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:
amazon.com/author/graceisall
amazon.com/author/graceisall
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