Pure Love and Union with God

Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee. PSALM 73:25

In the book of Job, the accuser asks God a question that has haunted believers ever since.

Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought? JOB 1:9

Does anyone love God for His own sake? Or is all our religion, in the end, a bargain — obedience in exchange for blessing, worship in exchange for heaven? Madame Guyon spent her life insisting that God can and should be loved for Himself alone, and that the soul which loves Him so will be drawn at last into union with Him. Her name for the first was pure love; her name for the second was divine union. Together they are the goal of everything she taught — prayer, abandonment, silence, the cross and the fire were all, for her, the road. They are also the most beautiful part of her teaching, and the part that most needs careful reading, for it was here that the storm broke over her and her friend Fénelon.

Loving God for Himself

The theme runs all through A Short and Easy Method of Prayer. In describing the prayer of simplicity she says that we should go to God not so much to obtain something from Him as to please Him and to do His will, and she adds a hard sentence: “for a servant who only serves his master in proportion to the recompense he receives, is unworthy of any remuneration.” In the last chapter she presses the same point from the other side. Our blessedness, she says, is the enjoyment of God Himself, not of His gifts, which can never fully satisfy the soul.

Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore. PSALM 16:11

This is a deep and searching truth. Much of our religion is, if we are honest, a trade. We pray for what we want. We obey because we fear the consequences of not obeying. We love God when life goes well and grow cold when it does not. Pure love asks us to love God because He is God — good, beautiful, holy, worthy of all love — whether or not He gives us anything else.

Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation. HABAKKUK 3:17–18

It is not that the prophet does not care about the harvest. It is that God matters more than the harvest. Out of such love, she believed, all real goodness grows; she quotes Augustine’s famous saying, love, and do as you please. And this love cannot be taught as a technique. In her word to preachers she says it plainly: “we cannot learn to love God better than by loving Him.”

Where pure love went too far

So far, she is on solid ground. But the doctrine of pure love, pressed to its limit, went further, and the church’s censure fell there.

In the circles around her, and in some of her own writings, pure love was described as so detached from self that it would love God even with no hope of reward — even, on what was called the impossible supposition, if God were to condemn the soul for ever. Some spoke of a state in which the soul was indifferent to its own salvation. When Fénelon set out to defend a careful version of this teaching in his Maxims of the Saints in 1697, Bossuet attacked it fiercely, and in 1699 the Pope censured a number of its propositions. Fénelon submitted.

We need not side with every argument Bossuet made, nor with the politics of the affair, to see that there was a real danger. Scripture never asks us to be indifferent to our own salvation. It commands us to seek it, to hope for it, to lay hold on it. Our Lord Himself, whose love for the Father was perfectly pure, endured the cross for the joy that was set before Him.

Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. HEBREWS 12:2

The mistake was to treat our own happiness and God’s glory as rivals. They are not. God has made us so that our deepest happiness is found in Him. What pure love rightly refuses is not the desire for God’s gifts, but the desire for the gifts instead of Him. And it is only fair to add that the little book on prayer is more balanced than the later controversy. In her preface she tells her readers, “Seek nothing but the love of God; have a sincere desire for your salvation, and you will assuredly find it.”

A river to the sea

Where does such love lead? Her favourite picture of the soul’s journey was a river. “Do you wish to get to the sea? Embark upon a river, and insensibly and without effort you will be taken to it.” Spiritual Torrents develops the image at length: souls are streams of different kinds, some slow and sluggish, some broad and steady, and some rushing torrents that tumble down the mountainside, broken and at times lost from sight, until they reach the sea. The torrent was her own soul; the sea is God.

There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High. PSALM 46:4

In the Short Method she sets out the stages simply. “Union has its beginning, its continuation, its completion, and its consummation.” It begins with an inclination towards God: the soul turned to Him as its centre. Then it adheres, drawing nearer. Then it is united. Finally it becomes one spirit with Him.

But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit. 1 CORINTHIANS 6:17

This has great value. It reminds us that salvation is not merely a transaction — sins forgiven, a verdict passed — but a relationship that grows. Our Lord prayed for His disciples to share in the union He had with the Father, and Peter goes so far as to say we are made partakers of the divine nature. These are staggering words, and many Christians have never taken them seriously. Madame Guyon took them with all seriousness.

I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me. JOHN 17:23

Her other great picture of union is marriage. Like Bernard of Clairvaux and many before her, she read the Song of Songs as a picture of Christ and the soul, and in her commentary on it she traces the bride’s journey from first longing, through seeking and losing, to settled union with the Bridegroom. Paul himself calls marriage a great mystery concerning Christ and the church, so there is warrant for her bridal language. It has helped countless believers to see that God desires not merely their obedience but their love.

My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies. SONG OF SOLOMON 2:16

Guarding the mystery

Yet here the most careful reading is needed.

First, union with God is never the merging of the creature into the Creator. The river-and-sea picture, if pressed, suggests that the soul simply disappears into God as a drop into the ocean. Scripture does not teach that. Even in the fullest union, God remains God and we remain His creatures, known and loved as persons. The bride is united to the Bridegroom; she does not become Him.

Second, union with Christ is first a gift received by faith, not a height reached by experience. Every believer is already joined to Christ by His Spirit. What grows is our awareness of it, our yielding to it and the fruit of it. To treat union as the reward of an elite who have passed through extraordinary states risks dividing Christians into ranks.

At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you. JOHN 14:20

Third, the test of union is not the intensity of an experience but the fruit of the life: humility, love, obedience, patience. People can and do deceive themselves about their spiritual states, and some who claimed great heights in her circles fell badly. And the full union she longed for belongs in its completeness to the life to come.

Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. 1 JOHN 3:2

Love that answers love

One more thing needs saying. The New Testament never asks us to love God as if from nowhere, by a heroic effort of disinterested will, nor to climb to union by our own striving. It tells us where love comes from.

We love him, because he first loved us. 1 JOHN 4:19

Pure love is not a height we climb by despising ourselves. It is a response to the love God has shown us in Christ, who did not die merely to get us out of trouble but to bring us to God in a union closer than any marriage. That is the right answer to the accuser’s question. Does anyone serve God for nothing? No one serves Him for nothing; we serve Him for Himself. And He is not nothing. He is everything.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Review your recent prayers. How much of your relationship with God is a trade, and how much is love for Him?

2. Pray Habakkuk 3:17–18, naming the particular fig tree that has not blossomed in your life.

3. Do not be ashamed of longing for heaven. Thank God that your joy and His glory are not rivals.

4. Read John 17 slowly and notice every phrase about union. Thank God that, if you are in Christ, you are already joined to Him by His Spirit.

5. Examine the fruit of your spiritual life rather than its feelings: is there more humility, love and patience than a year ago?

A PRAYER

Lord, I have loved Your gifts more than You, and served You for what You give.

Forgive my bargaining, and teach me to love You for Yourself, because You are worthy of all love.

Yet thank You that You have made my joy to be found in You, and that I need not choose between Your glory and my good.

You prayed that I might be one with You as You are one with the Father. Draw me nearer; let me incline to You, cleave to You, and live as one spirit with You.

Keep me humble, fruitful and honest about my soul, until I see You as You are. Amen.