Fénelon on Loving God Without Feeling It
⏱ 12 min read
Your love for God has stopped feeling like love and you wonder if it ever was. The hymns that used to undo you slide past unmoved. The verse on the morning page lands flat. The prayer in the chair produces nothing — no warmth, no sweetness, no small consoling sense that He is in the room with you. The faithfulness is still going — you still show up, you still read, you still pray — but the felt part has gone, and the absence has been long enough now that the small honest part of you has begun to ask whether the love was real in the first place.
François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose letters of spiritual direction were gathered after his death into Spiritual Progress, wrote often to women and men in exactly this small private suspicion. His pastoral move, gently repeated, was the opposite of what the saint expected. The dryness was not, in his reading, the evidence of failed love. The dryness was often the evidence of the will learning, slowly, to love God without the help of the felt sweetness — and the fenelon loving god without feeling he was patiently teaching was the deeper love that was being grown underneath, while the felt love was being temporarily withdrawn. The Everspring Dry Season Devotional was built as the daily small home for this slow learning. For now, the slow read of Fénelon himself.
The dry season, named
The signature of the dry season is the sudden mismatch between the saint’s faithfulness and her felt response to the faithfulness. She is still doing the right things. She is still in the chair. She is still reading the Psalms. She is still serving in the small ways she has always served. None of it produces what it used to produce. The morning quiet time, which once carried her into the day on a small warm tide, now produces no warmth at all. The Sunday worship, which once moved her, slides past untouched. The intercession that used to come with tears comes without them.
The saint usually does not understand why. She has not stopped loving God. She has not stopped meaning the prayer. She has not turned aside to another life. The faithfulness is intact. Only the felt confirmation of the faithfulness has been withdrawn, and the withdrawal has been long enough — months, sometimes years — that the saint has begun to suspect she was deceived about her own love all along, and that the felt sweetness was the love itself, and that the absence of it now means the love was never there.
Fénelon’s pastoral correction is gentle and exact. The felt sweetness was not the love. The felt sweetness was the consolation that accompanied the love in its first season — the small warm encouragement God often gives to the beginner, to draw her in. The love itself is something else. The love itself is seated in the will, not in the feelings, and the will continues to love God in the dry season because the will is the deeper organ of love, and the feelings have only been temporarily silent so that the saint can learn this distinction. The fenelon loving god without feeling is the love of the will — and the will can love perfectly well when the heart is cold, if the saint will only trust that the loving is happening even though the feeling is not.
The first passage: the gentle un-feeling of fidelity
“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 it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the surprising directness of Fénelon’s claim. I heartily rejoice at it. He is not condoling with the saint over the dry season. He is rejoicing in it. The pastoral move is meant to startle her out of the assumption that the dryness is a problem. The dryness is, in his pastoral reading, often a gift — the gift of a purer fidelity, one that does not depend on the delights that may have been seated too exclusively in the imagination.
The line to sit with is seated too exclusively in the imagination. Fénelon is making a careful pastoral observation. The felt sweetness, in the early seasons of the spiritual life, is often as much a product of the saint’s own imaginative warmth toward God as it is a product of God’s actual self-disclosure. The two are entwined, and the saint cannot, from inside the felt warmth, distinguish what comes from her own imagination from what comes from God Himself. The dry season is the small interior surgery in which the two are gently separated. The imagination’s contribution is temporarily silenced. What remains is the love of the will, unaccompanied by the imagination’s warm illustration of it — and the saint can finally see, for the first time, what her love actually is at its core.
A fidelity, unsustained by delights, is far purer, and safer from danger. This is the line for the dry-season saint to hold near the page. The fidelity that has continued through the silence is the purer fidelity, because it cannot be the loving of the delights — there are no delights to love. What remains is the loving of God Himself, by the will, in the absence of the felt confirmation. This is not a lesser love. It is, in Fénelon’s pastoral reading, the deeper one — the love that the spiritual life has been quietly walking toward all along.
The second passage: peaceful dependence in the silence
“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 twice. Notice that Fénelon’s prescription for the dry-season saint is not to manufacture a return of the felt sweetness, and not to add more spiritual disciplines to compensate for it. The prescription is the simple view of faith.
The simple view is the plain look toward God that does not first require an emotional state. The saint who has been waiting for the warm feeling to return before she resumes her prayer is waiting for a precondition Fénelon refuses to grant. The look is plain. The faith underneath the look is the will’s loving turn, with or without felt confirmation. Raise our hearts to God in the simple view of faith. The lifting is by the will. The will can lift even when the heart is silent.
Sweet and peaceful dependence. The adjectives are gentle, but they are exact. The dependence Fénelon names is sweet and peaceful even when the felt sweetness has been withdrawn — because the sweetness of the dependence does not come from the saint’s feelings. It comes from the Spirit of grace, who continues to be present, and active, and the only means of safety and strength, regardless of whether the saint can presently feel His presence. The peace is not in her feelings. The peace is in the structural fact of His grace, which has not changed during the dry season, and which is still holding her even though she cannot, this morning, feel the holding.
The dry-season saint who learns to raise her heart in the simple view of faith is learning what the rest of the spiritual life will eventually ask of her. The seasons that come and go will continue to come and go. The felt sweetness will return for a stretch and withdraw for another. The will, taught by the dryness, learns to continue loving across the whole of it — the warm and the silent — because the loving was never the warmth, and the loving was never the silence either. The loving is the will’s quiet daily turn, sustained by the peaceful dependence underneath all the seasonal weather.
For the daily home this slow learning needs, the Everspring Dry Season Devotional holds a short evening page built specifically for the saint in the silence — a small place to raise the heart in the simple view of faith when the felt response is not arriving, and to return tomorrow to the same un-decorated turning.
The somatic — the un-clenched throat
Pause here. Sit somewhere quiet. Notice the small clench in the throat — the place where the dry-season disappointment has been quietly held. The saint in the silent season often carries the suspicion in the throat, where the unspoken question — was the love ever real? — has been sitting unvoiced for months.
Place one hand gently at the base of the throat. Let the throat soften by a small amount under the warm hand. Let one slow inhale come in, and one slow exhale go out. Notice that the will is still turned toward God in this moment, even though no felt response has arrived. The loving is happening. The loving has been happening all along. The body’s small softening at the throat is the place where the will’s quiet loving is, for sixty seconds, allowed to be felt as itself — not as a wave of emotion, but as the small ongoing fact of the turning.
Stay there for half a minute. Then continue reading.
The un-clenched throat is the smallest physical version of the fenelon loving god without feeling. The saint who can soften the throat under the warm hand can, at the interior level, recognise that her continued faithfulness is the love, and that the will’s turn is the love, and that the felt confirmation is something else entirely. The daily small softening teaches the body what the soul is being asked to learn — that the love is not the feeling, and that the loving continues whether or not the feeling joins it.
The third passage: dwelling in peace under uncertainty
“We court the reproach of Christ Jesus, and dwell in peace though surrounded by uncertainties; the judgments of God do not affright us, for we abandon ourselves to them, imploring his mercy according to our attainments in confidence, sacrifice, and absolute surrender.”
— François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress
The third passage is the long horizon. Dwell in peace though surrounded by uncertainties.
The dry season is the saint’s most concentrated experience of uncertainty. She is uncertain whether the love was real, uncertain whether the silence is His withdrawal or her failure, uncertain whether the dryness is a gift or a verdict. Fénelon’s pastoral move is to refuse to resolve any of these uncertainties intellectually, and instead to invite the saint into the dwelling in peace though surrounded by them. The peace is not the resolution of the uncertainty. The peace is the abandoning of herself to the judgments of God about it — the small daily decision to let the dry season be whatever it turns out to be, in His hands, while the will continues its quiet loving turn underneath the unresolved felt question.
Imploring his mercy according to our attainments in confidence, sacrifice, and absolute surrender. The line names the saint who has, slowly, walked into the fenelon loving god without feeling. Her confidence is not in the felt sweetness. Her sacrifice has included the willingness to keep loving when the loving did not feel like loving. Her surrender has become, quietly, absolute — which is to say, the will has handed even its own felt response over to God, and is loving Him without any guarantee that the felt response will ever return.
This is the saint Fénelon has been writing toward across the whole pastoral letter. The dry-season saint who has continued. The faithful will under the silent heart. The purer fidelity that does not need delights to sustain itself.
Three small returns
If you take nothing else from Spiritual Progress, these three returns are the spine of the un-felt-love posture:
The first return is the un-clenched throat — the small body practice of warm hand at the throat, once a day, until the body has learned that the will’s loving turn is still the love even when the heart is silent.
The second return is the simple view of faith — the daily plain turn toward God that does not first require a felt response. The lifting is by the will. The will can lift in the silence.
The third return is the un-felt fidelity — the slow daily showing-up to the chair without requiring the prayer to produce sweetness, and the small interior trust that the loving is happening even though it does not feel like loving.
(For the sibling readings in the pure-love cluster: what Fénelon meant by pure love of God walks the foundational concept of loving God for who He is rather than for what He gives, why Fénelon said most Christian devotion is self-love walks the harder pastoral question of where the mixed love quietly persists, and Fénelon on the disinterested love that survives loss walks the love that holds when the consolations are removed. If the bridge to the Reformed contemplative tradition is the question, what Andrew Murray meant by abide in Christ and Andrew Murray on Christ as the indwelling life walk the same un-felt abiding from a different pastoral angle.)
What changes, slowly
The dryness does not have to end this month. Fénelon was not promising the saint that her felt sweetness would return on a particular schedule. What changes is the saint’s relationship to the dryness itself. The fenelon loving god without feeling is the slow recognition that the will’s quiet turn is the love, that the felt sweetness was never the substance of the love but only its early consolation, and that the purer fidelity being formed in the silence is a deeper love than the consoled love it is replacing.
By month six of daily un-clenched throat and simple view of faith, the saint usually recognises that the suspicion has eased. The question was the love ever real? has quietly stopped being asked, because the showing-up itself has answered it — the love is real, the love is the will’s quiet daily turn, and the loving has continued through the entire silence whether she could feel it or not. The felt sweetness, when it returns — and it usually does, in its own time — returns as gift rather than as proof, and the saint receives it differently than she once would have, because she has learned, in the dry season, that the love does not depend on it.
A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Dry Season Devotional.
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Everspring Press is preparing slow reprints of François Fénelon’s letters, including Spiritual Progress, for the contemporary reader in the silent season whose un-felt faithfulness is, in the French archbishop’s quiet pastoral reading, the deeper love being slowly formed underneath.
