Francis de Sales, Saint

FRANCIS DE SALES, Saint. - Bishop of Geneva, Doctor of the Church, b. at Thorens (ancient duchy of Savoy) on 21 Aug. 1567, d. at Lyon on 28 Dec. 1622.

I. LIFE

The firstborn of Francis of Sales, lord of Boisy, and of Francesca of Sionnax, both belonging to the ancient Savoyard nobility, he received his first education at home, from a priest tutor, and then at the nearby Colleges of La Roche (1573) and Annecy (1573). Although destined by his father for the magistracy, at the age of eleven he received, at his own request, the clerical tonsure. Sent to complete his studies in Paris (1582), he attended there the courses of rhetoric and philosophy at the College of Clermont, run by the Jesuits. By his own inclination, he also devoted himself to theological studies. In the last years of his stay in Paris, between 1585 and 1588, he underwent a long spiritual trial, which originated from intense reflection on Predestination. Reduced to extreme anguish, to the point of despairing of his eternal salvation, he freed himself from it by adhering to Molinist doctrine.

In the autumn of 1588 he left Paris and, after a brief stay with his family, at the beginning of 1589 he went to Padua, to study law at that University, especially under the celebrated Guido Panciroli; from whom, at the end, he received the doctoral cap with a public eulogy (Sept. 5, 1592). He also continued in that period his beloved sacred studies and advanced in the ascetic life, under the guidance of the Jesuit Antonio Possevino. Having returned to his homeland, he was appointed advocate of the Senate of Chambéry.

But F., resolved to embrace the ecclesiastical state, when, through the efforts of others, he obtained the provostship of the Chapter of Annecy, set himself decisively on that path, overcoming his father's opposition. On June 12, 1593, at Annecy, he received the subdiaconate, and on Dec. 18 following the diaconate and the priesthood. After a few months, he offered himself to his bishop Msgr. Claude de Granier (of Geneva but then residing at Annecy) for an apostolic mission urged by the Duke of Savoy Charles Emmanuel I: to bring back to the Catholic faith the Chablais, a country of 30,000 inhabitants, which some decades earlier had passed to Calvinism. In Sept. 1594, F. began to travel through it preaching and instructing; but for a long time he found almost no hearers, so that he had to entrust his word to the distribution of broadsheets. Left alone, during the first three years of the mission, amid the apparent disinterest of the duke, whom he visited in vain at Turin in Oct. 1596, he persevered firmly in the work, despite the extreme scarcity of fruits, the insistent appeals of his family and the repeated criminal attempts on his person.

He also had to conduct a long negotiation for the sending of some other missionaries into the country and to secure their maintenance from the revenues of ecclesiastical property, held by the Knights of Sts. Maurice and Lazarus. But at last, after some isolated conversions of lords and important personages, the return of the Chablais to Catholicism, also because of the changed political conditions following the peace between Savoy and France (1598), began to spread rapidly. In a solemn ceremony, celebrated at Thorens in the presence of a papal legate and the Duke of Savoy, there were several thousand public abjurations (the figure of 25,000 conversions was given by the Saint himself, in a report of 1603 to the Pope).

Meanwhile, in the summer of 1597, F. had been elected coadjutor bishop of Geneva; and at the end of 1598 he was sent on diocesan business to Rome, where he stayed from Jan. to Apr. 1599, also triumphantly passing the canonical examination for the episcopate in the presence of Clement VIII and Bellarmine. Having returned to Annecy, he devoted himself mainly for another two years to consolidating the religious state of the Chablais. In 1602 he was sent by his bishop to Paris, to negotiate the reestablishment of the Catholic parishes in the country of Gex, which had passed from the dominion of the Genevans to the sovereignty of France. During that stay, which lasted eight months, he met some great religious souls, in particular frequenting the circle of Madame Acarie, the future Mary of the Incarnation, whose confessor he became. He preached before the court and King Henry IV, as well as in numerous churches and monasteries. Among the aristocratic and cultured society of Paris, he was then able to take the measure of the aspirations of many souls, of whom he would become an incomparable master of the spirit, with his teaching on the possibility of practicing even in the world the "devout life."

Having set out again for Annecy toward the end of Sept. 1602, during the journey he learned of the death of his bishop; whom he succeeded in the see of Geneva, being consecrated on Dec. 8 and making his entry into Annecy on the 14th following. The diocese, made up of several provinces, partly under the sovereignty of the Duke of Savoy, partly under that of France (Bugey and Gex), was vast and laid waste by the recent religious innovations. Threats and reprisals against Catholics were exercised by neighboring Calvinist Geneva, of which the bishop was by then reduced to bearing only the title. Added to this were the ruins accumulated by wars and religious hatred, the destitution of the populations, the poverty of the clergy. F., who had made a donation of his patrimony and had at his disposal only the scanty revenues of the diocese, lived in a cramped house, with barely a few household members.

He devoted particular care to the formation of the clergy and the instruction of the people, to whom he preached incessantly and personally conducted the Sunday catechisms. He reorganized the diocese, reconstituting numerous parishes, convoking annual synods, carrying out the pastoral visitation even of the most inaccessible places. Frequently called to preach elsewhere, on the occasion of the Lenten sermons held at Dijon in 1604 he met the baroness Jeanne Françoise Frémyot de Chantal, who had recently been widowed, with whom in 1610 he would found the Order of the Visitation. Meanwhile he devoted himself to preparing her through a direction, exercised in large part through correspondence.

He returned to Paris, on the occasion of the marriage negotiations between the prince of Piedmont and Christine of France, sister of Louis XIII; and he stayed there from Oct. 1618 to Sept. 1619, in the retinue of the prince cardinal of Savoy, much sought after for his preaching (in that period he delivered no fewer than 365 discourses) and for spiritual direction. Venerated by illustrious personages — among the many, by Vincent de Paul and Mother Angelica Arnauld, abbess of Port-Royal — he refused, as already during his previous stay, substantial benefices and the coadjutorship of Paris, offered to him to keep him in France. Having returned to his diocese, he obtained in 1620 that his brother John Francis be elected his coadjutor with the title of bishop of Chalcedon. In Nov. 1622, although only recently recovered from a serious illness, he received from the Duke of Savoy the order to accompany him on his journey to France, where he was going to visit Louis XIII. He set out from Annecy, clearly foreseeing his approaching death, after having dictated his will and taken leave of everyone. He went first to Avignon, where the sovereigns met, and then in the retinue of the two united courts, to Lyon, where he spent the last month: on Dec. 11 he conferred for the last time with Mother de Chantal. On the 27th, in the afternoon, he was struck by apoplexy; and he died on the 28th, toward eight in the evening. The body was solemnly transported, in Jan. 1625, to Annecy, and buried in the church of the Visitation. F. of S. was beatified on Dec. 28, 1661, and canonized on Apr. 19, 1665; declared Doctor of the Church, on July 7, 1877. Pius XI assigned him as patron of Catholic journalists and writers (encyclical Rerum omnium, Jan. 26, 1923). Feast on Jan. 29.

Nello Vian

II. DOCTRINE

In the history of French literature, St. Francis de Sales occupies a primary place for his prose, so rich in images, comparisons, and allegories, so luminous with serene joy, so fresh and at the same time composite in its sweetness and in its very stylistic preciousness. St. Francis de Sales was not a "thinker" in the usual sense of the word: almost all of his vast activity as a writer was born occasionally as a written defense of his wonderful work as a refined and persuasive preacher. Thus the Controverses, composed during his mission in the Chablais, were nothing but loose sheets that were posted in the squares and streets; and yet they have a not negligible importance for the conceptual determination of the "notes" of the Church: in the face of Protestant theory he reaffirms the uniqueness, the sanctity, and the catholicity of the Church, and for the recognition of the truth of the Catholic creed, he determines the rules of application: beyond natural reason and miracles, Sacred Scripture, apostolic tradition, the Holy Fathers, the Councils, and the Pope, whom he does not hesitate to call the "confirmateur infallible" of truth. Also the Sermons (of extreme clarity), the Lettre sur la prédication, his various opuscules, the very rich epistolary, and also Les vray entretiens spirituels (conversations held by Francis with the Daughters of the Visitation and written down by them) and La défense de l'estendart de la Ste-Croix

(where it is specified how, although absolute honor is due to God, a relative honor is admitted to the Cross of Christ) are the occasional fruit (but no less savory for that) of his apostolic activity. His two masterpieces, on the other hand, have an organic structure: the Introduction à la vie dévote (originating from the spiritual direction of Mme De Charmoisy, published for the first time in Lyon in 1600) and the Traité de l'amour de Dieu (conceived as a true theological "treatise," and later urged on by Chantal; it too was published in Lyon in 1616); indeed the latter has all the profound complexity of a work of thought.

Affable, amiable, ready to forgive, to be accommodating, to understand the difficulties of life and the weaknesses of man, rich in great douceur for everything that is not sin or an occasion of sin, Francis de Sales created a new "type" of devotion. Certain sources of Christian optimism undoubtedly directed his mentality and his very feeling: the Combattimento spirituale attributed to Scupoli, the "benignism" of St. Philip Neri, the Christian humanism of a Possevino, and the devotio moderna itself. But Francis de Sales has his own incomparable charm in the way he presents the bouquet of the flowers of the devotional tradition. Naturally the Saint's delicacy is not weakness: his devotional program loves not femelles souls but vigorous and independent ones: the "femininity" of the soul disturbs and unsettles the heart and distracts it from loving prayer toward God, and ends by suffocating complete resignation and the perfect death of self-love; gentleness and sweetness must never, for St. Francis de Sales, fall into excessive imaginativeness and into sadness and melancholy, but must instead always remain on a plane of serene and virile devotion.

Salesian optimism is decisively Christocentric: immense, indeed infinite, are the means of salvation that man has inherited from the death of Jesus. Hence salvation is open in any social condition (provided it is lawful, of course). As has been rightly noted, the Saint's revolutionary novelty was that of opening the highest exercises of the contemplative religious life also to those who live in the world: to those who live in domestic life or in public employments is given the possibility of sanctification, indeed of a perfect devout life, which is not content with the normal honest life but surpasses it, straining toward sanctity itself, toward the perfection of charity; to all it is granted to sanctify themselves while living in the world, without however receiving "aucune humeur mondaine": the soul, as he wrote on the day of St. Magdalene in 1600 in the preface to the Introduction à la vie dévote, can find the sources of a sweet piety amid the bitter waves of this century. Hence each state of life must practice some specific virtue: different are the virtues of a priest, different those of a prince or a soldier, different again those of a wife and of a widow: all must have all the virtues, but each must have in an eminent way those specific to his own kind of life. To all, however, must be familiar the Sacrament of Confession, hatred for grave sin, detachment from affection for venial sin and for useless or dangerous things, control of the will, a simple and affectionate adornment, and above all frequent Communion (and when there is a specific disposition, even daily); this, like Mithridates' counter-poison which strengthened his own body so much as to prevent a true poisoning when, a prisoner of the Romans, he felt like killing himself, is the sure antidote against the poisoning of sin and of every bad affection (the comparison is naturally the Saint's and is part of his demonstrative method, as in so many other comparisons). Prayer is not only a means, but an end to which all the other practices of the interior life are subordinate; prayer (which is the same as love) is a voluntary adherence to the mystery of sanctifying Grace (Bremond).

St. Francis de Sales, having started from a vision of life of frank ascetic flavor (the deposit of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises is very notable), had initially had a certain suspicion of mystical illuminations; later, while around 1610 he was working on the Traité de l'amour de Dieu, he felt the need to deepen the problem of mystical prayer: and it was the Visitandines whom he directed who influenced him on this fundamental theme of the life of the soul; naturally the answer came from his interior journey and from the meditation of the Spanish and Italian mystics (from St. Teresa going back to St. Catherine of Genoa and including various mystics of the Low Countries. He had begun to speak of L. of Granada in 1604; St. Teresa had initially interested him little on a mystical plane. The prodrome of his evolution can be placed in 1604 when he meets Chantal at Dijon, but, in any case, it does not appear that until 1610 he had left the ordinary way of devotion [A. Lluima]). St. Francis de Sales came to accept the whole mystical scale, including the prayer of quiet: in the latter, for the Saint, the will operates with a very simple quieting to the divine will and without any other desire than to stand under the divine gaze as it will please God Himself: this quiet is devoid of any interest; the powers of the soul feel no contentment in it, nor does the will, except in the joy of having no joy for love of the divine will: the highest step of ecstasy is that of not having the will in one's own contentment but in God's, and of not having contentment in one's own will but in God's. And it is well known how toward the end of the 17th century, during the anti-Quietist battle, certain propositions of St. Francis de Sales were judged Quietistic (for example, by Bossuet); but in reality St. Francis de Sales had never been a Quietist precisely because he had not rejected the virtues of hope and charity during every mystical stage. St. Francis de Sales was accused (also by Bossuet) of having written that the natural love of God arrived by itself at supernatural love; but in reality, for St. F. de S., the natural propensity toward the love of God is not an affection for loving God, precisely because the soul disposes itself to be justified only negatively, rejecting the obstacles that cut off its path and placing man at the point where he can be tout gratuitement justified by Grace (Pernin). It should not be forgotten, however, that in the problem of predestination F. is a Molinist and therefore believes that it proceeds from God post praevia merita (in this regard, on 28 Sept. 1618 he congratulated Lessius, because he upheld the theory of election to glory following the foreknowledge of merits, a theory which is, says St. F., confirmed by the antiquity, the sweetness and the authority of Holy Scripture, and which is more worthy — than any other doctrine — of divine mercy and goodness: cf. on this X.-M. Le Bachelet, Prédestination et grâce efficace, II, Louvain 1931, p. 321 ff.).

The doctrinal work of the Saint is not only a milestone in the history of Christian spirituality, but also of specifically dogmatic-mystical theology: his theology of love, his loving fear that does not want the terror of God, the declared possibility of accepting suffering without anger only in the love of Christ, his own conscious favor toward the Scotist tendency in the problem of the Incarnation (the Word would have become incarnate even if man had not sinned) have brought back into the modern world, upheaved by rigid and absurd Calvinist theology, the sweet and operative vision of feeling oneself children and not slaves of God.

ICONOGRAPHY

The images of the Saint derive for the most part from his portraits, painted during his lifetime, among which the most beautiful is the one dated 1618 preserved in the Monastery of the Visitation in Turin. Almost always the Saint is represented without a mitre. As an attribute he sometimes holds in his hands a heart encircled by a crown of thorns. Thus Carlo Maratta painted him in the church of the Oratory in Forlì.