Few would deny, however unsatisfactory their own lives, that to be a saint is the supreme expression of human life on earth. We recognise in sanctity or great holiness the closest possible relationship between a man and God who is the supreme Reality, the supreme Truth, Goodness and Beauty. “God is the only reality, and we are only real so far as we are in His order, and He in us,” wrote Coventry Patmore.
It is not surprising, when we reflect on the all-comprehensiveness of God, that the saints should vary immensely in the outward expressions of their sanctity, and, in honesty, we must admit that many saints seem strange and puzzling figures. Saints, of course, are not born saints, and their sanctity has to be incarnated in the psychological and physical complex which makes them the particular human beings they are. This life-long process of growing union between one individual from among the infinite variety of human character and the supreme "Isness" of God must lead to many different expressions of sanctity.
Each of us, therefore, with his own particular character and taste will tend to find one saint more attractive and understandable than another. Similarly, people of one culture and period of history will tend to prefer certain saints, certain kinds of holiness, and be puzzled perhaps by the popularity of saints in earlier epochs.
Today it is the contemplative and the unassuming saints who seem to attract us most, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Lisieux, St. Thomas More, St. Philip Neri, the Cure d'Ars. St. François de Sales would probably be included in any short list, but less perhaps is known about him by the ordinary person than the others, at any rate in Britain and America. Many books about his contemplative teaching have been written, and his two great works, the Introduction to the Devout Life and the Treatise on the Love of God, called by Dom John Chapman “the greatest work of genius in theology since St. Thomas,” are still widely read. But, strangely, no English-speaking writer has for a very long time told the fascinating story of his life. This was one reason why I have been bold enough to attempt the task.
The second is that St. François de Sales is the patron of writers and journalists and it is surprising that they have not queued up to make their patron better known. In passing, may I say that the study of his life showed him to be a most suitable patron for a great variety of occupations—of viniculture and pubs, for example (for he once performed the most charming of miracles to enable his travelling companions to drink wine rather than the excellent mountain-water) and of rowing and University boat-clubs (for he called himself a "doctor of rowing"). A third reason was that St. François de Sales was, indeed, the greatest of all mystical theologians—the saint of the "Love of God," the spiritual approach which more and more people today, however dimly and feebly, find to be the most rewarding.
I was encouraged to try my hand because the task did not seem to be so very difficult for a journalist-writer. There can be few saints about whom more is known, and what is known has been made easily available. The monumental Annecy edition of his works in 26 volumes is an inexhaustible quarry, and it is to the English Benedictine, Dom Mackey, that we owe this great work completed long after his death. Two immense lives in French—the 1,300 pages of Hamon and the nearly 1,500 much better informed pages of Mgr. Trochu (published during the war)—give us the facts. Bremond, of course, sets the scene. Alas, all this proved a veritable embarras de richesses for the writer of a short life which would be neither a mere summary of the long lives, unavailable in English, nor an essay on the Saint. One was faced with the problem, for example, of telling the story adequately and yet finding room for letters which the great lives, long as they are, omitted presumably through lack of space. For to me it is in his letters that St. François most vividly lives today.
I must now quite simply confess that the writing of this book has left me with the conviction that François de Sales is the greatest of the saints—at least for modern times. And I base this conviction on the sense I had all the time that here was the human being of our period of Western history who, naturally, instinctively, as well as supernaturally, reflected most directly the character and way of Christ Our Lord. It was long after this truth had been brought home to me that I read the words of St. Vincent de Paul: " Mgr. de Sales ardently wished to imitate the Son of God. So closely did he model his life on Our Lord, as I myself saw, that many a time I asked myself with astonishment how a mere creature could reach so high a degree of perfection, given human frailty . . . Recalling and meditating on his words, I felt them to be so admirable that I could only see in him the person who most nearly reproduced the Son of God living on earth."
" Perfection," yes; but, in the case of François de Sales, it is the humanity within perfection, the love, the tenderness, as well as the tremendous strength, which make one so strongly feel how like he was to Our Lord.
It has been waggishly said that François de Sales " invented Christian charity." We need not do more than smile at that, at the same time finding the phrase unforgettable and by no means entirely off the point. It seems to be the paradoxical answer to the fear one has of men who are "too perfect." There will be something of the hypocrite in the " too perfect" man, we feel, or else we shall come up against strains of harshness, inhumanity, resulting from lack of balance, from suppression of endearing human weaknesses. Miraculously, François de Sales comes out the "perfect man," not the "too perfect man." Did he not say of himself that he was "nothing if not a man”?
It was his glory that the humanity in him was always retained and rightly directed, but through the hardest and highest of spiritual disciplines: increasing detachment from his ego so that God who is Love might transform with the touch of Divinity itself the natural balance and tenderness of his character. It was in the continuous practice of giving himself up to God and to his neighbour that his own humanity became radiant and without blemish.
Love or charity, for François de Sales, while reaching in the end to the heights of mystical love, also seemed inevitably to feed on the lesser natural loves for his own family, his friends, the people entrusted to his pastoral care, the great and the humble, and not least the weak and sinful. Nor did the great apostle of the Chablais, brought up in times of religious wars and trained in the harsh views of intolerance then current on both sides, see the heretic as other than his neighbour to be converted by love. " Love will shake the walls of Geneva; by love we must invade it; by love we must conquer it," he said to the Chapter of his diocese when first he addressed it.
François de Sales is immortally linked with Sainte Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal, for their relationship, apart from its spiritual fruits, was unique. To the ordinary person that relationship can only be a mystery, for it went unbelievably deep in the natural as well as in the supernatural order. It was love, even human love, free and full, in which there was no taint, no suspicion, no breath of anything but their supernatural vocations. Again one is forced back to Scriptural parallels, the love of Joseph for Mary, the love of Our Lord for Martha and Mary.
Among the other women with whom François de Sales came into close contact through his spiritual direction and his gift for friendship were Madame Acarie (Blessed Mary of the Incarnation), one of the most interesting mystics of her time, and Angelique Arnauld, the famous Abbess of Port-Royal, who might be accounted his one great failure, despite the tenderness of their relations.
François de Sales sought to live outside the great world of his day, asking only to minister to his " poor wife " of a diocese and to train men and women in the love of God, most of all Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal, with whom he founded the Order of the Visitation, whose beginnings make one of the most beautiful of pictures of religious life. Yet his birth, his status, his gifts and his fame connected him in many ways with the period of history when the religious civil wars of France under Catherine de Medici ended with the pacification and renewal of the country under the convert, Henry IV. To anyone who knows the decadence and immorality of those times, it is astonishing to think of the sanctity of a François de Sales. He was the friend of kings and princes, semi-feudal nobles and their families, of cardinals, bishops and clergy of every type, yet untainted in a relationship which was always personal and natural. Further, he holds his place in French literature as a writer in the formative period which led to the great days of Louis XIV. For the reader, as for the biographer, these trimmings lend colour and glamour to one of the most human lives lived all for God.
Had he had his own way, François de Sales would have been happiest as a writer and a spiritual director of souls. God willed that he should be a bishop and a public figure. It was in bearing these honours and dedicating his life to the heavy, active duties they entailed that he endured with unique zeal and never-failing cheerfulness a constant, unsung martyrdom. That, for him, was the method of detachment from self-love for the love of God.
The reader, by this time, will surely be accusing me of having lost my head over my subject. Actually, what follows is written in a detached manner, for throughout I have sought to regard my hero as an historical figure, freed from the overtones which his reputation and sanctity too easily import into a biographer's judgment. And perhaps just because I have sought only the "man," and the "human," I have been driven, as I look back, to see him only as the most wonderful and fascinating of saints.
I hope that these pages may be of interest to readers who do not belong to the Communion which unites their subject and their writer, for Saint François has always had a wide Christian appeal, not least to members of the Anglican Communion. I have all the greater hope that this may be so in that I have long had in my possession a copy of the " Devout Life," inscribed " A. W. Roffen "—the signature at one time of my own grandfather who was successively Bishop of Rochester and Bishop of Winchester, Anthony Wilson Thorold.
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