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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