By P. Wirth MORAND 
Reading time: 12 min.
St. Francis de Sales presents the spirit as the highest part of the soul, governed by intellect, memory, and will. At the heart of his pedagogy is the authority of reason, a “divine torch” that truly makes a person human and must guide, illuminate, and discipline passions, imagination, and the senses. To educate the spirit therefore means cultivating the intellect through study, meditation, and contemplation, exercising memory as a repository of received graces, and strengthening the will so that it consistently chooses good. From this harmony flow the cardinal virtues – prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance – which shape free, balanced individuals capable of genuine charity.
Francis de Sales considers the spirit as the higher part of the soul. Its faculties are the intellect, memory, and will. Imagination could be part of it to the extent that reason and will intervene in its functioning. The will, for its part, is the master faculty to which particular treatment should be reserved. The spirit makes humans, according to the classic definition, a “rational animal.” “We are human only through reason,” writes Francis de Sales. After “bodily graces,” there are “gifts of the spirit,” which should be the object of our reflections and our gratitude. Among these, the author of the Philothea distinguishes the gifts received from nature and those acquired through education:
Consider the gifts of the spirit; how many people in the world are foolish, furiously mad, mentally deficient. Why are you not among them? God has favoured you. How many have been educated rudely and in the most extreme ignorance; but you, divine Providence has had you raised in a civil and honourable way.
Reason, “Divine Torch”
In an Exercise of Sleep or Spiritual Rest, composed in Padua when he was twenty-three years old, Francis proposed to meditate on an astonishing topic:
I will stop to admire the beauty of the reason that God has given to man, so that, illuminated and instructed by its marvellous splendour, he may hate vice and love virtue. Oh! Let us follow the shining light of this divine torch, because it is given to us for use to see where we must put our feet! Ah! If we let ourselves be guided by its dictates, we will rarely stumble; it will be difficult to hurt ourselves.
“Natural reason is a good tree that God has planted in us; the fruits that come from it can only be good,” affirms the author of the Treatise on the Love of God. It is true that it is “gravely wounded and almost dead because of sin,” but its exercise is not fundamentally impeded.
In the inner kingdom of man, “reason must be the queen, to whom all the faculties of our spirit, all our senses, and the body itself must remain absolutely subject.” It is reason that distinguishes man from animal, so we must be careful not to imitate “the apes and monkeys that are always sullen, sad, and lamenting when the moon is missing; then, on the contrary, at the new moon, they jump, dance, and make all possible grimaces.” It is necessary to make “the authority of reason” reign, Francis de Sales reiterates.
Between the upper part of the spirit, which must reign, and the lower part of our being, sometimes designated by Francis de Sales with the biblical term “flesh,” the struggle sometimes becomes bitter. Each front has its allies. The spirit, “fortress of the soul,” is accompanied “by three soldiers: the intellect, memory, and will.” Therefore, beware of the “flesh” that plots and seeks allies on the spot:
The flesh now uses the intellect, now the will, now the imagination, which, associating against reason, leave it free field, creating division and doing a bad service to reason. […] The flesh allures the will sometimes with pleasures, sometimes with riches; now it urges the imagination to make claims; now it arouses in the intellect a great curiosity, all under the pretext of good.
In this struggle, even when all the passions of the soul seem upset, nothing is lost as long as the spirit resists: “If these soldiers were faithful, the spirit would have no fear and would not give any weight to its enemies: like soldiers who, having sufficient ammunition, resist in the bastion of an impregnable fortress, despite the fact that the enemies are in the suburbs or have even already taken the city. It happened to the citadel of Nizza, before which the force of three great princes did not prevail against the resistance of the defenders.” The cause of all these inner lacerations is self-love. In fact, “our reasonings are ordinarily full of motivations, opinions, and considerations suggested by self-love, and this causes great conflicts in the soul.”
In the educative field, it is important to make the superiority of the spirit felt. “Here lies the principle of a human education,” says Father Lejeune, “to show the child, as soon as his reason awakens, what is beautiful and good, and to turn him away from what is bad; in this way, to create in his heart the habit of controlling his instinctive reflexes, instead of following them slavishly. It is thus, in fact, that this process of sensualisation is formed which makes him a slave to his spontaneous desires. At the moment of decisive choices, this habit of always yielding, without controlling oneself, to instinctive impulses can prove catastrophic.”
The Intellect, “Eye of the Soul”
The intellect, a typically human and rational faculty, which allows us to know and understand, is often compared to sight. For example, we say: “I see,” to mean: “I understand.” For Francis de Sales, the intellect is “the eye of the soul”; hence his expression “the eye of your intellect.” The incredible activity of which it is capable makes it similar to “a worker, who, with hundreds of thousands of eyes and hands, like another Argus, performs more works than all the workers in the world, because there is nothing in the world that he is not able to represent.”
How does the human intellect work? Francis de Sales has precisely analysed the four operations of which it is capable: simple thought, study, meditation, and contemplation. Simple thought is exercised on a great diversity of things, without any purpose, “as flies do that land on flowers without wanting to extract any juice, but only because they meet them.” When the intellect passes from one thought to another, the thoughts that thus cram it are ordinarily “useless and harmful.” Study, on the contrary, aims to consider things “to know them, to understand them, and to speak well of them,” with the aim of “filling the memory,” as beetles do that “land on roses for no other purpose than to satiate themselves and fill their bellies.”
Francis de Sales could have stopped here, but he knew and recommended two other higher forms. While study aims to increase knowledge, meditation aims to “move the affections and, in particular, love”: “Let us fix our intellect on the mystery from which we hope to draw good affections,” like the dove that “coos holding its breath and, by the grumbling that it produces in its throat without letting the breath out, produces its typical song.”
The supreme activity of the intellect is contemplation, which consists in rejoicing in the good known through meditation and loved through such knowledge; this time we resemble the little birds that frolic in the cage only to “please the master.” With contemplation, the human spirit reaches its peak; the author of the Treatise on the Love of God affirms that reason “finally vivifies the intellect with contemplation.”
Let us return to study, the intellectual activity that interests us more closely. “There is an old axiom of philosophers, according to which every man desires to know.” Taking up this affirmation of Aristotle on his part, as well as the example of Plato, Francis de Sales intends to demonstrate that this constitutes a great privilege. What man wants to know is the truth. The truth is more beautiful than that “famous Helen, for whose beauty so many Greeks and Trojans died.” The spirit is made for the search for truth: “Truth is the object of our intellect, which, consequently, discovering and knowing the truth of things, feels fully satisfied and content.” When the spirit finds something new, it experiences an intense joy, and when one begins to find something beautiful, one is driven to continue the search, “like those who have found a gold mine and push themselves further and further to find even more of this precious metal.” The amazement that the discovery produces is a powerful stimulus; “admiration, in fact, has given rise to philosophy and the careful search for natural things.” Since God is the supreme truth, the knowledge of God is the supreme science that fills our spirit. It is he who “has given us the intellect to know him”; outside of him there are only “vain thoughts and useless reflections!”
Cultivating One’s Intelligence
What characterizes man is the great desire to know. It was this desire that “induced the great Plato to leave Athens and run so far,” and “induced these ancient philosophers to renounce their bodily comforts.” Some even go so far as to fast diligently “in order to study better.” Study, in fact, produces an intellectual pleasure, superior to sensual pleasures and difficult to stop: “Intellectual love, finding unexpected contentment in union with its object, perfects its knowledge, continuing thus to unite with it, and uniting ever more, does not cease to continue to do so.”
It is a matter of “illuminating the intellect well,” striving to “purge” it from the darkness of “ignorance.” He denounces “the dullness and indolence of spirit, which does not want to know what is necessary” and insists on the value of study and learning: “Study ever more, with diligence and humility,” he wrote to a student. But it is not enough to “purge” the intellect of ignorance; it is also necessary to “embellish and adorn” it, to “wallpaper it with considerations.” To know a thing perfectly, it is necessary to learn well, to dedicate time to “subjecting” the intellect, that is, to fixing it on one thing before moving on to another.
The young Francis de Sales applied his intelligence not only to studies and intellectual knowledge, but also to certain subjects essential to man’s life on earth, and, in particular, to “consideration of the vanity of greatness, riches, honours, comforts, and voluptuous pleasures of this world”; to “consideration of the wickedness, abjection, and deplorable misery present in vice and sin,” and to “knowledge of the excellence of virtue.”
The human spirit is often distracted, forgets, and is content with vague or vain knowledge. Through meditation, not only on eternal truths, but also on the phenomena and events of the world, it is able to reach a more realistic and profound vision of reality. For this reason, in the Meditations proposed by the author to Philothea, there is dedicated a first part entitled Considerations.
To consider means to apply the mind to a precise object, to examine its different aspects carefully. Francis de Sales invites Philothea to “think,” to “see,” to examine the different “points,” some of which deserve to be considered “separately.” He urges her to see things in general and then to descend to particular cases. He wants her to examine the principles, causes, and consequences of a given truth, of a given situation, as well as the circumstances that accompany it. It is also necessary to know how to “weigh” certain words or sentences, the importance of which risks escaping us, to consider them one by one, to compare them with each other.
As in everything, so in the desire to know there can be excesses and distortions. Beware of the vanity of false wise men: some, in fact, “for the little science they have, want to be honoured and respected by all, as if everyone should go to their school and have them as teachers: therefore, they are called pedants.” Now, “science dishonours us when it swells us up and degenerates into pedantry.” What ridiculousness to want to instruct Minerva, Minervam docere, the goddess of wisdom! “The plague of science is presumption, which swells spirits and makes them hydroponic, as are ordinarily the wise men of the world.”
When it comes to problems that surpass us and fall within the realm of the mysteries of faith, it is necessary to “purify them from all curiosity;” we must “keep them well closed and covered in the face of such vain and foolish questions and curiosities.” It is “intellectual purity,” the “second modesty” or “inner modesty.” Finally, one must know that the intellect can be mistaken and that there is the “sin of the intellect,” such as that which Francis de Sales reproaches to the lady of Chantal, who had made a mistake by placing an exaggerated esteem in her director.
Memory and its “warehouses”
Like the intellect, so memory is a faculty of the spirit that arouses admiration. Francis de Sales compares it to a warehouse “that is worth more than those of Antwerp or Venice.” Is it not said “to store” in memory? Memory is a soldier whose fidelity is very useful to us. It is a gift from God, declares the author of the Introduction to the Devout Life: God has given it to you “so that you may remember him,” he says to Philothea, inviting her to flee “detestable and frivolous memories.”
This faculty of the human spirit needs to be trained. When he was a student in Padua, the young Francis exercised his memory not only in his studies, but also in his spiritual life, in which the memory of benefits received is a fundamental element:
First of all, I will dedicate myself to refreshing my memory with all the good motions, desires, affections, purposes, projects, feelings, and sweetnesses that the divine Majesty has inspired and made me experience in the past, considering its holy mysteries, the beauty of virtue, the nobility of its service, and an infinity of benefits that it has freely bestowed upon me; I will also put order in my memories about the obligations I have towards her for the fact that, by her holy grace, she has sometimes weakened my senses by sending me certain illnesses and infirmities, from which I have drawn great profit.
In difficulties and fears, it is indispensable to use it “to remember the promises” and to “remain firm trusting that everything will perish rather than the promises will fail.” However, the memory of the past is not always good, because it can engender sadness, as happened to a disciple of St. Bernard, who was assailed by a bad temptation when he began “to remember the friends of the world, the relatives, the goods he had left.” In certain exceptional circumstances of the spiritual life “it is necessary to purify it from the memory of perishable things and from worldly affairs and to forget for a certain time material and temporal things, although good and useful.” In the moral field, to exercise virtue, the person who has felt offended will take a radical measure: “I remember too much the taunts and injuries, from now on I will lose the memory.”
“We must have a just and reasonable spirit”
The capacities of the human spirit, in particular of the intellect and memory, are not destined only for glorious intellectual enterprises, but also and above all for the conduct of life. To seek to know man, to understand life, and to define the norms concerning behaviours conforming to reason, these should be the fundamental tasks of the human spirit and its education. The central part of Philothea, which deals with the “exercise of virtues,” contains, towards the end, a chapter that summarizes in a certain way the teaching of Francis de Sales on virtues: “We must have a just and reasonable spirit.”
With finesse and a pinch of humour, the author denounces numerous bizarre, foolish, or simply unjust behaviours: “We accuse our neighbour for little, and we excuse ourselves for much more”; “we want to sell at a high price and buy cheaply”; “what we do for others always seems a lot to us, and what others do for us is nothing”; “we have a sweet, gracious, and courteous heart towards ourselves, and a hard, severe, and rigorous heart towards our neighbour”; “we have two weights: one to weigh our comforts with the greatest possible advantage for us, the other to weigh those of our neighbour with the greatest disadvantage that can be.” To judge well, he advises Philothea, it is always necessary to put oneself in the shoes of one’s neighbour: “Make yourself a seller in buying and a buyer in selling.” Nothing is lost by living as “generous, noble, courteous people, with a regal, constant, and reasonable heart.”
Reason is at the base of the edifice of education. Certain parents do not have a right mental attitude; in fact, “there are virtuous children whom fathers and mothers can hardly bear because they have this or that defect in the body; there are instead vicious ones continuously pampered, because they have this or that beautiful physical gift.” There are educators and leaders who indulge in preferences. “Keep the balance straight between your daughters,” he recommended to a superior of the Visitation nuns, so that “natural gifts do not make you distribute affections and Favors unjustly.” And he added: “Beauty, good grace, and gentle speech often confer a great force of attraction on people who live according to their natural inclinations; charity has as its object true virtue and the beauty of the heart, and extends to all without particularisms.”
But it is above all youth that runs the greatest risks, because if “self-love usually distances us from reason,” this perhaps happens even more in young people tempted by vanity and ambition. The reason of a young person risks being lost above all when he lets himself “be taken by infatuations.” Therefore, attention, writes the bishop to a young man, “not to allow your affections to prevent judgment and reason in the choice of subjects to love; since, once it has started running, affection drags judgment, as it would drag a slave, to very deplorable choices, of which he might repent very soon.” He also explained to the Visitation nuns that “our thoughts are usually full of reasons, opinions, and considerations suggested by self-love, which causes great conflicts in the soul.”
Reason, source of the four cardinal virtues
Reason resembles the river of paradise, “which God makes flow to irrigate the whole man in all his faculties and activities.” It is divided into four branches corresponding to the four virtues that philosophical tradition calls cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.
Prudence “inclines our intellect to truly discern the evil to be avoided and the good to be done.” It consists in “discerning which are the most appropriate means to reach the good and virtue.” Beware of passions that risk deforming our judgment and causing the ruin of prudence! Prudence does not oppose simplicity: we will be, jointly, “prudent as serpents so as not to be deceived; simple as doves so as not to deceive anyone.”
Justice consists in “rendering to God, to our neighbour, and to ourselves what is due.” Francis de Sales begins with justice towards God, connected with the virtue of religion, “by which we render to God the respect, honour, homage, and submission due to him as our sovereign Lord and first principle.” Justice towards parents entails the duty of piety, which “extends to all the offices that can legitimately be rendered to them, whether in honour or in service.”
The virtue of fortitude helps to “overcome the difficulties that are encountered in doing good and in rejecting evil.” It is very necessary, because the sensitive appetite is “truly a rebellious, seditious, turbulent subject.” When reason dominates the passions, anger gives way to gentleness, a great ally of reason. Fortitude is often accompanied by magnanimity, “a virtue that pushes and inclines us to perform actions of great importance.”
Finally, temperance is indispensable “to repress the disordered inclinations of sensuality,” to “govern the appetite of greed,” and to “curb the passions connected.” In effect, if the soul becomes too passionate about a pleasure and a sensible joy, it degrades itself, rendering itself incapable of higher joys.
In conclusion, the four cardinal virtues are like the manifestations of this natural light that reason provides us. By practicing these virtues, reason exercises “its superiority and the authority it has to regulate sensual appetites.”
Ángel Card. FERNÁNDEZ ARTIME