Of the suffering purification of the lower or sensory part, and how one is to bear oneself therein.

The Hundred-and-forty-seventh Letter.

Of the suffering purification of the lower or sensory part, and how one is to bear oneself therein.

N. N.

I hope yet now to find a moment's time and ability; to answer your agreeable of the 28th passato to me; were it even only with a few lines.

You hang, dear brother, under the purifying hand of Jesus on the cross. I take you in compassionate faithful love: Only, if I could give you the insight into your state which I have of the same, you would surely keep courage, and only let all storms go over you. It is a suffering purification of the lower part; the senses, the imagination-power, and the whole animal part rise up at times against it: Only even through their rising-up and force will they by degrees lose their strength, if you only remain rightly suffering. I say: it is a suffering purification; it speaks therefore of itself, that here no activity comes to pass. Wanting to help oneself, inspect, lament, keep with unrest, pray with vehemence and the like, sometimes only irritates more, and God attains not His end-purpose, which, besides the purification of the lower part, is the discovery and destruction of self-love.

Abandon and delaissement are (as you speak of them) distinguished, as active and passive. That, namely to give oneself over to God, to offer up and yield unto all His good-pleasure, from a cordate upright will, is quite another thing, than from faintness and confusion to let oneself sink, and to leave oneself over to the mercy and keeping of another, whom one neither knows nor sees, who yet in the ground secretly demands that we should yield him the victory, and confess that we are nothing and can nothing. This latter, I mean, is delaissement, and the chief medicine of your illnesses. Bear yourself and the several risings-up so quietly as is possible to you, with a mute consent into your general nothingness; that is, that you believe with inmost truth that you are such a one as you are, and that you must and will gladly expect your help and your good solely from God.

Because the Lord also is in the play, so it is now not so serviceable, through conversation and explanations, to want to help this or that, true or imagined, wrong and inequity, especially when it runs not into your duty; then generally one does not succeed there; and if one seems to have succeeded, yet one is not rightly at rest, because namely one has not struck the enemy at the right place. The stirred-up nature-powers in us were the ground of all the evil, which must be overcome not through doing, but through suffering and letting-go. It is well true, God well makes use of men and occasions, but with that we have nothing to do: He has servants many; if we accept not the one, then He calls another.

In prayer you must also bear yourself as you can, not as you will; in general not too vehemently. If you cannot so or otherwise enter in, or sink deep, (as you express yourself) then remain will-less, as you are, out of reverence toward God's good-pleasure, and set yourself otherwise through no manner of straining.

I seem to give you rules; but because you now can poorly observe rules, I add yet this rule at the close with it: That, so often as you notice that you have not made it according to your present state, you seek to make such good again not through unrest and vexation, but through a peaceable making-nothing. Be of good courage, be spread abroad, my brother, trust yourself to God infinitely; only hold out under His hand, and believe that I will not forget you in weakness.

Mülheim, the 7th of January, 1751.

German

Der hundertsiebenundvierzigste Brief.

Von der leidentlichen Reinigung des untern oder sinnlichen Theils, und wie man sich darinnen zu verhalten.

N. N. Ich hoffe doch jetzt einen Augenblick Zeit und Vermögen zu finden; auf dein mir Angenehmes vom 28ten passato zu antworten; wäre es gleich nur mit wenigen Zeilen.

— Opening lines of the original German. The complete transcription of all 605 letters appears in the forthcoming Encounter Press critical edition; Brief 1 is shown in full as a sample.

German text: public domain (1773–75 first edition / 1845 Gesammelte Schriften).