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Gerald Heard
A young man is kneeling in his room. His hands are pressed against the paneling. He is dressed in clerical costume. His whole attitude shows that he is absorbed, maybe entranced. But he is not praying. His eyes are neither raised to heaven nor reverently closed. He is looking intently, peering, peering through the paneling. He is not contemplating. He is eavesdropping through a hole he has bored between his room and the next. The room next his is that of his host. But his clerical dress is not a spy's disguise. Nor does his ungentlemanly behaviour show him to be a cad violating the commonest rules of hospitality. This key-hole peerer is Camus Bishop of Belley. He is a young man of good family, intelligence, and devotion. He has lately been promoted to his first step in the episcopate which should lead (as indeed it did) to offers which would be grateful to the best born and most ambitious. But he is not a careerist. He has wished to take his "high calling" seriously. And Belley is a good training ground. It is a small semi-Alpine diocese. The people are poor, strenuous, yes and inclined to be dour. Their wine is the wine of the upland Chablis--always dry and easily soured. And as the wine so the mind. They can easily come to see something attractive in Calvinism. Young Camus was shrewd enough to see that he had been put in a challenging position, and with enough humbling self-knowledge to realise his own unpreparedness. But Belley had one immense advantage. The very next diocese was that of Geneva, and Annecy where the present Bishop resided was not many miles away. For the city of Geneva had thrown off the lordship of the Duke of Savoy and had within its fortifications established is own grim Calvinist theocracy. Hence that city's rejected Bishop lived in exile from his cathedral. Soon, however, his amazing character had won for him a spiritual diocese which made Geneva a very little thing. Young Camus learnt as soon as he came into residence in his own see that already all Savoy and much of France was questioning whether his neighbour-bishop was not a saint. Enquiry showed that at the very least a case lay for investigation. And Camus was clearly not the kind of enquirer who delays. To his own immediate need for counsel was added a really Boswellian interest in character. But the reports were almost too good to be true. His very need made him cautious. And the fact that his own first visits, observations, and insights only confirmed and deepened what he had been told, roused his curiosity the more. François de Sales had then attained to the height of his unique achievement. For he is obviously a unique saint. No doubt all are, in the sight of God. But many saints wished (and God seemed to have granted their wish) to be in the pattern of their orders. He intended something different from his servant and friend, François. When young, François himself had felt drawn to what may be called the conventional pattern of heroic souls. Later he often smiles at these adolescent heroics. But they served to present him with his first true trial. Few men have been more gently affectionate. He was a boy of brilliant promise. In a world that was beginning to rate almost supremely, elegance, address, style, he had these supremely--to the pitch and point of that exquisite balance and restraint that made others' efforts seem laboured and his effects unstudied, inevitable. He was to refine and frame French prose--that unpretentious ease of expression which with apparent casualness continually commands le mot juste. And the style was the man. It was the precipitation of his spirit's perfect sincerity, its dread of sham, display, or any extravagance. He was the first-born of parents cultured and influential. His father naturally longed for his son's success and the son to give his father this seemingly intended fulfilment. The conflict gave precisely that unspectacular sacrifice which François' true nature would choose--instead of one of those spectacular torture-deaths which the immature mind loves to imagine. And to this painful test of divided loyalties was now added another. He had, after his "pre-teen" education at Annecy (which was the family's provincial capital) gone for eight years to Paris to study at the Clermont (Jesuit) College. There his temperament fell in love with France. Hence he suffered through his life the modern man's misery--loyalty to a small nation in conflict with devotion to an embracing culture. And a third and most acute distress was to be added by the very way in which his desire for the religious life was to be granted. When at eleven he had received the tonsure he knew he had a third and all-embracing loyalty, to religion. When in 1592, after he had returned to Annecy equipped with the necessary Paduan law degrees, he still sought time to win his father's willing consent to his abandoning a civil career, by qualifying to be an advocate to the Senate. His friends, however, worked more efficiently for him. They succeeded without his knowledge in having him appointed as Provost of the Geneva Chapter. The father was satisfied with the preferment and the son was set on a religious career. But for him his actual task was far more painful than the ardours of the mission field. To a nature as sensitive as his, fell the duty of winning back the Calvinists through the countryside. His preaching and example, his tact, courage, skill, and method won over the greater part. It was the obdurate remnant that presented the tormenting problem. He made a distinction between those who he said, "follow their heresy rather as a party than a religion". And, finally, when he decided that they must go, he secured that they should be permitted to sell their property before leaving. Against the fortress of Geneva itself he made little headway. But year by year the light of his mind and heart had radiated, like a beacon from his Alpine station touching and kindling spirits throughout the vast archdiocese God grants to each of his saints. It was this man, arrived at such proficiency, that young Bishop Camus was testing. He saw, with the surprise of the man who has closely observed his fellows, that Bishop de Sales was not only incessantly busy and yet never hasty nor hurried, but, close scrutiny showed, he gave total attention to each visitor, however exhausting, however diffuse. De Sales' answer to Camus' question "Why do you give so much to such timewasters?" "It is God's will for me at that moment''--this answer met the problem at the height of theology. But all the more it seemed to leave it unsolved at the level of humanity. Camus was passionately interested in human beings, and, not mistakenly, in himself, in what he might hope to get out of himself. Hence his odd hole-in-the-wall procedure. Here he applied his final test. All day long for days on end he watched his amazing new friend. And as they went the unremitting round of innumerable duties--administrative, secular, religious; liturgy, negotiation, conversation, complaints, abuse, flattery--one thing was always the same in the tumbling flood, the complete equanimity, the unwavering interest, the just affection of the man who was so surged upon. From the moment the Bishop rose like a mouse, not to disturb even his valet; on through that lovingly-cross valet's stream of complaints because the Bishop had dared dress himself; through the bullying rudeness of highland chiefs; the more unpleasant carneying of dishonest suitors and scandalmongers; the meals where visiting churchmen ostentatiously abstained, looking pointedly at the way "the holy Bishop" ate all that was put before him; the presiding in a free law court (set up by the Bishop, to the chagrin of the lawyers, to save his silly, cantankerous, litigious farmers from ruining themselves with their quarrels); the arrival of that modern misery, a large and pressing mail; right to the end of each distended day, de Sales' spirit never flagged, wavered, or jarred. Then he went to his room. And then? That, Camus felt, and quite rightly as a psychologist, that was the moment, there the final scene about which he must be informed, certain. Surely then the bow of steel must unbend. Human nature must relax. So, feeling that all's fair in such an issue of life and death, Camus bored his hole. He had bored well. His eye commanded his unconscious senior. "And he saw and believed." There sat his beloved, superhumanly kind, unwaveringly considerate hero. Yes, he was praying--apparently he always did. But now, alone, will he not unbend--not collapse but at least deliver himself? Camus shrewdly knew what the day had cost. François de Sales felt everything. There was no apathy in him. But there he sat alone in his room as quietly as on the bench, or caught on the steps of the church, or abused by valet or by peer, or patronised by a fellow bishop proud of his own obvious austerities. Then Camus' generous soul could at last give itself completely, and the great master at whose feet he laid his devotion raised his younger brother to the amazing privilege of intimacy. They were brothers. François would take time off to let Camus row him out on the lake. They went on Alpine walks, picking those small bunches of flowers, those "nosegays" which gave François one of his most beautiful and apt illustrations to us about prayer and how to carry its fragrance into the life of action. François teased Camus when Camus in hero worship tried to change his own tumbling oratory and to use the quiet method of his mater and joked him out of a too serious concern over secondary things--e.g., whether troops in his diocese were keeping Lent as strictly as they should. But it was through asides and silent example that the disciple learnt what abysmal foundations of humility were needed to rear this delicate, skyhigh shaft of sanctity, what sufferings were required to burn out the last alloy of pride from this intensely gifted mind and give that ultimate resilience of temper to the soul. St. François had no illusions about himself. His immediate predecessor in non-monastic sanctity "the Apostle of Rome", Philip Neri, exclaimed once, "Lord, do not trust Philip, he will betray thee!" St. François, asked to berate into docility an evil young scape-grace (whom the mother who had spoilt him, had cast out, and cursed), remarked in the same spirit as Neri's humility, "It would not heal him and I might well lose in twenty minutes what it has taken me twenty years to win!" What lowliness to confess that his most wonderful characteristic was not his at all; his most precious possession, his peace that made him of constant service to the bewildered and passion-swept, and kept him constantly open to the Peace of God, was never his own, always an instantly renewed free grace from the Eternal. So, too, he could recognise, equally with his own utter dependence on God, God's fullness in others, a fullness as utterly independent of their worthiness as his own greatness was dependent on God's momentary replenishment. When one of the outstanding "grand prostitutes" of the day, summoning a desperate courage came to him, made her confession, and having made it collapse in horror at the exposure of her true self, St. François rose from his seat of judgment and absolution. He raised the woman to her feet, himself knelt before her and, to fasten her grasp on God's granted grace, told her that he so knelt because he was now in the presence of a sinless soul. His name, however, is of course connected forever with another woman whose conversion was even more important than his long care for Camus. Round the triple theme of St. François, St. Jeanne de Chantal and the Order of the Visitation a whole library of spirituality now exists. Not only was a large portion of his incomparable letters written to St. Jeanne and members of their order, but with his genius for humility he learnt from them. His first great literary triumph, the Introduction to a Devout Life, had swept the secular world with a new hope. So God was not a hater of human happiness and fun! He really loved mankind. With perfect honesty the bishop told lay-folk what were God's merciful terms. You must observe them and by his grace you could. You could never be happy otherwise. It was disgraceful, it was the behavior not only of a fool, but of a cad, if you did not. "He could and would never reject you unless you first rejected him." Further, as never before, the Bishop gave layfolk lucid instructions how they might day by day have God as their companion in the world. Likewise, when St. François came to planning for the specific vocation of the religious he again is a modern and, at least in his mode, a moderate. The "Visitation" is one of those new inventions in which the modern Catholic Church has been so fertile. But in one way St. François is more modern than St. Ignatius with his encyclopaedic, globe-circling Jesuits, or Neri with his Oratory-club centers for priests and their devout lay guests. He worked out a new religious pattern for women who were not sufficiently robust to stand the ancient orders' traditional Rule. In all his planning we see a mind of lucid aptness. One of his epigrams illustrates this--"I will not have the home in the cloister or the cloister in the home", the latter being a too common confusion of vocations made by Puritagnism. But when the Visitation was established (after protracted delicate negotiations in which the patience, tact, and intelligence which he had in such high measure were all required) then this new variety of holiness showed its vitality by growing more vigorously, more originally than its founders in their fondest hopes had expected. There was no greater fruit in that experiment than the second spiritual classic which the order inspired St. François to write. It was the experience of St. Jeanne de Chantal and her daughters that gave him, the master exponent of the life of sane, adequate lay devotion, the opportunity to become, in the Treatise on the Love of God, an equally masterly exponent of devotion's highest range. He who had stooped to school beginners, now rose and reached to be the companion and recorder of those who, setting no limit to their generosity, wholly dissatisfied with a fulfilment of the law's letter, asked to be permitted to offer everything. To write of that experience requires the rarest combination--a valid experience of the Ineffable and a mastery of expression. Perhaps no author-saint ever combined such height of divine devotion with such width of appeal. An essayist of genius, yet his incomparable lightness of touch accompanied the profoundest penetration of spirit. As Abbot Chapman says of St. François, in his own charmingly human Spiritual Letters, St. François under a tact that feels easy and even caressing, has a grip of steel. The very delicacy of his penetration (like the sharpness of a super-fine hypodermic needle) prevents the patient from feeling how deeply he has been pierced. How did St. François achieve this spiritual tact--what au fond is its nature? It is certainly this feature of his holiness that made him the great modern, more than St. Ignatius and even St. Philip Neri. True, Neri is his pioneer in this endearing peculiarity. The Apostle of Rome realised that what stood most between Renaissance man and his God was pretension. Somehow that terribly competent creature of intellect must be shocked out of his deadly self-complacency, which found the whole universe curious and none of it awe-inspiring. The only thing he really feared was laughter. If you could make him laugh at himself he might be saved. So Neri, as a true teacher, would make himself ridiculous, in order to exorcise by humour the demon of pride. St. François carried the lesson to a finer point, as the good taste of seventeenth-century France was a subtler disguise of Lucifer than the more ostentatious arrogance of sixteenth-century Rome. Neri had warned penitents that prolonged expression of remorse for a venial sin was often worse than the sin itself. St. François penetrates further the intricacies in which lurks spiritual pride. He is then probably the first great doctor of the spirit and director of the soul to bring to light the connection between holiness and humour. For he saw that self-humour, the gentle mockery of the ego, is the one way with modern self-conscious man, to bring him to a humility that is neither the blind alley of an inverted ride nor the precipice of despair. His last famous scene with St. Jeanne illustrates poignantly this delicate surgery of detachment. On what was to prove his last visit to France she had come to meet him. There were plenty of acute problems of the order and of her own directorate and life to be discussed. He was her guide, director, and inspirer. It was impossible that she should not be wrought up at such a crisis, expecting a culmination of insights, advices, illuminations to last her for a lifetime. The interview could not be lengthy; her longing was intense. Her orderly mind was ready to avail itself of every second. St. François was as instant as ever. When she would speak he asked her to listen. But not to him ... to his footman Charles waiting outside and entertaining himself by whistling a casual tune. When St. Jeanne would have interrupted, he would beg a moment's more silence to appreciate the unselfconscious grace of the boy's ditty. It was like a scene between a Zen master and his pupils--the master listening to a bird and then telling the anxious class, "The sermon has been preached, did you not hear it?" And St. Jeanne when she and her dear master had parted for good realised, and told her daughters, how he had given her a message, the essence of his own detachment, richer than any amply answered questionnaire, however copious and itemised. For years he had instructed, advised, counter checked with her. Indeed from that day when she had first asked an interview, after the Lenten sermon he had preached at Dijon, had asked whether she was bound by a promise of absolute obedience exacted by an ignorant director, and he, after praying all night, had released her, he had been her guide in private and public affairs till they were known as the joint founders of the Visitation. Now the moment had come for final guidance. He was to commit her directly into the hands of God, for he himself was about to enter before the unveiled face of God. Henceforward, as he would see face to face, she must stand, though still veiled, without intermediary in that Presence, deprived of images, advanced beyond consolations (as she years after told one of her discouraged daughters). For the time of his departure was at hand. Though still in middle life he had already expended the energy of several lives of more than average usefulness. And maybe too his spiritual detachment was complete. He had long ago given as his motto, To ask for nothing and to refuse nothing. That achieved, what could detain him? He had also said with perfect truth, "I want little now: if I returned I would want nothing." His physical strength went from him at Lyons in his beloved France, attending a state function. His fame was as great as that of any of the great ones present. Even his death room was invaded by those who would gaze on a still breathing saint. Father Olier, then a youth, who was to attain high holiness, counted that sight as a signal grace. The doctors, however, felt that the bishop should and could be roused. So they put red-hot irons to his feet. Those standing by noticed how almost without a shudder he endured this inept attempt at stimulant. Then he was ready to go. He himself had given a number of convincing reasons why every devout soul should look forward to Purgatory. And the Church has considered him so sound a teacher as to raise him to the rank of one of her acknowledged Doctors. Above all, he tells us, look forward because after death the soul that dies in grace is ever after incapable of sin, and the cause of its intense suffering is due to God being beheld by a still imperfect spirit--a pain that rapidly purifies those of intense generosity. For years the wise had felt that God was shaping this man for sanctity. On one of his few protracted visits (on a diplomatic mission) to Paris, the remarkable Madame Acarie and her circle had put themselves under his guidance, though they were clearly advanced people of great power of prayer, and St. Vincent de Paul kept close to him through these months, drawing on his spirit. Yet when the Church swiftly proclaimed him Venerable, then Beatus, and finally Sanctus, at every step in the heavenly elevation exclamations of surprise were heard among the applause. The Bishop was charming, of course; so affable, so accessible that we could all judge him to be a gentleman; so agreeable because so like ourselves. But surely holiness should be more emphatic, more awe-inspiring, yes forbidding! But God, who provides in his charity for each age its models of goodness, with St. François had made a style for the modern age. Generation after generation has therefore recognised that in the exiled Bishop of Geneva the modern gentleman of self-effacing humour was given his patron saint in the man who showed how with neither heroics nor spectacular self-humblings, the perfect anonymity of holiness could be attained. Saints for Now, ed. Clare Boothe Luce
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St.
Francis de Sales