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.

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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