What the Saints Say About Obedience

A virtue against the current

Obedience runs head-on against modern sensibility, which makes autonomy the supreme good. The saints, for their part, never set it against freedom: they presented it as the way to a higher freedom. The author of The Imitation of Christ announces this from the very first sentence of his chapter on obedience:

"It is a great thing to live under a superior in obedience, and not to depend on oneself. It is much safer to obey than to command." — The Imitation of Christ, book I, ch. 9^[2]

The reason for this confidence is theological, not sociological. For the saints, a man left to his own will alone is not free: he is captive to his moods, his pride, his illusions about himself. "Go where you will, you will find no rest but in humble submission to the direction of a superior"^[3], The Imitation continues. Obedience does not enslave: it delivers from the tyranny of the self.

Obedience, sister of humility and charity

In spiritual tradition, obedience never stands alone. It is born of humility and ends in charity. Saint Catherine of Siena makes them a family of connected virtues:

"Obedience has humility for its nurse; it is humility that feeds it every day. We are as obedient as we are humble, and as humble as we are obedient." — Saint Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, ch. 154^[4]

This kinship explains why the saints keep returning to the same pattern: pride begets disobedience (Adam), humility begets obedience (Christ, the new Adam). Everything that follows must be read within this framework — obedience as the fruit of humility and the path towards love. On the twin virtue, see What the Saints Say About Humility.

Before it was a doctrine of the saints, obedience was a datum of Scripture, and it is always there that the spiritual masters draw. Four texts return like refrains under their pens.

"To obey is better than sacrifice" (1 Samuel 15:22)

The first is the prophet Samuel's sentence upon King Saul, who had preferred his own judgement to the order received:

"Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams." — First Book of Samuel 15:22^[5]

This word runs through the whole tradition: no devotion, no penance, no brilliant work ever replaces simple obedience to the will of God. Saint Faustina would receive its echo almost word for word: "I did not demand your mortifications, but obedience. By submitting, you give me great glory"^[6].

Christ "obedient unto death" (Philippians 2; Hebrews 5)

The centre of the whole doctrine is Christ. Saint Paul makes his obedience the heart of the mystery of Redemption:

"He humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross." — Letter to the Philippians 2:8^[7]

"Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered." — Letter to the Hebrews 5:8^[8]

Where Adam had been lost through disobedience, Christ raises man up through obedience — "as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man's obedience many will be made righteous" (Rom 5:19)^[9]. All the saints repeat this antithesis. Catherine of Siena sums it up: it was "pride that made [the first man] lose obedience", and it is the Word who, "faithful to my commands, opened the gate of heaven"^[10].

"He was obedient to them": the hidden obedience of Nazareth (Luke 2:51)

The saints like to stress that Christ did not only obey his Father: he spent thirty years in the ordinary obedience of a son to his parents.

"And he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them." — Gospel according to Saint Luke 2:51^[11]

This "obedience of Nazareth" founds the whole spirituality of hidden obedience: God sanctifies himself first in silent submission to the duties of one's state, long before visible works. The Catechism sees in it the model of ordinary filial obedience^[12].

"We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29): the limit

Finally — and the saints never omit this point — obedience is not unconditional. It has an absolute limit: one may never obey an order contrary to God.

"We must obey God rather than men." — Acts of the Apostles 5:29^[13]

This word of Saint Peter before the Sanhedrin would become the rock on which all the martyrs leaned: true obedience is obedience to God, and human authorities deserve it only insofar as they transmit his will. We shall return to this: it is what radically distinguishes Christian obedience from servile submission.

We can now listen, century after century, to the masters who most marked the spiritual doctrine of obedience. Their chronological order reveals an astonishing continuity.

Saint Benedict: obedience "without delay"

In the 6th century, Saint Benedict of Nursia places obedience at the very beginning of his Rule. From the prologue, he defines monastic life as a return to God "by the labour of obedience", after "the laziness of disobedience" had turned men away from him^[14]. But it is chapter 5 that gives the formula that became famous — obedience without delay:

"The first degree of humility is obedience without delay. It characterises those who hold nothing dearer than Christ. […] As soon as the superior has given an order, as if the order came from God, they cannot bear any delay in carrying it out." — Saint Benedict of Nursia, Rule, ch. 5^[15]

For Benedict, obedience is not first a social discipline, but a way of recognising God in human mediation: "the obedience shown to superiors is given to God"^[16]. He immediately adds a decisive precision, which saves this virtue from all formalism: obedience must be joyful, not murmured.

"Disciples must obey with a good heart, because 'God loves a cheerful giver'. If a disciple obeys unwillingly and complains, even only in his heart, then even though he carries out the order, he will not be pleasing to God, who sees his discontented heart." — Saint Benedict, Rule, ch. 5^[17]

Benedictine obedience is therefore not mechanical execution: it is an act of love, engaging the heart as much as the hands. The interior murmur — that secret complaint which obeys outwardly while refusing inwardly — empties it of all merit.

Saint Catherine of Siena: "the key that opens heaven"

Eight centuries later, Saint Catherine of Siena devotes to obedience the final treatise of her Dialogue (chapters 154 to 165), as the crowning of the whole spiritual life. Her master formula, placed on the lips of the Eternal Father, has become classic:

"No one can enter eternal life except through obedience. It is the key of obedience that opened the gate of paradise, closed by Adam's disobedience." — Saint Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, ch. 155^[18]

For Catherine, the sign proving that one truly possesses this virtue is not displayed docility, but patience: "The sign proving that one possesses the virtue of obedience is patience. Impatience, on the contrary, shows that one is deprived of it"^[19]. True obedience is recognised by the peace with which one welcomes contradiction.

Catherine further distinguishes two levels: general obedience to the commandments, to which every baptised person is bound, and particular obedience — that of the counsels — chosen by souls who want to go further. But both have the same root: love. "God does not reward according to the difficulty or the duration of obedience, but according to the zeal and the greatness of charity"^[20].

The Imitation of Christ: "safer to obey than to command"

In the 15th century, the little book of The Imitation — attributed to Thomas à Kempis — spread this doctrine throughout Christendom. Its chapter I, 9 makes obedience the path of interior peace and true freedom. Renouncing one's own judgement holds a central place in it:

"It is true that everyone likes to follow his own mind […]. If your opinion is good, and for God's sake you give it up to follow another, you will gain more by it." — The Imitation of Christ, book I, ch. 9^[21]

The issue, for The Imitation, is not to become a passive executor, but to break secret attachment to oneself — that certainty of always being right which is the root of pride. Sometimes giving up one's opinion "for the sake of peace" is a deeper exercise in humility than it appears, and the mark of a free rather than "proud and obstinate" spirit^[22].

Saint Ignatius of Loyola: the three degrees and the image of the "corpse"

In the 16th century, Saint Ignatius of Loyola gave the doctrine of obedience its most systematic formulation. In his famous Letter on Obedience to the Jesuits of Portugal (26 March 1553), he distinguishes three degrees of an obedience that, from the outside, gradually wins over the whole man:

Reading the table: for Ignatius, obedience is perfect only when it reaches the third degree — not out of contempt for the intellect, but out of trust that God leads through the legitimate superior. The first degree alone (execution) remains, he says, "of little value".

It is in his Constitutions that Ignatius uses the image that would spill so much ink — that of the corpse and the staff:

"Let everyone be persuaded that he must allow himself to be led by divine Providence through his superiors, as if he were a corpse that lets itself be moved and treated as one wishes, or like an old man's staff that serves him who holds it wherever he goes and for whatever he wants." — Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, no. 547^[23]

This comparison, often caricatured as "blind obedience", must be read in its exact context. Ignatius himself sets an absolute reservation: one never obeys where "one would see sin"^[24]. Far from abolishing conscience, Ignatian obedience presupposes full freedom and constant discernment; the "corpse" is not an abolition of the person, but an image of total availability to God — one who no longer resists, out of love, the hand that leads him.

Saint Francis de Sales: obey "gently, promptly, cheerfully"

At the beginning of the 17th century, Saint Francis de Sales adapted this doctrine to the laity in his Introduction to the Devout Life. There he distinguishes two obediences: the necessary one (towards the pope, the bishop, the prince, parents, legitimate superiors) and the voluntary one (that which one chooses, for instance towards a spiritual director)^[25]. Above all, he describes a very concrete progression, from the easiest to the most perfect:

"Obey in indifferent things […] and that will already be a highly commendable obedience; obey in difficult, harsh and hard things, and that will be a perfect obedience. Lastly, obey gently, without answering back; promptly, without delay; cheerfully, without resentment; and above all obey lovingly, for the love of him who for love of us made himself obedient even unto death on the cross." — Saint Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, part III, ch. 11^[26]

Francis de Sales also recalls a precious warning against illusion: "It is a mistake to think that, if one were a religious, one would obey easily, when one finds oneself unwilling and reluctant to render obedience to those whom God has set over us"^[27]. Obedience is not proved in dreamed-of great commitments, but in today's ordinary submission.

Saint Francis of Assisi and "perfect obedience"

More radical still, Saint Francis of Assisi makes obedience the most total sacrifice man can offer. In his Admonitions, he describes the soul that "gives itself wholly to obedience into the hands of its superior" as one that offers God even its "body"^[28]. Above all he denounces the false obedience of the religious who "thinks he sees that there is something better to do than what his superiors order" and who, in so doing, "returns to his vomit, that is, to his own will"^[29]. For the Poverello, the root of all disobedience is always the same: attachment to one's own will, disguised as zeal for some greater good.

Modern witnesses: Foucauld, Faustina, Luisa Piccarreta

The same doctrine continues down to recent saints. Saint Charles de Foucauld sums it up in a stripped formula: "obedience without arguing, without any ulterior motive of self-interest, obedience for the sake of obeying"^[30]. Saint Faustina receives from Christ the assurance that obedience takes precedence over any self-chosen penance^[31]. And the servant of God Luisa Piccarreta, whose spirituality of the Divine Will lies at the heart of Ignispedia, receives a word that illuminates the whole doctrine:

"Obedience kills self-will and pours divine graces into the soul in torrents. […] In the practice of the other virtues, even the most sublime, self-love can always slip in; but in the practice of obedience, never!" — The Book of Heaven, vol. 2, 17 August 1899^[32]

This word links the obedience of the saints to life in the Divine Will: to obey perfectly is already to do no longer one's own will, but God's. On this spirituality, see The Divine Will and The Book of Heaven.

Beyond the diversity of schools, the saints' words on obedience come down to a few great lines of force. Here they are, grouped together.

To obey is to do the will of God

The first, foundational theme is that obedience makes sense only in relation to God. One never purely obeys a man: one obeys God through legitimate human mediation. Saint Benedict already affirmed it — "as if the order came from God"^[33] — and all repeat it after him. That is why obedience is inseparable from faith: one must believe that God truly leads through the superiors he has established. The Catechism speaks of "the obedience of faith" (Rom 1:5) as man's very response to God who reveals himself^[34].

Obedience, path of freedom

Second theme, the most paradoxical: obedience liberates. Far from alienating, it tears the soul away from the worst of slaveries, that of self-love. "They will never possess freedom of spirit unless they submit themselves with their whole heart", says The Imitation^[35]. The obedient saint no longer bears the crushing weight of having to decide everything, judge everything, master everything: he rests in the will of God. It is the freedom of children, not the slavery of servants.

Obedience, summit of love

Third theme: obedience is a matter of love, not constraint. Francis de Sales wants us to obey "lovingly"^[36]; Catherine affirms that God rewards "according to the greatness of charity"^[37]. To obey out of fear or calculation remains exterior; to obey out of love transforms. Here obedience rejoins its model: if Christ obeyed "even unto death", it is because love made him obey. Perfect obedience is the concrete face of love giving itself.

The obedience that "kills self-will"

Fourth theme, more austere: obedience is a death to self — precisely to self-will, which the whole tradition designates as the first obstacle to union with God. The image returns insistently: "killing" self-will (Luisa), making oneself an available "corpse" (Ignatius), renouncing "one's own mind" (The Imitation). It is not a matter of destroying the will — a good faculty, a gift of God — but of healing it of its curvature upon self, so that it may at last freely will what God wills. In this sense, obedience is the exact antidote to the original sin, which was the choice of one's own will against God's.

Reading the table: the five great axes of the spiritual doctrine of obedience, each attached to the voice that best expressed it. We see that the saints do not contradict one another: they illuminate in turn one and the same reality.

To be faithful to the saints, we must set aside three frequent misunderstandings — which they themselves took care to exclude. On this point, see also the companion article Common Errors About Obedience.

Neither servility nor abdication of conscience

The saints' obedience has nothing servile about it. Ignatius's "corpse" is an image of loving availability, not of being crushed: Ignatius elsewhere demands constant discernment and full freedom. The saints never asked us to switch off conscience; they asked us to purify self-will. The distinction is crucial: one does not give up one's intelligence, one gives up the pride that always wants to be right.

The absolute limit: "obey God rather than men"

No saint ever taught that one must obey an evil order. Ignatius himself expressly reserves the case of sin. The rule, formulated by Saint Peter (Acts 5:29) and taken up by the Catechism, is without appeal: "The citizen is obliged in conscience not to follow the directives of civil authorities when they are contrary to the demands of the moral order"^[38]. Martyrs are precisely those who disobeyed men to remain faithful to God. Christian obedience is therefore anything but unconditional: it binds only because it transmits the will of God, and ceases to bind as soon as it contradicts it.

Obedience "out of necessity" is not yet the virtue

Finally, the saints distinguish true obedience from its counterfeit: the kind executed through pursed lips, murmuring within. The Imitation targets "those who obey rather out of necessity than out of love, and they, ever suffering, are prone to murmuring"^[39]. Benedict refuses this forced obedience any reward^[40]. Obedience is a virtue only when it is free and joyful; constrained and grudging, it is a mere appearance.

What remains of this doctrine for a 21st-century Christian who is neither monk nor religious? Much. The saints insist: obedience is not reserved for the cloister. For the lay person, it takes the face of God's will manifested in the concrete — the duties of one's state, the teaching of the Church, legitimate authorities, circumstances willed or permitted by Providence.

Francis de Sales already gave its practical translation: obeying ecclesiastical and civil superiors each in their proper domain, one's parents, one's duty, "each according to his vocation"^[41]. More deeply, the Christian's great obedience is that of Christ's prayer: "Not my will, but thine" (Lk 22:42)^[42]. Each renunciation of being right, each peaceful acceptance of a contrariety, each "yes" said to an ungrateful duty is a fragment of that obedience the saints sang.

That is why their message, far from being dated, meets the most modern aspiration — that of a freedom that would not be slavery to caprice. The saints answer: full freedom is not doing what one wants, but at last willing what God wills. In this sense, their last word on obedience is a word of joy, that of Catherine of Siena herself naming this virtue "the key that opens heaven"^[43].

• What the Saints Say About Humility — the twin virtue, "nurse" of obedience according to Saint Catherine of Siena.
• Common Errors About Obedience — blind obedience, servility, false submission: the misunderstandings to avoid.
• How to Grow in Obedience — concrete means for progressing in this virtue day by day.
• The Divine Will — where obedience finds its fulfilment: no longer only doing God's will, but living in it.
• The Book of Heaven — the writings of Luisa Piccarreta, source of the words on obedience as the gate of divine life.