Chapter II. The Passive Purification of Faith
Trials accompanying the passive purification of the soul
The period of trial which St. John of the Cross calls the night of the soul is necessary, not only to free souls from those things that still prevent them from enjoying the intimacy of divine union — the remains of unconscious egoism, self-love, and intellectual and spiritual pride— but also to give great strength to the higher virtues. Because of die temptations against chastity and patience often accompanying initial infused contemplation, the night of the senses is a period of holy warfare, during which the virtues having their basis in die sensuous appetency show great gain. For the same reasons, the night of the soul is marked by still greater progress in the highest virtues, in humility, the virtue of religion, and the three theological virtues.
The means used by God to purify us in this way is, as St. Thomas1 and St. John of the Cross2 have shown, die supernatural light of the gift of understanding. It illumines the soul about the infinite greatness of God, for we recognize more and more clearly how far He is above every idea and formula that we can frame of His greatness. By contrast, die soul discovers that it has miseries heretofore unsuspected. The light that God gives it is sometimes so intense that the eyes of the mind, as yet still weak, become dazzled and as if blinded by it and, although the soul is moving forward into greater clarity, it believes itself swallowed up in darkness.
God purifies humility and the theological virtues chiefly by means of this light, but He also makes use of the enemy of salvation himself for this work, sometimes permitting the devil to try souls with violent temptations against faith, hope, and charity. Those tried in this way find that they must make intense and meritorious acts of virtue, and so temptation contributes to their growth. The soul is the arena for a struggle between Satan and the Holy Ghost, a struggle that at times becomes terrible, the devil evidently desiring to attack God's work with weapons like His own. The more the Lord attracts a soul toward the heights of faith, the more the devil strives to deny that they exist. The soul finds itself between two kinds of sufferings: one comes from God and is essentially purifying; the other comes from the spirit of evil, and God makes it serve His own ends indirectly.
Something mavelous now happens, something reminiscent of the first conversion or justification of the impious, when the soul passes from the state of mortal sin into die state of grace. As St. Thomas taught 3 and the Council of Trent later defined, the soul at the time of its first conversion is led by God to realize its own misery and to make an act of faith in the infinite merits of the Savior, to hope in God, to love Him above all things, and to hate sin as the greatest of evils. By justifying us, the good God has, as it were, plowed a furrow in the soul for the sowing of the divine seed there; now, in
THE PASSIVE PURIFICATION OF FAITH 125 the passive night of the soul, He goes back over the same furrow again to extirpate all the evil roots still to be found there. This He does that the seed of eternal life, the semen gloriae, can give its full yield of thirty, sixty, or even a hundredfold, according to the parable of the sower. 4
By the light of the gift of understanding the Lord shows the soul not what He is in His infinite holiness, but what He is not; by opposition, it sees its own nothingness, weakness, and baseness, and, under the influx of the grace that it receives, makes profound acts of humility, of faidi, of hope, and of charity, acts necessary and indispensable if it is to resist the temptations arising against these virtues.
To get a better understanding of how this great purification is effected, let us compare what St. John of the Cross tells us of the infused light given in the night of the soul with what St. Thomas teaches about the formal motive of the highest supernatural virtues. Clearly, the more perfectly these virtues attain by their acts to the primary object and formal motive specifying them, the more purified they are of every natural alloy.
Acts and habits are specified by their formal object. 15 We are going to see the manner of purification described by St. John of the Cross. It often occurs in a less rigorous way, mixed with the sufferings of the apostolate; but even this mitigated form is properly understood only if we discern in it the other higher mode that represents the perfect development of die supernatural seed within us. It must be noted, too, that not merely in the lives of individuals do these purgations take place but in the lives of groups of people, of
religious families as well, especially at the time either of their foundation or of their full development, when trial is made to discover whether die house is built on rock or on sand. And the Lord waits, as it were, until these trials are done so diat He may give crowns to diose who are faithful to Him, whether they are individuals or whole peoples.
Humility and piety on tried
The good God teaches humility to die saints by showing them die abyss still separating them from Him. We can learn to practice die same virtue by looking at the distance dividing us from the saints. They show us how, in a truly Christian spirit, we ought to bear our crosses, so much less heavy than theirs.
St. Augustine says that humility is the foundation of the spiritual structure. For die building to be sound its foundation must go deep into the earth. Its cornerstone, St. Thomas says, is faith; the excavation necessary before the first stone can be laid is humility, which drives out spiritual pride so that we can receive the word of God widi docility. As diese things have been said to us again and again from the first days of our interior life, we have broken ground, done some excavating, and then begun to build our spiritual structure. But days stormy with temptations of pride and of revolt have made us realize that our building lacked sturdiness and might have been blown down, had die storm been worse.
We should have made our foundation deeper. When the Lord desires to raise the spiritual edifice of a soul to great heights, He Himself takes charge of digging down into depths which we are unaware of. Saints whom He has so grounded, no matter to what heights He may later lead
THE PASSIVE PURIFICATION OF FAITH 127 them, find pride impossible because they have had sufficient experience of their own nothingness and wretchedness, less than mere nothingness. We too often forget that the interior sufferings of the Cure of Ars came from his growing enlightenment regarding the greatness of the priesdiood and his consequent conclusion that he himself fell far short of being fit for it.
Intense supernatural light gives the soul a lofty idea of perfection and shows it its own powerlessness and poverty incomparably better than the most careful examination of conscience. We then come to know experimentally die profound meaning of Christ's words, "Without Me you can do nothing." 0 "No one can come to Me, except the Father, who hath sent Me, draw him." 7 We discern much better than ever before what St. Paul meant when he wrote: "For who distinguished! thee? Or what hast thou that thou hast not received ? And if thou hast received, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?" 8 Experience teaches the soul how truly the Church has spoken in teaching, against the Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians, that grace is necessary, not merely to accomplish supernatural acts better, but to accomplish them at all. It understands more truly how grace, as St. Augustine and St. Thomas say, is efficacious of itself and not because of our efforts, according to St. Paul's deep pronouncement: "For it is God who worketh in you, both to will and to accomplish, according to His good will." 9
In the light of the gift of understanding, the soul discerns everything that taints its best deeds. Just as when a ray of
I2 8 THE LOVE OF GOD sunlight passes through apparently limpid water we detect a host of tiny particles imperceptible in diffused light, so now the soul sees such a multitude of faults within itself that it is completely humiliated and overwhelmed. The devil often takes this opportunity to tempt it to discouragement, and if the Lord were to withhold His special help, it would yield to the temptation.
St. Anselm marks out the way to true humility as having seven degrees: first a man knows that he is worthy of contempt; then he learns to endure being contemptible; goes on to own that he is so; and then to wish His neighbor to believe it of him; comes to put up with being told that he is; and after that to accept being treated with contempt; and finally to love to be so used. 10 The humble man no longer glories in himself, but in God alone, and lives in the profound conviction that whatever we have of ourselves— our worthlessness and our sins — is inferior to whatever another man holds from God. 11 All the saints have had a realization of our nothingness. Full Christian perfection is impossible without it, for it sets the soul definitively in die way of truth and gives to God the glory due Him.
When Blessed Angela of Foligno was enduring the passive purification of which we are speaking, she saw herself as an abyss of sin and wished to make it known to everybody and make an end of what she called her hypocrisy. St. Benedict Joseph Labre began his confession by saying, "Have pity on me, Father. I am a great sinner." The confessor, not finding anything grave in what he accused himself of, thought that he did not know how to make his confession and questioned
him on the commandments of God, receiving answers so humble and so penetrated with the spirit of faith, that he knew he was dealing with a saint.
Together with humility, the virtue of religion grows mightily during such trials. In those who remain faithful, substantial devotion (which is nothing else but readiness of will in God's service) shows fuller and fuller development in the absence of all accidental devotion, since the soul perseveres in prayer without experiencing either sensible or spiritual consolation. The gift of piety lends strong support to the virtue of religion, and prayer is infused but very arid. St. Jane Frances de Chantal spent long years in diis state.
Going into the matter more deeply, we find that the special end of this purgation is to rid the theological virtues of all defects. By the light of St. Thomas' doctrine, we see now more than at any other time that the purification of the great virtues is accomplished by freeing their absolutely supernatural motive from all human ends, now recognized as being infinitely below it. Despite all obstacles and notwithstanding its own foresakenness, the soul is led to cleave to God solely because He is first truth, infinite mercy, supreme and sovereignly lovable goodness.
As already remarked, nominalist theologians and those who follow them, have frequently failed to appreciate the essentially supernatural character, the quoad substantiam, of the formal motive of these virtues. The supernaturalness of a miracle belongs to a far lower order since it is naturally knowable, whereas the formal motive of the theological virtues lies beyond the reach of any natural knowledge. 12 What we are
12 The miracle of the resurrection gives back to the body in a supernatural way its natural life, vegetative and sentient, belonging to an order infinitely less than going to consider next will show us the magnitude of die mistake made by diose with nominalistic leanings.
Imperfections that stand in the way of a life of deep faith
Faith is an infused, essentially supernatural virtue by which we believe the mysteries revealed by God because He has revealed them and as they are proposed to us by the Church, die proximate guide of our belief. Through die inspiration and illumination of the Holy Ghost 13 our intellect, moved by the will, adheres to an essentially supernatural revelation and to the hidden mysteries which it makes known.
These formulas are soon said, but what do they contain ? Of course, every good Christian believes what God has revealed because He has revealed it; but whereas we say that "the just man liveth by faith," 14 it often happens that we live too little by the supernatural mysteries which are the primary object of divine revelation: the Blessed Trinity and die mysteries of salvation. Our thoughts may tend more toward the natural truths of religion, such as the existence of God as die author of nature, His power, His providence in the natural order, and the spirituality and immortality of the soul. These are all revealed, too, but are accessible to reason and demonstrable as well. Or, if we do think of supernatural mysteries often enough, do we not, for example, dwell too much on the sensible symbolism of divine things when assisting at Mass by paying too much attention to the external the order of grace. This point of doctrine and its consequences have been developed at length elsewhere. Cf. De revelatione. Vol. I, ist and 2nd ed., pp. 197- 217, 337- 403, 482-500; Christian Perfection and Contemplation, pp. 56 ff., 269 ff.
13 The Council of Orange and the Council of the Vatican.
THE PASSIVE PURIFICATION OF FAITH i 3I mold, the letter of the liturgy, and all those things within the grasp of our natural faculties ?
Some people's faith is so little enlightened that is could be called embryonic and bears no proportion to their literary, scientific, or professional development. Generally our faith is far too weak for us really to live by the mysteries of the Blessed Trinity, creation, the elevation of the first man to the life of grace, the redemptive Incarnation, the mission of the Holy Ghost as the special guest and sanctifier of the just, and the beatific vision as reward of those faithful to grace. For many these are colorless and oft-repeated formulas, and their object seems as far removed as the remotest heaven. We fail to let these supernatural truths become the light of our life, points of reference for our judgment on every subject, guiding principles for our thinking. In the obscurity of faith God reveals to us the very object of His own contemplation, that which constitutes His own infinite happiness, and what a pity it is if we do not live by it! The weakness of our faith, our lack of the spirit of faith, becomes especially apparent in adversity, sickness, and in other sufferings badly borne. Our lack of kindness toward our neighbor reveals it, too, for it shows how slow we are to recognize him as a brother called to the same supernatural happiness as we are.
The reason why we believe die truths of faith is that God has revealed them; but it is questionable whedier we fully grasp the greatness of this uncreated and wholly supernatural motive. Nominalist theologians and their followers, let it be said, have not recognized it, nor have they grasped what an infinite distance lies between natural knowledge of God as the author of nature and essentially supernatural knowledge of God as the author of grace. Such a supernatural knowledge
I32 THE LOVE OF GOD of God implies not merely knowing Him as the author of different corporeal and spiritual natures or as the worker of naturally knowable miracles. It implies knowing Him. as He is in His inner life, which He Himself has revealed to us, giving our intellects a capacity beyond the natural powers of the greatest angels to adhere to His divine revelation of Himself. 15
Acquired faith, immediately founded on the evidence of miracles, belongs to a far lower order than infused faith and is possessed by the devil himself, although he is bereft of every supernatural gift. 10 Because we fail to grasp fully the sublimity of the formal motive of infused faith, we dwell too much on secondary motives, reasons not for believing supernaturally and infallibly, but for orientating ourselves toward the faith. Motives of this kind are many— the evident harmony of dogma with demonstrated truths, the higher intuition of great philosophers and poets, and our own natural aspirations, whether individual or social, or again with our own personal experience when in a moment of consolation we are given some cognizance of God's action widiin us. Those called Modernists have placed far too much emphasis on secondary motives like these, confusing them with the formal motive of infused faith. As a result they have failed utterly to recognize the essentially supernatural character of infused faith, so infinitely beyond and above all natural knowledge, whether human or angelic. The final outcome of such a confusion is the reduction of Christian faith to a kind of natural
™Cf. St. Thomas, Ha Ilae, q.i, a.i; q.4. a.i; q-5. a.i, a. 2, a.3, ad 1; q.6, a.i. De veritale. q.14, a.8, a. 9, ad 4. In Boetium de Trinilale, q.3, a.i, ad. 4. Quodhbet II, a. 6, ad 3. In Joannem, c. 4, lect, V, no. 2.
"Mia Ilae, q.5, a.2; De vcritale. q.14. a. 9, ad 4; "Credere aequivoce dicilur de hominibus el de daemon/bus."3
and Kantian belief in the existence of God and of free will, while denying the whole order of grace. Often men's unconscious and latent confusions lead, if we deduce their consequences, to greater mistakes. In the present instance they would lead to a denial of the essentially supernatural character of the three theological virtues. 17
God's purification of our faith
When God desires to purify our supernatural faith from every natural alloy, He brings out in relief its formal motive and seems even to do away with any secondary motives, for they are not geniune reasons for belief. We no longer have any sensible experience of the divine action within us; only dryness and aridity, not only of the senses but also of the soul, are our portion. The harmony of dogma with the truths of reason is blotted out, and the testimony of the world's greatest thinkers in favor of the faith seems weak indeed. The life of Christ and the lives of His saints as well, seem more wonderful than ever ; but the failings of churchmen do much to disconcert us, bringing to mind, it may be, the description of her times drawn by St. Catherine of Siena in her Dialogue. Motives of credibility, like miracles and prophecies, no longer have any force for the tormented reason.
Two contrary causes bring all this about: God accords us a new light to lead us away from our too human ways of do-
17 Cf. St. Thomas, Ila Ilae, q.2, a. 10 concerning how the natural alloy in a man's actions decreases the merit of the acts of the theological virtues. A human motive intermixed with a divine motive, elicits not a supernatural act, but a concomitant natural act of inferior quality, as would happen in the case of a man who still desired to go to Sunday Mass for a supernatural reason because of a remaining vestige of Christian faith but also docs it naturally because it is a family custom and he would no longer go should this custom disappear.
ing things, and the devil makes use of this change, although it both liberates and elevates us, to tempt us and make us fall. As St. John of the Cross shows, we receive at this time a supernatural light that discloses to us the spirit of God's word and obliges us to rise above its letter and our own inferior way of conceiving the divine perfections. 18 The wholly supernatural heights of the mysteries of infinite justice, of predestination, of the Savior's passion, of the salvation and loss of souls, are all illumined by this infused light; the narrow concepts to which wc have been used are, in a sense, blown wide open. Wc stand astonished before inexorable justice, asking how it can be reconciled with unbounded mercy. The question arises before us how such a good God can allow such great evils. Objections formulated by heretics and examined speculatively by theologians present themselves to us, not in the abstract, but at life's core, for example, on the death of fadier or friend. Everything contributes to the impression diat the understanding is lost in the dark, whereas in reality it is flooded with light too strong for its feeble vision. God plunges the soul into the depths of the mysteries of faith and it feels itself sinking and drowning, like a child put down in the sea before it knows how to swim, although held up by the unseen hand of its father. And souls that go down into the troubled sea of the dark night find that the hand of God yet bears diem up.
At these times, the Lord also allows the devil to tempt His elect to doubt the existence of eternal life, the redemptive Incarnation, the mystery of grace, and all supernatural realities. 19 To reason about the matter of the temptation
10 Cf. what St. John o£ the Cross has to say on this subject in The Living Flame,4 is not the way to meet such an attack. We cannot meet this adversary with arguments; we must turn our back on him in contempt and, although he will bend every effort to keep us from doing so, we must adhere firmly to God's word. As St. John of the Cross says, the devil torments and afflicts the soul in ways that defy the telling, for now two spirits are engaged in open warfare within it. 20
Secondary motives all seem poor weak things now. The harmony of dogma widi the truths of reason, with philosophic and poetic intuitions, and with human aspirations, appear almost childish. God is, however, making temptation serve His ends. He sustains the soul in secret and, by the gift of understanding, preserves within it, even in times of greatest darkness, its certitude that it must believe, 21 that it must believe for the single and supernatural reason that God has said it; God, who can neither deceive nor be deceived; God, the First Truth revealing.
What will help us to adhere to the First Truth ? Some story from the life of Christ ? An account of one of His miracles ? Or any of the histories of the Church written by fallible st. 3, no. 55! Complete Works of St. ]ohn of the Cross (London: Burns, Oates and Washbournc, 1934), III, 93. "For the evil one takes his stand, with great cunning, on the road that leads from sense to spirit, deceiving and luring the soul by means of sense, and giving it sensual things, as wc have said, so that it may rest in them and not escape from them; and the soul is entrapped with the greatest case, for it knows of nothing better d>an this, and thinks not that anything is being lost by it, but rather considers it a great blessing, and receives it readily, thinking that God has come to visit it; and in this way fails to enter into the innermost chamber of the Spouse, but stands at the door to see what is liappening. . . . And, if perchance any soul enters into recollection, he labours to bring about its ruin by means of horrors, fears or pains of the body, or by outward sounds and noises, causing it to be distracted by sense, in order to bring it out and distract it from the inner spirit." See too The Dark, Night, Bk. II, chap. 23.
men ? The rereading perhaps of a good historical and critical treatise of apologetics ? Any rational inquiry, no matter how indispensable and unerring, serves only as an inferior disposition for the act of faith; between die two stretches the infinite distance separating nature and grace. To return to such a pursuit would mean going back to discursive reasoning at a time when we need to rise above it and fly over temptation, instead of fighting it with arguments. To succeed, we have to beg ardently for the actual grace of faith and we must also will to believe, for the object and the formal motive of faith is inevidcnt and hidden, and the will must intervene to bring the intellect to give it firm adherence. 22
Widi God's help, the soul is inwardly led to say the aposdes' prayer, "Lord, increase our faith." 23 Lord, give me grace to believe, lift up my intellect to Thee, and to the uncreated Father. Raise my mind to what it cannot naturally attain, the infinite, grant that I may cleave supernaturally to Thyself, the First Truth revealing. Grant that I may believe. Give me refuge from my inconstancies in Thy immutability. I believe in God revealing and in God revealed. 24
Presently the full sublimity of the formal motive of faith begins to appear not simply in a speculadve but in an experimental way. The First Truth revealing, die authority of God the revealer, is a motive as essentially supernatural as the mysteries to which we hold because of it. It belongs to an
24 Ila Ilac, q.2, a. 2; ibid., ad ium. As Cajctan says in flam Ilae, q. 1, a. 1, " Veritas prima est id quo et quod creditur." Cf. also Ila Ilae, q. 5, a. 3, ad ium; ibid., q. 6, a. 1. Here we see how the Thomistic conception of the essential supcrnaturality of faith and the formal motive of faith far surpasses the nominalistic view as held by Molina, and de Lugo, and still maintained by many theologians. This point has been shown at length elsewhere, De revelatione, chap. 14, a. 3.
order much higher than the natural knowledge of the angels; they too, in their state of wayfaring, had it as a supernatural gift. When faith has been purified and cleansed of every natural alloy, natural knowledge of the signs of revelation — miracles and prophecies— retains its force but we see plainly that it pertains to a much lower domain than the properly divine order, to which the act of infused faith belongs. By infused faith we adhere to revealed mysteries simply because of their infinite weight as truths proposed to us by God for our belief.
In her Dialogue 20 St. Catherine of Siena says diat faith is an infused light received at baptism and serves as the pupil of the eye of the intellect, making us know supernaturally revealed things as though seen with the eye of God. She thought, in fact, diat, aldiough we still remain in darkness, we ought to judge human and divine things with the perfect clarity with which God judges diem. In sinners, the light of faith is clouded by a stained conscience so that they often judge things according to their own pride, self-love, and sensuality, and not by the spirit of God.
No other way leads to perfect purity of faith but the passive purification of the soul. The infused virtue of faith must become so deeply rooted in our intellect that the intellect can no longer, so to say, do otherwise than judge things human and divine by the spirit of faith. This spirit has to become second nature to it, and at die end of die period of purgation the healed and supernaturalized intellect should tend spontaneously toward divine mysteries and the First Truth revealing, just as the eye turns toward light and color and the mind reaches out to the first principles of reason.
28 Treatise I.
A higher law in the order of grace
That faith is purified in this way is not a notion peculiar to St. John of the Cross and a few other mystics because of the particular way they themselves followed. The apostles' faith went through just such a purification during the dark night of the Passion. They had heard Christ's sublime sermons and seen diem confirmed by His holiness and miracles, as well as by all the good works He had done; three of them had been present at His transfiguration on Mount Thabor. But when Jesus was made a prisoner, condemned, scourged, crowned with thorns, and crucified, their faith was sorely tried, despite die fact that the Master had repeatedly foretold everything to them. What a dark night this was for the apostles, "die hour of darkness" 26 indeed ! Christ seemed overcome and forsaken by God and man, His work brought to nothing.
The Blessed Virgin, St. John, and Mary Magdalen remained at the foot of die cross. Not for a moment did the Blessed Virgin stop believing that her Son was the Word of God made flesh, the Savior of mankind, and that in diree days He would arise again as He had said. She alone grasped the full meaning of the seven last words of the agonizing Christ. When she heard die Consummation est she understood that our apparently defeated Lord had conquered sin and Satan and she knew, too, that Christ's victory on Good Friday was greater than His triumph over death by His glorious resurrection. Death being the result of sin, the resurrection of the body is only the sign and result of His great
victory over sin. Mary the Co-Redemptress understood this in the dark night of die Passion according to the measure of her union with Christ the Redeemer. John and Mary Magdalen continued to believe in propordon to the light and love given to them by our Lord in His last hours.
What Christ had foretold of the other aposdes came true: "Behold the hour cometh, and it is now come, that you shall be scattered every man to his own, and shall leave Me alone ; and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me. . . . In the world you shall have distress: but have confidence, I have overcome the world." 27 Christ warned Peter particularly: "Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren." 28 Immediately afterward our Lord made known to Peter that he would deny Him. The apostles were indeed sifted by tribulation, thus learning their own powerlessness and frailty and seeing their faith itself apparently on the point of shipwreck; but Christ sustained them, and Peter failed only through weakness in the external confession of his faith, immediately afterward weeping abundant tears for his sin. The graces of Easter and of Pentecost confirmed his faith and the faith of his brethren for all time. They had had their dark night and, if we would share in their intimacy with Christ, we must first follow them into the shadows.
The passive purification of faith occurs in some way in the lives of all the saints, although it may take different forms, being sometimes entirely interior, sometimes mixed with the sufferings of the apostolate. It can be safely said that in
the depth of every interior soul some cross of mind or heart is to be found, and none can really know that soul while unaware of the cause of its hidden suffering. All the saints have had to carry the cross and follow our Lord along the way of sorrows, praying in the depths of their hearts that God would grant them the grace to bear within them the death of Christ. Make me a bearer of Christ's death in the company of Mary and John and the holy women around the cross.
For ten years Blessed Henry Suso had temptations against faith. St. Vincent de Paul passed four years in this kind of torment, becoming a spiritual martyr, for he no longer quite knew whether he had or had not consented to temptation and could reassure himself only by holding to his heart a little piece of paper on which he had written the Credo. 29 In her last years St. Teresa of the Child Jesus also had to make her way through this dark tunnel; what she tells us of her trial brings the doctrine of St. John of the Cross down to the concrete for us. If we are to resist temptation and reach the place our Lord desires us to have, we must perform heroic acts of faith at this time. Such acts at once obtain a great increase of the infused virtue so diat it receives a tenfold or even the promised hundredfold increase.
When the time of purgation comes to a close, the night of the soul becomes a sparkling and delightful night, according to the verse which St. John of the Cross loves to quote: "and night shall be my light in my pleasure." 30 Stars appear only after the sun has set and thus, too, supernatural mysteries shine fordi only when the soul knows how to make a perfect sacrifice of reason in the order of grace, not permitting it to
29 Cf. Abclly, Vie de saint Vincent de Paul (Paris: Dcbccourt, 1843), III, 167. sops. 138: 11.
THE PASSIVE PURIFICATION OF FAITH 141 attempt to cross the boundaries of the region accessible to it. 31 Souls walking in darkness have often been enlightened after calling on St. Thomas Aquinas. He often obtains for them the grace to rise above their affliction, to look down upon it and see the end to which its darkness leads.
The passive purification of faith having been achieved, the soul is fully convinced that only supernatural truth and reality matter and everything else is only, as it were, a shadow of reality. It comes to understand how truly the Book of Wisdom says: "I called upon God, and the spirit of wisdom
31 To give a more concrete idea of such purification we shall quote from a manuscript giving the response of a soul of deep faith especially tempted against the mystery of the Incarnation. It sometimes seemed to her, especially at Communion, as though it were absolutely impossible. What liberal Protestants say about the absurd descent of the metaphysical, the divine, and the eternal into the temporal, she would experience with singular intensity; the infinite distance between the divine nature and the human nature of Christ struck her so forcibly that their union seemed incapable of realization and irreconcilable with God's infinite mercy. St, Paul's words, exinanivit semetipsum ("He emptied himself"), rose up like an insurmountable stumbling block before her, and the annihilation of the cross became a scandal to her, as it was and still is for the Jews.
Her director once asked her, "But you have never seriously doubted the Incarnation?" She gave her answer in writing, part of which is quoted here:
"If by that you mean that I have never voluntarily doubted. Father, then I hope not, although I cannot, however, assert it absolutely, for there arc times when I do not know where my will lies. But if by 'doubting seriously' you mean finding myself faced with absolute negation and only able desperately to repeat acts of faith while wholly powerless to free myself but with the stubborn impression diat such simple formulas avail nothing — this is what happens to me constantly and haunts and harasses me some days until I am worn out. Where is my will then? I wish to hope that it is wholly on the side of that self which repeats the formulas and tries to abandon itself to God, in spite of the terrible sensation of falling down into emptiness. As far as I am able to judge at the very same time I would give my life with joy for the least truth of faith, unless I am deluding myself. During thanksgiving after Communion, all diis redoubles in intensity. If I could tell you what my Communion was yesterday and today, Father, you would have pity on me and would see that I have not die strength to bear this daily. I beg you, give me permission to communicate only when5 hope to be capable of it without provoking these assaults which confuse and shake me. I know well that afterward I shall reproach myself and find a greater emptiness within me than before, but at least I shall be sure of not having offended God."
I4 2 THE LOVE OF GOD came upon me. And I preferred her before kingdoms and thrones, and esteemed riches nothing in comparison of her ... for all gold in comparison of her is as a little sand, and silver in respect to her shall be counted as clay. I loved her above health and beauty, and chose to have her instead of light; for her light cannot be put out." 32 This is the kingdom of God, the pearl of great price, for which a man sells all that he has that he may buy it. 33 Those who have understood and experienced these things have almost always left in the depths of their souls a memory of God, an obscure contemplation of His infinite perfection.
The purification of faith proceeds thus and, until the Lord has completely purged the soul in the way that He wills, "no means or remedy is of any service or profit for the relief of its affliction . . . until the spirit is humbled, softened, and purified, one with the Spirit of God, according to the degree of union of love which His mercy is pleased to grant it." 34
The author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a work of the fourteenth century, anticipates St. John of the Cross by the way in which he speaks of divine obscurity, which is nothing other than God's inner life, the Deity, above being, truth, goodness, wisdom, love, all of which the Godhead contains formally and eminendy, much more truly and fully than white light contains light of other colors, for they are to be found in it only virtually.
In the eighth chapter of this work we read: "And just as it is an unlawful thing, and would hinder a man that sat in his meditations, were he then to consider his outward bodily works, the which he had done or should do, although they were never so holy works in themselves: surely it is as unlawful a thing, and would as much hinder a man that should work in this darkness and in this cloud of unknowing with an affectuous stirring of love to God for himself, were he to let any thought or any meditation of God's wonderful gifts, kindness, and works in any of his creatures, bodily or ghosdy, rise upon him to press betwixt him and his God; although they be never so holy thoughts, nor so pleasing, nor so comfortable.
"And for this reason it is that I bid thee put down such a sharp subtle thought and cover him with a thick cloud of forgetting, be he never so holy and promise he never so well to help thee in thy purpose. For why, love may reach to God in this life, but not knowing." Ed. Dom Justin McCann (London: Burncs, Oates and Washbournc, 1943), pp. 16 f.
This recalls the doctrine often set forth by St. Thomas that, although knowledge draws God down to us and in some way imposes upon Him the limitations of our ideas, love lifts us up to Him and attains to Him without intermediary (Ha Uae, q. 27, a. 4, 5). Love is led toward what remains most obscure in God, to His inner and ineffable life, to the Deity, for our minds a great darkness. This is why the author of The Cloud of Unknowing often says we must penetrate this cloud of love, that is, we must tend toward God and His inner life with all the force of our charity in the obscurity of faith. In the same work, see also chaps. 5, 9, 36-44, 72-75.
Footnotes
Chapter 24 of 37