Fénelon on the Use of Humiliations
⏱ 9 min read
Something humbling has happened and you cannot tell whether it was for you or against you. Not the loud catastrophe — the small one. The unreturned message. The correction in front of others. The small failure that was witnessed. The reputation that quietly dimmed by one degree in a room you cared about. You have been turning it over for days, looking for the meaning, and the meaning has not arrived.
François Fénelon, writing as a spiritual director to the bruised souls of the seventeenth-century French court, would have recognised the question exactly. His Spiritual Progress — a collected set of letters to women and men whose interior lives were being shaped by the small humblings God was permitting in their daily affairs — returns again and again to this single concern: that the humiliation you are most tempted to resent is often the one quietly doing for your soul what no success could ever do. The Everspring Dry Season Devotional was built as a daily home for this slow reading — a short page each evening for the woman whose interior is being worked on in ways she cannot always name. For now, the Fénelon text.
The shape of the small humbling
The humiliation Fénelon writes about is rarely the one the world would identify. He is not, in these letters, addressing public disgrace. He is addressing the small humblings — the gentle erosions of the self-image the soul had been quietly leaning on, the daily corrections that the proud part of you registers as injuries and the deeper part of you cannot yet read at all. The woman whose competence was the quiet foundation of her sense of self is being humbled at exactly the point where her competence lives. The woman whose reputation for kindness was her interior anchor is being humbled at the point where her kindness is questioned. The humbling lands precisely where the self has been most stationed, because that is the only place the humbling could do anything.
Fénelon’s pastoral move is to slow the soul down before she draws any conclusions about the humbling. The first instinct — this was unfair, this was unkind, this was a misunderstanding I must correct — is the instinct of the self that has just been touched. Fénelon’s whole counsel, gentle and unhurried, is that you cannot read a humbling accurately in the first hours after it lands. The humbling needs to be sat with, slowly, before any verdict is reached on what it was.
The first passage: the small fault that obscures the light
“Carefully purify your conscience, then, from daily faults; suffer no sin to dwell in your heart; small as it may seem, it obscures the light of grace, weighs down the soul, and hinders that constant communion with Jesus Christ which it should be your pleasure to cultivate; you will become lukewarm, forget God, and find yourself growing in attachment to the creature.”
— François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice what Fénelon does not say. He does not say the humbling itself is the sin. He says the small daily fault — left in the heart, unattended — obscures the light of grace. The humbling is not the wound. The humbling is, often, the place at which the small daily fault has been gently surfaced so the soul can see it and let it go. The thing you found out about yourself in the small humbling — the impatience, the wish to be thought well of, the quiet pride you had not seen in yourself before — that is the daily fault the humbling has surfaced. The humbling did not put it there. The humbling has only made it visible.
This re-frames the whole question. The humbling that exposed the daily fault is, in Fénelon’s reading, for you and not against you — because nothing could be more for the soul than the small uncovering of the thing that has been obscuring the light of grace unseen. You did not know it was there. The humbling has shown you. That is the use of it.
The line to keep near the page is the second half: that constant communion with Jesus Christ which it should be your pleasure to cultivate. The humbling, properly received, returns the soul to that communion. The daily fault, once seen, is gently let go. The lukewarmness, once named, begins to thaw. The attachment to the creature — to the good opinion of the room, to the reputation, to the small interior idol of one’s own competence — loosens by the smallest degree. The humbling has done its quiet work.
The mid-article callout — a slow daily home
For the woman walking through a season of small humblings, the daily place to receive them slowly matters more than any single article can hold. The Everspring Dry Season Devotional walks the same posture this letter is walking, in one short evening page at a time — a verse pre-printed, a small room to name what the day exposed, and the unhurried company of a page that does not rush you to a verdict. The use of humiliations is mostly read at the speed of one quiet evening, repeated over weeks.
The second passage: the 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
Read this one twice. The line that does the work is the middle: dwell in peace though surrounded by uncertainties.
The interior storm after a humbling is not the humbling itself; it is the not-knowing-yet what the humbling was for. The soul, freshly bruised, wants the meaning immediately. Tell me whether this was a judgment or a kindness. Tell me whether I was wrong. Tell me whether to act or to stay still. Fénelon’s counsel is that the not-knowing is part of the work. The humbling that delivers its meaning instantly delivers a shallower meaning than the humbling that is received in slow peace and only gradually understood.
Dwell in peace though surrounded by uncertainties. This is the posture for the days after. You do not have to interpret the humbling on the day it lands. You may sit with it for a week, or a month, or longer, without drawing a verdict. The verdict will come, slowly, as the soul is given the eyes to see what the humbling exposed. The peace in the meantime is not a denial that the humbling hurt. It is the small interior stillness in which the meaning is allowed to surface in its own time.
The abandonment Fénelon names is gentle. It is not a forced acceptance. It is the small turning of the soul toward God with the open hand — I do not yet know what this was. I am not yet ready to act on it. I trust your slow uncovering more than my own quick interpretation. The humbling becomes, by this small abandonment, a place where the soul learns the daily confidence, sacrifice, and absolute surrender that the louder spiritual seasons could not teach it.
The somatic — the hand on the chest
Pause here. Sit somewhere quiet. Place one hand, lightly, on the centre of your chest — over the breastbone, just above where the ribs meet. Notice what is there. The small contraction the humbling left. The held-in breath you have been carrying since the day it happened. The quiet bracing that the soul has been doing in the days since, in case another small humbling lands behind the first.
Let one slow breath move under your hand. Then another. The chest does not have to release the humbling on this breath; you only have to acknowledge what is there, gently, under the warmth of your own hand. The Fénelon humiliation spiritual reading is not asking the body to perform peace. It is asking the body to be in the room with what the soul is carrying, so the soul does not have to carry it alone.
Stay with the hand on the chest for thirty seconds. Then continue reading. The small acknowledgement is itself the start of the unbracing the humbling needs.
The third passage: the un-purposed devotion
“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
The third passage closes the work. A fidelity, unsustained by delights, is far purer.
The humbling has, among other things, quieted the emotional brightness the soul had been leaning on. The prayer life that used to come with felt warmth feels flatter. The devotional reading that used to lift the heart sits differently. The soul, recently humbled, wonders whether something is wrong with her interior. Fénelon’s word is no — something is, in fact, more right than it was. The humbling has gently removed the delights that the imagination had been mistaking for the substance. What is left is the bare fidelity — the small daily turning toward God without the felt reward — and that bare fidelity is, in Fénelon’s careful judgement, the purer thing.
This is the line for the woman who is wondering whether the humbling has cost her the warmth she used to have with God. The warmth is not the substance. The warmth was a gift, often given to the soul early in her walk to anchor her, but the deeper interior is built when the warmth is gently withdrawn and the faithful turning continues anyway. The humbling has done that quiet work. The soul that keeps turning toward Him without the warmth is being built into a fidelity that the imagination could not have produced on its own.
What the small humblings do, slowly
If you take nothing else from these letters, this is the spine of the Fénelon humiliation spiritual reading: the small daily humblings, received slowly and without instant verdict, do for the interior what no public success could ever do. They surface the daily faults the soul could not see in itself. They loosen the attachments to the creature that had quietly hardened. They teach the peace though surrounded by uncertainties that only the un-resolved season can teach. And they purify the fidelity by removing the felt warmth the imagination had been resting in. The use of humiliations is, in one phrase, the slow interior work that the proud version of the self could not have permitted.
(For the related Fénelon readings in this cluster, Fénelon on why God allows dryness walks the long silence the humbled soul often finds herself sitting in, and why Fénelon said the dark night is not punishment walks the related concern that the humbling is a sign of God’s displeasure when it is, more often, a sign of His patient interior shaping. For Murray’s sibling counsel on the same posture, Andrew Murray on the surrendered will and what Andrew Murray taught about the Christian’s lost strength walk the surrender and the small daily strength the humbled woman is being slowly given. For the wider letter to the woman in the long quiet, feeling spiritually dry — a letter for the long silence holds the broader pastoral company.)
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Everspring Press is preparing reprints of Fénelon’s letters — including the Spiritual Progress correspondence — for the contemplative reader who wants the older French school in slow, daily form. The matched Dry Season Devotional is the daily home for the practice walked above.
