Letter 23 of Saint-Cyran.

My mother, it is no great trouble writing you. I take pleasure writing since my words are my feelings. That is why I forget what I write you because not drawing it from my memory and doing it quickly nothing remains except what is in my heart which fills itself up as it expands. That is a clear sign that it is charity alone, God’s lovingkindness within me, that makes me write what I write, to which alone belongs an inexhaustible abundance. God’s love can always give itself to us. It does not take any special care to restrain what it gives and so it forgets itself in the very act of giving itself.

   That is the way I believe I should answer what I just read in your letter. Your humility makes you write that you are astonished at the way I speak to you. I assure you in good conscience that I do not remember at all what I write to you and that confirms what I just said, that I draw my words from the truth that lives in my heart and also that I forget it after having written it. For what we write from the heart is not always printed in our spirit or in our memory.

   But it is not enough to tell you that what I wrote you during your sickness came from the sincerity of my heart. It is necessary to add to it abundance. Abundance always goes with sincerity but sincerity is not always a part of abundance. As far as I know myself and I am aware of what I feel, everything I have authorized you to do has come from the superabundance of my heart.  God has given me the grace that makes me see  by our relationship that there is not at all any other nearness and relationship in the church of God when we do God’s will than that of a sister or a brother, as Matthew writes, of Jesus Christ.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill.

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Letter 22 of Saint-Cyran.

My Mother, I learned the state of your health and I know the difficulty you have without the strength you had before. Only those who have experienced infirmities can judge them. If you believe me, you will let yourself be treated as someone infirm and in your frailty you will not attach yourself so strongly to exterior works of piety. It seems to me that there is not any man who has more inclination than I to all the works of religion. There are none of them that I would not have wished to do and yet, although I hear three masses Sundays when I can, I was not at all troubled when my infirmities forced me to spend several Sundays without hearing any.

   I have said that there is not any firm reason and necessity to join exterior and interior piety and I plan to write my ideas about the subject when God will give me the grace to do it. But meanwhile for the present nothing ought to prevent us from supporting with patience being deprived of the exterior exercise of piety. When God deprives us  of it, we should bear witness as a result that we are attached only to his spirit. Surely we are obliged to believe according to the gospel that the church on earth is the kingdom of God. As a result it is necessary to believe that it happens occasionally that believers are blessed and that God sometimes exempts them from all other duties except those of his love. If our infirmities reach the point that we be exempt from reading and vocal prayer, the love within us will be all the more pure and heavenly since it will be joined with the prayer that comes out of silence which is closer to prayer in heaven which consists only in a pure praising.

   Having recovered your health against all hope, you must take care of it better than before as a new gift from God. He could not involve you better in taking care of it than by showing that he wishes that you live still for the good of his abbey. Your life in the future will be only as a good example when you should do nothing else than live and change the actions of penitence into those of interior virtues which gleam into the eyes of God and are the real fruits of penitence. When fruits begin to appear on trees, we do not take any longer the trouble to cultivate, prune and fertilize them, which are  three things that mark the works of penitence.  Then God alone takes care of trees to conserve and mature the fruits on them by his warmth and by the secret influences of his sun which is Jesus Christ. It is to him that you should unite yourself more closely than before by exercises that are entirely interior by considering him more in his glory than in his cross. You will find in him the same virtues to imitate and the same example of subjugation that he gave to his Father while he lived with us but in him more perfect and more excellent and in their ultimate perfection. It is the image of this fidelity that he wishes that you hold yourself to in the future. He will furnish you beyond fasting and other stern practices that your body can no longer support the means to honor him more perfectly. I beg you to act in this way and to bear in mind that a body reduced in strength is similar to a body used up by old age. It is imprudent and indiscreet to demand from it  the same exercises of virtue as when it was young. If I had a Superior over me as you have now a Superior over you, I would take pains to obey only him. I am experiencing here in prison the disadvantage there is in not having anything like that which  sometimes makes it difficult to know what I should do to do my best. I ask for your prayers here on earth as I would ask them from you if you had gone to heaven.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill.

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Letter 21 of Saint-Cyran.

My mother, I know what evils you have endured. I have commiserated with them otherwise than by words in the extreme feebleness that I endure still and that has reminded me more than once of the other world. We are very fortunate to belong to Jesus Christ and to participate in his sufferings but my great weakness is nothing like your state which is painful. God gives you sufferings consistent with the interior strengths he had already given you but your sufferings are in truth other than mine which are both from weakness of the body and of the soul. I thank him with all my heart for everything he has given to others more than to me, and particularly to you, because It seems to me that I would not love you at all with the charity I hope for if I did not love a little more your advancement than mine. I believe I understand the level that you have reached and I know that I have certainly not reached it. When I remind myself that  all the good things of the soul have the goodness of God as their source, I love just as much that this source spread over the souls of others as over mine. I think only that by giving back to him my love I give him the honor and the reverence I owe him without thinking of myself or thinking that what I receive from him is less than others. I am only too happy that I belong to God by the least degree of his grace.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill.

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Letter 20 of Saint-Cyran

My mother, the two main objects of my love on earth are the will of God and the Body of the Son of God. I have kept them in mind and loved the one and the other during your sickness. If I have spoken to you with a certain degree of affection, I dare not say of charity, I did it only because I have always considered you in the Body of Jesus Christ whom I love as belonging to him. In his Body I looked upon you as my mother and my sister following the words of Matthew who writes, For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother. It is as if you enclose in yourself alone all the particular degrees of a kinship entering the church by a divine generation. And if you had been lower in this divine order of grace, I would have loved you less and I would have felt less the sadness and the joy that your sickness and your cure gave me. By the knowledge that God gave me by his mercy and and by the feelings in my heart, I am very far from the opinion of those who believe that charity is without feeling and indifferent and that it is exempt from all passions, instead of that passions that are met with outside of grace belong to grace. God would never have given them to man if he had not created him in order to make man able to love by his divine power. But I confess that one cannot use these divine passions in relation to men except in the union they have with Jesus Christ and as being members of his Body. Those who do not belong to him, we should love only in the hope that they will belong to him by the great mercy God can show them by bringing them to Christ by a true conversion. This is what makes my love more enhanced for those stable and firm souls who love Christ and are loved by him in the union that they have with him. Their rarity makes them more worthy in my eyes and has as a result that I find almost no one at all in the degree of charity that Saint Paul speaks of when he asks, Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? I embrace easily those who live in this disposition. I assure you that there are those of them that I do not know at all by sight and who do not know me at all and that I do not love less than those like you whom I have seen. This makes me realize rather well that I have not written anything for you that does not leave behind even more in my heart and in order to know how true this is you must take what I write not as something someone can just write about but as something someone can feel.

   Four years ago when I was first confined to this place I went through a terrible spiritual ordeal. God tested me extremely but he gave me the grace to accept my condition here. Only God and I know the obligation I have to die to the world to give witness to what I owe to such great grace. My prison takes the place for me of a great proof of divinity and I do not take any heed, except sometimes fleetingly, of men opposed to truth and charity, virtues that I argued were fundamental to Christianity and as a result was sent to prison. In the epistles of Saint John he joins together truth and charity. In his second epistle, he speaks only of truth and charity and in the third epistle, he repeats more than four or five times truth and charity. The Son of God has taught us  as virtues poverty and penitence. He gave primacy to poverty in his sermon on the mount and to penitence in his preaching. Naturally at your abbey your virtues are poverty and penitence but I would hope you add truth and virtue to give the four virtues uniformity, Poverty, Truth, Charity, Penitence. Otherwise it is like the stones in the arches of churches which are not well unified with one another.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill.

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Letter 19 of Saint-Cyran

Mother Agnes, the meetings I have had one after the other prevented me from expressing to you as greatly as I would have desired the joy I felt because of your convalescence. I was expecting it from God for several reasons, but particularly at this time to console me, not for the continuation of my life in prison which is for me a good thing, but because it pleased him to accomplish his gospel by leaving you still in this world and taking in your place our sister. He has given her no doubt his paradise whether he may be still purifying her or has accomplished her purification. The beautiful and saintly words she said while dying (She said with a cross in her hands, “May I never glory in anything except in the cross of our lord and savior Jesus Christ in whom is our salvation, life and resurrection, by whom we have been saved and freed.” ) were able, in my opinion, to be a substitute for purgatory if they are considered together with the good life she led after God had completely converted her to himself. It is the condition of men of the world that we must pity when they are not thoughtful of God as you and she. They are truly dead souls in living bodies instead of being like those who die in God. Saint John says, Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord. Such remain living not only in their souls but even in some measure in their bodies and in a way which approaches that according to which the Body of the Son of God was living in the tomb by the union hypostatic that he had with the divinity. For you know that the dead bodies of such souls are still the temple of the Holy Spirit in the tomb. According to the fathers of the church, even Jesus Christ lives there by virtue of his Body which stays sown in them, so to speak, in an earth that belongs to him. From the earth one day he will form a better body than the Adam he created from clay, a body that will be more glorious and more immortal than was that of Adam. Do not forget, my mother, to give thanks to God with us for such great mercy even though you are now withdrawn in your religious community. For it is not the location that saves, as Saint Bernard said, since the first angel did not save himself in heaven, the first man in paradise, nor Judas in the house of the Savior. Our joy at your recovery can serve as a consolation to our sorrow at the death of our sister, which I am wrong to describe with this word if it is true, which I do not doubt at all, that the temporary death of the body has been the cause of the eternal salvation of a soul and that this same body has been consecrated in eternal glory in its tomb. I beg all those to whom I can write to take part in this common consolation which should be yours since it is mine and since it has pleased God to give us a sensible consolation in the hope that it gives us of your perfect cure. I will not fear praying for it since it has pleased him to involve me by the extraordinary grace he has made to the Abbey of Port-Royal Des Champs which had more need than you of the continuation of your life.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill.

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Letter 18 of Saint-Cyran

Mother Agnes, I was delighted to receive your letter which confirmed the news of your convalescence. As greatly as God forbids us to desire anything from the world and from anything that belongs to time, he just as greatly wishes that we rejoice at the recovery of health of those who belong to him. For these we can rejoice and our joy is truly an action of God’s charity by means of which alone we love them. You must take care of yourself better in the future since God wishes that you continue to serve him at his Abbey of Port-Royal and has established you there to direct it as someone sent back to it from the gates of the other world. You can speak to him as did David, thou liftest me up from the gates of death that I may show forth all thy praise in the gates of the daughter of Zion. You must now make a transition from one virtue to a second. You can not be the primary example in your religious community of the mortification of the body as you were when sick. You now must be to others a spiritual example, a very difficult and praiseworthy quality that really belongs only to superior souls and is truly  a reward for the other virtue of mortification. Those like you who have come back from so far and whom God has given the grace to edify a religious community by facing death so peacefully are exempt from many things to which they are not disposed by their frailty. That is why you will take care of yourself better. You will make a great practice of humility and together with it you will be full of mercy towards members of your community who need you. In exchange for this spirituality, rule yourself within and give yourself to silence, to patience, to prayers from your heart that come from desires, moans and separation from those outside of you. These are penitences that God demands from you because your weakness projects you beyond your actual age to the discipline of those whom old age exempts from many things. There is what I believed I had to tell you in the state of weakness that I now find myself which teaches me by the experience it gives me of the way the weak should conduct themselves.

   I recognize in your deceased sister whom you mention everything you said about her. The inclination I had towards her prevented me from giving her evidence of it because I saw that she was too affectionate towards me in her feelings because of the grace God had given her by means of me. I believe not responding to her was greatly useful to her to purge her soul of all her faults. I do not doubt at all that God was merciful to her by satisfying the things she hungered and thirsted for by leading her to the divine sources of truth and charity. Some leave this world earlier, others later, but the death that ends their life is equally for all the beginning of their eternity. Happy those who have passed a part of life like she with an experience of the truth and the grace that God gave them. I know how rare it is to find such souls and in this time they are almost not found at all. I would regret it more if I did not know that God rules everything and that life is his, if I must so speak, more than every other thing. He dominates the length and shortness of our ages as the only master of time, which he has reserved for himself alone and that he has not put into the hand of any creature of the earth to govern. Even though I am not perhaps ready to appear soon before him, I offer him nonetheless my life at every hour and I would not be surprised at whatever way it might please him to take it from me. I have absolutely no greater respect to pay him than to agree to it. I will not stop praying for your deceased sister for all my life as I desire that those who love me pray for me for all of their life.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill.

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Letter 17 of Saint-Cyran.

Mother Agnes, I do not know  what condition you are in but I dare say that I hope for an equal consolation from either of two possibilities although one is sensible to our human feelings and everyone can share in it as well as myself. The other belongs only to those who love you with the charity of God which leads to an even more grand consolation. If my life was not already committed to God through my sins (he knows each of them), through his mysteries and particularly the mystery of his Passion, through each of the marvelous things he brought about during my life for the good of his church, through each of the favors he granted me (I merited them merely by inwardly dying for him), through each of those persons that I loved for him as the result of his charity and that I often gave to him spiritually in order to conserve them, if my life, I say, was not committed to him in so many ways and if I did not wish to remain grateful to him for the life he gave me, I would willingly offer it to him so that he might preserve you still for the visible government of the Abbey of Port-Royal.

   Against my expectation, God gave me the grace today to carry the pall in the procession of the Holy Sacrament. Since I was thinking I would not be able to do it because of my weakness, I beg you in your weakness to thank God for giving me the strength to do it in the way the sick can do it, which is by suffering more cheerfully their evil through love of God after hearing what those treating their sickness told them about it.  I hope I will have been heard in the prayers I made to him giving me assurance that he will hear those that you will make to him for me, if he wishes that you be with him rather than with us. There are few people to whom I would have spoken with this assurance considering the condition you are in. But  I say it with such certainty that even if I had not had the feeling of the lovingkindness of charity that I have towards you I might have been driven by longing to say it anyway. All your prayers should be in the expectation not only of the coming of Jesus Christ, for that is the main prayer of all Christians, but also of the appearance of his holy will. In it I wish to join myself with you in order to take part in that great vow that includes all the others and is the first demand that he wanted us to make to him for ourselves. Other than that, I can only speak humanly of your sickness as a man who seeks your health. It is past two o’clock. I am back from church and in such great joy for having been able to carry the pall that my joy alone can moderate the grief I feel in the bottom of my soul that you are perhaps going to God.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill.

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Letter 16 of Saint-Cyran.

Mother Agnes, you are always present in my spirit and I can not return within myself without finding you there. I have not received news from Paris yesterday or today and I take that as a good sign for us. For you you do not need any news at all since you live doing only the will of God and awaiting the coming of Jesus Christ which make up  the complete piety of a Christian. Saint Paul said that God shall also confirm you unto the end that ye may be blameless to the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. Keep your piety joined in silence with your peaceful acceptance of the evil that you suffer. I do not desire any other piety when it will please God to reduce me to the state where you are now. The greatest humility in life seems to me to conclude it and finish it waiting for God with silence and patience. I would add also with obedience to those who have taken responsibility for the care of our body and soul. We will inherit that from you if God loves you more for heaven than for earth and more for himself than for us.

   I have been consoled by the observations that Monsieur Singlin gave me about your condition. I thank God that he continues to favor you by giving you this secret grace that he brings about in you that will never die if you go to live with God but preserves itself in the souls of those on earth who see him and feel him. I feel that he has already brought about something in my soul, which has no greater passion than to live and die in Christian charity. Everything in my religious experience confirms this piety in which God has placed you and it is the only condition I desire for myself at this last time of life. How admirable is the devotion of a soul who lives waiting continually for the voice and the commandment of God and even finds himself full of joy because of the plan he has to obey the voice of God even before he knows what it will be. The good servant of God is one who obeys with joy the voice of God after it resonates in the ears of his soul. But the one that Saint John calls the friend of the bridegroom does more for he feels an unspeakable joy while waiting for this voice.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill.

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Letter 15 of Saint-Cyran.

Mother Agnes, I received your letter as if coming from the gates of Paradise and I hope that God will have kept you still alive in order to receive my answer. The peaceful manner with which you wrote it made me see the main difference that there is between you and me which you will know better when you are with God. Even with the sorrow I feel because your condition has you near death, since you write in your letter that I have more in common with the dead than the living, I feel joy because of the foreknowledge your words give me of the grace God will grant me by your prayers when you will be with him. Reading today in the gospel, I came upon the chapter about Lazarus which made you even more present in my spirit so I decided to use some words spoken there as though they were spoken about you. It seemed to me I said to God these words, “Lord, the one you love is sick”. He answered me, “This sickness is not for death but for the glory of God”. Whatever happens to you, it seems to me that this answer will turn out to be true. I also stopped and focused on this other answer that Jesus Christ gives there when his apostles wish to turn him away from going to Jerusalem by making him fear death. “If someone walks while it is light he does not collide with anything because he sees the light of the world. If someone walks during the night he does collide because he has no light". The light of the day was Christ who was like a sun and a light for the apostles who walked with him and his light must have removed from them all fear of death. Those who have received this light in their hearts like you, have still more reason than the apostles to believe in the words of our lord. Say to him as did David, Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for thou art with me.

   I read in the gospel this answer of Saint Thomas to the words of Jesus who was encouraging his apostles to go with him to Jerusalem, Let's go also with him that we may die with him. Let’s go also ourselves away to Jerusalem and die with him. Those are words that have always been a consolation to me and I would like to be able to say them to Christ when I will be in the condition you are in. They were pleasing to him since we can believe that they were very likely to have had the result that Saint Thomas deserved all the grace that he received afterwards.

    I read also about the active charity of Martha and the serene charity of Mary Magdalene which made me recognize that it was apparently she, Mary, who dictated the letter that they both sent to Jesus.  For it seems to me that the words in it could have originated only from a heart peaceful and completely united with Jesus Christ, a heart that asked nothing from him but only put forward for consideration the sickness of someone he loved.  I would not like to propose to God for you anything else. The words that one and the other sister say to Jesus when he arrived make, it seems to me, clear enough what I say, that the words of this letter and that prayer came only from Mary and not from Martha. For Mary asks him for nothing and is content to say that if he had been present her brother would not have died. On the other hand, Martha reveals her desire that her brother revive. Thus one hurries to go ahead and the other does not advance at all until Jesus calls her. Then she hurries as her sister had hurried previously before Jesus Christ had called her. You would do well to imitate the peaceful charity of Mary Magdalene and to wait in the state where you are for Jesus to call you to go to him.

  There is not at all any piety greater for a sick person than to be at peace in bed. You made it clear to me by your letter that such is your piety. It is mine also and it includes the prayers I offer to God for you finding it a great consolation to be able to tell him that a person that he loves is extremely sick. He will do for you what he did for Lazarus either reviving you for this life or for the other according to what he will judge most consistent with our needs and his eternal designs.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill.

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Letter 14 of Saint-Cyran

I am pleased that you opened your heart to me in your letter so frankly. It lets me know what is within you that can help me a great deal in giving you advice that you need to conduct yourself well. I wish to imitate your frankness by opening my heart to you although there is this difference between you and me that I am old and you young. Even if you have all the ordinary advantages of  nature and grace that a man of your age can have, you cannot pretend to have double the experience of the business of the world or of the church that someone like I acquires by living a long time. Enlightenment can anticipate advanced age but no man of no matter what natural excellence, of no matter what knowledge or of no matter what degree of grace can anticipate the enlightenment born of experience of someone who has lived long and had a hand directly in the  business of the world or of the church or of the two of them together. Without this type of enlightenment it is impossible to give good advice to another although it is possible that someone of your age may conduct themselves well towards the salvation of their soul by a particular grace granted by God.

   I hope and pray that God will never abandon you to passions with bad ends. It would be very difficult for me to free you from them. In your letter it appears that you have great warmth towards your sister whom it is permissible that you love. But that does not prevent me from saying that your affection for her you speak about is a sin not only against the gospel and regular theology but even against your baptism where you gave up love for all the attractive things of the world and especially for love of family members which is the most attractive and the most dangerous of all if it is not controlled by the prudence of God and his grace. Grace is nothing more than the love and charity we owe God to the detriment of all our inclinations.

   When God caused me to set my eyes upon you, he gave me a strong will to contribute to the advancement of your salvation by showing you the path you must follow of true charity without which no one reaches salvation. Think of charity as not a human kindheartedness but as a  kindheartedness, or better still a lovingkindness, that comes to our hearts from God. If I did not succeed in making you experience this true charity, It would be for me just as if I had done nothing if I would have given you all the property in the world. I beg you to believe that the plan I have for you I also have for your sister. You commit a kind of faithlessness towards me if you believe your sister is closer to you than to me. Just the opposite is true since I can say that she belongs more to me than to you if you are willing to follow the rules of the gospel which are the same for both of us. They teach us that since we have the advantage by the grace of baptism of being children of God, we ought to count for nothing all natural relationships. After I chose you, I chose your sister  in order to make her religious and I love her as I love you for her eternal salvation. But I know that what follows after God selects us to receive his charity depends on God and I always wait with trembling and fear what he will be pleased to give in the future. For we bring about our salvation and that of those nearest us in a humble manner that is completely dependent on the will of God. The greatest displeasure that I have about your passions is that they are so strong and so human in the matters of God as men of the world are accustomed to have passions in their matters. For loving you as I love you, that is, more than as if you were my brother or father or mother, and knowing that God has given you inclinations towards good, it troubles me greatly to see them darkened and obscured by these clouds of passion that you must get rid of to arrive at a great charity. This great divine lovingkindness is the only thing I want for you and without it all the love we have for family members is only a sin.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill.

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Letter 13 of Saint-Cyran

The plans of your father to make you a priest make me understand once again that civil wars are worse than foreign wars, domestic wars worse than civil wars, and among domestic wars those that derive from persons the closest to us are greater than the others. For wars and persecutions increase in intensity according to the degree of nearness that those persons have with us who persecute us. But I find nothing strange in the difficulty you are having with your father since the Son of God predicted it, and especially with fathers whom he named in more than five places speaking about family members. Matthew writes, And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death. Mark and Luke say the same thing using almost the same language.

   You should live simply as a religious person withdrawn from regular dealings with men as much as possible. You have visited Port-Royal des Champs in the countryside near Paris and you have seen how men live there as religious hermits. They are not monks or friars and certainly not priests. They are simply religious men who have cut themselves off from the world and live only for God. You must resist your father since he wants to force you to become a priest. The life of a priest is naturally much more involved in human affairs than the life of a religious person. Your life should be the life of penitence that everyone is obliged to lead by the vows of the Christian religion. He will be complaining continually if you persist in wishing to live like a true Christian. Support your father as much as is possible and do the best you can so that he does not become bitter but even the least principle of Christianity forbids that you obey him.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill.

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Letter 12 of Saint-Cyran (part 5)

I advise you to examine yourself closely about these main points which in truth come down to only one because intemperance of the tongue is inseparable from curiosity. You should feel good that I warned you about them so that you begin to bear witness to yourself because of my warning that I take care of you. You are the first among several persons that God gave me in my prison. I cannot abandon any of them without  being resistant to his orders.

   I will listen to everyone in order to improve myself by whatever is good in each of them and take note of it for my edification. Then when I have the time, I will write down in a book whatever anyone writes that nourishes my heart which nourishes itself only with divine truths. For all of pagan philosophy should be kept at the same rank as the law of the Old Testament which Saint Paul calls dung if it does not help us become better and promote our salvation.

   I confess that you will find few of these kinds of persons who can nourish you in this way with their speech. As soon as you have a plan to live in the way I have prescribed for you, withdraw little by little from dealings with men. You will find that all men are like one man and one man like all when they have tendencies neither to usefulness nor to kindheartedness, that is, towards the acquisition of the virtue that Jesus Christ desired that we learn by his incarnation. If I could somehow express to you the experience I have of it, there would be necessary only it alone to persuade you that I speak the truth and that you must believe me and live as I say in order to be happy in this world and in the other. For we live in a time when virtue and knowledge have been reduced to a miserable state, a state very different from the one they had in the first century. In our time men have made the error of separating one from the other and they content themselves with being virtuous without knowledge or being wise without virtue. As a result they turn Christian knowledge into a pagan knowledge. Saint Augustine called pagan knowledge the knowledge and the awareness of devils. He used the same expression to characterize the faith of those who believe in God without loving him and who know the truths of God without practicing them.

   God has given you a special grace by lodging you where you are. You can find there whatever you may desire to seek elsewhere for your instruction about knowledge and habits. An example in your household should alone keep you humble and far from cupidity in relation to everything. These two perfections are rare in an educated man of our time and they are much more rare in churchmen than in others.

   For you will have no need of any fellowship beyond that with the person to whom God has joined you and to whom he has submitted you in respect to everything. When you will become dominant over your reasoning and your tongue, which are the two elements that dominate in the head, you will cut the root leading to reasonings and curiosities and to superfluous talk. This practice is the foundation for all the other mortifications since it is true that all the disorders interior and exterior of the flesh and of our lower nature take birth in our head. It takes only a little care to keep under control the two main powers there that dominate. All the evil in our first parents came from the reasoning and the talk that they had with the ancient serpent. The evil maintains itself in the same way in us.

   From this kind of separation and mortification comes the love of silence which is not only rest, as says Saint Ambrose, but the height and the perfection of all virtues. If you add to it occupying yourself with continual prayer, the only thing left for you is to desire and long for the grace of God by means of these exercises. But notice well that they are useless and even harmful to those who do them without it because then they are without the force to attract to themselves the grace of God who is alone the cause of all the virtue that we can have.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill.

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Letter 12 of Saint-Cyran (part 4)

Examine yourself about your inclinations. Everyone has his own. For it counts for nothing to examine particular actions if we do not make ourselves aware of roots restricting us that we have to take pains with first. If you are naturally animated, you have to work at becoming cool, offering to God the injuries that your primary nature has caused you. If you are free, work at restraining yourself. If you are too gloomy and too quiet, try hard to speak at the right time in the right place and a little more than others. On the other hand, if you feel an inclination to speak and to give your opinion freely about everything, as happens very easily to someone with a straightforward temperament, to a young man, to a keen disposition, to someone born into the upper classes, use the presence of these strains and this secret violence to help you dominate your speech and learn to be silent.

   Remember that the Son of God said that we will have to answer for the least idle word. But I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. It is not easy to imagine how far this idleness extends,  there being nothing except usefulness or honesty in speech which prevents it from being idle. This truth relates directly to faith and kindheartedness without which there is nothing according to our faith that is useful and honest.

   I find that the main warnings of Scripture concerning habits are about controlling the tongue, an example would be the epistle of Saint James. If any man among you seem to be religious and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man’s religion is vain. But there are so many other examples that you could make a volume out of them. And I often admired why the Holy Spirit has taken so great care to repeat these warnings. I see the main reason for it Paradise where the tongue was the main cause for the fall of Eve and then Adam. It is easily believable as the cause if we know that all the moral instruction of Scripture has the purpose of ruining the capital sins which appeared in the fall of Adam and that the devil wanted to make come alive again by tempting Jesus Christ. By his admirable answers, he taught us to learn to keep this rule of Saint Paul: we speak before God in Christ.

   This warning is followed by another warning concerning another vice which, relating both to the eyes and to the tongue, depends more on the tongue than on the eyes.  Saint Augustine learned it from Scripture and calls it by the name of curiosity. He names it the second general root of concupiscence which extends to all things and which among those who make a profession of studying extends more to science and to the desire of knowing a great deal than to other objects which are without a clear shape and are more dangerous in appearance although their effects are less so.

   We have difficulty controlling the movements and the revolts of the flesh and we are unaware that the only way to control an inferior part is to keep in a good state a superior. For the natural disorder of man nourishes and maintains itself by the same causes that produced it. But faith teaches us that the disorder of our reason disordered our senses. Thus all our evil came from the head, by the two parts that dwell there, reason and the tongue. Whoever wishes to cure all the rest has only to put into good order his tongue and his reason, which he can do by preventing himself from being curious and a talker and someone always reasoning.

   There is no other rule more universal. It includes all the rest. It is the reason why Saint Augustine complains of being obligated because of his duties as a bishop to speak about the subject of God in a church. He does it so often that I put together once a notebook where were contained the complaints he made of not being able to be like Mary Magdalene who used to listen in silence to the word of God at the feet of Our Lord. One can find not a single word she said after her conversion except one at the death of her brother. Likewise one can not read either in the gospel any word either of Saint Joseph, the husband of the Virgin Mary, or of Mary herself after the mysterious rebuff she received at Cana.

   That caused this saintly doctor to say that there is not a greater interior humility, which is the source of all exterior humility, than to listen to others speak with joy.

   This made me desire, and I still have this passion, to be able to purge the faults that I committed even when speaking about God by a silence of nine months like Zachary. And if I might have been so happy to have found someone who would have given me early this warning about the tongue, I would have followed it as an oracle provided that I would have had then the sentiment I have now of truth and of the grace of God.

   What I did not do early in life I mean to repair by attaching myself with affection and kindheartedness to someone who, by the unity that charity causes between two persons, gives me the means by the reformation of his tongue to satisfy God and to give God the honor that I took from him by my failings. It is only that that impels me to speak about it in this way without knowing up to what point your virtue will go because of it. And I do not know either if God granted you a bias by his grace so that you avoided in your youth the excess that I complain about and that I committed by curiosity, by talking, by reasoning and by free judgment regarding truth and knowledge.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill.

The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:
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Letter 12 of Saint-Cyran (part 3)

There is a third kind of person different from those I have spoken about. They do not have such faults. They have virtue but they hold it within themselves in a low position and block it from growing by yielding submissively to a single man who indeed does not have as much virtue as they nor as much knowledge of virtue. But because by arrangements of the world or by classification based on age or by some degree which puts him above and in a  rank superior to another, he involves himself almost unconsciously with this other person and subordinates his spirit to his own just as if a subordination should result from him. This happens more easily when the person who is established in authority has natural advantages caused by his spirit or by his human industriousness. For then someone who was already involved with him by other considerations, if he is just a little inclined by his nature to yield and is timid, he becomes completely submissive to the leadership and to all the opinions of the person to whom he was already submissive for so many reasons.

   This is why in a society of men living together, when the man who leads the others is fortified by such qualities and in addition is somewhat superior naturally and dominant, all those who live under his leadership take easily all his opinions and they rule their lives based on them. This is the misfortune that the Son of God warned us about in the gospel when he said that one blind man leads another blind man and both of them fall into the pit, that is, into hell. For by these blind men he means the most excellent persons among the Jews in knowledge and virtue. They gave themselves the names of rabbis or teachers having taken titles of authority to distinguish themselves from all others who made a profession of living well and leading souls.

   There is nothing in my opinion that does more harm to the first steps of a man with tendencies towards virtue and is stronger in preventing that it grow to its fullness. It is amazing if such an obstacle does not finally ruin a virtue that is just beginning, if it is true that someone who does not make his virtue grow diminishes it.

   This is why in scripture the wise man (in Ecclesiastes) who knew perfectly all the detours of the soul and the smaller obstacles to virtue, urges us to ask God with great insistence for a director who can lead us in spirit and truth. For in that lies the great interest of a man who wishes to become truly virtuous and avoid all the obstacles that  oppose him and that block the entrance to grace which is the seed of virtue and virtue itself.

   For Christian virtue to take root in ourselves and to remain steadfast, it is necessary that it have nothing encircling it as is shown in the tree by means of which Scripture paints for us virtue and its fruits. Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

    God, as I believe, by his inspiration has put you in my hands and by me into the hands of Antoine Arnauld, as to someone whom everyone considered being the most appropriate for you. My desire that you become an excellent Christian, in which alone resides divine virtue in its perfection, has caused me to make this digression in order to make you circumspect by the misfortune of those that I have seen almost perish before me in the middle of their youth and before dying.

   (Saint-Cyran next gives his advice how to become an excellent Christian.)

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill.
The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:
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Letter 12 of Saint-Cyran (part 2)

The fourth thing that opposes us reaching true virtue is science. I mean the kind of science that you aspire to which is for the most part philosophic. It is all about the reasoning that the apostle Paul calls the wisdom of the flesh and is the enemy of God and hostile and contrary to faith which is definitely not about reasoning as Saint Thomas Aquinas says at the beginning of his Summa. Philosophical reasoning gives birth to a number of new conclusions which do not relate at all to the ancient tradition which is the foundation for the Christian virtue of the church. For neither virtue nor the church for 1300  years had any use for philosophy or reasoning which continually cause wounds that are very dangerous and very difficult to cure in the spirit of those who devote themselves to them. This misfortune happens even among persons who appear wise and morally well regulated and is all the more dangerous in them than in others because their example authorizes among regular Christians both the opinions that they follow and their conduct in the general government of Christian consciousness.

   For what means is there to consider bad what Theology joined to eloquence, rectitude and custom authorizes and almost all the learned and people of goodwill follow together in practice? Even though it is often and in several respects important and necessary for the regulation of the soul, it is an obstacle to true Christian virtue.

   I would never have believed it if I had not learned it by much experience with those people whom I was directing and in whom I found these four obstacles. My friends who strongly love truth and kindheartedness and who have received many perfections both from nature and from grace know the truth of this my experience. What makes me more believable is that I have seen it in my religious community and in my family. I could not help observing these four obstacles in four kinds of different persons, some had only one, others two, others three and the rest the four obstacles together. Of these I observed some who because of a great desire to make their fortune at court by following after people possessing great powers, held in check for a period of twenty-five years three kinds of inclinations that would have caused their perdition in their youth from which time they lived up to this time as if they had opposite inclinations. The violence of their desire to make their fortune made them suppress the real tendency of their heart and it hid from them interior movements under exterior actions that were completely opposite.

   I observed others who professed to live under my direction as well as people I directed first before them. They gave a good example and displayed a good discipline in which they lived throughout twenty years up to the point of making themselves admired by both the good and the wicked for their exterior moral rectitude. I can even say that this quality was accompanied by internal rectitude having never in my opinion given their consent to anything that was clearly bad. And yet, although it seems unbelievable, I can say that the first people under my direction and the later, when one expected great fruits from their virtue, finally appeared to be very unregulated.This could only have happened because everything that seemed good in them for so long stemmed from something other than grace which was not rooted in their heart and had not undergone any increase in them with age among their good exterior exercises of discipline and virtue. For what must be noted clearly is that there is no exterior effect of discipline and virtue that may be produced by any other principle than grace. Without grace the soul can not have any real virtue. It must always happen that no matter how long may have been the disguise in youth, men who are not virtuous within, or who are not virtuous to a solid degree, appear in the end with the faults that they have hidden for so long. For God does in the new law among Christians what he did in the old law among the Jews. He creates certain things and certain temptations which reveal what they are when the hopes which supported some and the fears which held back others are no more and they enjoy a greater freedom which gives rise to passions and inclinations which had been for a long time repressed. As a result they fall into excesses which make them known to everyone as imperfect and vicious.

   An exception can happen among those whom in the long regulation of life in which they have lived, the pretenses they adopt, even the knowledge they possess of God’s truths, the example of several men who are generally believed to be men of goodwill, and the general practices of the time remove from their consciousness  their faults and their adjustments. This condition sometimes pushes them to rise up against those who have directed them for so long and believe themselves well qualified to no longer believe them. This would perhaps be tolerable if they did not go all the way to the extreme of condemning their directors either of falsity or of peculiarity in their life or in their teachings. It is so true that the knowledge and awareness even of Christian truth, either well or badly understood, can produce the same effects on us as the old law produced on the Jews which made them more guilty than they were before God instructed them through Moses.

   This makes evident that true virtue is very hidden and very interior even as God himself is. Virtue is only there where it is. Virtue really only resides there where virtue is and resides. That is why Scripture says that sin by suffocating virtue chaises even God from the soul where he was residing.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill.

The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:
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