Fénelon on Loving God in the Dark
⏱ 10 min read
You cannot feel God. You have been trying to love Him by faith for months now, and you do not know whether the loving is working. The morning chair is faithful. The verse is read. The prayers are offered into a quiet that does not answer. Somewhere inside the quiet, the question keeps turning — is this love still love, if I cannot tell it is being received.
François Fénelon, writing as a spiritual director in late seventeenth-century France, was the pastor of many souls walking exactly this passage. Spiritual Progress, the letters that survived him, name the love that walks without seeing as the highest school of devotion God puts His friends through. Fénelon was not a romantic about the dark. He did not promise the woman that the warmth would return on schedule. He simply insisted, with the steady tenderness of a man who had watched many souls cross the same valley, that the love offered in the dark is more pleasing to God than the love offered in the light, and that the woman who keeps loving Him without consolation is not failing — she is being formed. The Everspring Dry Season Devotional was built as a daily home for that formation — one short page per evening, one slow sentence, one return to the God who is in the dark room. For now, the Fénelon text.
The dark, named
The dark is not the absence of God. This is the first thing Fénelon would say to you if you sat down at his desk. The dark is the felt absence of God, which is a different thing, and the difference is the whole pastoral case for the loving god in darkness that Spiritual Progress is built around. God has not gone. The soul’s perception of Him has been quieted — sometimes for purification, sometimes for the deepening of the love, almost always for both — and the woman experiencing the quiet is being taught, by the quiet itself, to love a God she is not currently feeling.
The first wave of the dark is usually panic. The second wave is usually self-suspicion — I must have done something wrong, I must have grieved Him, I must have lost the spiritual ground I had. Fénelon gently sets the self-suspicion aside. Sometimes the dark is the consequence of a small unfaithfulness — and when it is, he addresses that — but more often the dark is the work of God Himself in a soul He is preparing for a deeper love. The woman in the dark is not being abandoned. She is being moved into a school she could not have entered while the warmth was making her devotion easy.
The first passage: the simple view of faith
“We must make use of all that Christian vigilance so much recommended by our Lord; raise our hearts to God in the simple view of faith, and dwell in sweet and peaceful dependence upon the Spirit of grace, as the only means of our safety and strength.”
— François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
The line for the woman in the dark is raise our hearts to God in the simple view of faith. Notice the adjective. Simple. Not the elaborate view, not the felt view, not the consoled view — the simple view, the bare lifting of the heart, the small act of turning toward Him with nothing in your hands and no warmth in your chest. This is the love Fénelon is describing. It does not require feeling. It does not require certainty. It requires the small daily raising of the heart, in the simple posture of faith, into the presence of a God the senses cannot find.
The second half of the verse is the rest the woman in the dark most needs. Dwell in sweet and peaceful dependence upon the Spirit of grace. The word peaceful is the medicine. The woman who has been in the dark for months is exhausted by the inner argument — am I really loving Him, am I really being heard, am I really walking by faith or just performing the motions of it. Fénelon, with great gentleness, sets the argument down. The walking by faith does not require constant inner verification. It requires the peaceful dependence on the Spirit who is, even in the dark, the only means of our safety and strength. The woman’s job is to keep raising her heart. The Spirit’s job is to make the raising effective. She does not have to feel the effectiveness for it to be real.
The second passage: the fidelity without delights
“God does not call you by any lively emotions, and I heartily rejoice at it, if you will but remain faithful; for a fidelity, unsustained by delights, is far purer, and safer from danger, than one accompanied by those tender feelings, which may be seated too exclusively in the imagination.”
— François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress
Read this one twice, and let the consolation of it land.
Fénelon rejoices that God does not call this soul by lively emotions. The rejoicing is the pastoral point. The dark is not a problem to be solved. The dark is the very condition in which the purer, safer fidelity is formed. The woman who has been waiting for the warmth to return so that her devotion can feel real again is being told, by the man who watched countless souls walk this passage, that the warmth was the less safe form of devotion all along. The warmth, Fénelon notes plainly, may have been seated too exclusively in the imagination — meaning, in part, that the woman who depended on the warmth was loving God partly with her own emotional faculty rather than purely with her will, and the dark is the gentle withdrawal of the emotional support so that the will-led love can take its proper place underneath.
A fidelity, unsustained by delights, is far purer. The line is worth carrying. The love offered in the dark is not a lesser love because it is unconsoled. It is, by Fénelon’s reckoning, a purer love precisely because it is unconsoled — because nothing is propping it up except the soul’s deliberate, repeated, simple turning toward the God she cannot see. Every morning the woman keeps the chair without warmth is a deposit of the purer fidelity into the slowly forming love. The dark is the workshop. The unconsoled faithfulness is the substance being formed.
For the daily home this slow forming needs, the Everspring Dry Season Devotional holds a short page for the evening turning of the heart in the dark — one slow honest sentence, one act of un-felt love offered to Him as it is — structured for the woman whose fidelity is being purified in the quiet.
The somatic — the open chest in the dark
Pause here. Sit somewhere quiet. The woman walking by faith in the dark carries the dark in her body — the held breath, the slight collapse forward at the chest, the small bracing that says I am holding on without help right now.
Let the spine lengthen a little. Let the chest open by a small amount, not by puffing it out, but by simply letting the breastbone rise on the next inhale. Let the breath be slower than it has been. The body of loving god in darkness is not the collapsed body. It is the body that lifts itself, slightly, into the simple view of faith — the small physical raising that matches the soul’s small spiritual raising of the heart.
Stay there for thirty seconds. Then continue reading.
The lifted chest does not bring the felt warmth back. It does, quietly, place the body in the posture of the love being offered. The dark is held with more grace in a lengthened body than in a collapsed one. The Spirit can work through the peaceful dependence Fénelon describes more easily when the body itself is not arguing with the dark.
The third passage: the watching that is not full of self
“If, then, we never lost sight of the presence of God, we should never cease to watch, and always with a simple, lovely, quiet and disinterested vigilance; while, on the other hand, the watchfulness which is the result of a desire to be assured of our state, is harsh, restless, and full of self.”
— François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress
The third passage names the temptation the woman in the dark most needs to be released from. The watchfulness which is the result of a desire to be assured of our state, is harsh, restless, and full of self. This is the inner monitoring the dark produces — the constant checking of whether the love is real, whether the soul has progressed, whether the warmth is nearer than it was, whether the prayer last night reached Him at all. Fénelon, gently, names this watchfulness as the wrong one. It is full of self. It is, in the end, the soul checking on its own state rather than looking at God.
The vigilance Fénelon recommends in the dark is the opposite. Simple, lovely, quiet and disinterested. The woman in the dark does not need to watch herself; she needs to watch Him, in the simple view of faith, without checking whether the watching is registering anything. The disinterested vigilance is the loving god in darkness in its mature form — the soul that has stopped asking whether her devotion is being received, and has settled into the simple posture of looking at Him whether anything is felt or not. This is the rest underneath the dark. This is what the Spirit is forming, by slow daily degrees, in the woman who keeps showing up at the chair without a guarantee of warmth.
Three small returns
If you take nothing else from Spiritual Progress, these three returns are the spine of the loving-in-the-dark posture.
The first return is the simple raising — one slow lifting of the heart toward God each morning, without requiring it to feel like anything. Lord, I love Thee. Said once. Not measured for warmth.
The second return is the un-monitored sitting — five minutes in the chair in which you deliberately do not check whether the prayer is reaching Him. The simple view of faith does not require verification.
The third return is the evening sentence of fidelity — one written line at the close of the day naming what the day’s love looked like. Today I came to the chair without feeling. Today I prayed without warmth. Today I kept faith with Him in the quiet. The line counts the deposit of the purer fidelity Fénelon describes.
(For the sibling readings in the Pure Love cluster, what Fénelon meant by Pure Love of God walks the foundational distinction between loving God for who He is and for what He gives, Fénelon on Loving God Without Feeling It walks the will-led love that does not require the heart to be warm, and Why Fénelon Said Most Christian Devotion Is Self-Love walks the slow un-mixing of the love of the Giver from the love of His gifts. If the language of abiding has been the way you have framed this dark, what Andrew Murray meant by abide in Christ and Andrew Murray on Christ as the indwelling life walk the parallel teaching from the South African pastoral tradition.)
What changes, slowly
The dark does not lift on a schedule. The warmth may not return for many months. What changes, while the dark holds, is the substance of the love itself. The woman who has spent a season raising the heart to God in the simple view of faith finds, after some months, that the love offered in the dark has settled into her at a depth the consoled love never reached. The next time the warmth comes — and it usually does come, in His timing — she will hold it more lightly, because the love that survived the dark has taught her that the warmth was never the substance of the love anyway. The loving god in darkness is, in Fénelon’s pastoral view, the school in which the mature love of God is formed. The woman in the dark is not lost. She is being taught.
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This article continues the Fénelon reading library on Everspring Press — slow contemplative readings of the French spiritual director’s letters, with the matched journals at the centre of the practice. Everspring is preparing reprints of Fénelon’s letters, including Spiritual Progress, for the woman whose devotion has entered the dark and whose love is, slowly, being purified inside it.
