What Fénelon Said About Smallness in the Christian Life
⏱ 10 min read
You feel like a small Christian compared to the great ones, and the comparison is killing you. The bookshelves carry the giants — the people whose interior life has the depth your own has not yet found, the writers whose paragraphs land in places yours never reach, the women at the front of the women’s group whose prayer voice has the steadiness yours does not — and you have, for years now, measured yourself against them and come back to your chair with the quiet verdict that whatever you are doing is not enough. François Fénelon, writing in Spiritual Progress to a soul who had brought him the same complaint, did not encourage her to grow. He encouraged her to stop trying to be impressive. The Everspring Dry Season Devotional carries this same patient counsel into a daily companion, for the soul who has read enough about Christian smallness to suspect, finally, that the smallness itself might be the country she is being asked to live in.
Fénelon was the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose private letters of spiritual direction were collected, after his death, into the volume the English-speaking world has known as Spiritual Progress. He wrote, almost without exception, to people who were already serious about God — courtiers, nuns, scholars, married women — and he wrote with the assumption that the soul who has been walking the road for a while will, sooner or later, run into the same wall. The wall is the discovery that she is not, and is never going to be, one of the great ones. The smallness, in Fénelon’s reading, is not the failure of the Christian life. It is the door of it. The whole of his pastoral work was the slow turning of his readers toward that door.
The first passage — the small fault and the obscured light
Fénelon, in Spiritual Progress, opened the discussion of Christian smallness not by lowering the bar but by raising the attention to what was happening underneath the visible life.
“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, more slowly.
The line worth keeping near the page is small as it may seem, it obscures the light of grace. The fault Fénelon is naming is not the dramatic sin — the obvious failure that the soul already knows to confess. He is naming the small fault, the one the comparison-tired Christian has been overlooking because she has been busy measuring herself against the great ones. The small movement of self-pity. The small return to bitterness. The small habit of checking the inner mirror to see how she is doing. These do not look like sins to her. They are too quiet to look like anything. They are, in Fénelon’s reading, the actual obscurers of the grace she has been wondering why she cannot feel.
The contemplative French school, of which Fénelon was the gentlest voice, understood Christian smallness in a way the modern reader has often missed. Small did not mean insignificant. It meant un-impressive — the soul that had stopped trying to be a great Christian and had started, instead, the slow daily attention to the small interior faults that were, all along, the reason the great Christian life had been out of reach. Fénelon’s smallness is not the lowering of the standard. It is the relocation of the standard to where the actual work is. The work is small. The work is daily. The work is in the conscience, not in the comparison.
(For the wider context this letter sits inside, the sibling article what Fénelon meant by simplicity of heart names the un-divided interior the small soul is finally free to live in, Fénelon on recollection — the forgotten Christian practice walks the small daily gathering of the scattered self, and Andrew Murray on the inner chamber and the outer life carries the same recovery instruction in Murray’s plainer English.)
The somatic — for the body that has been bracing under the comparison
Pause here. The comparison has not lived only in the mind. It has lived in the upper back, where the small ongoing effort to be more than you are has been held for years, like a coat the body has forgotten it is wearing. The shoulders have been pulled in slightly. The chest has been working at the surface. The breath has not been reaching the lower belly because the lower belly is where the un-bracing happens, and the un-bracing would mean letting go of the comparison, and the comparison has felt, until now, like the engine that kept you serious about God at all.
Sit somewhere quiet. Both feet flat against the floor. Let the shoulders lower by an inch — not by trying to relax them, but by stopping the small effort of holding them up. Let the jaw release. Take one slow inhale, not deep, only slow, and let the breath travel down past the chest into the lower belly. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slower than the inhale, until the next breath arrives on its own. One more time.
The lowered breath is the body’s literal practice of Christian smallness. The body, like the soul, has been trying to be larger than it is — held up, braced forward, on display for the inner audience the comparison has been performing for. The slow lower breath teaches the body that it is allowed to be its actual size. The size is small. The smallness is the rest the soul has been looking for.
The second passage — the simple, lovely, quiet vigilance
Fénelon, a few letters later in Spiritual Progress, named the kind of attention the small soul is finally free to give — and named, just as clearly, the kind she has been giving instead.
“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 it twice. Slowly.
The line worth keeping near the page is simple, lovely, quiet and disinterested vigilance. Four adjectives, each of them a quiet rebuke to the kind of watchfulness the comparing Christian has been practising. Simple — not elaborate, not built of self-examination protocols and journals stacked with introspection. Lovely — done with affection toward God rather than anxiety toward the self. Quiet — not the loud inner audit that has been running in the background of her days. Disinterested — not invested in her own performance, not collecting data about how she is doing. This is what the watching of the small soul looks like. It is not the absence of attention. It is the relocation of the attention away from herself and toward Him.
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 line that, slowly, undoes the comparison. The watching that has been making you tired is not Christian vigilance at all. It is the desire to be assured of your state — the small ongoing checking of the inner thermometer, the constant inquiry about whether you are doing well enough, the quiet hope that the next confirmation of progress will let you finally relax. Fénelon names that watching for what it is. Harsh. Restless. Full of self. The Christian smallness he is offering is the slow release of that watching, in favour of the simple, lovely, quiet attention that is finally free of you. The Everspring Dry Season Devotional holds this exact rotation across one hundred and forty days — short passage, room for the un-anxious sentence, a small daily practice that is not, at any point, a measurement.
The third passage — the fidelity unsustained by delights
Fénelon, writing to a soul who had complained that she no longer felt the warmth of God she once had, gave the sentence that names what Christian smallness costs and what, slowly, it is worth.
“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 at speed. Then read it again, slowly.
The line worth keeping near the page is a fidelity, unsustained by delights, is far purer. The Christian smallness Fénelon has been describing is, in part, the slow loss of the lively emotions that used to accompany the faith. The warmth that once filled the chair has, over years, quieted. The feelings that once made prayer easy have thinned. The comparing Christian has read that thinning as evidence of her smallness — proof that the great ones have what she does not. Fénelon reads it differently. The loss of the delights is the slow purification of the fidelity. The fidelity that survives without them is the purer one. The delights, lovely as they were, were too exclusively in the imagination — too tied to the felt sense of God, too vulnerable to the weather of the heart. The fidelity built underneath them, in the small daily continuation of prayer when the feeling is gone, is the kind that holds.
This is, in Fénelon’s hand, the gift of Christian smallness. The great Christian, in his vocabulary, is not the one with the dramatic interior life. She is the one who has continued, faithfully, in the small daily contact with God after the dramatic interior life has gone quiet. The smallness is what made the fidelity possible. The fidelity is what the smallness was for.
What the slow practice will do over a year
If you walk the question of Christian smallness with Fénelon’s three passages as your quiet companion for the next year, the comparison will not disappear in a week. The great ones will still be on the bookshelf. The women at the front of the group will still pray with a steadiness yours does not yet have. What will change is your relationship to the comparison itself. The small daily attention will rotate away from your interior thermometer and toward the simple, lovely, quiet vigilance Fénelon described. The fidelity will continue when the feelings do not. The smallness will stop feeling like a failure and start feeling, slowly, like the country your faith was actually built for.
(For the bridge into the closely related practice the Reformed tradition has named in its own vocabulary, the Holy Spirit’s role in prayer — Andrew Murray’s plain answer walks the same un-self-watching attention from a different angle.)
We plan, in time, to reprint Fénelon’s letters through Everspring Press, in a slow modern edition for the Christian whose comparison-tired faith is ready, finally, to be met by the contemplative French school’s gentlest voice.
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A daily home for the small soul’s practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Dry Season Devotional. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — a small daily page for the soul who has stopped trying to be impressive, and has begun the slow Christian smallness Fénelon spent his letters teaching.
The Everspring Dry Season Devotional carries Fénelon’s slow vocabulary — the small fault that obscures grace, the simple lovely quiet vigilance, the fidelity unsustained by delights — into a daily companion for the Christian whose comparison has been killing her, and whose smallness is, finally, ready to become the room her faith lives in.
