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THE GOSPEL JOURNEY OF JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE (1651-1719)
Br. Luke Salm, FSC
This essay on the spirituality of John Baptist de La Salle forms part of a series devoted to the history of French spirituality. The title has been chosen with that in mind. However, in relation to the series as a whole, the approach taken here may seem to be rather narrow, if not downright irrelevant. Three introductory considerations will help to explain the reasons for such an approach. Furthermore, this rather lengthy preamble, while serving as an introduction to the theme, will contribute to its development as well.
The first introductory point concerns an observation that is commonly heard. The name of the Founder of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools brings to mind in the first instance the problems relating to the schools, education in general and teaching in particular, much more readily than questions of spirituality. De La Salle is usually associated with an approach to education which, depending on the background or the bias of the interpreters, is considered to be either realistic or utopian, popular or elitist, innovative or traditional, liberating or oppressive.
Thus it is rather rare for people to think at first of John Baptist de La Salle as a master of the spiritual life. Father Andre Rayez, for a long time the chief editor of the Dictionary of Spirituality and a man to whom the recent renewal of Lasallian studies owes so much, noted this in an article he wrote in 1952. Perhaps the most outstanding illustration of the truth of this observation is that the Abbe Bremond's monumental literary history of French religious thought does not speak at all of De La Salle. His name is nowhere mentioned in the eleven volumes of this standard reference work.
Nevertheless, the Founder of the Brothers does merit some attention even though he does not represent any particular stage in the development of French spirituality. It is true that he authored many pedagogical and catechetical works that for more than two centuries had an astonishing success in print. There were 24 editions of the Conduct of Schools up until 1903; 125 editions or reprintings of the Rules of Christian Politeness between 1703 and 1853; and 270 printings of the Duties of a Christian between 1703 and 1928. But he also produced a number of spiritual treatises: the Rule of the Brothers; an assortment of short excerpts on different aspects of the spiritual life which were brought together in one volume that he called the Collection; three series of Meditations, including 77 for Sundays and feasts in the temporal cycle, 109 for the feasts of saints, and 16 meditations for the time of the annual retreat. All of these meditations relate to the spiritual demands and the significance of the educational activity of the Brothers, for which De La Salle did not hesitate to use the term ministry. Finally, he wrote a treatise on mental prayer which was published under the title An Explanation of the Method of Mental Prayer, based on the instructions he had given to the Brothers.
On the basis of these writings, several historians see in John Baptist de La Salle a good witness to the many spiritual movements in the France of the seventeenth century. These are so varied as to defy categorization into schools or types. Like most of the spiritual authors of his day, De La Salle saw in the Sacred Scripture the basis for the spiritual life of the Christian. Above all, he set himself in the mainstream of the Catholic Counter- Reformation and so was animated by an enthusiasm for spiritual renewal and missionary zeal. His spiritual doctrine is marked by the Christocentrism of the school of Berulle, with its devotion to the Word Incarnate and identification with the "mysteries" that doctrine implies, adherence to the person of Christ and the effort to conform oneself to Christ a nd the mind of Christ, including above all that of renouncement and abnegation.
However, and this will be the second introductory point, those who have only recently become interested in studying the spiritual doctrine of De La Salle have been much taken up with the question of his originality. There is no doubt that John Baptist de La Salle was original in a number of characteristic traits and in some very specific instances that we find in his teaching on the spiritual life. Thus, for example, in order to give a context and a deeper meaning to the routine educational work of the Brothers, he had recourse to the great Pauline texts on the ministry of the Gospel. In his life and in his teaching he was, as Father Rayez wrote in 1955, "one of the best representatives of the spirituality of abandonment that was so widespread in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries." His method of mental prayer is original in the importance he gave to placing oneself in the presence of God. Finally, the explicit place that he gave to the Holy Spirit in his spiritual life is remarkable for its time.
But it can also be said somewhat paradoxically that John Baptist de La Salle was original in the very eclecticism of his sources. There are so many of them. He took his treasures where he found them. He could move easily from Olier to the Carmelite Laurent de la Resurrection, from St. Francis de Sales to Bernieres, from St. Theresa to Rance, from the Jesuit Busee to Beuvelet, the disciple of Bourdoise, or again from Tronson to Barre the Minim, from the Capuchin Jean-Francois de Reims to Canon Roland, from the Maurist Claude Bretagne to the Archdeacon Boudon. Here his originality comes through in his ability to assimilate, in his genius for being able to restyle these sources for his own use. If he had used a multiplicity of raw materials, he transformed them, putting them together in a new harmony, and so using them to construct an edifice of his own.
Ultimately, the spirituality of John Baptist de La Salle is original in a very special way. It was developed only gradually and with a distinct audience in mind, a group that he knew intimately, with whom he was associated, sharing a common vision, a common activity, and life together in a difficult environment. De La Salle composed practically all of his spiritual writings for this little band of schoolteachers who had cast their lot with him and who, under his direction, were little by little becoming a new kind of religious community.
He wrote for them in the sense that it was they to whom he addressed his spiritual works. Very many of his meditations are formulated in the second person plural. The fact that he wrote for such a restricted audience no doubt explains for the most part why the spirituality of De La Salle did not become more widely known.
John Baptist de La Salle wrote for his Brothers in another and quite distinctive sense as well. It was their concrete existential situation that constituted the basis for his spiritual teaching. It might even be said that the subject matter of his spirituality is a mystical realism. He refers constantly to the professional, community and personal situations of his Brothers, to their daily concerns, their talents, their simple but often arduous duties, and to their teaching. He refers above all to the lived reality of their interpersonal relations: with their Brothers, with the youngsters in their charge, with people generally. He helped them to search more deeply into the mystical dimensions of this real life experience.
This mystical realism was explored according to a quadruple rhythm, even if its presentation lacked the rigidity of an artificial systematization. But one can recognize in the development of the spiritual teaching of De La Salle a four- fold invitation: 1) to consider the concrete teaching situation; 2) to contemplate the element of mystery involved within it; 3) to make a renewed commitment to transform the present reality; 4) to be open to the transcendent and freely given Ultimate, i.e., to the reality of God. A word on each of these invitations in turn, quoting or paraphrasing the language of the Founder himself.
The first invitation is to be rooted in the concrete situation. "Look at the life you are living; be aware of the distressing situation of the youngsters that God has placed in your path; use that as a measure of what is at stake in your teaching service; look again at the concrete difficulties; assess what you have achieved thus far." In this way the concrete act of teaching has already become a spiritual matter. So also was the struggle that the newly formed community had to endure in order to succeed in introducing a type of instruction and a concept of the school that would constitute a genuine service for youth.
The second invitation is to contemplate the fact that within this life experience there is a genuine element of mystery. "It is God who has called you to this way of life and to this form of service. Every day God calls you anew by the appeals of these youngsters and the needs they have. It is his own work that God entrusts to you; your presence among young people is the way that Jesus brings salvation to them. That is how Christ can make his salvation real for them, together with the freedom that has been their destiny as human beings and sons of God ever since their birth and baptism. In you, and throughout all your teaching ministry, these youngsters can encounter Christ, the Good shepherd, who knows each of them by name, who loves them, who helps them to grow up to become what they are in reality, and who goes out searching endlessly for those who have gone astray. In your efforts to come in contact with young people, to give them the human and technical preparation they need for life in the world, in your concern to make of them living stones by which the Church may be built up, in all of this it is the power of the Holy Spirit who unites you, one to the other, not only that a new kind of school may be created out of your association together, but also that this brotherhood that is rooted in the Gospel may spread far and wide. Such a school is a place for mutual evangelization, for sharing and support, for reconciliation and forgiveness."
The third invitation of De La Salle to his Brothers is to make a renewed and a concrete commitment to their day to day existence in the classroom and in the community. "Since it is the work of God you are doing, do it with enthusiasm and bring to it all the resources of your talents, your gifts and your inspirations. Show as much creativity and inventiveness as you can, never losing sight of the true character of the teaching function that is your ministry. Since you are all ministers of Jesus Christ, be resolved to live in imitation of Christ by reason of your incorporation into Christ, into the mystery of his incarnation and nearness to us, the mystery of his role as servant and prophet, the mystery of his struggle for justice. Only in that way can you bring young people to assume their share in the full reality of what it means to be a son of God. This will help you to understand that all the difficulties you experience — the difficulties in maintaining the gratuity of the schools, the difficulties in changing the character of the school, the difficulties in overcoming inertia and traditional patterns of thought, difficulties that often turn into outright persecution — all of these are expressions of the paschal mystery, of a life that grows out of your suffering and a certain kind of death. You are agents of the Holy Spirit who in this way renews the face of the earth. Redouble therefore your pedagogical creativity while, at the same time, you enter into dialogue among yourselves, with the students, with their families and their world, as well as with all others who want to serve the Church in this way."
Finally, just as the spiritual teaching of De La Salle challenges the Brothers to be rooted more and more solidly into the reality of his everyday life, at the same time it calls him inexorably to clarify the meaning of that life, not by running away from it, but by living it deeply in its dimension of mystery. De La Salle thus calls the Brother to open himself in prayers of adoration and thanksgiving, of supplication and confidence. He invites the Brother to open himself in hope, to begin anew every morning with a wholly new gift of himself — in spite of the hard choices and disappointments, lack of progress and insurmountable obstacles. He invites the Brother to open himself in full confidence by abandoning himself to God. His should be the attitude of the unprofitable servant who, having given totally of himself, yet realizes that his work is the work of God and that the seed that has been sown will come to fruition in silence and apparent futility.
In this sense one can say that the source of the spirituality of De La Salle is the lived experience of God, but an experience that is reexamined, relocated and redirected in the context of the history of salvation. And that is the history of salvation that is being accomplished here and now in every aspect of the ministry of the Brothers, the history of salvation in its living source who is Jesus Christ, the Christ of the Gospel, the Christ who is living today through his Spirit. An important aspect of De La Salle's meditations on the saints is his sense of the salvation that is worked out in history together with that eschatological expectation that forms an integral part of the Christian commitment, Christian prayer, and the Christian Eucharist. For De La Salle, the God who lives in this history is Father, Son and Holy Spirit and it is to this God that his method of mental prayer invites the Brother to be open. The meditations of the Founder continually remind the Brother of his commitment and the need to enter into this internal and transcendent dialogue with the living God who calls, transforms, satisfies, and makes thirsty again for more.
This observation leads to a third introductory reflection. Much has been said so far of the lived experience of the Brothers. But the question remains: what was the personal experience of John Baptist himself and how is it reflected in his teaching on spirituality?
At first glance, De La Salle seems not to have referred very often to his own personal spiritual experiences. His language, in fact, seems to be rather impersonal and it scarcely conveys the reality of his own relationship with God. At the time they were writing, his earliest biographers had occasion to complain about this reticence. However, a closer reading of these very biographies, and the Founder's own writings, can bring us to realize to what an extent John Baptist was in contact with the living God. He was very much aware of living out his existence in an ardent dialogue and sometimes even in a violent struggle with that very God who was working in history for the salvation of his people.
To be more precise, De La Salle himself refers to that decisive spiritual experience which he went through when he was just about thirty years old. The whole direction of his life was completely reoriented in a most unexpected manner through a combination of circumstances that were entirely unforeseen. In this change of outlook that became progressively more radical, John Baptist had come to recognize the definitive passage of God in this life, the call to give up everything in order to follow Jesus Christ. Subtly but irresistibly, the Spirit had pointed him in the direction of founding a community of laymen consecrated to the Lord in the educational service of abandoned youth. As he expressed it in his own words: "God, who arranges everything with wisdom and sweetness and who in no way forces the inclinations of his creatures, gradually led me to take over the complete responsibility for the schools, doing so in a manner that was hardly noticeable and over a long period of time, in such a way that one commitment led to another, without my having foreseen it from the beginning."
The importance of the personal spiritual journey of John Baptist de La Salle has always been recognized. But two recent events taken together have served to bring this to the fore and give it a new significance. Vatican Council II has invited all the religious institutes to undertake and to pursue what is distinctive and characteristic in their lifestyle and their apostolic commitments. In this effort, the Council has pressured the institutes to return, but always with a fresh approach, to the school of their founders in order to discover in terms of the needs of today the source from which their particular form of the religious life first had its origin.
For the Brothers of the Christian Schools, this approach became suddenly real and was given new vigor by the celebration in 1980 of the tercentenary of the foundation of the Institute. The opportunity to recall the stages in the original development of the Lasallian congregation became the occasion for a profound and collective spiritual renewal. In tracing once again, and with greater attention, that path by which John Baptist de La Salle was led to become the Founder of a Society new in the Church, the Brothers have become able to better perceive how he lived this human process as a spiritual experience, a "Gospel journey."
The remainder of this essay will be devoted to an attempt to explain something of this research. For this purpose, it will be necessary to evoke the decisive spiritual experience which De La Salle went through between 1679 and 1684, an experience in which he became in a very real sense a Founder. This is the best way to treat of the spirituality of John Baptist de La Salle because in this approach we are dealing with its original source.
As has been the case with the foundation of every religious foundation, the Institute of De La Salle seems to have come into being by a slow process from laborious beginnings and a difficult period of growth until it became a living corporate entity. There is even a sense in which his Institute was not yet completely founded at the death of John Baptist de La Salle. When he left this world at the age of 68 on Good Friday, April 7, 1719, the Society which he had labored to establish over the course of forty years as yet had no legal status either in the Kingdom of France or in the Catholic Church. The journey of John Baptist had been a long succession of struggles and crises, of compromises and setbacks. At more than one critical juncture in his life he had to decide whether to begin all over again to be a Founder.
To maintain that the year 1680 was the actual date of the foundation of the Institute involves therefore a certain amount of arbitrariness. Nevertheless, it was on Easter Sunday in 1680 that a very real event took place that marks the symbolic first step in the actual beginning of the Lasallian community. On that day, John Baptist decided to invite to his family table the little group of schoolmasters that for more than a year he had been helping to get a foothold in the city of Reims. In March of 1679, when he was 28 years old, De La Salle had met their leader, Adrien Nyel, almost by chance. This layman, 55 years old, had come to Reims in order to establish there, as he had already done at Rouen, schools for the young boys of the poorer classes. De La Salle had put his experience and his influence at the service of this project. He continued thereafter to be involved in the early and hesitant efforts of the schoolmasters recruited by Nyel. At Christmas in 1679, he had hired with his own money a house for them where they could live together.
De La Salle was thus concerned enough to give these men a little of his time, a little money, and to show a little interest. But his work of charity remained external to himself personally. For the rest, he himself continued to lead a comfortable life, following the routines of his university studies, managing his financial affairs, and being faithful to his duties as a canon which were relatively few but financially quite rewarding.
In the decision to invite the schoolmasters to his table, John Baptist probably thought that he was only doing one more thing to help these men succeed in their efforts to become good teachers. By having them to meals he would be able to meet with them regularly, get to know them better, and be better able to help them improve themselves. In the long run, however, this step turned his whole life inside out; it revolutionized his options, his goals and his values. It was from this moment that he began to become a Founder. By admitting the schoolmasters to his family table, he began to share life together with them. He imposed this sharing on his own family, on his three younger brothers who were still living at home with him. By this very fact, he provoked a brutal confrontation, a cultural shock between two worlds that for all practical purposes knew nothing of each other. This shock was to be felt throughout his whole family and the social environment in which he had lived. It would have echoes in the very deepest part of his own being.
Easter 1680. This date marks the beginning, a reference point, for the upheaval of the entire internal universe of John Baptist de La Salle. It indicates the point of departure for his conversion to lead the life of the Gospel. It marks the perceptible taking hold of a process of interior and social liberation which would bring him to a point where he had neither the intention, the desire, nor the courage to go by himself. The beginning of the foundation of the Institute was to be found in this embryo of a community. But also, and more importantly, it was the moment when a Founder was born into his vocation to live the Gospel, a recognition on his part that the Holy Spirit had begun to work in him in an unforeseen and invisible way.
Mention has been made of the two worlds which were quite unaware of each other but which soon would be brought into contact, mutually discovered, confronted and finally set at odds. This began at the family table of De La Salle; it would soon touch the very depths of his heart. The world of the De La Salles was that of the great bourgeoisie of Reims. The meteoric rise of a Colbert had stimulated and symbolized their ambition, their vitality and their success. John Baptist belonged to a landed family of several brothers whose business affairs had brought them wealth over the course of many generations. His father, Louis de La Salle, Counsellor of the Royal Provincial Parliament, enjoyed the advantages both of power and the family fortune.
Upon the untimely death of his parents, John Baptist, the oldest in the family, became the legal guardian of his younger brothers and sisters. In the administration of the family's goods, he proved to be reliable and competent. More than one debtor to the family felt the rigor of his demands. When one community of religious women was delinquent in paying the rent, Canon De La Salle did not hesitate to send the law after them. When he resigned his guardianship in order to devote himself more completely to his theological studies, he was able to give to his relatives a meticulous account of his administration of their financial affairs. As we read these accounts, we find evidence of his exactness and his fiscal conservatism but also we see the tenderness and concern of an older brother.
This, then, was the world in which De La Salle lived, a world where the possession of money, the influence of power, the resources of culture, the networks of relationships and circles of influence all gave stability and security. It was into this world that John Baptist had caused to penetrate the five or six schoolmasters with whom he was concerned at the moment. But these men, for their part, belonged to a quite different world, to a class that was considered worthless and despicable, not without reason it might be added. The abundant writings of the period deplore in clarion tones the serious deficiencies of these people who often enough gave themselves over to teaching in the popular schools only when they were at the end of their resources and when all other means had failed. It will be enough here to cite one example of such a complaint taken from a work that Charles Demia published at Lyons in 1687:
We see today, unfortunately, the holy and exalted teaching vocation given over to anyone who comes along just because he happens to be able to read and to write. Although these teachers are often in poor health and bad straits and perhaps addicted to vice as well, we do not hesitate to hand over to them the care of our young people. We don't seem to realize that by doing something to help these wretches, we are doing real harm to the public at large ... No wonder that this occupation is so despised when it is so often undertaken by people who are miserable, unknown and of no quality whatsoever.
This judgment of Demia would find an echo later in John Baptist de La Salle when he had occasion to describe his own discovery of that very same world in the period following his meeting with Nyel. He admitted that he never would have dreamed of committing himself for life to such an enterprise:
If I had ever believed that the concern I showed out of pure charity for the schoolmasters would have involved the duty of living with them, I would have abandoned the idea at once. It was the most natural thing in the world for me to consider the men I was obliged to employ in the schools as lower in status than my valet. The very thought that I might have to live with them would have been impossible to bear.
Thus to speak of these two worlds, of the contrast between them, and the opposition that would develop once they were put in contact with one another, is not to reconstruct the past in some artificial or tendentious way. It is clear that in the social climate in which he lived, John Baptist believed that the schoolmasters belonged to a world so different from his own that it was inferior even to the world of his domestic servants. At least they fit into the social system to which he belonged. Such was not the case with the schoolmasters and that is why he could not imagine the possibility of living with them. At another time he put it this way: "The truth is that I felt a terrible pain in the early days when I first had them come to my house. And it took me two years to get over it."
If all this is true, why then did De La Salle let himself become involved with these men from such a different social world? And why did he take the risk of bringing them right into his own family? At this point we have to recall another feature of the personality of this canon of Reims. He belonged to his own social world, it is true, and he was part of it to the point where he accepted its prejudices. But also, from the time he was very young, he let himself be drawn by the living God. As a mere child, he had already heard the call of God. Although he was the oldest in the family, he very early on committed himself to the usual procedures leading to the priesthood. He undertook to prepare himself seriously to become a priest, first at the Seminary of Saint Sulpice in Paris and then, after the death of his parents, at the University of Reims. There he placed himself under the spiritual direction of Nicolas Roland while he continued to pursue his theological studies all the way to the doctorate.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, and this is the way his biographers put it, he did not go to the altar to "live off the fat of the land." The love of prayer which he demonstrated from infancy and his attraction to the interior life are signs that his vocation was authentic. He was always open to the invitations of the Lord and was disposed to fulfill the will of God whenever it was made clear to him.
At Saint Sulpice, and later under the direction of Roland, he had been formed by the spirituality and the missionary fervor of the vigorous Church of seventeenth century France, by movements inspired by Berule, Olier, Bourdoise and Vincent de Paul. He understood that the priesthood committed him to a personal search for God, an interior dialogue with God, and a call as well to announce the Gospel to God's people.
Yet the young Canon De La Salle remained no less thoroughly imbued with the mentality and the habits of the social world to which he belonged, even in the way he lived out his fidelity to God and his relationship to the Church. He didn't become a priest for financial gain. However, he did accept, from the age of 16 on, the revenue attached to his office of canon. Without any apparent scruple, he had accepted this office from an older cousin of his as if it were some sort of a family inheritance. This benefice obliged him to regular attendance at the divine office in the cathedral and it allowed him to satisfy in part the attraction that prayer had for him. But it also guaranteed him a comfortable income which, when added to his personal wealth, would have allowed him to live a life of ease in the present with no anxiety about the future. His financial resources gave him, of course, the opportunity to do good works as, for example, his assistance to the schoolmasters. But he never saw in all of this any reason to change his lifestyle or the direction of his life which remained well regulated, edifying, settled, dutiful and pious, suitable and comfortable.
It never would have occurred to me that I would ever take charge of the schools and the teachers. Not that such a plan had never been proposed to me. Several of the friends of Father Roland had tried to suggest the idea to me. But it never became part of my thinking and I certainly never had any intention of putting it into practice. I always thought that the supervisory role I assumed over the schools and the teachers would be merely an external supervision, committing me to nothing in their regard except to provide for their needs and see to it that they fulfilled their duties with piety and care.
In a century that has been called Cartesian, De La Salle was not about to let himself be taken by an idea so long as it remained for him something in the abstract, without flesh and blood so to speak. But his daily contact with the teachers was going to turn his universe upside down and reverse his entire way of thinking about his life, his priesthood and the Church. In the process, his whole hierarchy of values would change.
Thus the more De La Salle got close to the teachers, the more he discovered in them the distressing situation which had been described in readings and conversations that he remembered but had never really understood.
He began to understand that they needed help, support, and a sense of permanence. He recognized that it was possible for them to better themselves and how great was their good will. It might be enough if they could be encouraged, directed and educated; if they could share together their personal experience in the classroom for mutual reflection and criticism. Above all, De La Salle knew what a great hope for the future they represented and the kind of change of which they might become the protagonists. In the person of these teachers, the canon saw the profound misery, social and religious, of the sons of the artisans and the poor to whom they were directing their efforts. He began to have a premonition that a new world was about to be born, and perhaps, that it was up to him to do something to help it come into being.
On the other hand, the encounter between these uncultured schoolmasters and the family and social milieu of De La Salle gave rise to a situation fraught with tension and conflict. His friends challenged the direction he had taken. They ridiculed his claim that "it was through charity that he made himself vulgar by associating with vulgar people." His near relatives, alarmed at what they considered to be the risk to his younger brothers, took them away from the family house. John Baptist realized that it would not be possible for him to live very much longer in these two social worlds so opposed to one another. He would have to accelerate the pace of his entry into this new and strange world. He understood that he would have to offer the teachers an environment more adapted to their ways and their social background. So he decided to lodge them in another house. In the end, on June 25, 1682, he left his own home to go and live with them.
This courageous breaking away, this tearing up of the roots, this resolute commitment, only served to accentuate the contrast between the two social worlds and to make the conflict between them more exasperating. De La Salle saw that the moment of truth had arrived. The conflict this time was no longer a matter of family interference. He experienced it in his very flesh, even to the point of physical nausea. He learned the hard way how difficult it would be for him to become part of the world of the poor. His biographers relate in particular the repugnance he had to overcome to be able to partake of the crude meals of his companions. Painful as that must have been, it was a minor difficulty compared to the decisive confrontation that took place in the fall of 1682.
After the euphoria of the first few weeks, De La Salle noticed that a certain uneasiness was developing among the teachers. The atmosphere was getting heavy and long periods of gloomy silence weighed heavily on the group.
The confidence they had expressed in him seemed to evaporate. He finally succeeded in getting them to explain the cause of this embarrassment. The teachers raised the question of the future. True, they explained, they had a livelihood of sorts for the time being, modest as it was, and they had a specific work to do. But they had no guarantee as to what might happen on the morrow. Suppose the whole adventure they had undertaken of developing schools for the poor should collapse, they would literally find themselves out on the streets. Once he realized what it was that was bothering them, De La Salle ought to have had an easy response; it would be enough, he thought, to recall to them the words of the Gospel. He did, in fact, address a long discourse to the teachers on the need to abandon themselves to Divine Providence, quoting the words of Jesus about the birds of the air and the lilies of the field.
To the great surprise of John Baptist, the ground on which he had tried to base his reply to them gave way, so to speak, right under his feet. He had talked to them of the Gospel, but in a discourse that might just as well have been pulled out of his coat pocket. His works stuck the masters as totally unrealistic in the world in which they were living, the more so since despite the words that were coming from his mouth, De La Salle had no experience of their situation in his own life. He thought that he could propose a religious appeasement as a solution to a human problem experienced by human beings. But he had neither the opportunity nor the heart to understand their anxiety from within.
The teachers therefore rejected his discourse as if it were a package that they wouldn't even bother to open. What they wanted, first of all, was to be listened to and not to be given a sermon. "It is easy enough for you to talk," they told him, "since you lack nothing. You have a lucrative canonry and a rich patrimony as well. You have security and a guarantee against future need. If our enterprise falls apart, you will still be on your own two feet and the collapse of our situation will not involve your own. We are men without money, without regular income, and we do not even have a marketable skill. Where will we go and what will we do if the schools fail and people become fed up with us? The only thing we will have left is our poverty and the only way to remedy it will be to go out and beg."
In this case, it was the teachers who were dramatizing the incompatibility of the two social worlds. With deadly seriousness they set these two worlds in opposition: "you" and "us"; "your status" and "our status"; "your security" and "our insecurity." On the basis of this contrast they had no interest in listening to a discourse on the Gospel. For them, De La Salle was making declarations that presupposed a world to which they had no access; what he was saying was in direct contradiction to what he was living. Here he was, pretending to exhort to evangelical detachment men with real material insecurity, while he himself had no worries for the future, not through confidence in God, but through the financial resources of his canonry and patrimony.
It was a rude lesson for the canon but he accepted it. Perhaps he was even expecting it. This encounter led him into a long and profound period of meditation where the word of the Gospel literally began to take flesh in him. He saw clearly that the teachers still belonged to another world than his, despite all his efforts to bring the two together. He recognized the futility, the emptiness, the falsity of trying to give a discourse on the Gospel that was so contrary to what he himself was living. "I have been reduced to silence," he thought, "and I have no right to hold up to them the ideal of perfection and to speak to them about poverty if I myself am not a poor man." Yet by the very fact of entering into this struggle, he emerged victorious, calculating the cost of the inescapable option that was being presented to him. He began to think of the abandoned young people and this element entered into his internal dialogue with the attitude of the teachers and the demands of the Gospel. If nothing were to change, then the teachers would leave him, the schools would close, and the young would remain locked into the desperate situation from which they and just begun to escape. The promise of a new kind of world would evaporate into the banal status quo with its egoism, sterile mediocrity and endless boredom.
It was probably at this moment that John Baptist de La Salle let himself be grasped and overcome by the offer of the grace to become a Founder that God had been extending to him all throughout his long and arduous spiritual journey. In the light of the Gospel, he had a sort of prophetic vision that hope for salvation was being offered to the poor through this little group of men that had so boldly challenged him. He became aware also that the fulfillment of this hope would depend on the consent he would give to an exile without return, to an adventure based on the Gospel, to his incarnation into the world of the poor.
He was willing from then on to make of the Gospel not only the starting point of his preaching, but also the rule of his life. To be more exact, he understood in a new way, in his own personal history, the meaning of the word of Jesus: "If you would be perfect, go sell what you have, give to the poor, and come follow me." From that moment on, he became capable of radical decisions. He renounced his canonry and refused even to keep it within his family. He used the occasion of a famine to distribute to the needy all of his personal wealth. He thereby obliged the teachers to a new experience of renunciation since they might well have expected to share in some of his wealth and become one with him in his security. The power of the Gospel, the call of Jesus Christ of which they had been the messengers for him, now involved them all to a point far beyond the possibility of compromise. Father De La Salle was thus able to really share for the first time and without any exception the total life and destiny of the teachers whom he never got to know in the beginning. Now it was their poverty with which he associated himself, their insecurity in which he intended to become a partner.
In these events that took place between Easter of 1680 and the winter of 1684, there is rooted the foundation of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. At the deepest heart of this very human process of relationships, of events, of confrontation and dialogue, John Baptist de La Salle was born into his vocation as a Founder. As is often the case, this foundation of a religious institute manifests a bursting forth of the Gospel at a critical moment in history, to use the words of Father Chenu in speaking of Saint Dominic. For John Baptist de La Salle to become a Founder meant first of all that he had to be converted to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. His charism as a Founder had its origin, so to speak, in his active receptivity to the liberating action of the Holy Spirit.
At the term of this process of interior conversion, John Baptist de La Salle became a Founder in the sense that he had found a project which would give dynamism and unity to his entire existence. In the course of the long period of reflection that followed upon the intervention of the teachers, he realized that he had to choose between two ways of relating to the Church and living out his priestly ministry. "I cannot be the superior of these teachers," he told himself, "until I cease to become a canon." It was impossible for him to be present in choir for the required five or six hours a day and at the same time really share the concerns and the work of the teachers. If he wanted to help them in the service they were providing in the schools, he had to be there with them full-time. Once he knew that he had to act, he had first to ask himself what were the criteria for the choice. The greater glory of God and a better understanding of the reality of the Church led him finally to give the preference to staying with the teachers.
In the course of this period of reflection, John Baptist did not decide all of a sudden that he ought to change the world in which he had lived. He recognized rather that God had already liberated him from it, bringing him into the world of the poor that had so repelled him in the beginning. We have to re-read at this point what he wrote at the end of this period of reflection. It is written in a quiet mood, with a kind of joyful tone, and with an evident lack of anxiety. All of this gives evidence of the sort of solace that is experienced by one who all of a sudden felt himself freed for a new form of service, a sense that the fear of the crossing had disappeared now that he had arrived on the other side:
Since I no longer felt myself drawn to the vocation of a canon, it seemed to me that the office of canon had left me long before I left the office of canon. That state in life is no longer for me. Although I entered it freely through an open door, it seems to me that today God is opening the door again so that I can leave it. The same voice that called me then seems now to be calling me elsewhere ... The hand of God seems to be showing me rather clearly today that there is another state of life which deserves preference and to which God is leading me as it were by the hand.
John Baptist had experienced in his own personal history that the Gospel could become, in the here and now, a powerful force for change. In the events that led him to the point where he had arrived, he recognized the active presence of God. It was God who had freed him from his chains, from his wealth, from his prejudices. By the power of the Holy Spirit, he was able to commit himself with determination, if not to change the world, at least to change something in his world, to contribute to a breaking up of that infernal circle of which the poor were the victims.
That was to be his project. He would often express it in later years by saying that the Institute was founded to put the means of salvation at the disposal of poor and abandoned youth. The contrast between the two social worlds of which we have spoken always remained foremost in the mind of John Baptist de La Salle, as his biographer writes, between "the children of quality who are rich, well born, refined and amiable" and the "poor children of both sexes." The first group were not lacking in people willing to devote themselves to their education. Colleges were available to them and it seemed as if the whole society was concerned about them and with considerable success. But the others, "the vagabonds roaming the streets, where were they supposed to look for Christian instruction"?
Once he was converted to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, John Baptist and his Brothers had some assurance that God willed the salvation of these poor youngsters as well. God was not the author of the unjust situations of which the poor were the victims. In their decision to make the Gospel the rule of their lives, John Baptist and his Brothers had proof that the poor children were equally the sons of God, just as much as the others, just as much as they themselves. They understood that if Christ called them to be his followers, it was in order to help these youngsters realize their dignity as sons, to open up to them the freedom of the sons of God. Thus the foundation of the project undertaken by De La Salle was rooted in the Gospel just as it was the power of the Gospel that inspired him to devote himself to it. The Institute of the Brothers was founded to announce that Gospel to a class of young people that had been otherwise abandoned. That purpose became very clear to the Founder at the time of his own conversion to the Gospel; thenceforth he would devote himself to it entirely and with all his powers.
The result of all this has lasted into our own day as it has been passed on in the tradition of the Institute. The fundamental principle of the spirituality of De La Salle remains the same and that is the point to be made in the concluding section of this essay. It is not possible here to set forth in all its fullness the spiritual teaching of De La Salle that emerges from his conversion to the Gospel. In any case, that would be artificial and arbitrary. Enough has been said about the young canon to indicate that he entered on a path that could be described as a Gospel itinerary. But at that moment it was only in its earlier stages. He would have in later years, many occasions to renew the radical option which had been his in the beginning.
In order to follow up on this account, it would be necessary to bring into the picture the monotony of the daily routine together with the stormy crises that on many occasions brought the Institute to the brink of ruin. There were crises regarding the direction of the schools since the innovations of De La Salle were opposed by the conservatism and the corporate power of his many enemies. There were crises in the community both from without and from within — the difficulty of bringing to birth in the Church a new kind of religious family of laymen, rooted in the Gospel both in its external ministry and its internal life. There were personal crises in the life of the Founder as he experiences serious reversals in his forties, his fifties and his sixties, all made worse by his doubts about his own capacities and the usefulness of his life as he found himself sorely tried in the experience of the silence of God. In each of these crises, De La Salle found himself with his back against the wall trying to maintain the course of his own destiny and that of his Institute. He found personal support in each instance by making once again that same decisive choice, a new commitment as an act of love.
Thus it is that the spirituality of De La Salle has its root entirely in this initial event for three reasons which will here be sketched only briefly but doubtless will need to be further deepened and developed. Firstly, it was with this experience of conversion that John Baptist de La Salle understood that he had a mission to be a Founder and a Master of Spirituality as well. Secondly, any number of themes in the spiritual teaching of De La Salle take on a very different resonance when looked at in the light of his initial experience of conversion to the Gospel. Finally, it was in this initial event that the spirituality of De La Salle found its principal formulation and dynamism. A word on each of these points:
First of all, it was at the conclusion of this series of events that De La Salle was born into his vocation to be a Founder and a Master of the spiritual life. Once he had definitively cast his lot with the schoolmasters, he lived to the full and irrevocably the mission he had accepted to be a pedagogical innovator, the organizer of a religious community, the source of evangelical and spiritual inspiration for his followers. If he gradually formed a living body of teachers, it began with himself and the inspiration to be first of all a minister of the Gospel, a member of a brotherhood in a common search for God. Toward the end of his life, that is the way he formulated it for the benefit of his disciples in a text he put into their Rule: "That which is of the utmost importance, and to which the greatest attention should be given in a Community, is, that all who compose it possess the spirit peculiar to it; that the Novices apply themselves to acquire it, and that those who are already members, make it their first care to preserve and increase it in themselves; for it is this spirit which should animate all their actions and be the motive of their whole conduct." As any Brother knows, he refers here to the spirit of faith rooted in the Gospel.
The spirituality of De La Salle finds its best expression in this effort to animate all his actions by the spirit of faith, an ideal to which he vowed himself from the moment of his own conversion without any prospect of ever turning back. His spiritual teaching had its beginning and took its shape gradually in the living relationships he had with his Brothers, the spiritual direction that he provided in his exchanges with each of them, and in his many letters, of which only a few have come down to us. His spiritual doctrine became more precise over the course of his own personal life and in the development of the Institute, in the assemblies of the Brothers and in their annual retreats. De La Salle progressively formulated this spiritual teaching in his spiritual writings which he wrote for his disciples and with their special needs in mind.
There is a second reason for maintaining that the spirituality of De La Salle had its origin in the initial event of his conversion to the Gospel. So many of his themes, and among them those that he insisted upon most in his teaching, receive from this event their existential warmth, the vibration of a personal experience. This aspect has not always been made sufficiently explicit. A few examples will help to make the point.
1) On many occasions when writing about the saints, De La Salle takes pains to tell the story of their conversion to Christ. He cites again and again whenever it is appropriate the text of the Gospel wherein Jesus replies to the rich young man, "If you would be perfect..." Thus when speaking of Saint Bonaventure, De La Salle mentions a treatise that the great Franciscan had written on poverty. "He shows thereby," De La Salle writes, "that poverty is the foundation of evangelical perfection ... In fact, when Jesus Christ wished to lead his disciples to perfection, he told them that if they wished to be perfect, they would have to sell all that they had and give it to the poor." Thus in the spiritual teaching of De La Salle, as in his personal experience, the following of Christ begins by this renouncement of possessions for the service of the poor.
2) In the same meditation, De La Salle adds that Saint Bonaventure "put into writing in his books only what he himself practices." It is impossible not to see here an echo of the discovery that De La Salle himself made of how vain it is to discourse on the Gospel without making it clear to his disciples that he himself had experienced its radical challenge in his own life. De La Salle returns frequently in his spiritual writings to the priority he gives to being a living witness. "It is in vain," he writes, "for you merely to see what Jesus Christ is proposing to you in the Gospel; if your actions do not conform to these teachings, your faith is in vain ... You must confirm in your actions the truths and the maxims of the Gospel."
3) Mention has already been made of the importance of the doctrine of abandonment to God in the spiritual teaching of De La Salle. How is it possible, then, not to connect the actual experience of the young canon, renouncing his office of canon and giving away all of his wealth, to this text of a meditation where De La Salle has recourse to one of his rare images? "You would never believe how much good can come for the Church from one seed sown in complete detachment. That is because detachment gives proof of a great deal of faith. At the moment one abandons oneself to the Providence of God, he becomes like a man who sets out into the open ocean without sails and without oars." In this text, the Founder alludes to the story in the Acts of the Apostles of how Saint Barnabas, who had considerable property, sold it all and brought the price of it to the Apostles.
4) The last example concerns another element in the spiritual teaching of De La Salle that connects with his original conversion experience, and that is the importance he gives to God the Holy Spirit. The Method of Mental Prayer contains no less than six ways of placing oneself in the presence of God. Not the least of these refers to the presence of God in the midst of the Brothers. It may be recalled that it was while listening to the representations made to him by his disciples, and allowing to sink deep into his inner being the bitter words of their reproach, that John Baptist opened himself to be converted to the Gospel. He thus had himself an experience of the power of the Gospel present in the community. But he saw there as well the power of the Holy Spirit making itself felt in the words of his Brothers. It is impossible not to think of this event when we read or re-read such a text of the Founder as the following: "Jesus Christ is in the midst of the Brothers in order to give to them the gift of his Holy Spirit ... in order to enable them to live together ... to teach them the truths and the maxims of the Gospel, to have the Spirit penetrate into their inmost hearts and to inspire them to make the Gospel the rule of their conduct."
A third and final reason to suppose that the spirituality of De La Salle is rooted in the initial event of his conversion to the Gospel can be found in the principal themes and the essential dynamism of his teaching. This could be illustrated, for example, by reference to his teaching on the ministry of the Brothers and the importance of gratuity, on the fraternal life of the Brothers and the riches as well as the demands of community life, on the spirit of the Gospel as opposed to the spirit of the world, on the presence of God and the spirit of the Institute, on conformity to Jesus Christ and contemplation on how the mysteries of his life become actual in our own history.
It would be impossible here to develop all these themes. However, by way of conclusion, it seems appropriate to give some special attention to the dynamic principle that seems to be the most central and the most vital element in the spirituality of John Baptist de La Salle. This is not so much a theme as a deep faith in a living presence and a force that transforms, in other words, the Holy Spirit. Throughout the whole course of his path to conversion, John Baptist was able to feel the power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ. It was that power which engaged him in a new relation to God in the following of Jesus Christ; it was that power that brought him to vow himself to announce the Gospel to indigent youth and bound him to an evangelical brotherhood of a new type.
Thus the unifying principle of all of the spiritual teaching of De La Salle is to be found in his teaching on the Holy Spirit. For De La Salle, it is the Spirit who leads him to an ever more profound knowledge of the mystery of the living God who saves. It is the Spirit that gives him his special charism, causing him to open himself to that personal love that speaks to him in his inmost depths. It is the Spirit that gives stability by entering the heart and providing the stimulus for the exodus of going out of oneself.
For De La Salle, it is the Spirit who leads the Brothers as it had led him to see the most urgent needs of young people. It is the Spirit who sends the Brothers to these youngsters with the enthusiasm, the hope, and the power to enter into combat against the injustice of the world so that it might be possible for these lads who had been so far from salvation to have access to the promise and the covenant with God in Jesus Christ and in the Church.
The community is also for De La Salle, an example of the power of the Holy Spirit working through the weakness of men. Granted the necessity of structures for organization formation, and control. But in the long run it is from the Holy Spirit that the Institute awaits in radical poverty and joyful hope the continual renewal in the spirit of the Gospel and apostolic vigor, both as to its options from within as well as in whatever forms its community organization and educational endeavor may assume.
Thus Lasallian prayer itself has its echo in the liturgical invocation that De La Salle uses in his meditation for the Vigil of Pentecost: "Send forth your Holy Spirit to give us a new life and you will renew the face of the earth." In the decisive experience of De La Salle in the process of his conversion, it was this power of the Spirit that led him to embrace a new lifestyle and to become in his turn capable of renewing the face of the earth. This he did by establishing a new kind of religious community of Brothers associated in order to establish a new kind of school that would make available to underprivileged youngsters what it means to experience a genuinely human life and a renewed Christianity.
A translation by Luke Salm, FSC
of a lecture written and delivered in French
by Michel Sauvage, FSC,
at the Center of St. Louis of the French
in Rome on December 11, 1984.
Corrected English Version, 1985
Reprinted, 1987
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