François Fénelon on prolonged trials
French philosopher and Christian François Fénelon (1651-1715) is one of my favorite thinkers. Hugely influential during his day and on many great thinkers we’ve likely read or encountered, he is largely forgotten today.
But his penetrating insight can help us today. You can read a longer biography I wrote of him for Civic Renaissance here.
I especially love his insights on the right uses of suffering, and on prolonged trials, which you can enjoy in his own words.
These excerpts are from The Complete Fenelon, Translated and edited by Robert J. Edmonson and Hal M. helms, and which I commend to your reading. This book has offered me endless sourish comfort and consolation in times of trial.
I hope you find encouragement in them, too.
Prolonged Trials
Francois Fenelon (1651-1715), from The Complete Fenelon, Chapter 10, Translated and edited by Robert J. Edmonson and Hal M. helms
Why do we rebel against our prolonged trials? Because of self-love; and it is that very self-love that God purposes to destroy. As long as we cling to self, his work is not achieved.
What right have we to complain? We suffer from an excessive attachment to the world—above all to self. God orders a series of events that detach us gradually from the world first, and finally from the self also. The operation is painful, but our corruption makes it needful. If the flesh were healthy, the surgeon would not need to probe it. He uses the knife only in proportion to the depth of the wound and the extent of proud flesh. If we feel his operation too keenly, it is because the disease is active. Is it cruelty that makes the surgeon probe us to the quick? No, far otherwise—it is skill and kindness; he would do the same with his only child.
This is how God treats us. He never willingly puts us to any pain. His fatherly heart does not desire to grieve us, but he cuts to the quick so that he may heal the ulcers of our spiritual being. He must tear from us what we love wrongly, unreasonably, or excessively, the thing that hinders his love. In so doing, he causes us to cry out like a child from whom one takes away a knife with which it could injure or kill itself. We cry loudly in our despair, and murmur against God, just as the petulant child murmurs against its mother. But he lets us cry, and saves us nevertheless!
God afflicts us only for our correction. Even when he seems to overwhelm us, it is for our own good, to spare us the greater evil we would do to ourselves. The things for which we weep would have caused us eternal distress. That which we count as loss was then indeed most lost when we
fancied that it belonged to us. God has stored it up safely, to be returned to us in eternity. He deprives us of the things we prize only because he wants to teach us to love them purely, truly, and properly in order to enjoy them forever in his presence, and because he wants to do a hundred times better for us than we can even desire for ourselves.
Nothing can happen in the world except by God’s permissive will. He does everything, arranges everything, makes everything to be as it is. He counts the hairs of our head, the leaves of every tree, the sand on the seashore, the drops of water from the mighty ocean. When he made the world, his wisdom weighed and measured every atom. Every moment he renews and sustains the breath of life. He knows the number of our days; he holds the cords of life or death. What seems to us weightiest is as nothing in the eyes of God; a little longer or shorter life becomes an imperceptible difference before him. What does it matter whether this frail vessel, this poor clay, should be thrown aside a little sooner or later? How shortsighted and erring we are!
We are aghast at the death of one in the flower of his age. “What a sad loss!” we cry out. But to whom is the loss? What does the one who dies lose?—a few years of vanity, delusion, and peril. God takes that person away from the evil and saves that one from his own weakness and the world’s wickedness. What do they lose who love God?—the danger of earthly happiness, a treacherous delight, a snare that caused them to forget God and their own welfare. But in truth they gain the blessing of detachment through the cross. That same blow by which the one who dies is saved prepares those who are left to work out their salvation in hope. Surely, then, it is true that God is very good, very loving, very full of pity with regard to our real needs, even when he seems to overwhelm us and we are most tempted to call him hard.
The sensitiveness of self-love makes us keenly alive to our own condition. The sick person who cannot sleep thinks the night is endless, yet it is no longer than any other night. In our cowardice, we exaggerate all we suffer. Our pain may be severe, but we make it worse by shrinking under it. The real way to get relief is to give ourselves up heartily to God, to accept suffering because God sends it to purify us and make us worthier of him.
The world smiled upon you, and was as a poison to your soul. Would you wish to go on, right up to the hour of death, in ease and pleasure, in the pride of life and soul-destroying luxury, clinging to the world—which is Christ’s enemy, and rejecting the cross—which alone can make you holy? The world will turn away and forget, despise, and ignore you. Are you surprised at that, since the world is worldly, unjust, deceitful, and treacherous? Yet you are not ashamed to love this world, from which God snatches you to deliver you from its bondage and make you free.
You complain of your very deliverance. You are your own enemy when you are so alive to the world’s indifference, and you cannot endure what is for your real good when you so keenly regret the loss of what is fatal to you. This is the source of all your grief and pain. ■
The right use of crosses
The more we are afraid to bear crosses, the more we need them. Let us not, therefore, fall into hopes discouragement when the hand of God lays crosses heavily upon us. We should be fully aware of the magnitude of our disease by seeing the severity of the remedies that our spiritual Physician sees good to apply.
Truly we must be extremely diseased, and God must be extremely merciful, since despite our opposition, he reaches down to heal us. Surely we should find in our very crosses a supply of love, comfort, and confidence saying with the Apostle, “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” Happy are those who weep, and who, having sown in tears, will with indescribable joy reap the harvest of eternal life.
“I have been crucified with Christ, says St. Paul. It is with our Savior that we hear abound to the cross, and it is his grace that binds us there. It is for Jesus sake that we would not depart from the cross, since without it we cannot have him.