Lacordaire’s Letters to Young Men
70 Directions for Degenerates
Jean-Baptiste-Henri Dominique Lacordaire was, according to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, ‘the greatest pulpit orator of the nineteenth century’.
He ended his life in charge of the military school of Sorèze, inculcating manliness, patriotism and religion.
Many young men sought his advice. Having read all his letters to them, I have distilled his advice into these seventy directions for degenerates under seven categories:
I. Reading
II. Virtue
III. Community
IV. Prayer
V. Raising children
VI. Chastity and fornication
VII. Going gaily in the dark
Each category offers ten truths to improve your life.
I. READING
Whoever does not write in conformity with the Gospel is the enemy of God and man, much more so than the frail creature which simply yields to its passions.
Sinful weakness deserves compassion, but the pride which attacks truth, inspires no kind feeling.
Let me beg of you, my dear friend, not to let yourself be imposed upon by modern writings. They are nearly all pride-stricken, infected with sensualism, doubts, and prophecies, remarkable only for the boldness of the poets who indulge in them. Study the ancients closely.
Let us write not for glory, not for immortality; but for Jesus Christ.
I should not advise you to widen the circle of your philosophical studies, but, on the contrary, to narrow and concentrate them. Concentration is the prime and sole element of strength…Depth always supposes extent, but extent does not involve depth.
I have always regretted not having had ten years sound theological study before entering upon active life.
With the Scriptures and the Summa of St. Thomas, a man can outdo everything.
We must confine ourselves to the masterpieces of great names; we have not time enough for the rest.
We read in the Life of St. Jerome that he was scourged by an angel, who whilst striking him, reproached him for reading Cicero with more ardor than the Gospel.
The reading of literary masterpieces not only forms the taste, it keeps the soul in elevated regions, and prevents it from sinking down into the vulgarity of mere material and gentlemanly occupations.
II. VIRTUE
Bear constantly in mind that we have two great vices to beat down and destroy, pride and sensuality; and two great virtues to acquire, humility and penance.
Love springs out of sacrifice, and especially out of the sacrifice of pride.
Just consider how incapable you are of great things, and don't despise little ones.
In the spiritual, as in human life, perseverance is everything. If you return to irregular and aimless habits, you will infallibly lose all the way you have made.
What should I have gained to-day by having half-killed myself for the sake of doing things quickly? Go to work gently…
Idleness is the fruitful mother of corruption, and reading, although not hard work, suffices to put idleness to flight.
No amount of talent will go far unbacked by work. Work is the key to eloquence and knowledge, as well as to virtue.
You must pay no attention to the trouble and darkness which comes over your mind at times. We must betimes feel our own emptiness, and see the astounding misery of our nature, as well as its frightful corruption.
The accomplishment of duty with courage and single-mindedness is the surest way to come at the real and deserved admiration of men.
In general, the great men of antiquity were poor. This is the rock upon which every one splits today; people no longer know how to live on a little.
III. COMMUNITY
You ought to be very watchful over yourself in recreation in order to see whether it is the desire of giving others pleasure or that of shining which actuates you.
There is no One book which has not the disadvantage of not being written specially for us. The living word, issuing from a soul which understands ours, is much more powerful.
Choose some poor person, and relieve him regularly according to your means, and look upon him as Jesus Christ Himself, visit him, talk to him
Truth is ever able to win us over, however great the distance at which our mind may keep it.
Do your daily work. "Sufficit diei malitia sua,” said our Lord. What a beautiful and touching saying! How well suited to our misery!
Don't let us trouble about the future. Let us simply bear our burden each day.
Isolation confines us to ourselves, and individually we are very puny both in point of intellect and virtue. By being many under one rule, we assist, enlighten, support, and edify one another.
A Christian presents himself before the rich and great with neither the arrogance of the demagogue, nor the cringing of the courtier; he is simple and natural, without fear, without desires, without emotion.
You have to be joyous when you feel inclined to sadness, to be at the service of the first-come of your brothers, of him for whom you have the least liking; it is a perpetual thwarting of nature's yearning. Community life for the sake of Jesus Christ, and under the influence of supernatural charity, is, for this reason, the greatest miracle of Christianity. In it a man must be either unhappy or a saint.
All our life depends upon the persons with whom we live on terms of familiarity. Familiarity gets us used to things as well as to persons, and what at first appeared to us odious and abject, ends by entering into our habits.
IV. PRAYER
We enjoy ourselves innocently, and yet little by little the spring gets weak, prayer becomes irksome, mortification is lost sight of, we get into a negative state with regard to God, which deprives us of the joys of conscious love.
With regard to prayer, I should like you to recite the Psalter once a week, dividing it into seven parts, or at least once every fortnight, which would make ten Psalms a day.
Read daily with attention two chapters of the Holy Scriptures, one of the Old Testament, beginning with the first chapter of Genesis; the other of the New Testament, beginning with the first chapter of St. Matthew.
Go down on your knees for a moment in order to prepare yourself for this reading, and kiss your Bible affectionately on beginning and ending.
After having thus read the whole Bible, you would do well to confine yourself to the Psalms in the Old Testament, and to the Epistles of St. Paul in the New.
Read attentively every evening one or two verses of the Gospel, or of the Epistles of St. Paul, and fix your mind upon them on the morrow, producing such acts of love, faith, and compunction, as you might be able, and then to make every evening some good resolution, no matter how trifling. Lastly, you must beg of God unceasingly the grace to pray well.
Do not forget, my very dear friend, the fundamental question of confession and communion. Without these two arms your life is lost.
Prayer regularly morning and night, a short reading from the Gospel, monthly confession and communion, some penitential practice to keep you humble and chaste, and preserve you from the spirit of the world. This little will suffice, will preserve you, will raise you above the life of the senses, will keep you to God, will strengthen and console you.
You are lukewarm and languid in God's service. Prayer, communion, penance, pious reading, all that sustains and enraptures the soul is almost unknown to you.
A man may love God tenderly and ardently in every position. But you must will it; and in order thereto, lay down an inviolable rule of your relations with Him.
V. RAISING CHILDREN
The large majority of children are brought up in frightful selfishness on account of the very affection shown them: a disorderly affection which becomes their slave, and flatters in them the dreadful inclination of taking everything to themselves, without ever making any spontaneous return for the sake of giving pleasure to others.
The child has neither rivals nor enemies; nobody tells him hard truths; he is unacquainted with pain for want of an occasional blow from an ill-disposed hand. He is a kind of mummy swathed in silk, and ends by believing himself to be a little god.
The child then must be punished when he does wrong — he must have privations imposed upon — his faults must be plainly laid open to him; in case of need, a cold and severe countenance must be shown him; he must be exposed to slight trials to open out his sensibility, and to tiny perils in order to give him an idea of what it is to have a little courage; he must be made to ask pardon even of servants when he has offended them; he must from time to time be condemned to rough work, in order to prevent him from despising inferior occupations.’
Every opportunity must be seized of kindling in his soul the fire of sacrifice, without which every man, whatever his rank, is contemptible.
Avoid equally nurturing in a young soul the spirit of slavery and the spirit of independence, because both are contrary to the real state of the Christian as depicted in the Gospel.
The ‘child who never deliberates, never chooses; who is passive in all he does, will never be good for anything but to submit cravenly to men and things set over him by chance in like manner the child who is reared in independence will not submit where obedience is necessary, nor support with rational honor the pain of lawful obedience.’
The ‘child must neither command nor obey at every turn, like spoilt children but he is not therefore to be kept under like a slave, nor to be afraid of having an idea of his own
‘In our times, the besetting sin in education is softness. Formerly people were perhaps more severe than was needful ; to-day they are not severe enough. I think it desirable not to keep a child too long under the enervating shadow of home. At seven years of age princes used to be handed over from governesses to a tutor.’
‘In education two things are necessary, kindness and firmness.’
‘We must avoid both the idolatry which forgives everything and pets everything, as well as the severity which, when unremitting, repels and hardens the heart.’
VI. CHASTITY AND FORNICATION
Wherever there are women there are perils for the heart. Avoid everything which you could not do and say before witnesses. This is the great rule, and by it duty and peace are alike safe guarded. Avoid as far as possible conversations at which the whole family is not present; when they are all together, one is always safe.
Sometimes security itself is a peril, because the very innocence of all that surrounds us makes us less watchful over our hearts.
You think that if an occasion offered you would not resist. What an expression! …The man of honor never finds such occasions. You must of your own will either seek out places of infamy, to lead astray a wife from her husband and children by premeditated treachery or gain the affections of a young innocent person, hidden in the bosom of her family, to which honourable confidence has given you an entrance; or seek out in the lower ranks of the working classes, a poor creature who cannot resist your wealth, your youth, your good looks, your deceitful promises, and make her for a time the instrument of pleasures from which she will one day reap nothing but desertion, contempt, and ruin of body and soul. Such are, my dear friend, the only alternatives left by nature and society to the passions you are nursing. In all this there is nothing but crime, nothing fortuitous.
Vice is so infamous in its pleasures, and at the same time so short-lived a resource, that it beguiles a few moments only at the price of the most crushing remorse.
What can you expect to become with a life of perpetual pleasure, nowise counterbalanced by the serious practices of religion?
Debauchery is nothing but frightful selfishness, which kills everything tender and lofty in us.
You were a selfish and vain child, wrapped up in yourself, delighting in your name, your rank, your fortune, your horses; and subject, notwithstanding your pride, to all the movements of depraved flesh. Happy they who have made no victims. They are scarce. Few are they who will present themselves before the judgment of God without having ruined any one. Youth is sacred on account of its perils. Respect it always.
You are today able to compare the soul raised by Christianity above vile desires, with the soul sunk in the grovelling instincts of the body. Those poor young men no longer have even shame victims of their senses. They have not strength enough even to throw a veil over the interior disorder of their imagination. They must discover themselves fully, and have forgotten how to blush.
A good man shuns the conversation of lost women and of dishonourable men.
You have said nothing about the way you parcel out your day: your rising, your going to bed, and the employment of your time; and yet this is almost a man's whole life.
VII. GOING GAILY IN THE DARK
Silence is a great virtue. It is only cowardly when honor obliges us to break it; and honor does not oblige us to this in conversations where we give vent to our opinions for the simple pleasure of doing so.
I never like to hurt any one, and that is why I have passed through many dangers without doing myself over-much damage. Reserve in our opinions, or at least in the manner of putting them, is a prudence in which there is more heroism than in the hasty expression of our personal feelings.
Were I in presence of adversaries whom I thought honest, and whose opinion I valued, I should consider it my duty to answer and explain. But when I see men trample upon a beloved and venerated tomb…I do not feel even contempt: ‘look and pass on’, according to Dante's advice.
Get into a uniform, simple, and calm way of living. Never work at night, sleep well. There is no use in killing one's self writing instead of securing seventy years of a well employed life.
It is perfectly astounding what may be done with time, if we have patience enough to wait and not hurry.
The greatest catastrophes move men for a moment, nations lift their head, they look around and listen, then sink again, at the first glimpse of peace, into listlessness of soul. We must then make up our minds to look upon the present as lost and think of the future.
Man cannot command facts, but he can always preserve principles in his heart.
Everything changes, everything disappears, but to return. Man cannot destroy any of the fundamental conditions of his existence, and religion, which is one of them, can for the future exist under no other form than that of Christianity.
I have been very little engaged in controversy, being convinced that the direct exposition of Christianity ruins beforehand all the objections brought against it. Christianity is like an old monument, with deep and solid foundations, and controversy like the sand driven against that indestructible mass by the wind.
The designs of man cannot prevail against the force of things and the will of God. God stands behind man, and is greater than man.