Using Our Sins to Grow in Humility and Confidence

Humility, humus, humiliations

The word humility comes from the Latin humus, the earth. The humble person is the one with his feet on the ground, who keeps his place. But humus also evokes the soil underfoot: in practice, there is no humility without actual humiliations. Pope Francis recalled this on several occasions: we become humble only by passing through humiliation^[2].

The formula, abrupt as it is, carries a double warning. First: we do not become humble by reading treatises on humility; we become humble by enduring actual humiliations. Second: a humiliation received produces humility only if the will consents to it. Endured with resentment, it feeds the pride of revenge; accepted in faith, it digs the interior soil and lets God plant His root there.

Saint Francis de Sales had framed the matter in a striking dialogue, taken up by Tissot:

"I tell you that you will be faithful if you are humble. — But shall I be humble? — Yes, if you will. — But I do will it. — Then you are humble. — But I feel well enough that I am not. — So much the better! For that serves to make you humble more surely." — Saint Francis de Sales, Œuvres, vol. XIX^[3]

The feeling of not being humble is already a degree of humility, provided we consent to it. That is exactly the mechanism a fall triggers: it tears away the illusion we entertain about ourselves.

The fall as a means: "all things work for good"

Our ego wants to be the best, to succeed, to appear perfect. The worst humiliations this proud self can receive are our own faults. Properly understood, the fall strikes pride exactly where it lives. The central verse is from Saint Paul:

"We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose." — Saint Paul, Epistle to the Romans 8:28^[4]

Tissot, glossing Saint Paul in the spirit of the Augustinian tradition, sums up this profit in a formula: yes, all things — omnia, imo ipsi lapsus in peccata — even falls, because we can rise from them more humble, more watchful and more fervent^[5]. And Saint Francis de Sales takes it up, with his characteristic boldness:

"To live constantly in devotion, there is need only of establishing strong and excellent maxims in one's mind. The first I wish for yours is that of Saint Paul: All things work for the good of those who love God (Rom 8:28). And indeed, since God can and knows how to draw good from evil, for whom will He do this if not for those who have given themselves to Him without reserve? Yes, even sins (from which God, by His goodness, preserves us) are reduced by divine Providence to the good of those who belong to Him. Never would David have been so filled with humility, had he not sinned." — Saint Francis de Sales, Œuvres, vol. XVIII^[6]

The conclusion is clear: God never wills sin, but He sometimes obtains, through the conversion that follows it, a fruit that would not have been obtained from a virtue too sure of itself. It is the inverted image of the O felix culpa sung at the Easter Vigil^[7]: not celebrating sin, but celebrating the power of love that transfigures its ruins.

The dung that fertilizes: the image of Saint Bernard

The patristic image fixed by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), the Cistercian abbot, runs through the whole of spiritual literature:

"Dung is nothing but corruption and rottenness, and yet the husbandman and the gardener, as Saint Bernard observes, use it to make the earth bear more beautiful and more abundant fruits. In the same way God uses our faults to make our soul produce many fruits of virtue." — Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, formula reported by Tissot^[8]

The image is physical and brutal: sin is rottenness — Bernard minimizes nothing — but under the hand of the divine Gardener, this rottenness becomes the humus that fertilizes. Saint John Chrysostom applied the same logic to the wiles of the devil: "Often the devil himself is of great use to us; we need only make him serve to our advantage. The gain he will procure us will be beyond price."^[9]

Joseph Tissot, condensing the tradition, writes:

"Our sins, without losing anything of their ugliness and malice, can, if we will it, turn to our spiritual advantage. Obviously this advantage will not come from the sins themselves, but from the mercy of God and the grace of Christ, who knows how to make our iniquities serve His goodness and our weaknesses serve our salvation." — Joseph Tissot, L'art d'utiliser ses fautes, Part II, ch. I^[10]

The condition is marked from the outset: if we will it. The mechanism is nothing automatic. A fall left without conversion hardens; a fall welcomed in the light of God bears fruit.

Pride, the unrecognized root of all our falls

The tradition is unanimous: pride is the capital sin, the root of all the others. Saint Thomas Aquinas calls it principium omnis peccati, with reference to Sir 10:14^[11]. Saint Augustine had already written: "Pride begets every vice, as charity begets every virtue"^[12]. Saint Francis de Sales held it to be "by nature the worst of all sins, graver than infidelity, despair, homicide, lust"^[13]. That is precisely why it is so hard to dislodge: it feeds on our very virtues.

"Pride often feeds on our very virtues, and seeks to confiscate to its own profit, to fatten itself on them, the most exquisite gifts of God." — Joseph Tissot, L'art d'utiliser ses fautes, Part II, ch. I^[14]

And more:

"Against such an enemy of so indispensable a virtue, no one could ever be armed enough, and since it is not given to us to kill it in this life, at least we must eagerly exploit every means of weakening it and neutralizing its attacks. Now, among these means, one of the most effective is furnished to us precisely by our faults. Our sins, however hideous they may be, can be transformed into an all-powerful mass against pride and thus become the occasion of our salvation and perfection." — Joseph Tissot, L'art d'utiliser ses fautes, Part II, ch. I^[15]

The logic is airtight. Since pride is a failure to know our misery, every experience that puts our misery back before our eyes strikes pride at its root. And nothing sets us before our misery as effectively as a concrete fall. Tissot has a striking phrase: "our faults demolish piece by piece the imaginary scaffolding of our own strength" ​​^[16].

The three rods of the Good Shepherd, according to Paolo Segneri

The Italian Jesuit Paolo Segneri (1624-1694), famous preacher and missionary, is one of the great spiritual masters of the Italian Seicento. His Manna dell'anima (1673), a collection of daily meditations, was translated throughout Catholic Europe. In the meditation for 20 June, he distinguishes three means by which God humbles His sheep:

"The Good Shepherd uses three kinds of rods with His sheep: one is the rod of correction, namely adversities; another is a rod of trial, namely temptations; the third is a rod of indignation, namely the permission of sins. Under each of the three, man is forced to acknowledge his nothingness and to humble himself; but he never does so better than under the last: for it is there, in the experience of his falls, that he truly sees his misery." — Paolo Segneri, S.J., Manna dell'anima, meditation for 20 June^[17]

The progression is rigorous. Adversity (sickness, bereavement, failure) tries patience; temptation tries fidelity; the permission of sin, for its part, leaves illusion no way out. And Tissot specifies, reading Segneri: "this rod is so salutary that God does not hesitate to employ it with His best friends. Since their humility finds, in their very virtues, a more formidable reef, He sometimes lets them fall into imperfections, or He permits their old perverse inclinations suddenly to lift their heads again, so as to teach them, through the experience of their fragility, not to rely on their own strength" ​​^[18].

Saint Francis de Sales wrote exactly the same thing at the threshold of his spiritual direction:

"Our Lord permits that in these little encounters we be overcome, so that we may humble ourselves, and know that, if we have surmounted certain great temptations, it was not by our own strength, but by the help of divine goodness." — Saint Francis de Sales, Œuvres, vol. XVIII^[19]

The experience is a familiar one: we hold firm in a great temptation and collapse over a trifle. It is a hidden gift. The great temptation might have made us believe we were strong by ourselves; the trifle reminds us of the truth.

Saint Teresa of Avila: "humility is truth"

The great Castilian mystic had fixed, two centuries before Tissot, the decisive definition: humility is not a façade of modesty, but consent to reality.

"I was wondering one day why Our Lord is so fond of the virtue of humility. It is because God is supreme Truth, and humility consists in walking according to the truth. Now it is a very high truth that of ourselves we have nothing good, but rather misery and nothingness. Whoever does not understand this walks in falsehood; but the more we understand it, the more pleasing we become to sovereign Truth, because we walk in its paths." — Saint Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, Sixth Mansions, ch. 10^[20]

The practical consequence is immediate. If God sees us as fragile and we see ourselves as strong, we are not walking in truth. The only way to walk in truth is either to have a supernatural light that makes us see our nothingness directly (which is rare), or to experience it through facts — through our very falls. The fall, welcomed in this way, is not a spiritual failure: it is a light.

"This knowledge of our nothingness must not trouble us, but make us gentle, humble and lowly. It is self-love that makes us impatient at seeing ourselves poor and miserable." — Saint Francis de Sales, Œuvres, vol. XII^[21]

The pedagogy is exactly the reverse of what self-love expects. Self-love would want to collapse; holiness asks us to give thanks for having seen our misery, because this sight is the entry into truth.

Why God permits even shameful sins

The doctrine is so strong that, according to the doctors, it holds even for grave faults. Tissot, explicitly citing the Catena aurea of Saint Thomas, writes:

"The doctrine of our saint, like that of the other doctors, does not apply only to light faults. Saint Isidore and Saint Thomas affirm that sometimes, in punishment of pride, God permits gross falls into shameful sins. These sins are less grave than pride, they say, and divine mercy uses them to frighten, shake and bring back the proud soul. Like a skillful physician who, in order to cure a more serious infirmity, abandons his patient to the grip of a sickness perhaps more painful, but less dangerous." — Joseph Tissot, L'art d'utiliser ses fautes, Part II, ch. I^[22]

The argument is purely theological: between two evils, God permits the lesser. Now pride, as a radical refusal of God, is a deeper evil than lust or anger, which most often remain yieldings of weakness. A shameful fall, by breaking self-importance, can be less ravaging for the soul than a flawless but humility-less virtue.

Louis Veuillot (1813-1883), the nineteenth-century Catholic polemicist, formulated the idea with admirable concision:

"It is a grace granted to the misery of man that he sometimes falls, when steadier steps might have carried him to the fatal summits of pride." — Louis Veuillot^[23]

Saint John Chrysostom wrote the same thing sixteen centuries earlier:

"Sometimes God permits the sins of noble and great souls to be known. Intentions of vanity had crept into them. The Lord, by means of their faults, wills to strip them of that popular glory for which they have braved all manner of dangers, and, showing it to them as fleeting as the flower of the field, He leads them to consecrate themselves to Him without reserve, and to regard Him as the sole end of all their actions." — Saint John Chrysostom, Exhortation to Stagirius, Book I^[24]

And more radically still, in his De compunctione:

"For us, these remedies [meditations on humility] are insufficient. To triumph over our pride, another force is needed — which? The multitude of our sins, and the perversity of our conscience which, after plunging us into a thousand turpitudes, still dares to leave us puffed up with pride." — Saint John Chrysostom, De compunctione, Book II^[25]

These formulas, read hastily, may shock. They affirm only that pride is so deep an evil that the humiliation of a fall can be, medically speaking, the lesser evil. The surgeon who opens the flesh to save the organ does not celebrate the wound; he inflicts it because nothing else would save.

David, Peter, Elijah: the great biblical tradition of the fruitful fall

Scripture offers the canonical examples. David, after conquering Israel, falls into adultery with Bathsheba and has Uriah the Hittite killed (2 Sam 11)^[26]. Repentant after the prophetic confrontation with Nathan, he composes the Miserere (Ps 50/51), which will remain the universal prayer of the converted sinner. Saint Francis de Sales draws from it this incomparable trait: "never would David have been so filled with humility, had he not sinned" ​​^[27].

Saint Peter is the archetype of the spiritual man who must fall to become capable of feeding the flock. Three times he swore he would not deny Him — three times he denied Him (Lk 22:54-62)^[28]. It is precisely this threefold collapse that the Risen Christ will take as the matter for reinvesting him: "Peter, do you love me?" — three times the question, three times the profession, and the pastoral promise (Jn 21:15-17)^[29]. Tissot notes:

"God permitted the fault of Peter, the pillar of the Church, the haven of faith, the teacher of the universe, to teach him to deal with others mercifully; and, by a divine permission as well, Elijah falls, so as to clothe himself wholly in the mantle of charity and become indulgent like his Lord." — Joseph Tissot, L'art d'utiliser ses fautes, Part II, ch. I^[30]

Mary Magdalene, by contrast, is the exception. "In an instant," says Saint Francis de Sales, "from a sewer of corrupt water, [she was] changed into a fountain of the water of perfection" ​​^[31]. Her conversion is immediate, radical, without relapse. But it is the exception: Peter, the prince of the Apostles, follows the common way of souls that must stumble in order to learn.

"Solomon says that the servant who suddenly becomes mistress is unbearable. There would be great danger that the soul, which has long served its own passions, might become proud and vain, if suddenly it became perfectly their mistress. It is necessary that, little by little and step by step, we acquire this mastery, for the conquest of which the saints have spent several dozen years." — Saint Francis de Sales, Œuvres, vol. XII^[32]

The practical remedy: recalling our sins against vanity

When pride rises, the concrete remedy recommended by the Salesian tradition is the active memory of past sins. Bishop Jean-Pierre Rey (1770-1842), a distant successor of Saint Francis de Sales in the episcopal see of Annecy, formulated it for himself:

"I shall make, from the remembrance of my past falls, an intimate book which I shall entitle Remedy Against Pride, and I shall reread its pages; they will breathe the odor of my nothingness and poison the worm of my pride." — Bishop Jean-Pierre Rey, Bishop of Annecy^[33]

The method is simple: when pride rises, explicitly recall what we are capable of when grace no longer sustains the will. Not to brood — God has already forgiven — but to keep our feet in the humus. It is a therapy: a natural antidote to the thought "I am a good person."

The idea is extended in a revelation received by Saint Gertrude the Great (1256–c. 1302), the Cistercian nun of Helfta, in her Herald of Divine Love. Filled with exceptional mystical graces, she worried about the defects that remained in her. Christ answered her:

"These defects, of which my beloved complains, are very profitable to her. Every day I pour into her soul such an abundance of graces that, to preserve her from the attacks of vanity, I must hide several of them from her eyes under the cloud of these slight failings. Dung fertilizes the earth: the sense a soul has of its infirmity makes gratitude germinate in it, and each time it humbles itself for its faults, I give it a grace that destroys them; little by little I change defects into virtues, and the soul will one day surprise itself in a light without shadow." — Saint Gertrude the Great, The Herald of Divine Love^[34]

The words are extraordinarily revealing. God, to preserve a privileged soul from the danger it runs by reason of the very abundance of its graces, leaves it a few visible defects. These defects themselves become the matter for practicing humility, and each act of humility receives in return the grace that destroys the defect.

Leniency toward the faults of others

A side effect deserves emphasis: he who has seen himself sin becomes incapable of judging his neighbor severely. Saint Francis de Sales noted:

"Humility makes us not be troubled by our imperfections, remembering those of others; for why should we be more perfect than others? It also makes us not be troubled by those of others, remembering our own; for why should we find it strange that others have imperfections, since we have plenty ourselves?" — Saint Francis de Sales, Œuvres, vol. XII^[35]

Saint Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi, the Florentine Carmelite (1566-1607), went so far as to say:

"If God had not shut me up in a cloister, I would have ended my days in a perpetual prison, or under the executioner's axe." — Saint Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi^[36]

This saying, seemingly excessive, is exactly the lucidity that saves. It is not morbid self-depreciation: it is the calm conviction that apart from preserving grace, every sin is possible for me. The practical consequence: no sinner is a stranger to me. The Salesian tradition fixes two sentences that may be engraved in the mind:

"There is no sin possible to a man with which I could not stain myself."^[37]

"We are all weak, but hold yourself for the weakest of all."^[38]

Humility gained through our sins begets mercy toward sinners. It is the great pastoral secret of the saintly confessors.

A practical exercise: asking for the grace to see oneself as one is

Following this logic, one exercise is very effective for whoever wants to advance. In a time of prayer, explicitly ask the Lord for the grace to know one's own sins — not to crush oneself, but to enter into gratitude for what He has given freely. A simple formula, which can be adapted:

"Lord, give me the grace to see my sins better, that I may truly know who I am without You. May this light upon my sins break my pride and bring down the image I try to give of myself. May I understand that You love me as I am and that I need not fear to look at myself in truth, with all my weakness."

It is a paradoxical prayer: we ask for God's light upon our own shadows, knowing that this light never crushes — it liberates. As Jesus said to the French mystic Gabrielle Bossis: "Do not diminish your gifts; think only that all come from Me" ​​^[39]. True humility goes hand in hand with great gratitude: all we have that is good comes freely from God; all we have that is shameful comes from ourselves.

The next step is more delicate. Acknowledging our misery is one thing; loving it is another. Saint Francis de Sales nevertheless sets the requirement very high.

The summit of humility according to Francis de Sales

"The highest point of humility consists not only in voluntarily acknowledging our misery, but in loving it and taking pleasure in it — and not from lack of courage and generosity, but to exalt divine Majesty all the more and to esteem our neighbor much more highly in comparison with ourselves." — Saint Francis de Sales, Œuvres, vol. X^[40]

The expression "loving one's misery" is strong. It obviously does not mean loving sin. It means loving the condition of lowliness that this misery brings us. The motivation is strictly theocentric: exalting God. The smaller we account ourselves, the greater we see Him who deigns to love us. It is the logic of Mary in the Magnificat: "The Almighty has done great things for me… for He has looked upon His lowly servant" (Lk 1:48-49). The more the soul experiences itself as "servant," the more it marvels at the "regard."

Saint Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi redoubled:

"Humility is nothing but a continual knowledge of our nothingness, and a continual delight amid all that procures us contempt of ourselves." — Saint Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi^[41]

And Saint Francis de Sales, in a borderline formula that directors have commented on for four centuries:

"If it were possible that we could be as pleasing to God being imperfect as being perfect, we ought to desire to be without perfection, in order to nourish in ourselves, by this means, most holy humility." — Saint Francis de Sales, Œuvres, vol. XIV^[42]

The holy bishop does not teach that imperfection is desirable in itself. He teaches — by an unrealizable hypothesis — that if imperfection were equal to perfection before God, humility would be a sufficient motive for preferring it. In other words: in God's eyes, what counts first is not the cleanness of the soul, but the lowliness of the creature.

"Consent to be nothing": the modern mystic voice

This seventeenth-century doctrine has been massively confirmed by the mystics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To the French mystic Marie de la Trinité (1903-1980), a secular Dominican, Jesus speaks of souls "who consent to be nothing" ​​^[43]: the condition is precise — not "taking oneself for nothing" out of false humility, but "consenting" to what we are: creatures, fragile, totally dependent.

To Luisa Piccarreta (1865-1947), the Italian mystic of Corato, Jesus says it in very developed terms:

"For Me to pour My graces into your heart, it is necessary that you convince yourself that, by yourself, you are capable of nothing. I fill with My gifts and graces the souls who hesitate to attribute to themselves the good effects of their works done with My Grace. I look upon them with great approval." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 1^[44]

And:

"Remember that I am generous and that I pour torrents of graces upon souls that acknowledge their nothingness, that usurp nothing for themselves, and that understand that all is accomplished by means of My grace. […] I cannot enter hearts that are smoked with pride and so swollen with themselves that they have no room for Me." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 1^[45]

To Marcel Van, the Vietnamese Redemptorist (1928-1959), Jesus speaks a very familiar language but with identical firmness:

"Marcel, you must know that you do not yet have the least virtue. […] And, frankly speaking, with you it is complete emptiness; absolutely nothing is found that represents any beauty. But you must not be saddened by it, do you hear? Look at the flower, your sister Thérèse; she acknowledged that she possessed nothing but in reality she possessed everything because, possessing nothing, she obtained everything." — Jesus to Marcel Van, Colloques^[46]

And further on:

"Yes, it is just as you say, little brother; it is only in these moments of weariness that I can make you see your weaknesses and teach you that truly you do not have an atom of virtue. Little brother, see by this how weak you are. Let it suffice you to abandon yourself to Me and to put all your confidence in Me alone." — Jesus to Marcel Van, Colloques^[47]

To Léandre Lachance, the Canadian lay mystic (1934-2020), Jesus says the same thing in another register:

"What I love is that you agree to acknowledge [your weakness]. It is at that moment and at that moment ONLY that I can act in you; always give Me your weakness; it is then ONLY that I can act in fullness in you and through you. You, by yourself, are nothing, nothing, nothing. I am everything, everything, everything! Acknowledge what you are and acknowledge what I Am." — Jesus to Léandre Lachance, Aux bien-aimés du Père^[48]

These voices, received by mystics with no doctrinal connection between them, confirm exactly what the Bishop of Geneva taught his Visitation directees. The biblical echo is Saint Paul:

"My grace is sufficient for you; my power is made perfect in weakness. I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me." — Saint Paul, 2nd Epistle to the Corinthians 12:9^[49]

Loving abjection without loving sin: the decisive distinction

The fifth degree of humility, in Saint Francis de Sales's classification, is precisely this love of abjection^[50]. But the Bishop of Geneva takes infinite care that it not be confused with love of sin itself:

"If I have been carried away by anger or self-indulgence to say unseemly words, by which God and my neighbor are offended, I shall repent keenly and be extremely grieved at the offense, which I shall strive to repair as best I can; but I shall still welcome the contempt that comes to me from it; and if the one could be separated from the other, I would ardently reject the sin and humbly keep the abjection." — Saint Francis de Sales, Œuvres, vol. XIV^[51]

The distinction is essential. Two realities are born of the same fault: (1) the offense against God — which must be hated and repaired; (2) the outward abjection (the contempt of others, public humiliation, loss of esteem) — which may be welcomed with joy as a remedy for pride. If the two could be separated, the holy bishop would keep the humiliation and throw away the sin.

"Nevertheless, my daughter, take good heed of what I am going to tell you: although we love the abjection that follows from evil, we must not neglect to remedy the evil. I shall do what I can not to have an ulcer on my face, but if I have it, I shall love its abjection. In the matter of sin, this rule must be held still more firmly." — Saint Francis de Sales, Œuvres, vol. XIV^[52]

All is said. Hating sin; loving what the fault incidentally produces — humility.

The hidden treasure of the fall according to Jean de Bernières

Jean de Bernières-Souvigny (1602-1659), Treasurer of France at Caen, layman and great spiritual writer of Bérullian inspiration, author of Le Chrétien intérieur, formulated the intuition with particular intensity:

"If a soul is miserable by its fall, the abjection that returns to it is a treasure that enriches it. But this is hidden from most men, who do not know this happiness. They are poor and yet they have a treasure in poverty itself; but, alas! they do not possess it, because they do not know how to seek it there." — Jean de Bernières-Souvigny, Le Chrétien intérieur^[53]

An eminent religious of the Visitation, quoted by Tissot, extended it:

"Our faults constitute an important part of our spiritual wealth. The love of the humility they teach us is the essential thread of this wealth. If we try to weave without this thread, everything will in the end collapse. […] Our faults are so advantageous to us that whatever the lack of strength in our will does not make us accomplish, the fruit we draw from our faults accomplishes it and makes our advancement. Life is a series of falls, after which we must rise again at once by cutting short and saying: I will do it no more. […] We can regain through humility what we lost through cowardice." — A Religious of the Visitation, quoted by Tissot^[54]

The formula is striking: regaining through humility what was lost through cowardice. The fault is not cancelled — it leaves a debt — but the movement of humility that follows can qualitatively exceed the value lost.

Before others: not concealing our falls

Jean de Bernières himself applied this principle to a public outburst he bitterly deplored, in a letter addressed to a friend:

"You know, you are aware of my latest outburst and you witnessed it. My consolation is that this fault happened to me in the presence of my friends who will thus know what I am. I am deeply displeased at having displeased God, being unfaithful to His graces. But my joy is in my humiliation, which I welcome. The happiness of being brought low in the minds of others is great, and something very sweet for those who wish to repair the injury done to God. To be firmly convinced that one is pure nothingness, very fragile — that is the profit to be drawn from our imperfections." — Jean de Bernières-Souvigny, letter to a friend^[55]

Saint Francis de Sales even recommended not seeking to conceal one's imperfections before one's sisters:

"I would wish, as regards our defects, that we not strive to cover them: for by not letting them be seen outwardly, they are none the better for it. The sisters will not believe for all that that you have none, and your imperfections will perhaps be more dangerous than if they were uncovered, and cause you confusion. We must therefore not be surprised or discouraged when we commit imperfections before our sisters; on the contrary, we must be very glad to be recognized for what we are." — Saint Francis de Sales, Œuvres, vol. XII^[56]

Saint Claude La Colombière, Jesuit, director of Saint Margaret Mary, summed it up:

"Happy miseries whose feeling makes me blush before God and abase myself before men. If you are necessary to me, I would not exchange you for the merits and virtues of others. I prefer to be such as I must be in order to be humble." — Saint Claude La Colombière, S.J., Retraite spirituelle^[57]

Safeguards: hating sin, not yielding to quietism

The warning is constant throughout the Salesian work:

"If I tell you this, it is certainly not so that we may sin, but so that we may have sentiments of humility. Faults are always faults. But they put us in a state of confusion and return to God which does us great good." — Saint Francis de Sales (paraphrase reported by Tissot)^[58]

And more systematically, against every quietist drift: we must always fight sin. The doctrine of using our faults is not a permit to fall; it is an antidote to discouragement once the fall has already happened. Saint Francis de Sales insisted, at the end of the Introduction to the Devout Life:

"O God, we must sooner die than knowingly and deliberately offend Our Lord; but when we fall, we must lose everything rather than courage, hope and resolve." — Saint Francis de Sales, Œuvres, vol. XIV^[59]

That is the exact balance: hating sin to death, never despairing of the sinner — even when that sinner is oneself. Saint Francis de Sales added that love of our misery is not a beginner's virtue: it must accompany the Christian at every spiritual age.

"You see, this little virtue of love of our misery must never move a step away from our heart, because we need it at every moment, however advanced we may be in perfection, since our passions are reborn, sometimes after we have lived long before God and after making great progress in perfection." — Saint Francis de Sales, Œuvres, vol. XII^[60]

A humble image closes the section:

"There are certain matters which seemingly soil clothes and yet serve to remove stains. Such is the use the just make of their sins, while detesting them. They use them to purify their soul of pride, which is the greatest of their sins." — Saint Francis de Sales, Œuvres^[61]

The third use is the most paradoxical and the most consoling. Not only can our sins humble us, not only can we love the humiliation they bring — but we can use them to strengthen our confidence in God's love.

"For thy name's sake, O Lord, pardon my guilt, for it is great"

It all begins with a staggering verse from Psalm 24 (Vulgate; Hebrew numbering 25):

"For thy name's sake, O Lord, pardon my guilt: for it is great." — The psalmist, Psalm 24:11^[62]

Human logic would expect: pardon me because my fault is small, or because I repent, or because I deserve it. David, on the contrary, grounds his request on the very greatness of his fault. Why? Because he knows that divine mercy is measured by the misery it comes to fill. Tissot, citing Segneri, explains it with a pointed metaphor:

"David knew that the enormity of sin is a motive, for divine Goodness, to exterminate it all the more willingly, and he addressed that same Goodness saying to it: Enormous is my sin, in order to determine it to purify his soul entirely. Thus the vine-dresser, who sees his vineyard ravaged by a wild boar, describes in the most horrible colors the ferocity and strength of that animal, before the hunter, with the aim of encouraging him all the more to pursue and kill it." — Paolo Segneri, quoted by Tissot^[63]

David does not minimize his fault; he aggravates it before God — not to flagellate himself, but to excite mercy to deal a death blow to so great an evil.

Why God pardons all the more willingly

The theological argument is rigorously reasoned. God directly hates sin; He never hates the sinner except indirectly. To exterminate sin, He must therefore, in time, await the sinner's conversion. The graver the sin, the more its eradication rejoices God — for it is a greater evil that He makes disappear.

"God holds sin in such great horror that, in order to tear it from hearts, not only did He humble Himself unto death, clothed in mortal flesh, but even today, glorious in heaven, He humbles Himself to the point of making Himself a suppliant. […] Precisely because the divine hatred attacks the fault directly and only indirectly, on account of the fault, the sinner, God uses so many devices, humbles Himself with so much love, in order to separate sin from the sinner, and to annihilate the former while saving the latter." — Paolo Segneri, quoted by Tissot^[64]

Hence the dazzling formula of Mother Marie de Sales Chappuis (1793-1875), the Visitandine superior of Troyes, called "the good Mother," inspirer of Father Brisson, founder of the Oblates of Saint Francis de Sales:

"He is the God of the miserable. Each time we offer Him a fault to repair, we give Him back the title of Savior." — Mother Marie de Sales Chappuis, quoted by Tissot^[65]

God obviously needs nothing — He is absolutely self-sufficient Being. But mercy is an attribute that manifests itself only where there is misery. By offering Him our faults to repair, we offer Him the matter upon which His specific joy is exercised: saving.

The throne of mercy is our misery

The image joins classical iconography. A throne is the place where the sovereign manifests his power. God's specific power is mercy; the throne where He manifests this power is therefore human misery. Saint Francis de Sales, in one of his best-known formulas:

"I am accustomed to saying that the throne of God's mercy is our misery. The greater our misery, the greater confidence we must have." — Saint Francis de Sales, Œuvres, vol. XVII^[66]

And elsewhere, to a scrupulous directee, the holy bishop spins out the maternal metaphor:

"May God look upon you with love; you have no reason to doubt it, for He looks lovingly upon the most horrible sinners in the world, for however little true desire they have to be converted. […] Our imperfections must not please us; but they must not surprise or discourage us; we must truly draw from them submission, humility and distrust of ourselves, but not discouragement nor affliction of heart, and still less distrust of God's love for us. God does not love our imperfections and venial sins, but He loves us in spite of them. Thus, just as the weakness and infirmity of the child displease the mother, and yet she does not cease to love him for all that, but loves him tenderly with compassion; so, although God does not love our imperfections and venial sins, He does not cease to love us tenderly." — Saint Francis de Sales, letter to a scrupulous directee^[67]

For his own part, the holy bishop crisply applied the doctrine:

"I do not know how I am made; I feel miserable, but I am not troubled by it, and sometimes I am even glad of it, thinking that I am a truly good burden for God's mercy." — Saint Francis de Sales to Saint Jane de Chantal^[68]

The boldness of the formula — "a good burden for God's mercy" — sums up the whole doctrine: personal misery is not an obstacle to holiness; it is, paradoxically, the raw material upon which God deploys His masterpiece.

Glorifying God by displaying His mercy: the prayer of Saint Claude La Colombière

The most famous application of this doctrine is a prayer written by Saint Claude La Colombière, Jesuit, spiritual director of Saint Margaret Mary at Paray-le-Monial. Instead of praying timidly after a fault, the saint proposes that the sinner take the initiative of glorifying God through His very mercy:

"Lord, here I am to exercise Your admirable mercy and to display it in the presence of heaven and earth. Others glorify You by showing what is the strength of Your grace through their fidelity and constancy, how gentle and generous You are toward those who are faithful to You. As for me, I shall glorify You by making known how good You are toward sinners and that Your mercy is above all malice, that nothing is capable of exhausting it, that no fall, however shameful and criminal it may be, should drive a sinner to despair of pardon. I have grievously offended You, O my lovable Redeemer; but it would be still worse if I did You this horrible outrage of thinking that You are not good enough to pardon me. In vain does Your enemy and mine lay new snares for me every day. He will make me lose everything rather than the hope I have in Your mercy. Though I had fallen back a hundred times and my crimes were a hundred times more horrible than they are, I would still hope in You. Amen." — Saint Claude La Colombière, S.J., Retraite spirituelle^[69]

The prayer is extraordinary on several counts. (1) It does not minimize sin: "grievously offended," "crimes," "shameful and criminal." (2) It calls the temptation to despair an "horrible outrage" — declaring God incapable of pardoning is, for Saint Claude, a worse evil than the initial sin. (3) It projects itself into an imaginary relapse ("a hundred times"), to neutralize in advance any resumption of discouragement. It is a true therapy: the soul is pre-armed against future despair.

Beggars at the temple door: showing our wounds

The beggar image returns several times in Francis de Sales:

"Glory in being nothing; be glad of it, since your misery is the object of God's goodness for exercising His mercy. Among beggars, those who are the most miserable, and whose wounds are the greatest and most frightful, account themselves the best beggars, and the most apt to obtain alms. We are but beggars: the most miserable are of the best condition; God's mercy looks upon them willingly." — Saint Francis de Sales, Œuvres^[70]

The image is sociologically exact for his time: at the threshold of the churches of seventeenth-century Savoy, the beggars who displayed their most visible wounds received the most alms. The good beggar is the one who shows his wound. The spiritual transposition is immediate: let us not conceal our misery before God; show it — it is upon it that He will pour the alms of His mercy.

"Let us humble ourselves, I beseech you, and show only our wounds and miseries at the door of the temple of divine pity; but remember to show them with joy, consoling yourselves at being wholly empty, so that Our Lord may fill you with His kingdom." — Saint Francis de Sales, Œuvres^[71]

And further on:

"Certainly, our miseries and weaknesses, however great they may be, must not discourage us, but must humble us and make us throw ourselves into the arms of divine mercy, which will be all the more glorified in us as our miseries are great, if we rise again from them: which we must hope to do, with the grace of Our Lord." — Saint Francis de Sales, Œuvres^[72]

The divine Physician and the sinner's sickness

The Venerable Alexandre of Saint Francis (1607-1685), French Discalced Carmelite, extended the same intuition by spinning out the medical metaphor:

"Therefore, my soul, because you acknowledge yourself sick, for pity's sake do not fear to go to the Physician. On the contrary, go with all the more confidence since it is for you, to come to you, that He leapt from His bridal bed, that He walked with giant strides from the summits of heaven (Ps 18:6). He came to deliver you from the sickness of sin, for He knew that the physician is necessary for the sick, and not for those in health (Mt 9:12). Fatal madness of sinners, who draw motives to flee the Physician from what should give them more confidence to go to Him! Foolish is he who fears to find an indignant adversary in Him who came to heal him!" — Venerable Alexandre of Saint Francis, O.C.D.^[73]

Joseph Tissot joins the same register:

"The joy and honor the sick man gives the physician by entrusting to him his wounds and the chances of his cure, the sinner procures for the divine Samaritan by offering Him his faults to heal. If God was offended by the fault, the Savior is glorified by the pardon that destroys it. Truly, to see the favors with which He inundates the prodigals returned to Him, one would think He wishes to thank them for giving Him the occasion to satisfy the desires and needs of His clemency." — Joseph Tissot, L'art d'utiliser ses fautes, Part II, ch. III^[74]

Concordant voices of the mystics of the Sacred Heart

All the great mystics of the Sacred Heart say the same thing in varying images. Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690), Visitandine of Paray-le-Monial, canonized by Benedict XV in 1920:

"The Heart of Jesus is the throne of mercy, where the most miserable are the best received, provided love accompanies them into the abyss of their miseries." — Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque^[75]

Father Joseph Varin (1769-1850), restorer of the Society of Jesus in France and co-founder (with Saint Madeleine-Sophie Barat) of the Society of the Sacred Heart:

"Since the coming of Our Lord, confidence must be the virtue of poor sinners." — Fr. Joseph Varin, S.J.^[76]

Mother Marie de Sales Chappuis:

"Though, with each of our breaths, we fell into some fault, if just as often we give ourselves back to God to begin doing well again, the falls do no harm. The Lord looks less at the faults than at the profit we draw from them, if we use them to abase ourselves before Him, and to make ourselves little, humble and gentle." — Mother Marie de Sales Chappuis^[77]

And Jesus to Sister Josefa Menendez (1890-1923), Spanish religious of the Sacred Heart who died at the convent of the Feuillants in Poitiers at 33, in her Appeal to Love:

"If one knew the wrong one does to God by doubting His divine goodness! However great, enormous, numerous the sins of My creatures may be, I am always ready, not only to pardon them, but to forget them, provided sinners return to Me. […] I make My finest masterpieces with the most miserable subjects, provided they let Me act." — Jesus to Sister Josefa Menendez, Un Appel à l'Amour^[78]

The saying — "My finest masterpieces with the most miserable subjects" — is exactly the Salesian doctrine, expressed by the mystic voice three centuries later.

The sacramental application of this whole doctrine is obvious: the sacrament of Penance — or of Reconciliation, or of confession — is, in the great spiritual tradition, the sacrament of the double abyss. It humbles radically (we spread out our sin before God, before the priest, before the Blood of Christ) and it radically exalts mercy (pardon is total, immediate, gratuitous, renewable indefinitely).

Why confession humbles even as it lifts up

Everything in the rite is designed to dig both abysses at once. First phase: the examination of conscience. We look our sins in the face, fleeing nothing. That is the practical knowledge of misery. Second phase: the vocal avowal before another man — the priest representing Christ. That is the humiliation, at least a private one, that brings pride down. Third phase: absolution. That is mercy descending under an infallible sacramental word. Fourth phase: penance, which repairs and commits us to conversion.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church formulates it thus:

"Those who approach the sacrament of Penance obtain pardon from God's mercy for the offense committed against Him, and are, at the same time, reconciled with the Church which they have wounded by their sins and which by charity, by example, and by prayer labors for their conversion." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1422^[79]

Jesus said explicitly to Sister Josefa Menendez:

"You must learn to say what humbles you most and in the way that costs you most." — Jesus to Sister Josefa Menendez^[80]

And more radically, to another Italian mystic, Sister Benigna-Consolata Ferrero (1885-1916), Visitandine of Como:

"If I have predilections, they are for the soul that abases itself most in a humiliating confession. I love a humbler soul more, though it was more guilty, than a less humble soul that would not have lost its innocence." — Jesus to Sister Benigna-Consolata Ferrero^[81]

The affirmation is striking: humility, in the sacrament, can more than compensate for a greater guilt. Not that God favors sin — He abhors sin — but He favors humble souls, and a humiliating confession is one of the most powerful acts of humility in the Christian life.

God's greatest pleasure, according to the holy Curé of Ars

Saint John Mary Vianney (1786-1859), Curé of Ars from 1818 to 1859, remains in the history of the Church one of the greatest confessors. He spent up to eighteen hours a day in the confessional, receiving penitents from all over France and beyond. His saying on the sacrament has become classic:

"God's greatest pleasure is to pardon us. The good God will sooner have pardoned a repentant sinner than a mother will have snatched her child from the fire. In the sacrament of Penance, He shares His Mercy with us to infinity. The good God, at the moment of absolution, throws our sins behind His shoulders. He forgets them, He annihilates them; they will never reappear." — Saint John Mary Vianney, Pensées^[82]

The image — "behind His shoulders" — is drawn from the prophet Isaiah: "Thou hast cast all my sins behind Thy back" (Is 38:17). The promise is radical: not simply pardon, but divine forgetfulness, the annihilation of sin as such.

The joy of the Father: "the greater the man has been in sin…"

Jesus to Sister Josefa Menendez condenses the parable of the prodigal son (Lk 15:11-32) into a structurally stunning formula:

"When My sons, abandoning My kingdom, made themselves children of the devil, if they return to the Father, the Father has great joy and makes them feel the superior delight. […] The greater the man has been in sin, the greater he can also be in the other abyss." — Jesus to Sister Josefa Menendez, Un Appel à l'Amour^[83]

It is exactly the parable taken as a spiritual method: the elder son, who stayed home, does not know the joy of the return; the younger, who comes back from afar, is seized by an understanding of paternal love that the elder does not suspect.

Practical advice: frequent confession

The Catholic spiritual tradition recommends regular confession — at least once a month for the faithful engaged in a serious Christian life. Saint Francis de Sales proposed it in the Introduction to the Devout Life, among the ordinary means of progressing in the devout life^[84].

The point is not to collect confessions, like an accountant his ledger. The point is that we must not wait for great falls to go. Regular confession of daily imperfections (impatience, failures in charity, laziness, backbiting, voluntary distractions in prayer) maintains two things: (1) a fine knowledge of oneself; (2) a regular contact with sacramental grace. For whoever hesitates after a grave fall, the word of Jesus to the mystics evoked above suffices: the Heart of God runs to meet the sinner, and the return rejoices the Father beyond anything we can imagine.

Tissot concludes his Part II with a formula that sums up the whole doctrine:

"Through the knowledge of its voids and faults which it acquires by this humility, the soul is purged of pride and purged of demons. The more the soul is afflicted, stripped and profoundly humbled, the more it conquers, with purity, the aptitude for heights. The elevation of which it becomes capable is measured by the depth of the abyss where it has its roots and foundations." — Joseph Tissot, L'art d'utiliser ses fautes, conclusion of Part II^[85]

The image is vertical and symmetrical. The height of a plant is measured by the depth of its roots; the height of a cathedral by the depth of its foundations. A soul's holiness is measured by the depth of its humility — and therefore by the use it makes of its own miseries to dig that humility.

Saint Angela of Foligno: "Plunge yourselves into the abyss"

Saint Angela of Foligno (1248-1309), Franciscan tertiary of Umbria, formulates the intuition in mystical terms:

"I desire, I desire, I hunger and thirst, my children; I hunger and thirst that you plunge yourselves into the abyss, that you engulf yourselves in the depth of your nothingness and in the height of the divine immensity." — Saint Angela of Foligno, The Book of Visions^[86]

The double depth is set out. Depth of nothingness (the lower abyss): practical knowledge, through experience, of what we are without God. Depth of the divine immensity (the upper abyss): knowledge, through grace, of what God is and of what He does for us. The further the soul descends into the first, the higher it can rise into the second.

Saint Francis de Sales closes with a saying he liked to repeat to the scrupulous:

"Hate your imperfections, then, because they are imperfections, but love them because they make you see your nothing and your nothingness, and because they are subject to the exercise and perfection of virtue and of God's mercy." — Saint Francis de Sales, Œuvres^[87]

It is exactly the balance the adult soul seeks: hating sin, because it offends God; loving what it reveals, because that revelation is the direct road to the Kingdom.

Synthesis: freedom regained

The doctrine of using our sins produces, in those who truly practice it, a characteristic interior freedom. Freedom with regard to oneself: we no longer hate ourselves, because we no longer love ourselves for our apparent perfection but accept ourselves as loved by God. Freedom with regard to the gaze of others: we no longer hide our falls, because they are no longer a threat to our identity. Freedom with regard to the devil: he can no longer exploit discouragement, because every fall, from now on, can be converted into humility and confidence.

This freedom is not carelessness; it is peace. And this peace, in the saints' constant experience, is the breathable air of adult Christian life. Saint Paul summed it up in a sentence:

"I will glory in my infirmities, that the virtue of my Savior may dwell in me." — Saint Paul, 2nd Epistle to the Corinthians 12:9^[88]

Go deeper with Via Divina — This article summarizes a course from the free basic Via Divina formation, the direct continuation of Humility and Confidence: Changing How We Look at Our Sins. To hear the full development, with the continuous readings of Saint Francis de Sales and Joseph Tissot, open the formation: browse Via Divina.

• Humility and Confidence: Changing How We Look at Our Sins — the twin article, on the right response when the fall occurs (do not be surprised, do not be troubled, do not be discouraged).
• The Double Abyss: Humility and Confidence — the general structure of the interior life in the Catholic spiritual tradition.
• Saint Francis de Sales (1567-1622) — the "encouraging doctor," Doctor of the Church since 1877.
• The Knowledge of God's Love, Which Produces Confidence — the second abyss of the double abyss.
• The Knowledge of Man's Nothingness, and Humility — the first abyss.
• The Necessity of Humility and the Danger of Pride — why pride is the worst enemy of the spiritual life.
• Scrupulosity: A Spiritual Sickness and Its Classical Treatment — for those whose self-examination turns into a trap.
• Saint Faustina and Divine Mercy — the contemporary revelation of the same message in the 20th century.
• Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897) — the "little way" of confidence, the direct heir of this doctrine.