Letter 10 of Saint-Cyran

I am writing you in secret as I write all my letters from my prison eluding observation by my guards. But I am writing this letter more anxious than usual because I want to be sure you know I read with pleasure your two letters. If you have your heart as strongly joined to mine as I feel mine joined to yours, you will be eternally with me as we are both eternally with God. Nor will your brother and your sister find anything of me just as do you which is not theirs. I will love them with the incomprehensible spirit that unites God the father with God the son and composes the indescribable knot of their love. I know your sister as if I had had her in my charge and I feel as certain of you, of her and of your brother as I would wish that someone be certain of me. I add to our union your father, if he wants it, who will find his part in this love without parts because if the spirit and the heart of the old man had some parts, that of the new man does not have any any more than god has any.

   Give Antoine Arnauld every evidence of a mutual love taking care that you do not make him feel some lack of it that he might without right impute to me. For you are the personal gift that I gave him which is the true image of the personal gift that God gave us in order to give us the means to serve him. As Saint Paul said, we should walk worthy of the lord pleasing to all.

  I had to speak to you in this first letter the language of God’s love that no one understands except someone who loves.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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