Section I.

THIRD DEGREE OF THE PASSIVE WAY OF FAITH, IN ITS COMMENCEMENT, AND ITS PROGRESS BY VARIOUS SPECIAL DEATHS TO A TOTAL DEATH, TO BURIAL, AND TO DECAY—DURATION OF THIS TRANSITION, IN WHICH THERE MUST BE NO ADVANCEMENT BEYOND FAITH, NOR ANY RECEDING—SPOLIATION OF THE SOUL, AND THE THREE DEGREES OF IT—FIRST DEGREE, WHICH CONCERNS GIFTS, GRACES, AND FAVOURS, OR ORNAMENTS—ITS NECESSITY AND EFFECTS.

You have seen dying persons who, after they have been believed to be dead, have all at once assumed a new strength, and retained it until their death; as a lamp whose oil is spent flickers in the surrounding darkness, but only to die out the more quickly: thus the soul casts out flames, which only last for a moment. It has bravely resisted death; but its oil is spent: the Sun of Righteousness has so withered it up, that it is forced to 152 die. But does this Sun design anything else with its fierce rays, except the consumption of the soul? And the poor soul thus burned thinks that it is frozen! The truth is, that the torment it suffers prevents its recognising the nature of its pain. So long as the Sun was obscured by clouds, and gave out rays to a certain extent moderated, it felt the heat, and thought it was burning, while in reality it was but slightly warmed: but when the Sun flashed full upon it, then the soul felt itself burning, without believing that it was so much as warmed. O loving deceit! O sweet and cruel Love! Have you lovers only to deceive them thus? You wound these hearts, and then hide your darts, and make them pursue after that which has wounded them. You attract them, and show yourself to them, and when they long to possess you, you flee from them. When you see the soul reduced to the last extremity, and out of breath from its constant pursuit, you show yourself for a moment that it may recover life, only to be killed a thousand times with ever-increasing severity.

O rigorous Lover! innocent murderer! Why dost Thou not kill with a single blow? Why give 153 wine to an expiring heart, and restore life in order to destroy it afresh? This is Thy sport. Thou woundest to the death; and when Thou seest the victim on the point of expiring, Thou healest one wound in order to inflict another! Alas! usually we die but once; and the very cruellest murderers in times of persecution, though they prolonged life, it is true, yet were content to destroy it but once. But Thou, less compassionate than they, takest away our life time after time, and restorest it again.

O life, which cannot be lost without so many deaths! O death, which can only be attained by the loss of so many lives! Perhaps this soul, after thou hast devoured it in Thy bosom, will enjoy its Beloved. That would be too great happiness for it: it must undergo another torture. It must be buried and reduced to ashes. But perhaps it will then arrive at the end of its sufferings, for bodies which decay suffer no longer. Oh! it is not thus with the soul: it suffers continually; and burial, decay, and nothingness are even more sensibly felt by it than death itself.

This degree of death is extremely long, and as I 154 have said that very few pass the other degrees, so I say that far less pass this one. Many people have been astonished to see very holy persons, who have lived like angels, die in terrible anguish, and even despairing of their salvation. It is because they have died in this mystical death; and as God wished to promote their advancement, because they were near their end, He redoubled their sorrow. The work of stripping the soul must be left wholly to God. He will do the work perfectly, and the soul will second the spoliation and the death, without putting hindrances in the way. But to do the work for ourselves is to lose everything, and to make a vile state of a divine one. There are persons who, hearing of this spoliation, have effected it for themselves, and remain always stationary; for as the stripping is their own work, God does not clothe them with Himself. The design of God in stripping the soul is to clothe it again. He only impoverishes that He may enrich, and He substitutes Himself for all that He takes away, which cannot be the case with those whose spoliation is their own work. They indeed lose the gifts of 155] God, but they do not possess God Himself in exchange.

In this degree the soul has not learned to let itself be stripped, emptied, impoverished, killed; and all its efforts to sustain itself will but be its irreparable loss, for it is seeking to preserve a life which must be lost. As a person wishing to cause a lamp to die out without extinguishing it, would only have to cease to supply it with oil, and it would die out of itself; but if this person, while persistently expressing a wish that the lamp should go out, continued replenishing it with oil from time to time, the lamp would never go out: it is the same with the soul in this degree, which holds on, however feebly, to life. If it consoles itself, does not suffer itself to be killed, in a word, if it performs any actions of life whatever, it will thereby retard its death. O poor soul! fight no longer against death, and you will live by your death. I seem to see a drowning man before me; he makes every effort to rise to the surface of the water; he holds on to anything that offers itself to his grasp; he preserves his life so long as his strength holds 156 out; he is only drowned when that strength fails. It is thus with Christians. They endeavour as long as possible to prevent their death; it is only the failure of all power which makes them die. God, who wishes to hasten this death, and who has compassion upon them, cuts off the hands with which they cling to a support, and thus obliges them to sink into the deep. Crosses become multiplied, and the more they increase, the greater is the helplessness to bear them, so that they seem as though they never could be borne. The most painful part of this condition is, that the trouble always begins by some fault in the sufferer, who believes he has brought it upon himself.

At last the soul is reduced to utter self-despair. It consents that God should deprive it of the joy of His gifts, and admits that He is just in doing it. It does not even hope to possess these gifts again.

When those who are in this condition see others who are manifestly living in communion with God, their anguish is redoubled, and they sink in the sense of their own nothingness. They long to be able to imitate them, but finding all their efforts 157 useless, they are compelled to die. They say in the language of Scripture, “The thing which I greatly feared is come upon me” (Job iii. 25). What! they say, to lose God, and to lose Him for ever, without the hope of ever finding Him again! To be deprived of love for time and for eternity! To be unable to love Him whom I know to be so worthy of my affection!

Oh! is it not sufficient, Divine Lover, to cast off your spouse, to turn away from her, without compelling her to lose love, and lose it, as it seems, for ever? She believes she has lost it, and yet she never loved more strongly or more purely. She has indeed lost the vigour, the sensible strength of love; but she has not lost love itself; on the contrary, she possesses it in a greater degree than ever. She cannot believe this, and yet it is easily known; for the heart cannot exist without love. If it does not love God, its affection is concentrated upon some other object: but here the bride of Christ is far from taking pleasure in anything. She regards the revolt of her passions and her involuntary faults as terrible crimes, which draw upon her the hatred 158 of her Beloved. She seeks to cleanse and to purify herself, but she is no sooner washed than she seems to fall into a slough yet more filthy and polluted than that from which she has just escaped. She does not see that it is because she runs that she contracts defilement, and falls so frequently, yet she is so ashamed to run in this condition, that she does not know where to hide herself. Her garments are soiled; she loses all she has in the race.

Her Bridegroom aids in her spoliation for two reasons: the first, because she has soiled her beautiful garments by her vain complaisances, and has appropriated the gifts of God in reflections of self-esteem. The second, because in running, her course will be impeded by this burden of appropriation; even the fear of losing such riches would lessen her speed.

O poor soul! what art thou become? Formerly thou wast the delight of thy Bridegroom, when He took such pleasure in adorning and beautifying thee; now thou art so naked, so ragged, so poor, that thou darest neither to look upon thyself nor to appear before Him. Those who gaze upon thee, 159 who, after having so much admired thee, see thee now so disfigured, believe that either thou hast grown mad, or that thou hast committed some great crime, which has caused thy Beloved to abandon thee. They do not see that this jealous Husband, who desires that His bride should be His alone, seeing that she is amusing herself with her ornaments, that she delights in them, that she is in love with herself; seeing this, I say, and that she sometimes ceases looking at Him in order to look at herself, and that her love to Him is growing cold because her self-love is so strong, is stripping her, and taking away all her beauties and riches from before her eyes.

In the abundance of her wealth, she takes delight in contemplating herself: she sees good qualities in herself, which engage her affection, and alienate it from her Bridegroom. In her foolishness she does not see that she is only fair with the beauties of her Beloved; and that if He removed these, she would be so hideous that she would be frightened at herself. More than this, she neglects to follow Him wherever He goes; she fears lest she may 160 spoil her complexion, or lose her jewels. O jealous Love! how well is it that thou comest to chastise this proud one, and to take from her what Thou hast given, that she may learn to know herself, and that, being naked and destitute, nothing may impede her course.

Thus, then, our Lord strips the soul little by little, robbing her of her ornaments, all her gifts, positions, and favours—that is, as to her perception or conscious possession of them—which are like jewels that weigh her down; then He takes away her natural capacity for good, which are her garments; after which He destroys her personal beauty, which sets forth divine virtue, which she finds it impossible to practise.

This spoliation commences with the graces, gifts, and favours of conscious love. The bride sees that her husband takes from her, little by little, the riches He had bestowed upon her. At first she is greatly troubled by this loss; but what troubles her the most, is not so much the loss of her riches, as the anger of her Beloved; for she thinks it is in anger that He thus takes back His gifts. She sees the 161 abuse she had made of them, and the delight she had been taking in them, which so fills her with shame that she is ready to die of confusion. She lets Him do as He will, and dares not say, “Why dost Thou take from me what Thou hast given?” for she sees that she deserves it, and looks on in silence.

Though she keeps silence, it is not so profound now as afterwards; it is broken by mingled sobs and sighs. But she is astonished to find, when she looks at her Bridegroom, that He appears to be angry with her for weeping over His justice towards her, in no longer allowing her the opportunity of abusing His gifts, and for thinking so lightly of the abuse she has made of them. She tries then to let Him know that she does not care about the loss of His gifts, if only He will cease His anger towards her. She shows Him her tears and her grief at having displeased Him. It is true that she is so sensible of the anger of her Beloved that she no longer thinks of her riches. After allowing her to weep for a long time, her Lover appears to be appeased. He consoles her, and with His own 162 hand He dries her tears. What a joy it is to her to see the new goodness of her Beloved, after what she has done! Yet He does not restore her former riches, and she does not long for them, being only too happy to be looked upon, consoled, and caressed by Him. At first she receives His caresses with so much confusion, that she dare not lift her eyes, but forgetting her past woes in her present happiness, she loses herself in the new caresses of her Beloved, and thinking no more of her past miseries, she glories and rests in these caresses, and thereby compels the Bridegroom to be angry again, and to despoil her anew.

It must be observed that God despoils the loss little by little; and the weaker the souls may be, the longer the spoliation continues; while the stronger they are, the sooner it is completed, because God despoils them oftener and of more things at once. But however rough this spoliation may be, it only touches superfluities on the outside, that is to say, gifts, graces, and favours.

This leading of God is so wonderful, and is the result of such deep love to the soul, that it would 163 never be believed, except by those who have experienced it; for the heart is so full of itself, and so permeated with self-esteem, that if God did not treat it thus, it would be lost.

It will perhaps be asked, If the gifts of God are productive of such evil consequences, why are they given? God gives them, in the fulness of His goodness, in order to draw the soul from sin, from attachment to the creature, and to bring it back to Himself. But these same gifts with which He gratifies it—that He may wean it from earth and from self to love Him, at least from gratitude—we use to excite our self-love and self-admiration, to amuse ourselves with them; and self-love is so deeply rooted in man, that it is augmented by these gifts; for he finds in himself new charms, which he had not discovered before; he delights in them, and appropriates to himself what belongs only to God. It is true, God could deliver him from it, but He does not do it, for reasons known only to Himself. The soul, thus despoiled by God, loses a little of its self-love, and begins to see that it was not so rich as it fancied, but that all its virtue was in Christ; it sees 164 that it has abused His grace, and consents that He should take back His gifts. The bride says, “I shall be rich with the riches of my Bridegroom, and though He may keep them, yet, from my union in heart and will with Him, they will still be mine.” She is even glad to lose these gifts of God; she finds herself unencumbered, better fitted for walking. Gradually she becomes accustomed to this spoliation; she knows it has been good for her; she is no longer grieved because of it; and, as she is so beautiful, she satisfies herself that she will not cease to please her Bridegroom by her natural beauty and her simple garments, as much as she could with all her ornaments.