Why Fénelon Said Self-Will Hides in the Holiest Things
⏱ 10 min read
You thought you had surrendered, and then you caught your hands clenched around the same thing again — the relationship, the outcome, the small daily thing you had handed over in prayer on Sunday and were quietly running yourself by Tuesday afternoon. The catching is what unsettles you. The yes felt real. The release felt real. And here you are, fingers white around the thing you said you had let go of.
François Fénelon, writing in seventeenth-century France as a spiritual director to women in the court who were learning the slow inward labour of surrender, would tell you — without surprise, without rebuke — that this is exactly what the will does. It comes back. It comes back in places you do not expect. And, most of all, it comes back in the holy places, where it is best disguised. The book where he names this most carefully is Spiritual Progress, his collected letters of direction. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women is the 140-day companion practice this essay opens — the slow daily ground in which the fenelon hidden self will work can actually take. For now — read slowly.
Fénelon’s premise is gentle and difficult at once. The self-will, he writes, is not a single act you renounce once and have done with. It is a posture of the soul that re-asserts itself, often unnoticed, in the very practices you have set up to be done with it. You surrender on Sunday. By Wednesday the self has crept back into the surrender itself — into your devotional discipline, your prayer life, your service, your quiet times. The hidden self-will lives most easily in the holiest rooms of the house, because in the holy rooms it is least suspected.
The first passage: the watchfulness that is harsh and full of self
The line where Fénelon describes the hiding place of self-will most exactly is the one where he names two kinds of watchfulness — the soul’s quiet attention to God, and its anxious attention to 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 it twice. Notice what Fénelon is describing in the second clause.
The harsh, restless watchfulness is not — at the surface — a worldly thing. It is a spiritual watchfulness. The soul described here is watching herself, and what she is watching for is her own state — whether she is making progress, whether the surrender is being credited, whether the prayer is taking, whether she is becoming the kind of Christian she meant to be. The activity looks devout. She is monitoring her spiritual condition. She is examining her conscience. She is checking the temperature of her faith. From the outside, nothing about her practice is wrong.
Fénelon, however, sees what is happening underneath. The watchful self is full of self. The eye is turned, in the name of holiness, back upon the woman herself. The will that has nominally surrendered to God has quietly re-asserted itself as the manager of the soul’s spiritual progress. The same will that used to manage the marriage and the calendar is now managing the devotional life, and the devotional life feels heavier than it should because the self has not let go. It has only changed jobs.
This is the hiding place Fénelon is warning about. The will does not announce itself in the obvious vices. The vices it has already noticed and renounced. It hides in the practices the woman would never suspect — in the journal, in the prayer list, in the morning quiet time, in the careful examination of conscience. Each of those is a good. Each of those, in the hand of the un-surrendered self, becomes the new territory in which the self quietly continues to be at the centre. The instrument is holy. The hand holding it is not yet.
The somatic — locating the hidden grip
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it.
Sit somewhere quiet. Let both feet press flat against the floor. Bring to mind one of your most established devotional practices — the morning quiet time, the prayer notebook, the small evening ritual you have kept for years. As you bring it to mind, notice your hands. Without changing anything, see if there is a faint clench in the fingers, a small grip in the palms, a tightening across the knuckles. The body has been carrying the management of the holy thing.
Now let one slow inhale come in. On the exhale, let the fingers open. Let the palms turn upward, lightly, on your knees. Let the breath go further than the inhale. Bring the same devotional practice back to mind, this time with the hands open. Notice the difference. The same practice, held with un-clenched hands, sits in the body differently. The hidden grip you just released was the grip of the self-will on the holy thing. Stay with the open palms for half a minute. Then continue reading. The territory Fénelon is naming is, in part, the territory your hands just located.
The second passage: love Thee without loving self except in and for Thee
The second passage Fénelon sets next to the first — and the one that names the cure — is the prayer he prays in the same letter:
“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
Slow down at the last clause. Love Thee without loving self except in and for Thee.
This is the surgical line. Fénelon is not asking you to stop loving yourself. He is asking you to stop loving yourself for your own sake. The self can still be loved — but in Him and for Him, as a creature He made and is making — rather than as the centre of a private project the soul is still secretly running. The hidden self-will hides because it loves itself the wrong way. It loves itself as its own end. It tends itself. It monitors itself. It watches its own state, examines its own progress, takes secret pleasure in its own holiness — and all of this looks, from a distance, like devotion.
Fénelon’s cure is small and devastating. The eye that has been turning back on the self is asked, gently, to keep turning forward — past the self — into Him. Not by violent repression, not by hating the self, not by the harsh asceticism the seventeenth-century Jansenists preferred. By the quiet redirection of love. Love Thee, and let the self be loved in Thee, and for Thee, and not otherwise. The will does not have to be killed. It has to be re-aimed. The self stays. The centre moves.
This is why the holy practices are the will’s best hiding place. They are precisely the places where the self can love itself most respectably under the disguise of loving God. The journal entry can be written to Him or about how spiritual the woman writing it is becoming. The prayer can be prayed to Him or as evidence to the soul that the soul is praying. The hidden self-will inhabits the second version of each, and the second version is identical, on the page, to the first. Only the inward direction is different — and the inward direction is what Fénelon’s spiritual direction is in the slow business of correcting.
The daily work of this re-direction is what the Prayer Journal for Women was built to hold. Not a discipline added on top of an over-disciplined life, but a small evening page in which the eye is gently turned, again, off the self and onto Him — until the practice itself has been emptied of its hidden self-management, and the woman who sits down at it is no longer monitoring her own progress through it, but simply being with Him on it. The 140-day shape is deliberate. The hidden will is not exposed in a day. It is exposed slowly, in the small evening returns, by the One who alone can show the soul where it has been hiding.
(The sibling essays in this Fénelon cluster — What Fénelon Meant by Abandonment to God’s Will, Fénelon on the Difference Between Abandonment and Resignation, and Fénelon on the Hourly Self-Offering — walk the next angles of the same single concept. Because the Fénelon cluster overlaps the Murray hub at the centre, Andrew Murray on the Surrendered Will and What Andrew Murray Meant by Absolute Surrender walk the same ground from the other side of the contemplative library.)
Why the holy rooms are the will’s best hiding place
Hold the two passages together. The first names where the hidden self-will lives — in the harsh self-watching that wears the clothes of devotion. The second names how it is dislodged — by the slow re-aiming of love, so that the self is no longer the end of its own attention. Together they form Fénelon’s quiet teaching on the fenelon hidden self will: the will does not return to the obvious vices, because the obvious vices are too well-guarded. It returns to the holy practices, because there it is least suspected.
This is why the woman who has been faithful for decades can feel, on a tired Tuesday, that her devotional life has become a small private burden. The practices are not the burden. The hidden self-will in them is. The disciplines have been carrying the freight of the woman’s self-management for years, and they are heavy with it. The cure is not to drop the disciplines. The cure is to let the self-management slowly leave them — to allow the journal to become, again, a quiet conversation with Him rather than a record of the soul’s progress; to allow the morning prayer to become, again, presence with Him rather than performance of devotion. The instruments are good. The hand holding them is being slowly opened.
This is patient work. It is not done by one good Sunday evening of decision. It is done by hundreds of small evenings in which the self quietly notices the grip, opens the hand, and turns the eye, again, back toward Him. Fénelon, who directed women through years of this work, would tell you: this is the long slow shape of the contemplative life. The hidden will is not exposed once. It is exposed, lovingly, again and again, until the holy rooms of the soul have been emptied of the secret self-management that lived in them, and the practices are at last, simply, His.
The line worth keeping near the page
If you take only one sentence from Fénelon into the week ahead, take this one:
“Love Thee without loving self except in and for Thee.”
Write it small. Put it where the holy practice will find it — beside the journal, on the inside cover of the Bible, near the chair where you sit in the morning. The question is not whether your devotional life is rigorous enough. The question is whose eye is at the centre of it. Your job is not to expose every hiding place of the will at once. Your job is to keep returning, gently, to the small daily re-direction of love, until the hidden self-will has been quietly dislodged from the holy rooms it has been living in. (Everspring Press is, in time, hoping to bring Fénelon’s letters back into a slow contemplative edition; for now the essays in this Fénelon library are the working library that reprint will be built on.)
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