In the Footsteps of St. Louis Marie de Montfort
"Footsteps Online"
Autumn 1996 (Volume 1, Issue 3)
A Synthesis of Montfortian Spirituality - Part Two
In the last issue of "Footsteps", we presented the first part of a synthesis of St. Louis Marie's teaching. We saw that he starts off from the consideration of a "descending movement" of God's love coming down to us in Jesus Christ. The second part of this synthesis looks at the corresponding "ascending movement of our response to God.
The following abbreviations are used in the text to refer to works of St Louis Marie:
- TD
- Treatise on True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin
- SM
- The Secret of Mary
- LEW
- The Love of Eternal Wisdom
More information on these works can be found in The Writings of St Louis Marie de Montfort.
An ascending movement
It is St Louis Marie's belief that, when we respond to God's call in love, we ought to do so in a way similar to the way in which this call is made known to us and put into operation in history. As he puts it, God does not change: "we can safely believe that he will not change his plan in the time to come, for he is God and therefore does not change in his thoughts or his way of acting" (TD 15). Just as God became a human being in the Incarnation of his Son, we, in our turn, are called to "put on the divine nature" by being formed into the likeness of Jesus Christ. We are to return to a state in which we are "the living image of (God's) beauty" (LEW 35). In other words we are to become more and more like the Eternal Wisdom of God, revealed to us in Jesus Christ, or, as he puts it, we are called to "acquire and preserve divine Wisdom" (cf. LEW 203).
It is in this acquisition of divine Wisdom that our happiness lies. In LEW, St Louis Marie examines other forms of wisdom (means of achieving happiness), and rejects them all as being ineffective and unworthy of the sublime call of the human being (cf. LEW ch. 7). We can only achieve our end by responding in love to the love of God, and thereby becoming the likeness of Jesus Christ. But to love Christ, the Eternal and Incarnate Wisdom, we must first know him: "Can we love deeply someone we know only vaguely? ....To know Jesus Christ incarnate Wisdom, is to know all we need. To presume to know everything and not know him is to know nothing at all" (LEW 8,11). So we are first called to know Christ, the Wisdom of God, then to love what we have come to know, and finally to be formed into his likeness. Along with many others in the Church, St Louis Marie calls this latter process Consecration, and it is a process which begins with Baptism, by which we are "incorporated" into Christ, to use St Paul's terminology.
Jesus Christ is the end to which we tend. And there can be no other end in view in all our striving: "Jesus, our Saviour, true God and true man must be the ultimate end of all our other devotions; otherwise they would be false and misleading. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and end of everything. ... For in him alone dwells the entire fullness of the divinity and the complete fullness of grace, virtue and perfection. In him alone we have been blessed with every spiritual blessing; he is the only teacher from whom we must learn; the only Lord on whom we should depend; the only Head to whom we should be united and the only model that we should imitate" (TD 60-61). Jesus Christ is the only Lord, and his reign in the world is our only goal.
But again, St Louis Marie says, we must follow the path chosen by God himself. That path, in the descent of his love, involved Mary. So, in our ascent to God, we ought to follow the same way: "It was through the Blessed Virgin Mary that Jesus came into the world, and it is also through her that he must reign in the world" (TD 1). It has to be noted, however, that Mary is only the path; she is not the end towards which we travel, which is the reign of Jesus Christ, the kingdom of God. Devotion to Mary is a means to the end, and indeed only one among several means to the acquisition of divine Wisdom. It is, however, "the greatest means of all, and the most wonderful of all secrets for obtaining and preserving divine Wisdom" LEW 203), precisely because she was the means chosen by God for bringing into being his plan of love.
If devotion to Mary is to be "the greatest means of all... for obtaining and preserving divine Wisdom", it has to be "genuine" or "true" devotion, and not something misleading, shallow or unreal. St Louis Marie will agree that there are many forms of devotion to Mary which satisfy the criteria for "true devotion", but among them all he claims there is one which is "a smooth, short, perfect and sure way to attaining union with our Lord" (TD 152). It consists in a total dedication of oneself to Mary, in order to be totally dedicated to Christ. The end then is dedication to Christ (and not to Mary), but he insists that this is the surest way to achieve that dedication, which he sees as the same dedication of oneself which takes place at Baptism, but now in a more personal and conscious manner. His reason for his emphasis on Mary as the path to this end, is that (a) Mary was the path chosen by God to bring his love to us, and (b) that Mary is the one who, above all others, has achieved the perfection of dedication to God in her Son, and is therefore a model for us. Once again, she is the "type" of the Church, of the assemblage of the disciples of Christ, since she is the perfect disciple and imitator of her Son.
The form of devotion to Mary (and through her to Christ) which he is proposing, he sometimes calls "consecration", although he accepts that the strictest meaning of "consecration" can only be applied to our relationship to God. Indeed he says that he prefers to speak always of Consecration to Christ, Eternal and Incarnate Wisdom, through the hands of Mary. But he provides other forms of words which could just as well be used today. The same can be said of the name "Holy Slavery" which was sometimes applied in his own day to this devotion, and which to our ears can sound offensive or off-putting. Knowing full well that such a form of devotion would not appeal to everyone at first glance, St Louis Marie sees it as a "secret" - i.e. as something not generally recognised, which requires deeper examination to see its value, but which when accepted will yield the richest results. This is why he refers to Mary herself as a "secret": "Happy, indeed sublimely happy, is the person to whom the Holy Spirit reveals the secret of Mary, thus imparting to him true knowledge of her" (SM 20).
Another "secret" which he insists upon for true conformity to Christ, or true acquisition of divine Wisdom, is that of "the Cross". The Cross of Christ was the greatest triumph of divine Wisdom, and the greatest manifestation of the love of God for us. So our acceptance of the cross in our own lives is a sure means of entering into the movement of love which brings us back to God. By this cross in or own lives, he means the suffering which is inevitable in trying to be faithful to our commitment to God, and other forms of suffering which can have a purifying effect on our consciousness and our intentions - e.g. "mortification". The Cross is "the sign, the emblem and the weapon of his faithful people" (LEW 173), and "mortification" is included as one of the essential means for acquiring divine Wisdom (cf. LEW ch. 16). St Louis Marie never sees the cross in a negative light, but always as the consequence of love and as something which accompanies love. This is true both in the descending movement of God's love for us, and in the ascending movement of our return to Him.
Finally, Montfortian spirituality could be summed up in the formula: "To God Alone, by Christ Wisdom, in the Spirit, in communion with Mary, for the reign of God."
