Chapter IV: That Union with God is a Grace, although it is the End set before all Christians

UNION with God, even in this world, is the end whereunto all spiritual life tends. But this union is, at the same time, a grace which all man's efforts and works can never naturally attain. Hence many argue thus within themselves: "If union with God is a grace, it is above my reach; I can only remain in peace and expect it from the gratuitous liberality of God. How can we reconcile these two things, namely, that union is a grace and, at the same time, that it is the end set before all Christians?" As if everything that comes to us from God were not a gift, down to our very being, to which we certainly had no claim. But while leaving to the word "grace" its proper signification, namely, a gratuitous help in the supernatural order, it is easy to see that we cannot shelter our cowardice under the plea of incapacity to accomplish the work as though, from the fact that union is a grace, we had nothing more to do but to await it from God's hands, without making any effort to obtain it. We wish to show that these two views may be easily reconciled. Final perseverance is also a grace; but though it is a grace, and for the very reason that it is a grace, we are bound in conscience, while doing everything necessary to obtain it, to hope constantly and firmly that it will be granted us.

Therefore when we use the word "grace," we understand simply a good which God does not owe us in virtue of His justice, a good which is above our efforts and our natural wants. Having said this, let us beware of believing that the soul cannot prepare the way of the Lord, and make straight the paths by which He will come.

Exact fidelity in conquering self, constant seeking after virtue, persevering imitation of our Lord Jesus Christ, loyal obedience to all God's commandments, these are the efficacious means for obtaining the grace of divine union; but even then it is from God only that it can be obtained. Moreover, our Lord often shows that this is the domain of His free generosity. At one time He unites Himself almost suddenly to a soul that has done nothing to prepare herself for this high favour; at another time He refuses it for years to one who seems most exact and fervent in God's service.

Far from lessening our desire after divine union, or causing us to relax in our efforts, this fact ought, on the contrary, to animate us to multiply those acts which may draw upon us the look of our divine Lord. Can we be astonished that the most excellent gifts that divine liberality can bestow upon us should often call for many desires, efforts and prayers? If so few souls reach this end, the fault is not on God's side; He has not become sparing in His dealings with souls. The grace of the Unitive Life would be much more common among Christians if it were better understood, more highly esteemed and more ardently longed for.

When we consider what fasts, watchings, and humiliations the fathers of the desert undertook; when we see the long hours they devoted to prayer, both mental and vocal, their admirable detachment from all things, their incomparable submission to the spiritual guides under whom they had placed themselves, we cannot be surprised that God rewarded so many labours by an eminent gift of contemplation and union with Himself. It was always a gift, a gift bearing no proportion to their labours; but it astonishes us less in them than when it comes, as it were, on a sudden to reward our dispositions as yet so far from generous.

We ought at least to persevere in the little that we are doing, striving daily to do more, and then to keep full of confidence in God's infinite goodness. "I believe to see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living. Expect the Lord, do manfully, and let thy heart take courage, and wait thou for the Lord."¹ The Gospel gives us the precious assurance that this waiting will not be in vain: "Blessed are those servants whom the Lord, when He cometh, shall find watching. . . . And if He shall come in the second watch, or come in the third watch, and find them so, blessed are those servants."² Why "blessed," if not that great and choice favours are reserved for this vigilance? God will sometimes leave us waiting and longing till the third watch, and then He will come. How great would be the soul's loss and misfortune, had she grown weary of waiting on the eve or fore-eve of her Lord's visit.

Moreover, in the Old Testament, God was not slow in making known His full will on this subject: "Wisdom is glorious, and never fadeth away, and is easily seen by them that love her, and is found by them that seek her. She preventeth them that covet her, so that she first showeth herself unto them. He that awaketh early to seek her shall not labour, for he shall find her sitting at his door."³

The same thought inspires the Church to sing as follows, on the feast days of saints: "Thou hast given him his heart's desire, and hast not withholden from him the will of his lips. For Thou hast prevented him with blessings of sweetness. . . . He asked life of Thee, and Thou hast given him length of days for ever and ever.”⁴ This saint asked for the true life, and God gave it to him with an abundance and development beyond all his expectations.

Our Lord is so desirous of giving Himself to souls, the expansive force of His love is so great that, far from always waiting till the grace is asked of Him, He sometimes with ineffable sweetness anticipates the soul’s action, even when that soul is far off from Him: “The Lord hath appeared from afar to me. Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore have I drawn thee, taking pity on thee. And I will build thee again, and thou shalt be built, O virgin of Isræl.”⁵ Admirable indeed is the work of divine mercy and compassion which we have daily before our eyes, and which gives joy to the angels of God! Yet, it is not the supreme effort of God’s essential goodness. St. Paul reveals this fact, when quoting another prophet he says: “But Isaias is bold, and saith: I was found by them that did not seek Me; I appeared openly to them that asked not after me. But to Isræl he saith: All the day long have I spread My hands to a people that believeth not, and contradicteth Me.”⁶

In His ardent desire of drawing souls fully to Himself, and to that closeness and intimacy which we call union, our Lord employs a further stratagem—He invariably inspires those who have reached divine union to solicit a like favour for others. The nearer souls are to God, the more are they a force of attraction for others, and the more earnestly do they offer violence to heaven in order to obtain for other souls the grace of which we are speaking. Thus it is that an invisible world already reveals itself—a world which, later on, will open out before our ravished gaze, a world in which we shall contemplate the mysterious fact of a supernatural filiation—not only in the sense usually understood, but in a deeper sense in which we may say that saints are born from saints, according to an ineffable generation “of God—ex Deo.”

The most striking example of this fruitfulness is found first of all in our Lord Jesus Christ. In the holy Gospel we see Him giving Himself to prayer in order to obtain from His Father the graces necessary for His apostles. It is after a night spent in prayer on the mountain, that our Saviour chooses them. They are truly the children of Christ's prayer: “I pray for them. I pray not for the world, but for them whom Thou hast given me, because they are Thine.”⁷ And when there is question of Peter's infallibility, our Lord permits us to see that it also rests upon His all-powerful prayer: “I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not; and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren.”⁸ The Old Testament also brings before us the vocation of Eliseus as due in part to the prophet Elias.⁹ And who has not been equally struck by the link existing between the prayer of the glorious deacon St. Stephen and the conversion of Saul, who had kept the garments of his murderers? And what accents of prayer for those whom he has begotten in Jesus Christ do we not hear from St. Paul in his Epistles! If we open the acts of the martyrs, there again we meet this mysterious transmission of holiness and this fruitfulness of prayer. The lives of the fathers, too, offer many examples of it. Who has not read the story of St. Paul, the first hermit, receiving St. Antony and saying to him, "Long ago God promised me that you should spend your life like me in His service"?¹⁰

Monastic chronicles are not less eloquent. That to which we are now drawing attention is to be seen principally in the beginnings of the Benedictine Order; St. Maurus and St. Placid take pleasure in showing that they owe everything to the prayers of their holy patriarch. Again, how can we fail to recognize this law in the succession of holy abbots at Cluny, and in the active vigilance with which each of them prepared his successor? Furthermore, at Helfta we find traces of this supernatural filiation when we learn that those holy nuns could not rest until the gift—thus they spoke of the unitive life—was granted to some one among them. Here we have the secret cause of St. Mechtilde's zeal for St. Gertrude. And no doubt this is why holy Scripture attaches so much importance to the expression, "God of our fathers"; for to our mind it signifies, in most places, a transmission of the divine blessing and of holiness, rather than a carnal filiation. We doubt not that this is also the reason why the ancient fathers, and in particular St. Benedict, as may be seen in his Rule, attribute so great importance to the Abbot's prayer.

Nor must we be astonished that God desires to be earnestly entreated to admit His rational creatures to intimate union with Himself; for that union is both the end that He proposed to

Himself in His works and the pledge of the supernatural prosperity of the Church. Let those who love the Church give a thought to this. If they would work for her, the most efficacious process for so doing is to possess the science of the saints, and to be able, by means of it, to have weight in that centre where human events are controlled. It was through this kind of powerful intervention that Moses won the battles for his people; "And when Moses lifted up his hands, Isræl overcame."¹¹ The same means enabled him to conquer the Lord Himself, when he said: "Either forgive them this trespass, or if Thou do not, strike me out of the book that Thou hast written."¹² In like manner through prayer Nehemias obtained the favour of witnessing the end of the captivity. In this way the prophets showed themselves to be as much men of prayer as they were inspired preachers; and in this way Esther gained favour with Assuerus, and saved her people.

Holiness of life and the spirit of prayer are all-powerful in this world; and when our Lord does not find these elements on our earth, He complains of their absence as if He could no longer show mercy. It is in these terms that He says to Ezechiel: "And I sought among them for a man that might set up a hedge, and stand in the gap before me in favour of the land, that I might not destroy it; and I found none. And I poured out my indignation upon them."¹³ Such is undoubtedly the secret of many revolutions in the history of empires. Hence we understand that both private and social interests call for an increase in the number of souls truly united with God. Most certainly such an increase is a grace; but once again, it is none the less a grace promised to ardent and generous prayer.

The Holy Ghost, to encourage this ardour in souls, opens the sacred Canticle with the expression of a most vehement desire: "Let him kiss Me with the kiss of his mouth."¹⁴ And when, later on, the Bride glances back, after many struggles and labours, she considers that she has not paid too dearly for the much desired union: "If a man should give all the substance of his house for love, he shall despise it as nothing."¹⁵ Yet she had wholly given herself with all she possessed; but it is as nothing, so inestimable is the good with which she has been enriched.

Let us then be generous with our Lord; let us offer Him, without reckoning the very marrow of our being, as though everything depended upon our generosity and our effort. But when we have given all, let us follow that counsel of our beloved Master: "When you shall have done all these things that are commanded you, say, 'We are unprofitable servants; we have done that which we ought to do.'"¹⁶ It is very remarkable that our Lord does not say: "You are unprofitable servants," but rather, "Say, 'We are unprofitable servants.'" God holds to the asserting of His divine freedom; He tells us so in a formal way: "Friend, I do thee no wrong; didst thou not agree with me for a penny? Take what is thine, and go thy way. I will also give to this last even as to thee."¹⁷

We cannot be too much on our guard against the desire to bring God down to our level; many of our errors arise from it. We are indeed made after God's image and likeness, and we know that the human nature of the Incarnate Word has brought the Divinity within touch of us, according to that sentence of St. John: "For the life was manifested; and we have seen and do bear witness, and declare unto you the life eternal, which was with the Father, and hath appeared to us."¹⁸ But we must beware, we repeat, of limiting God to the proportions of our nature. Therefore, when God makes a formal engagement with us, we know by the very tenor of His promise what He strictly engages Himself to do; but should it please His Divine Majesty freely to go beyond His first generous engagements, we have no right to say: "Thus far shalt Thou go and no further." God in His munificence always surprises us, "Give, and it shall be given to you; good measure and pressed down and shaken together and running over shall they give into your bosom."¹⁹

Here it seems useful to settle a question in advance. There exists an opinion too widely spread and accredited perhaps by the mystic treatises of modern times, and the way in which many lives of the saints are written; it is that sanctity consists merely in those extraordinary manifestations which sometimes signalize it, or else in those processes which our Lord makes use of to prepare, to increase, or to make known holiness, when it so pleases Him, processes which sometimes are a means for attaining the fulness of charity, sometimes the indication of the disproportion existing between our present state, and that to which God, in His ambitious love, desires to bring us; but processes which are neither sanctity nor the essential revelation of sanctity.

The proof of this is, that these same phenomena can be brought about externally and physically by diabolical or by natural causes, and that they are of no value except inasmuch as they come from God. If their cause is divine, the effects are worthy; if these phenomena do not come from God, the effects are deplorable. Even when the cause is divine, there is no reason to attach great importance to them, since they cannot reveal the real depth and worth of God's working, which is generally the more intense the less it betrays itself outside: "God is a spirit";²⁰ and when He unites Himself to the substance of the soul, without sign or medium, He produces no phenomena, because in a union such as this the senses perceive nothing. Phenomena of this kind always fall short; they are but feeble, distant and inadequate indications of what really takes place in the soul; and it is not in such a poor outward expression that the real spiritual life consists.

In reading attentively the lives of the fathers and the great contemplatives of old, we are struck with the almost absolute silence which they kept with respect to the external effects of supernatural contemplation. One would think that these effects were accidents of which they made no account, because they are of no value either in themselves or as proofs. In the mind of these masters union with God, true holiness, consists in the heroic practice of the theological and cardinal virtues. All the rest seems undeserving of mention, and scarcely do we find any allusion to it in their writings. St. John of the Cross, though modern, belongs to this admirable school, which has the advantage of securing holiness from the irreverent inquiries of materialistic science.

In the lives of the saints, the exaggerated stress laid upon the supernatural phenomena of ecstasy, rapture and the like constitutes a peril, and prepares the way for dangerous illusions. No doubt, while bringing forward these extraordinary facts, the danger of aspiring after graces of this kind is with reason insisted upon. And yet in that insistence there is an evident contradiction, for if these favours constitute holiness, and if, though not the cause, they are at least the essential indications of it, why forbid souls to esteem and desire them? Holiness should be more than merely desired by Christians; it should be the object of our highest and most salutary ambition, as our Lord Himself declares: "Be ye perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."²¹ How is it possible to desire the end without desiring the means? There is a subtle temptation here, arising from inexact notions; there is also a danger of illusion and an opening given to the devil's fraud—danger of illusion, because to make much of extraordinary things calls for and provokes it; also physical temperament, weakness, want of energy and of self-control may predispose a person for certain phenomena, independently of the holy cause which ordinarily produces them. Moreover, it is a matter of positive experience that when these graces are brought about by God's working, their effects are very different in different subjects. Though the soul itself is the same in all, physical temperaments are very various and they react upon the soul in different ways. Some are too easily carried away by supernatural impressions, and thus they excite, entertain and, to a certain extent, bring back to themselves the state which they have experienced. If an imprudent director betrays admiration for these phenomena as if they were supernatural graces much to be desired, he does serious injury to souls. Again, if on their side, souls set too high a value on extraordinary graces, they not only prejudice themselves, but they ruin their health without gaining any spiritual profit. More than one failure in the spiritual life has had no other cause than this.

On his side the demon, bent upon ensnaring souls and mimicking God, hastens to make good interest out of all esteem, all love, all seeking for these phenomena which God's action may produce, but which belong to a world where the demon finds access. What a subject of joy for the "ape of God"—as Tertullian calls the devil—when he can find servants of God, either men or women, ready to be the innocent accomplices of his fraud, simply because they are not sufficiently on their guard against yielding to those external, sensible and physical accidents which sometimes accompany God's grace! What a satisfaction for the devil, when he succeeds in making a creature of God lose his time and his health, whereas, with more energy and sound spiritual life, he might be dealing him some hard blows!

Further, let us add that the word "extraordinary" is not synonymous with the word "supernatural"; the distinction to be made between the two is a very important one. The intuitive vision of God, which is the final term of the supernatural, cannot be called "extraordinary," since it becomes the portion of all who are saved. Thus there may be a very high grace of union, and yet it may not take any extraordinary form, while certain extraordinary graces do not necessarily result in divine union. St. John of the Cross has no mercy for those who seek visions, ecstasies and even the gift of miracles; but he nowhere says that we must not aspire to union with God. On the contrary, it is to make this union more perfect that he counsels souls not to stop at the processes by which it may please God to bring it about. It is as though he would recommend us not to waste our time admiring the magnificence of the halls in the royal palace, as long as we have not reached the apartment where the king himself resides.

It will always be lawful to aspire after union with God, which is our end, without on that account desiring the extraordinary ways and phenomena which sometimes lead to it, but which are not indispensable, which even disappear, little by little, when the soul attains the highest stage of the supernatural life.

We will rather seek the means which God has given for producing in our souls, with sovereign efficacy, His own proper perfection, by kindling in our hearts that fire which He came to cast upon the earth. Surely, He has willed to accomplish in favour of the true Isræl what he promised to Isræl of old: "As the eagle enticing her young to fly and hovering over them, He spreads his wings, and hath taken him and carried him on His shoulders."²²

Footnotes

1. Credo videre bona Domini in terra viventium. Exspecta Dominum, viriliter age, et confortetur cor tuum, et sustine Dominum (Ps. xxvi, 13-14). ↩

2. Beati servi illi, quos, quum venerit Dominus, invenerit vigilantes . . . Et si venerit in secunda vigilia, et si in tertia vigilia venerit, et ita invenerit, beati sunt servi illi (Luc., xii, 37-38). ↩

3. Clara est, et quæ numquam marcescit sapientia, et facile videtur ab his qui quærunt illam. Præoccupat qui se concupiscunt, ut illis se prior ostendat. Qui de luce vigilaverit ad illam, non laborabit; assidentem enim illam foribus suis inveniet (Sap., vi, 13-15). ↩

4. Desiderium cordis ejus tribuisti ei, et voluntate labiorum ejus non fraudasti eum; quoniam prævenisti eum in benedictionibus dulcedinis. . . . Vitam petiit a te, et tribuisti ei longitudinem dierum in sæculum et in sæculum sæculi (Ps., xx, 35). ↩

5. Longe Dominus apparuit mihi. Et in caritate perpetua dilexi te; ideo attraxi te, miserans. Rursum ædificabo te, et ædificaberis, virgo Isræl (Jer., xxxi, 3, 4). ↩

6. Isaias autem audet et dicit: Inventus sum a non quærentibus me: palam apparui iis qui me non interrogabant. Ad Isræl autem dicit: Tota dic expandi manus meas ad populum non credentem, et contradicentem (Rom., x, 20, 21). ↩

7. Ego pro eis rogo. Non pro mundo rogo, sed pro his, quos dedisti mihi, quia tui sunt (Joann., xvii, 9). ↩

8. Ego autem rogavi pro te ut non deficiat fides tua; et tu aliquando conversus confirma fratres tuos (Luc. xxii, 32.) ↩

9. 3 Reg., xix, 19. ↩

10. E Vita S. Pauli Erem., x. ↩

11. Cumque levaret Moyses manus, vincebat Isræl (Exod., xvii, 11). ↩

12. Dimitte eis hanc noxam; aut si non facis, dele me de libro tuo quem scripsisti (Exod., xxxii, 31, 32). ↩

13. Quæsivi de eis virum qui interponeret sepem, et staret oppositus contra me pro terra, ne dissiparem eam: et non inveni. Et effudi super eos indignationem meam (Ezech., xxii, 30, 31). ↩

14. Osculetur me osculo oris sui (Cant., I, 1). ↩

15. Si dederit homo omnem substantiam domus suæ pro dilectione, quasi nihil despiciet eam (Ibid., viii, 7). ↩

16. Cum feceritis omnia quæ præcepta sunt vobis, dicite: Servi inutiles sumus: quod debuimus facere, fecimus (Luc., xvii, 10). ↩

17. Amice, non facio tibi injuriam: nonne ex denario convenisti mecum? Tolle quod tuus est, et vade: volo autem et huic novissimo dare sicut et tibi (Matth. Xx, 13, 14). ↩

18. Vita manifestata est, et vidimus et testamur, et annuntiamus vosbis vitam æternam quæ erat apud Patrem, et apparuit nobis (Joann. I, 2). ↩

19. Date, et dabitur vobis; mensuram bonam, et confertam, et coagitatam, et superefflueatem dabunt in sinum vestrum (Luc., vi, 38). ↩

20. Spiritus est Deus (Joann., iv, 24). ↩

21. Estote perfecti, sicut et Pater vester cœlestis perfectus est (Matth. v, 48). ↩

22. Sicut aquila provocans ad volandum pullos suos, et super eos volitans, expandit alas suas, et assumpsit eum, atque portavit in humeris suis (Deut., xxxii, 11). ↩