Books 04 - 07 (Treatise on the Love of God) (Saint Francis of Sales)

Book 4. describes the relations of love and sin. The following five Books treat of the exercise of benevolence in its generic sense�the sovereign love of God for his own sake.

Book 5. treats in general of the double action or manifestation of this love, in complacency, and in benevolence in its specific sense, that is, desire.

Books 6. and 7. treat of union with God by affection, that is, by prayer; the former treating of meditation, and of contemplation as far as union, the latter of union itself. The various degrees of the prayer of quiet are treated in these books, and Quietists bring forward passages from them, as from other parts of the Saint's works, in support of their extravagant system oaf annihilation of the powers. and of purely passive prayer. We have said elsewhere as much as we think it necessary to say to overthrow these allegations. But it is important to show that F�n�lon was utterly wrong in appealing to the Saint's authority in support of his erroneous doctrine on this point in his " Maximes des Saints." Bossuet has exposed these errors and given a full explanation of the passages cited from S. Francis; particularly in the 8th and 9th Books of his "Instruction pastorale sur les �tats d'oraison." The Saint expresses in this as in all things the very teaching of the Church. He rightly teaches that there is, even short of suspension and ecstasy, a kind of prayer in which God takes into his own hands the powers of the soul, and produces in it acts far above the ordinary operations of faith, hope and charity. When God lifts a soul to this prayer, and also to some extent in preparation and expectancy of this elevation, the will acts, by a placing of itself (remise) in the hands of God, and even continues to act, though insensibly: hence the soul is not purely passive, but the action of God is so mighty, and so far beyond all proportion to that of the will, that S. Francis says this is "as it were passive." And as the soul must offer itself to be lifted, and must co-operate with God, therefore also must it help to acquire and preserve that "quiet" which is the condition of God's operation: it must abstain from intrusive acts of reasoning and from other acts of the will,especially from violent ones.

But this prayer, however frequent, long, uninterrupted, absorbing, it may become, is of itself a non-permanent state, and not of the nature of a habit, but is always an act of charity. And far from saying that for perfection it is necessary to be raised to and to keep oneself in this state, the Saint teaches in a hundred places that the soul, however perfect, must exercise itself in all ordinary acts of prayer, faith, hope, petition, which are only put on one side for the time in which God has raised it. The practice of S. Jane Frances, whose authority was invoked even more speciously than that of her saintly director by the advocates of passive prayer, bears on this. We are told that: "She wrote out and signed with her blood a long prayer which she had composed of petitions, praises, thanksgivings, for general and particular favours, for relations and friends, for the living and the dead, in fine for all intentions to which she considered herself obliged, with the Credo of the Missal, also signed with her blod. She carried this in a little bag night and day round her neck, and she had made a loving covenant with Our Lord that whenever she pressed this to her heart she should be taken to have made all the acts of faith, the thanks and the petitions she had written."

And, at last, prayer is not a character of perfection, but a means to it, and the two following statements of S. Francis in his second Conference absolutely settle the whole question as to his teaching.

"It happens often enough that Our Lord gives these quietudes and tranquillities to souls that are far from perfection." . . . . and on the other hand: "There are persons who are very perfect to whom Our Lord has never given such sweetnesses nor such quietudes; who do all with the superior part of the soul, and make their will die in the will of God by main force, and with the supreme point of the reason; and this death is the death of the cross, much more excellent than that other, which should rather be called a slumber than a death."