Letter 67 of Saint-Cyran

       I must tell you once and for all, if I have not already done so, something about my writings. I write down my thoughts when it pleases God to inspire them and time permits it, which happens rarely. It happens even less that I am able to write without interruption. For that reason, I am always in a hurry writing and dictating them. I write only those thoughts that are the least and are as much as my memory can supply me without forcing it.

   I never desire that they be for anyone but when I am moving them out of fear or having a meeting with someone which give me chances to remove them, I prefer sometimes to send them rather than burn them or leave them in my room where they can be discovered.

   I intend them for this one or that one according to the inspiration that God gives me, and often I do not intend them for anyone like the three or four last letters. I do not begin writing them except when God gives me the will to do it and I think of nothing else except to send them to keep them out of danger. I suppose I conserve them in the bottom of my heart to revisit them one day, if I am free, either to correct them or to revive the spirit I had while writing them, if God gives it back to me. However generally speaking, I would be very unhappy living or dead if they were ever seen by anyone and if they would not die forever in the spirits of those to whom I send them just as they are dead in my spirit. I am content, if I was faithful in my writings, to withdraw at the right time and in the right season (that God makes known) the spirit of the seed that God plants secretly in souls who pray to him sincerely and with his spirit.

   I know very well that in the papers I sent you, there were interruptions, the soldier dropping in on me was the cause and sometimes a lack in my memory. For the spirit of my writing is a spirit who goes away and does not return at all.

    I beg you that this one be useful for all the Sisters who have received papers from me and that they believe I have no other intent than to follow the movement that God gives me to give them some proof of my charity towards them by the truth of God. I know I often mix things up and jumble together a lot from my reason and from my own judgment but I trust in my simplicity and in the charity of those who read my thoughts. For this charity does not allow them to judge them badly.

(Translator’s note. Friends of Saint-Cyran in the Jansenist movement took no notice of his desire that his writings be seen by no one. All true Jansenists were devoted to the writings of Saint Augustine who made grace, the active participation of God’s love acting in the soul to give believers the strength to avoid sin, the essential element of his theology and also of the Catholic religion. Saint-Cyran had an extraordinary gift of communicating personally to many people the grace he found in his soul and to make grace come alive in them. Cardinal Richelieu knew of this gift and was certainly jealous of it. But by imprisoning Saint-Cyran and cutting him off from the personal religious communication of grace to others in some unwritten and direct form, he forced his prisoner to express in writings in an imperfect form the grace in his soul. Grace is extremely difficult to express in writings, if not impossible. Ironically Cardinal Richelieu by imprisoning Saint-Cyran for five years and forcing him to write in difficult circumstances released the grace he tried to repress to a larger public than it would ever have reached if restricted to merely personal communication.)

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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