How the Saints Practiced Humility — De Sales on the Devout Life
⏱ 13 min read
You have read the verses. Clothe yourselves with humility. He must increase, but I must decrease. Walk humbly with thy God. You have nodded along to the sermons. You have, perhaps, even tried — for a stretch of weeks — to be more humble, mostly by trying to think less of yourself and being faintly disappointed when you noticed how often you slipped back into self-importance.
And then, somewhere around the third week of the trying, the whole project went quiet, because trying to be more humble turns out to be one of the most pride-shaped activities the soul can undertake. The harder you focus on lowering yourself, the more you have to think about yourself in order to do the lowering. The mind that is asking am I being humble enough? is not, by the question itself, in any kind of humility worth keeping.
So you are here, asking the older and more useful question. How to practice humility as a Christian. Not how to feel it. How to actually do it, on the Tuesday, with the dishes still in the sink and the email still unanswered and the small irritation rising in your chest at the family member who took the wrong tone at breakfast. Francis de Sales, writing in 1609 to a young Frenchwoman who was trying to live a devout life inside an ordinary household, wrote one of the most useful pieces of pastoral theology ever produced on exactly this question. The Introduction to the Devout Life is not a treatise. It is a long letter, written to a real woman, walking her through what the practice of holiness looks like when it has to be done at home rather than in a monastery. If you are reading this with someone — a husband, a sister, a friend on the same slow road — the Couples Prayer Journal is the 140-day companion that walks the same posture together, one short page at a time.
What de Sales says about humility is not what the slogans say. It is older, kinder, and far more practicable.
The first thing de Sales does is reframe what humility is for
The mistake most people make with humility is to treat it as a moral target — a quality the soul is supposed to acquire, like patience or generosity, by a sustained programme of self-improvement. De Sales does not do this. He treats humility as a posture — a way of standing before God, with a particular quality of trust, that the rest of the practice flows out of. The aim of the humility, for de Sales, is not to make you smaller. The aim is to free you to receive what you would not otherwise be open enough to receive.
This is why his most-quoted passage on the practice of devotion does not begin with self-examination. It begins with the affections of the heart being turned, deliberately and tenderly, toward God:
“But when you pray let your words and affections, whether interior or exterior, all tend to love and trust in God. ‘O God of Mercy, most Loving Lord, Sweet Saviour, Lord of my heart, my Joy, my Hope, my Beloved, my Bridegroom.’ Vigorously resist all tendencies to melancholy, and although all you do may seem to be done coldly, wearily and indifferently, do not give in. The Enemy strives to make us languid in doing good by depression, but when he sees that we do not cease our efforts to work, and that those efforts become all the more earnest by reason of their being made in resistance to him, he leaves off troubling us.”
— Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life
Read it twice. The first thing to notice is how unfamiliar the tone is. We have been so well-trained on the examine-yourself school of devotion that a passage which begins with let your words and affections all tend to love and trust sounds almost too gentle. Surely the humility part comes later? Surely you have to do the hard internal work first, before you get to the sweet names?
No. De Sales is doing something more careful than that. He is saying that the practice of humility begins with the soul addressing God by His loving names — Joy, Hope, Beloved, Bridegroom — because the soul that has positioned itself in that posture is, by the very positioning, already in the humble place. It has admitted, by the speaking of those names, that God is the source of joy, the giver of hope, the One who loves. It has stopped trying to be its own joy-source and hope-source and worth-source. That admission is the humility. It does not have to be performed separately.
This is the genius of de Sales’s pastoral instinct. He saw that the soul which tries to be humble by working on itself ends up more entangled with itself, not less. The soul which is humble in the proper sense is the soul that has turned its attention outward toward the One who is its joy, and the self-occupation has fallen away on its own.
The second thing he does is name the saboteur
The passage above contains a clause most readers slide past, and it is the most important sentence in the whole paragraph for the woman trying to practice humility on a Tuesday.
Vigorously resist all tendencies to melancholy.
Hold that. Read it again.
De Sales is naming the actual saboteur of daily humility, and it is not pride. It is melancholy. He is writing to a woman who is sincerely trying to live devotedly, and he is saying — with the calm authority of a man who has counselled hundreds of such women — that the thing that will undo her practice is not the obvious sin of self-importance. It is the slow grey weight that settles on the soul when devotion feels dull, when the prayers seem to fall flat, when the morning chair time produces no warmth, when the whole project of trying to walk with God seems coldly, wearily, indifferently performed.
That weight, de Sales says, is the Enemy’s chief weapon against the devout life. Not because melancholy itself is a sin — it is not — but because the soul that sinks under the melancholy will gradually stop practising. The cold prayer will become the unprayed prayer. The indifferent scripture reading will become the unread Bible. The wearied work of love toward the people in your house will become the resentful withdrawal from them. And the slow drift will look, from the inside, like a reasonable response to the dryness, rather than the quiet capitulation it actually is.
The humility move, de Sales is saying, is to keep going anyway. To pray the loving names of God even when the affections are cold. To address Him as Joy on the day He feels least like joy. To do the small acts of love coldly and wearily and indifferently, and to not give in to the inner voice that says there is no point, because the feeling is not here. The point is not the feeling. The point is the practice — and the humble soul is the one that keeps practising when the feeling has gone, because the practice was never about the feeling in the first place.
This is one of the most counter-cultural pieces of spiritual direction you will read in 2026. We are trained to take feelings as the truth-tellers of the soul. De Sales, four hundred years ago, is saying the opposite. The feelings are weather. The practice is climate. The humble soul learns the difference and keeps practising through the weather, knowing that the climate is being formed underneath, in the seasons when the weather seems to give no return at all.
You may already be living some version of this. If you have been feeling spiritually dry for a stretch, de Sales is naming the discipline that walks the dry season without abandoning the chair. The chair time can be cold and the practice can still be holding.
A short bodily pause
Put the page down. Sit upright but not braced. Press both palms gently against your thighs, fingers loose. Take one slow inhale through the nose — the kind that lifts the lower ribs without lifting the shoulders. Let the exhale be longer than the inhale. Say, quietly, even if the words feel hollow: O God of Mercy. Lord of my heart. You are not trying to feel anything. You are doing what de Sales told the young woman to do — addressing God by His loving names when the affections are cold, because the addressing is the practice and the affection follows the practice, not the other way around. Stay there for a minute. Then return to the page.
The third thing he gives is a daily picture of what the practice looks like
Theory is cheap. The reason Introduction to the Devout Life has stayed in print for four centuries is that de Sales does not stop at theory. He paints a picture, again and again, of what the soul looks like when this kind of daily practice has done its slow work. One of the most quietly beautiful comes near the end of the book, when he is describing the community of saints who have walked the devout life ahead of you:
“Look around — one and all you will see them with loving, holy, gentle countenances listening to the Voice of their Lord, all seeking to enthrone Him more and more within their hearts.”
— Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life
Slow down for this one too. Loving, holy, gentle countenances. Three adjectives, in that order — and the order is deliberate. The face of the soul that has lived the devout life is loving first, holy second, gentle third. Not stern. Not heroic. Not impressive. Gentle. It is the gentleness that is the signature, because the gentleness is the visible evidence of a heart that has stopped striving to make itself important and has settled, instead, into the slow ongoing work of enthroning Him more and more within.
Enthroning Him more and more within. That is the daily picture of humility, in de Sales’s frame. The work is not the trying to be smaller. The work is the giving of more of the interior throne to Him. Every day, in the small Tuesday acts — the patience held with the family member, the email answered without the defensive edge, the half-hour given to the slow person who needs it, the prayer prayed coldly when the warmth has gone — you are quietly enlarging the territory He sits on, and contracting the territory the small managing self sits on. Neither move is dramatic. Both are real.
This is also why de Sales is so insistent that the devout life can be practised by a married woman in an ordinary household, not only by a nun in a cloister. The throne-enlarging work happens wherever you happen to live. The dishes in the sink are an occasion for it. The conversation at breakfast is an occasion for it. The chronic small irritation with the person you share a roof with is an occasion for it. There is no special religious geography required. The Tuesday morning is the chapel.
This is the practice the Couples Prayer Journal was built to hold for the two of you together — short, daily, scripture-anchored, without the over-warmth that makes most couples-devotionals feel forced. The slow practice of enthroning Him a little further inside today than yesterday, on the same page, side by side. If your husband is the one who doesn’t read marriage books, or you have been looking for couples devotionals that don’t embarrass one of you, this is the version that works on the Tuesday morning when the affections are cold and the practice still needs to happen.
What de Sales would not say
It is worth, briefly, naming what de Sales does not recommend, because the modern reader often expects spiritual direction on humility to include things he carefully avoids.
He does not recommend self-deprecation. The soul that talks down about itself in public is, for de Sales, still occupying the same throne — just from a different angle. Negative self-talk is not humility. It is pride in a minor key.
He does not recommend the constant rehearsal of your faults. The soul that returns again and again to its failures, dwelling on them, examining them, can convince itself it is being humble, while in fact it is simply staying centred on itself by the back door. De Sales is firm: confess, and move on. The lingering is not the practice.
He does not recommend the aiming at humility. The aiming makes the soul self-conscious about its progress, which makes the humility impossible. De Sales tells the young woman, again and again, to aim at love — at the loving address of God, at the loving treatment of her household, at the loving small work in front of her — and to trust that the humility is being formed underneath, as a by-product, in the seasons when she is not looking.
This is the radical and quietly liberating thing about his frame. Humility, in his hands, is not a project. It is a posture you walk into by addressing God lovingly, resisting melancholy, and doing the next small thing in front of you with as much gentleness as you can manage. The saints, looking around with their loving and gentle faces, did not get there by trying to be humble. They got there by trying to love Him, every day, through cold seasons and warm, and the humility grew in them the way fruit grows on a tree that is being properly fed.
The same posture is the one Augustine names from the diagnostic side — the restless heart that finally reposes in God — and the one Andrew Murray maps as the twelve marks of true humility. The three of them are saying the same thing in three different keys. De Sales is the most pastoral. He is the one who tells you what to do at breakfast.
The wider rhythm of how to pray for your children or a husband’s devotional for the man who reads slowly sits inside this same frame — small daily address of God by His loving names, on behalf of the people in your house, performed faithfully through the cold mornings as well as the warm ones.
The line worth keeping near the page
If you take only one sentence from de Sales into the week ahead, take this one:
“Vigorously resist all tendencies to melancholy, and although all you do may seem to be done coldly, wearily and indifferently, do not give in.”
Write it small. Put it where you will see it on the day your practice feels emptied out. That day is coming — possibly tomorrow. When it arrives, this line is the doctrine that keeps you in the chair. The coldness is not the verdict. The cold prayer is still the prayer. The wearied scripture-reading is still the scripture-reading. The indifferent kindness toward the person at breakfast is still the kindness. The Enemy is hoping you will mistake the dullness for an excuse to stop. De Sales is telling you, four hundred years later, that the dullness is exactly the conditions under which the humble soul keeps practising, and that the climate of the soul is being formed underneath, invisibly, while the surface weather seems to give no return at all.
The saints, when you look at them in his pages, are the ones who did not give in. That is the whole of it. They had cold mornings too. They had melancholy too. They kept addressing Him as Joy on the days He did not feel like joy, and the doing of that, ten thousand times across a life, formed the loving, gentle countenances de Sales is asking you to look around at and join.
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A 140-day home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Couples Prayer Journal. One short page each day. Scripture pre-printed. Space for the small honest sentence at the end. Built for the two of you to walk the devout-life posture together, on the Tuesday mornings when the affections are cold and the practice still needs to happen.
It is the format of this essay made into a daily companion, so the page you sit down at tomorrow already has a shape and you do not have to invent one from scratch.
The Everspring Couples Prayer Journal walks de Sales’s posture across 140 days — short, scripture-anchored, with space for the small honest work two people can do together without performing for each other. For the couple who want a slow daily home for the practice instead of a louder one.
