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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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. 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. 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.

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.

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. 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