Letter 58 of Saint-Cyran

                                                                      

   I see clearly that God brings forth all the evils in the world as well as everything good. This interior desolation that you feel following relief to your body comes more from God than other evils because it is an interior evil that only can have good motives in God since it follows one of his favors which is not yours in particular but for everyone in your religious community, and for me in particular, who desired it with that kind of desire that God considers good when it comes from charity.

   You must bear much better than you have ever all the interior and exterior evils that he will be pleased to send you in the future since he has given you a proof in public that you are his concern. All the ambition I have in the bottom of my soul, which however I submit to his divine will, is that it may please him to look upon me once in my life in a way so that  simply and without reflection  I can feel in the bottom of my heart that I am his concern.

   Everything else seems nothing to me. If God would create ten thousand worlds and he would give me their government, as he gave Adam the government of Paradise, I should not be consoled by it as I would be by a small feeling that he might give me in significant circumstances that he has received me in his grace and that I belong to him eternally. I say eternally for I do not make any distinction between being in his grace for a certain time and not also being there eternally.

   That is how he treated you in your sickness and that obliges you to take as favors every interior desolation. But it is clear that the desolation you feel and that is fitting after the convalescence of your body is a minor disposition from the joy belonging to the same body and to all the souls of your religious community who have a part in it. For God has a habit accordingly to hide himself when he causes particular favors for those he loves as if he wished to conceal awareness of the good he has caused us. Never does he bear better witness that it is for the soul that he causes the favor and not the body than when he afflicts it and causes it interior desolation.

   I admire sometimes this conduct of God that we could name, so to speak, the humility of God that he adopts in order to teach us this same virtue and not to raise our spirit too high by the bodily graces he causes us. I would not want the grace that gives us the power to imitate him and to moderate the joys we gain by the good works we do, which instantly spoil us, if we do not know how to conceal them as God conceals his in order to teach us to conceal ours. That is why he humiliates himself in some manner as greatly in his divinity and in his graces as he humiliated himself in his humanity on earth in all the good works that he has accomplished here. There you have what I learned in what you wrote me about your interior desolation.

   You see by the operations that go with it and that you have indicated by your letter that it is entirely from God and a kind of purification of the soul which God prefered to accomplish in the soul itself and by this desolation that it feels than by the continuation of the sickness of the body. For it is visible in you and in people like you that never are sicknesses sent for another purpose than to cure the soul and to cleanse it. It is up to all souls to be cleansed by themselves and by interior evils. And God does not stop sicknesses of the body in order to transfer them into interior evils except in favor of those that he favors.

   I am telling you my true feelings. I believe I am speaking the truth and my understanding of it is better than what I can succeed in expressing.  I could go on to a more extensive development if I wished to speak the whole secret that I know only by myself. I know for certain that I do belong among those souls who ought to aspire to those favors and those transfers of evils that God causes from the body into the soul, from exterior sicknesses into interior ailments in their favor.

All the rest of your letter informs me better that I speak the truth both for you and for myself. I am very happy that it is more advantageous for you than for I. For it is enough for me if I belong to God, as I hope, when it is not in a condition as advantageous to me as to another. I do not love at all in a negative way. I am content that another may be more than I before God. I am very happy to know him and to love him a little and it makes little difference that I don’t believe firmly enough in him until I become more certain about what I believe. For I am not able to make myself so miserable that I do not love God and that he does not love me in spite of what I might have been before at another time. Sorry but the lack of paper here in prison does not allow me to add anything more except that I feel joy because of your double health.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill
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