Desire and Conversion in François de Sales’s Traité de l’amour de Dieu

In the concluding pages of his first major book, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, René Girard asserts that “Toutes les conclusions romanesques sont des conversions. Personne ne peut en douter” (All novelistic conclusions are conversions; it is impossible to doubt this).¹ By this he means simply that there comes a moment when both the great novelists whom he studies and their characters recognize a fundamental truth that dramatically changes them: a life founded on human desire alone can end only in misery and failure. Although not necessarily religious in nature, this novelistic conversion, as Robert Doran puts it in his recent edition of Girard’s uncollected writings on literature and literary theory, “represents an opening to religion, for the path that leads from literature to Christianity is one that has great historical resonance—Saint Augustine being the first and most spectacular example.”² Novelistic conversion shares with religious conversion “the recognition of the failure of desire—the failure of self-fulfillment through desire, which is at the root of modern individualism.” Ultimately, to understand the truth about desire “constitutes a renunciation of the world.”³

Although not intrinsically evil, desire turns perverse as soon as it becomes imitative or, to use a key term in Girard’s thought, mimetic. Don Quixote, perhaps the most famous example of mimetic desire in world literature, wants to be a knight only because of what he has read in books of chivalry. Rather than directing his desire toward an object that is inherently good and whose goodness he perceives, Quixote allows his aspirations to be determined by an external mediator, with the result that he goes quite mad. In Molière’s theater, as in the novels of Stendhal or Dostoevsky, characters often imitate each other. Orgon’s piety is modeled on the fausse dévotion (fake piety) of Tartuffe, and the self-righteously upright Alceste loves the coquette Célimène, whose values seem so opposed to his own, only because other men also pursue her. Célimène thus becomes the unattainable object of Alceste’s desire. When, at the end of Le Misanthrope, she seems within his reach, he makes of her a demand to which, given her character, she could not possibly be expected to acquiesce. One can only suspect that were she to withdraw from society to live in isolation with Alceste alone, as he proposes, he would lose all interest in her. Mimetic desire eventuates in rivalry with the model, not the satisfaction of that desire in the attainment of its object.

René Girard would undoubtedly not have surprised his audience when in a talk delivered at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association in 1998, he declared that “Great literature literally led me to Christianity.”⁴ Both great literature and Christianity focus attention on the problem of unchecked human desire. The greatest literary works reveal the truth about it, and religion calls on believers to turn away from desire that imitates the will of others. Christianity does not condemn imitation itself. However, by asking that Christians imitate Christ alone, it removes from the act of imitation its competitive element, the rivalry between the person who desires and the model of that desire.⁵ This distinguishes the desire to be like Christ from the human desire to be like or, more oft en, different from others. It also explains the advice given by François de Sales in the last of his Entretiens spirituels (Spiritual Conferences), a series of conversations he had with nuns of the Visitation order, which was founded under his guidance by his dear friend Jeanne de Chantal. At the end of his last visit to the convent before his death, as François is about to leave, a nun asks what he would most like the sisters to remember from his teachings. In its utter simplicity, his response both characterizes the saint’s prose style and defines the principle underlying much of his writing: “Que voulez-vous que je vous die, ma chère fille? je vous ai tout...