| How Vanity and Ambition Can Sink Our Ship |
from Selected Letters of St. Francis de Sales.To prepare for our chat on Sunday, please read the article, which is reproduced below, and review the questions at the end.Click for Living Jesus Chatroom  Pieter Bruegel the Elder – The Tower of Babel (Public Domain)To Monsieur Celse-Benigne de Chantal Written from Annecy, 8 December 1610 Sir,So, you are at last about to hoist sail and launch out on to the high seas of the world: you are going to court. May God be gracious to you and keep you ever in his holy hand.I am less apprehensive about this way of life than many other people and I do not consider it one of the most dangerous for men of noble spirit and of manly heart, for there are only two main reefs to guard against in these deep waters: vanity which is the ruin of sensual, slothful, effeminate and vacillating characters, and ambition which ruins those who are foolhardy and presumptuous.And in the same way as vanity is a defect of courage which, lacking force to win true and solid approbation, seeks and is satisfied with empty praise; so ambition is a surfeit of boldness which makes us pursue glory and honor regardless of reason and even running counter to it. Thus, vanity leads us to fritter away our energy in idle frivolity designed to curry favor with women and other people of slender intellect, while earning the disapproval of men of great heart and minds of real distinction. Ambition, however, makes us grasp at honors before we have done anything to deserve them, making us want others to look upon the excellence of our ancestry as our own and putting it forward as a claim on the world’s esteem.Now, Sir, to strengthen you against all this, since you want me to advise you, continue to nourish your mind with spiritual and divine fare, for this will make it strong to withstand vanity and right-minded in your attitude towards ambition. Be faithful to frequent communion and believe me that you could do nothing more certain to make you firm in your practice of virtue. And in order to make sure of keeping faithful to this exercise, put yourself under the guidance of some good confessor and ask him to assume authority over you, calling you to account in confession for any failure on your part in this exercise, supposing such a thing were to happen. Always be humble in confession and have a real and express purpose of amendment. Never forget (and I entreat you to make a special point of this) to ask Our Lord’s help on your knees before you leave your lodgings in the morning, and ask him to forgive your faults before you go to bed at night. Above all, beware of bad books, and not for anything in the world allow your mind to be carried away by certain books which captivate people of feeble brain-power because of certain subtleties which they savor, as for instance in the writings of that infamous man Rabelais and certain others of our age who profess to throw doubt and contempt on everything and jeer at all the maxims and precepts we venerate of old. On the contrary, have about you books of solid doctrine, and especially Christian and spiritual books, so as to find sound recreation in them from time to time.I should like you to cultivate a gentle and sincere courtesy which offends nobody but wins everyone, which seeks to gain love rather than honor, which never jests at anyone else’s expense, and never hurts, which never affronts anyone and is itself never affronted; and should this happen, it happens rarely, for courteous people are very often honorably advanced. Take care, I beseech you, not to get involved in flirtations and not to allow your affections to run away with your judgement and reason in your choice of those on whom you fix your affections; for once affection is given free rein it drags judgement along with it like a slave and impels it to very unsuitable choices, fully deserving the repentance which soon follows. Reflections: Vanity is an easy vice to warn against, but what about ambition? That’s commonly considered positive in our day and age. Why does St. Francis see it as negative?What makes vanity a defect of courage?What is vanity, precisely? Is it just about a concern for our looks?St. Francis encourages frequent communion. Since we receive all of Jesus (Body, Blood, Soul, Divinity), why is receiving communion more than once necessary?Back in the 1500s, when books were only beginning to be widely disseminated by the advent of the printing press, St. Francis warns in this letter of “bad books.” In our age, we have a proliferation of bad books, and more so we are inundated with endless words from the internet and social media. If St. Francis saw bad books as a danger back then, how so more do we need to be on guard today. What constitutes a bad book, image, or written piece in our world, and how do we guard against it? Sign up for our Living Jesus Chat Room:Come to our Living Jesus Chat Room, 7:30 PM to 8:30 PM Eastern Time |