The Ascent of Mount CarmelChapter XX. The joy of the will in natural goods is vanity. How to direct the will to God therein

By natural goods I mean beauty, grace, comeliness, bodily constitution, and all other physical endowments, and also good understanding, discretion, and other rational qualities. Now, for a man to rejoice, because he himself, or those who belong to him, may be thus gifted, and for that reason only, without giving thanks to God, Who thus endows men in order that they may know Him and love Him the more, is vanity and delusion. ‘Favour is deceitful,’ saith the wise man, ‘and beauty is vain: the woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.’² He teaches us that man ought rather to be afraid of his natural endowments, because they may so easily withdraw him from the love of God, and cast him down into error and vanity. This is the reason why physical grace is said to be deceitful; it deceives a man and allures him to that which is unseemly, through empty joy or complacency, either in himself, or in others so endowed. Beauty is vain; it makes man fall in divers ways, when he values it and rejoices in it, for he ought to rejoice in it only when it enables him or others to serve God. We ought, therefore, rather to fear, lest perhaps our natural gifts and graces should become occasions of offending God, through presuming upon them, or excessive estimation of them, arising out of their continued contemplation. He, therefore, who is thus endowed, ought to be very cautious, and watchful in his conduct, lest he should furnish another with the opportunity of withdrawing his heart from God even for a moment. For these natural gifts and graces are so prolific in temptations and in occasions of sin, as well to the owner as to the beholder, that scarcely any one can avoid all entanglement of the heart in them. Many spiritual persons, of natural beauty, have, under the influence of this fear, prayed to God for their own disfigurement, that they might not be an occasion of vain affection or joy, either to themselves or to others.

2. The spiritual man, therefore, must purify his will, and render it insensible to this empty rejoicing, remembering that beauty, and all other natural graces, are earth, from the earth, and soon return to it; that comeliness and grace are but smoke and vapour; and if he would escape falling into vanity, he must esteem them as such, and direct his heart upwards unto God beyond them all, ‘rejoicing and delighted that God is all beauty and all grace in Himself supremely, infinitely above all created things. ‘They shall perish,’ saith the Psalmist, ‘but Thou remainest, and all of them shall grow old like a garment.’³ If, therefore, our rejoicing is not in God, it will always be false and delusive. It is to this that those words of Solomon apply which he addressed to that joy which has its sources in created things: ‘To mirth, I said, Why art thou vainly deceived?’ that is when the heart suffers itself to be attracted by created things.