ARIAS, FRANCISCO. — Ascetic writer, born in Seville in 1533, entered the Society of Jesus in 1561, already a priest and graduate of the University of Alcalá, died in Seville on 23 May 1605.
He published in Valencia (1588), under the common title *Apparecchio spirituale*, a series of fairly personal treatises on spiritual progress, distrust of self, prayer (this treatise especially recommended by St. Francis de Sales to Philothea), the presence of God, mortification, imitation of the Blessed Virgin, together with a rosary of 50 mysteries imitated from Blosius. More extensive, though also more prolix, is his *Libro de la Imitación de Cristo Nuestro Señor* (3 vols., Seville 1591–1602); in the first volume he treats of the goods we possess in Christ; in the second and third of the virtues of which He is the exemplar. These works have been widely translated and reprinted up to the 19th century.