Triumph of the Will: Imagination and Self-Cultivation in François de Sales

Abstract

ON JANUARY 13, 1547, IN Trent, the Ecumenical Council approved the official statement of the Roman Catholic Church's doctrine on justification, that is, the way in which certain human beings are redeemed from sin and promised eternal happiness and others are condemned to eternal suffering. Central to the doctrine approved on that day is the freedom of the human will and the consequent responsibility of mankind to exert itself to cooperate with divine grace. In August 1608, Fran90is de Sales, Bishop of Geneva, completed the first edition of a best-seller of seventeenth-century French letters, L'Introduction a la vie devote, a guide to spiritual self-improvement that calls upon the reader to develop her or his 'inner life' through regular, structured use of imagination. Between the Church's strongly-worded, even militant, emphasis on the will and de Sales's promotion of the individual, private imagination there is a direct relation, one that the Bishop of Geneva recalls frequently, especially in his second, more theoretical book, Le Traite de l'amour de Dieu (1616). We are called upon to augment our inner life, for the grace of the Holy Spirit will enter into us 'sinon par Ie libre consentement de notre volonte [ ... J selon la me sure de son bon plaisir et de notre propre disposition et cooperation, ainsi que dit Ie sacre Concile'. 1 De Sales's insistence on disposition and cooperation furnishes the charter, so to speak, for his whole pastoral, and hence literary, project, and helps us to understand not only the simple fact that he and his Catholic contemporaries were avid practitioners of inner selfdevelopment but the particular form of that development: one that emphasised what could be called an active and imaginative form rather than a primarily hermeneutic or receptive one. Fran90is de Sales's work was widely read and influential there were at least twenty-four editions in the seventeenth century and have been at least four hundred editions in French altogether.2 Soon after the author's death in 1622, his tomb near Annecy became a place of pilgrimage, and he was canonised only forty-three years later in 1665. His call to develop the individual imagination may well have made subsequent use of this faculty or way of thinking important even for those whose intentions were far from religious. Moreover, the practice of Salesian devotion goes hand in hand with the development of the absolutist compromise that made possible so much of what we know as French baroque and classical culture? In this way, the use of imagination that is taught in L'Introduction a la vie devote has much importance for the development of politeness and civility across the spectrum of social condition in the following century.