Treatise on the Love of God

Treatise on the Love of God by St Francis de Sales, translated by Dom Henry Benedict Mackey, OSB, 555 pages

This work was written as a sequel of sorts to the author's legendary work Introduction to a Devout Life.  While that work was addressed to the spiritual beginner Philothea, this one has as its ideal reader the mature Theotimus, able now to digest real food.  Yet although it is, as Dom Mackey writes, "an immense mass of instruction, dogmatic and moral, on the science of the love of God", it is also eminently practical, with St Francis well aware of the difficulty in distinguishing between love of God and certain forms of self-love that disguise themselves as piety.

In St Francis' anthropology, man is a loving creature, that is, a creature whose nature is to love, and the only question is:  What will he love?  Being made for love, man becomes like that which he loves, so that his love can raise him to heaven or confine him to hell.  Finally, man can only find satisfaction in the love of Love Himself.  St Francis finds nothing worthwhile without love, for him, supernatural charity is the root and crown and bond of natural virtue.  As a result, the smallest acts, done in love, can be worth more than the greatest triumphs of calculation.

The book was first published in 1616, and, as was the style in 17th century France, the saint frequently employs elaborate poetic metaphors - comparing the appetites to a falcon that must be hooded to be pacified, or the devil to a mother bird which leads predators astray by feigning vulnerability, only to take off and leave him empty-handed once they are thoroughly lost.  This may grate on readers who prefer a more straightforward contemporary style.  Likewise, some readers will find St Francis' usage of the scientific knowledge of his day jarring - as when he describes pearls as being formed by drops of dew taken in by the oyster.  To those with even a little charity such minor annoyances will not detract from the wealth of wisdom contained in this masterpiece on the spiritual life.