On the former, Fenelon’s teaching may be summarised as follows:  Self-interest must be excluded from our love of God, for self-love is the root of all evil.  This predominant desire for God’s glory need not be always explicit—­it need only become so on extraordinary occasions; but it must always be implicit.  There are five kinds of love for God:  (i.) purely servile—­the love of God’s gifts apart from Himself; (ii.) the love of mere covetousness, which regards the love of God only as the condition of happiness; (iii.) that of hope, in which the desire for our own welfare is still predominant; (iv.) interested love, which is still mixed with self-regarding motives; (v.) disinterested love.  He mentions here the “three lives” of the mystics, and says that in the purgative life love is mixed with the fear of hell; in the illuminative, with the hope of heaven; while in the highest stage “we are united to God in the peaceable exercise of pure love.”  “If God were to will to send the souls of the just to hell—­so Chrysostom and Clement suggest—­souls in the third state would not love Him less[308].”  “Mixed love,” however, is not a sin:  “the greater part of holy souls never reach perfect disinterestedness in this life.”  We ought to wish for our salvation, because it is God’s will that we should do so.  Interested love coincides with resignation, disinterested with holy indifference.  “St. Francis de Sales says that the disinterested heart is like wax in the hands of its God.”

We must continue to co-operate with God’s grace, even in the highest stage, and not cease to resist our impulses, as if all came from God.  “To speak otherwise is to speak the language of the tempter.” (This is, of course, directed against the immoral apathy attributed to Molinos.) The only difference between the vigilance of pure and that of interested love, is that the former is simple and peaceable, while the latter has not yet cast out fear.  It is false teaching to say that we should hate ourselves; we should be in charity with ourselves as with others.[309]

Spontaneous, unreflecting good acts proceed from what the mystics call the apex of the soul.  “In such acts St. Antony places the most perfect prayer—­unconscious prayer.”

Of prayer he says, “We pray as much as we desire, and we desire as much as we love.”  Vocal prayer cannot be (as the extreme quietists pretend) useless to contemplative souls; “for Christ has taught us a vocal prayer.”

He then proceeds to deal with “passive contemplation,” and refers again to the “unconscious prayer” of St. Antony.  But “pure contemplation is never unintermittent in this life.”  “Bernard, Teresa, and John say that their periods of pure contemplation lasted not more than half an hour.”  “Pure contemplation,” he proceeds, “is negative, being occupied with no sensible image, no distinct and nameable idea; it stops only at the purely intellectual and abstract idea of being.”  Yet this idea