The Passage from Self-Will to the Will of God

Before speaking of the passage from self-will to the Will of God, we must know where this passage takes place. It takes place in the highest part of man: his spiritual life. But this spiritual life can only be understood by situating it in relation to the other dimensions of living things.

Aristotle's distinction, taken up by Saint Thomas

Aristotle, in his De anima, distinguishes in every living being three great degrees of life: vegetative life, common to plants; sensitive life, common to animals; and intellective or rational life, proper to man^[1]. This threefold division, far from being an antique curiosity, was taken up by Saint Thomas Aquinas, who adopts it in the Summa Theologiae as a fundamental framework for thinking about man^[2].

Saint Thomas, following Aristotle, distinguishes three degrees of vital operation: vegetative (growth), sensitive (sensation), intellective (intellection)^[3].

Man is not only a body that breathes and feeds itself (vegetative life), nor only an animal that feels (sensitive life): he is an incarnate spirit, capable of knowing by reason and of willing freely. It is this spiritual life, hidden within, that tradition also calls the interior life.

The primacy of the spiritual life, without contempt for the body

The Catechism recalls that man is "body and soul, but truly one"^[4]: these three dimensions do not exist side by side like three isolated compartments; they are unified by the spiritual soul which is their vital principle. This unity has a hierarchy: the spiritual life is by far the most important, for it is through it that man joins God for eternity. It is this priority that Christ himself engraves on the conscience of his disciples:

"Therefore do not be anxious, saying, 'What shall we eat?' […] For the Gentiles seek all these things; and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well." — Gospel according to Saint Matthew 6:31-33^[5]

Elsewhere, Jesus warns that the most just fear is not fear for the body, but fear for the soul: "And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell" (Mt 10:28)^[6]. And Saint Paul commands us to aim higher: "If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth" (Col 3:1-2)^[7].

The primacy of the spiritual life is, however, not a contempt for the body or for psychology. Saint Thomas stresses it: the spiritual life assumes and directs the other two degrees without abolishing them^[8]. The saintly masters of the interior life are unanimous in denouncing the false spiritualism that would claim to deny the body or the emotions in the name of the soul. Depression is not overcome by prayer alone, nor bodily illness by fasting alone. The spiritual director refers to the psychologist or the physician when necessary, without ceasing to recall that the life of the soul remains the thing that matters most.

The will, summit and root

This interior life is not some vague religious emotion. It has a precise seat: the will, located in the highest part of the soul^[9]. The will is both the summit (because it commands everything) and the root (because all our free activity springs from it). Saint Thomas returns to this at length in the Summa: it is through the will that we love or refuse God, and it is through the will that we unite ourselves to him or separate ourselves from him.

Saint Thomas specifies that dilection — love accompanied by choice — is not found in the sensitive appetite, but only in the will^[10].

It is therefore the will that directs our spiritual life, and through it, the whole of our psychological and bodily life. But — and this is the whole drama — the human will, wounded by original sin, no longer naturally knows how to will what God wills^[11]. It wills its own good, its own comfort, its own glory. It is this disordered will, folded back upon itself, that tradition calls self-will.

What is self-will?

From birth, from the awakening of consciousness, man spends his days willing: getting up, eating, speaking, choosing, refusing, desiring. Thousands of acts of the will follow one another every hour. And by default — that is, because of the original wound — almost all of these acts are commanded by our own wanting, without our even asking about God's. This is what spiritual authors call the life of self-will.

A life, by definition, is what endures in a continuous way: breathing, the beating of the heart, metabolism. Likewise, the life of self-will is an uninterrupted succession of small acts, which together form a true existence — not neutral, but marked by the ego as its centre of gravity.

The battle described by Saint Paul

Saint Paul described this inner battle with striking precision, in a passage that all spiritual directors take up again:

"I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. […] For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do." — Saint Paul, Epistle to the Romans 7:15-19^[12]

The experience is universal: we will the good in the secret of our heart, and we often do the opposite. This duality is not a mere psychological weakness; it is the mark of a wounded will that must be healed, reoriented, transfigured. That is exactly the work of grace.

Saint Augustine: "two wills in me"

Augustine, in his Confessions, perhaps gave the most penetrating analysis of this duality. At the moment of his conversion, just before the famous scene in the garden at Milan, he describes the inner struggle tearing him apart:

"Two wills were in me, one old, the other new, one carnal, the other spiritual, and their conflict tore my soul apart." — Saint Augustine, Confessions VIII, 5, 10^[13]

The battle is therefore fought not only between God and the devil, or between the soul and the body: it is fought within the will itself, divided against itself. And the victory, for Augustine, is never won by human strength alone — it is given by the grace that heals the will^[14].

The Will of God: signified and of good pleasure

Opposed to this self-will stands the Will of God. But what exactly is meant by this expression? Saint Francis de Sales, in his Treatise on the Love of God, provided the most useful distinction for daily spiritual life: he distinguishes the signified will and the will of good pleasure^[15].

• The signified will is what God makes known to us that he wills of us: the commandments, the evangelical counsels, the inspirations of grace, the duties of our state in life. It is knowable, therefore lovable and able to be carried out.
• The will of good pleasure is what God permits or disposes in our life without having first signified it to us: an illness, a failure, a bereavement, an unexpected joy. Before it, the soul does not always know why — but it is invited to a trusting act of abandonment.

The Salesian rule can be put in two words: to the signified will, obedience; to the will of good pleasure, trusting resignation^[16].

This distinction is precious: it prevents the false abandonment that would justify sin ("God perhaps willed that I commit this fault" — no, God never wills moral evil), and it also prevents the Stoic revolt that would refuse trials as unjust. Before the commandments, we obey; before the crosses permitted, we abandon ourselves.

The Our Father as a programme

The passage from self-will to the Will of God is no invention of advanced spiritual souls: it is inscribed, word for word, in the prayer that Christ himself taught his disciples. At the heart of the Our Father, after adoration and the kingdom, comes the central petition: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" (Mt 6:10)^[17]. This petition is no accessory: it expresses the ultimate goal of all Christian life.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church comments on it forcefully:

"In Christ, and through his human will, the will of the Father has been perfectly fulfilled once for all. Jesus said on entering into this world: 'Lo, I have come to do your will, O God' (Heb 10:7)." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2824^[18]

Gethsemane: "not my will"

The moment when this passage reaches its absolute summit is Gethsemane. On the eve of the Passion, Jesus, bent beneath anguish, prays to his Father:

"Father, if thou art willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done." — Gospel according to Saint Luke 22:42^[19]

The whole history of salvation is contained in this sentence. The first Adam had willed his own wanting against God's ("you will be like gods", Gen 3:5)^[20]: he had preferred his self-will to the Will of God, and all humanity fell with him. The second Adam, Christ, makes the exactly opposite movement: he lays down his human will — not because it is bad, it is perfectly good — before the will of the Father, and all is saved^[21].

The whole life of Jesus is inhabited by this passage. He already announced it at the beginning of his ministry: "My food is to do the will of him who sent me" (Jn 4:34)^[22]. He repeated it to the crowds: "For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me" (Jn 6:38)^[23]. And the Letter to the Hebrews sums up his whole existence in this formula: "Lo, I have come to do thy will" (Heb 10:7)^[24].

Making what Christ lived come alive in our wills

That is exactly what Jesus came to work in us. The Christian life is not the outward imitation of pious gestures: it is the inward reproduction, in our own wills, of the passage that Christ accomplished in his. Saint Paul expresses it in a striking cry:

"It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." — Saint Paul, Epistle to the Galatians 2:20^[25]

The passage from self-will to the Will of God is therefore the very life of Christ taking the place of our own life. It is the voluntary stripping away of our ego, "who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself" (Phil 2:6-7)^[26].

"We were buried with him"

The Christian life does not begin with an isolated moral effort; it begins with a sacrament that plunges the soul into the death and resurrection of Christ. Baptism is, for tradition, the foundation of the whole Christian life, the gateway to life in the Spirit^[27]. Saint Paul gives its mystical scope:

"All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead […], we too might walk in newness of life […]. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin." — Saint Paul, Epistle to the Romans 6:3-6^[28]

Baptism therefore works, in a sacramental and real manner, the burial of self-will. The old man — man folded back upon himself, enslaved to his disordered desires — is crucified. This is no image: it is a real change in our being, given by the grace of the sacrament^[29].

But a death to take up again each day

And yet, experience shows that, despite baptism, self-will is not dead in a single stroke. It is vanquished in its principle, but its remains are tenacious. This is what classical theology calls concupiscence — no longer sin, but that residual inclination to evil which remains until death as matter for combat and therefore for merit^[30].

That is why Saint Paul extends his teaching on baptism with a commandment for each day:

"For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live." — Saint Paul, Epistle to the Romans 8:13^[31]

The verb is harsh: put to death. It is not a matter of merely containing self-will, nor of managing it psychologically. It is a matter of putting it to death, by the power of the Spirit, so that the life of the divine Will may take the place left free. That is precisely the programme of the whole spiritual life.

Why the cross is a treasure

Hence the central paradox that all the saints have meditated upon: the cross, understood as everything that thwarts our self-will, is in reality a treasure. It realizes, in the flesh of our life, what baptism gave us in its principle: the death of the self.

Saint John of the Cross pushed this logic to its extreme in the sketch of the Ascent of Mount Carmel:

"To reach satisfaction in all, desire satisfaction in nothing. To arrive at possessing all, desire the possession of nothing. To come to be all, desire to be nothing in nothing." — Saint John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book I, ch. 13^[32]

Far from an unhealthy dolorism, this is a logic of love: for God to be all, self-will must be nothing any more. The cross, by breaking our refusals, opens the space.

The whole Catholic spiritual tradition has meditated upon this passage. Before examining the particular light shed by Luisa Piccarreta, we must hear the great voices that preceded her, for Luisa's doctrine is rooted in them and extends them without contradicting them.

Saint Augustine: "he who made you without you will not justify you without you"

For Saint Augustine, the human will is both wounded and precious. God, who created us without us, refuses to justify us without our free consent. Grace never suppresses the will — it heals it, enlightens it, strengthens it, but it always awaits our fiat^[33].

Saint Bernard: the four degrees of love

In his treatise De diligendo Deo, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux describes the path of the human will in four ascending degrees^[34]:

1. Loving oneself for oneself (natural man);
2. Loving God for oneself (the religious man who sees his own interest in God);
3. Loving God for God (the converted man);
4. Loving oneself for God (the saint, whose will is fully wedded to God's).

This fourth degree, Bernard writes, is rarely fully attained in this life, but it is precisely the goal toward which every passage from self-will to the divine Will tends.

Saint Alphonsus Liguori: the union of our will with God's

In the 18th century, Saint Alphonsus Liguori devoted a small treatise of barely forty pages to this passage, Conformity to the Will of God (Naples, 1755). Its central theme can be put in one celebrated sentence:

"Perfection is founded entirely on the love of God: 'Charity is the bond of perfection'; and the perfect love of God consists in the complete union of our will with his. […] The more one unites one's will to the divine will, the greater will be one's love of God." — Saint Alphonsus Liguori, Conformity to the Will of God, ch. 1^[35]

For Alphonsus, all virtues, all practices, all penances find their worth solely in this conformity. A single virtue realized against the will of God (for example, a fast demanded by self-love when obedience asks for something else) is worth nothing. A simple ordinary action done for the will of God is worth a treasure.

Saint Teresa of Avila: the seventh Mansion

Saint Teresa of Avila, in The Interior Castle, describes the summit of the mystical life — the seventh Mansion, or spiritual marriage — as a union of wills between the soul and God, so close that they no longer will but a single thing:

"What happens here in the spiritual marriage […], is that the two wills become one, as if one were to throw a little drop of water into the sea: it could no longer be separated from it." — Saint Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, Seventh Mansion, ch. 2^[36]

The image is no trifle: the drop does not lose its being, but it can no longer will anything other than the sea. So it is with the human will when it has fully passed from the reign of the self to the reign of God. Teresa here describes the summit of conformity to the divine will; she did not teach life in the Divine Will as Jesus reveals it to Luisa Piccarreta — her image marks its highest point in tradition, not the new gift.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: "I will what you will"

Four centuries later, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux says the same thing again with the simplicity of the little way: to be little, and therefore to let oneself be wholly willed by God. In Manuscript B, she writes:

"I feel within me still other vocations; I feel the vocation of warrior, priest, apostle, doctor, martyr; in short, I feel the need […] to accomplish for you the most heroic deeds… […] O Jesus, my Love, my vocation, at last I have found it; my vocation is love!" — Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, Autobiographical Manuscripts, Manuscript B^[37]

Her most stripped-down formula, gathered a few weeks before her death, sums up the whole doctrine in a few words:

"I desire no more to die than to live; that is to say, if I had to choose, I would rather die; but since it is the good God who chooses for me, I prefer what he wills. It is what he does that I love." — Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, Last Conversations (Yellow Notebook), 27 May 1897^[38]

Caussade and Lehodey: holy abandonment

In the 18th century, the Jesuit Jean-Pierre de Caussade synthesized the doctrine of abandonment in a posthumous treatise that is now a classic, Abandonment to Divine Providence. His thesis: each present moment carries within itself the will of God in the form of a hidden sacrament, which need only be welcomed, without calculation or anticipation^[39].

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Trappist Dom Vital Lehodey took up and clarified this doctrine in a manual that became standard, Holy Abandonment (1919). In it he insists on the distinction between passive resignation (enduring God like a fate) and active abandonment (positively willing what God wills, as it reveals itself)^[40]. True abandonment is not a resignation of the will; it is the highest act of the will freely choosing the divine will.

All this tradition — from Augustine to Lehodey by way of Bernard, Alphonsus, Teresa of Avila, Francis de Sales, John of the Cross, Thérèse of Lisieux, Caussade — converges on a single point: conformity of our will to God's is the heart of holiness.

Holiness is a succession of acts

The Council of Trent recalled against Luther that justification is not an isolated fact, but a dynamic state in which the soul grows through grace and virtuous acts^[41]. Saint Thomas had already said it: virtue is a habitus, that is, a stable disposition acquired through the repetition of good acts^[42]. No one becomes courageous through a single act of courage: the series of acts is needed for the disposition to be imprinted on the soul.

That is exactly what Jesus teaches Luisa Piccarreta:

"Holiness is not achieved by a single act, but by the succession of many acts. A single act forms neither holiness nor perversity. Without the succession of acts, the true colours of holiness or perversity are absent and neither the one nor the other can be judged. What makes holiness shine and constitutes its seal is the succession of good acts." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, volume 17, 25 July 1924^[43]

The comparison he gives is crystal-clear: "No one can say he is rich because he owns a penny, but only if he owns many goods […]. Holiness is the result of many good acts, sacrifices, heroic acts."^[44]

"The Supreme Will is a continuous act"

And yet, Jesus goes further. Ordinary holiness — that of the saints conformed to the Will of God — still knows intermittences. But when the soul is introduced into the very life of the Divine Will, the act becomes continuous, because it is joined to the continuous act of God himself:

"The Supreme Will is a continuous act. […] Holiness in my Will, for its part, knows no intermittences. It is joined to the continuous act of the eternal Will. The latter is always at work, always triumphant, always loves and never stops. Holiness in my Will places in the soul the imprint of the continuous act of the Creator, his continual love and the continual preservation of all the things he has created." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, volume 17, 25 July 1924^[45]

Fr. Joseph Iannuzzi, in his doctoral thesis defended at the Pontifical Gregorian University in 2012, made this point the hermeneutical key to Luisa's entire work: the distinction between doing the Will of God (conformity, proper to ordinary holiness) and living in the Divine Will (a living and continuous union, proper to this wholly new holiness in which it is God himself who lives and acts in the soul)^[46].

Fr. Iannuzzi sums up this distinction thus: to live in the Divine Will is not only to carry out the Will of God, it is to let the Divine Will itself act continually in the soul, like a single and permanent act^[47].

The love that makes die and live again

This continuous act is no cold mechanism: it is a dynamic of love, in which Jesus himself dies and lives again unceasingly to give his life to the soul. The same page of the Book of Heaven expresses it in striking terms:

"My daughter, my Love for creatures makes me die at every instant. The nature of true Love is to make die and to bring back to life continually for the beloved being. In wanting a person for oneself, love makes death be felt. […] But, stronger than death, this same love gives life at the very instant it gives death. […] You too can die of love for me, who knows how many times, perhaps at every instant." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, volume 14, 21 February 1922^[48]

The passage from self-will to the Will of God is therefore not a single exploit to be achieved once and for all: it is a continuous breathing in which, at every instant, the soul dies to itself to be reborn in God, and dies again to be reborn again.

Without new acts, the divine life withers

If the spiritual life is a true life, it needs to be nourished. For a body, without food, death comes; for the life of the Divine Will in us, without acts placed in that Will, it grows anaemic. Jesus explains it to Luisa:

"My daughter, you must know that in disposing yourself to do your acts in my Divine Will, It remains conceived in your act. In doing it you give It free rein to form Its Life in the act you accomplish. Your new acts serve as food for those already accomplished. […] New acts are necessary because they serve to maintain its divine air, its continual breath, its uninterrupted beats and the food to make my own Will grow in the creature." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, volume 29, 7 September 1931^[49]

The logic is crystal-clear: the Divine Will is a Life in us, and every life asks for air, beats, food. Without new acts, the breath stops.

A food always available

But this food, unlike that of the body, is offered in profusion, without limit and without danger:

"As established by eternal Wisdom, the soul too needs food. The Divine Will is for it a delicious food. This food makes it strong in the pursuit of good and overflowing with love for its God. It fills the soul with liveliness, urging it to grow in all the virtues, to undertake new works and to make great sacrifices. […] Moreover, this food is available at every instant, with every breath, day and night, in all things, as often as one desires. Unlike bodily food, one need not fear that by taking too much of it one could be incommoded. Quite the contrary, the more one takes of it, the more one is strengthened and the more one grows in resemblance to one's Creator." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, volume 18, 17 October 1925^[50]

The soul that voluntarily deprives itself of it, Jesus adds, "deserves condemnation, since it rejects a food that gives it life and is offered to it freely"^[51]. This echo of Saint John the Baptist's warning before the Pharisees (Mt 3:7-10) and of the parable of the feast (Lk 14:16-24) shows that Luisa's doctrine fits, without break, into the great evangelical logic of the gift freely offered and freely refused.

To make felt the contrast between a will united to God and a will isolated within itself, Jesus uses in the Book of Heaven two powerful images that the same page links together: the sea and the human body. Both say the same truth about what we are: a will cut off from God is not a free will, it is a will decomposing.

The image of the motionless sea

The movement of the sea, perpetual, is what keeps its waters pure. The murmur of the divine Will in us plays exactly this vital role.

"My daughter, the human will is in itself repugnant. But united to the divine Will, it is the most beautiful thing God has created. […] United to ours, the human will had the continual movement of Good, of Light, of Holiness, of Beauty. And, with our continual movement that never ceases, it was the greatest prodigy of Creation. Our movement purified it of every trace of stain. It was as with the movement of the sea which, thanks to its murmur and its perpetual movement, keeps its waters pure and crystalline. Oh! if the waters of the sea were motionless, they would lose their purity and would become so repugnant that no one would want to look at them. […] So it is with the human will which, even more than the sea, if the divine movement murmurs in it, remains beautiful and pure while all evils stay buried and lifeless. On the other hand, if my Will does not murmur in the human will and does not constitute its first movement, all evils come back to life and make of the most beautiful thing God has created the most horrible creature." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, volume 23, 31 January 1928^[52]

The image of the body without the soul

The same page goes on with an even more existential comparison: that of the human body separated from the soul.

"Human nature is another image: united to the soul, it is beautiful. It sees, feels, walks, works, speaks and does not smell bad. But without union with the soul, human nature putrefies, stinks horribly and becomes horrible to see. […] Such was the case of my Will placed in the human will, like the soul from which it was to receive Life, the continual murmur. That is why, as long as the human will remains united to my Will, it is a prodigy of life and beauty. Separated from my Will, it loses its legs, its hands, its speech, its sight, its warmth and its life." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, volume 23, 31 January 1928^[53]

These images are not mere poetic metaphors: they state a truth about the very being of the will. The human will is made to be inhabited by the divine Will; cut off from it, it does not fulfil itself — it decomposes. That is why the passage from self-will to the Will of God is never an impoverishment of man: it is his true beauty restored to him.

Doctrine is clear; application takes time. Here is how, very concretely, the spiritual tradition invites the soul to enter into this passage. None of these practices is exotic; all belong to the common heritage of the Church.

Recognizing each act before accomplishing it

The first work is a work of awareness. Most of our acts are accomplished without our even asking whether they are willed by God. Conformity begins with a simple question, asked mentally at regular intervals: "This act I am about to do — does God will it?" This question supposes no complicated discernment; for 95% of ordinary acts (doing one's work, speaking to a loved one, praying, eating), the answer is yes, it conforms to his signified will^[54]. For the rest, the question obliges us to choose — and that is already a spiritual act.

Praying the Our Father as an act of transfer

The Our Father, said slowly and consciously, is the shortest and most powerful act of transfer from self-will to the Will of God. The petition "thy will be done" must be made with a real act of inward adherence, not merely as a recited formula. Saint Teresa of Avila devoted several whole chapters to it in her Way of Perfection^[55].

Welcoming contrarieties as a gift

Everything that thwarts self-will — a delay, a criticism, a failure, an illness — is, according to the doctrine of Saint Francis de Sales, an occasion of will of good pleasure offered by God. The soul that seizes it as it arrives, without murmuring, without rebelling, without even seeking to understand it, performs the deepest and most liberating act of the passage. This is what the ancients called embracing the cross of the present moment^[56].

Asking the Holy Spirit, unceasingly

All this is impossible without grace. The simplest prayer is also the most effective: "Holy Spirit, do in me what thou willest." The battle is not won by an effort of self-will — that would be absurd, it would still be a victory of self-will. It is won by letting the Holy Spirit will in us, as we go^[57].

The passage from self-will to the Will of God is therefore not the work of a voluntarist spiritual hero: it is the work of God in us, to which we are simply asked not to put obstacles. The baptized person who says yes at every instant — a humble, short, ever-renewed yes — sees, almost without noticing, his own life fade and the divine life take its whole place.

Go further with Via Divina — This article takes up the matter of a course in the free Via Divina formation. To follow the complete formation and advance step by step in the passage from self-will to the Will of God: open the Via Divina formation.

• The Divine Will — the central doctrine that illuminates this passage.
• The Book of Heaven — the major work of Luisa Piccarreta.
• The Will of God and suffering — why trials are part of the passage.
• Wanting what God wants: the greatest happiness.
• The two foundations: knowledge and will — previous course in Via Divina.
• The 8 stages of the spiritual life — next course.
• The new and divine holiness.
• Answers to objections about Luisa Piccarreta.