Begging Pardon from the Doctors

St. Francis de Sales and Rejecting Theological Authorities

In the years after his death in 1622, the friends and acquaintances of St. Francis de Sales, including his colleague St. Jane Frances de Chantal, shared their memories of him, and these accounts were then used in the process leading to his eventual canonization in 1665. De Sales had shared with Chantal and a handful of others an episode from his early life that was pivotal to his spiritual development and that I continue to find inspiring for my own vocation as a theologian.

De Sales was born in 1567 into an aristocratic family from the Duchy of Savoy, in southeastern France. When he was sixteen, his parents sent him to the College of Clermont, a Jesuit college in Paris offering a secondary and post-secondary education, as was typical for aristocratic boys at the time. De Sales’s parents sent with him a tutor, a priest known as Abbé Déage, who was to look after him and guide his education.

The curriculum at the college focused on rhetoric, literature, and philosophy. The young de Sales had always been devout, and by this point secretly desired to become a priest, contrary to the wishes of his father. A year or two into his studies, his desire to know God became overwhelming, and he begged Abbé Déage to allow him to study theology, even though the study of theology was only permitted for those entering the priesthood and who had completed their liberal studies. The Abbé devised a solution and allowed de Sales to accompany him to the lectures on theology at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne), which the Abbé had already been attending.

By the 1580s, when de Sales was at the college, the French Wars of Religion, pitting the Calvinist-inspired Huguenots against the Catholic majority, had been raging for over two decades, and so the theological lectures at the Sorbonne, as well as the preaching in local churches, often included polemical attacks against Calvinist theology. In this environment, de Sales became obsessed with the question of predestination, particularly with the possibility that God could have decided to withhold from him, without any merit or demerit on his part, the grace necessary for salvation. De Sales eagerly listened to the theological lectures hoping to understand the Catholic perspective, but he found that the two great Doctors held up by the theologians, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, although differing from Calvin in some respects, likewise held that God withholds grace from some while granting it to others.