Compunction and humility free the Christian from excessive attachment to self and worldly things, cleansing the soul and enabling it to reflect divine light. This leads to a deep experience of God's presence in contemplation, resulting in admiration, joy, and ultimately praise. The Christian’s admiration rises beyond nature to God and His mysteries, culminating in a supernatural joy rooted in divine love and wisdom. This spiritual joy often coexists with life's hardships, much like Jesus' simultaneous experience of suffering and beatific vision. The passage warns against sin, which blocks access to this divine consolation, and encourages fervent Christians to engage deeply in contemplation to maintain this connection with God's grace and joy.
Yours in Jesus and Mary.
From the book Divine Contemplation for All: or the Art of Communing with God by Dom Savinien Louismet, O. S. B. (Burns Oates and Washbourne, LTD, 1920, pages 42-48).
Admiration and Joy
Compunction and humility together produce their first effect by setting the Christian free from all inordinate love of self or of creatures; and, further, they cleanse the soul, rendering it exceedingly bright; and, still further, they cause it really to receive, and really to reflect, the rays of divine light as they shine full upon it — nay, upon all men, and upon all the world.
So the divine goodness floods the contemplative soul with its splendor and benignant heat; there is immediate contact between the loving God and the loving soul; God allowing Himself, in a manner, to be seen and touched, to be handled and tasted by the spirit of this fervent Christian, in whom there then arises a feeling of admiration, that usually breaks forth into praise and melts away into an overwhelming sense of joy.
Compunction and humility are, indeed, peculiar characteristics of Christian contemplation; seldom if ever are they found anywhere else: although one might be inclined to think that these two new feelings, admiration and joy, are also found in purely natural contemplation. It is true that some kind of admiration and joy is the reward of natural contemplation; but these feelings are of a different description altogether.
The Christian's admiration in the act of Divine Contemplation is a joint product of the exercise of his natural reason, theological Faith and the gift of Understanding; while his joy is a joint product of the exercise of his natural affectionateness, the theological virtue of Charity, and the gift of Wisdom. These two feelings then, in their origin, in their motive, in their mode of operation, and in their results, are essentially supernatural.
A man casts his eyes upon the loveliness of nature in its majestic totality or in some of its wondrous details, and he is seized with admiration: if he be a mystic, his admiration will at once rise above what evoked it, and it will ascend straight up to God the Father as the benign creator of all these marvels, to God the Son as their divine exemplar, to God the Holy Ghost as the sustaining principle of them all. “By the word of the Lord the heavens were established and all the power of them by the spirit of his mouth” (Psalm 32:6).
Then he casts the eyes of his soul upon the mysteries of Our Blessed Lord as they are presented to us by the Church in the Gospel revelation, and he discovers in them (as we shall see at some length in a subsequent volume), a new world full of incomparably greater wonders: and his admiration grows by leaps and bounds. Finally, from the Sacred Humanity of his Savior, our fervent Christian is led on to the contemplation of the divine personality of the Word, and of the Father who eternally begets Him, and of the Spirit of Love who proceeds from both Father and Son as from one principle, and to the contemplation of their infinite perfections, and there his admiration is unbounded and unutterable.
Some modern writers, of the infidel school of thought, accuse Christianity of having a tendency to render men insensible to the charms of nature. How unjust this indictment is, the lives of our Saints, and almost all the monuments of Catholic art and literature, demonstrate. What has sometimes happened is that the contemplative has, on particular occasions, been so overwhelmed by the spiritual beauty he beheld with the inward eye, that there was left in him no power to enjoy the loveliness of natural scenery. Thus, St. Bernard could travel a whole day on the shores of one of the most beautiful lakes in the world, and not look at it, because he was then rapt in the greater loveliness seen by his spirit united to God in ecstatic prayer.
This only shows that there are divers grades of beauty which solicit man's admiration, and that in our present condition our reserve power of actual perception and enjoyment is strictly limited. And so it will happen that, if it be mightily drawn upon by one particular object, none of it can be spared for another. The fountainhead of St. Bernard's rapturous admiration lay deeper than the surface of things: consequently, it was of a finer quality, and incomparably more refreshing and potent than any purely natural feeling; and sprang up even unto eternal life, to the very throne of the Blessed Trinity.
From this admiration of the contemplative flows spontaneously the praise of God: the loving and rapturous praise of Our Father in heaven. This is abundantly illustrated in the whole range of the sacred writings from Genesis to the Apocalypse, in the sacred liturgy, and in so many burning lyrical effusions of the Saints; for instance, to name but one: in the canticle of St. Francis of Assisi to “My brother the Sun.” It is also borne out by the daily experiences of fervent souls who live in close union with God and are careful to banish from their heart all that displeases Him. Praise, rapturous, burning praise of the Beloved, not always set in words or sounded in the ear — for when admiration is intense, one is struck speechless; the feeling expresses itself only in the ecstatic attitude of soul and body. And is not this the loudest praise: “Tibi silentium laus! — Silence is thy fitting praise (Psalm 64:2, in the Hebrew version). Does not the recollected, serene, winsome countenance of the Saints proclaim to the world that the Divine Wisdom's conversation hath no sadness, “nor her company any tediousness but joy” (Wisdom 7:16)— joy unspeakable?
In his contemplation, our mystic emulates the admiration shown by the simple-hearted shepherds of Bethlehem at the angelic message, and at what they found in the grotto of the Nativity; the admiration of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of St. Joseph at the things they heard said of the Divine Child; the admiration of the angelic hosts at witnessing the Lord of glory become an infant of a day, when they made the countryside of Judea resound with their songs of praise. This also enables him to picture to himself the admiration of the same angelic hosts at the mystery of the Holy Mass and of the real presence of Our Lord in the tabernacle.
Oh! how the contemplative sees at times, “in his mind's eye,” these Blessed Spirits pressing around him after holy communion, adoring their Lord just new born in the poor stable of his own heart, and praising Him there! And if we, too, are dimly conscious of the glory that is visiting and investing us at such a moment, how we should break forth into songs of gladness and praise at the loving condescension of Our Lord!
We have spoken of joy. May we not use a stronger word — more expressive, at any rate — and say “exultation”? So it is styled hundreds of times in the Scriptures. The song of praise of the Blessed God on the lips of the mystic, or in the inmost sanctuary of his heart, is not only a sign of admiration but of exultation as well.
And now, mark. The praise seems to go forth from man to God; in reality it comes from God, passes through the heart and lips of man, and, then, from man, returns to God. The exultation that goes along with it is an overflow from the heart of the loving God, flooding the heart of the pure and fervent Christian. It is the very bliss of God making itself felt in man. It is the Holy Ghost, the substantial gladness of God the Father and of God the Son, manifesting His presence in the soul and body of the wayfarer who is yet so far from home; and filling him already with delight and heavenly consolation.
People of little faith cannot understand this. Seeing the servants of God experience, as they themselves do, so many of the sorrows and hardships of the present life, they find it difficult to reconcile visible facts with assertions concerning the great joy of the spiritual life.
The explanation is simple.
There takes place in the fervent Christian something like the wonderful phenomenon of the bliss of the beatific vision in Our Lord's soul, at the same time as He was plunged in the horrors of His agony in the garden and of all His sacred Passion. It is of faith that Jesus enjoyed the beatific vision in the highest part of His soul, without cessation for a single moment; and it is of faith, also, that He truly suffered all the bitterness of the torments described in the Gospels, and much more, that may be read between the lines of the sober narrative.
Now, in much the same way — if we may liken small things to great, and the servant to his Divine Master — in much the same way, the mystic experiences at once joy and pain. The common sorrows and trials of the present life are not spared him. He has his full share of them; nay, at times, much more than the rest of men: still — deep down in his inmost heart there is the joy of the presence of God, the exultation of the conscious possession of the Holy Ghost.
It is precisely the task of divine contemplation to render the Christian aware of this wellspring of heavenly consolation which he carries about with him; to bring it to the surface; to make it flow freely and water all the garden of his soul, in the measure of the actual dispensation of divine grace.
The devil tries hard to make the Christian who is in trouble from outward circumstances abandon the practice of prayer, and, especially, commit mortal sin. He knows that then, indeed, the poor man will be in sore distress, for he will no longer have the resource of going down into the secret place of his heart, there to seek and to find the consolation of God — and the God of consolation. A mortal sin is like a corpse, thrown by a murderer into that deep well, the conscience of man, poisoning its sweet waters with abomination.
On the other hand, the tepid Christian, through grace — so long as he preserves it — possesses, indeed, in the depths of his soul this well-spring of the presence of the Holy Ghost and of His consolation: but he keeps the mouth of the well obstructed. A heavy stone lies there, which he never takes the trouble of lifting up or rolling aside, so as to draw and drink of the refreshing waters. May not this, per chance, be our case?