Folio 375

Innocent XII, 1691-1700

printed p. 343 · pdf p. 375

INNOCENT XII 1691-1700

Errors Concerning the Most Pure Love of God1

[Condemned in the brief "Cum alias," March 12, 1699]

1327. 1. There is an habitual state of the love of God, which is pure charity and without any admixture of the motive of one's personal interest. Neither fear of punishment nor desire of reward any longer has a share in it. God is no longer loved for the sake of merit, nor because of one's own perfection, nor because of the happiness to be found in loving Him.

1328. 2. In the state of the contemplative or unitive life, every interested motive of fear and hope is lost.

1329. 3. That which is essential in the direction of a soul is to do nothing else than to follow grace, step by step with infinite patience, precaution, and subtlety. One should restrain himself within these limits so that God may be permitted to act, and he should never aspire to pure love, except when God by an interior unction begins to open the heart to this word, which is so hard for souls heretofore attached to self, and can therefore scandalize them or cause them confusion.

1330. 4. In the state of holy indifference, a soul no longer has voluntary and deliberate desires for its own interest, with the exception of those occasions on which it does not faithfully cooperate with the whole of its grace.

1331. 5. In the same state of holy indifference we wish nothing for ourselves, all for God. We do not wish that we be perfect and happy for self interest, but we wish all perfection and happiness only in so far as it pleases God to bring it about that we wish for these states by the impression of His grace.

1332. 6. In this state of holy indifference we no longer seek salvation as our own salvation, as our eternal liberation, as a reward of our merits, nor as the greatest of all our interests, but we wish it with our whole will as the glory and good pleasure of God, as the thing which He wishes, and which He wishes us to wish for His sake.

1333. 7. Dereliction is nothing else than the abnegation or renunciation of oneself, which Jesus Christ requires of us in the Gospel, after we have left all external things. This denial of ourselves is only with regard to our own interest. . . . The extreme trials in which this abnegation or dere-

  1. DuPl III, II 402 ff.; Viva I 562 b ff.; BR(T) 20, 870 b ff.; MBR 10, 21 9 a ff.—They are contained in the book, Explications des maximes des Saints sur la vie intérieure, by Messere Françoise de Salignac Fénelon, Archevêque Duc de Cambray, etc. (Paris, 1697). Variant readings have been corrected according to the original Gallic text which DuPl, l.c., supplies. ↩