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Spiritual men always placed themselves in a concrete situation where efforts that were possible would open the soul and make it receptive and active. They were never concerned with doctrinal abstractions, with a search for merits or of a pharmaceutical mixture of grace and freedom. They left this preoccupation to theologians and expressed themselves only in terms of experience. “God does everything in us... What is ours is the good disposition of our will.”17.1 If they spoke of “labor and sweat”, they meant the human action within the divine action. We can formulate it in this manner: it is God who “works”, and it is man who “sweats”.
Asceticism has nothing to do with moralism. The contrary of sin is not virtue but the faith of the saints. Moralism exercises natural forces, and its fundamental voluntarism submits human behavior to moral imperatives. We know how fragile and inefficacious is every autonomous and immanent ethical system, for it offers no vivifying source. We can respect a law, but we can never love it as we love a person--Jesus Christ, for example. Christ is not the principle of good but good incarnate. That is why in the tragic conflicts of existence, in the depths of some overwhelming sorrow or loneliness, moral and sociological principles are powerless. They do not have the power to say to a paralytic: “Get up and walk!” They cannot pardon or absolve, wipe out a fault or raise the dead. Erected into a system, their rigid appearance of being impersonal and general hides the pharisaism of “the pride of the humble”. This is pride's most dangerous form, for once “pride is taken for humility, the malady is without remedy”.17.2
On the other hand, the “virtue” of the ascetics has an entirely different resonance and designates the human dynamism set in motion by the presence of God. There is no question here of any “meritorious” work. “God is our creator and savior; he is not the one who measures and weighs the price of our works.”17.3
No juridical idea of recompense is applicable here. “My child, give me your heart.” These words of the Old Testament already announce the Gospel. “Seek the kingdom of God and all these things shall be given you besides.”17.4 In seeking the one thing necessary, man puts himself in harmony with it, and gives his heart as an offering. What comes from God is the kingdom, and this is a gratuitous gift. “If God regarded merits, then no one would enter into the kingdom of God.”
Spiritual men in their search for salvation are not concerned with the mercantile calculations of those who are too interested in their own lot. Humility forbids us to feel ourselves “saved”, but it makes us think ceaselessly of the salvation of others. The soul is occupied above all with the destiny of God in the world, and with the response that God expects from man. In the vision of mystics, God sometimes appears as abandoned and suffering in his wounded love. If it is necessary to save anything in this world, it is not man before all else, but the love of God, for he has first loved us and his power bears and sustains the expected response. In the interaction of grace and sin formulated by the theologians, spiritual men contemplate the interaction of the two fiats, the encounter of the descending love of God and the ascending love of man.
If “man is condemned and saved at the same time”,17.5 and if “the Church is the salvation of those who are perishing”17.6 it can be a question only of the full expression of our faith. It is the free choice not of “works” but of the irresistible desire to be a child of God. It is for me to open the door of my soul so that he can enter in. I can only prostrate myself and hide my face as did the disciples on Thabor, blinded by the splendor of his presence. The violence of which the Gospel speaks has reference to the heart of man. That is why “God will judge the hidden secrets of men”.17.7 He will judge them because man is master of his heart.