5 Conditions for inner peace according to a Spanish mystic

We are all made to experience tranquility of the soul, a state that presupposes all the virtues, says the Spanish mystic St. Miguel de los Santos, born in Vic in 1591. In his Breve tratado de la tranquilidad del alma (“Brief treatise on tranquility of the soul”), he presents five conditions for someone to attain inner peace.

Catalan philosopher Abel Miró i Comas, a translator of St. Miguel’s work, explained them to us.

Those who are in a state of tranquillity of the soul must be detached from all creatures, senses, passions, and feelings.

It’s not a question of annihilating the powers and potential that God has placed in human beings, but of using them well, in accordance with the divine plan, Miró explains to Aleteia.

St. Miguel de los Santos writes that in order to achieve peace of mind, we must dispense with all the sensory pleasures that prevent us from concentrating on our ultimate goal.

We must empty ourselves in a way so that we can be filled by God. And in a sense we will be sustained because God makes up for what we have previously emptied (the knowledge or love of creatures is exchanged for another kind of knowledge or love).

“But what if God suddenly became silent?” asks Miró. “It would be terrible! And this is what happens.”

On this, St. Miguel de los Santos writes, “It seems that when God wants to fill the emptiness of the soul, he relates to it like a father to his beloved child when he wants to give him something like an apple.”

First he shows it to them and shows that he wants to give it to them, continues the Trinitarian mystic. But when the child reaches out to take it, they feel deceived. Because at the very moment they reach out, the Father hides the apple.

God tends to behave in the same way with the souls whose emptiness he wants to fill, says St. Miguel de los Santos, sharing his personal experience with God. The mystic explains that God often makes souls that have been emptied of affections, of passions, of all distraction, somehow glimpse the beauty of eternal life.

“But suddenly God becomes silent so that the soul is left facing its own emptiness,” continues Miró, explaining St. Miguel de los Santos’ teachings.

“Why would the father amuse himself like that with the child?” he asks in the face of what seems like an existential drama. And he answers, “Because the emptiness of God increases the desire for fullness, the absence of God is a stimulus for the love of God.”

St. Miguel de los Santos interprets this “sensitive eagerness,” these “great sorrow and extreme difficulties,” this “inner torment,” which drove him to the point of screaming and jumping up and down, as an opportunity to increase his love of God.

When people saw these outward signs in this mystic, some thought he was in a “mystical rapture.” But St. Miguel de los Santos clarifies that he was actually “screaming out of emptiness.”

He integrated this intense experience of emptiness into his mystical life as a phase (not as the end, as existentialists like Samuel Becket would consider it) of a spiritual process.

St. Miguel de los Santos explains that tranquillity of the soul entails “being hated by others” and being judged negatively. According to the mystic, those who have attained serenity are not popular people, who are liked by the world.

And he recalls the beatitude of Jesus: “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” (Matthew 5:11).

St. Miguel de los Santos says that he experiences very little joy through his senses, that he has no kind of sensual desire. And he complements this with the evangelical quote, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 16:25).

It seems like a paradox: it’s dangerous for us to love our own soul because by loving doing so we can lose it.

So, would we have to lose our soul to find it? Abel Miró makes it clear that “if you’re afraid of losing your soul, it means you’re already attached to it.”

One of the saints who inspires St. Miguel de los Santos is St. Augustine of Hippo, who distinguishes between two kinds of love relating to the soul itself: a proper kind and a disordered kind.

Proper love refers to the higher aspects of the soul, to the most noble side, and disordered love to the least valuable, that which has to do with our feelings and senses, with corporeal life.

And it’s not that we shouldn’t love our own body, but rather that “one should love the body no more than the soul,” explains Miró.

“Those who love themselves in this way will lose themselves, because they don’t love the noblest part of themselves; to love oneself well means to love the highest part of one's soul,” he points out.

“Losing one's soul to Christ means subjecting everything that has to do with the body and the senses to the spiritual dimension of man, putting the spiritual dimension first and subordinating the rest to it,“ he adds, warning against confusing the means with the ends.

“This means experiencing aridity in our feelings and senses,” he concludes, “that the sensual passions don’t distract us from spiritual contemplation.”

In this sense, Miró emphasizes that faith that seeks God only in order to receive spiritual consolations would be very weak. “Clinging to these good feelings may not allow for maturation,” he adds. ”Sometimes the passage through the desert helps one to mature.”

St. Miguel de los Santos explains that it’s about “feeling inhabited by Christ,” that is to say, experiencing that the one who lives in us is not ourselves but God.

In his treatise, after explaining the requirements, St. Miguel de los Santos simply summarizes what the tranquility of the soul means: wanting what God wants you to want. Thus, inner peace is achieved by “not placing impediments in the way of God's will,” by being “docile instruments to the motions that God gives the soul.”

Consequently, “the most perfect activity that man can carry out in his life is maximum passivity, maximum openness to divine motions,” Miró summarizes.

“Everything that is good in us and in our actions comes from God,“ he adds. “What is exclusively ours is sin and defects. And the more docile we are to divine motions, the more fully we exist, the more our individuality is realized.”

The Brief Treatise on the Tranquility of the Soul wasn’t published during the lifetime of St. Miguel de los Santos. The manuscript remained hidden until it was discovered in the National Library of Madrid in 1914.

For Miró, in a world focused on production and action, the testimony of someone who put contemplation at the center of their life is healthy.

“The evils of this world are mainly the result of an excess of action,” concludes the philosopher. “There’s no shortage of things to do — we do too many things, there’s more of them than we need. Perhaps what the world needs is for us to prostrate ourselves and worship God.”