“Blessed the Breasts at Which You Nursed”: Mother-Child Intimacy in St. Francis de Sales’ Treatise on the Love of God

Of the myriad motifs St. Francis de Sales invokes to illustrate his conception of God’s love for humankind, none is perhaps as touching or as iconic as the set of images used to capture the love relationship between mother and child, images ostensibly informed by both personal observation and Christian inspiration (in the form of texts, art), as well as by Francis’ profound devotion to Mary and her role as nurturer of the child Jesus. Indeed, Francis accords particular value to this motif in the first chapter of Book VII of the Treatise on the Love of God, when, having already had recourse to the mother-child image several times, he writes, “The comparison of the love of little children for their mothers must not be abandoned, because of its innocence and purity.”¹ As drawing explicit attention to the rhetorical function of a particular image (here, comparison) is not a frequent occurrence in the Treatise, one must surmise that this comparison was particularly dear to Francis. Moreover, among the many mother-child interactions described by Francis, that of the child nursing at the mother’s breast holds a place of honor; Henri Lemaire has suggested it is one of the images that “best reveals the soul of the saint.”² In this study, I will first explore the personal, cultural, historical and aesthetic context that may have informed Francis’ attraction to the image of the mother nursing her child as a privileged representation of love, both God’s for the devout soul and the soul’s for God, and the union that results. I will also offer a close reading of a few key passages of the Treatise in an attempt to arrive at a more thorough understanding of the power of this image in the Treatise as a whole, and of its place in the mystical theology of the saint. While much has been written about the nature of prayer in the Salesian tradition as heart-to-heart,³ a state captured by the pray-er laying her head against the heart of God,⁴ relatively little attention has been paid to the even more intimate image of the soul at prayer drinking at the breasts of God. My hope is that this study will offer a new appreciation of this image as a novel entry into Salesian spirituality and practice, one that may enhance St. Francis de Sales’ readers’ understanding of their own intimacy with God in new and decidedly modern terms.

La Vierge allaitant l’Enfant, Pisanello from the Codex Vallardi

ESTABLISHING A CONTEXT WITHIN WHICH TO CONSIDER THE TREATISE

Textual clues in the Treatise on the Love of God suggest that, when evoking the image of the nursing mother and her child, Francis de Sales is basing his description to a large extent upon his own personal observation of this phenomenon, not only in the very true-to-life details he includes—realistic signs of the child’s eagerness to nurse such as his surging toward the breast and his feet beating with pleasure⁵—but also in verbs of visual perception used to draw forth what he imagines to be a memory he shares with his fictional interlocutor Théotime and others. For example, Book VI, Chapter 9, begins: “Have you never noticed, Théotime, the ardor with which little children attach themselves to their mother’s breast when they are hungry?”⁶ Francis goes on to use the verb voir, to see, twice in the following two sentences: “One sees them mumbling …” and “You would see them close their little eyes right up. …” Also noteworthy is Francis’s choice of vocabulary to describe the mother’s breast, including the very familiar chicheron, meaning “nipple.” This word will have lost its common usage by the time Antoine Furetière publishes his Dictionnaire universel in 1690,⁷ though it will receive an indirect and passing reference in César de Rochefort’s 1685 Dictionnaire général...