François de Sales and the paradoxes of abjection

Abstract

François de Sales is, next to Pascal, the early modern French religious author whose work has for centuries reached the widest audience. Whereas Pascal conceived many of his reflections and arguments in the Pensées for persons uncommitted to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church, de Sales aimed at a wide audience of faithful Roman Catholics. This difference of intended public (or interlocutor) explains much about the advice the two writers offer about how to think and what to think about. In his Introduction à la vie dévote, de Sales’s figurative language makes it seem that he is teaching a form of easy-going religiosity, similar to the dévotion aisée that Pascal mocks in the Provinciales. For today’s reader, the Introduction can seem a cloying confection, full of suavité. And yet, Salesian devotion promotes the radical vision of a deeply degraded humanity.

KEYWORDS:

• Abjection; meditation
• imagination; devotional practices
• inner life; original sin
• Roman Catholicism

Notes

1 François de Sales, ‘Introduction à la vie dévote’, in Œuvres, ed. by André Ravier, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 101.

2 Sales, ‘Introduction à la vie dévote’, p. 101.

3 Sales, ‘Introduction à la vie dévote’, p. 49.

4 Sales, ‘Introduction à la vie dévote’, p. 48.

5 Blaise Pascal, ‘Les Provinciales’, in Les provinciales; Pensées; [et opuscules divers], ed. by Gérard Ferreyrolles and Philippe Sellier (Paris: Livre de Poche, 2004), pp. 155–619 (p. letter 9, pp. 402–19, and letter 11, 440–60).

6 We find these terms rarely in Pascal’s writing. Douceur(s) appears only six times in the Pensées, parfum(s) three times, odeurs once; suave, suavité, miel are absent, according to the Hugh M. Davidson, Pierre H. Dubé, eds., A Concordance to Pascal’s Pensées (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976). When douceur appears in the Lettres provinciales it is often in the mouth of a Jesuit.

7 François de Sales, ‘Introduction à la vie dévote’, p. 145.

8 Sales, ‘Introduction à la vie dévote’, p. 145.

9 Cassell’s Latin-English and English-Latin Dictionary; Graffiot, Dictionnaire Latin-Français.

10 François de Sales, ‘Introduction à la vie dévote’, p. 140.

11 Sales, p. 54.

12 Sales, p. 56.

13 François de Sales, ‘Introduction à la vie dévote’, p. 137–40.

14 Sales, p. 140.

15 Sales, p. 42.

16 Sales, p. 141.

17 Sales, p. 145.

18 Sales, p. 145.

19 Sales, pp. 174–5.

20 Sales, p. 175.

21 Sales, p. 146.

22 Sales, pp. 38–40.

23 Sales, p. 147.

24 Blaise Pascal, ‘Pensées’, in Les Provinciales; Pensées [et opuscules divers], pp. 754–1374 (p. 1018). Lafuma number 358.

25 Gilberte Périer, ‘Vie de M. Pascal’, in Les provinciales; Pensées; [et opuscules divers], pp. 47–78. See for example pp. 60–1. And see also the ‘Prière pour le bon usage des maladies’, published with the ‘Pensées’ in the 1670 edition but not found in most recent editions of the the ‘Pensées’.

26 Blaise Pascal, ‘Pensées’, in Les Provinciales; Pensées [et opuscules divers], p. 1215.

27 Sales, p. 128.

28 François de Sales, ‘Traité de l’Amour de Dieu’, in Œuvres, p. 764.

29 Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. by Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965), book 2, chap. 12, p. 452.

30 See, for instance, Michael Moriarty, Pascal: Reasoning and Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 31–7.

31 Sales, ‘Introduction à la vie dévote’, p. 66.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John D. Lyons

John D. Lyons is Commonwealth Professor (emeritus) at the University of Virginia. His latest book is Women and Irony in Molière's Comedies of Marriage (OUP, 2023).