Chapter III: Progress in the Life of Prayer

A CAREFUL study and analysis of the various states or degrees of prayer as given by spiritual writers enables us, avoiding subtle and, for practical purposes, unnecessary distinctions, to define three main steps by which the soul progresses toward a more perfect prayer.

(1) Mental or Discursive Prayer.

(2) Affective Prayer, or the Prayer of Simplicity.

(3) Active or Acquired Contemplation.

The essential note of progress in prayer is simplification. Beginning with mental prayer, in which there is a large use of the understanding, having as its end the motiving of the will, the soul, more or less unconsciously and by virtue of its fidelity, passes to a prayer in which the understanding moves the will much more rapidly, one thought, and that more and more single and simple, actuating to acts of prayer. This, in turn, leads to a state in which recollection is almost constant, and the soul's prayer is but a more deliberate and direct centring of itself upon God at special times. Whereas, in mental prayer, careful and deliberate attention had, as it were, to be forced upon Divine realities, and the will moved to act by definite and prolonged reasoning, in the prayer of simplicity, acts follow thought without any appreciable interval, until in acquired contemplation the multiplicity of acts give way to a single direction of the soul toward God in which acts of prayer, as hitherto practised, are merged in an intuitive sight in which the soul no longer meditates upon God, nor addresses Him in varied acts, but simply, adoringly and lovingly contemplates Him as its Supreme Good.

In his admirable treatise Divine Contemplation for All, Dom Louismet describes the three stages of ordinary prayer very clearly. ' Discursive prayer is the mental prayer in which the Holy Ghost moves the mind of a fervent Christian to many considerations concerning the Divine Essence of the Blessed Trinity, or the mysteries of our Blessed Lord.

' Affective Prayer takes place when the Holy Ghost puts a stop to the arguments of the mind, and acts directly on the sensitive faculties and on the will, drawing the soul towards God, with great sweetness and vehemence.

' The Prayer of Quiet is when the Holy Ghost stays even the multiplicity of the affective movements of the soul, and reduces it to silence, but a silence pregnant with unutterable love, in presence of the Divine Majesty.'

Fr. Augustine Baker also makes a threefold division : (1) Discursive prayer or meditation. (2) The prayer of forced acts or affections of the will. (3) Active contemplation of aspirations flowing naturally from the soul under the immediate direction of the Holy Spirit (Holy Wisdom, Sect. II., chap. i.).

In Chapter III. I have given reasons for what I believe is the great need of to-day – the practice of methodical, mental prayer – since so large a number of Catholics are woefully ignorant of the fundamental truths of their religion, and can in no other way gain that kind of knowledge which unites them to God. But this is far from saying that there are not many who, if they are rightly directed, will not quickly reach a more perfect state of prayer. In fact, those who will apply themselves faithfully to the practice of the interior life, who set their prayer in its rightful place and are prudently zealous in the matter of mortification, especially of self-will, ought to arrive in a comparatively short time at affective prayer. This is particularly true of those, e.g. priests, religious and lay people with a certain amount of time and aptitude for spiritual reading, who, having their minds more constantly fixed upon Divine things, do a large part of their meditation in advance, as it were, and so come to their prayer with much material which the ordinary Christian has to find at the time of prayer. But no particular period can be laid down in general. It is not true, for instance, as I have heard a Retreat conductor say, that religious should arrive at affective prayer in six weeks.

I have already emphasised the fact that all souls are called to perfection, and this implies a more or less steady progress in the life of prayer, which, without any forcing, tends to seek that acquired contemplation which is the highest state possible to the soul's efforts aided by Divine grace. ' Contemplation,' says St. Thomas, ' is for man the end of human life. Wherefore Augustine says, in his first volume on the Trinity, that the contemplation of God is promised us as the end of all our actions and the eternal completion of our joys, which in the next life shall indeed be complete, for we shall see Him face to face. It is this vision that fulfils every function of the blessed ; here on earth we contemplate Divine truth imperfectly, " darkly, through a mirror," but this itself is the beginning of the Beatific Vision, begun here and completed hereafter ' (Summa Theol., Pars II. ii., q. clxxx. 4. 4).

The witness to the possibility of contemplation for all faithful souls runs through all the ages, as may be seen in St. Augustine's ' If we be faithful we have already arrived at the way of faith, and if we do not abandon it, we shall without doubt arrive . . . to the height of contemplation which the Apostle calls face to face !

For some of the least ones, who yet walk perseveringly in the path of faith, come to most that blessed contemplation' (Ep. cxx. 4); St. Gregory's 'There is no state of life of the faithful from which the grace of contemplation can be excluded; anyone who keeps his heart within him, may be illumined by the light of contemplation'; Fr. Baker's words already quoted; the common teaching of the Counter-Reformers as exemplified in such a popular preacher as the Carmelite, Père Leon, 'There is no Christian who, by the obligation of his profession made in Holy Baptism, is not called to the study and practice of mystical theology' (he uses the term in the more ancient sense, not as modern writers would rightly now restrict it to those higher states of prayer which are not attainable by any human efforts) – all those admirable sentiments, nearly always confined to the monastic state, primitively and literally apply to all Christians. 'Ye are not of the world,' 'You are dead, and your life is hid in God.' 'To whom, my Master, dost Thou pronounce these words? To the cloistered? Not at all, but to the whole Church. To whom and of whom speakest thou, O great St. Paul? Of solitaries, of religious, of Benedictines? No! No! Of whom, then? Of the baptised, of the faithful, of Christians' (Sermons prêchés à Montmartre en 1661), down to Bishop Hedley's 'It is the very aim of the teaching of Fr. Baker and his school that extraordinary prayer, contemplation, should be an ordinary state for Christian souls,' and the Abbot of Pershore's 'In point of fact, some of the best mystics and contemplatives are to be found in the world.'

That this truth is so little recognised is largely due not only to the prevailing ignorance about any prayer except vocal prayer, intercessions and the like, but also because any mention of the higher states usually connotes to the mind such extraordinary phenomena as visions, locutions, raptures, ecstasy, which are comparatively rare and are not to be sought for or expected by any soul. Undoubtedly existent and deeply valuable as they may be where God vouchsafes them, there is much to be pondered over in the words of R. P. L. Grandmaison (Études, May 1913) on this difficult subject. ' It is unnecessary to concur in the common opinion that the ecstatic phenomena constitute the essential of the mystic state and call for our admiration; they are nothing more than its concomitants, consequences and effects, due to the weakness, the imperfection, the insufficient spiritualisation of the human instrument, which diminish with its progress in the spiritual life. Ecstasy – I here reserve the term to the phenomena of inhibition, temporary insensibility – is not an honour nor a power ; but a tribute paid by the mystics to the humanness of their nature.'

Further, many are held back by the thought that any advance would be only a mark of presumption in one so imperfect and full of failure. They are obsessed by the common error which seeks a self-made goodness as a condition for receiving the gifts of God, and give all their attention to efforts of their own when they should be simply abandoning themselves to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The experience of St. Teresa is so common that we may well listen to her description of a personal struggle which is so like our own.

She had entered a convent which was somewhat relaxed; there was a great deal of intercourse with relations and friends, and the young novice found herself drifting toward a mere exterior observance of the religious life. ' My soul was so distracted by many vanities that I was ashamed to draw near to God in an act of such special friendship as prayer . . . it was the most frightful delusion into which Satan could plunge me – to give up prayer under the pretence of humility. . . . I thought it would be better for me, seeing that in my wickedness I was one of the most wicked, to live like the multitude, saying the prayers I was bound to (i.e. by the Rule) and that vocally, not to practise mental prayer nor commune with God so much.' She was tormented by the gulf between her prayer and her life, accentuated as it was by the good opinion all had of her; she had great desires to further the progress of others, 'a most common temptation of beginners.' 'I have been a year or more without praying, thinking it an act of greater humility not to do so. This was the greatest temptation I ever had and very nearly wrought my utter ruin; for when I used to pray, if I offended God one day, on the following days I would recollect myself and withdraw further from the occasion of sin.' About this time she received great help from a Dominican priest, who advised more frequent Communion and charged her never to omit her prayer, for 'it would not do me anything but good.' Yet no less than eighteen years passed 'in that strife of soul which arose out of my attempts to reconcile God and the world . . . the reason of my telling this at so great a length is that men may understand how great is the good which God works in a soul when He gives it a disposition to pray in earnest, though it may not be so well prepared as it ought to be. If that soul perseveres in spite of sins, temptations, relapses, brought about in a thousand ways by Satan, our Lord will bring it at last—I am certain of it — to the haven of salvation . . . I may speak of that which I know by experience, and so I say let him never cease from prayer who has once begun it, be his life ever so wicked; for prayer is the way to amend it, and without prayer such amendment will be much more difficult' (Life, chap. vii.).

Another difficulty often arising in the minds of those who find themselves giving much more time to affective acts of the will, to the reiteration of a few acts or even one act of adoration, etc., than to actual meditation, or who remain motionless before God contemplating the Divine Majesty and Beauty, is the fear that they are 'doing nothing.' There is, of course, a danger of the soul drifting into a mere dreamy reverie in which nothing is done, and this must be checked at once by a return to considerations, acts or resolutions, but when the eye of faith is riveted on God, the memory, imagination and will possessed by and drawn to Him, there is nothing to fear, for this is a state of prayer commended by all the Saints. Thus St. J. F. de Chantal writes to St. François de Sales, 'My spirit in its extreme summit is in a very simple unity; it does not unite, for when it desires to make acts of union, which it too often wishes to do on certain occasions, it feels a strain and perceives clearly that it cannot unite itself, but only remain united; the soul would not willingly stir thence. She neither thinks nor does anything, unless it be a certain deepening of her desire, which goes on, as it were, imperceptibly, that God should do with her and with all creatures, in all things, as He wills'; and again she says: 'In this state of holy indolence our capacity for love grows greater, and the shafts of Divine love strike far more deeply; our own activity keeps the soul chained, it is in stillness that it grows.'

Père Surin says that there are three signs by which we may know that this kind of prayer, which Bossuet describes as 'one simple look of ours, one loving attention on our part, towards some Divine object – either God in some of His infinite perfections, or Jesus Christ in some of His mysteries, or some of the Christian virtues,' a prayer in which there are no distinct reflections, is good and should be adhered to. First, that during the prayer the soul is in peace without any sense of weariness or ennui; second, that it goes forth from prayer with a great resolution to persevere in good; third, that during the day it sees clearly how to conduct itself and has much strength in the practice of virtue (Cat. Spirit, Pt. I., chap. iii.).

There is much need to remember that the Christian life is a unity and a continued, ordered progress, though, as Fr. Martindale has said, it is a progress up an inclined spiral, so that at times the going on is apparently on a lower plane. St. John of the Cross has left an exact and vivid description of the soul's passage from the darkness of sin to the heights of Carmel, showing us how the soul is gradually liberated from its lower self by the practice of active mortification and meditation, then led through the Dark Night of the Spirit in which it surrenders all dependence on external and even on spiritual things, mortifying the understanding, the memory and the will, passing through and beyond the use of all intermediate images to direct union with God Himself. He further emphasises the unity of progress by his teaching, which is also that of St. Catherine of Genoa, in her treatise on Purgatory (vide chap. xvii.), that the pains of Purgatory are a continuation of that purification of the soul by Divine love which begins in this life, as the final vision of God is but the fulness of that sight of Him in contemplation, in which, as St. Augustine says, we see 'in such a way as the heart sees, when it is said, He is Truth,' but cannot here abide in that seeing, but 'glide back into usual and earthly things' (De Trinitate, Tome viii., chap. ii.).

In this connection, too, we are enabled to see that all our exercises of prayer are not meant to end in themselves (' he who prays only on his knees, prays but little ' - Cassian, Confer. X. xiv.), but are designed to create and foster within us that life of prayer of which the Apostle speaks, that life which is lived 'in Christ,' sharing in His virtues, animated by His Spirit, guided by His principles, inspired by His mind, a life, not now and then, here or there, turned to God, but all and always turned to Him, lived in a continual, abiding recollection of His Presence, 'in Whom we live and move and have our being,' given over to His interests and inclinations, governed at all points by Divine, supernatural, Christ-like views, dispositions and standards.

A further point is of importance. St. John of the Cross, who describes so fully that 'strait and narrow way' of the 'Nada, Nada, Nada y in monte nada,' the way of universal and complete renunciation by which the All is to be found by the loss of all, yet says that 'God does not raise to perfect contemplation everyone that is tried in the way of the Spirit, not even half of them: the reason, He knows' (Dark Night, Bk. I., chap. ix.).¹ And, indeed, in his map or diagram of the ascent of Mt. Carmel he shows another path leading upward but not actually reaching the summit, i.e. the perfection of union with God so far as it is possible in this life. This is, indeed, the path of the many who ascend to God, not by the way of renunciation of all creatures, even the most spiritual, but by the right use of creatures who, without inordinate attachment to the gifts of God, yet never cease to be in some way dependent on them, finding in them, as Saint Robert Bellarmin teaches in his De Ascensione Mentis, steps in a 'ladder of created things.' Not all souls, then, are to be expected to follow St. John of the Cross all the way, nor, indeed, unless God wills, can they do so. For the majority the other path opens out and must be trodden with all the generosity possible, and with the utmost confidence that so long as the soul follows the Divine leading humbly and faithfully, it shall find rest ' in the haven where it would be.'²

How are we to know whether a soul is in the state of prayer which God wills for it? What are the normal signs which mark the transition from one stage to another? Actually, two moments have to be considered; first, the passage from the ordinary mental prayer of beginners to affective prayer, and second, that from affective prayer to ordinary, acquired contemplation. In the first case, there is a gradual but increasing ability to pass more rapidly from considerations and the use of the imagination to acts of prayer. The soul finds in a single thought, or even in the act of placing herself in the presence of God, a desire and a facility to pour herself out in affective acts of prayer – catches fire, as it were, at once, without the labour of reflection hitherto necessary. It is not so much that meditation becomes more difficult as that it becomes less necessary. In this stage the acts of prayer may be spontaneous, or use may be made, especially where a certain aridity is experienced, of such acts and aspirations as those given by Father Baker at the end of his Holy Wisdom, or in Dom Rutherford's Acts of Mental Prayer. The test which determines the need and the time of making this advance in the prayer-life is the attraction the soul feels toward a more actual prayer, as contrasted with the exercise of the mind, etc., which leads to prayer, and the fact that it moves the will to at least as great a desire and endeavour after the solid and common virtues as did the previous prayer. The latter may, and probably will, be slow in appearance; indeed, as all real progress in prayer must bring increased light and purity of heart, the soul will see its defects and imperfections more clearly, and may be tempted to think that she is going back. Further, this strengthening of the union of the soul with God results in a keener sight of the existence of exterior faults, e.g. lack of humility and charity in regard of one's neighbour, which had hitherto been overlooked, partly from the appreciation of, and attention to, the needs of the interior life. Thus, it is the best of signs that the soul is walking in the path marked out by God for her, and that real, if little, seen progress is being made, if she goes out of prayer not only possessed with an interior peace in 'the fine point of the soul,' but also with a greater desire to exercise those virtues which concern her relation to others.

In the second case, that of the passage from affective prayer to the beginning of contemplation, all our guides follow the teaching of St. John of the Cross, although in some there may be found a lack of clarity in their exposition resulting from a failure to grasp that the Saint does recognise the distinction between acquired contemplation and that infused contemplation which belongs to the mystical life properly so-called, and to which not all are called. It is true that St. John is not always easy to follow, and that more than one reading is necessary if one would sound the depths of his doctrine. But it is, I think, clear that in The Ascent of Mount Carmel he speaks of a state of prayer which the soul arrives at and enters upon by its own activity, aided by grace, and that this state is what is now commonly known as acquired contemplation. The signs which he gives in chapters xiii. and xiv. of the Ascent as denoting the time when the soul should pass to contemplation are not identical with those mentioned in The Dark Night of the Soul, and should not be applied to the higher state of infused passive contemplation.

In the Ascent, then, St. John is treating of acquired contemplation and of the signs by which the soul may know when to abandon the latter stages of mental prayer, affective acts produced by few considerations, and go on to the first rungs of the ladder of contemplation. That this is acquired, active contemplation may be gathered from his own words : ' The end of meditation and reflections on the things of God is to have the knowledge and love of Him as its fruit. Each time this is done, it is an act, and as acts often repeated produce habits, so many acts of loving knowledge continuously made by the soul beget the habit thereof in the course of time. God is wont at times to effect this without these acts of meditation – at least without many of them – leading souls at once into a state of contemplation. Thus what the soul obtained before, at intervals, by dint of meditation, in particular acts of knowledge, is now by practice converted into habit and substance of knowledge, loving, general, not distinct, particular, as before ' (Ascent, Bk. II., chap. xiv. 2). Now all this is an active response of the soul to the attraction and grace of God, gradually leading to a more complete unification of its powers and to a closer union with Him, whereas infused contemplation is a pure gift of God, which the soul can do nothing to attain to and which is not bestowed, according to St. John, but to a few. But that there is a form of contemplation which is open to all is, as we have seen, the common tradition of the Church.

The signs which the Saint gives of the arrival of the soul at this state are three in number :

(1) An inability to make reflections or to exercise the imagination upon Divine truths, coupled with an aridity resulting from the endeavour to make such acts wherein previously light and consolation were present. So long as meditation is fruitful it should be persevered in nor must it be supposed, that the entry upon contemplation precludes any return to formal meditation, for, as the Saint says, until the new state has become habitual, 'sometimes one, sometimes the other, occurs in this time of proficiency in such a way that very often the soul finds itself in this loving or peaceful attendance upon God, with all its faculties in repose; and very often also will find it necessary, for that end, to have recourse to meditation, calmly and with moderation' (Ascent, Bk. II., chap. xv. 1). Here, again, the phrase 'for that end' indicates a form of contemplation attainable by the soul's fidelity to mental prayer.

(2) The second sign manifests itself in a growing detachment from creatures, not only of the natural but of the supernatural order. It is true that the imagination may still wander toward them, 'for it is disorderly even in the most complete self-recollection,' but the will is more firmly rooted in God, and the desire of the soul is for God Himself more than for His gifts or consolations. It sees more clearly that thoughts about God and the means by which He is apprehended and approached are not God; that they are to be used, not rested in or enjoyed in themselves; that, as St. Augustine says, 'the things of the world are for our use, not for our enjoyment. That which is for our enjoyment is the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.' There is an increasing transcendence of particular thoughts of God which are replaced by a general, confused, loving knowledge and perception of Him.

(3) The third sign, 'which is the most certain of the three,' consists in the fact that the soul finds itself at peace in this prayer, delighting 'to be alone, waiting lovingly upon God without any particular considerations, in interior peace, quiet and repose,' occupied in a general knowledge and loving attention to God, undisturbed by any scruples that it is doing nothing, or that it is losing ground. Any fears of this nature which result in forced efforts to produce reflections, or to seek for a more particular knowledge in place of this 'general loving knowledge,' a state 'confused, loving, peaceful and tranquil wherein is drunk wisdom, love and sweetness,' are to be resisted as tending to deprive the soul of the higher gifts God now wishes to bestow upon it.

It is important to note that all three signs must be present before the soul may safely give up the practice of ordinary mental prayer. For the inability to meditate alone may be due to one's own fault, to lack of preparation, dryness or to conditions of physical health. Added to this inability there must be a positive lack of desire to occupy oneself with other things, a more pronounced detachment from creatures. Yet even these two signs are insufficient in themselves, for both may be the effect of some mental disorder, 'melancholy or some other oppression of the brain or heart' which creates a morbid disinclination for things in general. But the third sign sets its seal upon the others, providing the soul with an assurance that, despite the subtilty and delicacy of this new state, it has begun to find the fruit sought in the labour of mental prayer.

'It is by the bodily senses that the soul is able to reflect, search out, and come to the knowledge of things; and by the spiritual sense to rejoice in the knowledge thus attained without further labour, search or reflection. The difference between these two conditions of the soul is like the difference between working, and enjoyment of the fruit of our work; between receiving a gift, and profiting by it; between the toil of travelling, and the rest at our journey's end.'

This state of ordinary, acquired contemplation marks a real advance from the way of sense to the way of spirit, an intense deepening of the soul's union with

God. It is the end – itself unending (for there can be no end in the sense of a full stop to the soul's growth in the loving knowledge of God) – of the journey of those whom God does not raise to the highest stages of the spiritual life. The soul, having 'found Him whom her soul loveth,' rests in peaceful contemplation at the feet of her Divine Lord, 'listening to His word' and 'with joy drawing water out of the wells of salvation.'

Footnotes

1. As this sentence is often mistranslated, 'lleva' being rendered 'called' instead of 'raised' and 'el por qué él se lo sabe' by 'God alone knows why,' both of which do violence to the Saint's meaning, I give the original. 'No á todos los que se ejercitan de propósito en el camino del espiritu lleva Dios á contemplacion ni aun á la mitad: el por qué, él se lo sabe.' / The point is that all are 'called' but not all are 'raised' to the highest state of contemplation owing, not to something known to God alone, but as St. John teaches in The Living Flame (Stanza II. 28. English of David Lewis), to the fact that he finds so few who have the patience, courage and resolution to endure the least hardness or mortification by which God wills to detach them from creatures and lead them into the dark night of pure faith (Edit. espagnole, Tomo ii. p. 640–641). ↩

2. Cf. the conclusion reached at the second Spanish Congress on ascetism and mysticism organised by the Carmelites of the Province of Castille at Madrid in 1926. ' The mortification taught by St. John of the Cross is principally interior . . . the practice of his doctrine of Nada (entire renunciation) ought to be ruled according to the general condition of human nature and to the particular dispositions of the individual. The doctrine of total negation concerns all contemplative souls.' ↩