HE spiritual life, like any serious un­
dertaking, requires clear-cut goals and
concrete, specific plans whereby those
goals can be realized in practice. With
these requirements uppermost in mind,
Father Trevino has compiled a volume
that will act as the ideal guidebook for
everyone genuinely determined to achieve
sanctity.
Based on the author’s many years as a
spiritual director, the eighteen rules set
forth in this work are characterized by an
acute awareness of the needs and problems
facing men and women who five active
Eves in the world and by a brilliant syn­
thesis of theory and practical application
of theory to the events of daily life. Father
Trevino’s main concern is centered on
developing within his readers an under­
standing of what true spirituality involves,
on imparting to them the principles funda­
mental to the correct ordering of the
spiritual fife, on encouraging them to per­
severe in the midst of trials and periods ol
dryness, and on dispelling common mis
conceptions with regard to the essence ol
holiness.
He begins by setting forth the necessity
for tearing out the least affection for evei
semideliberate venial sins and goes on t<
consider such topics as the supernaturaliza

T

(Continued on back flap)

(Continued from front flap)

tion of affections, the place of prayer and
mortification, the constant practice of
God’s presence, and the absolute indis­
pensability for performing the small tasks
of daily life in the spirit of Christ. He ends
by showing that the consummation of the
spiritual life consists in the free, total, and
absolute surrender of self to God, a sur­
render resulting in true spiritual joy and
peace.
Among the many features making Rules
for the Spiritual Life an outstanding con­
tribution to contemporary Catholicism, one
of the most important is the author’s clear
and probing analysis of what the Church
teaches about grace and justification — an
analysis made vivid and understandable
by an expositon of how this teaching has
been put into practice by the masters of
the spiritual life, the saints.
A practical handbook outlining the
stages of spiritual progress from the time
one has turned from mortal sin to the
time one lives a life of union with God,
this volume will be of inestimable value for
all who want to lead a truly Christo­
centric life.

Rules
FOR THE

Spiritual Life

By

Jose Guadalupe Trevino

MISSIONARY OF THE HOLY CHOST

TRANSLATED

BY

REV. BENJAMIN B. HUNT, C.S.P.

THE BRUCE PUBLISHING COMPANY
MILWAUKEE

IMPRIMI POTEST:

William A. Michell, C.S.P
Superior General
nihil obstat:

John A. Schvlien, S.T.D.
Censor librorum
IMPRIMATUR:

+ Albert G. Meyer
Archiepiscopus Mihvauchiensis
Dec. 17, 1955

The New Testament quotations in this book arc taken from The New
Testament of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ — Λ Revision of the
Challoncr-Rheims Version, by license of the Confraternity of Christian
Doctrine, owner of the copyright.

Rosary College Dewey Classification Number: 248

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 56-7046
© 1956

by

Rev. Ben Hunt, C.S.P.

MAKE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

59398
TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD
In Rules for the Spiritual Life Father J. G. Trevino, one
of the most prolific of contemporary spiritual writers, presents
a sort of ground plan for spiritual activity. Beginning with the
importance of avoiding even semideliberate venial sin, he
conducts the soul to the brink of the transforming union,
there to have a glimpse of “hidden things which it is not
given to a man to utter." Along the way he carefully points
out and skirts the pitfalls, guiding the traveler securely along
the path of Christian perfection.
Father Trevino originally titled his work, “Rules of Spiritual
Direction,” not that he meant the book as a guide to spiritual
directors — although it might serve somewhat in that capacity
— nor that he intended it as an adequate substitute for a
spiritual director. But the work does, however, supply for a
director in the broad sense that it combines theoretical prin­
ciples and practical directives as a spiritual director might, in
order to take the soul along the spiritual way. The book is
at once doctrinal and very concretely practical.
The eighteen rules are the equivalent of eighteen chapters.
Total surrender of the soul to God is the key to the whole
book. The earlier rules are meant to prepare the way for
total surrender, the later rules to carry it through. The first
thing necessary for total surrender is the determination to get
rid of all deliberate sin and affection for sin (Rule I). This
requires the perfect supematuralization of the motives out
of which we act (Rule 2). To grow in virtue we must learn
to accept and to love humiliations (Rule 4); mortification
must become our daily food (Rule 6), adversity our consolation
(Rule 7).
But it is essential that in our new-found dedication to
spiritual things we avoid exaggerations and extremes (Rule 3).
Holiness is to be found essentially in the constant and faith-

vi

Translator’s Foreword

fui fulfillment of our daily duty (Rule 9), and like Rome it
cannot be built up all in one day (Rule 5). What we give up
in the spiritual life we give up because of love (Rule 4).
In fact, as the eye of the maidservant is on her mistress so
is our eye to be on Jesus our divine Model (Rule 8). Union
with Him must be our total desire (Rules 10, 13).
In keeping our view on our lofty goal we must be mindful
of the danger of falling from our first fervor (Rule 11) and
reflect on the truth that to live the spiritual life is to grow in
it (Rule 12). When at last we totally make ourselves over to
God (Rule 14), we must not permit our offering to be vague
and abstract; we must make it practical and concrete (Rule 15).
Surrendered to God, we are to live in a peace that the world
cannot give (Rule 16), always aware that it is the interior
that gives our religious life its soul and its substance (Rule 17).
The loftiness of the experiences of God’s great mystics is at
least a reminder of the sublimity of our Christian vocation
(Rule 18), the end of which is that God may be all in all
(Conclusion).

The Translator

CONTENTS
Translator’s Foreword

.

V

Rule I

WE MUST BEGIN BY TEARING OUT AT THE
ROOTS AFFECTION FOR EVEN SEMIDELIBER­
ATE VENIAL SIN. IN ORDER TO DO THIS, WE
MUST VALUE PURITY OF SOUL PASSION­
ATELY, ABOVE EVERYTHING ELSE, AT THE
SAME TIME AVOIDING SCRUPULOSITY.

1

Rule II

IF WE DESIRE TO PROGRESS IN VIRTUE, WE
MUST PURIFY OUR HEART AND SUPERNAT­
URALIZE OUR AFFECTIONS. .

4

Rule III

IN THE WORK OF SANCTIFICATION WE MUST
ABOVE ALL AVOID EXAGGERATIONS AND EX­
TREMES, AND STRIVE FOR PERFECT BALANCE.

8

Rule IV

WE MUST LEARN TO LOVE AND TO PRACTICE
EVERY KIND OF HUMILIATION.

17

Rule V

WF. MUST COME TO REALIZE THAT SANCTITY
IS NOT ACHIEVED IN ONE LEAP, BUT ONLY
THROUGH A VERY SLOW AND GRADUAL AS­
CENT; IT GENERALLY STARTS FROM VERY
INSIGNIFICANT BEGINNINGS.

23

Rule VI

WE MUST LEARN TO PRAY AND TO MORTIFY
OURSELVES OUT OF LOVE. .

30

Rule VII

WE MUST LEARN THAT IT IS NOT CONSOLA­
TION BUT ADVERSITY THAT BRINGS US CLOSE
TO GOD AND UNITES US TO HIM.

35

Rule VIII

WE MUST SO ACCUSTOM OURSELVES TO THE
PRESENCE OF GOD, THAT WE CANNOT LIVE
WITHOUT LOOKING TO CHRIST AT OUR SIDE.

40

Rule IX

IN ORDER TO AVOID ILLUSIONS WE NEED A
SOUND, CLEAR, AND PRACTICAL NOTION OF
HOLINESS. HOLINESS CONSISTS IN THE FAITH­
FUL AND CONSTANT FULFILLMENT OF OUR
EVERYDAY DUTIES. ....

48

■

VÜ

viii

Contents

Rule X

FT IS OF CAPITAL IMPORTANCE THAT WE
LEARN TO LOVE THE SACRED HUMANITY OF
JESUS, THE CROSS, THE HOLY EUCHARIST,
THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS, THE BLESSED
VIRGIN MARY, AND THE HOLY SPIRIT.

Rule XI

ONE OF THE GREATEST DANGERS FOR THOSE
WHO ARE TRYING TO BECOME HOLY IS THAT
OF LOSING THEIR FIRST FERVOR AND FALLING
INTO LUKEWARMNESS.

Rule XII

THE ESSENTIAL LAW OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE,
AS OF ALL LIFE, IS PROGRESS AND GROWTH.
THE ALTERNATIVE IS DECAY AND DEATH.

Rule XIII

WE MUST AWAKEN IN OURSELVES AN EVER
GROWING HUNGER FOR JESUS.

Rule XIV

HAVING DULY PREPARED OURSELVES, WE
MUST FORMALLY MAKE OUR TOTAL SUR­
RENDER TO GOD.
....

Rule XV

HAVING FORMALLY MADE OVER EVERYTHING
TO GOD, WE MUST PUT THIS COMMITMENT
INTO PRACTICE, ACTUALLY GIVING TO OUR
SAVIOUR EACH THOUGHT AND WORD AND
WORK.
.....

Rule XVI

SURRENDERED TO THE DIVINE WILL, WE ARE
TO LIVE IN SPIRITUAL JOY AND PERFECT
PEACE.
.....

Rule XVII

WE CANNOT AFFORD TO LOSE SIGHT OF THE
TRUTH THAT CONTEMPLATION IS FAR SUPE­
RIOR TO ACTIVITY. ....

Rule XVIII

TUE TRANSFORMING UNION IS THE SUMMIT
OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE AND THE PREI.UDE
TO BEATITUDE.
.
.
.
.

Conclusion

Rules for the Spiritual Life

Λ man trying to make
his way along a road
blocked with obstacles
We must begin by tearing
must first get rid of the
out at the roots affection
for even semideliberate
obstacles. On the road
venial sin. In order to
to perfection, the first
do this, we must value
and greatest obstacle is
purity of soul passion­
sin. Let us suppose mor­
ately, above everything
tal sin removed by a sin­
else, at the same time
cere conversion to God.
avoiding scrupulosity.
The obstacle of venial
sin remains and, in striv­
ing to get rid of it, we must be guided by sound principles.
First, we must keep in mind that the greatest trouble does
not come from the venial sins into which we fall occasionally
and through frailty. Because of our great weakness and misery,
we cannot except by a special grace of God be completely
free from falls of this sort.
Second, we must remember that the great obstacle on the
road to perfection is affection for sin. Sins which arise from
affection for sin generally proceed, not from weakness or
ignorance, but from malice. They are not usually isolated acts,
but spring from genuine habits. If we entertain affection for
venial sin in general, we are in the unfortunate state of
lukewarmness. If the affection is for only a particular kind
of sin, then there is still present a defect which the will is
not disposed to correct and which places an obstacle to progress
in grace. Individuals who entertain affection for sin remain
bogged down on the road to perfection.
St. Thomas Aquinas says that “the chief duty of beginners
is to avoid sin.” Our first rule simply makes this more con­
crete by affirming that “it is necessary to tear out by the
roots affection for venial sins, even semideliberate ones.”
There are four steps in this task. (1) We have to eliminate
venial sin. (2) We have to get rid of affection for sin. (3)
We must tear out this affection by its roots. (4) We must
work to free ourselves not only of deliberate, but also of
semideliberate, venial sin. The most perfect way of avoiding

RULE I

£5
«g

2

Rules

for the

Spiritual Life

venial sin is to get rid of even' affection for it; the most
efficacious way of getting rid of the affection is to tear it
out radically; and the whole goal is best attained by combating
not only deliberate, but also semideliberate, venial sin.

♦

·

♦

Now how arc we to tear out this affection by its roots?
The root or cause of an affection is generally the dominant
fault, or the inordinate attachment to something created. To
root out affection for venial sin, we must discover and combat
this dominant failing. Or better, we must attack the disordered
attachment which gives rise to affection for sin. But there is
a more general means of fighting affection for venial sin. In
order to win this battle we have to fight the enemy with his
own weapons. We must fight affection with affection. And so
the most universal and, at the same time, the most efficacious
means for rooting out affection for venial sin is the love of
purity of soul — a love so alive, so intense, so efficacious and

ardent that it can justifiably be called a passion.
By analogy with the sensible passions, we give the name of
passion to two supernatural affections which are generally
found in those who serve God wholeheartedly: the love of
purity and the love of sacrifice. Passionate love of purity and
sacrifice is the fruit of the Gifts of Fear, Knowledge, Under­
standing, and Wisdom. If we beg the Holy Spirit to set our
soul aflame with these divine passions, and if we are faithful

to the illuminations and motions that come from Him, we
will succeed in acquiring the perfect purity of soul demanded
by this rule.
In working to get rid of sin, we must take equal care to
avoid scruples, or vain fear of sin where there is no sin. If
an act is lawful or if advertence and consent are lacking, there
is no sin. Delicacy of conscience must not be confused with
scrupulosity. Scrupulosity causes distress; delicacy of conscience
does not. Scrupulosity is born of a groundless fear while
delicacy of conscience proceeds from a holy fear of God,
from that filial fear which makes one avoid everything that

Rules for

the

Spiritual Life

3

could be displeasing to one’s heavenly Father. Λ delicate con­
science will distinguish with unfailing care between mortal
sin and venial, between venial sin and imperfection, between
what God commands and what He counsels.
'Hie first step, then, on the path to perfection is self-purifi­
cation. And here lies not only the beginning, but also the
end, the golden thread which binds all the stages of the
spiritual life together.

£<
ί<

RULE II

We have just seen that
the first step in the spirit­
ual life consists in the

removal of the first and
greatest obstacle to per­
fection, sin. This is the
in virtue, we must purify
same as saying that the
our heart and super­
soul must be purified.
naturalize our affections.
The second rule also
speaks of purity, of the
purification of the heart
and the affections.
One sometimes hears the assertion that virtue dries up
the heart. A widespread prejudice affirms that one cannot
arrive at holiness without inhumanly disemboweling himself
of all affections, even the most lawful. The severe words
of our Lord are alleged: “If anyone comes to me and does
not hate his father and mother ... he cannot be my disciple”

»♦>
«δ
»♦>
*♦>

If we desire to progress

(Lk. 14:26).
Now such an opinion is absolutely erroneous. The essence
of holiness lies in love or charity. Christian charity is essen­
tially universal, extending to all men, whether relatives or
foreigners, acquaintances or strangers, friends or enemies. Char­
ity can exclude no one. In fact by positively excluding from
his charity any human being whatsoever, a person would
sin against charity.
Charity does two things. First, it puts legitimate affections
in proper order. As the Spouse says in the Canticle of Canti­
cles: “He set in order charity in me” (2:4). Second, it sup­
presses affections incompatible with the love of God.

Among affections we can distinguish lawful and unlawful.
And within the lawful we find ordinate and inordinate. Every
affection which cannot be indulged without offense to God
is unlawful or sinful. For example, a married man cannot
lawfully have conjugal affection toward any person except his
wife. Toward any other person this affection is unlawful.

Rules for

the

Spiritual Life

5

Someone consecrated to God in the religious state cannot
lawfully entertain this affection toward any person whatso­
ever. Unlawful also are all affections which are the proximate
or remote occasion of sin. Now it is easy to understand why
charity must suppress all these unlawful affections. If they
are gravely sinful, they are completely incompatible with
charity; if they are lightly sinful, they are an obstacle to the
development and growth of charity.
All affections are lawful which do not of themselves imply
offense to God. But even these will be inordinate when not
subordinated to the love of God or when not supematuralized. To understand this properly, we must distinguish natural
from supernatural affections. In reality there is no other
supernatural love or affection besides charity, a single virtue
through which we love God, and our neighbor because of
God.
Natural affections are those which correspond to human
nature, without reference to elevation to the supernatural
order. In man there are two powers for loving, one sensible
and the other spiritual. From this there result two classes
of affections, sensible and spiritual — "spiritual” being here
understood not in the sense of supernatural but simply as
opposed to material. An example of a sensible affection is
that which a man has for his dog or his horse, or for some
human being purely because of physical beauty. Examples of
spiritual or immaterial affection are those which the scientist
has for knowledge, the philosopher for wisdom, the hero for
his country, the upright man for duty, the gentleman for
honor.
The work of charity with respect to these lawful affections
is to order them. In what does this order consist? First, it
consists in moderating the affections. All sensible affections,
by the very fact that they belong to the sphere of the
passions, tend to excess; and what they lack in consistency
they make up for in impetuosity. They must be kept within
the limits indicated by reason illuminated by faith.
Ordinarily, the practical way of moderating a sensible affec­

6

Rules for

the

Spiritual Life

tion is to suppress, or at least diminish, its sensible manifesta­
tions. The reason for this is that in a sensible affection
everything is sensible: the sense faculty or appetite which
produces it, its object, and the external expressions which
manifest it. Take, for example, a friendship which is purely

sensible. The faculty which produces it is what
call concupiscible appetite. Its object consists
qualities of one’s friend. It manifests itself
actions and words. Practically speaking, to

the theologians
in the sensible
in affectionate
moderate this

affection is to moderate its manifestations, even supposing,
as we arc supposing in fact, that they arc lawful manifesta­
tions. Consequently, we ought not to converse with this
friend purely for the pleasure of conversing, but only when
there is a reasonable motive; and even having a reasonable

motive, we should not waste time in excessively long con­
versations. Likewise we ought not to do favors that are
unreasonable, favors that are not proportionate to our own
resources and justified by a reasonable motive such as gratitude
or helpfulness.
In the second place, charity orders our lawful affections
by subordinating them to the love of God. Charity would
not be charity if by it we did not love God above all else.
Therefore our Lord says: “He who loves father or mother
more than me is not worthy of me" (Mt. 10:37). When
the love of our parents comes into conflict with the love
of God, we must prefer the love of God, as many a young
man and woman have done in answering God’s call to the
religious life. To embrace the religious life is to separate
oneself from one’s parents, and this sometimes occasions great
pain.
To subordinate natural affections to the love of God con­
sists, then, in putting natural affections in the second place
with reference to the love of God, and in being disposed to
give them up entirely when they are in conflict with this
same divine love.

Rules for

tue

Spiritual Life

In the third place, charity orders our natural affections by
supernaturalizing them or making them ‘‘divine." It is a
principle of capital importance in Christianity that every­
thing must he supernatural. The spiritual life cannot be
relegated to certain hours nor to a certain part of a person's
being, even the higher part. The Christian must be wholly
supernaturalized, in body and soul, in the faculties of the
soul and the senses of the body, in his association with God
and his association with creatures, in his intellectual, sensi­
tive, and vegetative life, in his social and political relations.
In a word, the whole man must be supematuralized. Holi­
ness and perfection are in reality nothing but the perfect
divinization of the Christian. This divinization results when
the Holy Spirit, by means of grace, the virtues, and the
Gifts, and especially charity, invades the whole of our being
and the whole of our activity. It is the prelude to the
perfect glorification of eternity, where all our being will,
in a certain way, lose itself in God as a drop of water in
the ocean.
Nothing is really so easy of accomplishment as a super­
natural act. In order that an act of a just man be supernatural,
two conditions suffice: first, the state of grace; second, that
the act itself have a reasonable end. An act is more perfectly
supernaturalized when a person has an actual or at least virtual
intention of doing it for God.
The importance of this second rule lies in this, that God
will never fill any soul until that soul is fully purified of all
affections incompatible with charity, and until all lawful affec­
tions have been set in perfect order. Charity puts the natural
affections of the soul in order by moderating them, by sub­
ordinating them to the love of God, and by supernaturalizing
them.

A reed shaken by the
slightest breeze, a leaf

RULE HI

snatched up in a whirl­
wind, a cloud forever
changing shape — such
fication we must above
arc the images with
all avoid exaggerations
which Sacred
and extremes, and strive
represents the life of
for perfect balance.
man — troubled, agitated,
changing. Man is en­
dowed with reason to
lead him along the
straight road of virtue. Yet he is often the plaything of his
passions. He passes his days oscillating from extreme to ex­
treme, unable to maintain that famous golden mean which

In the work of sancti­

is the object of the moral virtues.
A person leading a life of sin frequently has a conscience
so lax as almost not to notice wrongdoing. When by the
grace of God and a change of disposition he begins to lead
a life of fervor, he often tightens and trims his conscience
quite unnaturally and goes to a new extreme, that of scrupu­
losity. Now a scrupulous person who does not work to cure
himself of his malady, may so burden himself as to make
virtue seemingly insupportable. God’s convert goes back to
his old ways, and the last state is worse than the first. A sound
conscience is a balanced one.
Consider a person dominated by pride. If those who under­
take to correct him repeat constantly that he is worth nothing,
he may finally believe that statement quite literally. Thinking
himself incapable of anything, he goes to the opposite ex­
treme from which he started; all initiative for good is destroyed
and the gifts of God remain unused. St. Paul advises parents
not to overwhelm their children with rebukes, lest they be­
come weaklings with no heart for anything. This same recom­
mendation must be made to spiritual directors, religious supe­
riors, masters of novices, and those engaged in education. To
form souls one must correct them temperately and moderately.
Consider again someone of poor character, with many flaws
8

Rules

for the

Spiritual Life

9

in his behavior, but who does try hard to improve. If improp­
erly advised, this sort of person will go to the opposite extreme,
becoming now not good but sugary. In his new condition he
lacks the firmness to persevere in good and the energy to resist
evil. He lacks balance.
Or take somebody else who desires to practice the counsel
of poverty, whether in the religious life or in the world. There
is danger that he will think of poverty not as generosity in
giving but as stinginess in retaining. Now in fact, nothing is
so opposed to the spirit of poverty as is miserliness; mean and
base as it is, miserliness constitutes avarice in its very worst
form. Between extravagance and stinginess there is a just middle
ground. A balanced spirituality discovers it.
Finally consider someone who has ceased to live according
to his own taste. Having determined to set aside the natural
inclinations toward a good table and fine clothes, he may so
give himself to excessive corporal mortification that he ruins
his health. Then he begins to take such precautions with re­
gard to himself that by another route he returns to a more
refined type of self-indulgence than that which he left. And it
all happens for lack of balance.

*

·

*

What happens in the conduct of individual souls is also
reflected in the general march of the Church through the
centuries. There is a well-known principle of mechanics that
"every action produces an equal and opposite reaction.” The
principle seems to hold in the spiritual order as well. The
sanctification of souls results from the combined action of God
and man. God has the principal role by means of grace; and
man the secondary, although necessary role, which consists in
correspondence with grace.
For lack of balance men have oscillated between two ex­
tremes in the twenty centuries of the Church’s history. There
has been a chain of actions and reactions. Either such im­
portance has been given to the action of grace as practically
to suppress the co-operation of man, or else in the attempt to

10

Rules

for the

Spiritual Life

safeguard human liberty the part of God has been almost
suppressed. In the time of St. Augustine, Pelagius and his
followers inclined to this latter extreme, even going so far
as to affirm that man could save himself by himself, without
the help of grace. In order to combat this error, and with
his own peculiar fire and eloquence, St. Augustine insisted on
the necessity of grace and the gratuitous character of predestina­
tion, not perhaps without some danger of excessively belittling
man. In the singular struggle between these two tendencies,
“Augustinianism” presented in living colors the havoc wrought
in man by original sin and the weakness of man’s will agitated
as it is by his passions. It affirmed gratuitous predestination,
exalting the role of the divine activity, and not always with
due moderation.
In the Middle Ages, Augustinianism held sway, especially
when St. Thomas Aquinas presented it in a carefully reasoned
and serene way. But not all stayed within reasonable and
orthodox limits. The “Predestinationism” of Gottschalk went
to the point of heresy, and such exaggeration culminated in
the errors of Luther, Calvin, Baius, and Jansen.
From the very time of Augustine there was a contrary reac­
tion. After Pelagianism there came Semi-Pelagian ism, which,
without denying the necessity of grace, affirmed that the first
movement of a man toward his conversion comes from man
himself, not from God. In the last analysis it is man him­
self who decides his own salvation or damnation. Along with
this unorthodox reaction, there were also reactions within
the bounds of orthodoxy. These gave a special importance to
the co-operation of man with God’s grace — whether safe­
guarding sufficiently the rights of God, it is difficult to say.
Likewise “Christian humanism” tried to favor human liberty
and give more place to the intervention of man. In order
to do this it abandoned the doctrine of St. Augustine and
St. Thomas.
At the end of the sixteenth century the controversy between
these two tendencies became accentuated in the controversy
between Bâfrez and Molina. There arose the two great schools,

Rules for

the

Spiritual Life

11

Thomism and Molinism, whose dramatic struggles so embroiled
our theological forebears. Molinism was very successful toward
the end of the sixteenth century and during the seventeenth.
But it soon provoked reactions, one orthodox, that of the
Berullian school or the Oratory, and the other heterodox, that
of Jansenism, the second doing as much harm as the first
did good.
The Berullian school insisted on “the nothingness of man
and the all of God.” Beginning with this consideration it aimed
at fostering a proper attitude on the part of man toward God,
an attitude of respect and adoration, culminating in love. A
major benefit which we owe to this spirituality is a more pro­
found understanding of the mystery of Christ, the Incarnate
Word. Besides the Sulpicians, St. Vincent de Paul, St. John
Eudes, St. John Baptist de la Salle, Father Faber, Cardinal
Newman, and Monsignor Gay were illustrious representatives
of this school.
The Jansenists carried the reaction against Molinism and
Humanism to its furthest extreme. They boasted of their great
severity and asserted that not only one or the other school,
but the whole Church had departed from the Christian auster­
ity of the first centuries. They exaggerated the corruption caused
in human nature by original sin, and affirmed that the will
is wholly inert in the face of evil or good, grace constraining
man to do good. They forged a God of whom one could only
be afraid, a God who was not a father but a harsh and rigorous
master. They affirmed that Jesus Christ had not come to save
all men but only the elect. Instead of encouraging the recep­
tion of the sacraments, they drew the faithful away from them,
especially Confession and Communion, and demanded for their
reception a superhuman perfection.
The Jansenists claimed that we are responsible not only
for our voluntary actions but for all the acts of our corrupted
nature, even involuntary or inadvertent ones. In a word they
turned the whole spiritual life into penance, penance, and
more penance. By this excessive stress on penance they sought
to assure their own salvation, for according to them the number

J2

Rules for

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Spiritual Life

of the saved is very small. Having a veritable horror of any­
thing connected with the senses, they did not approve of
devotion to the Blessed Virgin or even to the sacred humanity
of Jesus Christ, and they looked unkindly on vocal prayers.
Their piety was wholly dry, arid, austere, and rigorous — more
likely to engender despair than hope.

The severity of the Jansenists produced at the end of the
seventeenth century a reaction still more dangerous: Quietism.
From about the middle of the seventeenth century onward
people began to speak and write a great deal about pure or
disinterested love. This was a reaction against the Jansenists,
for whom the spiritual life was nothing but severity and fear.
The doctrine of pure love led logically to the doctrine of
absolute abandonment to the will of God. This can undoubtedly
be understood correctly enough, and the first who spoke on it,
men like Nouct, Surin, and de Canfeld, did understand it
correctly. But little by little distortions crept in, and finally the

1

genuine Quietism of Miguel Molinos.
The false doctrine of Quietism teaches that pure love and
abandonment to God ought to be carried to an absolute dis­
interest even in one’s own salvation, and that true prayer
leads the soul to total passivity and complete inertia. True
piety is the total annihilation of the faculties of the soul. The
faculties ought to become not only inactive but even inert.
The soul ought to become like a corpse, the activity of God
taking tire place of one’s own activity. This is the “mystical
death” through which the soul becomes so deified that it
constitutes one thing with God. At this point it can no longer
sin, even venially.
The soul’s inertia excludes discursive prayer and devout re­
flection. One must not think of heaven, hell, or eternity. One
must neither be concerned about one’s own salvation, nor
disturbed at the sight of personal faults. Examination of con­
science is useless. Devotion to the saints, to the Blessed Virgin,
and even to the humanity of Christ must be discarded. And

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13

even in the most violent temptations one is not to offer any
resistance. It is easy to understand how these errors led in
practice to lamentable excesses. Molinos, after being con­
demned by the Holy Office in 1687, appears to have died
repentant.
Perhaps the most striking phase of this struggle involves
the two great French ecclesiastics, Bossuet and Fenelon. The
controversy between them turned especially around the notion
of "pure love.” Fenelon affirmed that it was of the essence
of perfect charity to love God for His own sake with no
relation to our own blessedness. Bossuet, for his part, affirmed
that the idea of heavenly reward does not cause charity to be
"interested” or selfish, "since the recompense which it desires
is no other than He whom it loves, and it does not ask honor
nor riches nor pleasures nor any of the other goods which He
is able to give but only God Himself.”
In order to defend his ideas, Fenelon wrote his book, The
Explanation of the Maxims of the Saints. In it, as the title
indicates, he undertook to explain the experiences and ex­
pressions of the saints regarding the interior life, showing that
all the interior roads tend to pure or disinterested love. But
he failed to give to all these expressions due exactness and
precision, so that a kind of mitigated Quietism resulted, the
fundamental principle of which was an habitual state of pure
love in which the desire for reward and the fear of punishment
would have no part.
On March 12, 1699, the Holy See condemned Fenelon’s
book, and on April 9, Fenelon published a pastoral letter in
which he declared that he submitted wholly, absolutely, and
without restrictions to the judgment of the Church. Even
more than the triumph of Bossuet, one must admire the
humble and generous submission of Fenelon, who though
he erred, “erred,” as someone has said, "through love.” The
truth is that real charity includes the virtue of hope; and
however perfect charity may be, it cannot be exclusive of
beatitude or the possession of God.
The fake mysticism of Quietism could not but do harm

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to true mysticism. As a result eighteenth-century spiritual au­
thors did not dare to treat of mysticism or even so much as
mention it. Almost all confined themselves to treating of
asceticism and of the exercise of the moral virtues. There
arose the tendency in writers, preachers, and spiritual directors
to be purely "practical.” Frequently this turned into a kind
of casuistry or spiritual empiricism. And yet nothing is more
necessary in spirituality than to know the basic principles or
fundamental truths, and afterward to apply them to practice.
Without grounding in principles we expose ourselves to serious
errors.
Always providential with I lis Church, God raised up at
this time St. Margaret Mary Alacoque and by means of her
showed men the treasures hidden in His Heart. This was a
magnificent proof that there is a true mysticism and that
the rigorism of the Jansenists was false. Later Cod’s providence
gave St. Alphonsus Liguori to the Church, to continue the
reaction against the rigorism which was still wreaking havoc.
Truly the doctor of prayer, St. Alphonsus found in prayer the
secret for resolving in a practical way the terrible problem
of predestination: “He who prays will certainly be saved; he
who does not pray will certainly be condemned.” St. Alphonsus
also put new life into devotion to the Holy Eucharist and
to the Blessed Virgin.
Finally, toward the end of the nineteenth century, there
began a movement of renewal on behalf of mysticism, in which
Goerres, Arintero, Meynard, Gardeil, Saudreau, Lamballe,
Joret, and Garrigou-Lagrange merit places of honor. Mean­
while the liturgy, forgotten and unknown as far as the simple
faithful were concerned, began to see a resurgence, initiated
especially by Dom Gueranger, who did so great a service
for the Christian people.

*

·

♦

This quick historical survey enables us to see the constant
fluctuations of the human intelligence, ceaselessly oscillating
from extreme to extreme. How rightly does Scripture say: “For

Rules

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15

the thoughts of mortal men are fearful, and our counsels
uncertain’’ (Wisd. 9:14). Here is where the teaching role of
the Supreme Pontiffs stands out. Just as the pilot constantly
holds the ship in its true course while the waves ceaselessly
work to swerve it to the right or to the left, so the teaching
authority of the Holy See declares and determines through
the centuries what precisely is the truth and ceaselessly cor­
rects the errors of human opinions as they veer from extreme
to extreme.
Now what is this oscillation but a lack of balance? How rare
it is to find someone who is completely balanced in his judg­
ments. All of us, to quote St. Paul, arc like “children, tossed to
and fro and carried about by every wind of doctrine devised
in the wickedness of men, in craftiness, according to the
wiles of error” (Eph. 4:14). We see everything in terms of
our own ego. We are influenced by our own temperament,
which in some is violent and impulsive, in others impression­
able and susceptible, in others indolent, lazy, inert. Personality
traits affect our way of looking at things; some are naturally
optimistic and see everything through rose-colored glasses, while
others pessimistically incline to judge every cause as already
lost. Personal interest and love of self cause us to judge
truth to be where convenience is; we will not hear of our
own opinions being criticized and insist on our own judgment’s
being right against every wind and tide. Finally our passions
blind us, or at the very least obscure the true and the right.
How are we to achieve that all-important balance of outlook
and activity? Without any question the road is long, and the
work is the work of a lifetime. But we have basic principles
to guide us. First, God made man a rational being and intends
man to be guided by his reason. Second, in the present order
man must direct his actions not by reason alone, but by reason
elevated and illumined by faith. We must therefore work to
get rid of the obstacles which obstruct the clear vision of
reason and faith. And we must make positive use of reason
enlightened by faith to direct our whole life, interior and
exterior. We must work, then, to moderate the excesses of

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our temperament and to supply for its deficiencies. We must
correct our character defects; wc must gain dominion over
our passions. In brief wc have to strangle our egoism.
Above all, we must act as rational beings, and wc must
live by faith. The task assigned to us is to elevate ourselves
above the meanness of our passions, the inconstancy of passing
impressions, the fickleness of feeling. We are to elevate our­
selves to that serene and pure region where in silence and
peace everything is seen from the point of view of God, His
interests, His glory, His love. We will work as those who
belong not to time but to eternity. Wc will regard ourselves
not as permanent settlers who have established their patri­
mony here but as travelers passing by in search of another
and eternal homeland. Only by viewing things in this light

can we have perfect balance.

Everybody is aware of
the truly basic character
of humility at every turn
of the spiritual life. The
more one advances in
We must learn to love
the practice of virtue, the
and to practice every
more permeated must he
kind of humiliation.
be with humility. The
most elevated heights of
perfection suppose un­
sounded abysses of hu­
mility. St. Augustine
teaches us this graphically. The higher the building you pro­
pose to construct, he says, the deeper you must dig your
foundation. The higher the building of our perfection, the
deeper must be the foundations of humility.

RULE IV

$2

Supernatural humility is an infused virtue put into the
soul by God as part of the whole retinue of moral virtues
that accompany sanctifying grace. Nevertheless in order to be
preserved, grow, and acquire the facility proper to the acquired
virtues, infused humility must be exercised, just as must the
other supernatural virtues. Now the acts proper to humility,
or the occasions which give opportunity to exercise it, are
humiliations. This is why our fourth rule speaks not directly
of humility, but of humiliations. Now although we speak of
humiliations, it would be an error to try to acquire humility
by external acts alone. Like all virtues, humility springs from
a light. This light is a supernatural one, which manifests to
us our own helplessness, nothingness, and misery.

*

*

·

The rule says that we must practice every kind of humilia­
tion. What kinds of humiliation are there? We can consider
three: those which come from ourselves or which we voluntarily
seek out; those which come from men; and those which come
from God.
17

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Much discretion is needed in order not to fall into lament­
able exaggerations when there is question of seeking humilia­
tion on our own. Someone who lacks balance or good practical
judgment, or who does not subject himself to his director
in such matters, will make not only himself but also virtue
look ridiculous. This is what happens when under the guise
of practicing humility a person assumes an affected and
shrunken demeanor, eyes cast down, head lowered, hands
folded, and goes about affirming in season and out of season
that he is worthless, a great sinner, of no use whatsoever. A
few think to exercise humility by dressing carelessly, and wearing
worn-out, dirty, or outlandish clothes. And some will deliber­
ately do badly that which they have been commanded to do,

in order to win a rebuke.
In doing such things one runs the risk of fostering secret
pride instead of practicing humility. We expose ourselves to
vain complacency in our pretended virtue, or at the very least
to a kind of false humility because by these external humilia­
tions we may be at least unconsciously trying to acquire or
sustain a reputation for virtue and holiness. The humiliations
which we can safely seek of our own choice are those which
go unperceived. For example, we can avoid speaking of our­
selves where there is no real need for doing so. We can prac­
tice exterior modesty and avoid excessive forwardness, not to
say impertinence. We can avoid ostentation in clothing, living
quarters, and furnishings. Besides often being in bad taste, this
serves for nothing but to encourage vanity and to waste money
which could be given to help the poor. We can observe modera­
tion in discussions, avoiding real arguments whenever possible
and never maintaining our own opinion acrimoniously. If we
have authority we can issue orders without causing the weight
of authority to be felt. We can reprimand only when this
is absolutely necessary and truly for the good of souls. A
reproof ought to be a light which enables a person at fault to
see his error, not an insult which wounds, nor a mere outburst
of anger.

Rules for the Spiritual Life

19

Second, there arc humiliations that come to us from others.
Since they arise from the will of another, our only task is
to bear them with patience, or better, to accept them calmly
and serenely. Such a humiliation may occur when we are
rebuked without reason, or when we are criticized unjustly
or falsely. To bear these humiliations without getting upset,
we should remember that we arc bad judges in what touches
ourselves and our own innocence or guilt. Supposing that
we are truly innocent in some particular instance, how many
other times have we really been at fault and no one reproved
us! It is merely a matter of confusion of dates! Whenever we
are falsely accused, we ought to dwell upon our real but
hidden faults, reminding ourselves that the truth will come out
sooner or later and that “God speaks through him who keeps
silent." Sometimes humiliations occur when our superiors fail
to give us certain considerations that we should like to receive
but which we are, in fact, very far from deserving. A superior
keeps us waiting overlong, refuses to give us a hearing, speaks
to us gruffly or harshly. We should remember that God permits
such things precisely to give us another opportunity to practice
virtue. We might keep in mind the Canaanite woman whom
our Lord treated with harsh words, but only to move her to
such virtue that He Himself, exclaimed: “O woman, great is
thy faith!” (Mt. 15:21-28.)
We might, too, have some pity on poor superiors, besieged
as they are day and night. There comes a point at which
human resistance reaches its limit, at which from sheer physical
exhaustion a person is not equal to a smile. A superior’s
physique does not yet have the endowments that come with
glorification.
Humiliations may also come when those who are subject to
us do not give us quite the attention and consideration we
think we deserve. They may not run the roll call of all the
honorific titles which we think belong to us. They may fail
to serve and obey us with quite the submission of slaves.
Well, let us remember that our subjects are not properly our
inferiors. True worth does not depend on the particular office

20

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a person discharges. God is the true judge of personal worth.
Before Him many a superior will be inferior to some of his
subjects.
Humiliations come, too, when justifiably or unjustifiably
the office that we exercise is taken away from us and we
have to descend to the common level. It is extremely difficult
to step gracefully up into some new and higher responsibility.
But it would appear almost impossible to step gracefully down
from it. Those are able to step down gracefully from some
position who through personal gifts and virtue are actually
superior to the particular duty entrusted to them. In the case
of such persons, the duty or position really becomes a pedestal
from which their personal worth stands out better. Those who

cannot step gracefully into some higher post are inferior to
it. The position subjects them to itself; they try to use the
position to make up for their own personal mediocrity and
lack of virtue. But if stepping up is hard, stepping down is
harder. How rare is the person who steps down gracefully,
who descends naturally, without loss of peace, and with
equanimity and serenity! Only the saints do it. There can
hardly be a surer proof of profound humility and lofty per­
fection than to step down well from a lofty post to an in­

significant one.

*

·

»

Superiors have been known deliberately to humiliate their
subjects in order to teach them humility. Those having the
responsibility of forming souls — spiritual directors, masters of
novices, religious superiors, educators, fathers of families —
sometimes try to make their subjects humble by dint of
trumped-up humiliations. With the talented they find fault
at every turn as fools and idiots. They exaggerate the faults
of those who have acquired some virtue, and reprimand them
publicly. They ridicule unmercifully those who have artistic
ability.
What are we to say of such a system? Far from forming
humble souls, it is likely to have one of the following results.

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21

First, it may produce wounded and hurt, weak and cowardly
individuals; as a result of being told that they are good for
nothing they come to believe it and become completely use­
less. Or such a system turns out persons full of silent rebellion
and secret pride. Injustice produces stubbornness. The abused
person begins to reason: "If they so humble me, it is because
I am worth so much. . . .” No, you cannot make souls humble
with a big stick.

«

·

*

Finally, there are the humiliations that come from God.
Some of these come indirectly from God and others directly.
When God desires that we know our misery from personal
experience, He may permit not only temptations but real
falls. In order to cure pride, for example, which is a kind
of spiritual lust, He may permit falls in matters of purity.
The humiliations which come directly from God are at
bottom a kind of light, though at first they may not seem so.
God does not humble us as creatures do, by blows. He simply
illuminates our soul so that it may comprehend in a super­
natural way its nothingness and misery. God humbles by
illuminating. He enables us to understand something of His
own grandeur, perfection, and holiness. By sheer contrast we
understand as never before our nothingness and misery, and
would like some deep hole in which to bury ourselves.
We cannot possess a profound humility until the Gifts
of the Holy Spirit come into play: the Gift of Fear of the
Lord, which inspires in us a deep and reverential fear; the
Gift of Piety, which makes us venerate God as our Father;
the Gift of Knowledge, which makes us understand the vanity
of everything created, of every dignity and honor; and especially
the Gift of Understanding, which makes us penetrate somewhat
into the all that God is and the nothing that the creature is.
By the Gift of Understanding we can appreciate that incom­
parable little dialogue between God and St. Catherine of Siena:
"Do you know what it is that you are and what it is that
I am?”

Rules for

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"No, Lord, not unless You tell me.”
"Very well; you arc she who is not, and 1 am lie who is."
We all know this truth theoretically. But what a different
knowledge we can have of it when God makes it divinely
known, His dazzling light illuminating the inmost recesses of
our intelligence. We arc left emptied of self and free of
pride. We want neither high temporal honors, nor striking
spiritual graces with which we may impress others.

«

♦

*

Such are the various kinds of humiliation. Our rule in fact
demands more than their mere practice. We ought not only
to practice humiliation but to love it. Is it possible to love
humiliation? If humiliation be considered only in itself, cer­
tainly not. But if we take into account that humiliation is the
absolutely indispensable condition of God’s lowering Himself
to the soul, enriching it with His highest graces and lavishing
upon it the most wonderful gifts of His love — is not humilia­
tion then made lovable? Someone has said that “at the bottom
of humiliations accepted one finds peace.” And so it is. For
in humiliations one finds God. The Blessed Virgin knew this
better than anyone else. As she herself explained, “He has
regarded the lowliness of His handmaid; for, behold, hence­
forth all generations shall call me blessed. . . . He who is
mighty has done great things for me, and holy is His name”
(Lk. 1:48-49).

It is a law of Divine
Providence in the distri­
bution of graces and the
We must come to realsanctification of souls
ize that sanctity is not
that the higher the sanc­
achieved in one leap, but
tity to which a soul is
only through a very slow
destined the more hum­
and gradual ascent; it
ble and hidden are its
generally starts from very
beginnings. Most of us,
insignificant beginnings.
nevertheless, are not pre­
pared for this way of
acting on God’s part.
Our judgment has been warped by lives of the saints written
without historical sense and with an exaggerated eagerness
to edify. These books hide the defects of the saints, speak
only of their virtues, and place too much emphasis on extraor­
dinary things. The saints appear not as human beings, weak
and full of misery like the rest of us, but as extraordinary and
privileged beings of a different order. Instead of being spurred
to imitate them, we find ourselves disillusioned and discouraged.
Poets, it is said, are "bom, not made." A person who
does not have the poetic gift will never succeed in becoming a
real poet even if he studies all his life. And, on the other
hand, a person born with a natural gift might never study
and yet compose verse of merit, even though not wholly in
accord with the rules of poetic composition. Exactly the
opposite must be said of saints: They are “made, not bom.”
St. Augustine’s assertion that “He who made you without
yourself will not save you without yourself,” applies with
special force to sanctity. He who made you without yourself
will certainly not sanctify you without yourself. Holiness is
always the fruit of grace on the part of God, and of the
correspondence with grace on the part of man.
It is an error both theological and historical to think that
saints were just born saints. True, this is what some hagiographers would have us believe. According to them the saint
at the moment of birth found himself enveloped in a mysteri­
ous light; in order to celebrate his birth, the bells rang out

RULE V

Μ

2Î

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even with no one to ring them. Now even supposing the
historical truth of such extraordinary events, it is of paramount
importance to insist that sanctity does not consist in them.
Such incidents, in fact, neither particularly edify nor move
to imitation. Individuals who pay too much attention to them
either become discouraged or fall into self-deceit.
Theologians call such extraordinary favors “graces gratui­
tously given" — gratiae gratis datae — because they are not given
to a soul to sanctify it, as is the “grace which makes pleasing”
— gratia gratum faciens —but rather for the profit and ad­
vantage of others. They give accreditation to a mission or con­
vince men of the sanctity of someone when such fits in with
the plans of God.
True sanctity ordinarily has very small beginnings. At first
it is hidden, almost insignificant. It develops so gradually that
it almost always passes unnoticed, not only by the world at
large, but even by those who could be firsthand witnesses
to it. The last to notice it are the saints themselves. Sanctity
is the seed hidden in the furrow of the soul, a seed at first
seen by none and which germinates slowly. First a tender,
tiny shoot bursts forth. Gradually developing, it finally be­
comes a great tree where the birds of the air come for refuge
and in whose shade the tired traveler takes shelter.
Sanctity is like the light of day, which begins so imper­
ceptibly that we cannot say exactly when night ends and day
begins. The diffused semi-light increases little by little until
it finally becomes the soft light of the dawn which precedes
the rising of the sun. At length the sun appears, its light
warm and mild and soft. As it rises more and more above
the horizon, the light and heat increase until with the
arrival of high noon there is a veritable flood of light and
a furnace of heat. Sanctity is like a river. When we watch
the river emptying into the ocean, the volume of its waters
is so great that it appears one thing with the ocean. But if
we follow the current back we see that the river is formed
by various tributaries; and if we follow it to its origin, we find
hardly more than a tiny trickle.

Rules for

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25

Sanctity is the delicate trace of light which cannot be com­
pletely distinguished from the shadows of the night, but
which increases and increases until it is transformed into the
full day of eternity. Sanctity is the trickle of water which grows
through life until it becomes the abundant river which goes
on to lose itself in the immense ocean of God.
Why does sanctity grow so gradually? Sanctity is at bottom
nothing but the life of grace. And this life, like all life,
begins from a seed which must develop in order to reach
full growth. Except for the infinite and immutable life of
God, all life, both natural and supernatural, is subject to
development. Like a seed it comes to maturity only by de­
grees. God does not forge saints all at once, as one might
cast a medal. God’s making of a saint is rather like the work
of an artist who, taking a piece of marble, little by little cuts
and polishes and chisels until he has turned it into a
beautiful statue. But there is a difference; the block of marble
is entirely passive, while man must co-operate in the work of
sanctification.

♦

*

«

That the saints do not happen all at once can be verified
from experience. Francis of Assisi was very far from being
born a saint. As a child he lived like other children. As
a young man he was no different from many others. He was
indeed endowed with an exceedingly sensitive nature, and
being overmuch given to sensible things, he liked to dress
well, sit down to a fine table, play the guitar, and sing. He
took part in parties with his friends. He was, if anything,
quite conspicuous at every party, the most hilarious and noisiest
of all. If at this time someone had prophetically told him
that he was one day to be a canonized saint or that he would
soon be going about dressed in a robe of rough wool tied with
a crude cord, he would have burst out laughing: “And these,
I suppose, are the signs?”
How did the sanctity of Francis Bemardone, the poor man
of Assisi begin? With something very ordinary and trivial.

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One day he met a beggar who asked for an aims. He kept
on going, but then touched by the grace of the Holy Spirit,
he turned back and gave the man some help. Francis responded
to grace and had the satisfaction of having done a good turn
and alleviated someone's misery. This little spark of generosity
was the beginning of a holocaust of charity.
How grace adapts itself to naturel Francis was of a nature
generous to the point of wastefulness. He began to hand out
money on all sides and with lavish hands. His alarmed father
finally accused him before the Bishop of squandering his
property. Not out of spite but because he could no longer
hold himself back from the way of complete detachment,
Francis handed over to his father everything, right down to
the expensive clothes he had on his back. Then he came to
know not only the satisfaction of doing good, but also the
sublime happiness of calling God his father. God had been
but waiting to see the heart of Francis empty. He at once
began to fill it with a love that would bring it eventually to
the seraphic transfiguration of La Verna. Λ sanctity so elevated
with beginnings so insignificant! How many times we have
met the needy only to pass them by. Or perhaps we have
helped them, and yet still have not begun the road to sanctity!
What is true of St. Francis can be verified in other saints.
The holiness of St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, had
equally humble beginnings. In order to divert himself while
laid up in the hospital, he looked about for something to
read. There fell into his hands two books, one about Christ
and another about Christ’s saints. To kill time, and purely
out of curiosity, he began to read. And he was on his way
to sanctity! Tire holiness of Francis Xavier, the apostle to
India, whose arms grew weary from innumerable baptisms,
began its wonderful course when St. Ignatius repeated to him
the sentence from the Gospel: "What does it profit a man
to gain the whole world, if he suffer the loss of his own soul?”
St. Francis Borgia, St. Silvester, St. Bruno are said to have
begun their conversions by contemplating a corpse.
How many times have we read the lives of the saints, or

■

Rur.ES FOR THE SPIRITUAL LlFE

heard snatches of the Gospel, or looked upon the bodies of
the deceasedl Yet have we even begun to be saints? If St.
Francis had not corresponded with grace on that particular
occasion, would he have frustrated his sanctification? And
what of the other saints? If they had not corresponded with
that first little grace, would they have become saints?
Before we try to answer, let us consider the truly enormous
consequences that go with a soul’s becoming holy or not be­
coming holy. If Luther had corresponded with grace, he would
have remained faithful to his calling. The world might have
escaped one of the worst heresies in history. Millions, whole
nations through centuries, would not have been separated
from Christ’s Church. Can we calculate the loss of souls
occasioned by the infidelity to grace of Martin Luther?
The holiness of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius Loyola,
St. John Bosco, St. Margaret Mary, the Little Flower, was
tied in by God with the salvation and sanctification of in­
numerable other persons. If they had not become saints,
many others would not have reached sanctity and many might
have been lost.
Here we touch upon the great mystery of the solidarity of
souls, which at bottom is but the dogma of the Communion
of Saints. In the supernatural order nobody lives in isolation.
In a greater or lesser degree, one person influences others, so
that nobody is saved alone and nobody is lost alone.
In particular, there are those who are, as it were, the
center of others. We see this in the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
The pope is the center of the whole Church, the bishop of a
whole diocese. The pastor is a kind of spiritual focal point
for his parishioners, the priest for the souls that God has
entrusted to him, religious founders for whole religious families,
superiors for those in their charge. All holy persons are the
center of a multitude of others. The failure of a soul to be­
come holy is a true catastrophe compared with which a world
war is like the play of children. And holiness depends on corre­
spondence with a first grace often humble and hidden.

28

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But let us return to our problem: If St. Francis of Assisi
had not corresponded with the inspiration to help that partic­
ular beggar, would his sanctification have been frustrated and
consequently that of countless others? Speaking absolutely, wc
must answer in the negative. God has too many ways to
compensate for a failure, to make up for an infidelity, to correct
an error. This is especially true when there is a question of
graces that, in appearance at least, arc relatively insignificant.
Nevertheless, it seems no exaggeration to affirm that there
are infidelities, in appearance small, which make a whole life
take a different direction. There arc crucial graces. Until some
given moment there is only one road in some particular
person’s life. But in that given moment a person arrives at
a crossroads. The path divides and as the person moves
along one fork he gets farther and farther from the other.
The destinations of the two are completely different. Perhaps
we might say that God has two classes of graces. One class,
of the secondary order, He scatters in abundance, taking into
account how much will be lost by our lack of correspondence.
But He has others which can be called “capital.” A grace of
this class can be compared to a link of a chain. When a
person gets hold of the first link and draws it to himself,
the second follows; it in turn draws the third and so on
successively until the last. On the other hand, let the first
link slip, the whole chain is gone. Such arc the “capital"
graces. They constitute, as it were, the substance of the de­
signs of God with regard to some particular person. They arc
nothing but the mission or vocation of a person to that
special degree of sanctity to which God has called him.
Ordinarily, the first link in this chain is very small. Each
link is progressively larger until we come to the great link
that unites us definitely and forever with God. And if one
consider well, these links are not in reality many graces, but
at bottom only one grace which develops as a living seed
develops into a plant.
Be these things as they may, the result of our reflections
cannot be less than this: correspondence with grace is of

Rules for

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29

crucial importance. Those little graces, the little inspirations
which we treat lightly because they are small, may well be
the seed of a holy life. “Well done, good and faithful servant;
because thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will set
thee over many” (Mt. 25:21). Our Lord need not be under­
stood as meaning only that our tiny good works receive from
God a huge reward of eternal happiness. He may also mean
that a person who corresponds with little graces will receive
greater, progressively greater ones, until he reaches the summit
of perfection. The secret of sanctity is fidelity to grace, corre­
spondence with the very slightest inspirations of the Holy
Spirit.

This rule comes very
fittingly after our earlier
discussion of humility.
Prayer springs up sponta­
neously from the depths
We must learn to pray
of humiliation. "Out of
and to mortify ourselves
the depths I have cried
out of love.
to Thee, O Lord” (Ps.
129:1). It is as if
the Psalmist would say,
“from the depths of hu­
miliation, O Lord, I have
cried to Thee.”
Pride is unable to pray. How unbearably proud was the
unbeliever who advised: “Do not kneel. You are already small
enough. Don't make yourself still smaller by kneeling.” This
advice comes naturally from the lips of a proud man. To pray,
one must feel one’s need, and the proud man thinks that
he is sufficient to himself.
The first kind of prayer is that of the beggar, who be­
cause he is hungry, extends his hand to ask for a piece of
bread. St. Augustine says: “You arc God’s beggar. All of us
arc mendicants of God when we pray. We stand before the
door of the great father of the family. We prostrate ourselves
on our knees, begging for something. That something is God
Himself. What does the beggar ask of you? Bread. And what
do you ask of God? Why, that He give you Christ, who
said of Himself: ‘I am the living bread that has come down
from heaven’ (Jn. 6:51).’’
Without humility nobody can recognize himself as a beggar,
even in the face of God. If prayer begins with asking, it ends
in adoring, in that supreme adoration which becomes one
thing with unitive love and culminates in the possession of
God. To attain to lofty prayer, one must lower himself still
more into the abyss of humility. St. Augustine teaches us
that we approach God, who is very high, by becoming our­
selves very low. God withdraws from the person who proudly
raises himself up, and He draws near to one who humbly
30

RULE VI

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31

lowers himself. The loftiest summits of holiness rise up along­
side the most profound abysses of humility.

*

·

·

The spiritual life can be almost identified with the life
of prayer. In its fullness the spiritual life consists in the
union of the soul with God. And the life of prayer also is
nothing but the union of the soul with God. There is no
better criterion of progress in perfection than prayer. It is
impossible to live without breathing. And the necessity that
the body has for breathing is the necessity that the soul
ought to feel for prayer. Prayer is the respiration of the soul,
and without it the soul cannot live.
The role of prayer in the spiritual life can be likened to the
role of the heart in a living body. The heart expands in
order to receive the flow of blood. Then immediately it con­
tracts, sending the flow of blood to the other organs and
flooding them with life. So the soul must expand through
prayer in order to receive the flow of graces from heaven. It
can then spread these graces through the whole spiritual
organism, and even make them circulate through the whole
Mystical Body of Christ.
We set certain definite hours for nourishment, but not for
breathing. Breathing fills our whole life. We breath asleep
and awake, at work and at rest, sick and well. Prayer is like
breathing in that we ought to pray always. Jesus Christ
recommended us to “always pray and not lose heart" (Lk.
18:1); therefore the strength to pray need never be wanting
to us.
Someone directed by St. Francis de Sales presented for his
approval a daily schedule of spiritual exercises which began
with one hour of mental prayer. The saint crossed this out
and in its place put twenty-four hours. He wanted to emphasize
the truth that prayer is not to be a single exercise in the
day but must fill the whole day.
The time dedicated expressly to prayer in any program
of the spiritual life ought to signify the period for making

32

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Spiritual Life

"prayer provisions" for the whole day. Λ hiker getting ready
for a long trip, loads his knapsack with adequate food sup­
plies. Someone sensitive to cold approaches the stove to warm
himself before going into the chilly out-of-doors. So by formal
prayer we prepare ourselves for the day. We must strive to
make our life a constant treating with God, in the midst
of the occupations, conversations, and difficulties that form
the framework of our day. Our life can be a constant living
with God, if we but prolong our prayer, or the contact with
God which is the fruit of prayer. From time to time we must
freshen our contact by a simple raising of our mind to God
or by means of ejaculatory prayers, spiritual communions, in­
terior aspirations.
A person at first will find difficulty in attending at the
same time to external occupations and interior union with
God. Many times he will surprise himself in the midst of
distractions which have taken his thoughts very far from
God indeed. But if he is faithful in his efforts, distractions
will disappear little by little. He will come to live in a
supernatural atmosphere, in constant contact with God, like
the fish which lives submerged in water or the eagle which
moves in the vastness of space. This is to live a life of
prayer, and only when one has arrived at this point has
he fully learned to pray.

Mortification is as indispensable as prayer in the spiritual
life, granted our state of being sinners. Mortification is neces­
sary for the expiation of past sins and the conquest of
present ones. It is required for successful resistance to the
inclination to evil left in the soul by original sin and
strengthened by personal sin. Mortification is necessary not
only in the purgative way but also in the illuminative. We
cannot imitate Jesus crucified without carrying in our own
flesh the sacred marks of Jesus’ passion. “I bear the marks
of the Lord Jesus in my body” (Gal. 6:17). Mortification is
necessary even in the unitive way in order that, uniting our

Rules for the Spiritual Life

B

sufferings with those of our Saviour, we may continue His
redemptive work, obtaining graces of conversion for sinners
and graces of sanctification for the just. In this way we com­
plete, on behalf of Christ’s Mystical Body, the Church, "what
is lacking of the sufferings of Christ” (Col. 1:24).
One kind of mortification may be more valuable than
another. Mortifications that come from God, like sickness,
poverty, failure, and humiliation, are worth more than those
like fasting which come from our own will. Interior mortifi­
cation — patience in bearing with one’s neighbor, refusing to
indulge one’s own bad disposition, avoiding making excuses
when reprimanded — this is of more value than exterior or
bodily mortifications. But no one should limit himself to one
kind of mortification. The different kinds can be combined.
Mortification on our own initiative will help us to receive
properly the mortifications that come to us from others, and
ultimately from God. In the same way, corporal mortification
will help us in the practice of interior mortification. And all
prudent mortification will dispose us for union with God.

•

*

*

Prayer and mortification — what is the connection that
exists between them? So profound a connection that St. John
of the Cross declares: "Tell me what your mortification is
like, and I will tell you what your prayer is like.” Prayer
consists in union with God. But we unite ourselves with
God in the measure in which we purify ourselves, for nothing
impure can be united with infinite purity. Now the great
instrument for obtaining purity of soul is mortification. Just
as fire purifies gold, so mortification purifies the soul, burning
all the dross and remains of sin and preparing the soul for
union with God.
God is an infinitely exalted being, and prayer is a lifting
up of the mind and heart to Him. The soul, being spiritual,
tends of itself to rise. But the weight of human miseries is
a ballast that drags it toward the earth and makes its ascension
difficult. Mortification destroys the attraction of the corporeal.

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It cuts the moorings of the human and earthly and frees the
soul for a heavenly ascent.
Perfect union requires the perfect likeness of the things
united. Now St. Paul tells us we ought not to know any
other Christ than Christ crucified. But we cannot unite
ourselves to such a Christ if we do not by mortification
crucify ourselves, so that with the same Apostle we can say:
"With Christ I am nailed to the Cross” (Gal. 2:19).
Finally, the life of prayer, like all life, must be fruitful. The
most intense and fruitful apostolate is exercised by those
who pray. But fruitfulness in prayer is achieved when the
soul, not only united with Christ but transformed into Him,
comes to be an instrument or, as it were, a prolongation of
the humanity of Christ. Through such a soul Christ continues
His passion and sacrifice, His work of redemption and sancti­
fication. But to share with Christ in this way one must mortify
oneself through love and love alone. St. John of the Cross
said with good reason: “Tell me what your mortification is
and I will tell you what your prayer is.” And this is why our
sixth rule exhorts us “to pray and mortify ourselves through
love."

In order to understand
this rule we must first
grasp the meaning of
"consolation” and "ad­
Wc must learn that it is
versity.” Naturally we
not consolation but ad­
are speaking of consola­
versity that brings us
tion and adversity in the
close to God and unites
service of God. But tieus to Him.
ing in this seventh rule
more particularly with
the sixth which treats of
prayer, we have in mind
here especially consolation and adversity in prayer or conversa­
tion with God.
By consolation we understand all those delights which may
be found in prayer. These may be purely sensible, purely
spiritual, or spiritual and sensible at one and the same time.
We must keep in mind that there are two kinds of knowing
powers in man: the senses, by means of which we perceive
the sensible; and the intellect, by means of which we know
intelligible truth. Likewise there are two kinds of powers
for loving the good: the sensible appetites, which seek the
sensible good manifested through the senses; and the will,
which loves immaterial good presented through the intellect.
Every faculty seeks its own proper good. When it has found
that good and possesses it there results the delight which we
call joy. If the good is sensible, the joy is sensible; if the good
is immaterial, the joy is immaterial. Sensible consolations here
refer to the joy or delight which we experience in our sense
powers when we pray to God. This joy resides in the sense
faculties, or in the language of the Scholastics, in the concupiscible appetite. Sensible joy has sensible manifestations.
For example, the checks become flushed, tears flow, the heart
palpitates, or even the whole body trembles. Spiritual con­
solation is the joy or delight which the will experiences in
the possession of the good proper to it. Spiritual consolation
resides in the will, and does not itself have sensible mani­
festations.

RULE VII

35

36

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Finally, because of the union of soul with body and the
mutual influence exercised by each upon the other, when
spiritual consolation is abundant it overflows the spiritual
part of the soul and floods the inferior part of our being or
our sensible nature. The Psalmist expressed this fullness of
consolation when he said: "My heart and my flesh have re­
joiced in the living God” (Ps. 83:3). Not only my heart
(my will) but even my flesh itself has trembled with joy.
Purely sensible consolations belong especially to beginners;
purely spiritual ones, to the proficient or those who are
progressing in the way of perfection; and the integral consola­
tions, spiritual and sensible, are characteristic of the perfect.
We speak here in a predominating not in an exclusive sense.
The three stages of the spiritual life are the purgative, proper
to beginners; the illuminative, belonging to proficients; and
the unitive, belonging to the perfect. Now each of the three
kinds of consolation appears in each stage of the spiritual life.

But the purely spiritual predominates in the illuminative way,
and the complete or integral in the unitive way.
We can set up this general rule: a person must not become
attached to consolations, especially sensible ones; he must make
use of them as a pure means for getting to God. To become
attached to consolations, to want them inordinately, to seek
them as an end and not as a means, is a spiritual vice which
St. John of the Cross calls “spiritual gluttony.” But this docs
not mean that one would be justified in systematically despis­
ing them. Whenever God sends them, He sends them for
our spiritual profit.

*

*

*

It will now be easier to understand what we mean by
adversity in prayer. It is simply the absence of consolations.
More particularly it can be called aridity, impotence, desola­
tion, abandonment. And these terms may well be used to
signify adversity in its varying degrees.
The lack of sensible consolation we call aridity. Aridity
deprives one of the sensible delight previously tasted in

Rules for

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Spiritual Life

37

prayer. As the sensible part of the soul now finds no nourish­
ment, the result of aridity is distractions. The imagination,
finding nothing on which to feed in prayer, readily begins
to roam and to occupy itself with other than spiritual things.
A further degree of trial in prayer is impotence. A person
not only lacks fervor and sensible devotion. He further feels
himself impotent even for acts of the higher faculties, reflec­
tion on the part of the intellect and affections on the part
of the will.
A yet higher degree is desolation. Over and above the ex­
perience of impotence, a person finds in spiritual things nothing
but weariness, tediousness, and repugnance.
Last of all there is abandonment. This is the last and greatest
trial that the soul can suffer in prayer. Not only does one
here find spiritual things repugnant, but he feels himself
abandoned by God. He is shaken by temptations against faith,
and all spiritual things appear to be a farce. Temptations
against hope work to convince him that he is reprobate, al­
ready lost. Temptations against love bring horrible blasphemies
to his lips. He even appears to hate God. . . .
These states of adversity in prayer must be carefully dis­
tinguished from lukewarmness. Lukewarmness, too, can produce
aridity, impotence, and weariness in prayer. But lukewarmness
is characterized by a willful and habitual negligence. Careless
about his spiritual obligations, the lukewarm person abuses
grace and nourishes affection for venial sin. The spiritual
states referred to above arc characterized by the continuance
and increase of impotence in spite of the efforts of the soul
against it. In addition, they are accompanied by an emptiness
and disenchantment as far as creatures are concerned, a divine
uneasiness and restlessness, a hunger and thirst for God, which
already constitutes a kind of obscure contemplation or infused
knowledge of God. In this obscurity the soul knows God as
one might know the magnitude of the ocean by the abyss
which would be left upon the withdrawal of its waters, or as
a person realizes how much he has loved someone through the
emptiness left by death.

38

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If both adversity and consolation have a part to play in
our sanctification, what is the relative value of each?
First, as to their causes, sensible consolation and bitterness
can come from a person’s temperament. There arc highly
sensitive and emotional temperaments which react to the
slightest stimulation. Then there are the extraordinarily dry

or "melancholy” temperaments — those who, as St. John of
the Cross says, seem scarcely to have sufficient sensibility to
remain human. Moreover, difficulty in prayer is sometimes
temporary and can arise from illness; e.g. poor digestion, im­
proper glandular function, or nervous depression.
Sensible consolations sometimes come from the devil. He
may try to arouse sensible “devotion” in us in order to de­
ceive us into taking for solid progress in prayer what is really
but a sentimental and passing fervor. Or he may use sensible
sweetness as a means to start souls on the tragically perilous
path of false mysticism.
Sensible consolations also come from God. How often
are men drawn away from virtue by the fascination of sensible
creatures'. It is natural that, knowing our nature so well, God
should make use of the purely sensible to draw us also to
His service. This is why beginners in prayer arc frequently

favored with a period of great sensible fervor. Beginners are
like children. They like nothing but sweets, and even when
giving them medicine, God hides it in caramels and chocolates.
Consolations and adversity which involve more than the
sensible part of human nature can come only from God. Purely
spiritual consolations, and above all, those spiritual consola­
tions that because of their intensity redound into the sensible
part, are but God’s reward to those who have been generous
in enduring aridity, impotence, desolation, and abandonment.
These states of soul are as a rule mystical; the soul cannot
produce them by its own power, nor can it by its own power
cause them to disappear.

The reason for our seventh rule should now be clear. When

Rules for

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Spiritual Life

a person first begins to serve God, sensible devotion helps
pull him free of creatures and attach him to God. But once
he has become somewhat stable in God’s service, God deprives
Him of these consolations. For these consolations themselves
arc of the creaturely order, and a man must be free of attach­
ment to them in order to live for God alone. In the process
of bringing a soul to Himself God docs two things. He purifies
the soul, emptying it of all creatures and of itself; He fills
it with grace and charity so as to unite it directly to Him.
The three stages through which one ascends to union with
God, must be preceded, then, by three purifications. In the
purgative way there is the active purification of the senses; at
the threshold of the illuminative way the passive purification
of the senses; at the entrance to the unitive way the passive
purification of intellect and will. Impotence, desolation, and
abandonment correspond to these three purifications. And only
after one has passed through these three "nights,” as St. John
of the Cross calls them, does the light of spiritual consolation
shine in the heaven of the soul, as a legitimate reward.
According to the ordinary economy of grace, virtue will not
be achieved in a heroic degree except by means of these succes­
sive privations of consolations, each more trying and more
purifying than its predecessor. These privations teach us ex­
perimentally our weakness and helplessness. As a solid humility
forms in us, we come to realize the necessity of grace and
its true value. We acquire that obscure faith which St. John
of the Cross so extols. We learn to “hope against hope.” At­
taining that pure unadorned charity which is the death of
the most dangerous and subtle of our spiritual defects, selflove, we arrive at the summit of genuine “pure love,” perfect
conformity of our will with the will of God.
Adversity, then, not sweetness or consolation, leads us near
to God and to eventual union with Him. Adversity is the
way or road to God, the instrument which God uses to unite
us to Him. Sweetness or consolation is the fruit of this union.
We barely taste of the fruit here on earth, we enjoy it fully
in heaven.

The preceding rules are

concerned with prayer,
cither preparing for it or

RULE VIII

treating of it directly.
This rule is meant to
complete the material
of God, that we cannot
touching on prayer. It
Jive without looking to
is concerned with the
Christ at our side.
prolongation of prayer
through the day. By the
practice of the presence
of God our whole life
can be a life of prayer. Let us practice interior recollection.
Along with prayer, spiritual reading, examination of con­
science, and frequenting the sacraments, the practice of the
presence of God has become a recognized part of the spiritual

We must so accustom

ourselves to the presence

life. This practice prepares for, accompanies, and follows prayer.
It prepares for prayer, because if we live habitually in the
presence of God we will always be recollected; and recollection,
exterior and interior, is the principal preparation demanded by
prayer. Exterior recollection consists in guarding the senses, by
the observance of exterior and interior silence and modesty.
Interior recollection consists precisely in the habitual practice
of the presence of God.
The exercise of the presence of God accompanies prayer,
because one cannot begin to pray without putting oneself in
the presence of God. The traditional custom of explicitly
putting oneself in the presence of God before meditation is
but an acknowledgment of this. If in prayer we are going to
talk to God, we must begin by reminding ourselves that we
are in His presence, that He sees us, listens to us, and is
attentive to our words.
Finally, this exercise is the prolongation of prayer through
the whole day, in conformity with the various occupations to
which we must devote ourselves.

*

·

*

The exercise of the presence of God has its roots deep in
40

Rtn.ES FOR THE SPIRITUAL LlFE

41

dogma. Of the truths on which it is founded, some pertain
to the natural and some to the supernatural order.
A truth of the natural order is that God is present every­
where by what theologians call His immensity and ubiquity. A
body is completely circumscribed by the place in which it is.
It cannot be in two places at the same time except through a
miracle. Such a miracle, verified in the lives of the saints, is
called bilocation. But even then the real body is only in one
of the two places; there is but the appearance of a body in
the other. The angels, being pure spirits, are not circum­
scribed by one particular place; they can be in two or more
places at one and the same time. God, the purest of spirits,
not only can be in several places, but He is in fact in all
places.
Moreover, God is where He is after the manner of a spirit.
Having no parts, He cannot be divided, and is wholly in the
whole universe and wholly in each one of the creatures which
make up the universe. God is wholly in the whole ocean and
wholly in each drop of water in the ocean. God is wholly in
the endless expanses of the universe and wholly in each one
of the atoms that compose it. God is therefore wholly in each
and every man, the greatest sinner, the worst criminal, and
even the damned. The first truth on which my exercise of the
presence of God is based is this: God is in me.

*

«

·

Not only is God everywhere. He also knows everything.
His knowledge is infinite. It is impossible that there should
be anything past, present, or future, anywhere in the universe,
to which God’s eye does not reach. No one knows as He does
the nature, temperament, character, personal habits, thoughts,
desires, and intentions of each one of us. God sees all that we
have been, are, or will be. Scripture teaches us that everything
is patent and manifest to His eyes, and that He searches into
the most intimate depths of our being: “ . . . but all things
are naked and open to the eyes of him to whom we have to
give account” (Hebr. 4:13); “the wickedness of sinners shall

42

Rui.es for the Spiritual Life

be brought to nought: and Thou slialt direct the just: the
searcher of hearts and reins is God” (Ps. 7:10). This, then,
is the second truth on which the practice of the presence of

God is based: God sees me.

*

*

*

But not only is God’s knowledge and presence all-pervasive.
It is everywhere active. No creature can do anything except
under the influence of the divine action, and in dependence
on the divine action. God is always the primary and principal
cause. With respect to God no creature can be other than a
secondary or instrumental cause. Consider the way in which
an instrument works. A paint brush paints. But it is impossible
that it do so except under the motion of the painter. A piano
plays, but only at the touch of the artist. Now all creatures arc
instruments of God. All creation is an immense lyre played by
the divine hands.
This truth applies even to man, free and rational creature
that he is: all man’s activity, whether feeling, thinking, or
willing, depends more upon the power of the first cause, God,
than upon man himself and his own power. As men, we arc
instruments in the hands of God, free instruments, but in the

last analysis instruments.
The exercise of the presence of God depends upon three
truths of the natural order: God is in me; God sees me; God
works in me.

*

«

>»

God is present in things by His very substance which, being
immense, fills everything. He is present by His knowledge,
which, as infinite, knows everything. He is present by His
power, which moves every creature, God being the first and
omnipotent cause of all. This threefold presence of God per­
tains to the natural order and is found in all creatures. It is
found in all men, even those in the state of mortal sin.
But there is a new presence of God found only in the soul
that has been supernaturalized. This presence is not only of the

Rules for the Spiritual Life

43

one God but of the one God who is three Persons. If we
possess divine grace there is present in us the Father who
loves us as sons, the Son who loves us as brothers, and the
Holy Spirit who showers us with gifts.
This presence of the triune God in the soul justified through
grace is a great marvel. Neither man nor angel nor any other
creature can enter by its own proper power into association
with God in God’s own intimate life. The intimate life of God
consists in those mysterious relations which constitute the three
divine Persons. The Father, knowing Himself, begets the Word;
and the Father and the Word, loving each other, give origin
to the Holy Spirit. These relations cannot be externalized. Since
all God’s attributes pertain to the nature which is common
to the three divine Persons, everything that God does "out­
side” — ad extra, as the theologians say — He does not as triune
but simply as one.
God causes the universe. But far from excluding any one of
the three Persons, this act is common to all three. God knows
all that exists. But this knowledge is not peculiar to the Father
alone or the Son or the Holy Spirit; it is common to the three
Persons. God governs the universe. But God’s Providence per­
tains to God as one, not as triune. All these associations of God
with creatures and consequently of creatures with God are
with God as one, not with God as triune.
But what is impossible to a creature is not impossible for
God. And here is the ingenious way, if we may so speak, in
which God in fact has overcome a difficulty and given us a
share in His own divine life. The second Person of the
Blessed Trinity, the Word, united Himself personally with a
soul and with a body. In this way one member of the human
race, a representative of humanity, penetrated into the intimate
life of God. The work of the Incarnation, since it is "outside"
or ad extra, is common to the three divine Persons. Neverthe­
less the Hypostatic Union does not take place with either the
Father or the Holy Spirit, but only with the Word. The
humanity of Jesus Christ was the first created nature after the
fall to have special relations in a unique way not only with

44

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God as one but with God as triune. “The firstborn among
many brethren/’ says St. Paul, of our Saviour (Rom. 8:29).
Now by means of grace, the source of which is Jesus Christ,
we are incorporated into Christ. Through I lis mediation, we,
lowly creatures though we are, penetrate into the Holy of Holies
which is the intimate life of God. It is natural that grace,
which resides in Jesus Christ as in its fountainhead, should
adapt itself to the special character of the second Person of the
Most Blessed Trinity, who is Son par excellence. The grace
that we receive is a grace of sonship; we are sons along with
the Son. The Father is our Father, and the Holy Spirit, who
is the Spirit of the Son and the Father, is also our Spirit. The
Holy Spirit moves, governs, and sanctifies us, consummating
our union with the Father and the Son.
Here then is a new wonder: not only is God in me, as
Creator, Conserver, and Governor of the universe; He is also
in me as triune, as three Persons, and has made my soul His
lasting dwelling place. He does this not in a passing way, but
in a kind of definitive way. If I should lose God’s presence, it
will not be because God has first withdrawn His gifts but
because I have voluntarily renounced them. Moreover God is
present not as a stranger —as He is present in the sinner —
but as a beloved guest who comes to me in order that I may
rejoice in His company and conversation. He comes to me in
order that I may live, as St. John says, in communion with the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is with me as Father,
enveloping my soul in infinite tenderness. He is present as
Word, illuminating me with a never failing light, causing me
to rejoice in the intimacy of brother and friend. He is in me
as Holy Spirit directing and sanctifying me with His gifts.
This then is the first truth of the supernatural order on
which the exercise of the presence of God is founded: the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are dwelling in me. I do not
have to search them out in the heights of the heavens. I need
only enter within myself; my soul, and even my body, is a
temple in which dwell the “Three.”

Rules for

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45

Perhaps this supernatural presence of God in the soul may
appear too lofty for those just beginning the spiritual life. If
beginners have not an exercise of the presence of God which
supplies food for the imagination, the imagination will roam
away into harmful distractions. But fortunately Jesus Christ
is not only true God but also true man. He can be touched
not only by our faith but also in a certain manner by our
senses. Moreover, as we shall see later, it is impossible to reach
the Divinity without passing through Jesus, the Mediator. The
most sacred humanity of Jesus is the one road that can take
us to the Divinity. The exercise of the presence of God becomes
the exercise of the presence of Jesus.
What is the dogmatic foundation of this new presence?
Jesus, as man, that is in His Sacred Humanity, is not to be
found really except in heaven and in the consecrated Host.
One might suppose then that the presence of Jesus in us or near
us is a pure figment of our imagination. Nevertheless, the fol­
lowing points must be kept in mind. First, whenever we pray
before the tabernacle, the presence of Jesus is absolutely real.
Jesus is very near us. Second, every time we receive Communion
and so long as the sacred species remains, the presence of Jesus
in our soul is absolutely real. Third, between Communions
something of Jesus remains in us. Did not He Himself affirm:
"He who eats My flesh, and drinks My blood, abides in Me and
I in him”? (Jn. 6:57.) Deposit an exquisite perfume in an urn
and the scent remains long after the liquid has disappeared.
Now when Jesus passes through our souls He leaves them
scented with His divine fragrance. Souls that have received
Communion should spread everywhere the good odor of

Christ.
What is it that Jesus leaves with us from one Communion
to the other? First, He leaves sanctifying grace, which is
increased. He leaves also the sacramental grace proper to the
Eucharist. Grace is a life which Jesus as God and man com­
municates to us. It is the fruit of the Sacrifice in which His
most Sacred Humanity was immolated. It is the price of His
blood, the fruit of His body, given over to death for our sakes.

46

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A son invariably has about him something of his father, for
he has received from his father nothing less than life itself.
Now we have much of Jesus Christ in us, if we have received
from Him the life of grace. Moreover, consider that although
a father gives his son life, once he has given life, that life is
independent of himself; a son can continue to live though his
father die. The life of grace as we receive it from Jesus is
different. The life of grace cannot continue even one moment
in us without the constant and direct influence of Jesus Christ
upon us. Jesus Christ exercises this vital influx on our souls
not only as God but also as man. To be sure, there is something

in us of Jesus.

*

♦

·

What is this something of Jesus which is in our souls? Let
us first of all relate it to the fact that Jesus sees us. He not
only knows us with His divine knowledge but also with His
human knowledge. It is common teaching, which cannot be

denied without a grave sin of presumption, that even as man
Jesus knows perfectly each and every human being that has
ever existed in the past, that exists now, or that will exist in
the future. His role of Redeemer and Sanctifier of the human
race requires this. Jesus Himself tells us that He knows His
sheep and that He calls each by its own proper name. He
knows His own, not vaguely and confusedly, but particularly.
He knows every characteristic trait. His knowledge is integral,
intimate, and complete.
What a consolation to realize that Jesus sees us and that
His gaze follows us everywhere! His gaze is not a cold one.
Still less is it severe or inquisitorial. Jesus’ look is full of tender­
ness and love. It is the look which transformed Peter, con­
verted Magdalen, and entangled the rich young man of whom
we read in the Gospel.
Moreover, Jesus not only sees us, He also loves us. He loves
us as God, He loves us as man. His heart, as the Church
exclaims in the preface of the Mass for the feast of the Sacred
Heart, has never ceased to burn with love toward each and

Rules for the Spiritual Life

47

every soul — "flagrare numqnam destitit.” Spirits do not ap­
proach or move away according to material distances. They
come near through understanding and especially through love.
They move away through misunderstanding or indifference,
and especially through hate. Two souls that know and love
each other are united, even though separated by the immensity
of the ocean or the vastness of the desert. ... If the Heart of
Jesus loves us, as it certainly does, and if we also love it, as
our conscience bears witness that we do, then Jesus and our­
selves, far from being separated by the immense distance
between heaven and earth, are intimately united by the inde­
structible bonds of love.
This "something" of Jesus which is in us is, in fine, a vital
inflow. Besides seeing and loving us, Jesus causes the life of
grace to pulsate in our souls. He conserves and increases this
life, and by means of His actual graces exerts an efficacious
influence upon our whole spiritual activity. The dogma of the
Mystical Body of Christ teaches us this. As the head exerts a
vital and permanent influence over the whole organism, so
Jesus Christ, head of His Mystical Body, exercises a vital,
permanent, and absolutely essential influence on each and
every one of His members. If there be any difference, it lies in
the superiority of the reality over the symbol. The supernatural
reality of the Mystical Body surpasses immensely the lowly
realities of the natural order which symbolize it.
*

♦

·

We sec, now, the theological foundation of the presence
of Jesus. Jesus not only as God but also as man sees us and
loves us. He exercises a vital, constant, necessary, and efficacious
influence on our whole supernatural life. For this reason the
rule which we have just been explaining proposes not only
that we exercise ourselves in the presence of God but also
that we try to achieve the presence of Jesus. Our goal is to be
no longer able to live alone, but only in intimate, constant, and
delightful union with our Saviour.

Since all Christians arc
called to holiness, noth­
ing is more important in
In order to avoid illu­
the spiritual life than an
sions we need a sound,
adequate notion of what
clear, and practical no­
holiness is. This notion
tion of holiness. Holi­
<<
ness consists in the
must be sound and clear,
X
faithful and constant
concrete and practical.
fulfillment of our every­
·♦>
One can hardly make in­
day duties.
telligent progress towards
a goal he has not quite
located.
If our notion of holiness is to be sound, it should rest not
on the more or less probable opinions of men but on the solid
foundation of Sacred Scripture. The dogmatic teaching of the
Church should be its support. To be clear, it should be
expressed in a formula accessible to all. Moreover, it should be
expressed in words which do not require philosophical and
theological training to be understood. To be concrete, it must
avoid vague abstractions and illusory idealism. To be practical,

RULE IX

it should enable us to see what we must do in the concrete
circumstances of everyday life in order to arrive at holiness.
Let us look, then, for just such a concept of holiness: sound,
clear, concrete, practical.

Only God is substantially and absolutely holy, the very
essence of holiness. Tire Church sings in the Gloria of the
Mass: “Tu solus sanctus. . . . Thou alone art holy. . . .” Man
cannot be holy except accidentally or by participation. Man is
holy in the measure in which he participates in God’s holiness,
and unites himself with God. Now as a creature, he is funda­
mentally and radically united to God by grace. Through grace,
as St. Peter says, we are made “partakers of the divine nature"
(2 Pet. 1:4). This participation is not simply moral, as
nominalists and Protestants contend, consisting purely in the
rectitude of the human will as imitating the divine will. It is
a formal and physical participation, as the light of the atmos­

Rules for

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49

phere may be called a participation in the light of the sun.
At the same time it is an analogical participation, imitating in
an accidental and imperfect way something which in God is
perfect and substantial.
Now a thing cannot become one with fire and not bum, or
one with light and not be illuminated. In the same way, if God
is holiness itself it is impossible to participate in His nature
without participating in I lis holiness. Therefore, as our partici­
pation in the divine nature, grace radically sanctifies; this is
why it is called sanctifying grace. As soon as one is in the
state of grace, he possesses at least an initial holiness. In the
measure in which grace develops, he progresses in holiness. To
the full development of grace in the present life there corre­
sponds the highest degree of sanctity for this particular indi­
vidual. Holiness in man is not something absolute, but relative.
It does not come all in one piece, nor is it achieved all at once.
It is progressive, and develops little by little as a seed develops
into a tree. We receive the seed of holiness the day of our
baptism; if we cultivate it, it will some day come to full
maturity.
Radically and fundamentally united to God by grace, we are
formally and ultimately united to Him by charity. Grace makes
us Godlike in the order of being and charity in the order of
activity, just as in the natural order the soul makes us to be
men, and the faculties of the soul, intellect and will, enable
us to act as men. He is most holy who possesses the most
charity. There is one charity in heaven and on earth; if charity
unites us to God there, it does so here on earth also. Charity
makes us like God and sanctifies us precisely because it unites
us to God. Holiness, formally considered, consists in charity.
•

*

·

But between the charity which we have at justification and
the charity of the saints there are innumerable degrees. And
to these degrees there correspond so many steps in the steep
climb up the road to holiness. The charity which makes us truly
saints is not incipient charity, but perfect, fervent, active

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charity. In order to have the perfect charity of the saints, we
must get rid of all obstacles to charity by exercising the moral
virtues, and we must exercise the theological virtues also. Faith
and confidence in God are necessary, since we cannot love
what we do not know and desire. Moreover, the virtues cannot
be exercised in all their perfection without the predominating
exercise of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. In order to arrive at
integral holiness we must, then, possess all the moral and
theological virtues in their perfection; and the Gifts of the
Holy Spirit must be operative in a predominating way. Holi­
ness radically consists in sanctifying grace; formally, incharity;
integrally, in the perfected virtues and the Gifts.

♦

♦♦

Perhaps I find such a complex and speculative notion of
holiness disheartening. I find myself perplexed, undecided,
confused. . . . When will I succeed in acquiring all the virtues?
Where should I begin? How are the Gifts exercised?
Actually, for practical purposes the notion of sanctity can
be considerably simplified. Concretely and practically I can
ask: what ought I do, in a practical way, to arrive at holiness?
Not only will the canonical or ecclesiastical notion of holiness
help us answer this question, but the procedure followed by
the Church in the process of the beatification and canonization
of saints will shed full light on it. Before placing a soul on
the altar, for veneration by the faithful, the Church opens
a most difficult and delicate process, the process of beatifica­
tion. The chief and most laborious part of this process con­
sists in proving that the four moral virtues and three theological
virtues have been exercised to a heroic degree. When this
has been established, a person acquires the title “Venerable.”
In earlier times the virtues were taken up one by one.
Relevant facts were brought forth from the life of the servant
of God to manifest each virtue. Tire task was laborious and
difficult, and often ended in failure.
At the present time the method of procedure has been
simplified. It now consists in demonstrating that the person

A

Rules for the Spiritual Life

51

in question fulfilled his or her everyday tasks with perfection
and constancy, in this way conforming fully with the divine
will. Perfect conformity of the human will with the divine
will — it is in this that holiness consists. Benedict XV was the
first to open this way. In 1916, at the proclamation of the
heroicity of virtue of the young Franciscan John Baptiste de
Bourgogne, for the first time in a canonical process heroicity in
virtues was said to consist simply in the faithful and constant
fulfillment of one’s duties and obligations.
In the decree concerning the heroicity of virtue of Vener­
able Antonio Cianelli, in 1920, this same doctrine was ex­
pounded with more precision. Sanctity was declared to consist
properly in the complete conformity of the human will with
the divine will; this conformity was said to be manifested in
the constant and exact fulfillment of the duties proper to
one’s state. Such a manner of living, persevered in unswervingly
over a long period of time, is beyond the power of human
nature left to itself. Left to himself man is a plaything of the
ups and downs of life, especially because of the inconstancy of
his passions. The exact and faithful fulfillment of duty sup­
poses the exclusion of all deliberate imperfection; otherwise
there would be lacking the generosity which heroism requires.
But it was above all Pius XI who taught this doctrine magis­
terially when he proclaimed the virtues of the relatively little
known Blessed Benildo, Brother of the Christian Schools. The
Holy Father called Blessed Benildo "a humble servant of God,
whose life was all modesty and silence, quite common and
ordinary.”
"But how uncommon and extraordinary,” the Holy Father
continued as quoted in Osservatore Romano, “is such a life
lived every day! This daily duty which is always being rebom
and which is every day the same, which consists always in
the same occupations, which carries with it the same weak­
nesses and the same miseries! It has been called the terrible
everyday duty.
“What efforts are needed to defend oneself against this
terrible, this crushing, this monotonous, this suffocating every­

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day duh'. By no means common virtue is required to fulfill
one’s daily duty with uncommon exactitude. Or better, there
is required an extraordinary virtue not to act with the so
common and daily and frequent carelessness, negligence, and
superficiality . . . but to act, on the contrary, with attention,
piety, and inner fervor of spirit.
“The Holy Church has never manifested herself a more
equitable and wiser teacher of holiness than when raising up
these humble lights, so frequently ignored even by those who
had the good fortune to see them shining right before their

eyes.
“Extraordinary things, great events, fine enterprises arouse
and awaken great enthusiasm as soon as they are mentioned.
The common and the ordinary quite to the contrary. That
which presents nothing outstanding and no splendor what­
soever, which is in no way attractive or fascinating, is relegated

to the merely everyday.
“And nevertheless it is this which makes up the life of the
great majority of people. Ordinary life is made up of common
things and everyday events. How many times in life do extraor­
dinary things present themselves? Very rarely. And how un­
fortunate this is for us if holiness must be reserved only for
extraordinary circumstancesl What then would be the lot of
the greater part of men? For, we repeat, the call to sanctity
comes to all without distinction.”

*

*

*

The Holy Father is here directing his teaching to the
whole world. There remains, therefore, no doubt that heroic
sanctity, the sanctity which the Church glorifies on her altars
and which she presents to all the faithful as a model to be
imitated, consists in the constant and faithful fulfillment of the
“terrible everyday duty.”
This everyday duty includes everything: the commandments
of God, the precepts of the Church, professional duties, and
the duties of one’s state. It applies equally well in every walk
of life: to priests, religious, parents, children, doctors, lawyers,

Rules for the Spiritual Life

53

businessmen, employers, laborers, servants. It extends beyond
duty in the strict sense to include every inspiration of grace.
It applies to every occasion of doing good which presents
itself and to every form of the apostolate within our reach.

*

*

*

Sure of this truth upon the authority of the Supreme Pontiff,
we can look for the reasons that justify it. How does the
constant and faithful fulfillment of the “terrible everyday
duty” suppose heroic sanctity?
We have already seen that holiness essentially consists in
charity; not in an idle and remiss, but in an active and
fervent charity. Now our Lord has taught us in what the
perfection of charity itself consists: “Not everyone who says
to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven; but
he who does the will of my Father in heaven shall enter the
kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 7:21). And St. Paul tells us that
not those who hear the law are just (that is, holy before God),
but those who fulfill it; they arc holy (cf. Rom. 2:13). On the
night before He died Jesus affirmed again: "He who has my
commandments and keeps them” (that is, he who carries
out my will), “he it is who loves me. . . .” "If any one love
me, he will keep my word” (Jn. 14:21; 14:23). In the Lord's
prayer He taught us that His Father is glorified and that His
reign, or holiness, is established among men when His will is
fulfilled on earth as it is in heaven. Holiness, then, must
consist in the union of our will with the will of God. The
more perfect the conformity of our will with God’s, so much
the greater is our holiness. Now in a practical and concrete
way the will of God is manifested to us in every moment
of our life by means of the “terrible everyday duty.” The duty
of everyday is nothing else but the concrete manifestation of
the divine will, according to the circumstances and state of
life of each one of us.
But why call it the “terrible” everyday duty? Far from ex­
ceeding our natural powers assisted by ordinary grace, to fulfill
it on this day and at this hour, is of itself admittedly easy.

54

Rules for the Spiritual Life

But think what it means to fulfill our duty every day of our
life, in youth, maturity, and old age; in the full vigor of our
powers and in their decay; in the enthusiasm of beginning an
undertaking and in the disillusionment which time brings
with it; in health and in sickness; in success and in failure;
in prosperity and humiliation; in periods of sensible fervor
and supernatural consolation as also in periods of dryness
and desolation; in a word across all the vicissitudes of life!
Think what it means to fulfill this everyday duty not only
with a constancy that cannot be discouraged, but with a
fidelity and effort which exclude every remiss act and every
voluntary imperfection.
Is it not evident that such an achievement exceeds the
forces of nature, even assisted by ordinary grace? Such an
achievement requires a perfection of charity and of the other
virtues inconceivable without an extraordinary fullness of grace.
For such an accomplishment grace must have made a man
Godlike in his being, and the activity of the Gifts of the
Holy Spirit must have made him Godlike in his operations.
Governed and directed by the Holy Spirit in his every action
he has arrived at heroic sanctity, or sanctity in all its fullness.
The duty is called “terrible,” because it requires a heroism and
fortitude greater than that of a martyr. Such a manner of
living is attained only in the ultimate period of life and
is a direct prelude to the consummation of eternity.
The mountain peak of heroic sanctity is lofty and the road
leading upward to it long. But the road is open before us
and the first steps along it easily within our reach. We have
simply to carry out our daily duties. The road is even easier
if we begin each day as if it were the only one. If we carry
out each daily duty faithfully, our fidelity and constancy will
grow almost without our realizing it. Through the years we
cannot but make great progress. But we must guard as a
great treasure this truth which does not admit of illusions, and
which embraces a notion of holiness at once sound, clear,
concrete, and practical: Holiness consists in the faithful and
constant fulfillment of “the terrible everyday duty."

This rule alone com­
prises a whole program
of the spiritual life. It
It is of capital impor­
expounds
the character­
tance that we learn to
istic notes of that school
love the sacred human­
of spirituality known as
ity of Jesus, the cross,
the Holy Eucharist, the
"the spirituality of the
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
cross,” and at the same
the Blessed Virgin Mary,
time firmly roots the
and the Holy Spirit.
whole spiritual life in
dogma. There is only
one road along which we
can arrive at union with the divinity and that road is the
humanity of Jesus Christ, the one mediator between God and
men, the one Redeemer and Saviour of the world. Our goal,
perfection, consists in charity. Charity is the image of the
Holy Spirit, but we reach the Holy Spirit only through the
humanity of Jesus. Mary, the co-redemptrix and the mediatrix
of all graces, is the means by which we go to the humanity
of Jesus. ‘‘To Jesus through Mary.”
In order to attract hearts and win their love, there have
been three great manifestations of devotion to the humanity
of Jesus: the cross, the Eucharist, and the Sacred Heart. The
cross was the devotion of early Christianity. The Eucharist, the
devotion of the Middle Ages, has continued developing right
into our own time. The Sacred Heart, the devotion of recent
times, stands as the supreme revelation of Christ.
These three aspects, these three devotions, would seem to
be really but the revelation, each time more intimate, of the
sacrifice of Christ, that sacrifice which is the cipher, key, and
center of His whole life, mission, and holiness. Jesus Christ
came into the world to sacrifice Himself. Through His sacrifice
He would redeem and sanctify souls and glorify His Father.
The cross is the symbol of the external sacrifice of Christ. The
Eucharist is His unbloody sacrifice, perpetuated through the
centuries. The Sacred Heart, expressing His interior sacrifice
and His internal sorrows, is in the words of Msgr. Gay, “the
passion of His heart and the heart of His passion.”
55
<>2

*·<

<2

RULE X

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The whole of the sacrifice of Jesus is a most clear revelation
and most eloquent demonstration of His love for men. No
one loves so much as he who gives his life for those he loves
— “Greater love than this no one has, that one lay down his
life for his friends” (Jn. 15:13). The whole life of Christ can
be summed up in two words: love and sorrow, or as St.
Paul says: In caritate et patientia Christi —in the love and
suffering of Christ (cf. 2 Thess. 3:5).
Dogmatic and Historical Aspects of This Rule
The divine wisdom, which tolerates evil only in order to
draw from it greater good, has willed to permit that from
the days of the Church’s birth to the end of time, heresies
should constantly arise against various teachings of the faith.
And from this great evil of heresy God draws a greater good.
With the combating of heresies and the defending of revealed
truths, dogma itself has been progressively clarified and made
more precise. This clarification has proceeded particularly from
the writings of the Holy Fathers, the Doctors of the Church,
and the sacred writers, and above all from the orientations

and dogmatic definitions of the Holy See.
As might have been expected, the first heresy to appear in
the Church was the denial of the divinity of Jesus Christ.
Jesus had been seen by all as a man; nobody was able to put
the reality of His sacred humanity in doubt. But He had
affirmed that He was God as well. Now a God who would
die crucified and conquered by His enemies could not appear
less than a contradiction. From the beginning of the Christian
era Cerinthians, Essenes, Ebionites, Gnostics, and Theodosians
denied the divinity of Jesus, just as did, later on, the Arians and
the Cathari, and in more recent times the Free Thinkers
and Modernists. These groups represent the Rationalists of
all times.
The Apostle John wrote his incomparable Gospel to demon­
strate the divinity of Jesus Christ. On terminating his Gospel,
he himself says: "But these are written that you may believe
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God" (Jn. 20:31). The

Rules

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57

Synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, speak in a special way
of Christ as man. John, represented by the eagle, spreads his
wings and rises up to the divinity of Christ from the very
beginning of his Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God; and the Word was God" (Jn.
1:1).
In the fourth century there appeared the great heresy of
Arianism which, if it had come later, would have produced
in the Church a break as definitive as that produced by Protes­
tantism. Arianism affirmed that Jesus Christ was an exceptional
man, of a superior dignity to all other creatures, through whom
all of them were created. But Jesus Christ was not God, consubstantial with the Father. He was only the adopted Son of
God. Arianism won so many adherents and spread itself so
successfully under the patronage of the emperors that, as
St. Jerome put it, “The whole world groaned, and was amazed
to see itself Arian.’’

•

♦

·

The Church was intent in this world controversy on affirm­
ing the divinity of Jesus Christ. The humanity of Jesus, uni­
versally acknowledged, naturally received less attention. Since
the spiritual life shares the lot of dogma, the emphasis on the
divinity of Christ inevitably had repercussions in spirituality.
The iconography or image making of these early centuries
reflects the devotion, and the devotion reflects the dogmatic
stress on our Lord’s divinity. Nobody dared represent the
crucified Christ with the tragic and bloody realism with which
we arc accustomed to contemplate Him today. True, Jesus
was depicted on the cross. His cross, however, was not a gibbet,
but a throne. Jesus was not depicted naked and bloody, but
clothed in priestly or royal vesture. He was crowned not with
thorns but with an imperial diadem. He was represented not
with the tortured muscular contractions of a man executed for
a crime, but with a serene and majestic air of triumph. In
a word, the triumph of the cross was represented, not its shame.
From His cross, Christ reigned over the world.

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The devotion to the Infant Jesus also reflects the stress on
our Saviour’s divinity. The Church of the first centuries cele­
brated the feast of the Nativity as devoutly as wc do. But this
feast then commemorated rather what wc commemorate in
the Epiphany. The royalty of Jesus stood out manifested to
the world. More importance was given to the God who re­
ceived the gold and the incense than to the man who received
the myrrh.
The devotion to the Holy Eucharist is another example. In
the first centuries of Christianity the Eucharist was kept hidden
in the catacombs, a great secret among Christians. When the
peace of Constantine came, Christians considered the Eucharist
especially in its sacrificial aspect. The Eucharist was not reserved
except for the purpose of giving Viaticum to the sick. As a
result the most sacred place in the church was not the taber­
nacle, which did not exist, but the altar. When the Holy
Eucharist was reserved, it was kept concealed, sometimes in a
dove suspended over the altar, sometimes in a kind of little
tower placed with its back next to a column of the sanctuary,
or sometimes in a little closet opening into the wall behind
the altar or even in the sacristy. Because the presence of the
Blessed Sacrament was difficult to recognize, the faithful vener­
ated preferably the altar, solemnly consecrated by the bishop;
there the precious relics of the martyrs were kept and there
each day tire divine mysteries were celebrated.
♦

*

*

In the Middle Ages the controversies about the divinity of
Christ subsided. This dogma having been solidly secured, a
healthy reaction appeared in favor of the humanity of our
Lord. “The great novelty and incomparable religious merit
of the Middle Ages,” asserts Rousselot, “is the understanding
and love, or better, the passionate love, of the humanity of
Christ. Tire Incarnate Word, the man Christ Jesus, not only
is the model whom it is necessary to imitate, the guide whom
it is necessary to follow, the uncreated light who illuminates the
interior of the soul; He is also the friend, the spouse.” He is

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the mystical spouse of the soul who lives with it in "stupendous
familiarity,” familiaritas stupenda nimis, as the author of the
Imitation says.
Devotion to the humanity of Christ unquestionably belongs
to every age of the Church. How many admirable pages could
be cited from St. John, St. Paul, St. Ignatius of Antioch, and
St. Augustine to mention a few! But in the Middle Ages there
developed in this devotion a tenderness so simple, intimate,
ardent, that it must be considered as something new.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux and St. Francis of Assisi are among
the principal initiators of this movement. The sermons of St.
Bernard form a kind of mystical biography of the Saviour, in
which their author finds delight in considering especially the
infancy and the Passion. "Upon seeing the Child in Bethle­
hem and the Man of Sorrows,” says Vernet, “he becomes
tender, he is filled with confusion, he weeps and finds himself
ready for whatever generosity the imitation of Christ demands,
for every heroism of love.”
One passage from St. Bernard will manifest his tender,
personal love for the Saviour. “I hail You, Jesus my beloved. I
desire to place myself upon Your Cross. You know the reason
why. Give Yourself to me. From the height of Your Cross, my
beloved, look down upon me. Draw me wholly to Yourself.
Once again say to me, ‘I pardon you!' See how all on fire
and enraptured by Your love, I embrace You. I press You to
my heart. Support me. Do not say anything. Let not my bold­
ness displease You. . .
St. Francis of Assisi was an equally passionate lover of
Jesus. What was the road taken by St. Francis when he turned
to God, to be united to Him in the loftiest sanctity? First
of all, God made use of his natural temperament. From the
time of Francis’ youth two great qualities are evident: an
extreme generosity and an exquisite sensibility'. His generosity
led him to give everything away, until he reached the point
of extravagance and provoked the anger of his father. His
sensibility caused misery and suffering to move him to tears.
Francis was at first charitable to the poor more through

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temperament than through virtue. Their misery moved him
and he showered them prodigally with gifts. But one day
God gave him a great light and he discerned in the poor
none other than Jesus Christ Himself. Upon his discovery
of his Lord and God in the persons of the poor, his exquisite
sensibility was profoundly moved. His generosity prompted
him to give not his gifts but himself in complete and total
oblation.
Francis of Assisi fell in love with Christ, contemplating
Him above all in three mysteries of His life: Bethlehem, Cal­
vary, and the Eucharist. In his personal appreciation of these
mysteries we can say that Francis of Assisi was truly original,
quite independent of St. Bernard, whom perhaps he had never
read. The Feast of the Nativity, translated into the beautiful
crib representations of Bethlehem, was an invention of the
exquisite sensibility and incomparable tenderness of St. Francis.
With what tenderness he took into his arms and pressed to
his breast the image of the Infant Saviour! Those hands which
later on were to be torn by the stigmata cradled the image
of the Christ Child with childlike simplicity and candor. The
Feast of the Nativity in that moment acquired the special
mark of simplicity and childlike joy which causes us today to
become children again in contemplating the immortal Infant
of Bethlehem. Christian art began to represent not only the
Child-God adored by the Magi, but also, and above all, the
poor little Child of Bethlehem wrapped in swaddling clothes
and lying in a manger.
Francis of Assisi was also the forerunner of what has been
called “the passion for the Passion of the Saviour.’’ In order
to love Jesus Crucified, he himself was mystically crucified while
still living, and he merited the grace of bearing in his afflicted
body the five wounds of the Saviour.
Finally, he was the pioneer in that great Eucharistic move­
ment which began in the thirteenth century, and which has
continued to grow until reaching that splendid high noon
which lights up the Catholic devotion of today. Francis of

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Assisi loved the Eucharist because, as he said, "it is the one
sensible manifestation that we still have of the Son of God.”

Homocentrism and Thcocentrism

We have just seen how the devotion of the first centuries
of Christianity especially emphasized Jesus Chiist as God
while that of the Middle Ages especially emphasized Jesus
Christ as man. In what has been called the “French school”
of devotion of the seventeenth century these two aspects
achieved an admirable synthesis. The spirituality of this school
has for its center Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word. But it
does not consider Him either precisely as God or precisely
as man, but in all His fullness and integrity, that is, as
God-Man. It studies each one of the mysteries of the mortal
life of Jesus Christ, but not so much in each historical act
which by its nature passes, as in the interior disposition which
the Incarnate Word had in these mysteries. Such a disposi­
tion does not pass, but endures as a “state.”
Although this spirituality is said to be of the French school,
it has had great influence in the whole Church, its principal
representatives being founders of religious families destined
for the education and formation of the clergy in the Church’s
seminaries. Among its leaders are Cardinal Berulle, founder
of the fathers of the Oratory; Father Olier, founder of the
Sulpicians; St. Vincent de Paul, founder of the Vincentians;
St. John Eudes, founder of the Eudists; and writers of im­
portance such as Condren, Saint Jure, and Monsignor Gay.

•

·

·

In order to understand better this movement we must recall
that there have always been in the Church two currents, two
systems or schools of spirituality: Homocentrism and Theocentrism. Perfectly orthodox, both schools end up by uniting man
with God. But they differ in the road they follow and the

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means they employ, or perhaps better, in their point of view.
Homocentrism, dominant in the centuries preceding the
seventeenth, concerned itself directly with the task of per­
fecting man. It began by studying him. It can be broadly ex­
pressed in that great maxim which sums up all of Greek
philosophy and which was written in letters of gold in the
temple of Delphi, "Know Thyself.”
In this spirituality the examination of conscience naturally
receives great stress. Through the examination of conscience
a man enters into himself in order to study and know himself.
He must know his defects and correct them; he must know
his good qualities and foster them. Hence the prominence of
the particular examen, by means of which a person proceeds
to correct defect after defect or to inculcate virtue after virtue.
Sometimes each defect or virtue is broken down into its
numerous parts, and a person works to improve himself almost
"piece by piece.”
Prayer, common to all spirituality, takes on a special charac­
ter in Homocentrism. It is considered as necessarily orientated
toward the reform of life, the correcting of defects and the
practice of virtues. Prayer must always culminate in a specific,
practical resolution. This is prayer in its utilitarian aspect.
Likewise, the way to grow in some particular virtue in this
school is to consider the virtue in itself, its necessity, its ad­
vantages, its beauty, so that one will be moved to practice it.
A like procedure applies to vices and defects. A person reflects
on their ugliness, the disadvantages which they carry with
them, and so on, in order that he may be moved to correct
himself.
How many well-known Christian expressions have their in­
spirations in Homocentrism! For example, the famous saying
of St. Augustine: “O Lord, Thou hast made us for Thyself,
and our heart is restless until it rest in Thee.” St. Augustine
concerns himself above all with the interior state of his soul,
and with the restlessness that afflicts it. Sad experience teaches
him that his restless soul can find rest only in God. He comes
therefore to this conclusion: God has made us for Himself. All

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of this he then expresses in an order the inverse of that in
which he discovered it. Thomas à Kempis manifests himself
a homoccntrist when he gives assurance that God is our
supreme and final end “if we truly desire to be happy.” "Si
vere desideras esse beatus. . . .”

*

*

*

Theocentrism begins to predominate precisely with the
French school of which we were speaking earlier. It stresses
the truth that our perfection is above all a life, a life of which
the source is Jesus Christ. The most efficacious means to
attain perfection is to unite ourselves to that life. We are to
adhere to Jesus Christ, assimilate His states to ourselves, make
His dispositions ours, commune with His mysteries. Little by
little the life of Christ will come to supplant, or perhaps better,
to transform our human life, so that it is no longer we who
live, but Christ who lives in us.
Resting upon this principle, Theocentrism considers every­
thing from a divine vantage point. In this school, too, man
tries to know himself. But he tries to know himself in com­
parison with God and by the light of contrasts, as night is
known by contemplating the clear brightness of day. He tries
to correct his defects and practice the virtues; however, he
considers virtues not precisely in themselves but rather as
incarnated in Jesus Christ. By contemplating the humble Jesus
and joining himself to the humility of Jesus, he will hate
pride more and practice humility with greater energy.
Just as it is impossible to carry perfume on one's person
without becoming saturated by its fragrance, just as we cannot
expose ourselves to the sun without having its rays warm us, so
we cannot put ourselves into contact with the virtues of Christ
and not become impregnated by those virtues. If there are
bodies which have a mysterious power to cure and the presence
of which alone destroys harmful germs — bodies like radium and
ultra-violet rays — how much more must Jesus Christ have power
to purify and sanctify our souls. During His mortal life there
went forth from Him a power capable of healing all (cf. Lk.

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6:19); and now there goes forth from His glorified body and
His most holy soul a power which purifies us of all our stains
and impregnates us with all His virtues.
Nor should anyone suppose that this system dispenses us
from the personal effort of correcting our defects and practicing
the virtues. It does not dispense us from doing these things;
but it does facilitate our doing them. It gives more importance
to the efficacy of grace than to our personal efforts, but it
does not deny the necessity of either the one or the other.
In Theocentrism, prayer has as its end to adore and praise
God, and all prayer is directed toward establishing this divine
contact. Following its union with God, the soul rests in God,

without seeking expressly anything more. This prayer is not
ordered directly to the correction of defects. But is it not clear
that the soul will come forth from this association with God
more resolved to renounce itself, more determined upon charity
toward others, more intent on all the various virtues even if it
has not expressly formulated concrete resolutions?

Spirituality of the Cross
The spirituality of the cross has a very close connection with

the spirituality of the French school of the seventeenth century.
It is Theocentric, or perhaps better, Christocentric. However,
it is not a simple copy, a superfluous reproduction of the
spirituality of the French school. Nor is it exactly an adaptation
of that spirituality to our own environment and our own time.
It has its own originality and its own proper characteristics
which are admirably summed up in the rule upon which we
are commenting. Its basic principle is a passionate love for
the humanity of Jesus Christ. In this respect it is related
to medieval spirituality. This spirituality considers in a special
way three manifestations of devotion to the humanity of
Jesus, which mark, at the same time, the three great stages
through which this devotion has evolved. First, the cross
symbolizes the sufferings of Jesus in His passion. Tire Eucharist

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is the means by which the humanity of Jesus, in addition to
being in heaven, is also found in our midst, exposed for our
adoration in the monstrance, immolated on our altars, and
given to us as food in Holy Communion. Finally, the Sacred
Heart is the symbol of the human-divine love with which
Jesus has loved us, and of the interior sorrows which lasted
throughout His mortal life and mysteriously continue in the
Holy Eucharist. Unquestionably Jesus is in the Holy Eucharist
in a state of glory, incompatible with the physical or moral
suffering proper to passible beings. Nevertheless, the revela­
tions of St. Margaret Mary, and even more significantly, the
Encyclical Miserentissimus Redemptor, make us aware of the
mystical sorrows of the heart of Jesus, begging of us our
consolation and compassion. Devotion to the humanity of
Jesus in the spirituality of the cross aims to unite us with that
sacred humanity, incorporate us into it, until a perfect assimila­
tion is reached.
The first stage consists in participating in the Passion of
Christ by means of mortification, according to the words of
St. Peter: "In as far as you are partakers of the sufferings of
Christ” (1 Pet. 4:13). This mortification purifies our souls,
disposing them for the second stage.
The second stage is Eucharistic. We have already noted that
all the mysteries of Christ have Christ’s Sacrifice as the center
around which they converge, the key which explains them,
and the symbol which expresses them. Now the Sacrifice of
Christ, consummated on the cross, and perpetuated in the
Eucharist, finds its consummation on earth in the hearts of
the faithful and in heaven on that "sublime altar" of which
the liturgy speaks in the Canon of the Mass. Purified through its
communication with the Passion of Christ and by means of
true Christian mortification, the soul is transformed, so to
speak, into a living altar where the Incarnate Word continues
His immolation and perpetuates His Sacrifice. In this Sacrifice
the soul is not a simple spectator; it is an altar, a priest that
offers, and a victim offered.
The soul makes constant offering to the Word and is offered

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with Him on the altar of its heart for the glory of the Father
and the sanctification of souls. This offering is something
more than an act which is repeated; it is a "state” or a
habitual disposition.
When the soul has been assimilated and transformed into
the Incarnate Word, participating intimately in that act which
is most fundamental and essential to Him, that is, in His
Sacrifice, it enters into the intimate sanctuary of the Divine
Heart. It receives a special understanding of Christ’s interior
sorrows and, even more important, it receives the grace to
participate in them in some way. This is the third stage, the
stage of spiritual fecundity. The Sacrifice of Christ saved the
world; and most central in the Sacrifice of Christ is His interior
suffering. When the soul participates in these sorrows, it
continues in a certain way the redemptive work of Christ on
earth. . . .
♦

#

#

It is a teaching of faith that no creature, however perfect,
can enter into relations through its own proper powers with
each one of the divine Persons. Man can place himself in
relation with God; but with God as one, not with God as
triune; with God the author of nature, not with God the
author of grace.
Reason also tells us this. Let us suppose that man had not
been elevated to the supernatural order; that, consequently,
he did not have the light of faith nor the teachings of revela­
tion, but only the natural light of reason. Sacred Scripture
teaches us that in this case man could still rise through creatures
to knowledge of his Creator (cf. Rom. 1:20). Nobody of sound
mind can in fact contemplate the Universe with its most wise
laws, its admirable order, and its unequaled beauty, without
concluding that someone has created it. And He who created
the universe must be superior to it, more perfect, more beautiful
than it is. Reasoning in this way even pagans have arrived at a
knowledge of God as author of the universe.
But all the attributes of God that put Him in relation with

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His creatures pertain to the divine nature, and consequently
to God as one, not to God as triune: His omnipotence, for
example, by which He created us; His providence, by which
He governs us; His goodness, by which He heaps benefits
upon us; His wisdom, by which He orders all that He has
made. When we study creatures we find in them a kind of
reflection of these same attributes. From creation we infer
the omnipotence of God; from the order in the universe, the
divine wisdom; from the goodness and beauty of the universe,
the goodness and beauty of God.
Now the divine attributes pertain to the divine nature; they
are not proper to one Person but common to all three. The
Father is omnipotent, as are the Son and the Holy Spirit.
The Father is wise, just as are the other two divine Persons.
The divine immensity, eternity, and other attributes are pos­
sessed by all three Persons. In the natural order we know
God only through His attributes, manifested to us through
creatures; and these pertain not to God as triune but to
God as one. Consequently, in the natural order we can enter
into relations with God only according to the unity of His
nature and not according to the Trinity of Persons. God does
not place Himself in relation with His creatures except by
means of His attributes; consequently, not as God who is
triune but as God who is one. The Most Holy Trinity, then,
lives in a light inaccessible to man. The intimate life of God —
the relations of the three divine Persons among themselves — is
a cloistered sanctuary as far as every creature is concerned. It is
like the "Holy of Holies” of the Temple in Jerusalem, into
which nobody could enter except the high priest and he only
once a year.
But what was impossible to man’s power was not impossible
to God. Between the abyss in which man lay and the inaccessi­
ble light in which God dwelt, God stretched a gigantic bridge.
God established a supreme Mediator. "And the Word was
made flesh, and dwelt among us” (Jn. 1:14). The Second
Person of the Most Holy Trinity came down from His royal
throne and united Himself in personal union to a human

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nature like ours. And this humanity was the first creature to
enter into contact, into intimate relations, with each one of
the three divine Persons. From the moment in which the Word
assumed it, that humanity became the human nature of
the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity. Christ in His
sacred humanity, then, is the natural Son of God and can
truly regard the divine Father as His Father and the Holy
Spirit as His Spirit. In His sacred humanity He is the Word
Incarnate Himself.
Now this mystery of the Incarnation has a kind of prolonga­
tion in all creatures and in all the souls of the just. In another
ineffable mystery, Jesus Christ unites us to His humanity,
incorporates us into it. United to Him, incorporated into Him,
we are His members and form one organic, vital unity with
Christ our Head. As a kind of prolongation of His most sacred
humanity, we enter, united with it, into intimate relations with
each one of the three divine Persons. As the Son makes us par­
takers of His Sonship, we can legitimately call the Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ “Our Father.’’ The Spirit of the Father
and the Son is also our Spirit, He who directs, moves, and

governs us.
How is this incorporation carried out? How could Jesus
graft us into Himself in this way, so that we form a kind
of prolongation of His Most sacred humanity? The answer is
grace. Here we meet with another new mystery, the mystery
of our justification. Jesus Christ is constituted by God the
source of grace for us. Or better, there is only one grace; it
is the very divine life and has its source in God. To adapt it
to our smallness, God has caused it to pass through the human­
ity of Jesus Christ. Through the humanity of Jesus Christ, it
is poured into the souls of the just, as life-giving blood is
distributed through the heart to the whole body.
Precisely because it comes to us from the Son, grace is
marked with the characteristics of filiation or sonship. It makes
us sons with the Son, causes us to receive the Spirit of adop­
tion, and enables us to exclaim: “Abba, Father” (Rom. 8:15).
Jesus Christ is the first-born among many brethren, the great

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Mediator and High Priest. Through Him the soul enters into
relations not only with God as one, but with God as triune.
And these intimate relations with each one of the three
divine Persons constitute one of the fundamental characteristics
of Catholic spirituality, including the spirituality of the cross.
The devotion which the majority of the faithful generally
have toward the Most Holy Trinity unfortunately is not the
devotion of which we have been speaking but rather devotion
to divine Providence. Moreover, as many practice this devotion,
it is not without a certain self-interest, for it amounts to seek­
ing the fundamental necessities of food, clothing, and shelter.
Is not that person rare, even among the devout, who has a
devotion to each of the three divine Persons, particularizing
his relations with each?

The life of Jesus Christ and our life are in the supernatural
order one and the same. Our parents give us life in the order
of nature. But after they have given it to us, we continue to
live independently of them. In a much more perfect way we
have life from Jesus Christ, for not only do we get it from
Him originally, but we continue to receive it constantly. We
cannot live in the supernatural order independently of Jesus
Christ. He must exert a vital influence upon us at every
moment. In all truth, we live the very life of Christ.
We are not united to Him only through a moral union. The
members of a state form one moral body animated by what
may be called "the soul of the nation”; when the country is
in danger, all individuals, whatever their party or ideas, unite
as one man with one heart for its defense. Now union with
Christ by grace is a much closer union than this. Perhaps it
could be called a physical union if it were not in the super­
natural order. At any rate it is unquestionably a vital union. In
Christ and ourselves there throbs but one life. Christ does not
have one life and we another; there is one life for both.
St. Paul offers the comparison with the vital union which
is to be found among the different organs of the body. An

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organism is formed of various organs: eyes, cars, digestive and
circulatory apparatus, the nervous system, and so on. But
among all these organs there is a perfect unity, because the
life which animates the eyes is the same as the life which
animates the ears, the tongue, the muscles. In spite of the
different functions of each organ, all have the same life. In
the same way but with a higher perfection, we are united with
Jesus in one life.
St. Jerome says that all the grace which is found in Jesus
Christ is found also in the Most Blessed Virgin, although in
a different way. Grace is found in Jesus Christ as in our Re­
deemer and Sanctifier par excellence: it is in the Blessed Virgin
as in our Coredcmptrix and Mediatrix. This is why we affirm,
in contrast to Protestants, that the Blessed Virgin has an in­
dispensable and necessary role in the actual economy of man’s
sanctification and salvation. In God’s actual plan it is not
possible to prescind from her, any more than it is possible
to prescind from Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ is our life, the
Most Blessed Virgin is truly our Mother, because she has given
us Jesus Christ. Our relations with the Incarnate Word neces­

sarily include the Blessed Virgin; Jesus Christ does not come
to us except through her, nor does grace, the life of our souls,
reach us except in passing through Mary. All men ought to
have a special devotion to the mystery of the Immaculate
Conception, in order to admire and venerate in this mystery
the fullness of grace which God poured into Mary. In both
the Gospel and the Offertory of the Mass of the Immaculate
Conception, the Church repeats the angelic salutation: “Ave
Maria, gratia plena — Hail Mary, full of grace.” Mary received
grace in its fullness in order from that fullness to pass on
grace to us.
*
·
·
A second consequence is that everything that belongs to
Jesus Christ, as well as everything that belongs to the Blessed
Virgin, is in some way ours. St. Paul tells us to "put on the
Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 13:14). In order to appear to be
his father’s first-bom and so receive the blessing reserved for

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the first-born, Jacob clothed himself with the perfumed vesture
of the first-born. And Jacob received the blessing (cf. Gen. 27:1;
29). When we come to present ourselves to our heavenly Father
we ought to clothe ourselves with Jesus Christ so that our
heavenly Father may not see our miseries but may sec His
Son, the Son of His eternal good pleasure, and through Him
look upon us with the same good pleasure with which He
looks upon His Son thereby pardoning us our sins: “Look on
the face of thy Christ” (Ps. 83:10).
The great secret of sanctity does not lie precisely in knowing
ourselves, endlessly analyzing our actions, trying to discern
our intention on some particular occasion. To know ourselves
is important, but it is not everything. No, we must clothe our­
selves with Jesus Christ, as the Apostle tells us, make all
that belongs to Christ ours, because in a certain way it is
ours. The virtues of Jesus Christ are meant to be our virtues,
His humility, our humility. We are to unite ourselves to Him
so as to participate in the meekness of His divine Heart.
His charity is to be our charity, His prayer, our prayer, and
His sacrifices, or better, Sacrifice, is meant to be our sacrifice.
Rather than for us to pray, Jesus Christ ought to be praying
in us. Rather than for us to offer our little sacrifices, Jesus
Christ ought to be sacrificing Himself in us. As we offer our
poor sacrifices along with His great one, our sacrifices should
become one with His. On the altar of our heart, we ought
to unite ourselves to that constant oblation which the divine
Word makes of His Sacrifice and ours, to constitute what has
been called the “chain of love, the offering of the Word.”

♦

*

»

St. Paul tells us not only to put on Jesus Christ but to
share His every disposition. "Have this mind in you which
was also in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5). Christ’s outlook must
become ours. When we pray we ought to consider: “How
would Jesus Christ pray?” In our dealings with others we
ought to ask: "What would Jesus Christ do here?” We should
enter into Jesus' way of looking at things, into the purity of

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His intentions, into the dispositions of His adorable Heart. In
a word we ought to try to have the “same mind as Christ
Jesus." In this way we not only ‘‘put Him on,” but we acquire
His very dispositions and mentality.
We ought to “communicate in all His mysteries"; that is,
in the intimate dispositions of Jesus Christ in all the mysteries
of His mortal, glorious, and Eucharistic life. We must be
small with Him in the mystery of His infancy and submissive
with Him in the mystery of His youth. We must share His
zeal for souls in the mystery of His public life; sacrifice our­
selves with Him in the mystery of His passion; lead with Him
a life of self-annihilation and adoration of the Father in the
mystery of the Eucharist. . . . Jesus lives in us as we com­
municate in His mysteries, and the words of St. Paul are ever
more perfectly realized in us: “It is now no longer I that live,
but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). It is Christ who works
in me, Christ who in a certain way carries out all the acts of
virtue which His grace enables me to perform during the day.
It is not I, a poor creature, it is Christ in me. . . .
In this way, “self" and self-will vanish little by little. In the
place of my poor "I," Christ more and more literally invades me
with His divine life. Finally the day arrives in which truly
Christ is He who lives in me and I can say: “For me to live is
Christ. . .
The founder of the Sulpicians, the Venerable
Father Olier, composed a little-known but beautiful invocation,
which admirably sums up our relations with the Incarnate
Word:

O Jesus, You who live in Mary,
Come and live in your servants
with the spirit of Your holiness,
with the fullness of Your power,
with the perfection of Your ways,
with the truth of Your virtues,
with the communion of Your mysteries.
Master all the power of the enemy with Your Spirit and for
the glory of the Father.

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Our Relations With the Father
Now, what of our relations with the Father? That which
primarily characterizes Him, the First Person of the Blessed
Trinity, is undoubtedly His paternity. If we could but form
some idea of this paternity of God, this abyss of tenderness! As
light, upon being refracted, is broken up into all the colors
of the rainbow, so also the love of God, His paternity, is
reflected in creatures and divided into all the many varieties
of love to be seen upon the earth. When St. Paul says that
all paternity in heaven and on earth is derived from the divine
paternity, he is also saying that the rich variety of love upon
the earth is but a reflection of that inexhaustible fountain of
love which is the paternity of God.
The divine paternity is especially reflected on earth in father
and mother. Each one of us can recall those very special
characteristics which mark a father and mother in the Christian
home. The father is a kind of power which protects. In him
we as little ones took refuge and, like the Little Flower of
Jesus, never did we feel so secure as when resting in our
father’s lap. He is also an intelligence which directs and
governs. As children we stood in awe of our father, so in­
telligent, talented, learned, and prudent. His opinions seemed
to us the compendium of all wisdom, his decisions beyond
appeal, his authority infallible. Fatherhood is also a special
tenderness. A tenderness full of virility, it makes great sacri­
fices but does no boasting. The whole of a father's sacrifice is
for his children, to educate them and assure their future; once
this is assured, he dies in peace. Paternal affection surely has
a character all its own.
The affection and love of a mother are of a different kind.
The love of a mother is all tenderness; a tenderness that
surrounds us with care our whole life through; a tenderness
which sacrifices itself for us with a self-denial that knows no
limits; a tenderness which envelops us in the holy caress of
its love. . . -

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Now all that we admire in a Christian father and mother is
infinitely deepened and multiplied in the paternity of God.
God is in a way Father and Mother. In Him, where all
perfection is fused into perfect unity, there is no division.
The tenderness of God is a force in which we find protection,
support, and security. A wisdom which governs and disposes
all, God is also a tenderness which constantly envelops us. If
we ever really understood the mystery of God’s enveloping
love, we should need nothing more to be intensely happy
on earth.
Devotion to the Father inspired the spirituality made popular
by St. Therese of the Infant Jesus, spiritual childhood. To
regard ourselves as children of the Father is to look upon
ourselves as little. As God’s children we abandon ourselves to
our Father, put our confidence in Him, feel ourselves tiny in
His presence. During the time that we have the happiness
to possess our human parents on earth, we do not feel our­
selves grown up with respect to them, nor do our parents
ever consider us as grown. A child is always small, while father
and mother arc always big in the eyes of their children. This
holds even more forcefully where God is concerned. If we
feel ourselves His children, we necessarily find ourselves very
little with respect to Him.

»

*

*

In the diary of Lucie Christine we read that one day, after
Communion, she felt herself invaded by an immense tender­
ness. Her being seemed a drop of water lost in the ocean, an
ocean of gentleness, sweetness, and tenderness. What had
happened, she realized, was that the Father had "looked upon
her.”
The second characteristic of the Father is that He “looks.”
The Father brings forth the Word with an eternal look which
had no beginning and will have no end. Looking upon the
Word, upon the Son of His eternal complacency, through
Him and in Him He looks upon all of us; in this look our
being has its beginning. Upon those with a special vocation

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the Father has looked with a special look, which is the
origin of vocation. What is a religious or priestly vocation, if
not a look of predilection on the part of the Father?
If the Father looks, wc can suggest that His Word is the eyes
with which He looks. We know from experience what a look
can mean. At times the most eloquent words, the most finished
discourses, the most inspired poetry, do not say so much as
a single look. The eyes alone! They are a whole poem, a
whole discourse! They can reflect an abyss of tenderness! The
Father has looked upon us in just such a wonderful way.
Gazing at us through His Word, or with those divine eyes
which are the Word, He has looked upon us in the way
that Jesus Christ looked upon the young man of whom the
Gospel speaks. "And Jesus, looking upon him, loved him”
(Mk. 10:21). Our heavenly Father looks upon us as Jesus
looked upon Mary Magdalen to transform her ... as He
looked upon Peter to convert him ... as He looked upon
all those who have had the happiness of being chosen for some
special vocation. From this look which never departs from us,
we have our life, and of it are begotten all the graces with
which our soul is enriched. Yes, a characteristic of the Father
is to look.

The third characteristic proper to the Father is that His
is a will which governs and directs all things, but especially
things in the supernatural order. Jesus Christ had no other
thought during His life than to do the will of His Father,
to fulfill His Father’s adorable designs. St. Paul tells us that
His first word on entering the world was, “Behold, I come . . .
to do thy will, O God” (Hebr. 10:7-9). His dedication to His
heavenly Father moved Him to speak those words that so
greatly pained Mary and Joseph, His earthly parents: “How
is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be
about my Father's business?” (Lk. 2:49.) These are the first
words of Jesus which the Gospel quotes; and how many times
He repeated them in one way or another. “My food is to

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do the will of him who sent me” (Jn. 4:34). He did the will
of His Father in order to glorify His Father, seeking not His
own glory, but only the glory of His Father.
When the supreme moment came to submerge Himself in
the bitter ocean of His passion, He told His disciples why it
must be: “that the world may know that I love the Father. . ..
Arise, let us go from here” (Jn. 14:31). And lie would not
permit death to snuff out His life on earth until He cast a
gaze over the whole of His life to sec if any detail of His
Father’s will remained unfulfilled. When He saw that all
had been completed, He exclaimed, “It is consummated!"
(Jn. 19:30.) “I have completed the mission which You gave
Me to do, I have glorified You upon the earth, I have con­
summated Your word.” There remained only for Him to drop
His head upon His breast and give over His soul to His
Father. “And bowing His head, He gave up his spirit" (Jn.
19:30). The true inner being, substance and perfection of the
whole life of Jesus Christ is to fulfill completely the will of
His Father in order to glorify Him.

Now our attitude toward the Father ought to be affected
by the three characteristics that belong to the Father. The
Father's traits should in a certain way become ours. The Father
is a tenderness that loves us, a paternal tenderness that em­
braces in admirable unity the multitude of characteristics that
love can have on earth. Therefore our devotion to the Father
ought to be an immense filial tenderness. The paternal tender­
ness of God ought to be the strength upon which we lean,
the wisdom by which we are governed and directed, the
indescribable love by which we let ourselves be loved.
If the Father’s look never ceases to embrace us, then we
ought to seek everywhere this look. His look is not the look
of a judge, an inquisitorial look; not a look which scrutinizes,
seeking out every imperfection, spying out the slightest faults
in order to administer punishment. No, it is the tenderness of
an indulgent Father, who better than anyone else knows our

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weakness and our misery. God, our Father, looks upon us to
cheer and strengthen us. He looks upon us to stimulate us to
try to do good and to reward us when we do. He looks
upon us to pardon and transform us. In a word, He looks upon
us because He loves us. All the tenderness which there is in
His infinite heart, He overturns, as it were, and spills upon
us, in this look in which he envelops us from eternity to
eternity.
And finally, if the Father is a will that governs all, a will
that has a special plan for each one of us, our duty is to
have no other thought but to carry out this will in everything.
Our aim must be to fulfill the designs of the Father in every
way and not so much in order to work out our own personal
happiness — although this is the only way to attain it — as to
glorify Him. Our Blessed Saviour could say: "I do always the
things that are pleasing to Him" (Jn. 8:29). It is for us to
imitate Him, always doing what the heavenly Father wishes,
carrying out at every moment His designs. Our food must
be to do the will of our Father who is in heaven, seeking not
our own glory but His. In every moment of our life, but above
all in the difficult ones which will not be lacking, we too
must say, “That the world may know that I love the Father
. . . Arise, let us go from here” (Jn. 14:31). Let us go forth
to carry out the will of our Father, a will which for us as for
Jesus Christ, means sacrifice of self. United with the Sacrifice
of Christ, our sacrifice too will glorify the Father.
*

»

*

In the prayer of all prayers, the Our Father, we are taught
what our disposition toward the Father ought to be. A vocal
prayer, the Our Father is also more than that. It is inexhausti­
ble material for meditation and for the inner nourishment
of the soul. Who could ever set forth all the treasures of
doctrine it contains! The first part in particular, directed in a
special way to the Father, reveals to us exactly what the Father
should mean to us.
“Our Father who art in heaven.” We call upon our Father

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who is in heaven, in order that lie may help us to do His
will. In doing His will we glorify His name. We bring about
the establishment in our hearts of His kingdom, that kingdom
which is joy and peace and justice in the Holy Spirit and
which, after this life, will be eternal happiness. When the
Apostles begged Jesus to teach them to pray, He said to them:
“When you pray, say: ‘Father.’ ” Prayer, He says in effect,
should above all be directed to the Father. With this in mind
a holy bishop once said that he found all spirituality contained
in the “Our Father" alone.
The story is told that a certain priest once encountered in
the loneliness of the countryside a young shepherd tending
his flock. The shepherd was poor and uneducated. But he was
a boy to whom a Christian mother had communicated that
simple faith of country folk which at times puts to shame the
learned. When the priest caught sight of the boy, he was
perched upon a large rock, his eyes on the sheep as they
wandered about the countryside grazing freely on the grass.
An air of recollection about him attracted the attention of the
priest, who began to talk with him, asking him what he did
during the many hours he passed in the field, with nothing
in particular to occupy him. Did he not become weary and
bored with so uneventful a life? The boy answered that he
did not become bored. . . . “In fact, Father, the days seem
very short."
“But what is it that you do?”
“I pray.”
“Pray? And what prayer do you say?”
“Tire Our Father.' But I suppose, Father, that I really don’t
pray very well. Often the day is not long enough for me to
recite even one ‘Our Father.’ I begin, Our Father who art in
heaven . . .’ And then I begin to think that here am I,
a poor shepherd boy worth nothing, a nobody in this great
big world of ours, and yet I have a Father in heaven who
loves me. My Father is so powerful that He has created all
the things around me, and so good and loving toward me
that He has done it all for me.

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"Well, I begin to go along in this way thinking how I am
a mere nothing compared to this Father of mine. I tell Him
that I love Him and that I want to be good in the way He is
good . . . and before I know it my day is gone!”
Hearing of the perfect prayer of this shepherd boy, the
priest could not but think of the words of Jesus to His heavenly
Father: “I praise Thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
that Thou didst hide these things from the wise and prudent,
and didst reveal them to little ones. Yes, Father, for such was
Thy good pleasure” (Mt. 11:25-26). "Blessed be thou, O
Father, because thus thou hast disposed it, thus thou hast
sought it.”
Devotion to the Father is the most fundamental of all
devotions. What rest for the soul that truly understands and
practices it! For all creation is truly pointed in the direction
of the Father. Union with Jesus aims at taking us with Him
to the Father. With profound insight the Apostle Philip
exclaimed, “Lord, show us the Father and it is enough for
us" (Jn. 14:8). “Jesus, manifest the Father to us. Grant us
to know the Father. Teach us to love Him with the tender­
ness of children. Teach us to enfold ourselves in that look
with which He has ever paternally looked upon us. Teach us
to fulfill His will on earth even as it is fulfilled in heaven. . . .
And this is enough for us!"

Our Relations With the Holy Spirit
But it is not enough to understand our relations with the
Word and with the Father. What of the Holy Spirit, the
Spirit of the Father and the Son, who proceeds from both?
The role of the Holy Spirit, so to speak, in the divine life is
to unite the Father and the Son. The bond of union between
them, He can be likened to a most close embrace, a divine
kiss. The Holy Spirit consummates the divine life.
The Holy Spirit is not a principle from which any divine
Person proceeds. He rather comes to seal, to consummate in

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perfect unity, the life of God. For this reason, it pertains to
Him to pour Himself out exteriorly for the sanctification of
souls. This, as it were, is His proper role, His special mission.
The Holy Spirit is not only the Spirit of the Father and the
Son; He is also the Spirit of Jesus Christ as both God and
Man. The Holy Spirit intervenes in the whole great mystery of
Christ in a very special way. First of all the Word became
incarnate in the most holy Virgin through the work of the
Holy Spirit. Moreover the key mystery of Jesus Christ is His
Sacrifice. The Sacrifice of Jesus explains all His other mysteries
which are like aspects or facets of the precious jewel which
is His immolation. Jesus Christ did many things during His
mortal life, and yet He did only one; He sacrificed. And as
if it were not sufficient to fill His mortal life with sacrifices,
He chose to immortalize these sacrifices in the 1 loly Eucharist.
But this sacrifice was inspired by the Holy Spirit. For St.
Paul says that, “Christ . . . through the Holy Spirit offered

himself” (Hebr. 9:14).
Now if everything that Jesus Christ did can be reduced to
His Sacrifice and if His Sacrifice was inspired by the Holy
Spirit, then all the acts of the human life of Christ were
motivated and inspired by the Holy Spirit. The Gospel tells
us expressly that this was true of some of the most special
and important acts in His life. For example, before beginning
His life of preaching, He retired first into the desert, “led . . .
by the Spirit” (Mt. 4:1).
If it is the Holy Spirit who moves and directs the humanity
of Jesus, and if, as we have seen, we are incorporated into
that humanity, forming only one Mystical Body in a perfect,
vital unity, sharing one life with Christ, then wc also should
be moved by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit ought, con­
sequently, to be "the soul of our soul.” Our whole body is
vivified by our soul, the vital principle which gives unity to
our whole organism, communicates life to it, and causes each
organ to have and fulfill its proper function. In the Mystical
Body of Christ, the Holy Spirit is the soul. He gives life to
the whole Body, governs it, directs it, moves it. He causes

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each one of the faithful to fulfill the mission entrusted to
each and brings each to the degree of sanctity predestined by
God according to the eternal plan.
St. Augustine asks: “Do you desire to live the life of Christ?"
And continues: “It is necessary, then, that you have the Spirit
of Christ. For just as each one of my members lives with my
life, because it is animated by my soul, so also the members
of the Mystical Body of Christ, in order to live with His
life, must be united with and animated by His Spirit, the
Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit. If the Holy Spirit does not
vivify us, direct us, move us, then we are dead members of
Christ's body.”
All perfection, all sanctity is here. We are saints in the
measure in which the Holy Spirit governs us. We are imperfect
in the measure in which we let our own proper spirit rule.
We are worldly in the measure in which the spirit of the
world rules us. The exceedingly perverse, the truly diabolical
— and unfortunately there are some — are moved by the spirit
of darkness, the devil. When we lead a self-centered, comfort­
seeking, unmortified, lukewarm, lax kind of life, then our
own spirit is governing us, the spirit of our fallen nature, always
inclined to evil. Those whom the Holy Spirit moves with
frequency are fervent souls. And those whose every action
proceeds from Him are holy and perfect. Here is the whole
secret of sanctity.
Now the Holy Spirit may move us either by His inspiration
or by His gifts. His inspirations, in turn, may be either illumina­
tions or motions. Has it not happened to us at times, praying
in silence, listening to the word of some preacher, reading
a good spiritual book, that we have seen some already known
truth with a clarity and penetration that we never had before?
The truth may be a general Christian truth, or it may be some­
thing peculiarly bearing on ourselves. The precept of fraternal
charity may hit us with new force, for example, and as a kind
of new insight. “Love one another as I have loved you” (Jo.
15:12). These words, thoroughly familiar to us, today take on
new meaning for us. We may not be able to explain what we

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felt. We cannot write a commentary on the commandment.
Yet interiorly we understand it better. This is an illumination
of the Holy Spirit. At other times there is a particular light
regarding our own soul. During a retreat, for example, we come
to realize that we are going along the wrong road, that we
arc becoming tepid in God's service, that we have fallen back
or that our forward motion is slowed. This, too, is an illumina­
tion of the Holy Spirit.
The inspirations of the Holy Spirit may also be a “motion.’’
We not only get the light to see but we arc also moved to
take advantage of that light. The person who receives new
understanding in the matter of fraternal charity may also feel
himself moved to conduct himself in a new way, especially
toward some particular person. Or again, someone who per­
ceives that he has gone backward along the road of perfection,
desires efficaciously to start moving forward again. He not
only sees where he ought to concentrate his efforts but he
also finds himself moved to effective action. A motion of the
Holy Spirit is at work here.
Both illuminations and motions are inspirations of the
Holy Spirit. They represent the ordinary manner in which He
moves and directs the followers of Christ. Although the divine
Wisdom sweeps with great force from extreme to extreme,
nevertheless it disposes of all things sweetly and with gentleness
(cf. Wisd. 8:1 ). Yes, God proceeds gently with souls. Before He
asks of us a sacrifice, He begins by giving us a desire for it.
The desire smoothes out the road, makes the execution of
the work easy, renders the task "natural” and spontaneous. So
intimate is the action of the Holy Spirit that when we have
good desires, we take them to be ours. And yet, at least in
the supernatural order, there is not one good desire that
comes from us alone. All are the work of the Holy Spirit,
who is smoothing out difficulties and making virtue easy for us.
Now when God gives us a desire. He proposes to see it
carried out in us. Consequently He intends to continue giving
us the necessary graces until we shall have carried it out.
God does not give useless desires. If through the special de­

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signs of God some particular desire is never to be carried
out, then the desire itself is the work which He has asked of
us. God counts as realized a good desire which we have but
which we cannot carry out. St. Francis of Assisi longed ardently
to preach the Gospel to unbelievers. He longed even more
ardently to find in his preaching an occasion of martyrdom.
Francis in fact did not succeed in becoming a martyr, and
had to return home safe and sound. But if the will of God
intended other things for Francis, God surely accepted the
burning desire for the act, and St. Francis received the merit
if not the bloody crown of the martyrs.
Now whenever an individual is docile to the inspirations
of the Holy Spirit, co-operating with grace and doing his part
toward carrying out the inspiration, he performs a meritorious
work which brings about an increase of grace, sanctifying him
further and raising him higher on the ladder of perfection.
Furthermore, seeing the person’s docility, the Holy Spirit
illuminates and moves him with new and more intense in­
spirations which otherwise he perhaps would not have received.
Other inspirations come because of docility to the first. They
are connected like the links of a chain. This particular in­
spiration may be the first link. Take hold of it and the other
links will come along too. The whole series goes together.
When one is faithful to inspirations, the Holy Spirit increases
them more and more, in both number and intensity.
Someone who is illuminated and moved at every moment by
the Holy Spirit and who faithfully corresponds to His in­
spirations, cannot fail to live an active and intense spiritual
life. Such a one must progress constantly in virtue, in fact
veritably fly along the road of perfection. Souls are made
perfect by fidelity to the Holy Spirit, the first stage in the
way of perfection lying in docility to these inspirations. The
divine Spirit rewards docility by multiplying His inspirations
without measure or limit.
If on the other hand a person does not conespond to the
Holy Spirit’s inspirations, if he does not listen to them and
is careless about them, they become rarer and rarer. St. Paul

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warns, "Nolite contristare Spiritum Sanctum .... Do not
grieve the Holy Spirit" (Eph. 4:30). The Holy Spirit is grieved
when we let His inspirations pass us by without making use
of them. Little by little He withdraws from us. If our lack
of correspondence continues, the day will arrive in which
He ceases to inspire us, saying nothing to us either by illumina­
tion or motion. St. Paul warns us also against this more ultimate
evil: “Spiritum nolite extinguere. ... Do not extinguish the
Spirit” (1 Thess. 5:19). “Let not your failure to co-operate
cause the Holy Spirit to become silent and cease to work in
your soul." The road of carelessness leads to lukewarmness, he
warns, and even to that hardness of heart which is the prelude

to final impenitence.
*

♦

*

The second way in which the Holy Spirit moves us is by
means of His Gifts. When a person has been faithful to the
inspirations of the Holy Spirit and these inspirations have been
multiplied, there comes a time in which the Gifts, until now
almost completely latent, begin to intervene more frequently
and actively. Up until this point the virtues have reigned,
the virtues which we exercise through our personal effort aided
and supematuralized by grace. The virtues have been exercised
so far in a human way. This period of the spiritual life is called
the “ascetical" or "active” life, or the period of "Christian
asceticism.” But when one has been faithful, the Holy Spirit
begins to intervene in a more direct and efficacious way by
means of His Gifts. Tire period of the spiritual life in which
the Gifts predominate is called the "mystical life” or the
"contemplative life.”
In the active life, the soul itself, under the influence of
grace, moves and works. In the mystical life the soul is moved
by the Holy Spirit and conducts itself passively. However one
should not suppose that under this motion of the Holy Spirit
the soul remains inactive and idle. It rather enters into a new
activity under the influence of the Gifts and exercises the
virtues in a divine way.

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When a child in school is learning to write he begins by
making lines and circles; and then letters; and finally sentences,
carefully copied from the model put before him by the
teacher. He continues practicing until there results writing
which is more or less satisfactory. It is a long and tedious
process in which the pupil does most of the work. But there
is another way of teaching to write. If this method is followed,
an almost perfect letter results at once. The teacher takes
the pupil’s hand in order to write with it; the teacher guides
the pupil’s hand. In this case, rather than saying that the
pupil writes, we should say that it is the teacher who writes,
making use of the pupil’s hand. All that is required of the
pupil now is that he make no movement of his own. Entirely
docile, he need only put his hand in the hand of the teacher
and let the teacher make the necessary movements. A perfect
letter results at once.
So there arc two ways in which the Holy Spirit works in us.
With His inspiration He shows us an example or model. He
says to us, enlightening us, “You ought to do this,” and gives
us the impulse to do it. But we are the ones who do it.
This is "the human way” of putting the virtues into practice.
But when the Gifts come into play, the Holy Spirit docs
not limit Himself to inspiring the soul. He intervenes directly.
He takes our faculties into His hands so to speak, as one takes
the reins of a carriage or the steering wheel of a car or the
controls of an airplane. He directs the movement and the
soul conducts itself entirely passively in His hands — passively
with respect to God, but extremely actively with respect to
creatures. This, the "divine way” of exercising the virtues,
takes place under the influence of the Gifts. Virtues exercised
in this way are called "perfect spiritual virtues.” Their acts
are called “fruits of the Holy Spirit.” And when they produce
in the soul a special sweetness and divine delight they are
called "beatitudes.” Just as in the example of the child and
the teacher we said that it is rather the teacher who writes
using the hand of the pupil, so here we can say it is rather
the Holy Spirit who works using the faculties of the soul.

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At this stage there comes that exalted knowledge of God
which is called “infused contemplation” because it is more
of the Holy Spirit than of us, and also infused love, which
belongs more to the Holy Spirit than to us. This is why the
mystics say that they love through the Holy Spirit. They
mean that it is the Holy Spirit who loves by means of the
soul, making use of a will which has been supernaturalized
by charity and an intelligence illuminated by the Gift of
Wisdom.

♦

♦

*

We can imagine what the life of Jesus Christ as man must
be like. Perfect balance, simplicity, insight, understanding, su­
pernatural prudence —a truly perfect life! In everything, even
the most insignificant details of His human life, Jesus was
directed by the Holy Spirit through His Gifts. From the
time of Isaias we are taught that Jesus Christ must possess the
fullness of the Holy Spirit: "And the spirit of the Lord shall
rest upon him,” prophesied Isaias, “the spirit of wisdom and
of understanding, the spirit of counsel, and of fortitude, the
spirit of knowledge, and of godliness. And he shall be filled
with the spirit of the fear of the Lord” (Isa. 11:2, 3). The
fullness of the Holy Spirit rested upon Him from the first
instant of the Incarnation. That is why the life of Jesus
Christ was perfect.
Again, what soul can compare with the soul of the Blessed
Virgin? “Spiritus Sanctus superveniet in te — The Holy Ghost
shall come upon thee” (Lk. 1:35). Not only will He come
upon you but He will come with incredible abundance, in
order that you may be ruled by Him in every way. It is almost
too little to say that the Blessed Virgin was docile to the
inspirations of the Holy Spirit. As St. Ephrcm says, Mary
was a harp played upon constantly by the Divine Spirit. We
can only imagine the harmonies that were produced, the
hymns of glory to the majesty of God, the perfection in the
actions which were all prompted immediately by the Spirit
of God!

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And yet all holy persons share a similar perfection, due
proportion being preserved. For one approaches perfection and
holiness in the measure in which he permits himself to be
moved by the Holy Spirit. Our relations with the Holy Spirit
can be summed up in terms of docility. We must place our­
selves under His direction and let ourselves be moved by Him.

This is the road to sanctity.

The spiritual life, like
the natural life, is forever
threatened by illness and
One of the greatest dan­
even by death. One of
gers for those who arc
the most serious of the
trying to become holy
spiritual illnesses, if not
is that of losing their first
the worst, is lukewarm­
fervor and falling into
ness.
At first sight it would
lukewarmness.
appear useless to talk
about the matter at all.
Is it not generally ad­
mitted that lukewarmness is incurable? The more fervent a
person is, the more he will be needlessly disturbed at the
thought that he may be lukewarm. And it will never occur to
the truly lukewarm individual that lukewarmness might apply
to him. Genuinely lukewarm persons are spiritually deaf and
blind; they are anemic and incapable of any effort. What use
is there in directing any warning to them?
But in the natural order, even though we may despair of
curing a sick person, we do not discontinue giving him medi­
cine. And although a sickness be incurable, doctors do not
therefore cease to study it, either in order to learn to prevent
it in others or in order to attack milder cases with hope of
success. So, too, in the spiritual order, lukewarmness must be
studied and combated, even though we suppose it in itself
incurable. There are three principal reasons.
First of all, in the supernatural order there are no strictly
incurable diseases. The grace of God is all-powerful; and God,
as absolute Sovereign, always keeps the last word for Himself.
His mercy has resources of which we are ignorant, and His
omnipotence can do all things, not only in the order of nature
but also in the order of grace.
There is said to be no remedy for lukewarmness in the
same sense in which it is said that the sin against the Holy
Spirit does not admit of pardon. There is no specific sin
which is genuinely unpardonable and which God excludes
from His forgiveness; but it is possible for man obstinately to
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reject the grace without which there can be no true con­
version or divine forgiveness. Lukewarmness is incurable in
the same sense. The lukewarm person is blind. God can
indeed cure him, but not realizing the state he is in, he may
never seek God’s cure. Moreover, the will of the lukewarm
person is atrophied. If he should realize the state he is in,
he is not capable of the effort required to cure himself, or he
does not want to make it. What the lukewarm person needs
is a special grace to enlighten and arouse him; but by his con­
stant and willful infidelities he has rendered himself unworthy
of such a grace. To say that lukewarmness is incurable is to
say that the difficulty is so great that it amounts to a moral
impossibility.
Second, however difficult lukewarmness may be to cure, there
will always be some reason to treat of it, if only for preventive
purposes. Upon realizing how serious an evil it is and how
terrible are its consequences, those who are not lukewarm may
be led to take precautions against it.
Finally, lukewarmness is an evil which has many degrees and
takes on many forms, some serious and others mild. If it is
incurable in the later stages, proper treatment in the earlier
ones has all probability of success. The following considerations,
then, are meant to help those who have not fallen into luke­
warmness to avoid doing so, and those who have begun to
take the first steps to turn back. We shall discuss the nature
of lukewarmness, its disastrous effects, its symptoms, and
finally, its remedies.

In What Does Lukewarmness Consist?
Lukewarmness is not exactly a sin. It is not a passing act,
but a state, something permanent and habitual. Its true notes
are blindness and paralysis. The lukewarm person cannot see,
and he is incapable of any effort.
If every fully deliberate sin tends to blind the person who
commits it, attachment to sin blinds still more. Consequently
habitual and fully voluntary venial sin blinds. A lukewarm
person has become attached to venial sins and commits them

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as naturally as one drinks water. As a result his spiritual vision
becomes cloudier and cloudier. His spirit of faith progressively
diminishes until it becomes almost extinct. While the luke­
warm person retains the faith necessary to avoid heresy, his
faith is sluggish, theoretical, inactive, and without influence
on his daily life. He has lost the esteem he once had for
virtue. His attraction toward piety has disappeared along with
his desires for perfection and his longings for holiness.
The lukewarm person no longer has any ideals; these ceased
to exist when he became convinced that holiness was nothing
but a silly illusion belonging to the years of first fervor. Now
that practical life has led him to sec that sanctity was not
meant for him, he is content for the future to lead a life
which is mediocre and common. St. Augustine saw this
condition clearly and warned against it. “Si autem dixeris:
sufficit, periisti. . . . When you say, ‘I have done enough . . .’
you are lost.”
As our willing naturally follows our knowing, this blindness
of the understanding has as its necessary consequence an ever
accentuated weakening of the will. The Gospel speaks of cer­
tain sick persons whom it calls “languid" (“curavit languidos”)
(Mt. 14;14) and of a sickness which it calls languidity
(“sanans omnem languorem”) (Mt. 4:23). Lukewarmness is
such a sickness in the supernatural order. The will has lost the
fervor, the enthusiasm, the fine temper of better days. Having
ceased to fight, it languishes prostrate, without elasticity, with­
out spirit, incapable of any effort, in a state of spiritual anemia
which at times amounts to a true paralysis.
The two characteristic traits of lukewarmness, then, are
blindness of the intellect and paralysis of the will.

*

*

*

In order that the intellect may see, and the will move,
there are required illuminating and strengthening graces. But
the lukewarm person renders himself unworthy of these graces
by his constant and habitual infidelity. God’s efficacious grace
does not come, and the soul remains in darkness and helpless­

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ness. The cause of lukewarmness, then, is a progressive infidelity
to grace, manifested primarily by negligence in the service of
God. The lukewarm person never makes fervent acts of virtue,
that is, acts which reach up to the level of grace already at­
tained. He rather makes remiss acts; imperfect, careless, tepid
acts, less intense than the grace he already possesses. His
practices of piety, which are the nourishment of the soul,
he makes with negligence. His prayer is full of voluntary dis­
tractions, his examen superficial, his Communion routine. And
this negligence is not transitory, but habitual and voluntary.
The lukewarm person may soon go further. Not only does
he perform his religious duties carelessly, but soon he begins
to shorten them and will use the slightest pretext to eliminate
them. How often will he not allege motives which are in
themselves irreproachable; for example, works of charity on
behalf of his neighbor! He salves his conscience, saying that
after all he is only “leaving God for God.” But what is hap­
pening is that activity is increasingly supplanting prayer.
The devil knows well that it would be a waste of time
to try directly to induce fervent souls to sin. His strategy is
to lead such persons progressively to increase their external
works and activities, with prejudice to their religions obliga­
tions. Almost imperceptibly he brings it about that prayer is
eliminated, so that there remains an activity without any soul
to it, a purely exterior and human activity which is sterile,
fruitless, and even harmful. Without nourishment from his
religious exercises a person becomes spiritually weakened; and
as an anemic organism is a propitious field for the growth
of harmful germs, so the soul without prayer is disposed for
the germination of disordered affections.
When inordinate affections are allowed free play, they in­
evitably produce the fruit of deliberate and habitual venial
sin. This is the third stage of lukewarmness, or lukewarmness
at its worst. The horror of sin is gone; a person willfully com­
mits whatever venial sins present themselves, without his
conscience either becoming alarmed or protesting. To this
state of indifference comes a soul called to perfection!

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Disastrous Effects of Lukewarmness

The description in the preceding section is sufficient of
itself to show us the gravity of lukewarmness. It is certainly
no trifle for a person to be blind and paralyzed with respect
to spiritual things, for his understanding to be insensible to
them, and his will incapable of the slightest effort to attain
them. But this is not the whole story. All of the evil effects
of lukewarmness, many as they are, can be reduced to one
principal evil in which all the others arc contained and from
which they flow. This principal evil we may describe as the
attitude of God toward the lukewarm soul.
Our Lord Himself has told us what God’s attitude is. A
code of mercy and pardon, of confidence and peace, the New
Testament nevertheless contains warnings of extraordinary rigor.
And perhaps the severest warning in it concerns lukewarmness.
Directing Himself to the lukewarm person, Jesus utters the
following frightful rebuke: "I know thy works; thou art neither
cold nor hot. I would that thou wert cold or hot. But because
thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, 1 am about to
vomit thee out of my mouth; because thou sayest, 'I am rich
and have grown wealthy and have need of nothing,’ and dost
not know that thou art the wretched and miserable and poor
and blind and naked one” (Apoc. 3:15-17). What, we ask
ourselves, can be the import of such terrible words, referring
as they undoubtedly do, to lukewarmness in its ultimate and
most serious degree. At first sight our Lord seems to prefer
mortal sin itself to lukewarmness: “I would that thou wert
cold or hot” — that is, fervent or a sinner — ‘‘and not luke­
warm." If it is absurd to suppose that our Lord really hates
mortal sin less than venial, what precisely is the meaning of
His dire warning to the lukewarm?
Considering these words first as they apply to the good
and fervent, we can affirm that, for the good, lukewarmness
is, in a certain sense, more dangerous than mortal sin. Mortal
sin of itself alarms, disgusts, bonifies. Those who fear God
place themselves instinctively on guard against mortal sin
and try to remove themselves as far as possible from its oc-

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casions. Their attitude toward lukewarmness, especially con­
sidered in its earlier stages, is likely to be different. Small in­
fidelities do not so much alarm the conscience as put it to
sleep. As a result there is a real danger that a good person may
fall into lukewarmness almost without noticing it. Since mortal
sin is a manifest and brazen enemy, while lukewarmness is a
crafty and hypocritical one, the good may have to be more on
guard against lukewarmness than against mortal sin.
Also for the less fervent, lukewarmness may be in a certain
sense more dangerous than mortal sin. When a person sins
seriously because of weakness and misery rather than because
of malice, he can with relative ease get out of the state of
sin, turn sincerely to God, and begin to lead a life of fervor.
How many times do people sin because they arc ignorant of
the gravity of sin and are not aware of all that Jesus Christ
has done and suffered in order to obtain for them the divine
pardon! Many sources can be successfully tapped to obtain the
conversion of the sinner. One can appeal to the seriousness
of sin, the four last things, the Passion of our Saviour, and
many other themes. Moreover, as the ordinary sinner may
have received relatively few graces, he cannot be said to have
systematically and deliberately abused grace. Cod is disposed
to bestow graces generously on the ordinary sinner, whose
conversion can at times be definitive and is always sincere.
The situation with the lukewarm is quite different. Lukewarm­
ness is not an illness of beginners. It presupposes a more
or less lengthy period of fervor and abundant graces. It touches
persons who know the gravity of sin, who have meditated
much on the eternal truths and on the Passion of our Saviour,
who through personal experience have tasted the sweetness of
divine love. A lukewarm person is one who has had these graces,
who has blinded and paralyzed himself spiritually, and be­
come deaf to divine inspirations and insensible to earnest
exhortations. The lukewarm has made himself unworthy of
God’s grace, and there remain no resources to be tapped. As
a result of the abuse of His grace, God has taken it away. A
lukewarm person's return to fervor is therefore so difficult

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that we can say that it is morally impossible in the sense
explained above.
Although mortal sin is incomparably more serious than
venial, a person in the state of mortal sin can turn to God
with relative case. But when lukewarmness is found in its most
serious degree, it is morally impossible for a soul to recover.
From this point of view, is it not better to be cold than
lukewarm? "I would that thou wert cold or hot.”
The words that follow are truly terrible on the lips of our
Lord, always so merciful to the sinner. They have a realism
which any comment on them tends to soften. ‘‘But because
thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to
vomit thee out of My mouth.” With this expression, which
may appear dull to the blunted sensibilities of our day, our
Lord wants to make clear how repugnant to Him lukewarmness
is. Consider Jesus’ attitude toward different sorts of people.
Toward the good He feels tenderness and gentleness; toward
the sinful forgiveness, compassion, and mercy; but for the
lukewarm He feels a repugnance and nausea like that of one
about to vomit. Does not this in itself represent the supreme
punishment for lukewarmness?
Whenever God loves, He loves most actively. His love
is manifested in the abundance of His gifts, so that souls
are literally overwhelmed by the greatness of divine love.
When God has mercy He seems to forget His own dignity,
lowering Himself to the sinner and seeking him out in the
abyss of his offenses. And when, after knocking for a long
time at the door of some heart and never tiring, He at last
finds it opened to Him, His joy is greater than that which
He would feel over the perseverance of ninety-nine just.
Now what happens when God is nauseated by a soul? This
is something so frightening and mysterious that one scarcely
dares to sound it out. Would this revulsion be an abandon­
ment by God similar, if only remotely so, to the definitive
abandonment with which God casts off the reprobate and
permits him to be buried in the abyss of eternal hate? To
say so much would seem to be going too far. Undoubtedly

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God never abandons anyone definitively in this life. He al­
ways offers graces at least sufficient for salvation; never is
salvation in this world absolutely impossible, and damnation
is always inexcusable. Nevertheless, God does in some sense
abandon the lukewarm person. Because of the soul's unworthi­
ness, God withdraws the graces of election which otherwise
He would have given.
Lukewarmness involves unfaithfulness; unfaithfulness sup­
poses a friendship betrayed, a love unrequited. If faithfulness is
perseverance in love, unfaithfulness is a love that has grown
weary, a friendship that has failed. It is represented by a loved
one who has turned his back. Now will not our own heart
tell us that the unfaithfulness of a friend causes much more
pain than grave injustice from a stranger? An affront by a
stranger insults our dignity and damages our rights; but un­
faithfulness on the part of a friend rends its most delicate
fibers. When a friend betrays us, we know that as Christians
we ought to forgive him. But no one obliges us to renew
the friendship that has been betrayed; perhaps it would even
be impossible.
Does something like this take place between God and the
soul? Magnanimous in everything, God undoubtedly is ready
to renew the former friendship. Divine love never admits
defeat. But the soul, through its own fault, has made itself
incapable of that love. For this reason it appears as if God
has in fact abandoned the soul definitively, turned His back
on it as on a thing that makes one want to vomit.
Can a lukewarm soul be saved? Before answering this terrible
question, let us not forget something we set down in the
beginning, namely, that we are here treating of lukewarmness
in its most extreme degree. Speaking even of this lukewarm­
ness, we must still say that a lukewarm person, absolutely
speaking, can be saved; sufficient graces are not wanting to
him. On the other hand, granted that state of blindness and
spiritual anemia in which he finds himself through his own
fault, ordinary graces in fact are not sufficient for his salva­
tion. A most efficacious grace is needed to jolt him and draw

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him out of his stupor. And how will God give this special
grace if with repeated infidelities he has made himself un­
worthy of it?
In fact a person will not generally remain merely lukewarm.
Lukewarmness is not generally a permanent state but a pass­
ing one, a phase through which a person goes as he descends
from his first fervor. Now a basic principle of the spiritual
life is that no one can remain stationary. Either he progresses
and keeps going higher, or he backslides and keeps going down
until he buries himself in the abyss of habitual mortal sin. Λ
lukewarm person is characterized by affection for venial sins;
he commits them constantly and ever increasingly. But if
habitual and completely voluntary, venial sin weakens the soul
and numbs the conscience, in this way predisposing for mortal
sin. Moreover, the boundary between mortal and venial sin
frequently cannot be defined with precision, and when one is
constantly approaching this boundary, he is some day very
likely to cross it. His conscience becomes so relaxed that it
makes no protest upon seeing the soul stained by some serious
fault; when it does protest, its complaint is quieted.
Now constant unfaithfulness to grace results in its with­
drawal. God withdraws His graces more and more, abandoning
the individual to his own resources. And in these circumstances,
of what is he not capable? What sin may he not commit? Into
what abyss may he not plunge? The devil, moreover, has but
been awaiting the moment most favorable to his designs. At
the right moment he sets up a strong temptation and the
lukewarm person falls. These falls become multiplied and there
results a habitual state of mortal sin — a thousand times worse
if this state is combined with a series of sacrilegious confessions
and Communions.
Now the circumstances of someone who has always been
sinful are very different from those of a lukewarm soul which
has become sinful. As the first has not abused the grace of
God, he can easily receive the grace of conversion. But the
latter has left no point at which he is easily vulnerable to
God’s grace. Moreover, he has made himself unworthy of the

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especially efficacious grace he needs to draw him from the
abyss in which he has been buried. There remains only the
frightful threat of Jesus: "Because thou art lukewarm, and
neither cold nor hot, I am about to vomit thee out of my
mouth" (Apoc. 3:16).
Most terrible of all, the lukewarm person, too blind for
self-knowledge, does not realize the state he is in. As he
maintains certain exterior expressions of piety, he deceives
himself into believing that he is rich in virtues, abundant in
merits, and in need of nothing. But the truth is so completely
to the contrary that Jesus hurls into his face the terrible words:
"Thou . . . dost not know that thou art the wretched and
miserable and poor . . . and naked one” (Apoc. 3:17).

How To Know Whether a Soul Is in a State of Lukewarmness

It is extremely important to have sure and exact rules which
can be of service in discerning whether someone is lukewarm.
First, we should remember that lukewarmness is not an illness
of beginners and that it always comes after a period of fervor,
an appreciable period of fervor, enthusiasm, and fidelity in
God’s service. From such a first fervor, a person descends to
lukewarmness by degrees. Infrequent and insignificant in the
beginning, his infidelities become more frequent and aggravated
later on. In the physical or natural order, lukewarmness is a
state midway between cold and hot. A thing must pass through
it whether the temperature be going up or down. What is
cold becomes lukewarm and then hot; what is hot becomes
lukewarm and finally cold. The same principle does not hold
in the supernatural order. Spiritual lukewarmness is a decline,
a degradation, and one arrives at it only by going down. From
fervor a person descends to lukewarmness; from lukewarmness
to mortal sin; and from isolated mortal sin he descends to
the vice or habit of mortal sin.
There is a state superficially similar to lukewarmness, which
nevertheless, must be carefully distinguished from it. This
state is spiritual dryness or aridity. Like lukewarmness, spiritual

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aridity comes after a period of fervor, and in it all sensible
fervor is absent. Yet the two states are completely opposed,
spiritual aridity being a step forward, lukewarmness a step
backward.
To foster detachment from creatures and attachment to
works of piety in beginners, God frequently grants sensible con­
solation in His service. But although helpful in the beginning,
sensible consolations in prayer can be harmful over an ex­
tended period. As we become attached to them, they will pre­
vent us from living by pure faith and will hinder our love
from being pure and disinterested. It is really as a reward for
fidelity and as a sign of progress, then, that God withdraws
sensible devotion in order that we may learn in dryness to live
by faith and to love God disinterestedly. In aridity we preserve
our fear of offending God, our desire to love Him, and our
longing to reach perfection. It pains us to see ourselves in this
state of helplessness; and if we can find no comfort in the things

of God, neither do we find it in creatures.
The lukewarm person is very different. He more and more
loses all fear of sin, his charity grows cold, his desires for per­
fection become nil. These characteristics become accentuated as
his lukewarmness grows. Far from being pained at discovering
himself in this state, he is satisfied to be as he is. Not realizing
the seriousness of his condition, he does nothing to get out of
it. He has no taste for the works of piety. Spiritual things weary
him. He cannot live without comforts and satisfactions; and not
finding these in God, he seeks them in creatures, to which he
becomes inordinately attached. Spiritual dryness differs from
lukewarmness, then, as night from day.

•

*

♦

A second sign of lukewarmness is carelessness about prayers
and spiritual exercises. We are speaking here not of an inci­
dental, but of a habitual and constant carelessness; a careless­
ness, moreover, which is willful and deliberate. An effort always
sustained at the heights with no eclipse or faltering whatsoever,
is more than heroic and far above ordinary human powers.

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Such a prodigy of constancy and fidelity we can admire in the
Blessed Virgin. But hers was a singular privilege. Granted our
human weakness and misery, there is no one of us, however
good he be, who does not have days or hours of dejection. The
mark of real spiritual earnestness does not lie in never faltering
but in quickly rallying and again pushing forward.
Lukewarmness is quite different from this inevitable human
weakness. The lukewarm person carries out all his spiritual
duties carelessly, negligently, hastily, and wearily, while at the
same time displaying in the whole natural order a marvelous
diligence and activity. His spiritual negligence is not the
product of an apathetic temperament or lazy character, since
it is in sharp contrast to his diligence in material and human
things.
How will this negligence express itself practically? In a
thousand ways in daily life. The lukewarm person may be un­
faithful to the appointed time for getting up in the morning —
he remains in bed as long as he can. He habitually and volun­
tarily indulges distractions and idleness at time of prayer, if he
does not sleep the allotted time away altogether. Lacking both
preparation and thanksgiving, his Communions bear no fruit.
Whenever he can, he postpones confession; and when he goes,
his confessions are superficial, without true sorrow and real
purpose of amendment, his sole purpose in going being to
avoid some greater inconvenience.
He never carries out any examination of conscience. Why
should he? He has no desire to know himself and he has no
intention of changing his ways. Spiritual reading he finds boring
and tiresome; he prefers light, frivolous, and even dangerous
reading. Rather than practice any penance, he seeks in every­
thing his own convenience. Instead of mortifying himself in the
matter of food, he gives free reign to his taste in both quantity
and quality. His prayers are recited mechanically and with haste;
routine is the order of the day in his spiritual exercises. As
lukewarmness increases, not only are religious exercises per­
formed negligently, but they are also shortened and abandoned
on the slightest pretext. When we pray badly, prayer wearies

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us; and when prayer wearies us we arc tempted to abandon it.
The first practices abandoned arc those which require
more effort, such as the daily examen, weekly confession,
meditation; or those which are more austere, such as practices
of mortification. Since spiritual exercises arc the food of the
soul, when they are done badly or eliminated, the soul gets
weaker and weaker, becoming rickety, anemic, and incapable
of any effort. This, as we have said, is the salient characteristic
of a lukewarm individual.
*

♦

*

A third sign of lukewarmness is the desire to avoid mortal
sin only. The fervent person fears not only mortal sin but
venial sin as well. Venial sin, because an offense against God,
he sees as “mortal for the heart." When through frailty he
falls, he repents at once and tries to avoid future falls. He
especially tries to avoid fully deliberate venial sins and is
always hard at work to uproot previously contracted evil habits.
The lukewarm person is just the opposite. If he still fears
clear and obvious mortal sin, this is only because he fears hell.
As for venial sin, he almost welcomes it and seems to take a
certain delight in it. Committing venial sins with full advert­
ence and as often as the occasion presents itself, he fosters
bad habits which in turn enslave him more and more. The
most characteristic note of lukewarmness is the habit of sin­
ning venially, with pleasure, without remorse, and without the
remotest intention of amendment. The conscience of the luke­
warm person is insensible, too relaxed in one respect and quite
hardened in another. Disgust for sin is a grace; but the luke­
warm soul has so abused God's grace, despising all salutary
movements of regret, that God ends up by withdrawing even
a sense of remorse. The lukewarm person can sin with gusto
and affection, sin having become for him a kind of pastime.
Looking upon himself as a mind of very broad standards and
very much abreast of the times, he ridicules “pious souls” who
try to avoid venial sins and lead a life which even in small
things conforms to the precepts of Christian morality. To him

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the conscientious servants of our Saviour are a scrupulous,
straight-laced, timorous lot. Poor soul! What good reason Jesus
has to say to him: "I know thy works; thou hast the name
of being alive, (because you acquired it in your years of
fervor) and thou art dead” (Apoc. 3:1).
The Remedies
When we ask about the possibility of one who has fallen
into lukewarmness getting out of this state and returning to
a life of fervor, we must distinguish three stages of lukewarm­
ness or three classes of lukewarm souls. Some are in the worst
stages of lukewarmness, some have only just entered the earlier
stages, and some, without being properly lukewarm, are never­
theless in danger of becoming so.
As for the worst stages, we have already seen that it can
be said to be morally impossible to recover from them and
return to a life of fervor. Conversion requires an extraordinary
grace from God which these individuals do not deserve, and
will neither ask nor desire. Spiritually blind, they just barely
keep the faith necessary to avoid heresy or unbelief, an inactive
and atrophied faith which has no influence in their lives. As
a consequence of their blindness they become more and more
insensible until they arrive at a hardness of heart similar to
that which prepares the hardened sinner for final impenitence.
In fact, they themselves are on the verge of falling into habitual
mortal sin.
Is their case one for utter despair? Fortunately not, for
there is a possible solution in the consoling doctrine of the
Communion of Saints. If there is somewhere someone who
will take an interest in these poor lukewarm souls, vicarious
prayers and sacrifices can obtain from the divine mercy the
needed extraordinary grace of conversion. Who will be such
a helper in the life of some particular individual? Perhaps a
near relative who has noted the extreme lukewarmness of this
dear one. Perhaps a friend — and what better service of Christian
friendship than this? Perhaps it will be some Sister or cloistered
nun, who if she has consecrated her life to prayer and sacrifice

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for sinners, certainly has not to exclude the lukewarm whose
need may in a certain sense be greater. It may be a zealous
and holy priest who, having noticed in the confessional the
state of certain penitents and gaining nothing by exhortation,
resorts to prayer and penance in order to win them and soften
their hearts.
At times, too, the divine mercy, always in search of pretexts
and occasions for pouring itself out upon even the most
poorly disposed, will find in the lukewarm individual himself
something which in a certain sense justifies the extraordinary
grace of conversion. It may be an extraordinary deed in the
person’s past life, some great act of charity, an important
service done for the Church, or some great sacrifice. It may be
a devotion or practice of piety, especially to the Sacred Heart
or the Blessed Virgin, which in the midst of so much wretched­
ness has been conserved like a glowing ember underneath the
ashes.
We may add that once God has granted the efficacious
grace which shakes up, jolts, and transforms the soul, nothing
is so much called for as a closed retreat, with a general con­
fession of the whole period of lukewarmness.
»

♦

♦

Less serious lukewarmness can be more directly reached by
human aid. The Gospel narrative of St. John tells us of the
cure of a paralytic by the pool of Siloe. This man had been
waiting thirty-eight years for a cure. He had not attained it
because as he sadly told our Saviour: “Sir, I have no one to
put me into the pool when the water is stirred” (Jn. 5:7).
Paralytic that he was, he had not the power in himself to
get down into the water when the angel miraculously moved it.
Tire lukewarm person is like that paralytic. Spiritually
paralyzed, he needs someone to help him, someone with divine
power to say: “Rise, take up thy pallet and walk” (Jn. 5:8).
More specifically, he needs the service of a zealous confessor
who will efficaciously help him to get rid of his malady not
only by general exhortations and counsels but also by means

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accommodated to his particular needs. While this is not the
place to treat in detail of how the confessor should proceed,
we shall indicate the general means for helping souls to rise
out of incipient lukewarmness.
First of all the lukewarm individual must be convinced that
he is lukewarm. Misled regarding his true state of soul, he
supposes that because he does not fall into serious sin he must
be spiritually quite sound. But a little reflection in God’s
presence and with good will, will bring out the contrast be­
tween his earlier years of fervor and his present carelessness.
Comparing seriously and earnestly the one period with the
other, he cannot but see that instead of advancing he has gone
backward. If he consults an experienced confessor, preferably
one who knows him well, such a confessor will confirm and
reinforce his fears, at the same time assuring him that there is
still time to escape.
Now once he is convinced, how is he to be cured? When
a doctor sets out to cure someone, he is not content to attack
the symptoms, as a simple palliative might do; he seeks out
the cause of the symptoms and attacks this. This is how
one must proceed against lukewarmness, for with lukewarmness,
too, identical characteristic effects may originate in different
immediate causes.
Lukewarmness may originate in some inordinate affection,
which, encouraged rather than combated, now flourishes like
a great parasite and absorbs all the vital energies of the soul.
When a man has become spiritually anemic and nothing in
the spiritual order attracts him, the only way he can return
to fervor is to fight against the inordinate affection which is
the cause of his trouble and implacably root it out of his heart.
Or again, lukewarmness may be traceable to some defect
which an individual has failed to fight and which has con­
tinued to grow and develop until it has become a habit. For
example, a person may indulge the habit of lying and de­
ceiving until he has created a whole life of duplicity and
pretense. Or he may have cultivated the habit of seeking in
everything his own convenience and of flying from any and

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all mortification, the habit of complaining about everyone and
everything. He may have developed such a flippancy, or a
lack of reflection, deliberation, and judgment, that he can
take nothing seriously and must look at everything superficially.
He may have gotten into the habit of chattering endlessly,
monopolizing every conversation, yet never saying anything
profitable, but simply speaking of himself, extolling his own
actions, and boasting of his own exploits. Each of these instances
manifests the most characteristic note of lukewarmness, the
voluntary habit of venial sin. Anybody who wishes to fight
free of lukewarmness will have to struggle earnestly against
the defect which caused him to fall into it.
Finally lukewarmness can arise simply from a general care­
lessness and negligence in the carrying out of spiritual
exercises. Prayer, Mass, Communion, spiritual reading, examina­
tion of conscience, confession become routine. But since spirit­
ual exercises are the food of the soul, the spiritual organism
becomes anemic when they are done badly or arc omitted. The
only way to recovery of health is to return to the conscientious
performance of one’s religious duties.
In doing this one must avoid the danger of trying to do
everything at once, as if all the old energies could be recovered
in a single moment. A person just emerging from a serious
illness does not instantaneously recover his full strength, con­
valescence often being longer and requiring more delicate
care than the illness itself. Since the lukewarm person is
spiritually anemic, he comes out of his lethargy with a minimum
of strength of will. He must therefore adjust the object of his
efforts to the littleness of his energies, and as his strength in­
creases he can undertake more difficult tasks. If he tries to do
more than he is able and fails, he will let everything go and
return to his lukewarmness.
Someone who has been careless about spiritual exercises,
for example, is not to set himself the task from the very first
moment of doing all of them perfectly. Let him take them one
by one. He can begin with prayer and concentrate all his
efforts on doing this well. He can even limit his aim to

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fightin? distractions. Or if he is accustomed to half an hour
of mental prayer, let him begin by working at actual mental
prayer for only fifteen minutes, devoting the other fifteen
minutes to spiritual reading or vocal prayers.
Someone who is not strictly lukewarm but is in danger of
becoming lukewarm can even more opportunely make use of
the means indicated above. Prevention is better than cure.
But it should be remembered that slight lukewarmness or the
danger of falling into it is not to be confused with a state
pathological rather than moral. Because of excessive work
(especially intellectual), great trials, or a general run-down
condition, someone may suffer a noticeable depression, lack of
energy, loss of will power — a complete enervation of will, so
that he does not seem to have the strength to do anything at
all. But where these are the causes, a doctor is needed rather
than a priest.
There are also spiritually wounded souls, who are not to be
confused with the lukewarm. Excessively severe humiliations,
flagrant injustices, failures, sometimes crush a whole life.
When great trials swoop down upon a person who is not of
an almost heroic temper, they sometimes shatter him and may
ruin him completely. Overwhelmed by discouragement, he de­
velops a kind of spiritual inferiority complex. His faith and
confidence in others and in himself is gone. No longer caring
about anything, he with great difficulty drags himself along in
a life which looks to him completely meaningless. Such an in­
dividual is fortunate if he finds along his path a priest accord­
ing to the heart of God, who, like the good Samaritan, binds
his wounds, restores his strength and causes to shine anew
from the depths of his depression the light of the divine
ideal of perfection. After all, even the most humiliating cross
is a royal road that leads to God. God, who never deceives,
is the supreme reason for our life and its ultimate meaning,
even when humanly it appears shattered. The spiritually shat­
tered individual must be treated with kindness and under­
standing, not severity.
In closing let us take a look at a typical historical case which

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will show not only that God can, but that in fact He does
cure lukewarm souls and even raise them to sanctity. Perhaps
the fact that this is a saint who is little known to us will
make the example all the more impressive. At the end of
the sixteenth century there was in Italy a family of noble
lineage, the Mariscotti family, probably of Scottish origin and
descended from Marius Scottus, who established himself in
Italy in the time of Charlemagne. A member of this family
married into the famous Orsini family, and the couple had
three daughters. All three received a Christian education, and
the eldest found her vocation as a Franciscan religious in the
Convent of San Bernardino of Viterbo. The second daughter,
Clara, was an extremely difficult girl and the nightmare of
her parents. When her younger sister, Hortensia, made an ex­
cellent family match, Clara considered herself disgraced that
a younger sister should have been asked for in marriage before
herself. So great was her spite at this humiliation that she
determined to enter the Convent of San Bernardino, without
so much as considering the real meaning of vocation. She
could not, of course, have committed a more serious error
than thus embracing the religious life without a supernatural
motive.
With such a motive for entering, we can imagine the life
of Clara in the convent. The rule, the common life, the
religious spirit all meant nothing to her. Abusing her family
influence and certain special traits of the Community, she
managed to have her cell furnished with every comfort in
complete contradiction to Franciscan poverty. She even had
special food brought in, justifying the irregularity by a variety
of pretexts. For ten years she lived this disedifying life. Then,
perhaps through the prayers of the Community and especially
of her sister, a religious in the same convent, the hand of
God intervened. God first sent sickness. To hear the sick
nun’s confession, her confessor had to enter her cell, and on
seeing its luxury he realized what an unfortunate state Clara
was in. God put such efficacy into this man’s exhortation that

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Clara’s heart was moved and from that day her conversion
began.
Clara recovered from this illness only to fall into another,
longer and more serious, which put her at death’s door. The
brush with death completed the work already begun, and
Clara arose from her bed a different person. She began to live
a life of humility, penance, poverty, strict observance, and
fraternal charity which was a marvel to the whole Community.
The sixteenth century was a time of severe penances and
Clara would be outdone by no one. Her bed was a bare board,
her pillow a rock. She habitually wore a hair shirt. She took
the discipline until she was bloody; she wore on her head a
band bristling with thorns, and she fasted frequently on bread
and water. In compensation for Clara's new found generosity
God led her along the ways of prayer until she reached the
highest union with Him. To witness to her virtue, He favored
her with the extraordinary gifts of counsel, miracles, and
prophecy. When Clara died at the age of fifty-five, in the
year 1640, she was a saint.
The Church has placed her on its altars and venerates her
under the name of St. Hyacinth Mariscotti. It was the name
given to her in the Convent of San Bernardino, where for ten
years she led a lukewarm life, and for many more years a
fervent and holy one.

Sours are hungry for
Cod! In the midst of a
materialism which looks
only to money and pleas­
The essential law of the
ure,
men, surfeited by
spiritual life, as of all
the false goods of the
life, is progress and
world, are resolutely turn­
growth. The alternative
ing to God. 'Iliis reac­
is decay and death.
tion can be seen among
people of every sort:
among the cultivated and
learned as also among
the ignorant and unlettered; among those who by God’s special
providence have preserved their baptismal innocence as also
among the prodigals who are returning from distant lands to
the house of their father in search of pardon and peace;
among the rich, who, favored by fortune and living in abun­
dance, are able to drink from the cup of every pleasure, as
also among the poor, who, disinherited by fortune, eat a bread
kneaded with tears and sweat; among those in the first years
of life as well as among those who, disillusioned with earth,
are descending the slope that terminates in the grave.
Yes, everywhere one finds this thirst for God, for the
spirit blows where it will (cf. Jn. 3:8). But if this necessity
for God is found everywhere, in some places it reaches gigantic
proportions, whether in souls consecrated to God in the
cloister or in devout persons in the world who are striving
to practice virtue and arrive at perfection. Impoverished and
spiritually stingy indeed are those who do not suffer this
hunger for God!

RULE XII

Now uncertainty often causes real anguish in those who are
trying to lead a spiritual life and who have a burning desire
to be united with God. “Am I going forward along the road
which leads to God?” they wonder. “Am I perhaps going
backward? Or am I simply standing still?” This problem be­
comes aggravated if in spite of spending years in working to
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correct a defect — for example, to acquire humility, patience,
meekness — the defect still persists in a most discouraging way.
As the habitual defect persists, the person naturally falls more
or less frequently into more or less deliberate faults.
This persistence of defects is very naturally taken as an
indication that no progress is being made. How can faults and
falls continue in spite of the sincerest will to overcome them?
If after years of working to correct a defect, the defect seems
just as lively as ever, a person naturally concludes that his
spiritual life must have become stagnant. And if, as some­
times happens, he passes through one of those periods when a
defect becomes aggravated and is actually more troublesome
than in an earlier period, he concludes that instead of progress­
ing he must surely be going backward. How easy it is in these
circumstances for discouragement to enter in! Deceived by
the devil, how readily one will abandon the work of sanctifica­
tion, bitterly concluding that holiness is not for him!
In order to solve this problem we must first of all limit its
scope. There are not three alternatives, but two. One must
go either forward or backward, since, practically speaking,
standing still in the spiritual life is impossible according to a
universally admitted spiritual principle. The spiritual life is
a true life. And no life in this world can stand still, for it is
either an activity and a developing, or it is a decaying and a
movement toward death. In human life we sec first a ceaseless
progress from infancy until maturity; and afterward we see a
steady decline that culminates in death. More palpably we
see this law in our sensitive life, where not for one moment
does the heart cease to beat, the blood to circulate, the lungs
to respire, or any one of the various organs fail to fulfill its
proper vital functions.
Just as there is no middle ground between sickness and
health, though health can be more or less vigorous and illness
more or less serious, so also and more emphatically there can
be no middle ground in the spiritual life. The soul either
possesses the grace of God or it is in the state of sin. Now
if a person is in a state of grace he merits, however little it

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may be. and consequently he progresses. If he is in the state
of sin, he is dead, and like a corpse he is in the process of
decomposition.

*

*

«

The problem then, can be reduced to this: to know whether
one is going forward or backward. Is the persistence of defects
and of falls a sign of going backward? The answer depends on
whether the individual in question is trying or not. When
someone fails to avoid falls or correct his faults because he
is not making the required effort, he is not advancing but
going backward. With each new fall a bad habit is becoming
more ingrained, a defect taking deeper root.
We must not forget that defects and virtues arc intimately
connected with their respective acts as cause with effect. A
habit tends to produce its proper acts. When a habit is present
the respective act is performed with frequency and ease. Λ
defect, as a bad habit, tends to produce corresponding bad
acts. Moreover these bad acts are performed with progressively
greater frequency and ease. The person who is naturally hot
tempered, for example, and who does not struggle to correct
his defect, will be found to give in to his temper more and
more readily.

*

»

♦

Now what of a person who does struggle? Suppose that in
spite of years of effort he finds himself with the same defects
he had at the beginning? The most natural thing in the world
is for him to become increasingly discouraged. His effort seems
completely useless. Discouragement ever more naturally holds
sway when the same defects not only continue but even
increase.
Before we answer this question, there are several points
that need to be clarified. First, our defects and falls have
their immediate cause in our will. God, who has nothing to
do with them except to permit them, exercises no direct
causality upon them. The highest Good cannot be the cause

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of any evil, nor can anything unholy proceed from Supreme
Holiness. Circumstance, environment, education, heredity, can
exercise influence for good or bad; but the cause of our
defects and falls is our will. No defect or fault can be imputed
to us except in the measure in which we will it. Where the
will does not intervene, the moral order does not exist.
•

*

»

Second, we must remember that our will is not the cause
of our acquiring supernatural virtues. At first sight this asser­
tion may appear strange, or even scandalous to the pious. We
are so accustomed to believe that the supernatural virtues are
acquired and increased with the repetition of acts just as the
natural virtues are! Natural habits, it is true, are acquired and
increased by repeated acts. But supernatural habits or virtues
are not. These are essentially infused, and their very name
indicates that man docs not acquire them but that God in­
fuses them. Now the same cause which gives birth to a virtue
makes it grow. It is a truth of faith that man in a state of
mortal sin cannot by his own efforts acquire either grace or
the infused virtues and Gifts of the Holy Spirit inseparable
from it. Consequently, he cannot by his own personal effort
or his own acts acquire or increase grace; nor can he acquire
or increase the supernatural virtues.
It can be objected that although man cannot by his own
effort put himself in the state of grace and acquire the virtues,
once he has been placed in grace his acts are supernatural
and he can with these cause the virtues to increase. In answer
to this it must be remembered that grace and the supernatural
virtues are a participation in the divine nature and activity.
Beyond the reach of man, even when he is elevated to the
supernatural order, they always remain a free gift of God. It
is God who infuses grace and increases it, God who infuses
the virtues and causes them to grow. This is why the Church
teaches us to ask this gift of God: “Da nobis fidei, spei et
caritatis augmentum — Give us increase of faith, hope, and
charity.’’

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Rui.ES FOR THE SPIRITUAL LlFE

On the other hand it would be a serious mistake to conclude
that if my efforts do not produce the increase of the virtues,
then it is useless to try. No response could be more unwarranted
than to fold one's hands in lazy inactivity. For if one’s own
efforts and acts of virtue do not properly produce the increase
of supernatural virtues, inasmuch as they are not the efficient
cause of the increase, they are the necessary condition that
God has set down for that increase to take place.
Our efforts in the state of grace are, practically speaking, acts
of virtue, and they produce merit. They are meritorious acts.
Now merit is the right which the soul acquires before God
to the increase of grace and the virtues, and to eternal glory
in the life to come. In short, God confers the infused virtues
and their increase; man does not acquire them. But man has
to place the conditions prescribed by God, which conditions
in practice arc nothing else but the effort to practice the
virtues and correct defects.

*

•

*

Third, we must understand that when this necessary con­
dition has been placed, grace and the virtues increase without
fail, for God does not contradict Himself. The Church teaches
us that every good act done in the state of grace merits an
increase of grace and of glory. Now the virtues and Gifts must
increase in a parallel manner, because they all form one
spiritual living whole which grows harmoniously as the body
of a child grows to maturity.

*

·

*

Finally, this increase is not sensible. Frequently it cannot
be verified and remains quite hidden. God so loves humility
that in order to teach a soul humility He may permit it to
fall seriously. Or with more likelihood, He will permit exterior
manifestations of a defect to persist for a long time, even for
a whole lifetime. Although now the person no longer consents
to it, the defect will appear to remain without correction, or
even to be aggravated at times.

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IB

St. Vincent de Paul struggled constantly and generously for
years against a melancholy disposition that gave his counte­
nance an air of severity and harshness which, instead of at­
tracting others, repelled them. St. Francis de Sales, by dis­
position hot tempered, struggled for many years against this
disposition without ceasing to feel its movements. When he
succeeded in conquering its exterior manifestations, he still
experienced it interiorly. On one occasion when someone had
insulted him without his showing any anger, he was later
asked in confidence if he hadn't felt even a little emotion.
He answered: “I felt anger boiling in my brain like a kettle
on a fire." St. Bernadette was by nature timid and highly im­
pressionable. Certain traces of the original rusticity of her
childhood stayed with her almost her whole life and in part
gave occasion to the dislike felt toward her by her superior.
Especially in order to keep souls in humility, God permits
them to fall not only into involuntary and semideliberate
smaller faults but even into more serious ones. Confirmation in
grace is a wonderful favor which God bestows only on souls
that have arrived at the pinnacle of holiness, the antechamber
of Paradise which is the Transforming Union. But such is
human misery that even this favor does not consist, as is
popularly believed, in absolute preservation from all sin. The
Blessed Virgin is unique in all her privileges and we can admire
this singular gift in her. But the confirmation in grace of
which theologians speak consists only in such an abundance
of sanctifying grace, with such deep roots in the soul, that
the soul remains protected from every serious act which could
deprive it of the state of grace. Such a blessing does not in­
clude of itself a knowledge of the grace of final perseverance,
for according to the Council of Trent no one can have
absolute assurance of final perseverance except through a special
revelation. Certainly, then, this privilege does not exclude
falling into semideliberate faults, a misery which we find even
in holy souls.
These fundamental principles lead us to a very consoling
conclusion : When over a period of years we have exercised our

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good will, have put up a real struggle for virtue and have
tried to combat our defects and avoid falling into sin, the
persistence of these defects and of our falls is not of itself a
proof that we are going backward. An outward, and to some
extent inward, persistence of defects is compatible with a
genuine, though hidden, progress.
Wishing to maintain souls in humility and to give them a
sort of counterweight to His graces, God permits continued
semideliberate falls. He allows defects to continue, at least
as to that which is external and more or less involuntary about
them, and at times these defects will even appear to have
increased. Happy is the individual who in spite of the apparent
uselessness of his efforts humbly perseveres! The day will come
when by the grace of God he will sing of victory!
♦

·

*

What arc the positive signs we may ask, by which someone
can know that he is progressing in the way of perfection. Among
various ones that might be given, we shall limit ourselves to
two which are proofs not only of progress but also of per­
fection. They are hunger for God and the desire to do
His will.

Hunger for God
The appetite of bodily hunger, the need which the body
feels for food, is a sign of bodily health. So also the hunger
for God, the need which the soul feels of being filled with
Him, is a sign of spiritual health. This hunger is not of itself
something sensible. It can be found in states of aridity and
desolation, and is very marked when the soul is going through
what St. John of the Cross calls the "dark night." It may be
pleasant and consoling; but it can also be anguish and even
torment. Obscure contemplation, which is the beginning of
infused contemplation, is nothing but the soul’s feeling of
emptiness and of a need for God, although the individual
himself may not be clearly aware of this. This sense of need
for God becomes acute precisely when the soul becomes spirit­

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ually disenchanted with creatures, when nothing created can
satisfy it and human satisfactions are flat and insipid to it.
Disillusioned with creatures and still not consciously enjoying
union with God, the individual has the sensation of a great
loneliness, of an immense emptiness that has to be filled.
This hunger for God is compatible with our failings if in­
stead of indulging them we sincerely lament and combat them.
And it can even exist along with sins of frailty if we quickly
repent of them, rise up, and try to make amends. It is a
grace of election which prepares the way for that most
excellent grace, union with God.
Scripture tells us that God disposes all things sweetly. Be­
fore giving grace He awakens in the soul a desire for it. Desire
for grace prepares the soul to receive it, because desire expands
the soul and, as it were, enlarges its capacity. “Open thy mouth
wide, and I will fill it,” says the Lord (Ps. 80:11 ). "Expand your
soul through desire and I will fill it.” Desire also prepares
for grace inasmuch as a desire supposes the recognition of a
need. A person desires only what he does not have. His desire
is transformed into a prayer and a plea. Desiring grace, we
ask for it; and asking for it we place the condition required
for receiving it. “Ask and it shall be given you” (Mt. 7:7).

But this hunger for God is not just any desire whatsoever.
Frequently a hidden desire, it is always an intense and con­
stant one. It takes its origin from the virtue of hope and is
perfected through the Gift of Knowledge. Through hope, the
so often forgotten virtue, faith is transformed into charity, and
supernatural knowledge of God is converted into divine love.
Through a living faith we know the lovablencss of God.
Knowing Him we desire to possess Him, and this desire is
the work of hope. “You would not desire Me, if you did not
already possess Me,” says Jesus to the soul in the Imitation.
God crowns this desire with charity, by which we are united
to God and possess Him even in this life.
Understanding what God is, we understand by contrast the

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futility of everything created. Intimately, experimentally feeling
the vanity of all that is not God, we empty ourselves and cut
ourselves free from every creature. This disillusionment with
creatures must not be confused with a mere human disappoint­
ment, possibly associated with a kind of unhealthy romanticism.
It is a profound inner disenchantment with creatures, the kind
that led the wise man to say, after having tasted of all the
satisfactions this world has to offer: "Vanity of vanities and
all is vanity” (Eccles. 1:2).
One aspect of this disillusionment with creatures is that
keen awareness of the fleetingness of time and the brevity of
life so characteristic of those whom God sanctifies quickly and
snatches from the world in the flower of youth. Reading the
abundant correspondence of St. Therese of the Child Jesus,
for example, one finds at every step the obligato theme of
the ephemeralness of life and the longing for heaven. In a
letter to Celine she wrote: “Oh, indeed, it is very hard to
live on earth. But tomorrow, within an hour, we shall arrive
in port. My God, what shall wc see then? What is that life
which will have no end? Tire Lord will be the soul of our
soul. Unfathomable mystery! St. Paul will clarify it for us:
‘Tire eye of man has not seen the uncreated light, his ear
has not heard the incomparable melodics of heaven, and his
heart cannot comprehend what it is that is reserved for him
in the future life.’ And all this will come soon, very soon, if we
love Jesus with passion!”
And in her poem, "My Song for Today,” there vibrates at
once the intimate sense of the brevity of life:
my life is an instant
a passing hour,
my life is a moment
ephemeral and fleeting.
and the immense desire for the day of eternity:

when the sun without setting
shines for my soul,

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on the harp of the angels
I will sing to the day
that knows no end.
It is impossible to come to a profound realization that
everything here below passes without desiring the good that
never passes. Nor can we watch the years go by, taking with
them so much that is close to us, without longing for the
"eternal years” of which the Psalmist speaks. Who does not
naturally love the spring, when the trees become green again,
the rose bushes bloom, and all of nature is decked with new
finery? And who does not long for that other spring that
will never end? Again in the words of Therese:

Here below all the lilies die,
the songs of the birds are short.
I dream of a spring which will endure
forever . . . forever . . .

These sublime longings have their cause in hope. They
are perfected by the action of the Holy Spirit through the
Gift of Knowledge. As a child weeps over broken toys, so
the soul weeps over the things which formerly were the en­
chantment of life. But its tears are divinely consoled. For
in place of these trifles, the fascination for which had kept
its true good hidden, the Gift of Knowledge reveals God to
it as its one true sufficiency. "For the bewitching of vanity
obscureth good things, and the wandering of concupiscence
overturneth the innocent mind” (Wisd. 4:12). The soul
understands that he who possesses God lacks nothing. God
alone is enough!
So it is that the hunger for God is bom in us. Hope be­
comes something gigantic, creating this hunger and preparing
charity which grows proportionately, uniting the soul to God
and nourishing it with God. "He who comes to me shall not
hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst” (Jn.
6:35; cf. Ecclus. 24:29). As hunger grows, possession becomes
more perfect. The process continues until eternity when this

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hunger will be fully satisfied. "Blessed are they who hunger and
thirst after justice, for they shall be satisfied” (Mt. 5:6). And
what is this process, if not the full progress, growth, and de­
velopment of the spiritual life?
*

*

♦

The Desire to Do the Will of God
Sanctity lies in love. Now love can be either affective or
effective. Affective love is subject to illusion, especially when
the emotions are involved in it. Effective love does not deceive,
and it manifests the sincerity of affective love. By affective
love we say to God, with words or from the depths of our
heart, “I love You." By effective love we carry out God's
will. We naturally first of all love God, and tell Him so. But
then we reflect: "If I love Him, I ought to please Him, give
Him all the pleasure I can, do whatever He wishes. If this
calls for sacrifice, so much the better.” Now how will I give
God pleasure? By doing His will, for He Himself has assured
me, “If anyone love me, he will keep my word” (Jn. 14:23).
When in order to prove to Him my love I set about to do
His will, my love has become effective.
I must remember that the will of God can be fulfilled in
various ways. I can submit myself to it solely for fear of
punishment, through servile fear. Or again, making a virtue
of necessity, I can accept God’s will with simple resignation,
adopting a "what else can I do?" attitude. Finally I can fulfill
the will of God for the sole motive of pleasing Him. The real
sign of progress in the spiritual life is the desire to carry
out the will of God in this last way. Rather than speak of a
desire to do God’s will in this case, we can better speak of
“love” for that will.
Perfect love for the will of God is universal. It extends to
every manifestation of God's will, whether He commands
or merely desires, and includes God’s will simply as manifested
by the external course of events. Perfect love is also exclusive;
by it I love nothing but the will of God. Determined to die
to my own will and to my personal desires, I must love ever)·-

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thing that God loves, only what God loves, and only because
God loves it. In this way my will comes to be transformed
into, and, as it were, fused with the will of God. Here is the
essence of holiness, for I am united with God in so far as my
will becomes one with His.

Love for the will of God is a trait common to all the
saints. Not all have been martyrs or great penitents. Not all
have been virgins. Not all have illuminated the world with
their doctrine. But each and every one has loved the will of
God and fulfilled it to the point of heroism. When love for
the will of God has become a real passion absorbing all the
energies of the soul, here is the surest sign there is of spiritual
maturity. Every saint is the proof.
The Saint of saints is our Lord. And in the Gloria of the
Mass we are assured that He alone deserves to be called
“Saint” or holy, "Tu solus sanctus. . . . Thou alone art
holy. . .
But the characteristic trait of Jesus, the whole
perfection of his life, so exalted as to be beyond our compre­
hension, is summed up in love for the will of the heavenly
Father. The first word of Jesus upon entering the world ex­
pressed His absorption in the will of His Father: “Behold, I
come ... to do thy will, O God” (Hebr. 10:7; cf. Ps. 39:8).
Instead of assigning Him some easy task His Father’s will
demanded sacrifice. But Jesus embraced it generously: “He
humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even to death
on a cross” (Phil. 2:8).
Jesus had one single preoccupation during His whole life.
“My food is to do the will of him who sent me, to accom­
plish his work” (Jn. 4:34). He was completely given over to
His Father’s will. “So be it, Father, for thus it has seemed good
in your sight. . .
Above all He could truthfully say those
words which express the pure essence of holiness and the
highest perfection: "I do always the things that are pleasing
to him . .
(Jn. 8:29).
The carrying out of His Father's will was by no means always

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a pure pleasure for our Lord. At times, as during His agony in
Gethsemani, victory came only after a terrible struggle between
the divine will and the legitimate longings of His human will.
But the unfaltering disposition of Jesus is expressed in words
uttered during that tremendous struggle: “Not my will but
thine be done!” (Lk. 22:42.) Before dying Jesus contemplated
from the height of His cross the whole panorama of His life.
He looked to see if even one iota of His Father’s will had not
been carried out. And seeing that everything was completely
done He exclaimed: "It is consummated!” (Jn. 19:30). “The
will of my Father has been perfectly fulfilled.” Only then
did He bow His head and yield up His spirit.
In the face of the example of Christ, it is not to be
wondered at that all the saints, especially as they attain the
very heights of sanctity, have one desire and one only. They
are captivated by a love, a passion, for the will of God.

The total surrender of
oneself to God is of in­
calculable importance in
all spirituality, and espe­
cially in the spirituality
Wc must awaken in our­
of the cross. In our set
selves an ever growing
of rules for the spiritual
hunger for Jesus.
life, total surrender is the
central point; the earlier
rules prepare the way for
it and the later rules
carry it through.
The substance of Christianity and the essence of perfec­
tion lies in charity, which is a mutual love or a love of
friendship. Now three acts, or three stages belong to love.
There is the love which is offered, the love which is given,
and the love which possesses. Or again, there is the love which
desires, the love which hands itself over, and the love which
unites. In the first stage, God manifests Himself and the
soul desires Him. In the second, God asks and the soul sur­
renders. In the third stage, God and the soul mutually possess
each other and are united to each other. These three stages
correspond respectively to this rule and to the two rules
which follow. We shall consider each one.

i
*2

RULE XIII

God disposes all things most sweetly and accommodates Him­
self admirably to our being and activity. Whenever He wants
something from us which of its nature is costly to us, He
makes its fulfillment easy by inspiring us with a desire to do it.
We readily do what we desire to do, and desire makes a rough
road smooth. Desire dilates the soul, creates in the soul a
greater capacity, makes of the soul an enlarged emptiness
which God and His graces hurry to fill. “Dilata os tuum et
implebo illud —Open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it,”
says the Lord (Ps. 80:11). According as we desire God more,
we possess Him more, especially in the next life but also
even in this life.
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Desire is highly praised in the Sacred Scriptures, and all
true religion before Jesus Christ can be summed up as a
gigantic desire for the coming of the Messias, the Desired
One of the Nations. After the coming of Jesus religion re­
mains an immense desire, the desire for the mystical coming
of Jesus to our hearts to fill and possess them; the desire for
His last coming, triumphant and glorious, to consummate
time and seal eternity.
Love, we have said, is the essence of Christianity and the
very model and form of perfection. Now is not love on earth
chiefly an insatiable desire? In heaven love will be possession,
but on earth it is a hunger and thirst that cannot be satis­
fied. No wonder that love and sorrow are inseparable on earth,
opposite sides of one reality. Bishop Gay has said of sorrow
that it is “perhaps nothing but another name for love on earth.”
If love is desire and desire sorrow, love becomes a kind of
martyrdom. The more insatiable the desire, so much the more
agonizing the martyrdom, as we see in those who achieve the
heights of sanctity. The desire to possess God was a martyr­
dom for the Blessed Virgin, the cause of her death. It moved
St. Paul to exclaim that he longed “to depart and to be
with Christ” (Phil. 1:23), and St. Teresa to affirm that
she died because she did not die.
Small wonder that spiritual authors ascribe such importance
to desire in the spiritual life, regarding it as a thermometer
or a gauge by which the spiritual life is measured. When a
person’s desires are sinful, his life is sinful. If his desires
are worldly, his life is worldly. If his desires are frivolous,
his life is frivolous. If a man has ceased to desire God and
divine things, his spiritual life is either dead or dying. If
his desires for God are mediocre, his life is lukewarm. When
his desire for God is ardent, his life is fervent; when his
desire for God is insatiable, his life is perfect and holy.
How a priest is consoled to find himself among souls of
great desires, noble ambitions, insatiable longings! These in­
dividuals are the timber of which saints and apostles arc made,
to set fire to the world. On the other hand, how distressing

Rtn.ES FOR TITE SPIRITUAL LlFE

it is to see an individual in whom all desire is
noble ambition snuffed out, all holy aspiration
illusioned, spiteful individuals trying to convince
that holiness is an illusion! Deadened souls in whom
resiliency has been extinguished!

*

·

123

extinct, all
dead! Dis­
themselves
all spiritual

♦

But is it really possible to find someone without desires?
Disillusioned with creatures wc shall indeed one day desire
none of the ephemeral and perishable goods around us. Know­
ing the inconstancy of human love we shall close our hearts
to all egotistical and mean affections. But how can anyone who
knows Jesus, if only slightly, fail, to bum with a desire to
possess and love Him? The Church sings beautifully of Jesus
that He is "totus desiderabilis — in every way desirable." Jesus
is desirable as God and desirable as man. Jesus is desirable
in His greatness and in His weakness; in the glory of His
triumphs and in the shame of His sorrows; in the infinite
power of His miracles and in the bitterness of His tears; in
the whole rich scale of His mysteries, as an infant in Bethlehem,
a youth in Nazareth, a miracle worker in Galilee, a martyr in
Gethsemani, a victim on Calvary, a host in the Eucharist. . . .
Jesus is desirable in whatever circumstances we find our­
selves, for there is no desire of the human heart which is
not satisfied in Him. If we are sad and desire some taste of
joy to sweeten the cup of bitterness, we have Jesus the joy
of heaven who has become our joy on earth. Jesus consoles us
as He consoled the Apostles in the sadness of His departure
from them, assuring them: "But I will see you again, and
your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no one shall take from
you" (Jn. 16:22). “Abide in my love . . . that my joy may be
in you, and that your joy may be made full’ (Jn. 15:10, 11).
If we are tired out by our trip along the rough road of life
and our heart is seeking rest, where will we find that rest
except with the beloved Disciple on the bosom of our Saviour?
Jesus invites us to follow Hirn and imitate Him precisely in
order that we may find rest for our souls (cf. Mt. 11:29). Open­

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ing His arms and His heart, He invites us: "Come to me, all
you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest”
(Mt. 11:28). You who arc tired out from work and suffering,
come to Me and I will be your rest and your consolation.
Arc we in search of a stable and enduring peace to calm
our restlessness and pacify our troubled spirit? In Jesus and
only in Jesus can we find it. For He and only He could
say in truth: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to
you” (Jn. 14:27). I do not give the false and deceiving peace
of the world; I give My peace, a peace which gives rest in
time and in eternity. I give that peace which “surpasses all
understanding” (Phil. 4:7), which causes “peace to reign in
your hearts” (cf. Col. 3:15) and joy to overflow in them. Jesus
the joy of heaven, is also the peace of earth. “For he himself
is our peace” (Eph. 2:14), says St. Paul. He has reconciled
earth with heaven and men with God, establishing in us
that reign which is “peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom.
14:17).
Are we passing through the supreme trial of life, interior
desolation of soul? Do we seem to have no one to love and
does it seem that there is none who loves us? Do we seem
abandoned in the midst of the selfishness of men? Well, in
spite of all, Jesus has remained with us, a most faithful
friend and companion. St. Peter’s overhasty claim (Mk. 14:31)
belongs most truly on the lips of Jesus, for though all should
abandon us, He never will. “And behold, I am with you all
days, even unto the consummation of the world” (Mt. 28:20).
When our mind is seeking out the truth, where shall it
find truth if not in Jesus “the light of the world” (Jn. 8:12),
Jesus who is truth itself? To whom else shall we go to avoid
deception if He alone has the words of everlasting life?
(cf. Jn. 6:69.) The words of men are deceitful and dead
words; the words of God, though communicated to the soul
without a sound, are words of truth and life.
When health is gone and strength has ebbed with the
years, when we feel that life is getting away from us, and
the coldness and the solitude of the grave lie open at our

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feet, how there reawakens in our soul the longing for immor­
tality, for a life which docs not end, crumble, and die! Well,
Jesus has told us, "I am the life” (Jn. 14:6). "I came that
they may have life, and have it more abundantly” (Jn. 10:10).
"I am the bread of life” (Jn. 6:35). The gift of Jesus in
the Eucharist sows in the furrows of our souls the seed of
immortality. "If anyone eat of this bread he shall live for­
ever” (Jn. 6:52). "He who believes in me, even if he die,
shall live” (Jn. 11:25).
If we have the souls of artists and long for a beauty which
does not wither or fade, an ideal and absolute beauty, where
shall we find the beauty for which we long but in Him who
has been called the most beautiful of the sons of men? (Cf. Ps.
44:3.) And if above all, we want a friend, a friend who will
satisfy the imperious and irresistible need of the human heart,
a faithful friend who will never betray us — who is that friend
if not Jesus, who, as Scripture says, “is called faithful and true”
(Apoc. 19:11)? There is not one single need of the human
heart that is not satisfied in Jesus. He is truly "wholly desirable,”
desirable in every way. How could anyone possibly not desire
Him?
What does it mean "to desire Jesus”? First of all, it means
to desire heaven, for heaven is the full possession of Jesus.
The truth is that we do not desire heaven enough. With our
attachments to the goods of this world, we are very different
from the Christians of the first ages of Christianity. Christian
life in those days was dominated by the longing for the com­
ing of Jesus. Christians greeted one another with the Hebrew
word, “Maranatha — Come, Lord Jesus.” Almost obsessed
by the shortness of life, they had constantly before their
eyes the truth that soon the day of liberty would come, and
the soul, free of the bonds of the mortal body, would go
forth to the full possession of its Lord. The first ages of
Christianity were still fragrant with the mortal presence of
Jesus in the world. Who could have lived with Jesus once
without loving Him and longing to be with Him again?

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His Apostles so loved Him that they were overwhelmed with
sorrow when He told them He must leave them. "Let not
your heart be troubled,” He said to them. “You believe in
God, believe also in me” (Jn. 14:1). “A little while and you
shall see me no longer; and again a little while and you
shall see me” (Jn. 16:16). It is true that in a little while you
will not see Me, but have confidence, wait patiently, and
again, in a little while, you will see Me. The first Christians
found their comfort in that “little while” of which Jesus
spoke. The whole of the present life, they knew, is but a
little while. When Jesus ascended into heaven the disciples
could not take their eyes off the sky into which their Master
had disappeared. “How can it be possible that we arc not
to see Him again?” And then they recalled His own words,
“In a little while you will see Me again. . . .” Those words
gave them strength to tear themselves away and return to
the struggle and toil of the world, to persecution and
martyrdom.
If we loved Jesus, we should desire the day of our death
as the day of the termination of our exile, the day in which
we too will see Him whom we have so loved: “A little while,
and you will see Me.” Desiring heaven more, we should love
the earth less.
*

*

♦

To desire Jesus is not only to desire heaven; it is to desire
an increase of grace in our souls. For grace is nothing else
but the life of Jesus in us. 'Hie seed of glory, of blessed­
ness, and of heaven, grace has its source in the very heart
of Christ. From there, as from a filled-up fountain, it overflows
to us. It gradually works its way into us, transforming us
and making us more and more like God. Holiness is nothing
else but the perfect divinization of the soul. When we shall
have become impregnated with the grace of Christ and our
whole heart filled up with Him, then we shall be saints. Each
shall be able to say with St. Paul, “It is now no longer I
that live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20),

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To desire Jesus is to desire not only grace but all the
means which will develop it in us. Among these means, there
is one that includes all the others. This is the cross. Yes, the
cross in its many manifestations. Jesus came to us by the
way of the cross and we cannot go to Him except by way
of the cross. To go to Jesus is to go not through glory but
through humiliation; not by way of convenience but by way
of renunciation; not by way of self-seeking, but by way of
abnegation; not by way of pleasure, but by way of mortifica­
tion. In a word, we go to Jesus by dying to ourselves. Jesus
longed for His passion. ‘‘I have a baptism to be baptized with,"
(a baptism of blood) “and how distressed I am until it is
accomplished!” (Lk. 12:50.) He desired to suffer as a means
of gaining our souls and bringing them to union with Him.
To unite ourselves to Christ, we too must desire to suffer.
Yet, although there is no other way, how many of us there
are like St. Peter, who take scandal at the cross. When Jesus
told His Apostles that He was going to suffer, Peter pro­
tested, “This will never happen to thee” (Mt. 16:22). The
cross is very beautiful in theory; but when it actually presents
itself, how few receive it well! With many the desire for
Jesus is purely theoretical and idealistic. It must in fact be­
come a threefold practical desire: the desire for heaven or the
full possession of God; the desire for sanctifying grace and its
increase, or the highest possession of God available to us on
earth; the desire for the indispensable means to the growth of
grace, the cross. “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for
justice, for they shall be satisfied” with the fullness of God

(Mt. 5:6).

Expressly, the total sur­
render is an act by which
a person freely and with
complete awareness of
Having duly prepared
what he is doing, offers
ourselves, we must forhimself to God in or­
mally make onr total
der that the will of God
surrender to God.
may be perfectly accom­
plished in him. Though
formally an act, this sur­
render produces a state
or habitual disposition
through which the individual remains constantly offered and
surrendered to God. Religious profession is one type of total

RULE XIV

surrender. It is an act, the act of making religious vows;
but by those very vows a person is established in a permanent
and definitive state.
Very closely connected with the total surrender is the
notion of “spiritual sacrifice.” Sacrifice involves essentially two
acts, one divine and the other human. In the human act the
victim offers himself to God, gives himself over to the divine
will, to be immolated. This human act can be called the
Offertory'. The divine act, or consecration, is the act by which
God accepts the victim and in this way consecrates it. This
is the Consecration.
Any contract of donation is completed only when these
two acts are united: the donor’s act of offering the gift and
the recipient’s act of accepting it. Once the recipient accepts,
the gift is his and belongs to him in full right. Now sacrifice
is like a solemn contract of donation between God and man.
Man offers, hands over, the gift of himself. When God accepts
the gift, the individual is no longer his own and belongs com­
pletely to God. He is consecrated to God, because whatever
is dedicated to divine service is said to be consecrated. The
total surrender is of key importance in the spirituality of the
cross precisely because this spirituality has sacrifice at its very
core. Sacrifice is a solemn giving to God. Man’s role is to
offer and surrender himself, to hand himself over not by
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129

halves or with limitations, but totally and without qualification,
as God deserves.

*

·

*

The state produced by the act of total giving is the source
of what has been called the Chain of Love. The Chain of Love
is formed by those who strive to live offered and surrendered
to the will of God, immolated and sacrificed. They cannot be
alone, however, for when they are alone their oblation is
worth nothing. They must be in union with the Word. Jesus
Christ and His Blessed Mother are the supreme examples of
the total surrender, the two perfect illustrations of this habitual
disposition which plays a part in the Chain of Love.
The first act of the Word upon becoming man, was to
give Himself over completely and totally to the will of His
Father. What His Father asked of Him was a whole life
of sacrifice and immolation. St. Paul tells us that on entering
the world Jesus said: “Behold, I come ... to do thy will, O
God” (Hebr. 10:7). The Blessed Virgin, too, began her mission
as Coredemptrix of the human race, the Mediatrix of all graces,
and Mother of God and men, by offering herself without re­
striction to the will of God. "Behold the handmaid of the
Lord; be it done to me according to thy word” (Lk. 1:38). The
life of any saint would tell the same story could we but know
his intimate relations with God.

*

*

*

Each new stage, each new ascent, in the spiritual life is
marked by a distinct act of total surrender, especially beginning
with the illuminative way. In the economy of our justification
God has imposed on Himself the rule of not carrying out
any of His intimate operations within us without first asking
our consent. These mysterious operations either are themselves
a true sacrifice or they require one. Since God wants the
sacrifice to be free and voluntary, He never sacrifices us unless
we freely offer ourselves to be sacrificed.
The heavenly Father sacrificed His Son, Jesus Christ, only
because Jesus offered Himself voluntarily, as Isaias had fore­

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told: "He was offered because it was His own will . .
(Isa. 53:7). Our Lord affirmed it of Himself: "For this reason
the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may
take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down
of myself. I have the power to lay it down, and I have the
power to take it up again . .
(Jn. 10:17, 18). Likewise when
God desired the Blessed Virgin to co-operate in the work
of the Redemption and sacrifice herself in union with her
Son, He sent an angel to ask her consent. The work of redemp­
tion did not begin until Mary said, "Behold the handmaid of
the Lord ...” (Lk. 1:38).
How are we to know when God is asking some special sacri­
fice of us? And if we do not know, how can we possibly make
our act of acceptance beforehand? Precisely because we do not
know the special sacrifice which God may ask of us, He in­
spires us to a total surrender. Such a surrender includes what­
ever God may ask.

♦

♦

*

To be efficacious and not merely verbal, to have true dignity
and seriousness, total giving must be preceded by total selfrenunciation. Wc can never give without losing ownership of
what we give. To give is to renounce ownership. Since we are
giving our very selves, since we ourselves arc being offered
and handed over, the giving plainly cannot take place unless
we truly renounce ourselves. Total giving and total self-re­
nunciation are not two distinct realities, but one reality under
a negative and positive aspect. Self-giving is the positive aspect,
self-renunciation the negative. To give ourselves we must dis­
possess ourselves of ourselves. If the renunciation is not total,
the surrender or handing over will not be total.
Renunciation or abnegation is in a certain way total by its
very nature. Self-denial, the negation of ourselves and of our
disordered inclinations, necessarily has something absolute about
it. One cannot deny by halves; a thing either is or is not.
Self-renunciation can be compared with death, for it is a

Rules for

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Bl

kind of death in the spiritual order. Nobody can be dead and
alive at the same time, or partly dead and partly alive. Like
death, real self-renunciation must be total.

*

*

•

There is one more reason why total surrender demands total
renunciation. As a vase cannot be completely filled with perfume
unless it is completely emptied of everything else, so our soul
cannot be completely filled with God unless it is empty of
all that is not God. Now in the last analysis the reason for
the total surrender is not and cannot be any other than to
attain full union with God. But God can fill a soul only
when through complete renunciation it has become completely
empty.
To be united with God we must be elevated and lifted up.
Every earthly tic must be broken. One bond only, however
insignificant, will suffice to hold us. A bird cannot fly freely,
whether it be imprisoned in a steel cage or held only by a
thread of silk. Renunciation breaks the ties that hold us and
permits us to rise to God. If one cord remains uncut, our
renunciation is not total and we remain fastened to the earth.
Renunciation must be definitive and perpetual —it is forever.
When we hand over something only for a determined time,
we are not said to give it but to lend it. Now the total
surrender as a complete and perfect giving must be definitive
and perpetual, not a loan. The corresponding self-renuncia­
tion or dispossession of self must be just as definitive and
perpetual. We give ourselves exactly in the measure in which
we cease to belong to ourselves.

•

·

·

No wonder that true total sunender is so difficult and so
laborious! How easily we can deceive ourselves, imagining that
we have really made the total surrender because in a moment
of passing enthusiasm wc pronounce the formula which ex­
presses total sunender. The truth is that as long as there is

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no total renunciation of self, total surrender is an illusion. On
the other hand, when we have truly renounced ourselves, our
surrender is genuine and effective.

*

*

*

Every virtue has a part to play in the total surrender. In­
ordinate inclinations of our sense appetite would make im­
possible our surrender to God. The virtue of temperance re­
presses these appetites. The virtue of fortitude gives us the
constancy to make our renunciation total and enduring. Pru­
dence moderates excesses in the application of the renunciation
and guides us to make the dispossession with due discretion.
As for justice, there is no greater justice than to give back to
God what is God’s; He is Lord and Sovereign of all that we
are and have.
The theological virtues enter in even more actively. Faith
makes us see the incomparable spiritual advantages which our
sacrifice brings and the right God has to receive it. Hope,
already exercised in the desire to belong to God, now animates
us to give ourselves over to Him, for we know that the secret
of our true happiness lies in surrender to Him. Total sur­
render is, above all, the specific and supreme act of charity.
The initial act of love is the desire to possess God. “You
would not desire to love Me, if you did not already love Me,”
Jesus says in the Imitation. But true love not only desires to
give, its very essence is to give. We give not only what we
have but above all what we are. To love is to give, and
especially to give oneself. The supreme love on all the earth
is the love that brings to completion the absolute giving of
ourselves to God —the total surrender.
Once more, we are confronted with the essence of the spirit
of the cross: love and sorrow. Total surrender is sorrow because
it is a sacrifice; it is love because it is giving. Sorrow is the
essence of the total surrender. Love is its cause and its goal.
We surrender ourselves because we love and in order to con­
summate our love in union.

Rules for

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B3

Because the total surrender is so basic it cannot be con­
fined to the spirituality of the cross or to any other particular
school. It is present in all true spirituality, sometimes under
another name, sometimes with different variations and
modalities.
Ignatian spirituality finds its most famous expression in that
wonderful little work, The Spiritual Exercises. On the very
first page, St. Ignatius tells us that a man must be "indifferent"
with respect to everything created. What is this indifference
but an attitude of detachment and total self-renunciation? Now
total renunciation of self, as we have already seen, is but the
negative aspect of "total surrender.” This is why commentators
on the Exercises teach that this indifference is not apathetic,
passive, or quietist, but eminently active and operative; it
detaches a man from creatures only in order that he may
fly to God, surrender himself to God and be united with Him.
At the end of the Exercises is a section called “Comtemplation as a means to love.” A sort of summary of the Exercises
and a compendium of the whole of Christian perfection, it
concludes with a true "total surrender” expressed in the
beautiful, traditional formula: “Take, O Lord, my entire
liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my will. All that
I am and have, Thou hast given me, and I surrender it all
to Thee, to be so disposed as accords with Thy divine will.
Give me Thy love and grace, and with these I am rich
enough; I desire nothing more.”
«

«

*

Another of the most celebrated spiritualities in the Church
is that of the so-called French school, Berullian or Sulpician
spirituality. It was adopted by the religious families of Cardinal
Berulle (Oratorians), Father Olier (Sulpicians), St. John Eudes
(Eudists and Religious of the Good Shepherd), St. Vincent
de Paul (Vincentians and Sisters of Charity), St. Louis Grignon
de Montfort (Company of Mary and Daughters of Wisdom),
Venerable Libermann, and others. Of great influence in the
spiritual formation of a large number of the clergy in our

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seminaries, it is represented by such men as Bossuet, Thomassin, Msgr. Gay, and Father Faber.
Tin's spirituality looks first of all to the primordial duty
of every man not only as a Christian but simply as God's
rational creature, to adore God. Jesus Christ came into the
world precisely with the mission, intimately united to that of
His priesthood, to raise up true adorers who would adore the
Father in spirit and in truth. “God is spirit, and they who wor­
ship him must worship in spirit and in truth” (Jn. 4:23, 24).
This means that men must adore in union with the Word,
Eternal Truth, and under the motion of the Holy Spirit,
Spirit of the Father and the Son. Tire proper role of the
Incarnate Word is to be the mediator of redemption and
adoration through His sacrifice. No one can carry out the
great duty of adoration or succeed in being a perfect adorer
of the Godhead except by participating in the "states” of the
divine Mediator and perfect Adorer. Wc must unite ourselves
to Christ, transform ourselves into Him, thinking, willing, and
working with Him for the glory of the Father. Such union
with Christ is realized by means of “renunciation” and "ad­
herence.” We renounce ourselves and adhere to Jesus Christ.
We dispossess ourselves and enter into communion with the
“states” of the Incarnate Word.
Father Olier contrasts quite clearly the individual who has
renounced himself and the individual who has not. He who
is not yet dispossessed is self-centered. Literally full of self,
he confides and trusts in himself and desires to be esteemed
by others. Habitually agitated, disturbed, restless, sad, illhumored, he takes affront at the slightest word or least discour­
tesy. On the other hand, a man who has renounced himself
is a man who has gone out of himself and is completely empty
of self. Distrusting his own powers and relying on Jesus Christ,
he is forgetful of self and tries to hide himself. He always
maintains an even disposition, lives in peace, and permits
nothing to irritate him. He suffers all things without disturbance
of soul.
Now, is not Father Olier describing the very total self­

Rules for

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13$

renunciation of which wc were speaking earlier? Is not "ad­
herence" to Jesus Christ or communion with the "states” of
the Incarnate Word simply the positive element of the total
surrender? By this adherence we first of all give joyful ratifica­
tion to the supernatural state in which we in fact find our­
selves. Wc accept all that God has disposed for us and every­
thing that Christ has done for us. In addition, wc enter into
the spirit of each one of our Lord’s mysteries. While these
mysteries may indeed have passed as far as the circumstances
of time arc concerned, in their power they are present and
enduring. The love which Jesus put into these mysteries re­
mains, and the dispositions which He had in the past He
continues to have now in His divine heart. Communion in
the life of Christ requires a mutual donation. The very name
indicates this — communion, “mutual union.” "It is called
communion,” says Father Olier, "because the soul gives itself
to God in order to share in His gifts.” Λ person dispossesses
himself only for the purpose of belonging to Jesus Christ. The
spirituality of Berulle and Olier is, then, a special form of the
“total surrender.”
Moreover, the celebrated "true devotion” to Mary as taught
by St. Grignon de Montfort is nothing but a total surrender,
a consecration of all that we are and have to the Incarnate
Wisdom through Mary.
Franciscan spirituality has perhaps been more popularized
among the faithful than any other, thanks to the Third Order
extended throughout the world. This spirituality has two
fundamental notes: poverty and seraphic love. Poverty makes
itself effective by the privation of material goods in so far as
this is prudent. But poverty is above all affective, a total
detachment of self from creatures. Tin's detachment from every­
thing created is taken to be the necessary condition that God
may become our single treasure, our only wealth, our one
love. The celebrated exclamation of St. Francis expresses this
well, “My God and my all!” “For me nothing counts but
God,” he would say. "God is all, everything else nothing.”
St. Francis’ words are a reminder of St. Paul speaking of the

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blessed state of creation when time will have come to an end:
. That God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). Do we not
see here the two aspects, negative and positive, of the total
surrender, a poverty which despoils us of everything in order to
give us over totally to the love of Christ?

♦

#

♦

A study of other Catholic schools of spirituality would show
that in one form or another the “total surrender” is an essen­
tial element in Christian perfection. The proper character of
the total surrender in the spirituality of the cross lies in the
aspect of sacrifice. The efficient and final cause of the sur­
render is love; its essence, sorrow; its condition, purity. Purity
is the necessary condition because the victim cannot be ac­
cepted if it is not pure. The sacrifice must be united to that
of Jesus Christ and no one can be united to Him unpurified.
Purity, in its negative aspect, is not really distinct from total
renunciation of self. In the spirituality of the cross, the three
characteristics of the total surrender are then: love, sorrow,
and purity.

Through the "total sur­
render” we give ourselves
to God in principle and
Having formally made
by right. When we do
over everything to God,
this sincerely and with
we must put this com­
our whole will, we have
mitment into practice,
already
done a great deal;
actually giving to our
we have laid the founda­
Saviour each thought
tion of all the rest.
and word and work.
Nevertheless the task is
still before us of making
the surrender effective.
What we have given in general we must now give in utmost
detail. What we have handed over by right, we must now hand
over in fact. What belongs to God by an act of our will,
must now become His by the activity of all our powers.
God as our Creator has the most absolute right over us.
As His creatures we belong to Him wholly and completely.
But because God willed man to be the free master of his
own activities, man is expected by the free determination of
his will to surrender himself to God by a new title. In the
state of original justice man was God’s in this way. But sin,
original and actual, repudiated and annulled man's original
donation. Jesus Christ then redeemed us, restoring to us the
power to give ourselves to God through that free and loving
surrender which is the fruit of charity. Already belonging to
God through creation, we can offer ourselves anew to God
through charity, give ourselves freely and lovingly. When we
say to God “I love You,” we signify that we esteem God above
all things, that we prefer Him to everything else, that we
desire for Him every good. But we further signify that we
surrender ourselves to Him, give ourselves to Him with all
that we are, do, and have.
The practical way to make our surrender effective is to
consecrate to God our activity. A mother manifests her love
for her child not only by caresses and words of endearment
but also by consecrating herself to his service; she literally
squanders on him her time, her strength, her health, her life.

RULE XV

3

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This is how wc must give ourselves to God. We must
aim to carry out His will completely, satisfy I lis every desire,
accept whatever He disposes, comply with His every wish.
Total surrender demands of us that we consecrate ourselves to
God’s service for the perfect accomplishment of His will. The
way to serve another human being is to do as he wishes,
sacrificing our own will and fulfilling his. This also is how we

serve God.

♦

*

♦

Now the divine will manifests itself chiefly in three ways:
the will which commands, the will which disposes, the will
which counsels or desires.
The will which commands is a manifestation of God’s
sovereign authority. God has employed it immediately in the
Commandments, mediately in the Precepts of the Church.
By this will God commands that this thing be done and that
avoided. Not to subject oneself to this will, or to disobey it,
is to commit a sin, serious or light, according to the importance

of the precept.
The will which disposes is manifested by means of events,
favorable or adverse. These events may come from irrational
nature or they may come immediately from the free will of
men. In any case they come under at least the permissive
will of God, for nothing, great or small, takes place in the
whole universe, without God at least permitting it. The fall
of an empire or the fall of a hair — God’s plan has a place
for both.
The will which counsels is manifested, not when God com­
mands or disposes, but simply when He makes known a
desire, a wish. To fail to satisfy this divine will is an im­
perfection, not a sin. Priestly, religious, or other vocations per­
tain to this will, as do also the inspirations of the Holy
Spirit and all the motions of grace which incline us to practice
the virtues.
*
*
♦

Corresponding to the three manifestations of the divine
will there are three degrees in which we may surrender our­

Rules

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B9

selves to it. The fiist consists in striving to fulfill with in­
creasing fidelity the preceptive will of God, obeying the divine
Commandments, honoring the Precepts of the Church, sub­
jecting ourselves to the orders of our lawful superiors, and
carrying out the obligations of our state. This solid, necessary
foundation for the whole spiritual edifice admits of no sub­
stitute. Without it we build on sand. It is the first purification
of the soul and corresponds to the purgative way. This sur­
render requires us to eliminate not only mortal sin, but also
that habitual venial sin which is so contrary to a fervent
spiritual life. It calls for ceaseless struggle against all deliberate
sin, including sins of frailty. Fidelity to God’s will here may
mean that we eventually receive from God the grace of avoid­
ing even semideliberate venial sins, a misery which op­
presses those far advanced in the way of perfection.
The second degree of surrender to God’s will consists in
applying ourselves to accept ever more readily the will of
God as manifested in events, great or small, especially when
they are contrary to our plans, or when they humiliate or in­
jure us, as do poverty, sickness, failure, loneliness, and interior
aridity. The first step here is that resignation to which the
most elementary Christian sense counsels us. If the will of
God has to be fulfilled regardless, what do we gain by rebelling
against it? We only lose our peace of mind and increase our
pain. "To kick against the goad” (Acts 9:5) is of no use and
only makes things worse.
Resignation then is the beginning, but it is insufficient for
one who would surrender himself to God completely. We
must rise higher and learn to accept joyfully whatever the
divine will brings. After all, our faith teaches us that God
disposes or permits nothing that is not for our greater good.
God is not so much a master who punishes as a Father who
loves. Because He loves us, He heals us and purifies us, working
to perfect us with the chisel of sorrow.
But even joyful acceptance is not sufficient. We must aim
at complete conformity of our will with the will of God by
complete abandonment to this same most holy will. But

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Rui.ES FOR THE SPIRITUAL LlFF.

since abandonment responds to the divine will in its every
manifestation, it belongs rather to the third stage which wc
are about to consider.

The third and last degree of surrender to God’s will re­
quires us not only to obey the will which commands and
accept the will which disposes, but to acquiesce completely in
the divine good pleasure, knowing that whatever God desires
must be holy and sanctifying. To obey the will which com­
mands and accept the will which disposes is the work of
justice. But to conform ourselves to the divine will in even
its slightest desires; to abandon ourselves to that will in its
every manifestation; to wish nothing except what God wishes;
to desire nothing except what God desires; to love only what
God loves; to die to all self-will in order to live only for the
divine will — this is the supreme work of love.
‘‘The sweet, full, living ineffable act of abandonment!”
writes Bishop Gay, “Is it not, in fact, the most natural in­
clination, the most personal and therefore most imperious
necessity, in fine, the supreme and decisive act of love? To
abandon oneself is more than to give oneself. Jesus gave Him­
self to us in the Incarnation. But He abandoned Himself to
us in His Passion. And He remains abandoned to us in the
Eucharist. For this reason the cross and the altar —which at
bottom are two aspects of the same thing — the cross and
the altar are the last word of the love of Jesus.
“To abandon oneself is to renounce oneself, to leave oneself,
to dispossess oneself, to lose oneself, without reserve, without
missing that which one gives. ... To abandon oneself is, as
it were, to melt and become liquid, according to the words of
the Spouse in the Canticle: ‘My soul melted when he spoke'
(Cant. 5:6). Of itself a liquid has no shape whatever. Its shape
is the shape of the vase which contains it. If we put it in ten
different sorts of vases it takes on ten different shapes. . . .
So the soul which has abandoned itself to God is liquid under
His word. And not only under the word which commands

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but also under the word of simple desire and of slightest

preference.”
Abandonment, as St. Francis de Sales explains, is the death
of self-will: ‘‘We call death a transition in order to signify
that death is nothing but a passing from one life to another,
and that to die is nothing but to pass beyond the confines of
this mortal life in order to arrive at eternal life. To be sure,
our will cannot die, just as the soul cannot; but at times it
passes beyond the limits of ordinary life to live only by the
will of God. And this happens when it does not know of
anything, or desire anything, except total abandonment to the
good pleasure of divine Providence, joining itself in such a
way to this good pleasure, that it can be seen no longer, com­
pletely hidden as it is with Jesus Christ in God, where it lives,
now not it, but the will of God in it.”
Bossuet speaks of seeking "something in man that will
be perfectly one; an act which will embrace everything in its
unity, containing on the one hand everything that there is in
man, and on the other hand responding to everything that
there is in God.” Bossuet finds what he is seeking in the act
of abandonment. To abandon oneself is to give onself wholly,
for abandonment is "total surrender,” the perfect immolation,
the holocaust of the whole man. Abandonment is the sacrifice
of the will, and by one’s will one gives one’s whole self.
With true abandoment to God there remains nothing more
that man can give, nothing more that God can ask. . . .
•

*

♦

This third stage of surrender implies a special docility to
the inspirations of the Holy Spirit. These inspirations become
increasingly frequent. If our correspondence grows proportion­
ately the activity of our spiritual life will be made perfect. The
Holy Spirit will take more and more into his own hands our
spiritual guidance. The Gifts of the Holy Spirit will be exer­
cised with increasing frequency until they come to predominate
in our spiritual life.
The predominance of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit is the

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characteristic sign of entry into the mystical life. Under the
influence of the Gifts, the soul continues to practice the vir­
tues but now in the divine manner proper to the Gifts rather
than in the human way proper to the simple virtues. In the
manner of working proper to man, the human manner, an
individual practices the virtues guided and directed by the
light of reason, which God has given for this purpose. This
is the ascetical period of the spiritual life. Even though we
speak of the “human way” here, grace, far from being ex­
cluded, is everywhere present. Sanctifying grace transforms the
soul, the infused virtues supematuralizc its faculties, actual
graces move the faculties in their operations. But in spite of
the presence of grace, the manner of acting is still human;
for man acts as man so long as his actions have right reason
as their rule.
Practiced in this human way, to how many imperfections
the virtues are subject! As Scripture says, “the thoughts of
mortal men are fearful, and our counsels uncertain” (Wisd.
9:14). How much ignorance there is to obscure reason, how
many doubts to torment it, how many limitations to hem it
in! Human reason, even illuminated by faith, is like a man
feeling his way in the midst of the half darkness of the night.
But when the Gifts come to predominate, the Holy Spirit
is the one who immediately moves, guides, directs. He indeed
causes the practice of the virtues. But now, in this divine
manner of operation, the norm of the virtues is not human
reason but divine Wisdom. What a difference! The virtues
do not now suffer from the vacillations, the timidity, the un­
certainty of poor human reason. On the contrary, they share
in the certainty, the clarity, the immutability of divine reason.
Instead of the vacillations of human prudence there is the
audaciousness of the Gift of Counsel. The inconstancies of a
love which is just budding are replaced by the fidelity and
fearlessness of heroic love!
Virtues, exercised under the influence of the Gifts, are
called by St. Thomas “iam purgati animi — of the soul al­
ready purified” (S.T. I—II, q. 61, a. 5). They are the virtues

Rules for

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M3

of the perfect, the virtues which produce heroic acts and lead
to that “heroicity of virtue” which marks the saints. An in­
dividual living habitually under the influence of the Gifts and
moved as constantly by the Holy Spirit as is possible in this
life, has by this very fact become Godlike not only in his
being but in the whole of his activity. He has become as
perfectly supematuralized as He can become on earth. He has
surrendered totally to God. . . . There remains only heaven,
where the soul will lose itself forever in the bosom of God
. .. the consummation of the total surrender.

«

♦

♦

Small wonder that the total surrender is the center, the
substance, the essence of the spirituality of the cross! The
whole program of the spiritual life can be reduced to three
steps: (1) to prepare for the total surrender; (2) to make the
surrender explicitly and formally; (3) to complete the sur­
render by giving to God in each moment of life the whole
of one’s being and the whole of one’s activity.

Λι.ι. LOVE, but especially
divine love, tends to the
possession of and union
with the beloved. This
Surrendered to the di­
is the law of love, its
vine will, wc arc to live
essence, its life. Love at­
in spiritual joy and per­
tains its definitive con­
fect peace.
summation and ultimate
perfection, its rest and
peace, only when union
is realized and possession
achieved. So long as it
has not arrived at possession, love is desire and hope. But when
perfect and consummated, it is a possession which is ever­
lasting—a definitive, eternal union.
Now union and possession produce in the soul an indescrib­
able inner satisfaction, difficult to define, which is at once
exultation, jubilation, satiety, rest, fruition, and happiness. This
happiness is the ripest fruit of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of
Love. Sacred Scripture calls it “joy in the Holy Spirit.” We
may call it here “spiritual joy.” Considered in all its perfec­
tion, this joy is not and cannot be of the earth. For the

RULE XVI

indefectible union of the soul with God, His definitive posses­
sion, is the way of heaven. Love on earth has to be hope or
desire. In the measure in which love increases on earth, it
becomes a true martyrdom as hope is enlivened and excruciat­
ing desire enkindled.
Yet the love of God on earth is also a fountain of joy.
Charity' on earth and charity in heaven are not two charities;
they are essentially and substantially one identical love. If
in heaven charity unites us with God and causes us to possess
Him, then already on earth it must in some way unite us
to Him and cause us to enter into the possession of Him.
If faith is the substance of the things for which we hope,
and if hope gives us a divine guarantee of possessing these
things, charity actually gives us the possession of God and
unites us with Him. St. John says, "He who abides in love
abides in God, and God in him" (1 Jn. 4:16).
144

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145

Through charity the Christian begins to enjoy God now,
as a kind of anticipation of heaven and foretaste of bless­
edness. If this present delight is not the definitive and con­
summated happiness of heaven, neither is it the ephemeral
and passing happiness of earth. It is a marvelous mixture
of joy and desire, hope and possession, happiness and sorrow.
Desire can be a torment. Because the joy that accompanies
charity in this life includes desire, it does not exclude sorrow
and it co-exists with suffering. When Lacordaire asserted that
"melancholy is the atmosphere of great souls,” perhaps he
had in mind the souls of the saints, which carry an ocean of
joy in an abyss of sorrow. The saints say with the Psalmist:
“According to the multitude of my sorrows in my heart, Thy
comforts have given joy to my soul” (Ps. 93:19).

The solid foundation, indestructible base, and inexhaustible
source of Christian joy is charity. In the measure in which
I love God and God loves me, joy will flood my soul. In
baptism I was justified; I received sanctifying grace, with
the infused virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and con­
sequently I received charity. If since baptism I have had the
misfortune to lose charity, contrition and the sacrament of
penance have given it back to me. The other sacraments
worthily received, and all the meritorious acts of my life can
only have served to increase it. Now charity, as a love of
friendship between God and the soul, supposes two great
truths: God loves me; I love God. In this ‘loves me” and this
“I love,” I must understand that the reference is not just
to humanity in general but also quite directly to me.
I Love God
To have absolute certitude that I love God with the super­
natural love of charity, I should need a revelation. But human
life ordinarily requires no such absolute certitude. For much
of human life moral certitude suffices. I have a moral certitude
as to who are my parents, who are my brothers, who are the

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lawfully constituted civil authorities. I have the same moral
certitude that I have been baptized, that Father John is a
real priest, that Eugenio Pacclli is the Pope. I have this
certitude that a given particular host is consecrated. Such moral
certitude is sufficient to put my mind at rest, to give a solid
foundation to domestic and social relations and even super­
natural ones.
Now God has established the means for me to attain grace
and to possess charity. As He has accommodated these means
to human weakness, they do not require talent, learning,
wealth, or influence; good will suffices. If with good will I
make use of the proper means — for example, sacramental con­
fession — I can have moral certainty of possessing God’s grace,
and consequently that “the charity of God is poured forth
in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us”
(Rom. 5:5). I ought, then, to lay aside pessimism and
scruples, and permit the Holy Spirit to give testimony to
my spirit that I am of the sons of God (Rom. 8:17) and
that consequently I love God with that spontaneous love
which a son has for his father. Can a son reasonably doubt
that he loves his father? Neither should I doubt that I love
God.
*
♦
♦
Sacred Scripture gives me signs by which I am able to
verify my love for God. First of all, is it not the mark
of a truly religious person to strive to avoid sin precisely
as offensive to God? Does not one who is truly religious
wish never to have transgressed the divine precepts? Does
he not try to carry them out as far as frailty permits? If
he does fall, is it not more through weakness than malice?
Jesus said: “If you love me, keep my commandments” (Jn.
14:15).
Another proof that I love God can be found in my readi­
ness to sacrifice myself for Him. He has said: “If anyone wishes
to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his
cross, and follow me” (Mt. 16:24). To follow Jesus is the
proper movement of love, and to follow Jesus is to embrace

Rules for the Spiritual Life

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suffering. If I embrace Christian suffering, this is a proof
that I am following my Saviour. No one can love without
becoming like the person loved. If I carry in my flesh the
marks of the Passion or bear in my soul the ignominies of
the Crucified, I am becoming like Him. This is a proof of
love for Him. The Imitation remarks that one cannot live
with love and yet be without sorrow. Surely I can conclude
that if I live in sorrow because of God, I do it for the love
of God.
*

♦

♦

Objections may needlessly trouble the sincere Christian
about his standing with God. The text of Sacred Scripture
is sometimes alleged: “And yet man knoweth not whether he
be worthy of love, or hatred" (Eccles. 9:1). But this text does
not mean that no one actually knows whether God loves
or hates him. It refers rather to our lack of certainty about
the future and to the mysterious conduct of God with the
good and evil alike. Translated literally from the original
Hebrew, it would read: “Man is ignorant of both love and
hate." According to the characteristics of oriental style, by
love is to be understood works of love; and by hate, works of
the contrary sort. The Scripture is saying that man does not
know if the happenings of life, whether favorable or adverse, are
rewards or punishments.
It happens frequently that things go ill with the good,
as if they were bad, and well with the bad as if they were
good. God is patient with sinners and postpones their punish­
ment, hoping for their conversion. On the other hand, He
may try the just, sometimes through the whole of life, in
order that they may be more abundantly rewarded in heaven.
Moreover, there are many natural and social calamities —
earthquakes, wars, accidents — that come upon all alike, the
good and the bad without distinction. God’s conduct in the
governance of the world is mysterious and beyond our under­
standing. But we do know that in the end good (love) will
definitely triumph, and evil (hate) will be vanquished. And
at all events, the above text from Scripture is wrongly quoted

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as meaning that we have no assurance whatsoever of how wc
stand in the eyes of God.
Sometimes the words of our Lord arc cited: "Many are
called, but few arc chosen” (Mt. 22:14). Our Lord is under­
stood to be saying that the number of the saved is very few.
But here again there is an error in interpretation. Jesus
speaks these words on the occasion of the parable of the
marriage banquet and applies them to the call to faith, or
to the call which God makes to all men to come into the
Church. This invitation He made first to the Jewish people
by means of the prophets. But they despised the invitation
and failed to come to the banquet; that is, they made them­
selves unworthy of the gift of faith. Afterward, by means of
the Apostles and their successors, God invited the gentiles
or all the non-Jewish peoples on earth to enter the Church.
The man without the wedding garment represents a person
who has faith but not sanctifying grace. Since nobody can
enter heaven without sanctifying grace, while one can indeed
belong to the Church without it, this detail confirms the point
that the parable is speaking not of salvation but of the call

to the faith.
“Many are called but few are chosen.” How can these
words be applied to salvation, or how can one argue from
them that the number of those to be saved is small, when
the parable ends by speaking of the hall as filled with the
multitude of those invited to the feast, and when of this
multitude only one is thrown out, only one dismissed? The
reference must be rather to the beginning of the parable, to
the calling of the Jewish people to the faith. God called the
whole people of Israel — multi vocati. But few among them
responded — the Apostles, the disciples, the first Christians —
pauci vero electi. Jesus’ words need not, then, disturb the
peace of mind of the sincerely practicing member of Christ’s
Church.
Finally there are the words of St. Paul: "Work out your
salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12). When I con­

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149

sider my own misery, I certainly have very good reason to be
in fear and trembling. But looking to the divine goodness
and mercy, I have immensely greater reason for confidence.
The divine goodness surpasses my human misery infinitely —
and exactly to that extent ought my confidence and security
to exceed my fear and trembling. The fact is that this truth,
"I love God” has not only a purely moral certainty. It
participates after a manner in the certainty of hope, and
consequently also in the certainty of faith. In order to explain
this point, difficult and mysterious, let us recall that there are
different classes of certitude.
In the natural order, there is scientific certitude, caused by
evidence, such as two plus two equals four, and there is the
certitude which rests on human authority, on the testimony
of persons who are not deceived and who do not deceive us.
In the supernatural order there is the certitude of faith which
depends upon the authority of God. This is the certitude
I have for divinely revealed truths. There is also the certitude
of the Gift of Wisdom, which results from a certain connaturality or sympathy of the soul with divine things, due
to the special inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
The theological virtue, hope, which relates to the possession
of God in heaven, is certain. It has not the certitude produced
by evidence or by a private revelation; but as St. Thomas
teaches (S.T., II—II, q. 18, a. 4), it is certain with a certitude
which it derives from faith. Through hope I have the cer­
tainty of being on the sure road which will lead to heaven
and the possession of God, guided by the infallible light of
faith and relying upon the absolute trustworthiness of the
promises of God. I am, moreover, in a certain way sure of
arriving at the goal, because even though through my own
misery I can lose my way, at least the help of God cannot
fail me. I am somewhat like a person traveling by train from
Chicago to New York; he is certain that he goes by a safe
route and has the assurance, barring a possible but not probable
accident, of arriving at his destination. Now, what is the road

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of salvation but grace and the virtues, especially charity or the
love of God? “I love God" is then a truth which participates,
after a manner, in the certainty of hope.
Once again, each of us must thrust aside false rigorism,
the disagreeable aftertaste of Jansenism, and with the assurance
given by Christian hope say to our Saviour: “Jesus, thou
knowest all things, thou seest into the very depths of my
heart and . . . thou knowest that I love thee” (cf. Jn. 21:17).

*

*

♦

God Loves Me
With more certainty still it can be shown that God loves
me. St. Paul said, “Dilexit me. . . . He loved me” (Gal. 2:20).
Now he did not say these words speaking as St. Paul, that is,
taking himself precisely as a saint. How far was the great
Apostle from believing himself a saint! He referred to him­
self simply as a human being, or at most a Christian. Con­
sequently, each can appropriate St. Paul's words to himself
and make them his own with full right and truth. I should
not say, then, simply, in the abstract, “God loves men, God
loves the human race.” In a concrete, individual, and absolutely
particular way, I ought to say, “God loves me.” God loves
me personally, just as I am. lie knows me and calls me by
my own proper name. “He calls his own sheep by name” (Jn.

10:3).
In order to understand better the meaning of the formula,
“God loves me,” I can meditate on the two extremes which
it unites “God and I. . . . God and my soul.” God, the omnip­
otent, who has made all things from nothing; the infinite,
whose perfection has no limit whatsoever; the eternal, who
has neither beginning nor end and whose years, as Scripture
says “shall not fail” (Hebr. 1:12); goodness itself, who has
placed in all creation a trace of the tenderness of His heart;
God, holiness by essence, in the presence of whom the very
angels veil their faces and feel themselves stained. . . .
And I, poor creature, less than a drop of water compared
with the ocean, a grain of sand lost in the immensity of

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the desert, a bit of dust hanging in infinite space. ... I
a sinner, stained by so many falls, who have descended into
that abyss more bottomless than nothing, the abyss of sin —
sin committed not once, but many times, so many times that
I cannot count them. . . . This God, so great, loves me who
am so small; this God so good and kind, loves me who am
so ungrateful; this God so holy loves me so great a sinner.
If I could penetrate deeply into this truth, if in the
fervor of prayer I could but understand it, if at the feet
of my Eucharistic Saviour, I could by God’s gift of under­
standing penetrate His secrets! In these three words, “God
loves me,” there is enough to fill my heart with joy and to
fill it for eternity. They are the cause for a jubilation so
intense as to place me beside myself with joy and throw
me into an ecstasy of love and gratitude. . . . But I do not
comprehend these words. If I did, could I go about seek­
ing those trifling earthly attractions which are worthless in
comparison with God? Would I not rather seek only the
love of God? In this love my every desire would find rest,
my every anxiety peace, my every ambition satiety, my every
sorrow joy . . . like the saints I would find myself intensely
consoled even in the very worst hardships of life.

*

·

·

I should note that there is not question here of a desire:
"Would that God loved me!” Nor a promise, as if God
had said: "If you are good, I will love you." Neither is
there question of probability: "I hope that God loves me.”
Nor do I believe this because some human being with author­
ity — a priest, a prelate, a saint —has assured me of it. No,
this truth, "God loves me,” is a truth of faith. With an
absolute certainty about it, it rests upon the authority of
God and is expressly contained in Sacred Scriptures. Even
in the Old Testament God affirmed this truth many times.
In the book of Proverbs there is a plea which on the lips of
God appears inconceivable: "My son, give me thy heart”
(Prov. 23:26). To give one's heart is to love. God would

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not ask me for my love if He had not first loved me. God’s
plea means that He wishes His love to be requited.
In order to tell me more eloquently of His love, God
compares it with the greatest earthly love there is: "As one
whom the mother caresseth,” he says, "so will I comfort you”
(Isa. 66:13). "Can a woman forget her infant, so as not to
have pity on the son of her womb? And if she should forget,
yet will not I forget thee” (Isa. 49:15). The Wise Man asserts
that God cannot cease to love me: “Thou hast mercy upon
all, because thou canst do all things, and overlookest the sins
of men for the sake of repentance. For thou lovest all things
that are, and hatest none of the things which thou hast made:
for thou didst not appoint, or make any thing hating it.
And how could anything endure, if thou wouldst not; or be
preserved, if not called by Thee? But Thou sparest all: be­
cause they are Thine, O Lord, who lovest souls” (Wisd.
11:24-27). According to the Scripture, God’s reason for creat­
ing me is His love for me. Now conservation in being is a
prolongation of creation, and therefore if I continue to be,
the reason is that God continues to love me. I can reason
legitimately then: "I exist, therefore God loves me.” Am I
sure of my existence? Then I can be sure that God loves me.
♦

*

*

But the New Testament is where the affirmations of love
abound, especially on the lips of our divine Saviour. In the
immortal pages of the Gospel according to St. John we
read: “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten
Son” (Jn. 3:16). Tire treasure of a father is his son. The
wealth of God is His Word. And this wealth, this treasure,
He gave to the world, proving His love for it. We have al­
ready seen St. Paul asserting: “Jesus loved me,” and we have
seen that each can apply these words personally to himself.
St. Paul adds that Christ “gave Himself up for me” (Gal.
2:20). Jesus’ passion and death are the great proof of His
love. The Father has loved me even to the point of giving
me His Son. Tire Son has loved me even to the point of

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sacrificing Ilis life for me. Moreover, Jesus died for all men
without exception. He died, consequently, for each one of
us, for me, as if no one else had existed on the earth. Jesus
said: “Greater love than this no one has, that one lay down
his life for his friends” (Jn. 15:13). And He did this for

His enemiesl
At the last supper, how the tender love of Jesus over­
flows! He speaks the almost inconceivable words: "As the
Father has loved me, I also have loved you” (Jn. 15:9). Will
I ever understand, either on earth or in heaven, the infinite
love of the Father for the Son, the Son of His eternal good
pleasure? This love is not, in scholastic terminology, an acci­
dent superadded to substance as is the love of creatures; a
love consequently unstable, passing, fickle, and ephemeral.
God’s love is a substantial, personal love, a love which is
God and which is His Holy Spirit. Can I ever understand
such a love as this? Well, this is the love with which Jesus
has loved me. After flinging out before the world such an
assurance, He had a right to add, “Abide in my love." How
touching to find God petitioning His creatures not to forget
Him, beseeching His creatures to love Him faithfully and
forever. Jesus concludes, “These things I have spoken to you
that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made
full” (Jn. 15:11).

What fathomless meaning in the words, “As the Father
has loved Me, I also have loved you.” First of all, as with
the whole Gospel, these words are meant not only for all in
general but for me in particular. “As my father loves me, I
love you in particular, my beloved son." In God there are not
two loves, one for the divine persons among themselves and
the other for creatures. There is only one love, the Holy
Spirit. The Father and the Son love each other in the Holy
Spirit and through the Holy Spirit. This substantial love unifies
them, as the Church so frequently affirms in praying
. .
in the unity of the Holy Spirit." Now with this same love.

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God loves each soul in particular and all together. Consequently,
He loves each with an infinite love which cannot admit of
more or less. But in His infinite love He showers grace on each
according to the vocation of each. The graces of a Maria
Goretti or a Brother Benildo, who live unnoticed and hidden
in the world, are not the graces of a Joan of Arc, a Vincent de
Paul, a Don Bosco, who have conspicuous public missions.
Besides affirming in Sacred Scripture that He loves me,
God shows His love in another and even more eloquent way
— the Eucharist! In the Eucharist the whole Jesus is present:
His divinity, His body and soul, His virtues, His merits, His
mysteries, His sacrifice, His passion, His death . . . and the
Host which contains the whole Jesus, is it not available to
every Christian every morning? After going to Communion,
each of us, the very holy and the wretched alike can say:
"Jesus loves me, and because He loves me and wishes to mani­
fest His love to me, He has given Himself to me wholly and
completely in the Sacred Host which I have just received.”
God loves me. In spite of my miseries I also love God. Here
are two fundamental truths of my Christian life. If the two
of us, God and I, love each other, if we live so united that
nothing can separate us, if God possesses me and I Him, and
if in Him I possess the substance of eternal blessedness, what
is lacking to me in order that my joy be full and perfect?

We live in an age of
activity. In the past the
difficulty of transporta­
tion and communication
We cannot afford to
caused the rhythm of life
lose sight of the truth
to be slower and more
restful. But now new
that contemplation is
methods of transporta­
far superior to activity.
tion and communication
have almost annihilated
distance and at the same
time pushed us into
feverish activity in industry, commerce, business, and science.
This spirit of activity expresses itself in our religious life. Never
before has there been such work in the foreign mission field.
And at home there has been the birth and development of
Catholic Action, the participation of the laity in the apostolate
of the hierarchy. Far from receiving censure, this activity
deserves unstinted praise. We should encourage it with all
our energies. But because of the natural human tendency to
go to extremes, we must more than ever keep in mind the
balance to be preserved between action and contemplation.
First of all, there is the question so often agitated, as to
which is better, action or contemplation. It may indeed seem
unnecessary to raise this question. Even the Greek philosophers,
pagans though they were, affirmed that contemplation is of
itself superior to action. Aristotle said that the “intellectual”
life is better than the "human” life, that immanent or vital
activity is superior to transient and nonvital activity. Only the
modern philosopher has thought of considering immanent
activity, the activity of the intelligence for example, as a mere
transient and productive activity.
The Christian has even more reason to affirm the supremacy
of contemplation. In a famous scene in Bethany, Jesus de­
fended Mary, the contemplative, against the complaints of
her more active sister, Martha. “Mary has chosen the best
part, and it will not be taken away from her" (Lk. 10:42).
St. Augustine has drawn a very beautiful comparison of
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the active life with the contemplative, making it clear why
the latter is better, and pointing out that because it is better,
it will never end: ‘The Church knows that there arc two
lives,” he says, "which God has revealed to it and has praised.
One is lived in faith, the other in vision; one in the time
of exile, the other in the mansion of eternity; one in work,
the other in rest; one along the road of pilgrimage, the other
in the home land; one in the place of struggle and work, the
other in the joy of contemplation.
“One avoids evil and does good, the other knows no evil
to avoid, but a great good to enjoy; one fights against the
enemy, the other reigns without an adversary; one comes to
the help of the needy, the other has no unfortunate to succor;
one pardons others the offenses which it receives in order to
obtain forgiveness of its own, the other receives no offenses
to pardon, nor does it do anything that requires it to ask for
pardon; one is scourged with afflictions in order that it may
not become proud of the good it has, the other is filled with
such abundance of graces that it is protected from all evil
and can adhere to the supreme good without the least tempta­
tion to pride.
“The one, then, is good, but full of miseries, the other is
better and is blessed. The one is passed completely on earth;
it will endure to the end of time and then will cease. The
other, to attain its perfection, must wait until the end of
the world. But in the future world it will have no end. . .
St. Thomas Aquinas (S.T., II—II, q. 182, a. 1), teaching that
the contemplative life is better than the active, produces eight
reasons drawn from philosophical considerations and reinforced
with texts from Sacred Scripture. They can be summarized as
follows:
1. Λ man exercises the contemplative life by his most
perfect faculty, the intellect, which attains to spiritual reality.
The active life, on the other hand, is exercised through the
powers which man has in common with the brute animals,
and it has for its object exterior things. The Old Testament
signifies this difference in Rachel and Lia. The contemplative

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life is represented by Rachel, whose name signifies “vision of
the source,” while Lia, whose eyes are weak, represents the
active life.
2. The contemplative life can be more continuous. In it
we can always be united to God, while the active life is
necessarily intermittent. Accordingly Mary, symbol of the
contemplative life, remains seated at the feet of the Saviour
while her sister is going to and fro.
3. The joy produced by the contemplative life is greater
than the joy produced by the active life. But that which pro­
duces greater spiritual joy is of itself better. St. Augustine notes
that while Martha was troubled, Mary rejoiced.
4. Peace is more secure in the contemplative life, because
in it fewer things are desired. Jesus said, “Martha, Martha,
thou art anxious and troubled about many things . .
(Lk.
10:41).
5. The contemplative life is sought for its own sake, while
the active life is sought for the sake of something else. Action
belongs only to the order of means, while contemplation is
of the order of ends. Contemplation excels action, then, as
the end excels the means. The Psalmist indicates this when
he says, "One thing I have asked of the Lord, this will I
seek often: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all
the days of my life, that I may see the delight of the Lord . . .”
(Ps. 26:4).
6. The contemplative life consists in a kind of rest which is
of higher value than work. This rest is not idleness but the
consummation of activity, for it is the repose of our faculties
in the possession of God. The Psalmist expresses this charac­
teristic of contemplation, saying: "Be still, and see that I am

God . . .” (Ps. 45:11).
7. The contemplative life is concerned with divine things,
but the active life with human things. St. Augustine says:
“ ‘In the beginning was the Word’ — behold the one to whom
Mary was listening — ; 'and the Word was made flesh’ —
behold the one whom Martha was serving.”
8. Finally, Jesus Himself declared: “Mary has chosen the

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best part, and it will not be taken away from her." St. Augustine
explains our Lord’s meaning like this: "It is not that the
way of Martha is bad, but that the way of Mary is better. Why
better? Because it will not be taken away from her. One day
we shall see ourselves free from this burden which necessity
imposes (the active life); but the sweetness of the contempla­
tion of the Truth is eternal.”
In explanation of the teaching of St. Thomas we might
add that the active life consists in the exercise of the inoral
virtues, contemplation in the exercise of the theological vir­
tues. The moral virtues remove obstacles to man’s union
with God, but the theological virtues achieve the consummation
of the Christian life by actually uniting us to Him. Action is
of earth, contemplation is of heaven. Action halts at the
threshold of eternity, while contemplation is made perfect
in heaven, its home.

#

*

♦

Presumably anyone will admit that in theory contemplation
is better than action. But how many in practice give the
first place to action! Not only the indifferent and the reli­
giously careless do it, but the devout as well. Even those
with some public dignity in the Church, whose example can­
not fail to make an impression on the simple faithful, must
take care here.

*

·

·

In order to resolve difficulties involved in the question of
action and contemplation there is nowadays much talk of a
third class of life, the mixed life, in which action and con­
templation are combined. But it seems that into this division
of active, contemplative, and mixed lives, there sometimes
creeps a certain confusion.
First of all, the active and contemplative lives are not
exactly a division of the Christian life. They are not two
lives running side by side like parallel lines, so that some
Christians are to follow the way of the active life and others

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the way of the contemplative life. Rather —and this is of
capital importance — the active and the contemplative lives
are two stages along an identical road. They are two phases
of one spiritual life. According to God’s plan, all men ought
to pass through both. Moreover, only in our mind and by
abstraction are the two stages found separately. In concrete
reality instead of being completely isolated, they more or less
interpenetrate. This means that the spiritual life is not an
exclusively active life. It means also that there cannot be a
truly contemplative life which is not fruitful and does not
redound to the good of others. Now if in concrete reality
neither action nor contemplation can exist in isolation, then
the spiritual life must be always a combination of action and

contemplation. Action will predominate in the beginner, con­
templation in the advanced.
What, in fact, is the mixed life as a special way of Christian
living? It can have meaning not as applied to the intimate
nature of the spiritual life, but only to its exterior manifesta­
tions, to someone’s daily program and occupation. Religious
orders and congregations are called “active,” "contemplative,”
or “mixed” by reason of the employment to which they are
dedicated — and not because religious in the first group lead
a purely active life, those in the second a purely contemplative
life, and those in the third combine the two.
Every Christian ought to combine the two lives. However
great his exterior activity, he ought to be a contemplative
within. The more he has to occupy himself with his neighbor,
the more he needs union with God. "Without contemplation,”
says Father Lallemant, "we shall never progress sufficiently in
virtue nor shall we be capable of helping others advance. We
shall never free ourselves completely from our weaknesses and
imperfections. We shall remain attached to the earth and shall
never succeed in elevating ourselves sufficiently above the senti­
ments of our human nature. We shall be unable to render to
God a perfect service. But with contemplation we shall do
more for ourselves and for others in a month than we could
do without it in ten years.” St. John of the Cross asks: "Of

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what use are those who prefer activity and imagine that they
are going to conquer the world with their preaching and their
external works?” He continues: “What are they doing? Some­
thing more than nothing; sometimes absolutely nothing; some­
times, instead of doing good, they do harm.”
Contemplation, itself the supreme activity, makes all other
activities fruitful. Contemplatives do the most good in the
Church of God, because by their prayer and sacrifice they
obtain the grace that moves hearts and converts wills. True
apostles, missionaries who have the spirit of God, attach more
importance to the army of those who pray than to the army
of those who fight, to hands raised to heaven to beg divine
grace than to those lowered to earth to remedy its miseries, to
the lips which speak to God about men than to the lips
which speak to men about God. This is why upon arriving
in a mission country, their first concern is to establish a
monastery’ of contemplatives to be a “leaven which leavens the
whole mass.” They see the need for a focal point of the interior
life, to draw down blessings from heaven. When His Holiness
Pope Pius XI assigned as patrons of Catholic missions St.
Francis Xavier and St. Therese of the Child Jesus, one an
apostle and the other a contemplative, did he not proclaim
to the world this great truth of the indissoluble union of
action and contemplation and the mutual influence of each
on the other?

*

*

*

The spiritual life has in reality three stages: active, con­
templative, and apostolic. In the active or ascetical life obstacles
to union with God are taken away. The moral virtues are
exercised and a person is placed in proper order with reference
to his neighbor and himself. In the contemplative or mystical
life we are united to God through the exercise of the theological
virtues and the predominating activity of the Gifts of the
Holy Spirit Finally, the apostolic life is the fruit of the con­
templative life, its overflow on behalf of one’s neighbor. If a
man is perfectly united to God, he will inevitably be power­

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fully moved by zeal for his neighbor’s welfare. A priest will
faithfully carry out his duties to teach and administer the
sacraments. A member of the simple faithful will pray, sacrifice,
and carry out the apostolate proper to his station.
St. Thomas Aquinas understands by the mixed life, not
the combination of the active and contemplative lives, but the
apostolic life. In the apostolic life the contemplative communi­
cates to others the fruits of his contemplation. "Contemplari
et contemplata aliis tradere — to contemplate and to hand
on to others what has been contemplated" (S.T., II—II, q. 188,
a. 6). Rather than being a combination of the active and
contemplative lives, the mixed life is in this way seen as the
fullness and consummation of the contemplative life. The
mixed or apostolic life can, then, hardly be described as
superior to the contemplative life, any more than the fruit
can be called superior to the tree which produces it. The
apostolic life is but the contemplative life communicated, just
as the charity which causes us to love and serve God and our
neighbor is one charity.
The contemplative life is related to the apostolic life as
the Incarnation is related to the Redemption. The first is
the eminent cause, the second the marvelous fruit. The In­
carnation, the Hypostatic Union of the divine and human na­
tures, is not inferior to nor subordinated to the Redemption,
although it is intimately related to it as the tree to its fruit.
Neither is the contemplative life subordinated to the apostolic
life or inferior to it. The contemplative life produces the
apostolic life as its effect and fruit. To deny this would be
to fall into the absurdity of affirming that the service of God
(contemplative life) is subordinated to and inferior to the
service of one’s neighbor (apostolic life). The Christian
apostolate, then, is not and cannot be anything but the over­
flow of contemplation, the crumbs that fall to the earth from
the banquet in which God and the soul give themselves to
each other in ineffable communion. . . . The reason why super­
ficial minds do not understand the contemplative life in
relation to the apostolic life is that the apostolate can be seen

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while contemplation remains hidden. Setting more store by
what appears than by what does not, attaching more im­
portance to what makes a noise than to what is silent within,
these minds cannot understand that the apostolate has its
source in the inner quiet of contemplation.
•

*

·

We can conclude, first of all, that in our spiritual growth
the active life is the preparation, the means, the road for
arriving at the contemplative life.
Second, in practice the one life cannot be disassociated from
the other. The reason the active life cannot be separated
from the contemplative is that the moral virtues cannot be
exercised without the theological virtues of faith, hope, and
charity. The exercise of the theological virtues in turn cannot
fail to produce in the soul a contemplation of the mysteries
of God, at least incipiently, and if contemplation be taken
broadly. The reason why the contemplative life cannot prescind
from the active life is that in contemplation there must
perdure at least the fruit obtained through the practice of
the moral virtues. Moreover, under the influence of the Gifts
the soul enters into a great activity, exercising the moral virtues
in a perfect manner. Under the influence of the Gifts, the soul
is more humble, meek, patient, strong, moderate, just, and
prudent than ever.
Third, we must note that while, strictly speaking, the con­
templative life can take on various forms — hence the magnifi­
cent variety to be admired among God’s saints —this life
expresses itself in two ways in particular, one more purely con­
templative, the other orientated toward activity. The contem­
plative or mystical life consists in the predominance of the
Gifts of the Holy Spirit. These Gifts can be divided into two
great groups: the contemplative Gifts (Knowledge, Understand­
ing, and Wisdom) and the active Gifts (Fear of the Lord,
Piety, Counsel, and Fortitude). When the active Gifts develop
in a special way and the contemplative Gifts themselves have
a certain orientation toward activity, there is produced the

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mystic apostle. St. Vincent de Paul, the Curé of Ars, St.
John Bosco are examples. When the contemplative Gifts
develop in a special way and remain specifically contemplative,
then there result the mystical contemplatives, such as St.
Francis of Assisi, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Jesus,
and St. Thcrese of Lisieux. In these latter, contemplation is
typical and manifest; in the others it is nontypical and veiled.
But both types of saints are contemplative, for contemplation is
the "soul of the apostolate” and the prelude to the blessed life

in heaven.

How much good it does
us to breathe the fresh
air of the mountains!
llicrc where the sur­
The transforming union
roundings are purer, the
is tire summit of the
atmosphere clearer, soli­
tude friendlier, and the
spiritual life and the
heavens nearer! Λ mere
prelude to beatitude.
glimpse of supernatural
summits has a similarly
invigorating effect. We
may be far from the
height of sanctity ourselves, plodding along and hardly seeming
to be making any progress up the steep incline of the purgative
and illuminative ways. Yet in contemplating the heights that
we aspire to reach, we renew our strength, revive our enthusiasm,
and inflame our hope.
Tire summit of the spiritual life is the transforming union.
True antechamber to heaven and a point which all Christians
ought normally to reach, it is in fact attained by few. Ad­
mittedly the transforming union is a mystical state; and as no
one can attain mystical gifts by his own powers, even aided
by grace, certainly the greatest of all these gifts, the transform­
ing union, is not to be so attained. Yet when a person gener­
ously complies with all that God asks of him, God, who calls
all to holiness, will not deny mystical graces or frustrate lawful
aspirations.
It is a comforting teaching, commonly admitted and taught
today, that mysticism is not something extraordinary and mirac­
ulous, like the gift of miracles or prophecy. Mysticism is not
to be confused with certain secondary and accidental phenom­
ena that sometimes accompany it, such as levitation, ecstasy,
stigmatization, or the gift of scrutiny of hearts. Genuine mysti­
cism is simply the full and normal development of sanctifying
grace, the infused virtues, and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit.
In the spiritual life there are not two parallel roads, one
ascetical and the other mystical; there is only one way. Like
all divine works, the spiritual life has perfect unity. Asceticism
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and mysticism are but two stages of one journey, two periods
in one ascent toward God. In the ascetical stage an individual
is exercised in the virtues while in the mystical, the Gifts
predominate. In the ascetical life the individual operates ac­
tively, practicing the virtues in a way which is human although
supernaturalized by grace. In the mystical life he is said to
act passively, the Holy Spirit moving him in His activity
through the mediation of the Gifts. Under the motion of the
Holy Spirit a person really enters into a new and more intense
activity, as he exercises the virtues under the influence of the
Gifts and consequently in a superhuman or divine way.
♦

*

*

If holiness is simply our divinization or our becoming God­
like, the transforming union is our perfect divinization. What
path do those follow who arrive at this summit? First, we
must understand that there is a distinction in man between
being and activity. Nature cannot act directly through itself
in man or in any other creature; it needs faculties, and these
in turn must be put into operation. The act of understanding,
for example, requires not only a spiritual nature, but a
spiritual nature perfected by a special faculty, the intellect.
The intellect, in turn, must be put into activity if understanding
is actually to take place.
There is a parallel in the supernatural order. Meritorious
supernatural acts require that the soul be supematuralized by
sanctifying grace. But beyond this, the faculties of intellect
and will must also be supematuralized by the infused virtues
and Gifts. Finally, the virtues and Gifts have to be put into
exercise by means of actual graces. In other words, our divini­
zation has two aspects: Both our nature and our activity must
be made Godlike. Sanctifying grace does the first; the virtues.
Gifts, and actual graces do the second.
When we receive baptism worthily and as long as we are
in the state of grace, our nature and our faculties are radically
supernaturalized by our possession of sanctifying grace with
its inseparable retinue of virtues and Gifts. God denies His

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actual graces to no one in the state of grace, and with the
aid of these actual graces, wc begin to exercise the virtues and
to do good works. The moral virtues, proper to the active life,
take away the obstacles that stand between ourselves and God,
while the theological virtues, exercised especially in prayer,
begin to unite us to God. Exercising the virtues or performing
the good acts which proceed from the virtues, we begin to
acquire merit and our spiritual wealth becomes daily greater.
Now the immediate result of merit is to increase sanctifying
grace and to make the soul grow in virtue —grace and the
virtues both increasing together. Meanwhile the individual is
purified by his exercise of the various virtues, including all
the exercises of the active life, especially mortification and
penance. This is active purification.

*

*

*

As a result of active purification an individual arrives at the
threshold of the illuminative way. God intervenes to begin a
new purification. When the moment arrives in which the
soul cannot actively purify itself further, the Holy Spirit
steps in to carry on the purification by means of the Gifts
of Fear, Fortitude, and Knowledge. This is called the passive
purification or in the terminology of St. John of the Cross,
the dark night of the senses. It may be likened to a surgical
operation in which the patient remains passive, while the sur­
geon cuts into the infected part of the body. In the dark
night of the senses, God anesthetizes the sensibility of the
soul by means of aridity, while at the same time His purifying
fire destroys all its disorders. Having been purified in this
way, one comes to a new knowledge of God (infused prayer)
and begins to love God with a love not present before (infused
love).
*
♦
*

But a new and more intimate purification is still needed,
the night of the Spirit. In this night the Holy Spirit employs
the Gift of Understanding to purify the higher faculties of
the soul — the intellect and the will. As a result the individual

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can enter fully into infused contemplation and the love of
God, where the Gift of Wisdom has a special role to play.
It should be noted, nevertheless, that the mystical life does
not always have a marked contemplative flavor. According to
the designs of God for each individual, some Gift other than
Wisdom can predominate. There are those who are conspicu­
ous for their spirit of compunction, for example, in whom the
Gift of Fear predominates. Others have a capacity for govern­
ing and a special mission to direct souls; in these the Gift
of Counsel has a directive role. In those outstanding for their
apostolic labor, the Gift of Piety is dominant.
When someone reaches the loftiest spiritual heights after
years of exercising the virtues not only in a human way but also
under the influence of the Gifts, the merits which he has
stored up are incalculable, and incalculable also the fullness of
sanctifying grace which divinizes him. Since the Gifts of the
Holy Spirit now predominate in his activity, he almost never
does anything except as directed by the Holy Spirit. In so far
as it is to be achieved in this life, he has attained the perfect
divinization of the Christian, in both being and activity. To
one so supematuralized God unites Himself so intimately that
there can be no greater union for him except in heaven. Such
is the transforming union considered in its substance.
•

·

«

Though the transforming union is always essentially the
same, it may in practice manifest a striking variety. There
are three principal variations. When the dominant note is
love, the transforming union is called spiritual marriage. When
it is sacrifice or immolation, the transforming union can be
called eucharistie transformation. When the outstanding charac­
teristic is spiritual fecundity, the union can be called mystical
incarnation.
St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa speak only of the
first variety of the transforming union, spiritual marriage. The
second is especially characteristic of the religious life of our
rimes, when devotion to the Blessed Sacrament has achieved

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such a remarkable development. In this expression of the
transforming union the soul becomes truly a victim or "host,”
assimilated to the Holy Eucharist in the most perfect possible
way. The crowning fruit of Eucharistic piety, this union is the
result of many fervent sacramental communions, which gradu­
ally transform the soul into a living Eucharist.
With respect to the third type of the transforming union,
its name need not surprise us if its meaning be understood cor­
rectly. The Incarnation of the Word is uniquely and ex­
clusively with the humanity of Jesus Christ. But in God’s
plan the Humanity of Christ is the means by which each
one of us is to be united to God. The Hypostatic Union is
with the humanity of Christ alone. But there is another kind
of union between Christ and the soul by grace. Sister Eliza­
beth of the Trinity very rightly wanted to be a prolongation
of the humanity of Christ. All Christians in grace are in fact
this, though more especially those who are perfect and holy.
Just as the Word made hypostatically His own the humanity
of Jesus Christ (who is the Word), so, due proportion being
kept, He makes others His own in another way. And for what
purpose? For the same purpose that motivated the Incarnation:
to redeem the world, and so to glorify the Father. Is there,
then, anything strange in the notion that when one arrives
at the height of the transforming union, the union may take
on this special aspect of being a prolongation of the humanity
of Christ, in order to continue in the world His fruitful work?
And why should we not be able to give to the transforming
union considered under this special aspect the name of “mys­
tical incarnation”?
Certainly the individual continues to maintain his own
proper personality. But the union with the Word is so intimate
that the Word takes this blessed soul as a prolongation of
His own proper humanity, in order to continue in it, in so
far as possible, the mysteries of His mortal life, the Incarnation,
the Nativity, the hidden life, the public life, the passion, and
death.
Msgr. Gay says very beautifully that “it is necessary to be

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Jesus if one is to do the work of Jesus.” One who has been
transformed into Jesus and who therefore is mystically Jesus,
has the task of continuing the work of Jesus. In the soul in
which He mystically reproduces the mysteries of His mortal
life, Jesus continues His work of glorifying the Father and
redeeming the world. It does not appear to us too bold to
suppose that the transforming union in this special aspect was
first of all realized in the Blessed Virgin — in her before any
other and as in no other. For besides being the natural mother
of Christ she is also His mother in a mystical way. She is the
Coredemptrix of the world, the Mediatrix of all grace, and
the mother of all men. What is proper to this mode of the
transforming union is that it gives to the soul a mysterious
and delicate character of fecundity and maternity. The soul
possesses a mystical maternity with reference to others and
also, in a certain sense, with reference to Jesus. Any relation
with the Mystical Body of Jesus always arises from a relation
with the head, which is Jesus.
The love, then, with which one loves Jesus is a love that
might be called maternal, in so far as it is possible to name
with human words the lofty and hidden realities of mysticism.
In the words of Archbishop Martinez:
“The mission of a soul which has received the grace of
spiritual fecundity is to conceive and give birth to Jesus
mystically, spreading Him around about it like a gently radiat­
ing light, like a perfume which makes everything around it
fragrant. Such a soul is to Jesus a mother; in unspeakable
mystery, it has for Him a new name, a new love, a new and
most sweet mission. In this holy and supreme fecundity are
concentrated and merged all the spiritual prerogatives of the
soul: its lights, its purity, its love, its sacrifice. All these divine
things have as their center and crown this virginal fecundity
the fruit of which is Jesus.
“For this reason the supreme rest for these souls is in fruit­
fulness. As the ancient Patriarchs rested in their desires and in
their hopes when they received from the Lord the promise that
their descendants would be multiplied as the stars of the sky;

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as the Blessed Virgin rested in a heavenly way when she
pressed against her heart her most sweet Son and when she
saw in Him, more numerous than the stars of heaven, the
innumerable souls redeemed through His blood and incorpo­
rated into Him through faith and love; so souls which have
received from God the singular gift of spiritual maternity,
find their rest in pressing to their heart the divine Jesus and in
Him all the souls, to whom, according to the divine designs, His
vital influence is to extend. What a magnificent mission! What
a sublime rest!"
The Gospel tells us how on one occasion our Lord’s blessed
Mother and some of His relations wished to speak with Him.
They could not get near to Him because of the multitude sur­
rounding Him. When someone said to Him: “Your mother
and your brothers desire to speak with you,” he answered: “Who
is a mother and who are brothers to Me?” Then extending His
arms toward His disciples He said: “Here are my mother and
my brothers. Everyone who does the will of my Father who
is in heaven, he is my brother and sister and mother” (cf. Mt.
12:46 ff.). Commenting on these words, St. Gregory says that
it is not remarkable that those who carry out the will of the
Father should be called brothers and sisters of the Lord. But
that they could also be called “mother of Christ” does appear
surprising. St. Gregory explains it through the mystery of the
priesthood, especially through the ministry of preaching, which
causes Christ to be born in souls, giving birth to Him in them.
St. Paul does not fear to say: “My dear children, with
whom I am in labor again, until Christ is formed in you"
(Gal. 4:19). Now this privilege of forming Christ in souls
belongs in a special manner to the hierarchical priesthood. But
it belongs also to the mystical priesthood of the faithful in
another way. This mystical priesthood is realized in none so
perfectly as in souls who have been transformed into Christ
with this special character of fecundity which we have called
mystical incarnation. To be sure, very little, almost nothing,
has been written about this, the ultimate stage of the spiritual
life. Father Poulain, S.J., author of the well-known treatise on

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mysticism, The Graces of Interior Prayer, was consulted on this
matter a short time before his death and answered: "Alas,
nothing has been written on this fourth stage of the spiritual
life.”
Perhaps so little has been said on this subject because of
the fear that souls might beguile themselves into following the
lamentable path of false mysticism, a path which can have
such frightful consequences for souls and for the Church.
Possibly the reason for this silence is that it is not prudent
to speak of something which one docs not know through
personal experience. Whatever the case may be, may we be
pardoned in our littleness for having tried to treat in hesitant
words of such lofty, divine mysteries. . . .

CONCLUSION
Frequently one finds among Catholics the notion that the
spiritual life is purely negative, simply a matter of avoiding
sin. When grace touches the soul of the careless Christian and
he turns seriously to God, he is likely to concentrate all his
efforts on maintaining himself in the state of grace and avoid­
ing mortal sin. Venial sin may seem of little consequence to
him. If he tries to rise higher, he will concentrate his efforts on
avoiding deliberate venial sin and on rooting out defects one
by one. He may further set his sights on growth in the moral
virtues, such as humility, mortification, patience. Since these
virtues are concerned with removing obstacles to union with
God, they pertain rather to the negative than to the positive
aspect of Christian life. When an individual has more or less
succeeded in carrying out this negative program, he may look
around wondering what to do next. The horizons close down
around him and his spiritual life comes to a standstill.
Yet the horizons of the spiritual life are truly limitless,
pointing as they do to the infinite God. God gives souls wings
to fly, to lose themselves in the divine immensity. But through
the want of understanding on the part of these individuals,
their wings are tied. What would we say of a man who con­
ceived of human life as only the absence of sickness —who
reduced his life to the careful prevention of illness by strict
observance of the rules of hygiene, and to the cure of sickness
when, in spite of his precautions, it came upon him? We should
certainly say that his notion of life was negative and im­
poverished! A man’s life cannot consist in merely continuing
to exist and in avoiding sickness. Life is positive; it demands
that we enter into integral human activity and exercise all
our faculties. Truly human life consists especially in the activity
of our spiritual powers of intellect and will. We want to know
the truth and to love what it is good for us to love.
Now if natural life must point to something positive, super­
natural life must no less do so. It does not consist merely in
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avoiding sin. It does not lie principally even in the exercise
of the moral virtues; as these have as their objects the removal
of obstacles, they too in one respect are negative. The spiritual
life consists positively in the full activity of those great super­
natural gifts which put us in touch with God. Faith causes
us to know God; hope makes us look for Him with keen
desire; charity unites us with Him in a most intimate embrace
which is, considered purely in itself, definitive. A person who
lives the Christian life is one who believes, and hopes, and
loves.
We can understand better the positive character of the
Christian life if we recall that it is essentially a family and a
social life. In the natural order, family life consists in the
association between parents and children. Parents must provide
the material necessities for their children and educate them by
giving them due instruction, counsel, and correction. Children
must obey, respect, and honor their parents, and mutually help
one another materially and morally. The family association is
based on the love which binds together and unites the mem­
bers of the family. Love is the indispensable foundation and
the sacred unity of the home.
Social life is made up of our associations with friends and
acquaintances, and others with whom we come in contact. In
these associations, we must respect the rights of others, ful­
filling our contracted obligations, rendering mutual services
and favors. In friendship there is, besides, the special love
which unites friends in the fulfilling of the mutual offices
which love implies. Social life is based, if not always on love
properly so called, at least on mutual esteem and respect.
Now the spiritual life is a family and social life transplanted
to the supernatural order. God is truly our Father, more truly
and by a title incomparably superior to that of the parent
who played a part in bringing us into the world. It is a dis­
tinctive boldness of Christianity to direct mankind to address
God by the most familiar name of Father. Through Christ
men are in reality God’s sons. Our supernatural sonship is a
genuine reality, if a hidden one. St. John says: "Behold what

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manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we
should be called children of God; and such we are. . . .
Beloved, now we are the children of God, and it has not yet
appeared what we shall be” (1 Jn. 3:1, 2).
The Incarnate Word is our Brother. A man like us, He
belongs to the same race of Adam, the same great human
family. In a more special way He is our Brother because we
are sons of His Father through the sanctifying grace which
we gain through Him. This grace is distinctively filial be­
cause it comes from Him, the Son. Sanctifying grace incorpo­
rates us into Christ, makes us sons with the Son, so that His
Father is now ours. It is in this sense that St. Paul calls Jesus
"the first-born among many brethren” (Rom. 8:30).
As sons of the Father and brothers of Jesus Christ, we receive
life from their Spirit, the Holy Spirit, who makes us cry,
"Abba, Father” (Gal. 4:7). This Spirit gives testimony to our
spirit that we are the sons of God. We enter into the company
of the Three Divine Persons themselves, as St. John says (cf. Jn.
1:3). We are no longer strangers, outsiders, or even simple
guests. We are of the family of God and fellow citizens of
the saints (cf. Eph. 2:19).
The most Blessed Virgin, the Mother of God, is our mother
also. For she became the mother of Christ according to nature
in order to be the mother of all men according to grace. She
is the mother of the whole Christ, the Mystical Body, which
contains in wonderful unity Jesus the head and His loyal
followers as members. The Gospel says that Mary gave birth
to her “first-born.” Due to have no other children according
to nature, she would bring forth a multitude according to grace
so as to be the mother of all.
Besides Christ’s Mother, all the angels and blessed in heaven
are our constant companions. An angel has been appointed by
God to assist, protect, and guide us here on earth. The saint
whose name we bear is on the lookout in a special way to
help us. All the angels and saints are actively interested in
our salvation and sanctification; they especially intercede for us
when we call upon them. When we neglect them the Church

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calls upon them for us, as on the Feast of All Saints and in
her litanies.
Our Christian life is indeed a family life with God, the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is a social life with the
angels and saints. But as these realities cannot be perceived
with our senses and cannot be comprehended by natural reason
alone, the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity are
indispensable. Faith discovers these divine realities. Hope makes
us desire them. And charity permits us to communicate with
them.
In our Christian life we are not limited, however, to associa­
tion with the Church Triumphant. The Church Triumphant,
the Church Suffering, and the Church Militant are so united
that they arc not so much three churches as three successive
stages of the one Church of Jesus Christ. Consequently, the
Christian life includes our association with all other men on
the supernatural level. The same virtue of faith that manifests

supernatural realities transforms our fellow man before our
eyes. Instead of seeing merely human failings, we discover the
divine image in our fellow man and we understand the grandeur
of sanctifying grace. We see about us images of God, mem­
bers of the Body of Christ, future citizens in the City of God
and the heavenly Jerusalem. Moreover, what faith manifests
on earth, it manifests more tellingly in the souls in purgatory,
now confirmed in grace. This knowledge which faith gives us
blossoms forth in charity toward all. We understand that
each can raise his eyes to heaven and say, “Our Father . . .”
Here is the universal Christian charity which has inspired such
heroism through the centuries.

•

*

·

What is true of the Christian life in general is true also
of the religious life which is its most perfect expression. One
can fall into the same error of conceiving it also under a
negative aspect only. The religious life will then be conceived
as consisting only in the avoiding of sins, but the religious must
take into account not only the prohibitions which bind all

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but also the innumerable special ones that bind him. The
religious has to avoid everything that is prohibited by the
law of God and the precepts of the Church. In addition he
must avoid everything prohibited by the vows of poverty,
chastity, and obedience; everything which the law of the
cloister forbids, everything prohibited by the rule, constitu­
tions, ordinances, and precepts of superiors. "There remains
very little that a religious can do!’’ one is tempted to exclaim.
A nun cannot go out of her convent because the law of en­
closure forbids it. She cannot on her own decision dispose of a
single red cent because the vow of poverty will not allow it.
She cannot set up a home and enjoy its legitimate satisfactions
because the vow of chastity forbids it. She cannot make an
act of her own will because she is bound by the vow of
obedience. From the moment that she answers the first bell
in the morning until she retires at night, constitutions, rules,
and house regulations indicate for her what she is to do. In
fact twenty-four hours a day her time is not her own.
If this were the whole story of the religious life, an intermi­
nable chain of prohibitions, it would be inhuman and unbear­
able. Fortunately, this is only half the story. All the negations
are but the efficacious means for the removal of obstacles. One
must detach oneself from creature and self, but only in order
to take full wing and fly into the arms of God. . . . The positive
aspect of the religious life is companionship with God, a com­
panionship all the more familiar as one is more emptied and
detached. The religious ought as no other, to live a life of
faith, hope, and love. In the religious above all is to be realized
the “stupendous familiarity” with God of which the Imitation
speaks. The hope of a religious should be a more vital hope,
for it rests not only on our Lord’s general promises but also
on a very particular one: “Everyone who has left house, or
brothers, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children,
or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive a hundredfold, and
shall possess life everlasting” (Mt. 19:29). The charity of a
religious ought to be more ardent, nourished by the fire of
sacrifice which the religious life itself is.

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We spoke earlier of the importance of balance in the
spiritual life. Nowhere is balance more urgent than in this
matter of the positive and the negative. There is the perpetual
temptation to consider only the negative or only the positive,
while in fact the two aspects must be combined. It would be
a vain illusion to try to unite ourselves to God without purifying
ourselves of sin, just as to think only of avoiding sin would
be to leave our spiritual life truncated and mutilated. But
if the two elements are inseparable and both are necessary,
the positive is definitely the more important. The negative
removes the obstacles; the Christian life consists especially in
the positive.
We must purify ourselves from sin, always aiming at the
positive goal of union with God. We will indeed try to live
in a state of grace. We will work to avoid deliberate venial
sin and even, in so far as is possible to our human frailty,
semideliberate venial sins. We will work to correct our defects.
We will practice the moral virtues. But before all and above
all, let us not lose sight of the fact that the true Christian life
consists specifically in conversation and union with God.
Father Felix Rougier, the holy founder of the Missionaries of
the Holy Ghost, was accustomed toward the end of his life
to say one word over and over; in his letters and conversations
he would repeat with the fervor of a saint, “God . . . God . . .
God . .
And with what good reason! Does not this one
word sum up all the spiritual experience that one can have?
Toward the end of their lives very holy individuals frequently
find that there is nothing more to say. They have so well
understood the vanity of everything created that there remains
for them but this one supreme reality. It is as when the sun
comes up — then all the stars are hidden and all other lights
tum pale. Purely human life is the night, life with God the
day. Blessed is the soul from whose heaven the shadows of
night have fled and for whom there shines only the brightness
of God!
St. Francis of Assisi expressed this truth when he exclaimed,
“Deus meus et omnia — My God and my All!” And St. Teresa

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of Jesus in saying, “To him who has God, nothing is lacking.
God alone suffices.” And St. Paul summed up the whole of
God’s plan, the entire purpose of the Redemption, when he
said: "Ut Deus sit omnia in omnibus —that God may be all

in all!” (1 Cor. 15:28.)
A holy woman of our own time, the French mystic Lucie
Christine, has written a sublime page describing her own ex­
perience of this "allness” of God:
"My soul understood that it must live in the most Blessed
Trinity, with that life from on high, far above everything else.
It understood that while it must lend itself to every duty,
it must surrender itself to God alone. . . .
"Afterwards, as if heaven had half opened a little, I heard
the universal concert of the angels and of the elect honoring
the most Blessed Trinity. I perceived in the future as in a
point, in a glance quicker than a lightning flash, all the voices
of the world dying and coming to an end in the canticle of
immortality ... the voice of genius, the voice of knowledge,
the voice of strength and power, the voice of love and tender­
ness of heart, the voice of valor, the voice of the imagination,
the voice of hope and fear, the voice of joy and sorrow, the
voice of all activities and tumults, the voice of nature and of
tempests and of thunder, the voice of the events and cataclysms
that change the face of empires, and vibrate in the depths
of the world and shake the balance of the human race from
the top to its foundation. All this will become extinct, all
this will be silent. In one day all this will give place to the
eternal alleluia to which my soul now listens. . . .
"Apart from the unfortunates condemned to eternal hate
and to God’s punishments, there will be but one cry, one only:
‘Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus; Holy, Holy, Holy,’ to the glory
of that God who is thrice holy, the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. . . .
“O sublime region, region of love, only region in which the
soul can find a new day, a new life, an air to breathe . . .
where only God appears and all else remains in shadow . . .

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where the soul, lost in Jesus only, adores and can do nothing
but adore, or rather where Jesus adores in itl . . . Divine rest
in the omnipotence which has lowered itself to our soul through
love; repose unknown to the world, repose in the Truth itself;
thirst of the soul, rapturously satiated by the infinite; supreme
confusion of a sinful nothing before its God, which, however,
does not take note even of this in order to humiliate itself
more profoundly, for it does not and cannot see anything but
its Creator!
“Oh, Father, Teacher, Friend, Spouse. . . I Why must I
again descend from that region where You are, O my Beloved?
We are so happy together in solitude. . . ! You speak to me
and I to You without a word. . . You find Your delight in my
soul taking all that Your love has put there; and I, no longer
seeing anything on earth, feel myself lost in You. . . . Why
must I descend from that heavenly region which is You,

my God?”