Modern psychology has demonstrated the importance and influence of emotions in the life of the human psyche, and everyone knows that emotions are particularly strong during youth. But there is hardly talk anymore of the “passions of the soul,” which classical anthropology has carefully analysed, as evidenced by the work of Francis de Sales, and, in particular, when he writes that “the soul, as such, is the source of the passions.” In his vocabulary, the term “emotion” did not yet appear with the connotations we attribute to it. Instead, he would say that our “passions” in certain circumstances are “moved.” In the educational field, the question that arises concerns the attitude that is appropriate to have in the face of these involuntary manifestations of our sensibility, which always have a physiological component.
“I am a poor man and nothing more”
All those who knew Francis de Sales noted his great sensitivity and emotionality. The blood would rush to his head and his face would turn red. We know of his outbursts of anger against the “heretics” and the courtesan of Padua. Like any good Savoyard, he was “usually calm and gentle, but capable of terrible outbursts of anger; a volcano under the snow.” His sensitivity was very much alive. On the occasion of the death of his little sister Jeanne, he wrote to Jane Frances de Chantal, who was also dismayed:
Alas, my Daughter: I am a poor man and nothing more. My heart has been touched more than I could ever imagine; but the truth is that your grief as well as my mother’s have contributed a great deal to this: I was afraid for your heart as well as my mother’s.
At the death of his mother, he did not hide that the separation had made him shed tears. He certainly had the courage to close her eyes and mouth and give her a last kiss, but after that, he confided to Jane Frances de Chantal, “my heart swelled greatly, and I wept for this good mother more than I had ever done since the day I embraced the priesthood.” In fact, he did not systematically restrain from manifesting his feelings externally. He accepted them serenely given his humanistic approach. A precious testimony from Jane Frances de Chantal informs us that “our saint was not exempt from feelings and outbursts of passions, and did not want to be freed from them.”
It is commonly known that the passions of the soul influence the body, causing external reactions to their internal movements: “We externalize and manifest our passions and the movements that our souls have in common with animals through the eyes, with movements of the eyebrows, forehead and entire face.” Thus, it is not in our power not to feel fear in certain circumstances: “It is as if one were to say to a person who sees a lion or a bear coming towards them: Do not be afraid.” Now, “when feeling fear, one becomes pale, and when we are called to account for something that displeases us, our blood rushes to our faces and we become red, or feeling displeasure can also make tears well up in our eyes.” Children, “if they see a dog barking, they immediately start screaming and do not stop until they are near their mother.”
When Ms. de Chantal meets her husband’s murderer, how will her “heart” react? “I know that, without a doubt, that heart of yours will throb and feel shaken, and your blood will boil,” her spiritual director predicts, adding this lesson of wisdom: “God makes us see with our own eyes, through these emotions, how true it is that we are made of flesh, bone, and spirit.”
The twelve passions of the soul
In ancient times, Virgil, Cicero, and Boethius broke the passions of the soul down to four, while Saint Augustine knew only one dominant passion, love, articulated in turn into four secondary passions: “Love that tends to possess what it loves is called cupidity or desire; when it achieves and possesses it, it is called joy; when it flees what is contrary to it, it is called fear; if it happens to lose it and feels the weight of it, it is called sadness.”
In Philothea, Francis de Sales points out seven, comparing them to the strings that the luthier must tune from time to time: love, hate, desire, fear, hope, sadness, and joy.
In the Treatise on the Love of God, on the other hand, he lists up to twelve. It is surprising that “this multitude of passions […] is left in our souls!” The first five have as their object the good, that is, everything that our sensibility makes us spontaneously seek and appreciate as good for us (we think of the fundamental goods of life, health, and joy):
If good be considered in itself according to its natural goodness, it excites love, the first and principal passion; if good be regarded as absent, it provokes us to desire; if being desired we think we are able to obtain it, we enter into hope; if we think we are unable, we feel despair; but when we possess it as present, it moves us to joy.
The other seven passions are those that make us spontaneously react negatively to everything that appears to us as evil to be avoided and fought against (we think of illness, suffering, and death):
As soon as we discover evil, we hate it; if it is absent, we fly it; if we cannot avoid it, we fear it; if we think we can avoid it, we grow bold and courageous; but if we feel it present, we grieve, and then anger and wrath suddenly rush forth to reject and repel the evil or at least to take vengeance for it. If we cannot succeed we remain in grief. But ifwe repulse or avenge it we feel satisfaction and satiation, which is a pleasure of triumph, for as the possession of good gladdens the heart, so the victory over evil exalts the spirits.
As can be noted, to the eleven passions of the soul proposed by Saint Thomas Aquinas, Francis de Sales adds victory over evil, which “exalts the spirits” and provokes the joy of triumph.
Love, the first and main passion
As was easy to foresee, love is presented as the “first and main passion”: “Love comes first, among the passions of the soul: it is the king of all the outbursts of the heart, it transforms everything else into itself and makes us be what it loves.” “Love is the first passion of the soul,” he repeats.
It manifests itself in a thousand ways and its language is very diversified. In fact, “it is not expressed only in words, but also with the eyes, with gestures, and with actions. As far as the eyes are concerned, the tears that flow from them are proof of love.” There are also the “sighs of love.” But these manifestations of love are different. The most habitual and superficial is the emotion or passion, which puts sensitivity in motion almost involuntarily.
And hate? We spontaneously hate what appears to be evil. It should be noted that among people there are forms of hatred and instinctive, irrational, unconscious aversions, like those that exist between a mule and a horse, or between a vine and cabbages. We are not responsible for these at all, because they do not depend on our will.
Desire and flight
Desire is another fundamental reality of our soul. Everyday life triggers multiple desires, because desire consists in the “hope of a future good.” The most common natural desires are those that “concern goods, pleasures, and honours.”
On the other hand, we spontaneously flee from the evils of life. The human will of Christ pushed Him to flee from the pains and sufferings of passion; hence the trembling, anguish, and sweating of blood.
Hope and despair
Hope concerns a good that one believes can be obtained. Philothea is invited to examine how she behaved as regards “hope, perhaps too often placed in the world and in creatures; and too little in God and eternal things.”
As for despair, look for example at that of the “youth who aspire to perfection”: “As soon as they encounter a difficulty along their path, one immediately gets a feeling of disappointment, which pushes him/her to make many complaints, so as to give the impression of being troubled by great torments. Pride and vanity cannot tolerate the slightest defect, without immediately feeling strongly disturbed to the point of despair.”
Joy and sadness
Joy is “satisfaction for the good obtained.” Thus, “when we meet those we love, it is not possible not to feel moved by joy and happiness.” The possession of a good infallibly produces a complacency or joy, as the law of gravity moves the stone: “It is the weight that shakes things, moves them, and stops them: it is the weight that moves the stone and drags it down as soon as the obstacles are removed; it is the same weight that makes it continue the movement downwards; finally, it is always the same weight that makes it stop and settle when it has reached its place.”
Sometimes joy comes with laughter. “Laughter is a passion that erupts without us wanting it and it is not in our power to restrain it, all the more so as we laugh and are moved to laugh by unforeseen circumstances.” Did Our Lord laugh? The bishop of Geneva thinks that Jesus smiled when He wanted to: “Our Lord could not laugh, because for Him nothing was unforeseen, since He knew everything before it happened; He could, of course, smile, but He did so deliberately.”
The young Visitation nuns, sometimes seized by uncontrollable laughter when a companion beat her chest or a reader made a mistake during the reading at the table, needed a little lesson on this point: “Fools laugh at every situation, because everything surprises them, not being able to foresee anything; but the wise do not laugh so lightly, because they employ reflection more, which makes them foresee the things that are to happen.” That said, it is not a defect to laugh at some imperfection, “provided one does not go too far.”
Sadness is “sorrow for pain that is present.” It “disturbs the soul, provokes immoderate fears, makes one feel disgust for prayer, weakens and lulls the brain to sleep, deprives the soul of wisdom, resolution, judgment, and courage, and annihilates strength”; it is “like a harsh winter that ruins all the beauty of the earth and makes all the animals indolent; because it takes away all sweetness from the soul and makes it as lazy and impotent in all its faculties.”
In certain cases, it can lead to weeping: a father, when sending his son to court or to study, cannot refrain “from crying when saying goodbye to him”; and “a daughter, although she has married according to the wishes of her father and mother, moves them to tears when receiving their blessing.” Alexander the Great wept when he learned that there were other lands that he would never be able to conquer: “Like a child who whines for an apple that is denied him, that Alexander, whom historians call the Great, more foolish than a child, begins to weep warm tears, because it seems impossible for him to conquer the other worlds.”
Courage and fear
Fear refers to a “future evil.” Some, wanting to be brave, hang around somewhere during the night, but “as soon as they hear a stone fall or the rustle of a mouse running away, they start screaming: My God! – What is it, they are asked, what did you find? – I heard a noise. – But what? – I don’t know.” It is necessary to be wary, because “fear is a greater evil than the evil itself.”
As for courage, before being a virtue, it is a feeling that supports us in the face of difficulties that would normally overwhelm us. Francis de Sales experienced it when undertaking a long and risky visit to his mountain diocese:
I was about to mount my horse for the pastoral visit, which would last about five months. […] I left full of courage, and, since that morning, I felt a great joy in being able to begin, although, before, for several days, I had experienced vain fears and sadness.
Anger and the feeling of triumph
As for anger or wrath, we cannot prevent ourselves from being seized by it in certain circumstances: “If they tell me that someone has spoken ill of me, or that I am being treated with any other form of discourtesy, I immediately fly into a rage and there isn’t a vein in my body that isn’t twisting, because the blood is boiling.” Even in the Visitation monasteries, occasions for irritation and anger were not lacking, and the attacks of the “irascible appetite” were felt to be overwhelming. There is nothing strange in this: “To prevent the resentment of anger from awakening in us and the blood from rising to our heads will never be possible; we will be fortunate if we can reach this perfection a quarter of an hour before we die.” It can also happen “that anger upsets and turns my poor heart upside down, that my head smokes from all sides, that the blood boils like a pot on the fire.”
The satisfaction of anger, for having overcome evil, provokes the exhilarating emotion of triumph. He who triumphs “cannot contain the transport of his joy.”
In search of balance
Passions and outbursts of the soul are most often independent of our will: “It is not expected of you to not have no passions; it is not in your power,” he said to the Daughters of the Visitation, adding: “What can a person do to have such and such a temperament, subject to this or that passion? Everything therefore lies in the actions that we derive from it by means of that movement, which depends on our will.”
One thing is certain, moods and passions make a person an extremely variable being in terms of one’s psychological “temperature,” just like climatic variations. “His/her life flows on this earth like water, fluctuating and undulating in a perpetual variety of movements.” “Today one will be excessively happy, and, immediately after, exaggeratedly sad. In carnival time one will see manifestations of joy and cheerfulness, with foolish and crazy actions, then, immediately afterwards, you will see such exaggerated signs of sadness and boredom so as to make one think that these are terrible and, apparently, irremediable things. Another, at present, will be too confident and nothing will frighten him, and, immediately afterwards, he will be seized by an anguish that will sink him down to the ground.”
Jane de Chantal’s spiritual director identified the different “seasons of the soul” experienced by her at the beginning of her fervent life very well:
I see that all the seasons of the year are in your soul. Now you feel the winter through all the barrenness, distractions, heaviness and boredom; now the dew of the month of May with the scent of the little holy flowers, and now the warmth of the desires to please our good God. Only autumn remains of which, as you say, you do not see many fruits. Well, it often happens that, threshing the wheat or pressing the grapes, one finds a more abundant fruit than the harvests and the vintage promised. You would like for it to always be spring or summer; but no, my Daughter: the alternation of the seasons must take place inside as well as outside. Only in Heaven will everything be spring as regards beauty, everything will be autumn as regards enjoyment and everything will be summer as regards love. Up there, there will no longer be winter, but here it is necessary for the exercise of self-denial and the thousand small beautiful virtues, which are exercised in the time of aridity.
The health of the soul as well as that of the body cannot consist in eliminating these four moods, rather in obtaining a “invariability of moods.” When one passion predominates over the others, it causes diseases of the soul; and since it is extremely difficult to regulate it, it follows that people are bizarre and variable, so that nothing else is discerned among them but fantasies, inconstancy and stupidity.
What is good about passions is that they allow us “to exercise the will to acquire virtues and spiritual vigilance.” Despite certain manifestations, in which one must “suffocate and repress the passions,” for Francis de Sales it is not about eliminating them, which is impossible, rather controlling them as much as possible, that is, moderating them and orienting them to an end that is good.
It is not, therefore, about pretending to ignore our psychic manifestations, as if they did not exist (which once again is impossible), but of “constantly watching over one’s heart and one’s spirit to keep the passions in order and under the control of reason; otherwise there will only be originality and unequal behaviours.” Philothea will not be happy, if not when she has “sedated and pacified so many passions that [they] caused [her] restlessness.”
Having a constant spirit is one of the best ornaments of Christian life and one of the most lovable means of acquiring and preserving the grace of God, and also of edifying one’s neighbour. “Perfection, therefore, does not consist in the absence of passions, but in their correct regulation; the passions are to the heart as the strings to a harp: they must be tuned so that we can say: We will praise you with the harp.”
When passions make us lose inner and outer balance, two methods are possible: “opposing contrary passions to them, or opposing greater passions of the same kind.” If I am disturbed by the “desire for riches or voluptuous pleasure,” I will fight such passion with contempt and flight, or I will aspire to higher riches and pleasures. I can fight physical fear with the opposite, which is courage, or by developing a healthy fear regarding the soul.
The love of God, for its part, imprints a true conversion on the passions, changing their natural orientation and presenting them with a spiritual end. For example, “the appetite for food is made very spiritual if, before satisfying it, one gives it the motive of love: and no, Lord, it is not to please this poor belly, nor to satisfy this appetite that I go to the table, but, according to your Providence, to maintain this body that you have made subject to such misery; yes, Lord, because it has pleased you so.”
The transformation thus operated will resemble an “artifice” used in alchemy that changes iron into gold. “O holy and sacred alchemy! – writes the Bishop of Geneva -, O divine powder of fusion, with which all the metals of our passions, affections and actions are changed into the purest gold of heavenly delight!”.
Moods of the soul, passions and imaginations are deeply rooted in the human soul: they represent an exceptional resource for the life of the soul. It will be the task of the higher faculties, reason and above all will, to moderate and govern them. A difficult undertaking: Francis de Sales accomplished it successfully, because, according to what the mother of Chantal affirms, “he possessed such absolute dominion over his passions as to render them obedient as slaves; and in the end they almost no longer appeared.”
