliberation on our part; we simply carry out God’s orders.  In everything else, however, we are perfectly free to make our own choice of what seems good – though it is not a question of doing everything that is permissible, but only such things as are suitable.  To discover exactly what is appropriate, St. Basil concludes, we are to take the advice of a prudent spiritual director. [Continue ...]

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Love Submissive: Union of the Human Will with God's Permissive Will

 

Francis treats in this ninth book of the unwanted and unbidden events that cross one's path in life and of how he sees them as part of God's gracious will. He extends his discussion beyond exterior events to include interior difficulties as well. Always he suggests a flexible, nonattached attitude willing to plumb the depths and diversity of experience to find there the traces of God's love.

 

Union of human will with the divine permissive will 

 

Sin excepted, nothing happens but by God’s will – by a positive or permissive will which no one can obstruct, which is known only by its results.  These events, when they occur, show us that God has willed and planned them. [Continue ... ]

 

Trials are the chief source of union between the human will and God’s permissive will

 

There is nothing attractive about trials in themselves; only when seen as coming form providence, enjoined by God’s will, are they infinitely lovable.  On the ground Moses’ staff was a frightful serpent; in his hand it was a miraculous wand (cf. Ex. 7).  Trials, in themselves, are dreadful; seen as part of God’s will, they are attractive, delightful. [Continue ... ]

 

Union of our wills with God’s permissive will in the difficulties of the spiritual life – by deference

 

Love of the cross leads us to go out of our way to meet unpleasant things – fasting, vigils, hair shirts, and other bodily mortifications; it makes us give up pleasures, honours, riches.  God finds the love behind these practices most attractive.  [Continue ... ]

 

Union of our wills with God’s permissive will – by disinterested love

 

 Deference means that we prefer God’s will to all else, though we know a great attraction to many other things.  Disinterestedness is a stage higher – it means that we are lovingly attracted to a thing only because we see God’s will in it; nothing else interests the unencumbered heart, when God’s will makes itself felt. [Continue ... ]

 

Calvary is the Mount of Lovers

 

Frances de Sales closes his lengthy manuscript by returning to the theme of hearts that so dominated the book's earlier segments. In fact, the transformation of the human heart by the heart of the divine has been the underlying subject of the entire work. He returns too, although implicitly, to a theme repeated explicitly in the Introduction to the Devout Life, the cry of "Live Jesus!" Francis ends this exposition on the "birth, progress, decay, operations, properties, advantages, and excellence" of divine love by taking us to Mount Calvary where Jesus died, the mount of lovers, as he calls it. It is there that the heart of Jesus is dis­cerned, that heart into which all human hearts must be formed in order for God's fullest love to be apprehended. For Jesus' heart is the mediator between divine and human hearts. Gentle and humble, yet radically God-directed, that heart as fully human was utterly responsive and compliant to its divine lover. So too must all other hearts be.

 

Calvary – love’s apprenticeship

 

And now, to end my book at last … Our Lord’s passion and death form the sweetest, strongest motive capable of quickening our hearts in this life.

In heaven too, next to the vision of God’s essential goodness, our Saviour’s death will be the most potent source of rapture for the saints. [Continue…]

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