A Complete Spiritual Organism: The Three Ways of the Spiritual Life by Rev. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. – Manuel Marrero
March 30, 2026
“If we do so consider it, we shall see how true is the saying of the ancients, that ‘in the way of God he who makes no progress loses ground’ ; and it will appear also that our interior life must, already here on earth, become the normal prelude to the beatific vision. In this deep sense our interior life is, as we have said, eternal life already begun.”
This book is an abridgment of Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s much longer The Three Ages of the Interior Life, an invitation to Christian perfection. He once formed a consequential pope, a saint and world historical figure, whose baptismal name was Karol Józef Wojtyła.
For me, it’s a call to conscience through prodigality in ecclesiology and acute metaphysics.
It’s been a Lent to darken my heart but I’ve endured.
A confessor told me to pray the Lord’s Prayer as if for the first time. A confessor told me to read the Parable of the Sheep. A confessor told me to think of the Good Thief. A confessor told me it’s never too late. The battle is already won in eternity, not time.
A Trappistine postulant whose birthday is a month before mine told me she doesn’t think anything is corny. She said intellectualism could be a vice for her. She said she had been afraid if she understands God too much she will lose faith but now she is less afraid. It’s something like when St. Paul says but have not love I gain nothing. Love had to happen first before she could think about it in a heady way. Although true, that God doesn’t need us is a cruel fact to isolate.
Someone whose birthday is two months before mine entered my life recently as well. He told me about Lady Poverty. How charity without orthodox faith always casts a kind of shadow, always running up against some kind of embarrassment. Faith in a way mitigates embarrassment. When stories of holiness contain a little bit of the opposite motive, like St. Francis imagining being disgusted at taking care of children and having to deal with a woman. To show me the limits of hospitality and fellowship and self-awareness even among Catholics. As much as I may be called to religious life, friction of communal living remains a barrier. I am not easy to live with. I welcome the mission enthusiastically but I yearn for interstices of solitude. I throw myself into the snow. Sometimes he wishes he was a simpler soul, who didn’t require art and all sorts of stimulations to excite faith. Persistence of attraction is not vocation.
I have grown uncomfortable in the world. True freedom will make you feel uncomfortable in the world and comfortable, at home, in yourself. I pray it saves my soul. My birthday this year falls on Holy Saturday and the Easter Vigil, the most desolate and triumphant hinge day of the liturgical year.
Beginning with a damning corrective on Martin Luther, Lagrange guides you through the three ages: the purgative, the illuminative, and the perfect. “The interior life is for all the one thing necessary. It ought to be constantly developing in our souls ; more so than what we call our intellectual life, more so than our scientific, artistic or literary life. The interior life is lived in the depths of the soul ; it is the life of the whole man, not merely of one or other of his faculties.”
“Their first conversion had taken place when Jesus called them, with the words : ‘I will make you fishers of men.’”
It is mirrored in the lives of the Apostles and in the developmental stages of childhood, youth, and manhood. For the Apostles, the life of grace or purgative path begins with following in Christ’s ministry, a “true conversion, by which a man passes from the state of mortal sin to the state of grace. In the former state his energies were dissipated and he was indifferent in regard to God ; now he loves God more than he loves himself, more than he loves anything else ; at any rate he esteems God beyond all earthly things, even though his love of God may not be free from all selfish motives.”
The theological virtues are received, gifts of the Holy Spirit; faith, hope, and charity, or participation in God’s inner life and love. In the “obscurity of faith,” “the profound understanding” of truth, “the continual and quasi-experimental living of them, is what we call the contemplation of saints.”
“God has always sent us saints in troubled times. We need them especially to-day.” Knowing God by faith, united with charity, we receive the “infused moral virtues,” cardinal which help us to pursue God. They are prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance, and the seven sacraments “dispose us to receive obediently and promptly the breathing that comes from on high, the special inspirations from God.”
Our task is to make saints, not model citizens. “An effective and operative love,” “the price of the blood of the saviour.”
The second conversion occurs at a “crisis,” for the Apostles, the Passion. Peter was allowed to fall in order “to cure him of his presumption, so that he might be more humble and place his confidence in God and not himself.” Deprived, with a feeling of desolation and even of death, an apostolic zeal surfaces, and yet, there is ego in apostolate. Finally, at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descends on the Apostles, which only could have transpired in their savior’s absence, and a living flame purged their spirits, and they received a deep knowing that it was not their will. “They received the fulness of the contemplation of this mystery which they were now to preach to humanity for the salvation.” The profound conviction of this mystery lives in you constantly until your martyrdom, a deep peace and knowing that the author of your nature is alive in you, “a life measured, like that of God, not by future time, but by one instant of motionless eternity.” The redeemer went from the Last Supper to the Cross on Calvary to make us perfect as he is perfect. Not merely proficient or spiritual, but supernatural.
“It happens not infrequently that a great grace is preceded by some striking perceptible sign which arouses us from our inertia ; it is like a divine awakening. Here the symbolism is as clear as it can be. As fire purifies, enlightens, and gives warmth, so the Holy Ghost in this moment most deeply purified, enlightened and inflamed the souls of the Apostles. This was truly the profound purging of the spirit.”
When your faith is reduced to people being angry with you, spitting on the devil’s army sowing scandal, remember that the Christ Child was destined for the fall and for the rise of many, and for a sign that shall be contradicted; and that thy own soul a sword shall pierce, and that he will raise you up on the last day.
“The Holy Ghost already dwelt in the souls of the Apostles, but by this visible mission He came into them to increase the treasures of His grace, of the virtues and the gifts, giving them light and strength in order that they might be capable of witnessing to Christ even to the ends of the earth, and at the peril of their lives.”
I have gone completely over to God and lost my voice. There’s a place in your heart where God belongs. God wants to dwell there and nothing else fills it right. Most people fill it with just about anything else, even their loved ones. It’s a morally intelligible drama of idolatry. Without divine law there’s no morality. Freed of attachments, heart purged of hate, not lingering growing tepid, mercy beaucoup for the “retarded soul,” the faculties experience God as darkness. “Henceforth the depth of the soul belongs completely to God.”
The rosary is a spiritual weapon, you feel the darkness retreat with each bead. God gave me a huge heart so I could feel everything. A confessor once said that while sexual sins are sins, chastity is about having a huge heart. Grace operates quietly and uses foolish people sometimes. I have prayed for a daughter of Christ. I want to love God with all my life. I have lost interest in anything that isn’t God, and in doing so, know that loving anything is to love the created things of God. A preacher once said that if you love the things of this world more than God you will be damned. Separated in an eternal inferno. Discomfort with the world is your soul being freed and saved. I would be a good oblate to a monastery, like anyone who might consider vagrancy or suicide should be. Structure over drift. Clarity to discern “that charity which is the source of peace, the tranquillity of order.” I want to talk about ordinary things like gardening. Investigate the moral theological backbone. If made to choose between literature and God I’d choose God now every time.
Materialism that is unrepeatable is integrated but I repent. I believe in redemption for wayward fathers. We pray for the grace of final perseverance. I can’t do it on my own I need God. Sin kills. Romantic love has never been further from my mind. Priests seem much happier than married people generally. You’ll taste hope in detachment. I pray for detachment from all materialism. Freedom. Dream of someone who loved me enough to lead me toward grace. I need you to love me with all your free will like I loved you first, died for you. On bread alone it is still His body His choice. What people call freedom is the freedom to do evil.
There are certain things, like love, that you shouldn’t go looking for and should find you instead. I can’t see myself happy with a woman unless she’s perfect. Until you understand sickness and health you won’t understand love and sex. We are God. I was a teenage pregnancy I was a clump of cells look at me now.
Caring about the dignity of persons.
May you be pure as a virgin on your wedding night.
The holiness of the faithful who heal the world by loving God strips bare the self of fragilities and deceptions.
I gave up movies for Lent. Been dreaming vividly.