The light of the divine will shines but little on the faces of the first circle; much more on those of the second; while those of the third are resplendent. The first show up most clearly; the second, less; the third, hardly at all. This signifies that the souls of the first degree are much in themselves; those of the second degree are less in themselves and more in God; while those of the third degree are almost nothing in themselves and all in God and absorbed in his essential will. All these faces have their eyes fixed on the will of God.’ The text of The Rule of Perfection is in the nature of an extended commentary on this symbolical frontispiece.
Father Benet begins by classifying’ the will of God under three heads; Exterior, Interior and Essential. The exterior will of God is ‘a certain light, norm or rule that guides us in active life’; the interior, ‘a brightness that directs us and supports the soul in contemplation’; and the essential, ‘a splendour that governs and perfects the spirit in the supereminent life.’ the first exercise that the aspirant must learn is the ‘practice of the intention of the will of God.’ There are six grades of this intention, which must be actual, unique, willing, indubitable, clear and prompt.
When one intends actually, one notes within oneself the actual remembrance of the will of God ; and one excludes thereby the sins of forgetfulness and mental dissipation. ‘This forgetting,’ writes Father Benet, ‘is a common error that brings immense harm, depriving us of an incredible amount of light and grace.’ To intend uniquely, is to conceive of God’s will as the sole and simple end of all one does or suffers. By this act one excludes all other selfish or merely irrelevant ends.
God’s will must not be done in a grimly stoical spirit, but with full inclination and a sense of peace and joy. In other words, the intention must be willing. To intend willingly excludes strain, worry and gloom, and makes the soul capable of receiving the Holy Spirit, of whom it is written, Factus est in pace locus ejus.
Intending indubitably, one excludes all vacillation; for one believes firmly that the work undertaken for the will of God is really God’s will. Clarity of intention refers to the quality of the faith involved. One clearly conceives the eternal and divine significance of one’s actions in the world of creatures. Finally there is the act of prompt intention, which exclude dilatoriness and sloth.
The practice of these six grades of intention is prescribed by Father Benet at every stage of the spiritual life, from the most rudimentary to the most advanced. The exercise is a very difficult one, but it is obvious that anyone who has learned to carry it out faithfully has gone far in the direction of transforming his entire life into a continuous act of prayer and contemplation.
A question that naturally arises, as we read this section of the book, is the following: How do we know which acts are in accord with God’s will and which are not? Father Benet tries to answer-not, it must be admitted, with entire success. He divides acts into three classes, those commanded, directly or indirectly, by divine authority; those prohibited; and the indifferent. In regard to the first two, God’s will is clear, because there are laws and commandments which embody an objective norm of conduct. In regard to the third, what counts is the intention. For in matters indifferent, ‘the work accords with the intention, not the intention with the work.’ If, while doing an indifferent thing, we dedicate our action to God, the doing of it will actually be the will of God. To go for a walk or to eat one’s dinner, consciously, for God’s sake is better, so far as one’s own soul is concerned, than the performance of intrinsically meritorious acts for one’s own advantage.
All this is good as far as it goes; but unfortunately it does not go far enough. Father Benet says nothing whatever about a whole class of acts which, so far as their earthly consequences are concerned, are more important than any others : I mean, those acts which the individual performs, not for his own sake, but on behalf and for the advantage of some social organization, such as a nation, a church, a political party, a religious order, a business concern, a family. There are no moral problems more difficult than those connected with this class of actions.
All the more reason, then, that in a treatise on the practice of God’s will they should be thoroughly examined. Father Benet chose to ignore them. In this he followed the example of all too many Christian moralists, belonging to both the great ethical traditions-the mystical, ‘theocentric’ tradition and that other ‘anthropocentric’ tradition derived from Stoicism. If Father Joseph deviated from the way of perfection into power politics, the fault must be attributed in part, at least, to his upbringing. Benet of Canfield never discussed the relationship between political action on the one hand and, on the other, the unitive life, the doing of the will of God. In a later chapter it will be necessary to examine this relationship in some detail.
The second part of The Rule of Perfection deals with the interior will of God-that ‘brightness which directs and supports the soul in contemplation.’ According to Father Benet the interior will of God is realized in stages, of which he counts five, namely, manifestations, admirations, humiliations, exultations and elevations. (The list, as one reels off the polysyllables, seems a trifle ridiculous. But then so do all classifications.
Compared with the manifest continuity of nature, what could be more absurd than the elaborate hierarchy of names devised by men of science? And yet, without such a hierarchy of names, there could be no analysis of the world about us and no intellectual understanding. It is the same with the higher psychology. Its experiences are continuous and direct; but they cannot be described or theorized about, and the conditions of their realization cannot be taught, except in terms of a hierarchy of analytical names. So long as we remember that ‘words are signs of things’ and avoid the all too common and absolutely fatal mistake of ‘making things the signs of words,’ classifications can be of the utmost value to us. With this parenthetic warning, let us return to Father Benet’s polysyllables.) Manifestations, which are those experiences of the divine presence that ordinarily accompany the first stages of the contemplative life, follow normally from the exercise of pure intentions in regard to the exterior will.
The mechanism is simple: purity of intention in action produces a dying away of passions and affections directed towards mundane objects; the dying away of passions and affections produces tranquillity of mind, which in turn produces the inward silence in which the soul can begin to experience the immanent divinity. ‘
Admirations arise when the contemplative gains a direct experience of God’s infinite greatness, together with a correlated experience of his own intrinsic nothingness. Humiliations are a further fruit of the sense of personal nothingness, and are valuable as providing an antidote to that complacency, into which beginners so easily fall after their first experiences of divine graces.
God’s goodness in uniting himself with the soul in spite of its abjectness produces exultations. This spiritual joy makes sweet the progressive denial of self which is the necessary condition of progressive advance in the way of union. In Father Benet’s own words, it ‘makes us despise carnal consolations, makes easy things that seem impossible, opens the way to heaven.’
Finally, the contemplative reaches the stage of elevations.
These are the ‘blind stirrings of love’ which result in union. Quis adhaeret Deo, unus spiritus est 3.
Of the third part of his book Father Benet says specifically that it is not for beginners. Its subject is the essential will of God, and the practices it inculcates are the equivalents of pure intention and contemplation on a higher stage of that ascending spiral, which is the way of perfection.
The essential will of God is that the soul should become united with God’s essence. In this union the soul is passive, God alone active. All the soul can do is to expose itself, utterly naked of its will, to the will of God, and to use ‘a subtle industry’ in order to strip away the last shreds of its selfhood.
Father Benet begins by describing two approaches to the supreme task of doing the essential will of God. The first is through a consideration of the imperfections in one’s acts of contemplation. Imperfections exist at every stage of the spiritual life. In the early stages they are gross and palpable. But as the mind becomes increasingly illuminated, these disappear and are replaced by faults of a more subtle nature. No spiritual, however far advanced, can ever afford to relax his watchfulness; for in an illuminated mind the tiniest imperfection can effectively hinder union with God. The contemplation of advanced spirituals has three common defects.
First, it may be too fervent, in which case the soul is not peaceful enough to receive God. Second, the soul may retain a subtle image of what is in itself imageless, the essence of God. Thirdly, the soul may conceive of God as being somewhere else than ‘in its own ground,’ ‘at the apex of the higher will.’ All these defects can be remedied by suitable acts of ‘denudation.’ Emotionality and images can be stripped away; and when they have
