I am serious when I say that this work demands a relaxed, healthy, and vigorous disposition of both body and spirit. For the love of God, discipline yourself in body and spirit so that you preserve your health as long as you can. But if, despite your best efforts, illness overtakes you, be patient in bearing it and humbly wait for God’s mercy. This is enough. Indeed, your patience in sickness and affliction may often be more pleasing to God than tender feelings of devotion in times of health.
CHAPTER 42
That by having no moderation in contemplation a man will arrive at perfect moderation in everything else.
Perhaps by now you are wondering how to determine the proper mean in eating, drinking, sleeping, and the rest. I will answer you briefly: be content with what comes along. If you give yourself generously to the work of love, I feel sure you will know when to begin and end every other activity. I cannot believe that a person wholeheartedly given to contemplation will err by excess or default in these external matters—unless he is a person who is always wrong.
If only I might always be preoccupied and faithful to the work of love in my heart! I doubt then that I would care much about my eating, drinking, sleeping, and speaking. For certainly it is better to achieve moderation in these things through heedlessness than through anxious introspection, as if this would help determine the appropriate measure. Surely nothing I do or say can really bring this about. Let others say what they will; experience is my witness.
So I say to you again, lift up your heart with a blind stirring of love, conscious now of sin, now of God, desiring God and detesting sin. You are only too familiar with sin, but your desire stretches out to God. I pray the good God come to your aid, for now you need him very much.
CHAPTER 43
That a man must lose the radical self-centered awareness of his own being if he will reach the heights of contemplation in this life.
Be careful to empty your mind and heart of everything except God during the time of this work. Reject the knowledge and experience of everything less than God, treading it all down beneath the cloud of forgetting. And now also you must learn to forget not only every creature and its deeds but yourself as well, along with whatever you may have accomplished in God’s service. For a true lover not only cherishes his beloved more than himself but in a certain sense he becomes oblivious of himself on account of the one he loves.1
And this is what you must learn to do. You must come to loathe and regret everything that occupies your mind except God, for everything is an obstacle between you and him. It is little wonder that you should eventually hate to think about yourself in view of your deep realization of sin. This foul, wretched lump called sin is none other than yourself and though you do not consider it in detail, you understand now that it is part and parcel of your very being and something that separates you from God.
And so reject the thought and experience of all created things but most especially learn to forget yourself, for all your knowledge and experience depends upon the knowledge and feeling of yourself. All else is easily forgotten in comparison with one’s own self. See if experience does not prove me right. Long after you have successfully forgotten every creature and its works, you will find that a naked knowing and feeling of your own being still remains between you and your God. And believe me, you will not be perfect in love until this, too, is destroyed.
CHAPTER 44
How a person shall dispose himself so as to destroy the radical self-centered awareness of his being.
And now you ask me how you shall destroy this naked knowing and feeling of your own being. Perhaps you finally realize that if you destroyed this, every other obstacle would be destroyed. If you really do understand this you have done well. But to answer you I must explain that without God’s special grace, freely given, and without perfect correspondence to his grace on your part, you can never hope to destroy the naked knowing and feeling of your being. Perfect correspondence to his grace consists in a strong, deep, interior sorrow.
But it is most important to moderate this sorrow. You must be careful never to strain your body or spirit irreverently. Simply sit relaxed and quiet but plunged and immersed in sorrow. The sorrow I speak of is genuine and perfect, and blessed is the man who experiences it. Every man has plenty of cause for sorrow but he alone understands the deep universal reason for sorrow who experiences that he is. Every other motive pales beside this one. He alone feels authentic sorrow who realizes not only what he is but that he is. Anyone who has not felt this should really weep, for he has never experienced real sorrow. This sorrow purifies a man of sin and sin’s punishment. Even more, it prepares his heart to receive that joy through which he will finally transcend the knowing and feeling of his being.
When this sorrow is authentic it is full of reverent longing for God’s salvation, for otherwise no human being could sustain it. Were he not somehow nourished by the consolation of contemplative prayer, a man would be completely crushed by the knowing and feeling of his being. For as often as he would have a true knowing and a feeling of God in purity of spirit (insofar as that is possible in this life) and then feels that he cannot—for he constantly finds his knowing and feeling as it were occupied and filled with a foul, stinking lump of himself, which must always be hated and despised and forsaken, if he shall be God’s perfect disciple, taught by him alone on the mount of perfection—he almost despairs for the sorrow that he feels, weeping, lamenting, writhing, cursing, and blaming himself. In a word, he feels the burden of himself so tragically that he no longer cares about himself if only he can love God.
And yet in all this, never does he desire to not-be, for this is the devil’s madness and blasphemy against God. In fact, he rejoices that he is and from the fullness of a grateful heart he gives thanks to God for the gift and the goodness of his existence. At the same time, however, he desires unceasingly to be freed from the knowing and feeling of his being.
Everyone must sooner or later realize in some manner both this sorrow and this longing to be freed. God in his wisdom will teach his spiritual friends according to the physical and moral strength of each to sustain this truth and in accordance with each one’s progress and openness to his grace. He will instruct them little by little until they are completely one in the fullness of his love—that fullness possible on earth with his grace.
CHAPTER 45
A good exposition of certain snares that may befall the contemplative.
I must warn you that a young novice, unseasoned by experience in contemplation, is liable to great deception unless he is constantly alert and honest enough to seek reliable guidance. The peril is that he may destroy his physical strength and fall into mental aberrations through pride, sensuality, and conceited sophistry.
This is how deception may insinuate itself. A young man or woman newly set out on the contemplative way hears about the desire in which a man lifts up his heart to God, unceasingly longing to experience his love; he also hears about the sorrow I have just described. Vainly considering himself clever and sophisticated about the spiritual life, it is not long before he begins to interpret what he hears in literal, material terms, entirely missing the deeper spiritual meaning. And so he foolishly strains his physical and emotional resources beyond reason. Neglecting the inspiration of grace and excited by vanity and conceit, he strains his endurance so morbidly that in no time he is weary and enervated in body and spirit. Then he feels the necessity to alleviate the pressure he has created by seeking some empty material or physical compensation as a relaxation for mind and body.
Should he escape this, his spiritual blindness and the abuse he inflicts on his body in this pseudo-contemplation (for it can hardly be called spiritual) may lead him to arouse his passions unnaturally or work himself into a frenzy. And all this is the result of pseudo-spirituality and maltreating the body. It is instigated by his enemy, the fiend, who takes advantage of his pride, sensuality, and intellectual conceit to deceive him.
Yet unfortunately, these people
believe that the excitement they feel is the fire of love kindled in their breasts by the Holy Spirit. From this deception and the like spring evils of every kind, much hypocrisy, heresy, and error. For this sort of pseudo-experience brings with it the false knowledge of the fiend’s school just as an authentic experience brings with it understanding of the truth taught by God. Believe me when I say that the devil has his contemplatives as surely as God has his.
The treachery of pseudo-experiences and false knowledge occurs in a myriad of guises and nuances according to the different mentalities and dispositions of those deceived, just as the real experience assumes many different subjective forms. But I will stop here. I do not want to burden you with more knowledge than you will need to keep you safe on your way. What will you gain from hearing how the evil one has deceived great clerics and those in different walks of life from your own? Nothing, I am sure. So I will describe only those snares you are liable to encounter as you toil at this work; I tell you so that you may be forewarned and avoid them.
CHAPTER 46
A helpful instruction on the avoidance of these snares; that in contemplation one should rely more on joyful enthusiasm than sheer brute force.
For the love of God, then, be careful and do not imprudently strain yourself in this work. Rely more on joyful enthusiasm than on sheer brute force.1 For the more joyfully you work, the more humble and spiritual your contemplation becomes, whereas when you morbidly drive yourself, the fruits will be gross and unnatural. So be careful. Surely anyone who presumes to approach this lofty mountain of contemplative prayer through sheer brute force will be driven off with stones.2 Stones as you know are hard, dry things that hurt terribly when they strike. Certainly morbid constraint will also hurt your health, for it is lacking the dew of grace and therefore completely dry. Besides it will do great harm to your foolish mind, leading it to flounder in diabolical illusions. So I say again, avoid all unnatural compulsion and learn to love joyfully with a sweet and gentle disposition of body and soul. Wait with gracious and modest courtesy for the Lord’s initiative and do not impatiently snatch at grace like a greedy greyhound suffering from starvation.
I speak half playfully now, but try to temper the loud, crude sighing of your spirit and pretend to hide your heart’s longing from the Lord. Perhaps you will scorn this as childish and frivolous but believe me, anyone who has the light to understand what I mean and the grace to follow it will experience, indeed, the delight of the Lord’s playfulness. For like a father frolicking with his son, he will hug and kiss one who comes to him with a child’s heart.3
CHAPTER 47
How one grows to the refinement of purity of spirit; how a contemplative manifests his desire to God in one way and to men in another.
Don’t be put off if I seem to speak childishly and foolishly and as if I lacked sound judgment. I do so purposely, for I believe that the Lord himself has inspired me over the last few days to think and feel as I do and to tell some of my other good friends what I now tell you.
One reason I have for advising you to hide your heart’s desire from God is because when you hide it I think he actually sees it more clearly. By hiding it you will actually achieve your purpose and see your desire fulfilled sooner than by any means you could devise to attract God’s attention. A second reason is that I wish you to outgrow dependence on your inconstant emotions and come to experience God in the purity and depth of your spirit. And finally, I want to help you tie the spiritual knot of burning love that will bind you to God in a communion of being and desire. For as you know, God is spirit and whoever desires to be united with him must enter into the truth and depth of a spiritual communion far transcending any earthly figure.1
Obviously, God is all-knowing and nothing material or spiritual can actually be concealed from him, but since he is spirit, something thrust deep into the spirit is more clearly evident to him than something alloyed with emotions. And this is because the spiritual is connatural with him. For this reason I believe that to the extent that our desire is rooted in the emotions, it is more remote from God than if it awakened gently in the joyful composure of a pure, deep spirit.
Now you may understand better why I counsel you playfully to cover and conceal your desire from God. I am not suggesting that you hide it completely, for that would be the counsel of a fool and an impossible task besides. But I bid you, use your ingenuity to hide it from him as best you can. Why do I say this? Because I want you to cast it deep into your spirit far from the contagion of capricious emotions which render it less spiritual and more remote from God. Moreover, I know that as your heart grows in purity of spirit, it is less dominated by the flesh and more intimately united to God. He will see you more clearly and you will become a source of delight to him. Of course, his vision is not literally affected by this or that for it is immutable. What I am trying to convey to you is that when your heart is transformed in purity of spirit, it becomes connatural with him, for he is spirit.2
There is one other reason I have in advising you to conceal your longing from God. You and I and many like us are so inclined to misunderstand a spiritual reality and conceive it literally. Perhaps had I urged you to show your heart’s desire to God, you would have demonstrated it physically either in gesture, sound, word, or some other strenuous activity such as you might employ to manifest a secret feeling of your heart to a human friend. But this would only render your contemplative work less simple and refined, for we show things to man in one way and to God in another.
CHAPTER 48
That God desires to be served by a man in body and soul; that he will glorify both; and how to distinguish between good and evil spiritual delights.
My intention in all this is certainly not to discourage you from praying out loud when the Holy Spirit inspires you to do so. And if the joy of your spirit overflows to your senses so that you begin to speak to God as you might to a man, saying such things as “Jesus,” “sweet Jesus,” and the like, you need not stifle your spirit. God forbid that you should misunderstand me in this matter. For truly, I do not mean to deter you from external expressions of love. God forbid that I should separate body and spirit when God has made them a unity. Indeed, we owe God the homage of our whole person, body and spirit together. And fittingly enough he will glorify our whole person, body and spirit, in eternity. In anticipation of this eternal glory, God will sometimes inflame the senses of his devout friends with unspeakable delight and consolation even here in this life. And not just once or twice but perhaps very often as he judges best. This delight, however, does not originate outside the person, entering through the windows of his faculties, but wells up from an excess of spiritual joy and true devotion of spirit.1 Comfort and delight like this need never be doubted or feared. In a word, I believe that anyone who experiences it will not be able to doubt its authenticity.
But I advise you to be wary of other consolations, sounds, joys, or delights originating from external sources which you cannot identify, for they may be either good or evil, the work of a good angel or the work of the devil. But if you avoid vain sophistry and unnatural physical and emotional stress in the ways I have taught you (or in better ways that you may discover), it will not matter if they are good or evil, for they will be unable to harm you. Why is your security so insured? Because the source of authentic consolation is the reverent, loving desire that abides in a pure heart. This is the work of Almighty God wrought without recourse to techniques and therefore it is free of the fantasy and error liable to befall a man in this life.
As for other comforts, sounds, and delights, I will not go into the criteria for discerning whether they are good or evil just now, because I do not believe it is necessary. They are discussed thoroughly in another man’s work which is far superior to anything I could write or say. You can find all I have said and all you need to know treated much better there. But what of that? I will go on anyway, for it does not weary me to reply to your heart’s desire which seeks understanding of the interior life. Thi
s desire you manifested to me before in words and now I see it clearly in your actions.
One thing I will say regarding those sounds and delights which you perceive through your natural faculties and which may or may not be evil. Learn to be continually occupied in the blind, reverent, joyful longing of contemplative love as I have taught you. If you do this I am certain that this love itself will enable you to discern unerringly between good and evil. It is possible that these experiences may throw you off guard in the beginning because they are so unusual.2 But the blind stirring of love will steady your heart and you will give them no credence until they are approved of from within by the Holy Spirit or from without by the counsel of a wise spiritual father.
CHAPTER 49
That the essence of all perfection is a good will; sensible consolations are not essential to perfection in this life.
And so you may confidently rely on this gentle stirring of love in your heart and follow wherever it leads you, for it is your sure guide in this life and will bring you to the glory of the next.1 This little love is the essence of a good life and without it no good work is possible. Basically, love means a radical personal commitment to God. This implies that your will is harmoniously attuned to his in an abiding contentedness and enthusiasm for all he does.2
The Cloud of Unknowing Page 10
