What Fénelon Meant by Pure Love of God
⏱ 12 min read
Your love for God feels mixed with what you want from Him and you cannot separate the two. The asking and the loving have become one motion in the prayer — the gratitude is genuine, but it is gratitude for the gifts, and the suspicion has been growing, in the quiet honest part of you, that if the gifts thinned out the love might thin out with them. You cannot prove the suspicion. You cannot disprove it either. It sits as a small unresolved question underneath the rest of your prayer life.
François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose letters of spiritual direction were gathered after his death into Spiritual Progress, spent the central decade of his pastoral life on exactly this question. The phrase he became known for — pure love, or in the older translations disinterested love — was the signature of his teaching, and the very phrase that drew Rome’s contested attention in his own lifetime. The fenelon pure love of god is the love that loves God for who He is, not for what He gives — the love that would still be love if the gifts were withdrawn, because its object is the Giver Himself rather than the giving. The distinction is delicate. The modern reader has rarely encountered it, and the most pastoral way to approach it is slowly, with the page open, in the company of Fénelon’s own quiet voice. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women was built as the daily small home for that slow recognition. For now, the slow read of Fénelon himself.
The mixed love, named
The signature of the mixed love is the small inner ledger. The saint who loves God in the mixed way is keeping, without recognising it, a slow informal account — He gave me this, so I love Him more; He withheld that, so the love thins for a season; the prayer was answered, so the devotion is full; the prayer was not answered, so the prayer life flattens. The ledger does not produce dishonest love. The saint genuinely loves God. The ledger only means that the loving is being modulated, week by week, by the perceived generosity of the giving — and that is the small fact that the honest part of the saint has begun to notice.
The mixed love is not, in Fénelon’s pastoral reading, a sin. It is the natural starting place of every devout soul. The Christian usually meets God first through what He gives — the felt consolation, the answered prayer, the small gift in the morning that turned the day, the rescue from the situation that had no other rescue. The gifts produce the love. The love deepens around the gifts. This is the ordinary opening movement of the spiritual life, and Fénelon was not against it.
What he was against was stopping there. The mixed love is the beginner’s love. Fénelon’s whole pastoral move, in Spiritual Progress, is to invite the saint who has been formed by the mixed love into the slow next movement — the slow growing of a love that does not depend on the ledger, that survives the withdrawn gift, that is, finally, for who He is, not for what He gives. This is the pure love, and the central pastoral fact about it is that it cannot be manufactured by an act of will. It can only be slowly received, over years, as the mixed love is gently purified by the small daily uncoupling of the loving from the having.
The first passage: love without loving self except in Him
“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 once. Then read it again, slowly.
The line to sit with is the last one. Love Thee without loving self except in and for Thee. Fénelon is making a careful distinction. He is not asking the saint to stop loving herself. He is asking her to stop loving herself as a separate object — as the recipient of God’s gifts whose own well-being is the reason for the loving. The pure love loves the saint’s own well-being only in and for God, which is to say, as one of the many things God is doing, rather than as the small private project that the loving is secretly about.
This is the precise hinge of the mixed love. The mixed love, when it loves God, is also — quietly — loving the saint’s own situation, the saint’s own continued blessing, the saint’s own protection. The two loves are wound together, and the saint cannot see, from inside the mixed love, where her love for God ends and her love for the gifts to herself begins.
Fénelon’s pastoral move is not to make the saint feel guilty about the entwined love. It is to name, gently, that the entwined love is the beginner’s love — and that the next stretch is the slow uncoupling. Love Thee without loving self except in and for Thee. The saint will not, this evening, fully uncouple. She will, this evening, see the entwining clearly for the first time, and the seeing is the first small act of the pure love she is being slowly drawn into.
The second 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 twice. Notice how directly Fénelon is naming, here, the purification the saint is undergoing.
God does not call you by any lively emotions, and I heartily rejoice at it. The line is meant to startle. The saint accustomed to the mixed love has assumed that the lively emotions — the felt warmth, the tearful prayer, the wave of consoling sweetness — are the evidence of true love, and the absence of them is the evidence that the love has cooled. Fénelon’s gentle reversal is that the lively emotions are often the marker of the mixed love, not the pure one, because the lively emotions are themselves a gift the saint is enjoying — and the loving that depends on enjoying the gifts is the loving that has not yet been purified.
A fidelity, unsustained by delights, is far purer. This is the line for the saint in a dry season. The pure love is the love that continues to love God when the consolations are gone, when the prayer feels flat, when the morning quiet time produces nothing felt, when the worship songs that used to undo her now slide past unmoved. The fidelity inside the dryness is, in Fénelon’s pastoral reading, the purer form — because it cannot, by the structure of the dryness itself, be the loving of the gifts. There are no gifts to love. What remains, if anything remains, is the love of the Giver Himself.
The dry season is not, then, the absence of love. It is, often, the slow purifying of love. The mixed love is being weaned off its dependence on the felt sweetness. The pure love is being slowly grown underneath. The saint usually does not see the growing until years later, looking back, when she realises that the love she has now is not the same love she had before the dryness, and that the fenelon pure love of god is what was being formed in her during the season she had assumed she was failing.
For the daily home this slow purifying needs, the Everspring Prayer Journal for Women holds a short evening page built for the fidelity unsustained by delights — a small place to show up to the chair without requiring the prayer to produce any felt sweetness, and to return tomorrow to the same un-decorated faithfulness.
The somatic — the opening of the upturned palms
Pause here. Sit somewhere quiet. Place both hands on your lap, palms upward. Let the fingers be loose. Let the breath slow by a small amount.
The mixed love has been holding the gifts. The hands have been the unconscious carriers of the holding — the small chronic curl of the fingers around what is being received, the half-closed cup that does not want the giving to stop. The pure love is the opened hand. Not the empty hand — the open one. The giving may still be arriving. The hand simply no longer closes around it. The loving is no longer about the keeping.
Let the palms stay upward. Let one slow inhale come in, and one slow exhale go out. Notice that nothing has been lost. The gifts that have been given are still given. The hands have only stopped requiring them as the condition of the loving, and the small inner posture of the for-who-He-is love is, for sixty seconds, what your body is rehearsing.
Stay there for half a minute. Then continue reading.
The opened palms are the smallest physical version of the pure love Fénelon is naming. The saint whose hands cannot open cannot, at the interior level, love God without conditions either. The two are the same posture. The daily small opening teaches the body what the soul is being asked to slowly learn — that the love is not about the keeping, and that the loving continues whether or not the giving continues in the form it once took.
The third passage: the vigilance that has lost interest in 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
The third passage names the precise word Fénelon’s whole pure-love teaching turns on. Disinterested.
The English ear in the twenty-first century usually mishears the word. Disinterested, in modern usage, has slid toward meaning bored or uninvolved. Fénelon means the older sense — without self-interest, not seeking benefit for the self. The disinterested vigilance is the watchful love that has no remaining angle on itself. The saint is not watching God in order to receive from Him, or to be assured about her own state, or to maintain the spiritual reputation of her interior life. She is watching Him because He is the One worth watching. The watching is for Him. The vigilance is disinterested — pure, unmotivated by self, fully turned outward toward its proper object.
This is the pure love in one sentence. The loving of God for who He is, not for what He gives. The disinterested love is the love that has lost its angle on itself. It is no longer about the saint at all. The saint is still loved by God, still given to by God, still held by God — but the loving she does back is no longer organised around any of that. It is organised around the Beloved Himself.
Disinterested does not mean cold. The pure love, in Fénelon’s reading, is the warmest love the saint will ever know — far warmer than the mixed love it replaced, because the mixed love was always slightly turned back on itself, and the pure love is fully turned outward and is therefore, structurally, a fuller love than the mixed one was. The pure love is the warm love that has stopped being about you, and has, in stopping being about you, become more fully love than it ever was.
Three small returns
If you take nothing else from Spiritual Progress, these three returns are the spine of the pure-love posture:
The first return is the opened palms — the small body practice of upward hands, once a day, until the body has learned that the loving continues without the closing of the hands around the gifts.
The second return is the un-emotional fidelity — the daily showing-up to the chair without requiring the prayer to produce felt sweetness. The slow showing-up is itself the pure love being formed.
The third return is the disinterested watching — the gentle daily turning toward God for His own sake, without the small self-monitoring about whether you are loving Him well, or correctly, or enough.
(For the sibling readings in the pure-love cluster: Fénelon on loving God without feeling it walks the dry-season form of this same love, 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 disinterested abiding from a different pastoral angle.)
What changes, slowly
The mixed love does not have to be repudiated. Fénelon was not asking the saint to repent of having loved God through the gifts. The mixed love is the beginner’s love, and the beginner’s love is the proper opening movement of the Christian life. What changes, slowly, is the centre of the loving. The saint who has begun the slow walk into the fenelon pure love of god is not loving God less than she did before. She is loving Him more, because the loving is no longer modulated by the ledger of what she is receiving in any given week. The love has been purified. The Object of the love has become the whole of the love.
By year three of daily opened palms and disinterested watching, the saint usually recognises that her love for God has stopped thinning in dry seasons and stopped surging in consoled ones. The love has steadied. The steadiness is not flatness; it is the unwavering warmth of the love that has lost its angle on itself. The mixed love has not been discarded. It has been purified into something whose name, in Fénelon’s pastoral lexicon, is the pure love of God — and the saint who has slowly come into it has, without intending to, become the kind of soul the French archbishop spent his pastoral life patiently directing.
A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women.
Get Seven Days of Stillness — free
A free gift from Hayley Louisa Mark. A short devotional companion drawn from the 140-Day series — seven passages, seven contemplative practices, sent to your inbox over the coming week.
No noise. No spam. Unsubscribe whenever you wish.
Everspring Press is preparing slow reprints of François Fénelon’s letters, including Spiritual Progress, for the contemporary reader whose mixed love is ready, slowly, to be purified into the disinterested love the French archbishop spent a contested lifetime gently teaching.
