As I keep reading Saint Francis de Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life, I would like to share a few aspects of this saint’s life story and a couple of my “along the way“ type of meditations upon them, which came to my mind while fleshing out this little portray.
Everything that follows is solely meant to encourage the one who reads it, whether Catholic or Protestant or neither nor, – meant to build up and not to tear down, because this is the very reason why we look to the lives of the saints and contemplate them: for our encouragement. And Saint Francis de Sales was, by all accounts, great at encouraging others. To give helpful exhortations to all, who may come and be his reader, is the principal spirit of his Introduction to the Devout Life.
Saint Francis de Sales was born in 1567 in Savoy, France, and became the bishop of Geneva in 1602, remaining a gentle and wise Shepherd of the Church until his death in 1622. 255 years later, Pope Pius IX declared him “Doctor of the Church“, a title of honor given to all saints whose studies and writings have greatly benefited the Universal Church in refining her understanding of the deposit and the practice of faith. According to the traditional liturgical calendar, his feast day is celebrated on the 29th January.
“The young nobleman‘s education was that of the youths of his class in the last years of the sixteenth century. His mother taught him his prayers and catechism. He made his first studies near his native place at the college of Annecy in Savoie; later, under the Jesuits in Paris. To the study of rhetoric and philosophy, he added that of theology, Scripture and Hebrew. At the age of twenty, the young man, handsome, cultured, and courtly, the perfect type of the gentleman of his time, went to Italy and heard the lectures of the famous Pancirola, in the law school of the University of Padua. The world smiled before him, pleasure beckoned him on, the highest honors of the State were dangled before his eyes. He made hosts of friends by his refined manners, his kindly humor, his eloquence, his wit, his unfailing kindness and his all-winning gentleness and sweetness. He made enemies, alas, by his uncompromising fidelity to the principles of his faith, his scorn of all that was base, his loyalty to the standards of honor and purity he had learnt in the ancestral home. His enemies, thinking no doubt they might terrify him from the paths of virtue from which they could not wheedle him, set upon him to cow him into submission. But the gentle Francis de Sales was not to be cowed by threat or blow, and when attacked by a band of assailants he whipped out his rapier and drove his enemies in headlong flight through the tortuous streets of old Padua. Gentle Francis de Sales! Yes, in truth. But he won the right to be so called because he had disciplined a naturally fiery temperament with the curb and bit of Christian self-control. (…) If ever there was a priestly soul, it was that of Francis de Sales. His life was stainless. His character was balanced. His intellectual gifts were of a high order, his mental vision clear, his fancy playful, his imagination creative, his learning extensive. His love of God burned like a poetic flame; it was tender and childlike; it was the very breath of his apostolate. With an almost feminine tenderness, he loved all men and because he loved them he wished all to know and to love God. But he was strong. In his strength, he was tolerant of men‘s weaknesses, of their peculiarities, their narrow views, their wims, their oddities, their ill-founded judgments, their inconsistencies and their faults, provided only, these did not essentially interfere with their solemn obligations towards God. (…) When he first preached to the mountain villages of the Chablais, his simple popular eloquence, full of parables, homely allusions and illustrations, won all hearts. He spoke to the people and for their needs.“
St. Francis de Sales, Philothea or An Introduction to the Devout Life, TAN Classics, p. xx-xxi
Such, the Jesuit priest John C. Reville introduces Saint Francis de Sales to us in his preface to a 1942 publication of the saint‘s famous Introduction à la Vie Dévote, a popular classic in Catholic spiritual literature. This book was published in several slightly different editions troughout Saint Francis de Sales‘ lifetime. Originally, the various chapters of the book were letters he sent to a female cousin of his, who was entering marriage – in the public version adressed as Philothea, the friend of God. It was his intention to give her spiritual advise concerning her resolution to lead a devout life, in respect to prayer, the sacraments, the practice of virtues, and on how to handle temptations along the way.
Besides his constant effort to give good counsel to Catholic laymen and laywomen, his heart for people of all social classes, Saint Francis de Sales labored to reach those in the Swiss cities and countryside, who had left the Catholic faith for Calvinism, who adhered to the erroneous teachings of John Calvin, his fellow countryman of French descendance, who had cut off parts of the Church from union with the Church of Rome. Calvin had, influenced by Luther, Zwingli, and Melanchthon, systematized so-called “Reformation theology“ and given it his very own spin in his Institutio Christianae Religionis, and had even founded an academy for the continuation and promulgation of his theology in Geneva in 1559. Saint Francis de Sales once, as a young student in Paris, lived through his very own personal struggle with Calvinism, before he later tried to win back the hearts and minds of the Calvinists with treatises and preaching apt to refute their misguided and misguiding principles.
One of the theological debates of the day was the question of “predestination“. A certain type of “predestination“ doctrine was a key component of Calvinism spreading in the French-speaking world during the 16th century, and as a young man, Saint Francis de Sales was acquainted with and strongly influenced by the debates surrounding it.
In short, Calvin‘s position was that, from the beginning of the world, there would exist a “double predestination“ concerning two groups of people: the elect, predestined to heaven, and the damned, predestined to hell. For Calvin (and for many Protestant theologians in his wake), the doctrine of salvation by grace and this doctrine of an unalterable pre-determination of any man to a path leading to one or the other destination, heaven or hell, were two sides of one and the same coin. The notion of the “Reformation“ theologians of being saved “by grace alone“ – without any willful contribution or effort on man‘s part, the distorted view of a merely outward, sort of distant, “grace“ of God declaring the sinner “righteous“ on behalf of Christ‘s merits, instead of God’s grace truly reaching intimately into man‘s very being to sanctify him from the inside out, to make him righteous, to actively change him into the likeness of Christ, so that man, cooperating with God‘s grace, may be made worthy of partaking in the resurrection of the just – all facets of the Protestant understanding of “sola gratia“ somehow inevitably led to this conclusion: If those, who are saved, are saved by (this kind of) “grace alone“ (and by “faith alone“ – understood mostly as giving assent to propositions, more than practicing obedience towards the Word Himself, and seen as something that can sustain itself without or even against reason), then it seems to be God‘s somewhat arbitrary choice to whom the grace of faith is handed at any lucky moment in time. None and nothing man does, has any effect upon God‘s choice, who has already determined at the beginning of all creation, who will enjoy this “gift“. The flipside is, that some, then, are predestined – by “God‘s sovereign will“ – from before their first breath to eternal damnation and separation from God, as if even specifically created for that purpose of suffering the ultimate exile and unredeemable pain. This is what it comes down to in the end. While, contrary to that, in Sacred Scripture, we read instead, in Saint Paul’s letter to Saint Timothy, that God “will have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth“ (1 Timothy 2: 4). And Saint James the Apostle reminds the faithful that “every best gift, and every perfect gift“ comes down “from the Father of lights, with whom there is no change, nor shadow of alteration“ (James 1: 17), just as Saint John the Apostle declares “that God is light, and in him there is no darkness“ (1 John 1: 5).
It came about then, that the young Saint Francis de Sales, his mind and heart influenced by the gloomy Calvinist air sweeping through central Europe, suffered through two agonizing months believing that he himself was a member of the crowd predestined to go to hell.
A man as gentle, as sweet, as charming, and as pure in heart, as he on all accounts more and more became throughout his life by God‘s grace, he must have had a high level of sensitivity as his natural constitution. If a sensitive soul encounters the daunting possibility of man‘s freedom going astray and leading one to all things and places opposed to what is true, and good, and beautiful, and in the end into the reality which is called by the name of “hell“, this soul can already become frightful and discouraged, because the extent of our personal responsibility and the many dangers along our way, that could lead us into misusing the freedom entrusted to us, truly is frightening – yet people of a different temperament, of a more choleric nature for example, might take the awareness of this possibility as a strong incentive that spurs them on in a good way. But then, if and when a sensitive soul is confronted with the idea that it is not only possible that a man‘s chosen path can lead to hell, but that for some it is an already certain actuality, certain even before their birth, that their predestined path will lead them there, things will be even worse. Sensitive souls can easily become spiritual hypochondriacs: If you tell them that a certain spiritual disease exists, they are experts in convincing themselves, that they themselves most definitely have it. Sensitivity is a certain ability to perceive everything sharply, deeply and almost like under a magnifying glass. Under a magnifying glass, doubt can become certainty.
Saint Francis de Sales suffered two months of utter despair, because the idea that he is one of those, who are unchangeably destined to end up in hell, separated from God forever, had transfixed his mind and heart completely. He fell into a deep depression completely paralyzing him, shackling him to his bed – he experienced a real spiritual bondage, resembling one of the many lame men we read about in the gospels, who were in need of the Messiah, the great Physician, to be ever able to walk again.
In his despair, but mixed with the hope, the faith, that is always saving us and that prevents us from despairing completely, he finally turned to the Messiah‘s Mother and her merciful eyes and hands, and she untied the knots of anguish. It was late December when he got up from his mattress, entered a church in Paris, knelt down at an altar dedicated to Mary and prayed the “Memorare prayer“, which many attribute in its origin to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, bringing his suffering to her with trust.
“Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary,
Memorare prayer
that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection,
implored your help, or sought your intercession,
was left unaided.
Inspired by this confidence,
I fly unto you, O Virgin of virgins, my Mother.
To you do I come, before you I stand, sinful and sorrowful.
O Mother of the Word Incarnate,
despise not my petitions,
but in your mercy, hear and answer me.
Amen.“
And in this way, he was delivered from his spiritual infirmity. He could afterwards believe and trust again that God is love and that “all things work together unto good“ for “them that love God“ and “are called to be saints“ (Romans 8: 28).
And what is meant by this calling? Holy Spirit and all saints, help us understand and help us remember… It seems to be the call with which a Father calls his son or his daughter to come to Him, calls the soul, who is always alive to Him, to draw near to Him through the merits of Christ, the Father‘s perfect Son, who dispeled the curse of Adam for all of humanity on the cross and in his resurrection, who had come into the world to reclaim all things, in heaven and on earth, as the sole property of His Father, disarming Satan, the thief, who comes only “to steal, and to kill, and to destroy“ (John 10: 10). It is, then, not some kind of disinterested and arbitrary pronouncing someone living or dead, of speaking yes to some and no to others, of giving some of us fish to eat and others in our midst only stones. It was revealed to Israel and to us through the Church that God is a person or rather a three-in-one person, not an idea, and not a principle. Throughout salvation history and from the first to the last verse of the Sacred Scriptures, God reveals Himself to us as a God who does act upon us and reacts to us and our actions – he loves us, as a father loves his son or his daughter, and he chastises us, as a father chastises his son or his daughter, and he calls us upward, as a father teaching his son or his daughter to stand up from the ground and walk. He is the God of covenants, of committed, with promises unto death verified, relationships – making a covenant with all of humanity in Noah never to be revoked again, making an everlasting covenant with a specific people, the people of Israel, in Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, deepening the covenant in Moses and demanding perfection of His people, like a father would wish perfection for his son or his daughter, and ever deepening this covenant and fulfilling all His promises in His very own Son, the Word made flesh and the Lamb without blemish offering Himself up in perfect obedience – deepening it to the depth of our bones and the bare grounds of our souls, and extending this height of all grace and intimacy to all nations, to whomever shall respond to the call to enter the kingdom of God.
On the opposing end, it seems to be the hallmark of any pagan religion to make people suffer under deities that are a mixed bag, a mixture of (false) light and darkness. The gods and goddesses of the pagans are like schizophrenic despots, unable to love – Scripture and tradition affirm to us, that ultimately they are demons living out their vices and their perverted desire to be worshipped in place of God. The god made into the image of a theology gone off the rails resembles the false gods of the pagans more than he reflects the one true God, the God of Israel. Some kind of poisonous powder that shimmers in a shriekingly awful color, maybe even held in a bottle with a warning sign on it, we can easily recognize as poison – and we will not use it to bake with it our daily bread that shall nourish us. But if the poison should, in a masterpiece of deception, look like salt and be given to us in a bottle, that deceivingly looks like any other bottle wherein salt is kept, we might take it for the wholesome ingredient which it is not. And that could be why the Church has always fought each and every heresy with high alert and vehemence, and why she, as our Mother, summons us to humbly submit ourselves to Her, whose salted bread is healthy and good for growth, keeping ourselves from baking our own bread apart from Her. The origin of all the follies we humans get entangled in is pride, of which each and everyone of us has more than enough, and the source of all wisdom we mere mortals will ever enjoy is humility, of which each and everyone of us always has too little. And no one is wise alone, but the Church as a collective body with Christ, with divine Wisdom Himself, as its Head, by the grace of God is wise, insofar as the Body yields to the Head. And even if someone was a trained physician, he would most likely need to go see a fellow physician, if he found himself sick – he cannot diagnose and help himself.
Saint Francis de Sales overcoming his crisis actually seems to paint a perfect example of how God‘s grace, coming down to us through his handmaid Mary, his chosen vessel, and man‘s active will – his hope – work together, and cooperate for a man‘s good end. There are, and this is one side of the coin of our existence, evil spirits keeping men in all types of spiritual bondages, but there is, and this is the other and the winning side of the coin, the Father of lights with his army of angels reaching down from heaven to our aid and for our liberation. Faith and hope in Him, who is all good, and just, and merciful, are the tiny little ingredients that we need to bring into the batch of our medicine – or at least cry out for with hopeful despair hoping to receive them so we can give them back to Him, like the blind man crying “Son of David, have mercy on me“. Though being blind, he sees that Jesus of Nazareth is the one, the Messiah from above, who alone can deliver him from his blindness. Or let us, if nothing else is possible, be like the sick woman, who fearful and frightened stretched out her hand to touch the hem of the Messiah‘s garment to be healed, not daring to speak to Him or come any closer to Him, but hopeful that the fringes of His royal robe are already more than enough to free her from her disease. Faith and hope are like the five small loaves of bread and the two small fish that the boy gives to Christ, who then does the great miracle: whatever we can give to God, we offer Him, hoping in Him, even if it is only our pain, suffering, and despair that we can bring – yet as long as we still turn to Him, it‘s not over and done, no matter how dark and tumultous the raging sea around us: His saving rope can still and will catch us and draw us towards Him and out of the depth of our misery. As Saint Paul writes to all the believers at the city of Rome and to every member of the Church everafter:
„For you have not received the spirit of bondage again in fear; but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons, whereby we cry: Abba (Father). (…) If God be for us, who is against us? He that spared not even his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how hath he not also, with him, given us all things? Who shall accuse against the elect of God? God that justifieth. Who is he that shall condemn? Christ Jesus that died, yea that is risen also again; who is at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us. Who then shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation? or distress? or famine? or nakedness? or danger? or persecution? or the sword? (…) But in all these things we overcome, because of him that hath loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor might, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.“
Romans 8: 31-39
After he had gone through doubts and afflictions himself, it was then part of Saint Francis de Sales‘ mission to instruct the ignorant, to counsel the doubtful and to comfort the afflicted, to highly practice these from among the seven spiritual works of mercy the Church knows of.
His approach in that, as one finds it reflected in the Introduction to the Devout Life, was a personal, relational one, not one of strict principles applied to each and everyone in each and every situation. Quite at the beginning, he tells Philothea:
“In the creation God commanded the plants of the earth to bring forth fruit, each after its kind; and in a similar way He commands Christians, who are the living plants of His Church, to bring forth the fruits of devotion, each according to his calling and vocation. There is a different practice of devotion for the gentleman and the mechanic; for the prince and the servant; for the wife, the maiden, and the widow; and still further, the practice of devotion must be adapted to the capabilities, the engagements, and the duties of each individual. It would not do were the Bishop to adopt a Carthusian solitude, or if the father of a family refused like the Capuchins to save money; if the artisan spent his whole time in church like the professed religious; or the latter were to expose himself to all manner of society in his neighbor‘s behalf as the Bishop must do. Such devotion would be inconsistent and ridiculous. Yet this kind of mistake is not unfrequently made, and the world being either not able, or not willing, to distinguish between true devotion and the indiscretion of false devotees, condemns that devotion which nevertheless has no share in these inconsistencies.
St. Francis de Sales, Philothea or An Introduction to the Devout Life, TAN Classics, p. 9-10
No, my Philothea, true devotion hinders no one, but rather it perfects everything, and whenever it is out of keeping with any person‘s legitimate vocation, it must be spurious. Aristotle says that the bee extracts honey from the flowers without injuring them, leaving them as fresh and whole as she finds them; but true devotion does still better, for it not only hinders no duty or vocation, but on the contrary it adorns and purifies them. Throw precious stones into honey, and the natural color of each will wax more brilliant; and so every individual adorns his vocation by following it with devotion; domestic peace is assured, conjugal love strengthened, fidelity to our sovereign more closely treasured, and all occupations rendered more acceptable and agreeable.
It is not merely an error but a heresy to suppose that a devout life is necessarily banished from the soldier‘s camp, the merchant‘s shop, the prince‘s court, or the domestic hearth. This we may learn from the example of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, David, Job, Tobias, Sarah, Rebecca, and Judith in the Old Dispensation and in the New from St. Joseph, Lydia and St. Crispin in their trades; from St. Anne, St. Martha, St. Monica, Aquila and Priscilla in their households; Cornelius, St. Sebastian and St. Maurice in their military charges; and from Constantine, St. Helena, St. Louis, and St. Edward, on their thrones. (…) Wheresoever we may be, we may and should aim at a life of perfect devotion.“
But what is that “perfect devotion“ which we shall seek and aim at?
„True, living devotion, my Philothea, implies the love of God. Indeed it is itself a true love of Him in the highest form, for whereas divine love enlightening our soul is called Grace, and makes us pleasing in His sight; so giving us power to do good, it is called Charity; and when it reaches that point of perfection wherein it not only causes us to do good, but to do it earnestly, frequently, and readily, then it is called Devotion. (…) In short, devotion is spiritual agility and vivacity, by means of which charity works in us, or we in her, with love and readiness; and as charity leads us to obey and fulfill all God‘s commandments, so devotion leads us to obey them with promptitude and diligence. (…)
St. Francis de Sales, Philothea or An Introduction to the Devout Life, TAN Classics, p. 4-5
In truth, charity and devotion differ no further than flame and fire, for charity is a spiritual fire which when it flames brightly, becomes devotion; and devotion adds to the fire of charity a flame which renders it ready, active, and diligent, not only in keeping His commandments, but in carrying out His heavenly inspirations and counsels of perfection.
Saint Francis de Sales, pray for us!