Letter 11 of Saint-Cyran

I am very pleased that you visited the hermits at Port-Royal des Champs. They must have made you understand by their example that the entire Christian life consists in a retreat from the world and a scorn for everything in it that is visible.

   I believe it is superfluous for me to recommend to you respect and reserve towards Antoine Arnauld since the greatest and most uniform alliances and friendships are not maintained except in this way. Respect has two inseparable conditions, silence and readiness to do what one desires you to do.

   I neither need to tell you to never lose a moment of time throughout the day  either to attend to God or to yourself and to feel grief when in spite of yourself you are distracted. For the devil fills what God does not fill, there being neither emptiness in the operations of grace nor in the operations of nature.

  I want you to read every day with attention two chapters, one from the New and one from the Old Testament. Write every day as best you can in a notebook two or three sentences chosen from them in order to read them again from time to time and nourish yourself in this way with the word of God. It has the same power to strengthen us as receiving the body of the Son of God in communion which is but the main work of the word of God. That is rather unbelievable to those who have neither the knowledge nor the experience of this truth.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill
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