Hobbit-Sense at OneFreeGarden.com

I’ve been reading a truly awesome book by Fr. Lorenzo Scupoli, The Spiritual Combat. If you’ve never heard of it, not to worry. St. Francis de Sales carried a copy around in his back pocket during the seventeenth century, so it hasn’t been on the New York Times best seller list for awhile. Still, alongside The Imitation of Christ, it’s considered the greatest post-mideival work of the Latin ascetic tradition.

I’ll let you skim through Fr. Scupoli’s preliminaries before I start sharing my commentary on the book; luckily, you can find them online for free, along with the rest of his treatise. Of course, I don’t guarantee the site I’ve linked to, just the actual text of The Spiritual Combat.

Once you get through the preliminaries, you’ll have a rough overview of Fr. Scupoli’s fourfold path to victory in spiritual warfare: distrust of self, confidence in God, proper use of the faculties of body and mind, and the duty of prayer. Today, I’ll begin my meditations on the first of these: distrust of self.

Here is the relevant passage for our discussion:

Distrust of self is so absolutely requisite in the spiritual combat, that without this virtue we cannot expect to defeat even our weakest passions, much less gain a complete victory. This important truth should be deeply imbedded in our hearts; for, although in ourselves we are nothing, we are too apt to overestimate our own abilities and to conclude falsely that we are of some importance. This vice springs from the corruption of our nature. But the more natural a thing is, the more difficult it is to be discovered.

But God, to Whom nothing is secret, looks upon this with horror, because it is His Will that we should be convinced we possess only that virtue and grace which comes from Him alone, and that without Him we are incapable of one meritorious thought. This distrust of our own strength is a gift from Heaven, bestowed by God on those He loves. It is granted sometimes through His holy inspiration, sometimes through severe afflictions, or almost insurmountable temptations and other ways which are unknown to us. Yet He expects that we will do everything within our power to obtain it. And we certainly will obtain it if, with the grace of God, we seriously employ the following four means.

First. We must mediate upon our own weakness. Consider the fact that, being nothing in ourselves, we cannot, without Divine assistance, accomplish the smallest good or advance the smallest step towards Heaven.

I would like to focus on our “being nothing in ourselves.” What does this mean?

We are created from nothing, and so our essence, our self, is quite literally nothing. Our very being is, so to speak, on loan from God. And we mustn’t forget this. When we do forget this, or in other words, when we sin, we “reassert our nothingness” in the words of Fr. John Hardon’s wonderfully written Catechism. We reject God’s gift of existence.

Judeo-Christian mysticism has long emphasized this truth: everything we have is a gift, and we ourselves are images reflecting God’s glory, not the masters of a private universe entirely of our own making. Diverse authors talk of our nature as images of the Divine using terms such as “eye of faith,” the “spiritual man,” or the “unseen observer;” but all these terms mean the same thing: that which is aware of being aware.

Let’s investigate this concept with a brief exercise.

Drop everything you’re doing and find a place where you can rest in stillness. Sit back as an observer and watch your thoughts flutter by. Do not intervene; just watch. Everything will continue its maddening course for a brief while even in your absence, but soon things will begin to calm and only the noises of your immediate environment remain. Everything you are aware of in this moment, these noises, the occasional concern that arises in your mind, your personality, your memories, your beliefs, absolutely everything you typically identify with your deepest self, will be seen as something external. All that remains, like the surface of a quiet pond, is the image of God.

Fundamentally, every man is a mirror which reflects the dazzling light of the God through whom we live, move, and have our being. We cannot point to any one thing in ourselves we did not first receive from a friend, or a kind word, or a beautiful picture, or perhaps a good book. To use a metaphor similar to that of the mirror, we are all prisms which capture the colors of the world for a brief moment, only to scatter them back from whence they came as we are tossed along in the winds of the Spirit.

In ourselves, we are nothing; our life is hidden in God.

Don’t be impatient if you find all this hard to grasp. And if the thought of you not ultimately even being in control of who you are disturbs you, if the thought of you being completely helpless and entirely dependent on the existence, on the God, who surrounds you frightens you, that’s okay–it’s supposed to do that.

And that is why this recognition of our nothingness, of our utter destitution, of our unfathomable poverty of spirit, is so vital to spiritual combat–it exposes every flicker of pride and selfishness for what it is: a foolish delusion. To try and clutch the self is like grasping at sand; to exalt the self is like trying to carve a statue out of water because there is nothing solid, nothing unchanging, present to latch onto.

This truth cannot be emphasized enough; by acknowledging and keeping it in mind, we can avoid a great deal of trouble.