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It seems that at first He strips the soul instead of enriching it.
In order to cure the soul of all spiritual and intellectual pride,
and to show it what dregs of poverty it still has within, He
leaves the understanding in darkness, the will in aridity,
sometimes even in bitterness and anguish. The soul then, says St.
John of the Cross, after Tauler, must
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'remain in the dark, in pure
faith, which is dark night for the natural faculties.' [106]
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St.
Thomas often points out that the object of faith is that which is
not seen (fides est de non visis); it is dark. And the Angelic
Doctor adds that it is impossible for anyone to believe and to see
the same thing under the same aspect; because what is believed, as
such, is not seen. [107] The soul has now to enter into the depths
of faith and to rise to its heights, like the Apostles when they
were deprived of the sensible presence of Christ after His
ascension. As He Himself had told them:
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'It is expedient to you
that I go. For if I go not the Paraclete will not come to you; but
if I go I will send him to you.' [108]
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St. Thomas gives an
admirable explanation of these words in his commentary on St.
John; he says that the Apostles, attached as they were to the
humanity of Christ by a natural love, were not yet sufficiently
filled with a spiritual love of His divinity, and therefore were
not yet capable of receiving the Holy Ghost spiritually, as they
must if they were to withstand the tribulations which they would
meet when Jesus had deprived them of His perceptible presence.
At first, then, God seems to strip the soul in this purification,
as in the preceding; He seems to leave it in darkness and aridity.
The motto of the soul must now be:
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'Fidelity and abandonment.'
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It
is now that the words of Christ will be fulfilled.
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' He that
followeth me walketh not in darkness, but shall have the light of
life.' [109]
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Especially illuminated now by the purging light of
the gift of understanding, the soul begins, as St. Paul says,
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'to
search the deep things of God.' [110]
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Now humility and the theological virtues are purged of all human
alloy. The soul experiences more and more, without seeing it, the
infinite purity and greatness of God, who transcends all the ideas
that we can form of Him; it experiences likewise all the
supernatural riches of the holy soul of Christ, which here on
earth contained the fulness of grace,
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'all the treasures of wisdom
and knowledge.' [111]
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Like the Apostles on the day of Pentecost it
has a glimpse of the depths of the mystery of the Incarnation and
the Redemption; it perceives something of the infinite value of
the merits of Christ who died for us on the Cross. The soul now
has a sort of living knowledge, an experimental perception, of the
supernatural world, a new outlook upon it. And by contrast the
soul becomes more conscious of its own poverty. The chief
suffering of a St. Paul of the Cross, of a Cure d'Ars, at this
stage, was to feel themselves so distant from the ideal of the
priesthood, which loomed now so great before them in the dark
night of faith; while at the same time they understood better the
great needs of those many souls that had recourse to them,
imploring their prayers and their help.
This third conversion or purification is, evidently, the work of
the Holy Spirit, who illuminates the soul by the gift of
understanding. As with a lightning-flash during the night He
illumines the soul that He wishes to purify. The soul had said to
Him so often.
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' Enlighten my eyes that I may never sleep in
death';[112]
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'O my God, enlighten my darkness' ;[113]
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'Create a
clean heart in me, O God, and renew a right spirit within my
bowels. Cast me not away from thy face, and take not thy holy
spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation and
strengthen me with a perfect spirit. I will teach the unjust thy
ways... and my tongue shall extol thy justice.' [114]
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The purified soul addresses to Christ those words which He Himself
once uttered, and begs that they may be fulfilled in itself.
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'I am
come to cast fire on the earth; and what will I, but that it be
kindled?'[115]
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This third purification comes about, as St. John of
the Cross says, by
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'an inflowing of God into the soul, which
purges it from its ignorances and imperfections, habitual, natural
and spiritual, and which is called by contemplatives infused
contemplation or mystical theology. Herein God secretly teaches
the soul and instructs it in perfection of love, without its doing
anything or understanding of what manner is this infused
contemplation.'[116]
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This great purification or transformation appears under different
forms, according as it is in pure contemplatives like a St. Bruno,
or in souls dedicated to the apostolate or to works of mercy, like
a St. Vincent de Paul; but in substance it is the same. In every
case there is the purification of humility and the three
theological virtues from every human alloy, so that the formal
motive of these virtues takes increasing ascendancy over all
secondary motives. Humility grows according to the process
described by St. Anselm, and repeated by St. Thomas:
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(1) To know that one is contemptible;
(2) to feel affliction at this knowledge;
(3) to confess that one is despicable;
(4) to wish one's neighbours to know this;
(5) patiently to endure their
saying so;
(6) to submit to being treated as worthy of contempt;
(7) to like being so treated.
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So we have the example of St.
Dominic, who by preference went to those parts of Languedoc where
he was ill-treated and ridiculed, experiencing a holy joy at
feeling himself made like our Lord, who was humbled for our sake.
Then the formal motives of the three theological virtues appear in
all their sublime grandeur- the supreme Truth that reveals, Mercy
ever ready to help, sovereign Goodness, ever lovable for its own
sake. These three motives shine forth like three stars of the
first magnitude in the night of the spirit, to guide us surely to
the end of our journey.
The fruits of this third conversion are the same as those of
Pentecost, when the Apostles were enlightened and fortified, and
being themselves transformed, transformed the first Christians by
their preaching-as we learn from the Acts of the Apostles, where
we are told of the first sermons of St. Peter and of St. Stephen's
discourse before his martyrdom.
The fruits of this third conversion are a true and deep humility,
and a living faith that begins to relish and savour the mysteries
of the supernatural order-as it were, a foretaste of eternal life.
Moreover, it produces a firm and confident hope in the divine
mercy, which is ever at hand to help us. To attain to this
perfection of hope, one must, as St. Paul says, have hoped against
hope.
But the most perfect fruit of this third conversion is a very
great love of God, a very pure and very strong love, a love that
hesitates before no contradiction or persecution, like the love of
the Apostles who rejoiced to suffer for the sake of our Lord. This
love is born of an ardent desire for perfection, it is
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'hunger and
thirst after the justice of God,'
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accompanied by the gift of
fortitude, which enables it to triumph over every obstacle. It is
the perfect fulfilment of the commandment-
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'Thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with thy whole heart, with thy whole soul and with
all thy strength and with all thy mind.'
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Henceforth the depth of the soul belongs completely to God. The
soul has now reached the stage of living almost continually the
life of the spirit in its higher part; it is now an adorer in
spirit and in truth. The darkness of the night of faith is thus a
prelude to the life of eternity: quaedam inchoatio vitae aeternae
It is the fulfilment of the words of Christ:
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'If any man thirst
let him come to me and drink.... Out of his belly shall flow
rivers of living water.' [117]
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This is the living water that
springs up into eternal life, the water which Jesus promised to
the Samaritan woman:
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'If thou didst know the gift of God... thou
perhaps wouldst have asked of him and he would have given thee
living water.... The water that I will give him shall become in
him a fountain of water, springing up into life everlasting.'
[118]
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