Conversation
with Oneself
excerpt
from The Three Ages of the Interior Life
by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.
As soon as a man ceases to be outwardly occupied,
to talk with his fellow men, as soon as he is alone, even in the noisy streets
of a great city, he begins to carry on a conversation with himself. If he is
young, he often thinks of his future; if he is old, he thinks of the past and
his happy or unhappy experience of life makes him usually judge persons and
events very differently.. . . .
If a man is fundamentally egotistical, his
intimate conversation with himself is inspired by sensuality or pride. He
converses with himself about the object of his cupidity, of his envy; finding
therein sadness and death, he tries to flee from himself, to live outside of
himself, to divert himself in order to forget the emptiness and the nothingness
of his life. In this intimate conversation of the egoist with himself there is
a certain very inferior self-knowledge and a no less inferior self-love.
He is acquainted especially with the sensitive
part of his soul, that part which is common to man and to the animal. Thus he
has sensible joys, sensible sorrows, according as the weather is pleasant or
unpleasant, as he wins money or loses it. He has desires and aversions of the
same sensible order; and when he is opposed, he has moments of impatience and
anger prompted by inordinate self-love. But the egoist knows little about the
spiritual part of his soul, that which is common to the angel and to man. Even
if he believes in the spirituality of the soul and of the higher faculties,
intellect and will, he does not live in this spiritual order. He does not, so
to speak, know experimentally this higher part of himself and he does not love
it sufficiently. If he knew it, he would find in it the image of God and he
would begin to love himself, not in an egotistical manner for himself, but for
God. His thoughts almost always fall back on what is inferior in him, and
though he often shows intelligence and cleverness which may even become
craftiness and cunning; his intellect, instead of rising, always inclines
toward what is inferior to it. It is made to contemplate God, the supreme
truth, and it often dallies in error, sometimes obstinately defending the error
by every means. It has been said that, if life is not on a level with thought,
thought ends by descending to the level of life. All declines, and one's
highest convictions gradually grow weaker.
The intimate conversation of the egoist with
himself proceeds thus to death and is therefore not an interior life. His
self-love leads himI to wish to make himself the center of everything, to draw
everything to himself, both persons and things. Since this is impossible, he
frequently ends in disillusionment and disgust; he becomes unbearable to
himself and to others, and ends by hating himself because he wished to love
himself excessively. At times he ends by hating life because he desired too
greatly what is inferior in it.(1)
If a man who is not in the state of grace begins
to seek goodness, his intimate conversation with himself is already quite
different. He converses with himself, for example, about what is necessary to
live becomingly and to support his family. This at times preoccupies him
greatly; he feels his weakness and the need of placing his confidence no longer
in himself alone, but in God.
While still in the state of mortal sin, this man
may have Christian faith and hope, which subsist in us even after the loss of
charity as long as we have not sinned mortally by incredulity, despair, or
presumption. When this is so, this man's intimate conversation with himself is
occasionally illumined by the supernatural light of faith; now and then he
thinks of eternal life and desires it, although this desire remains weak. He is
sometimes led by a special inspiration to enter a church to pray.
Finally, if this man has at least attrition for
his sins and receives absolution for them, he recovers the state of grace and
charity, the love of God and neighbor. Thenceforth when he is alone, his
intimate conversation with himself changes. He begins to love himself in a holy
manner, not for himself but for God, and to love his own for God; he begins to
understand that he must pardon his enemies and love them, and to wish eternal life
for them as he does for himself. Often, however, the intimate conversation of a
man in the state of grace continues to be tainted with egoism, self-love,
sensuality, and pride. These sins are no longer mortal in him, they are venial;
but if they are repeated, they incline him to fall into a serious sin, that is,
to fall back into spiritual death. Should this happen, this man tends again to
flee from himself because what he finds in himself is no longer life but death.
Instead of making a salutary reflection on this subject, he may hurl himself
back farther into death by casting himself into pleasure, into the
satisfactions of sensuality or of pride.
In a man's hours of solitude,
this intimate conversation begins again in spite of everything, as if to prove
to him that it cannot stop. He would like to interrupt it, yet he cannot do so.
The center of the soul has an irrestrainable need which demands satisfaction.
In reality, God alone can answer this need, and the only solution is
straightway to take the road leading to Him. The soul must converse with
someone other than itself. Why? Because it is not its own last end; because its
end is the living God, and it cannot rest entirely except in Him. As St. Augustine puts it:
"Our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee." (2)
________________________
1.
See IIa IIae, q.25, a.7: Whether Sinners Love Themselves. "Since the
wicked do not know themselves aright, they do not love themselves aright, but
love what they think themselves to be. But the good know themselves truly, and
therefore truly love themselves. . . as to the inward man. . . and they take
pleasure in entering into their own hearts. . . . On the other hand, the wicked
have no wish to be preserved in the integrity of the inward man, nor do they desire
spiritual goods for him, nor do they work for that end, nor do they take
pleasure in their own company by entering into their own hearts, because
whatever they find there, present, past, and future, is evil and horrible; nor
do they agree with themselves, on account of the gnawings of conscience."
2. The
Confessions, Bk. I, chap. I. "Our
heart is restless, until it repose in Thee." This is the proof for the
existence of God through natural desire for true and lasting happiness, which
can be found only in the Sovereign Good, known at least imperfectly and loved
above all, and more than ourselves. We develop this proof in La Providence et la confiance
en Dieu, pp. 50-64.
