Salesian Literature

Chapter 8  :  To scorn the evangelical counsels is a grave sin

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So vigorous, so pressing is our Lord’s appeal to us to tend towards perfection, to make it our one aim, that we cannot overlook our obligation to attempt the task: Your must be holy, because I am holy (Lev. 11:44; 1 Pet. 1:16); the just man must persist in winning his justification, the holy in his life of holiness (Rev. 22:11); you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Mt. 5:48).  This led St. Bernard[1] to write to the Abbot of Aux[2], St. Guarin, whose life and miracles are a fragrant memory in this diocese: “the good man never cries.  Enough!  He is ever consumed with a hunger and thirst for holiness (Mt. 5:6).”

 

There are never enough material possessions for the man whom a sufficiency fails to satisfy; that is certain.  If enough is insufficient, can anything fill the human heart?  However, the man who is content with his store of spiritual possessions, satisfied that he ahs enough, lacks a sufficiency of them; enough is insufficient, because part of genuine sufficiency in the things of God consists in ever longing for enrichment.

 

God, when the world began, commanded the earth to yield grasses that grow and seed; fruit-trees too, each giving fruit of its own kind, and so propagating itself on earth (Gen. 1:11).  Now experience teaches us that trees and fruits seed only upon reaching maturity.  Never do our virtues achieve full and perfect growth but they breed in our hearts ambitions of doing better, which are seeds of further virtue.  I do believe the garden of the soul has orders to yield flowers of virtue that will each bear the fruit of good deeds, that will each contain seeds of a resolute ambition of ever growing daily in perfection.  Virtues, where such seeds are wanting, have failed to reach maturity.

 

“Why, then,” St. Bernard asks the sluggard, “don’t you want to grow more perfect?”

“No.”

“Surely you don’t want to grow worse?”

“Of course not.”

“What then?  Do you wish to be neither better nor worse?  Poor fellow, you expect the impossible! So fugitive is all we cherish, here under the sun (Eccl. 2:11; 3:1); especially is this true of man – described as fugitive as a shadow, changing all the while (Job 14:2).  He has no choice, therefore, but to go on or fall back.”

 

I am not saying, any more than St. Bernard, that failure to practise the counsels is sinful.  Obviously not: the whole difference between a command and counsel is that a command is an obligation binding under pain of sin, while a counsel is an invitation binding under no such penalty.

 

This I do say, however: it is gravely sinful to scorn striving after Christian perfection; worse still to scorn our Lord’s invitation; while to scorn the counsels, the ways leading to perfection, which our Lord sets out for us – that is an intolerable impiety.  Only a heretic would deny that our Lord has given us good directions, suitable counsels; only blasphemers have bade God keep his distance from them, refused to learn his will  (Job. 21:14).

 

Still, it is dreadfully irreverent to say to one who invites us so lovingly, so charmingly to perfection: “I’m not going to be holy, I’m not going to be perfect; not for me a higher place in your benevolence, I’ve no time for following these counsels of yours destined to lead to perfection.”

 

There is certainly no sin in failing to follow the counsels, if our emotions are engaged elsewhere.  It may happen, for instance, that a man cannot bring himself to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor, because he lacks the courage to give up so much.  A man can marry, because he is I n love with a woman, or because he lacks the strength of soul to wage war against the flesh.

 

But to boast of having no intention at all of following any of the counsels inevitably involves contempt for God from whom they come.

 

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[1]  Cf. Book 3, Chapter 1.

[2]  This abbey, in the diocese of Geneva, was dedicated to our Lady of the Alps;  it was founded in 1133.

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