In his Treatise on the Love of God, St Francis de Sales says that when unity exists within a variety of different things, there is order. Now if order is established, there is a certain calmness, security and serenity that ensues as a result.
This calmness, security and serenity is called peace. Balance, quietness and tranquility are among the many other words we can use to denote peace. As I have mentioned previously, peace, or peace of soul is, according to St Augustine, the tranquility of order, tranquillitas ordinis.
It is order that brings about the calm and restful state of peace. Now in the spiritual life, we attain peace and we grow in peace when we subdue whatever is disordered in us. Create order in your interior life and you will create a wonderful interior peace, or rather, God will bring this about for you.
Peace of soul does not come to the full all in one go however. It is something we need to cultivate, improve and encourage to grow by our daily efforts to become better Christian persons; more devout, more prayerful, more mortified and more patient, etc. In other words, we must grow more and more in virtue in order to grow more and more in peace.
“Turn away from evil and do good: seek after peace and pursue it.” (Ps 33:15.) The peace of Christ, or of the internal Christian man, is not the same thing by any means as that more superficial and unstable peace which is created by external order alone, such as for example, the environment of an office or workplace which is neat and tidy and where everyone is dressed smartly and doing their appointed task without visible complaint.
Rather, peace of soul is something more intimate, more profound and it brings a real positiveness, confidence and joy with it. The truly wonderful thing about it is that it produces what is called interior liberty, or freedom of heart. Surely, no price in the world can be as great as this. Christ speaks of internal peace as ‘an hundredfold.’
St Paul speaks of it as something beyond human description when he addresses the Philippians, saying to them, “…and the peace of God, which surpasseth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:7).
Freedom of Heart
If we are prone to fall into sin, it is a sign that we are not yet masters of ourselves. We are not really free interiorly. Otherwise, we would be like the Saints and the Angels. But we are sinners and so we need to struggle daily to keep ourselves under control, or under the direction of reason enlightened by faith.
On the one hand we should not be too upset if we have not yet reached the inner freedom and peace of other fortunate persons; the mortified, the perfect and the saintly.
But on the other hand, we should at least want what they have gained and begin making steps to the same end. Freedom of heart means that your heart does not want the things that are not good for you. It loves in an ordered way all the time. It is one thing to punish and chastise the body or the external senses, but it is another thing to mortify the heart.
Mortifying the outward man only, will not suffice to bring us to holiness and interior liberty. This is simply because until the heart itself is converted, softened or changed, man will still love evil under a twisted appearance of good. He is not changed, he is still prone to offend, to go against God’s order of things, until he really changes from inside by a life of solid virtue. It is when he becomes more spiritual and more conformed to the will of God that he becomes inwardly free from the tendency to sin.
God looks more favourably on his prayers because they come more from the heart than from the mouth; “a contrite and humbled heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” (Psalms 50:19). It is a change of heart that
God really wants to bring about in us. Only then can we experience how sweet it is to live in union with Him.
Sadness is nearly always harmful or at least useless to us. It is not helpful and it does not belong in a man who is master of himself through the help of grace. Love always goes outward; it does not turn in on itself, it does not brood or indulge in gloomy binges of resentment, self-pity and coldness towards others. These things are against the nature of love and so we must affirm that the well-ordered kind of love which is required for interior liberty is estranged from these
things. It is not stuck in conflict with self and darkened by twisted ideas of the true good, and therefore it is ordered, at peace and interiorly free. The heart is ordered; it has become the way it was originally meant to be before there was the problem of sin. It has to be this way, or the way God intends if it is to be free. Otherwise, it is ill or wanting in the pureness or genuineness of love.