François La Combe
François La Combe or François Lacombe (1640 – 29 June 1715) was a Savoyard Barnabite priest, preacher, spiritual writer, and mystic. He is chiefly known as the confessor and spiritual associate of Madame Guyon and as one of the figures implicated in the French quietist controversy of the late seventeenth century. His writings on mental prayer and contemplation, especially the Latin Orationis mentalis analysis, were read in the context of wider debates over passive prayer, pure love, interior abandonment, and the accessibility of contemplation to ordinary Christians.
La Combe entered the Barnabites at Thonon in Savoy, taught at Annecy, Bologna, and Rome, and became superior of the Barnabite house of studies and novitiate at Thonon. He met Guyon briefly in 1671 and became closely associated with her after 1681. Their travels through Savoy, Piedmont, Vercelli, Turin, Grenoble, and Paris became one of the causes of suspicion against both of them. La Combe was arrested by royal authority in 1687, confined in a succession of prisons, and eventually transferred to the asylum at Charenton, where he died in 1715.
Recent scholarship and documentary editions have given fuller attention to La Combe's own writings, letters, and later reception. Dominique Tronc's source-dossier presents him under the double form François Lacombe or La Combe and argues that his surviving texts reveal a capable mystical director whose reputation was later preserved in European Guyonian and quietist circles.
Life
Early life and Barnabite career
François La Combe was born at Thonon in Savoy in 1640. He received the Barnabite habit at the Barnabite college in that town in 1655 and was probably professed on 9 July 1656. He became a subdeacon on 17 December 1661 and was ordained priest on 19 May 1663 by , bishop of Geneva.
At the Barnabite college of Annecy, La Combe taught grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, and theology. His Disputationes sabbatinae were noted by later biographers, and he also preached and assisted in the missions of the Chablais. At the end of 1667 he was called to the Collège Saint-Éloi in Paris with the title of consultant to the provincial. In 1669 and 1670 he took part in diocesan missions in the diocese of Autun. Tronc's dossier, following Jean Orcibal, emphasizes that La Combe's early Barnabite career was promising and that before the quietist controversy he was known principally as a teacher, preacher, and religious superior.
La Combe was sent to Bologna to teach theology on 7 September 1671, where he was also charged with spiritual exercises. He later served in Rome, also as a lecturer, from 12 September 1672 to 6 March 1674. On 18 April 1674 he was made vice-provincial for the visitation of the Barnabite colleges of Savoy, though illness forced him to withdraw to Thonon in March 1675. From 1677 to 1683 he was superior of the house of studies and novitiate at Thonon, while also preaching and directing religious women.
According to Orcibal, La Combe had a strong reputation during this period and does not appear, before 1680, to have been significantly influenced either by Miguel de Molinos or by Madame Guyon, whom he first met in 1671. Orcibal instead points to the Jesuit Honoré Fabri, who regarded La Combe as his disciple during his Roman period, and to other mystical influences in Savoy and northern Italy. Tronc likewise stresses this point as a corrective to any simple derivation of La Combe's thought from Molinos, while noting that a surviving letter of 12 July 1682 to Fabri shows La Combe's own affective and mystical language before his long imprisonment. Bernard McGinn similarly presents La Combe as a preacher and teacher whose career linked Savoy, France, Rome, and northern Italy, but adds that he may have come into contact with Molinos and Pier Matteo Petrucci during his Roman period, while noting that the extent of any such contact is uncertain.
La Combe's spiritual formation also stood within a wider Savoyard, Dauphinois, and Italianate contemplative milieu. Dominique Tronc and Murielle Tronc note that he admired Marie Bon de l'Incarnation, an Ursuline of Saint-Marcellin, whose Catéchisme spirituel was also read by Guyon and by persons connected with her circle.
Italian connections
La Combe's career placed him within a transalpine milieu in which Italian and French forms of disputed contemplative spirituality came into contact. McGinn identifies Vittorio Agostino Ripa, bishop of Vercelli, as a friend and supporter of both La Combe and Guyon. Ripa hosted La Combe in Vercelli in 1683 and 1684; during this period La Combe became his close companion and confessor, as well as Guyon's spiritual friend. McGinn treats the bond among Ripa, La Combe, and Guyon as an important point of contact between Italian quietism and the French current associated with Guyon.
In 1686 Ripa oversaw the publication of three spiritual works: La Combe's Analysis of Mental Prayer, Guyon's Explanation of the Apocalypse, and his own work on prayer. McGinn notes that Ripa taught a deep form of contemplation emphasizing resignation, abandonment, the soul's nothingness, the unknowability of God, pure love, and passivity to God, while avoiding some of the formulations that brought other authors under censure.
Tronc's dossier gives the Vercelli period a similar importance. It notes that, at Vercelli, Guyon wrote her commentary on the Apocalypse, La Combe composed the Orationis mentalis analysis, and Ripa wrote the Orazione del cuore facilitata. Drawing on the Dictionnaire de spiritualité article on Ripa, Tronc concludes that it is difficult to determine whether La Combe, Guyon, or Ripa most influenced the others, but that they shared a spiritual milieu favourable to what later came to be called quietism. In this view, Vercelli became a place through which Italian quietism passed into France and French pre-quietist spirituality entered Italy.
Association with Madame Guyon
La Combe first met Madame Guyon in 1671, when he brought her a letter from her half-brother Dominique de La Mothe, who was also a Barnabite. Guyon later described the meeting in her autobiography and claimed that their short conversation opened the interior way to him. The encounter did not immediately make La Combe her director, since Guyon remained for about a decade under the direction of Jacques Bertot. Tronc dates this first meeting more precisely to May or June 1671, on the basis of Guyon's autobiographical chronology, and treats it as the beginning of the remembered spiritual affinity between them.
After Bertot's death in 1681, Guyon again came into contact with La Combe. She went to Thonon and then to Gex, where she had been invited to assist the house of the Nouvelles Catholiques, an institution for women converted from Protestantism. Her relation with La Combe became increasingly close, and he served as confessor and spiritual director during the years in which she developed and circulated her teaching on prayer, abandonment, and the annihilation of self-will.
The Catholic Encyclopedia states that Guyon was initiated into the mystical life by Père Lacombe and that, under his direction, she passed through a series of interior states described in her autobiography. It also records that, after she felt drawn to Geneva, she went to Annecy and Thonon in July 1681, where she again found La Combe and placed herself under his direction. Britannica similarly summarizes the relation by saying that Guyon, influenced in her personal religious development by the Barnabite François Lacombe, left her children and travelled with him to Geneva, Turin, and Grenoble between 1681 and 1686.
McGinn gives a more reciprocal account of the relationship. He says that La Combe and Guyon met as early as 1671, but that a close relationship was established only when La Combe was superior at Thonon between 1677 and 1683. Guyon felt a strong spiritual bond with him; he became her confessor, but also, in McGinn's words, her disciple. During Guyon's apostolic years, from 1681 to 1686, the two had frequent contact and sometimes travelled together, which contributed to suspicion and to attacks by their opponents. In his analysis of Guyon's autobiography, McGinn also notes the distinction between La Combe's state of illumination and Guyon's higher state of faith, into which she believed he was gradually being drawn.
La Combe and Guyon encountered opposition in the diocese of Geneva. Jean d'Arenthon d'Alex, who had initially looked favourably on Guyon's arrival, asked her to leave his diocese and expelled La Combe. La Combe then went to the bishop of Vercelli, and Guyon followed him to Turin before returning to France. She published the Moyen court et très facile de faire oraison at Grenoble in January 1685. After further opposition from Cardinal Étienne Le Camus, bishop of Grenoble, she rejoined La Combe at Vercelli. They returned to Paris in July 1686. McGinn dates their return to Paris to 21 July 1686 and says that La Combe and Guyon travelled together for much of the journey.
McGinn also connects La Combe with the circumstances surrounding Guyon's early writing. During a retreat conducted by La Combe in mid-1682, Guyon experienced what she described as an irresistible impulse to write; the result was the treatise later known as Les Torrents, one of her major works on the interior life.
Arrest and imprisonment
La Combe arrived in Paris at a moment when the French crown and episcopate were increasingly suspicious of mystical teachings associated with passive prayer. The condemnation of Molinos at Rome and the wider fear of new spiritual sects gave the authorities a context in which La Combe's preaching and his association with Guyon could be treated as dangerous. By a lettre de cachet, he was removed on 3 October 1687 and sent to the Fathers of Christian Doctrine.
McGinn says that La Combe had developed opponents among the Barnabites, who denounced him both as a quietist and for his relationship with Guyon. He was arrested by royal secret letter on 3 October 1687, after which he underwent hearings, defences, appeals to Rome, and exchanges of letters before spending the rest of his life in confinement. Tronc similarly states that La Combe was arrested after accusations that he was a friend of Molinos and after manoeuvres that made him appear disobedient to royal orders.
La Combe was interrogated by ecclesiastical officials later in 1687. Orcibal reports that contemporary inquiries did not establish the moral charges associated in polemic with Molinos. Nevertheless, La Combe worsened his position by appealing to Rome at a time when Louis XIV was acting against suspected quietists and ultramontane spiritual writers.
La Combe was confined in the Bastille on 29 November 1687. He was transferred on 27 February 1688 to the Île d'Oléron, then to the Île de Ré, the citadel of Amiens, and finally, before 1 February 1689, to the château of Lourdes. Later proceedings against Guyon and her circle repeatedly returned to La Combe's letters and to claims about his relation with her. He was transferred to Vincennes near the end of 1698. The Catholic Encyclopedia records the same general sequence more briefly, saying that by order of Louis XIV, Père Lacombe was shut up in the Bastille and afterwards in the castles of Oloron and Lourdes, and that Guyon's own arrest followed shortly afterwards.
Dominique and Murielle Tronc emphasize the significance of La Combe's confinement at Lourdes, where they say that he formed a small spiritual circle around prayer. They argue that this circle became incriminating when La Combe used language that could be interpreted as suggesting a clandestine religious group, and that such language fed later interrogations of Guyon and the police construction of a dangerous quietist network. In their account, La Combe imprudently called the Lourdes circle a "little church", and police reports treated this language as evidence of a suspect group connected with Guyon.
Tronc's dossier also notes that authorities seized several manuscripts at Lourdes in 1698, including a corrected and expanded version of Guyon's Moyen court, said to have been written around 1689, and an unfinished Règle des associés à l'enfance de Jésus, begun by La Combe at Vercelli. These manuscripts, together with a corrected version of the Analysis mentioned in La Combe's letters to Guyon, are now lost.
La Combe's mental state deteriorated during his long confinement. On 29 March 1701 the Barnabite superior general considered him incurable. He was transferred on 29 June 1712 to Charenton, an asylum near Paris, where he died on 29 June 1715. McGinn similarly states that La Combe gradually lost his mind, whether through mistreatment or senility, and was eventually sent to a hospital for the insane, where he died in 1715. Dominique and Murielle Tronc state that he spent twenty-seven years in prison, and that a police report declared him insane at the age of seventy-two before his transfer to Charenton.
Writings
La Combe's principal writings belong to the years immediately before and after his imprisonment. His Orationis mentalis analysis, signed at Vercelli in 1686, is his chief Latin work on mental prayer. It was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum on 9 September 1688. Pierre Poiret reprinted it at Amsterdam in 1711 in his Sacra orationis theologia, and an anonymous French translation appeared in 1795 under the title Voyes de la vérité à la vie.
Tronc gives a more detailed publication history for La Combe's anonymous Lettre d'un serviteur de Dieu contenant de brèves instructions pour tendre sûrement à la perfection chrétienne. According to his dossier, it circulated in the diocese of Annecy between 1680 and 1687; the Barnabite general ordered copies destroyed in July 1682; it was printed at Grenoble and sold in Paris; it was bound with the second edition of Guyon's Moyen court in 1686; and it appeared separately at Paris in 1687. Jean d'Arenthon d'Alex condemned it on 4 November 1687, and it was placed on the Index on 29 November 1689.
A second work, the Brève instruction pour tendre sûrement à la perfection chrétienne, was included after his death in the second volume of the Opuscules spirituels published by Poiret in 1720 among texts associated with Guyon. McGinn identifies this work as an anonymous letter by a servant of God giving brief instructions for securely leading to Christian perfection and dates it approximately to 1680. La Combe also wrote an apology against the assertions of Innocent Le Masson in the latter's life of Jean d'Arenthon d'Alex; this defence was later published by Charles Urbain in the Revue Fénelon in 1910–1911. Tronc identifies the defence as the Apologie du P. La Combe contre les assertions d'Innocent Le Masson and treats it as one of the three principal surviving textual witnesses to La Combe's later reception.
Several letters by La Combe are preserved in the correspondence of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, François Fénelon, and other documentary collections. Manuscripts seized at Lourdes in 1698 included a corrected and expanded version of Guyon's Moyen court et facile de faire oraison and an outline of a rule for associates of the childhood of Jesus. These manuscripts are now considered lost. Tronc notes that nearly fifty letters by or concerning La Combe appear in editions of Guyon's writings and that the prison correspondence forms a major part of the documentary evidence for his later life.
McGinn describes the Analysis of Mental Prayer as a brief work of twenty-four chapters, written in fluent but over-elaborate Latin. He says that regarded it as the first attempt at a systematic presentation of Guyon's ideas. McGinn adds that, read in itself, the work does not obviously explain its placement on the Index; its stress on the supremacy of mental and especially contemplative prayer singled it out in the increasingly anti-mystical atmosphere of Louis XIV's France.
The 1795 French translation of the Analysis, Voyes de la vérité à la vie, was apparently published at Lausanne together with a translation of Molinos's Spiritual Guide. Tronc identifies the translator as Jean-Philippe Dutoit, the Swiss editor and transmitter of Guyonian writings, and says that comparison with the Lausanne manuscript shows only minor variants introduced in preparation for print.
Spirituality
La Combe's teaching belongs to the seventeenth-century Catholic literature of mental prayer, contemplation, abandonment, and pure love. In the Brève instruction, he presents the spiritual life as requiring a second conversion, by which the soul passes from mercenary or self-interested activity to pure love. This conversion involves a donation of the whole person to God, followed by renewed interior acts that ratify this surrender. Tronc notes that this teaching includes recognizable Catholic ascetical elements, including a self-giving placed under the patronage of Ignatius of Loyola, and therefore should not be reduced to a merely passive or anti-ascetical quietism.
His teaching on contemplation distinguishes between acquired and infused contemplation, while avoiding an absolute separation between them. Acquired contemplation consists in simplified, unitive acts of the soul that remain within the range of human cooperation with grace. Infused contemplation exceeds human strength and is dominated by divine action, though the soul still concurs with that action. In this respect, his doctrine differs from a purely inert or mechanical account of passivity.
La Combe cites traditional Catholic authorities, including Thomas Aquinas, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Gregory the Great, Richard of Saint Victor, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Johannes Tauler. His spirituality emphasizes the reduction of multiplicity to unity, the destruction of self-will, the cross, and the soul's abandonment to God's action. Although his writings became entangled in the anti-quietist controversy, Orcibal notes that his doctrine also contains cautions against some positions associated with Molinos and with other writers on passive prayer.
McGinn summarizes the doctrine of the Analysis through La Combe's three forms of mental prayer: meditation, aspiration or ejaculatory prayer, and contemplation. La Combe presents meditation as good, aspiration as better, and contemplation as best, while still insisting that meditation is the necessary beginning of mental prayer. In McGinn's interpretation, La Combe does not offer one prayer method indiscriminately for all Christians, but follows a graded scheme in which meditation belongs to beginners, aspiration to the proficient, and contemplation to the perfect.
Tronc's dossier similarly presents the Analysis as defining mental prayer as a devout application to God carried out in the heart while the lips are silent. It distinguishes meditation, aspiration, and contemplation, while also recording the place of recollection, the presence of God, intention, attention, fidelity, vocal prayer, bodily prayer, mortification, spiritual reading, sacramental practice, and devotion to Christ in the Eucharist and the crucifix.
McGinn further notes that La Combe describes contemplation in apophatic and Dionysian terms as mystical, dark, and unknown. La Combe distinguishes acquired from infused contemplation, while recognizing that the distinction was relatively recent. He argues from Scripture for both forms and maintains that contemplation is easier than meditation, that more people receive infused contemplation than is commonly thought, and that acquired contemplation can come at the beginning of conversion. McGinn regards the last of these claims as somewhat controversial.
In McGinn's assessment, the claims that contemplation was easy and relatively common probably made the Analysis questionable to Roman censors. Nevertheless, he says that much of the treatise is standard and even anodyne, and that it would be difficult to find doctrinally wrong statements in the work. He concludes that the problem with La Combe's short and relatively unoriginal treatise was that it was written by the wrong person at the wrong time, in a context where its stress on contemplation as the goal of Christian life and its openness to ordinary believers could appear dangerous.
Controversy and reception
La Combe's historical reputation was shaped less by his own published works than by his relation with Madame Guyon and by the anti-quietist campaign of the 1680s and 1690s. Contemporary critics often treated him as an intermediary through whom suspected doctrines entered France. Later Catholic reference works generally discussed him in connection with Guyon, Bossuet, Fénelon, and the condemnation of quietism.
McGinn argues that La Combe's reputation was also shaped by polemical accusations concerning his relationship with Guyon. During the renewed campaign against Guyon and Fénelon in the late 1690s, allegations of sexual impropriety, though unrelated to the theological issues, influenced opinion against them. McGinn states that La Combe, whose mental state had deteriorated during imprisonment, was induced in 1698 to sign a forged confession concerning Guyon, and that a probably forged letter attributed to Bishop Camus of Grenoble also circulated allegations against them. Tronc likewise disputes the evidentiary value of later documents used against La Combe and Guyon, arguing that no clear confession by La Combe resolved the accusations and that a compromising letter shown to Guyon was either forged or obtained from a prisoner exhausted or mentally disturbed by long confinement.
Modern scholarship has treated La Combe as a significant but secondary figure in the history of seventeenth-century mysticism. Orcibal's article in the Dictionnaire de spiritualité remains a principal modern reference for his life, works, and spiritual doctrine. Other studies have examined his relation to Molinos, the history of the Barnabites, his imprisonment at Lourdes, and his place in the Guyon controversy. McGinn presents him as a writer whose doctrine was not easily reducible to formal error, but whose associations, timing, and emphasis on contemplative prayer made him suspect in the wider crisis of mysticism.
Tronc's dossier has contributed to a recent reassessment of La Combe as a spiritual writer and director whose own writings, prison letters, and later reception complicate the older image of him merely as Guyon's compromised confessor. The dossier notes that his writings were preserved and republished in Guyonian circles: Poiret included one of his works in the second volume of the Opuscules spirituels in 1720, a Swiss group published a French translation of his Latin work in 1795, and his apology remained in manuscript until publication in 1910. Tronc argues that this textual afterlife helps explain why eighteenth-century European quietist circles revered La Combe as a witness to the mystical life in faith.
Works
- Lettre d'un serviteur de Dieu contenant de brèves instructions pour tendre sûrement à la perfection chrétienne (circulated c. 1680–1687; condemned 1687; placed on the Index 1689)
- Orationis mentalis analysis (Vercelli, 1686; placed on the Index 1688)
- Brève instruction pour tendre sûrement à la perfection chrétienne, published in Opuscules spirituels, vol. 2, edited by Pierre Poiret (1720)
- Voyes de la vérité à la vie, French translation of the Orationis mentalis analysis (1795)
- Apologie du P. La Combe contre les assertions d'Innocent Le Masson, published in Revue Fénelon (1910–1911)
- Letters preserved in the correspondence of Bossuet, Fénelon, Guyon, and related documentary collections