Wherein This Doctrine Is Further Explained and Confirmed

OR the greater confirmation and explanation of this doctrine, the saints and masters of spiritual life here observe that, to arrive at this high prayer and contemplation that we spoke of, there is necessary great mortification of our passions and a thorough grounding to begin with in the moral virtues and much time spent in their exercise;

otherwise they say it will be vain to pretend to enter upon this contemplation or make profession of it. It is proper, they say, to be Jacob wrestling before being Israel, who sees God face to face (Gen. xxxii. 30) —Oportet ut prius sis Iacob luctans quam Israel Deum videns (St. Bernard). You must first be a strong wrestler and vanquish your passions and evil inclinations before arriving at this intimate union with God. Blosius says that whoever seeks to arrive at a very excellent degree of divine love without first applying himself with great diligence to the correction and mortification of his vices and the casting off from himself of the inordinate love of creatures, is like a man who, laden with lead and iron and bound hand and foot, were to climb a very high tree. Wherefore they advise masters of spirit that, before treating with their disciples of this contemplation, they should first make them busy themselves with thorough mortification of all their passions and the formation of habits of virtue—patience, humility, obedience— and long exercise in the practice thereof. They call this the “active” life, which should go before the “contemplative.” Failing to observe that, many who have not proceeded by these steps, but have sought to rise to contemplation without due order, are found after many years of prayer very devoid of virtue, impatient, passionate, proud, so that, once you touch them on the sore point, they burst out into unmeasured words of impatience, clearly showing how far they are from perfection and mortification.

Our Father General Everard Mercurian declared this very well in a letter that he wrote on this matter in these words. “There are many who, rather from lack of discretion than from desire of improvement, when they hear tell of another, and that a very high, practice of prayer, of love of God, of anagogical acts, and a certain indescribable silence, have sought to ascend to the practice of the unitive way before their time. Thus they have lost much time and have covered very little ground; and at the end of many years they find themselves with their passions as lively, with their affections as uncontrolled, as great lovers of their comfort as if they had never dealt with nor had had any communication with God. They are as wedded to their own will, as backward in submitting their own judgment, when superiors have wished to make some arrangement about them that did not please them or was not to their mind, as they were on the first day. The reason of this is that they wanted to fly before they had wings. They skipped and scampered over the ground and did not go by the measured steps that they should have taken; they did not first ground themselves in mortification and the practice of the virtues; and so without foundation they could not set up a good building. They built on sand, and so they fail in the hour of emergency.”

Hence we may see how true, how common and general is this doctrine; it is what the saints commonly say when they assign three parts or three manners of prayer, according to the three ways called respectively purgative, illuminative, and unitive. Such is the holy doctrine drawn out by St. Denis the Areopagite, and after him by St. Gregory Nazianzene and by all the rest who treat of spiritual things. They say, and all agree in this, that before dealing with this so high and lofty prayer that belongs to the unitive way, we must occupy ourselves with what belongs to the purgative and illuminative. First it is necessary to exercise ourselves in sorrow and repentance for our sins and to root out from ourselves vicious and evil inclinations and to acquire true virtues, imitating Christ, in Whom they shine forth; because if we sought to pass on further without that, it would be without foundation, and so we should always remain imperfect and unformed, as he who should try to pass into the class of the seniors without being well grounded in that of the juniors, and to mount the second step of a ladder without going on the first.