Fénelon on the Christian Who Has Stopped Feeling Anything
⏱ 11 min read
Your devotional emotions have flattened and you are scared it means you have drifted. The worship song that used to land somewhere now passes by like a song you do not know. The communion bread that used to gather you into a small interior pause has become bread again. You are not sure when the flatness began — only that it has been some months now, perhaps longer — and the not-feeling has begun to feel like the early evidence of a quiet apostasy you do not have the language to confess.
François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop of Cambrai, wrote to many women in this exact distress. The letters collected as Spiritual Progress turn, again and again, on a single quiet correction: the withdrawal of devotional feeling is, almost always, not drift. It is the soul being weaned from a kind of devotion that was real at the start and is being exchanged, gently, for a deeper one. Feeling is given, Fénelon insisted, and feeling is removed — and through both the giving and the removing, faith continues. The Everspring Dry Season Devotional was built as the daily small home for the unfeeling stretch — one short page per evening, room for one honest line on the flat morning, no demand that the page produce a feeling it cannot manufacture. For now, the Fénelon text.
What the flattening usually is
The flattening of devotional emotion is, in most cases, one of three things — and Fénelon’s pastoral patience was to help the woman in his care distinguish carefully between them, instead of assuming the worst.
The first is true drift. A soul that has, over months, allowed small daily faults to accumulate — half-honest evenings, neglected vigilance, slow drifts into divided love — will eventually find her devotional life flatten as a symptom. Fénelon does not pretend this never happens. The first letter in Spiritual Progress names it directly. Drift is real. But drift, in Fénelon’s pastoral experience, is the least common cause of devotional flatness in the woman who is worried enough about her flatness to be writing to him. Drift, when it is real, tends to come with a slow loss of concern — not a sharp increase in it. The woman who is scared by her flatness is almost certainly not drifting. She is doing something else.
The second is fatigue. A soul exhausted by life — by mothering, by ministry, by chronic illness, by a long bereavement, by a job that has been taking more from her than she has — will sometimes lose her felt devotional life simply because her whole nervous system has flattened, and devotion is no exception. Fénelon, writing centuries before the language of nervous system existed, recognised the pattern. The remedy is rest, not panic.
The third — and most common in the woman writing the worried letter — is what Fénelon calls the withdrawal of sensible consolations. The early years of any Christian life are usually warm because God, in His tutoring of the soul, gives felt confirmation freely. The middle years are usually cooler, because the soul is being asked to learn a kind of love that does not depend on its own emotional readings. The withdrawal is purposeful. The flatness is the curriculum. The soul is not drifting. The soul is being matured.
Fénelon’s first pastoral act is to help the woman name which of the three she is in. Almost always, in his letters, it is the third.
The first passage: the purer 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 verb in the second clause. Rejoice. Fénelon is not consoling the woman about the withdrawal of her emotions. He is rejoicing at it — if you will but remain faithful. The rejoicing is not because feeling is bad. The rejoicing is because the soul who remains faithful without the delights has crossed into a kind of devotion that is far purer, and safer from danger than the warmly felt devotion of her early years.
The danger of warm devotion, in Fénelon’s pastoral observation, is that it is structurally dependent on a weather the soul does not control. The warm soul prays warmly when the warmth is there. When the weather changes — as weather always does — the warm soul stops praying, because the fuel of the praying has been the feeling. The feeling was the engine. Without the engine, the practice stops.
Fidelity unsustained by delights is built on a different engine. The engine is the will set on God by faith. The will does not depend on the weather. The will keeps walking when the warmth is there and when the warmth is gone — because the walking is no longer fuelled by sensation but by the simple structural decision of faith. Pure faith, in the older vocabulary, is faith that is no longer propped up by feeling. It is faith standing on its own.
For the modern Christian woman who has stopped feeling anything, this line is the consolation that goes deeper than reassurance. Fénelon is not telling her the feeling will come back. He may believe it will or may not. What he is telling her is that the feeling does not need to come back for the devotion to be real. The devotion that continues without the feeling is, in his estimation, the deeper devotion. The flatness is not regression. It is the soil in which pure faith slowly grows.
This is the fenelon on christian feelings teaching at its quietest. Feelings are given. Feelings are removed. The walking continues, and the walking — not the feeling — is what defines whether the soul is with God.
The second passage: the quiet vigilance that does not measure itself
“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
Read this one twice. A simple, lovely, quiet and disinterested vigilance.
Notice the word disinterested. In seventeenth-century English it does not mean uninterested. It means without self-interest — without a stake in the outcome for the self. The vigilance Fénelon is naming is the soul keeping watch on God for His own sake, not for the sake of confirming her own state. The eye is on Him, not on the thermometer of her devotional feeling.
The opposite vigilance — harsh, restless, full of self — is the woman who has stopped feeling anything and is now spending most of her devotional hour checking whether she is feeling anything yet. The hour has become a long anxious self-audit. The Bible is open but the eye is mostly on the interior dial. The dial is reading cold. The dial keeps reading cold. The woman cannot rest, because the dial is not giving the reading she needs.
Fénelon’s pastoral move is to take the dial away. The reading does not matter. The reading was never the right instrument. The right instrument is the simple lovely quiet disinterested gaze on God Himself, and the soul that returns her eye to Him will gradually stop noticing the dial, because she will be looking somewhere else.
The flatness, read through this lens, is not a problem to solve. The flatness is the climate inside which the soul is being asked to learn the disinterested vigilance. The warm years made the disinterested vigilance unnecessary — the warmth itself kept the eye on Him. The flat years require it. The flat years are where the disinterested vigilance is grown.
For the daily home this disinterested vigilance needs, the Everspring Dry Season Devotional holds a short page for the flat morning, the un-warm prayer, the small daily lifting of the eye toward God without the help of any felt confirmation. The page is built for the woman who has stopped feeling anything. The page does not ask her to feel. The page asks her to look.
The somatic — the unflinched face
Pause here. Sit somewhere quiet. Notice the small flinch the face has been making, on the flat mornings, when no devotional feeling arrives at the expected moment. The flinch is small. A tightening around the eyes. A small pulling-in of the mouth. The face is registering the absence of the warmth as a small private disappointment, and the disappointment has begun to take up residence in the muscles of the face.
Let the flinch un-set. Let the eyes soften without expecting anything to arrive that would make them soften. Let the mouth release without any felt invitation to release it. Disinterested vigilance at the level of the face. The face is not waiting for the warmth. The face is just resting on its own bones.
Stay there for thirty seconds. Then continue reading.
The unflinched face is the body’s small enactment of the pure faith Fénelon is naming. The flinching face is the body of the soul still measuring herself against the warm years. The unflinched face is the body of the soul beginning to walk by faith without the propping of sensation. The small daily un-flinch is the bodily form of the larger interior un-measuring. The soul follows the face in this, more than the face follows the soul.
The third passage: the love that is not for the self
“We must renounce, forget and forever lose sight of self, take part with Thee and shine, O God, against ourselves and ours; have no longer any will, glory or peace, but thine only; in a word, we must love Thee without loving self except in and for Thee.”
— François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress
Read it slowly. Love Thee without loving self except in and for Thee.
This is the deepest of Fénelon’s pastoral lines, and the one that names the destination the flat years are slowly walking the soul toward. The love that loves God and also loves the self’s own warm devotional experience of loving God is divided love. The love that loves God only, with the self loved only inside His loving of it, is undivided. The flat years are the slow training of the soul out of the first kind of love and into the second.
The warm years let the soul love God and love the warm devotional experience of loving Him — and the soul could not, in those years, tell the two apart. The flat years remove the warm devotional experience. What remains is the bare love of God Himself, with no felt experience to share the love with. The bare love is the love Fénelon trusts. The bare love is what the long Christian life is built on. The bare love is what survives every weather, including the long dry weathers the flat years are.
For the modern Christian woman who has stopped feeling anything, this passage is the line that re-frames the flatness as gift. The flatness is what allowed her to discover that her love had been partly her love for the felt experience of loving. The flatness is the instrument that has separated the love from the experience. What she is left with is the love itself — quieter, less coloured, more durable — and the discovery, slowly, that this quieter love is the truer one.
(For the sibling readings inside this slow-growth cluster: what Fénelon said about spiritual progress that modern Christians miss walks the wider thesis that real growth feels like loss before it feels like gain, the slow growth Fénelon said doesn’t feel like growth walks the hiddenness of interior growth from the one growing, and why Fénelon said the Christian’s hardest year is year three walks the dry middle every soul must walk. For the bridge to Andrew Murray’s neighbouring contemplative thread, the prayer Andrew Murray said most Christians never pray names the surrender-prayer underneath the unfelt walking, and what Andrew Murray meant by the deeper Christian life walks the slower interior life Fénelon would recognise as a near-cousin to his own.)
What changes, slowly
The feeling may return, in seasons, in smaller and quieter forms. Fénelon never promises it back, and he never tells the woman in his care to wait for it. What changes, over a year of the small daily disinterested vigilance, is the woman’s relationship to her own feeling. She stops needing it. She stops measuring by it. She walks beside it when it is there and walks beside its absence when it is gone, and the walking — by faith, in the simple structural decision of fidelity — becomes the thing that defines her devotion, instead of the warm or cool weather of any given week.
This is what fenelon on christian feelings finally describes. Not the suppression of emotion. Not the pretending that the flatness does not ache. The slow training of the soul to love God underneath her feelings, in the place that is deeper than the weather, where pure faith can quietly grow in soil the warm years could never have prepared.
A daily home for the practice
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The Fénelon reading library on Everspring Press carries slow readings of the seventeenth-century French archbishop’s pastoral letters, with the matched journals at the centre of the practice. Everspring is preparing reprints of Fénelon’s correspondence, including Spiritual Progress, for the soul whose feeling has gone quiet and who is ready, slowly, to discover what continues underneath it.
