St. Francis de Sales - The Art of Loving God: Simple Virtues for the Christian Life

Also available from Sophia Institute Press by St. Francis de Sales:

Thy Will Be Done: Letters to Persons in the World

St. Francis de Sales

Simple Virtues for the Christian Life

The talks contained in The Art of Loving God were published originally in a collection of St. Francis de Sales's conferences delivered to the Visitation nuns, entitled The Spiritual Conferences, translated from the French by Abbot Gasquet and Canon Mackey, O.S.B. (London: Burns & Oates, Ltd., Benziger Brothers, 1906). For this 1998 edition, there have been extensive editorial revisions and improvements in the translation.

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of all of us are called to do great things for the love of God and our neighbor, but we can all do little things each day with greater fidelity and love. Therein lies the essence of St. Francis's teaching in these talks given to the nuns of the Visitation convent in Annecy in the Savoy.

The Visitation was founded in 1610 for widows and unmarried women who wished to live a life of prayer and contemplation withdrawn from the world, but who could not tolerate the harsh austerity of the prominent women's orders of the day, such as the Franciscan Poor Clares and the Carmelites.

In the early years of the Visitation, St. Francis came often to hear the nuns' confessions, offer Mass, and give informal talks on the sort of modest virtues that were to be embodied in the life of the community. Often St. Francis gave these talks out of doors under the trees surrounding the convent, the beauty of the natural setting suggesting many of the charming and homely images he uses to illustrate the points he wants to make. Written down by the nuns as the talks were delivered or shortly afterward, these Spiritual Conferences were copied and widely circulated among Visitation houses, and cherished as precious monuments to their founder's faith, wisdom, and kindly good sense.

Just like the Visitation nuns, many of us in the world cannot, for various reasons, adopt the rigid austerities or heroic self-sacrifice of the great ascetics of the Christian tradition. We, too, must be content with striving for lives of simple virtue and humble service to Christ and His Church. For this reason, we publish those of St. Francis's spiritual conferences that teach us simplicity, humility, generosity, and other such simple virtues for everyday life.

Because this edition of St. Francis's talks to the nuns of the Visitation convent is intended specifically for laypersons, we have generally omitted points that pertain exclusively to convent life and have occasionally adapted St. Francis's wording (such as when he begins a phrase with the address "Sisters") so that the beautiful universality of these virtues will not mistakenly be circumscribed by the context in which St. Francis spoke of them.

Some of the original conferences address more than one virtue. In certain cases, we have divided those conferences into separate chapters, giving each the name of the virtue explained.

(from Conference II)

ou ask me if a soul sensible of its own misery can go with great confidence to God. I reply that not only can the soul that knows its misery have great confidence in God, but that unless it has such knowledge, the soul cannot have true confidence in Him; for it is this true knowledge and confession of our misery that brings us to God.

All of the great saints - Job, David, and the rest - began every prayer with the confession of their own misery and unworthiness. And so it is a very good thing to acknowledge ourselves to be poor, vile, abject, and unworthy to appear in the presence of God.

"Know thyself'- that saying so celebrated among the ancients - may be understood as applying to the knowledge of the greatness and excellence of the soul (so that it may not be debased or profaned by things unworthy of its nobility); but it also may be taken to refer to the knowledge of our unworthiness, imperfection, and misery.

Now, the greater our knowledge of our own misery, the more profound will be our confidence in the goodness and mercy of God, for mercy and misery are so closely connected that the one cannot be exercised without the other. If God had not created man, He would still indeed have been perfect in goodness, but He would not have been actually merciful, since mercy can only be exercised toward the miserable.

who, when they had fallen into some fault, were overwhelmed with shame.

Again, it is reasonable that, having offended God, we draw back a little in humility and from a feeling of embarrassment, for even if we have offended only a friend, we are ashamed to approach him. But it is quite certain that we must not remain at a distance, for the virtues of humility, abjection, and shame are intermediate virtues by which the soul must ascend to union with God.

for we must not remain unclothed, but must clothe ourselves anew with God. The reason for this little withdrawal is only so that we may better press on toward God by an act of love and confidence. We must never allow our shame to be attended with sadness and disquietude. That kind of shame proceeds from self-love, because we are troubled at not being perfect, not so much for the love of God, as for love of ourselves.