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  • Encountering Anew the Familiar: Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life at 400 Years ed. by Joseph F. Chorpenning, O.S.F.S.
  • Terence McGoldrick
Encountering Anew the Familiar: Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life at 400 Years. Edited by Joseph F. Chorpenning, O.S.F.S. (Rome: International Commission for Salesian Studies. Distrib. De Sales Resources, 4421 Lower River Road, Stella Niagara, NY 14144. 2012. Pp. viii, 117. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-9800371-3-5.)

The Introduction to the Devout Life is one of France’s most important literary works of the early-modern period and a spiritual classic. Leading Salesian scholars mine its historical trajectory and enduring value in this collection. The Introduction was published forty-two times during the lifetime of St. Francis de Sales; editions dropped about 70 percent of the text during the Enlightenment in France but less in Italy. Adaptations in succeeding decades to make the work more “modern” changed or deleted 50–60 percent of the original text to appeal to both Protestant readers and to the rationalism of the age for a public that no longer considered its many examples from nature as normative. Its popularity rebounded during the Catholic Restoration of the mid-nineteenth century in another adapted version, which was watered down to appeal to a wider audience. It was not until the critical edition of de Sales’s Œuvres in 1895 and an easily affordable 1935 printing of the original 1619 edition, that the saint’s own voice could once again be known without filters. The Introduction’s success fed an intense spiritual hunger of the laity as a practical and flexible guide to the Catholic reform theology of cooperation with grace. It was again vital to a popular spiritual resistance to nineteenth-century European secularism, inspiring the Salesian Pentecost that gave birth of St. John Bosco’s family of religious orders, the missionaries of St. Francis de Sales, and lay associations that numbered more than 1 million members.

The Introduction meets the criteria of a spiritual classic as described by Phillip Sheldrake, Rowan Williams, and David Tracey for its “excess of meaning” that continues across the ages to engage its readers to “be who you are and be that well.” Central to the Salesian ideal for lay spirituality is to live Jesus in the world in friendship with others that speaks heart to heart, which is a model for modern spiritual direction. That Salesian ideal of devotion in all walks of life, equal to the cleric or religious, anticipated the universal call to holiness of Lumen gentium. The Introduction counsels resolutions, constant prayer, direction, and “holy liberty of spirit” as a means to “do all deeds in God and for God,” with a pragmatic realism that envisions virtue as suitable to the individual and his or her particular temperament, station, and abilities. Salesian optimistic and flexible spirituality accentuates humility and gentleness, but at the same time rigorously seeks to be stripped of every selfish desire in “holy indifference.” The Introduction’s early-modern version of Christianity becomes all the more striking when set against its backdrop of Jansenist France in the aftermath of civil war and militant Catholicism that prevailed during the [End Page 361] saint’s lifetime. His rich use of natural images is built upon a theology born of the response to the Protestant iconoclasm that furthers the Patristic tradition of God the painter and the person as the image restored to God’s likeness through Christ.

The literary style of the Introduction reflects the Renaissance priority on rhetorical form over substance that these images portray, and yet it uses that imagery to elucidate some of the thorniest theological concepts of the day. For example, a pregnant mother tenderly preparing her baby’s crib for the day the child will arrive is used to depict the attractions of grace that prepare the soul for spiritual birth (V.8) to teach the Tridentine Church’s theology of grace and cooperation.

The lacuna in this small volume such as the Introduction’s reception in other European countries and the Americas, its influence upon the pure love-of-God heresies of...

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