St Louis Marie de Montfort is probably best-known for his devotion to our Blessed Lady. However, his particular spirituality is founded on the mystery of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, and is truly Christocentric. It is a mistake to see it as a purely "Marian" spirituality. What follows is an attempt at a synthesis. For a fuller presentation, see the article Montfort Spirituality in "Jesus Living in Mary - A Handbook of the Spirituality of St Louis Marie de Montfort".

The following abbreviations are used in the text:

LEW	The Love of Eternal Wisdom
TD	True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin
SM	The Secret of Mary
H	Hymns of St Louis Marie de Montfort

A Synthesis of Montfortian Spirituality

The motto of St Louis Marie de Montfort, which is repeated over 150 time in his writings, was "God Alone". This indicates that, for him, God is the absolute value; he alone is the one who gives meaning to all that exists. But it also indicates that He alone suffices: "God alone, and that suffices" (H 28:23). Therefore everything else that he will say about salvation history or our own personal life must be placed in the context of this absoluteness of God. And in fact, when St Louis Marie speaks of the place of human beings in creation, he begins with God and with his plan which he interprets as love. We can discern in the thought of St Louis Marie both a descending movement and an ascending movement.

For St Louis Marie, everything begins with the Father, who wishes only to share his love with his creation, and who creates humankind to be a perfect image of his own beauty and perfection: "his supreme masterpiece, the living image of his beauty and his perfection, the great vessel of his graces, the wonderful treasury of his wealth and in a unique way his representative on earth" (LEW 35).

A descending movement

In this he is simply in line with the Biblical interpretation and with many other great spiritual writers. But what distinguishes him from other writers is the use he makes, in speaking of this love of God and of his desire for humankind, of the "Wisdom literature" of the Old Testament, especially the Book of Wisdom and the Book of Proverbs. Here Wisdom is seen as a person who proclaims: "I was with God and I disposed everything with such perfect precision and such pleasing variety that it was like playing a game to entertain my Father and myself" (Prov. 8:30-31) (quoted in LEW 32). The Christian tradition has identified this person of Wisdom with Jesus Christ, the second person of the Holy Trinity, the Son. And St Louis Marie has made this title of Jesus Christ, the Eternal and Incarnate Wisdom of God, his favourite one. For this Wisdom of God is the one whom the Scriptures portray as loving human beings with an immense love, and desiring their love in return. "This eternal beauty, ever supremely loving, is so intent on winning man's friendship that for this very purpose he has written a book (the Book of Wisdom) in which he describes his own excellence and his desire for man's friendship. This book reads like a letter written by a lover to win the affections of his loved one, for in it he expresses such ardent desires for the heart of man, such tender longings for man's friendship, such loving invitations and promises, that you would say he could not possibly be the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth and at the same time need the friendship of man to be happy"(LEW 65).

The Wisdom of God

But St Louis Marie recognises also that, despite being created to be "the living image of (God's) beauty", human beings have allowed sin to enter the equation: "But, alas, the vessel of the Godhead was shattered into a thousand pieces" (LEW 39). God, however, in his continuing love, proposes to rescue them from the state in which they then find themselves: "I seem to see this lovable Sovereign convoking and assembling the most holy Trinity, a second time, so to speak, for the purpose of rehabilitating man in the state he formerly created him" (LEW 42); and it is Eternal Wisdom who offers himself to bring this about: "Wonder of wonders! With boundless and incomprehensible love, this tender-hearted Lord offers to comply with his justice, to calm the divine anger, to rescue us from the slavery of the devil and from the flames of hell, and to merit for us eternal happiness" (LEW 45). So the Incarnation is decreed, and "Eternal Wisdom" becomes "Wisdom Eternal and Incarnate". The Incarnation is, for St Louis Marie, as for most of the members of the so-called "French School of Spirituality", the core mystery of the loving plan of salvation devised by God. In this mystery is revealed that love of God for human beings, but also the way in which they may receive the fruits of this plan.

Sin and Salvation

The Incarnation, for St Louis Marie, is not just an event (the Son of God becoming human flesh and blood), but a new reality for humankind and indeed for all creation, and a state which encloses all that Jesus Christ did and achieved as man/God. It encompasses the "Paschal mystery" - the death and resurrection of Christ which seals our salvation. He sees the whole life of Christ as the manifestation of his love and the working out of the plan of God. But, in the midst of this whole, he sees the sacrificial death of Christ (the Cross) as "the greatest secret of the King - the greatest mystery of Eternal Wisdom" (LEW 167): "Among all the motives impelling us to love Jesus Christ, the Wisdom incarnate, the strongest, in my opinion, is the sufferings he chose to endure to prove his love for us" (LEW 154). The Cross is not so much the punishment of God wreaked upon Christ in our place, as the final proof of his love for us. And this love is the victory. Although St Louis Marie has little to say of the Resurrection of Christ, for him the Cross is the triumph of love over sin and hatred, of life over death.

The Incarnation

In the mystery of the Incarnation, St Louis Marie sees also the place of Mary. Although he was absolutely free to choose any means he wished to accomplish his plan of salvation ("this great Lord, who is ever independent and self-sufficient, never had and does not now have any absolute need of the Blessed Virgin for the accomplishment of his will and the manifestation of his glory" (TD 14)), God chose to use the free consent of Mary, and her docility to the Holy Spirit, to bring about the Incarnation and therefore the salvation of humankind: "God has decided to begin and accomplish his greatest works through the Blessed Virgin" (TD 15). In giving this free consent, she was, as it were, the representative of human beings of all ages, who in her also gave consent. She was thus constituted a "type" of the Church, the assemblage of all those who would enter into the mystery of salvation. St Louis Marie will develop this theme much further in speaking of how this salvation is to be applied to human beings.

The Place of Mary

This descending movement of God's love, manifested in the Incarnation of Eternal Wisdom for the salvation of human beings, through the co-operation of the Blessed Virgin, and brought to completion in the triumph of the Cross of Christ, is a call from God to us to receive and welcome his loving plan. But it requires our freely-given response.

It is St Louis Marie's contention that our response to God's call in love, must be consonant with the way that this call is manifested to us and put into operation in history. As he puts it, God does not change: "we can safely believe that he will not change his plan in the time to come, for he is God and therefore does not change in his thoughts or his way of acting" (TD 15). As God became a human being in the Incarnation of his Son, we are called to "put on the divine nature" by being formed into the likeness of Jesus Christ, and so to regain that state of being "the living image of (God's) beauty" (LEW 35). In other words we are to become conformed to the Eternal Wisdom of God, manifested in Jesus Christ, or, as he puts it, we are called to "acquire and preserve divine Wisdom" (cf. LEW 203).

An ascending movement

It is in this acquisition of divine Wisdom that our happiness lies. In LEW, St Louis Marie examines other forms of wisdom (means of achieving happiness), and rejects them all as being ineffective and unworthy of the sublime call of the human being (cf. LEW ch. 7). It is only in responding in love to the love of God, and thereby becoming the likeness of Jesus Christ, that we can achieve our end. But to love Christ, the Eternal and Incarnate Wisdom, we must first know him: "Can we love deeply someone we know only vaguely? ....To know Jesus Christ incarnate Wisdom, is to know all we need. To presume to know everything and not know him is to know nothing at all" (LEW 8,11). So we are first called to know Christ, the Wisdom of God, then to love what we have come to know, and finally to be formed into his likeness. Along with many others in the Church, St Louis Marie calls this latter process Consecration, and it is a process which begins with Baptism, by which we are "incorporated" into Christ, to use St Paul's terminology.

The search for Wisdom

Jesus Christ is the end to which we tend. And there can be no other end in view in all our striving: "Jesus, our Saviour, true God and true man must be the ultimate end of all our other devotions; otherwise they would be false and misleading. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and end of everything. ... For in him alone dwells the entire fullness of the divinity and the complete fullness of grace, virtue and perfection. In him alone we have been blessed with every spiritual blessing; he is the only teacher from whom we must learn; the only Lord on whom we should depend; the only Head to whom we should be united and the only model that we should imitate" (TD 60-61). Jesus Christ is the only Lord, and his reign in the world is our only goal.

Jesus the only Saviour

But again, St Louis Marie says, we must follow the path chosen by God himself, and that path, in the descent of his love, involved Mary; so, in our ascent to God, we ought to follow the same way: "It was through the Blessed Virgin Mary that Jesus came into the world, and it is also through her that he must reign in the world" (TD 1). It has to be noted, however, that Mary is only the path, she is not the end towards which we travel, which is the reign of Jesus Christ, the kingdom of God. Devotion to Mary is a means to the end, and indeed only one among several means to the acquisition of divine Wisdom, although "the greatest means of all, and the most wonderful of all secrets for obtaining and preserving divine Wisdom" LEW 203), precisely because she was the means chosen by God for bringing into being his plan of love.

The way of Mary

If devotion to Mary is to be "the greatest means of all... for obtaining and preserving divine Wisdom", it has to be "genuine" or "true" devotion, and not something misleading, shallow or unreal. St Louis Marie will agree that there are many forms of devotion to Mary which satisfy the criteria for "true devotion", but among them all he claims there is one which is "a smooth, short, perfect and sure way to attaining union with our Lord" (TD 152). It consists in a total dedication of oneself to Mary, in order to be totally dedicated to Christ. The end then is dedication to Christ (and not to Mary), but he insists that this is the surest way to achieve that dedication, which he sees as the same dedication of oneself which takes place at Baptism, but now in a more personal and conscious manner. His reason for his emphasis on Mary as the path to this, is that (a) Mary was the path chosen by God to bring his love to us, and (b) that Mary is the one who, above all others, has achieved the fullness of dedication to God in her Son, and is therefore a model for us. Once again, she is the "type" of the Church, of the assemblage of the disciples of Christ, since she is the perfect disciple and imitator of her Son.

The form of devotion to Mary (and through her to Christ) which he is proposing, he sometimes calls "consecration", while accepting that the strictest meaning of "consecration" can only be applied to our relationship to God; and indeed he says that he prefers to speak always of Consecration to Christ, Eternal and Incarnate Wisdom, through the hands of Mary. But he provides other forms of words which could just as well be used today. The same can be said of the name "Holy Slavery" which was sometimes applied in his own day to this devotion, and which to our ears can sound offensive or off-putting.

"Perfect" devotion to Mary - Total Consecration

Knowing full well that such a form of devotion would not appeal to everyone at first glance, St Louis Marie sees it as a "secret" - i.e. as something not generally recognised, which requires deeper examination to see its value, but which when accepted will yield the richest results. This is why he refers to Mary herself as a "secret": "Happy, indeed sublimely happy, is the person to whom the Holy Spirit reveals the secret of Mary, thus imparting to him true knowledge of her" (SM 20).

The "Secret" of Mary

Another "secret" which he insists upon for true conformity to Christ, or true acquisition of divine Wisdom, is that of "the Cross". Just as the Cross of Christ was the greatest triumph of divine Wisdom, and the greatest manifestation of the love of God for us, so our acceptance of the cross in our own lives (i.e. of the suffering which is inevitable in trying to be faithful to our commitment to God, and of other forms of suffering which can have a purifying effect on our consciousness and our intentions - e.g. "mortification"), is a sure means of entering into the movement of love which brings us back to God. The Cross is "the sign, the emblem and the weapon of his faithful people" (LEW 173), and "mortification" is included as one of the essential means for acquiring divine Wisdom (cf. LEW ch. 16). St Louis Marie never sees the cross in a negative light, but always as the consequence and concomitant of love, whether in the descending movement of God's love for us, or in the ascending movement of our return to Him.

Finally, Montfortian spirituality could be summed up in the formula: "To God Alone, by Christ Wisdom, in the Spirit, in communion with Mary, for the reign of God."

The Cross

See also