Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all Of Errors and of Truth, The Man of Desire and The Ministry of the Spirit Man.

Man explains the world

Saint-Martin's first rule turns the philosophy of his century around. The philosophers of his day explained man by nature, as one thing among things, a body moved by its senses. He teaches the reverse: it is by man that nature must be explained, and not by nature that man must be explained. The human being, with his thought, his will and his longing for the infinite, is the key, and the visible world is a book written in a lesser script, which only one who has first read himself can read.

The first dignity and the fall

In Of Errors and of Truth he sets out, in veiled words, the teaching he had received from Martinez de Pasqually. Man was first a being of light and power, set over the creation as the agent of God, with the task of holding in check a spirit who had fallen before him. He fell in his turn, by turning his will from his principle towards himself, and was clothed in a body of matter, which is at once his prison and his shelter. The visible world was made after that fall, as a place of exile and of remedy, in which every being suffers and waits.

Evil, in this teaching, is no second god. There is one good principle, the source of all; evil has no being of its own and is only the corruption of a will that has turned away. So the fall can be undone: what was lost by a turning of the will is regained by a turning back, and the human being is called to reintegration, the return to the first dignity.

The Repairer

The return is not made alone. Saint-Martin speaks of an active and intelligent cause, sent between God and the fallen human being, and in his later books he names it plainly the Repairer, the Christ, who came down into the world of the fall to open the way back. To follow the Repairer is not to hold an opinion about him but to let the same work of repair be done within oneself.

From the ceremonies to the heart

Among the Elect Cohens the way back was worked by ceremonies: circles, lights and invocations at fixed seasons, meant to bring the operator into contact with good spirits. Saint-Martin learned them and came to distrust them. Such works act on the outward person, he holds, and they open a door to spirits whose nature cannot be known. The true work is inward. The only initiation he preaches and seeks with all the ardour of his soul, he writes, is the one by which a person enters the heart of God and makes the heart of God enter his own, and it needs no rite at all: only prayer, attention and a purified will.

The man of desire

The name of his best loved book comes from the angel's word to Daniel, who is called in the Latin Bible a man of desires. Desire is for him the deepest force in the soul: the human being is not first a thinking thing but a longing, a hunger that nothing finite fills. Prayer is that desire turned towards its source, the breathing of the soul, and the man of desire is the one who keeps it awake, in short and frequent turnings of the heart to God through the day, in silence as much as in words. The meditations of the book ask the reader always to begin from within: to quiet the noise of the senses, to watch over the will, and to wait.

The new man

The aim of the inward way is a birth. Within the old person, shaped by the fall and by the world, a new person can be born, as the Word was born into the world, and The New Man describes that birth as the slow forming of the divine life in the soul: first a seed received in humility, then a growing likeness to the Repairer through trial, patience and charity, until the person thinks, wills and acts from the new centre and no longer from the old.

The ministry of the spirit man

In his last large book Saint-Martin gives the renewed person a task in the world. Nature suffers and waits, as Paul says that the whole creation groans and travails, waiting for the revealing of the children of God. The human being was meant to be the minister of the spirit to nature, the one through whom the divine word comes into the world, and human speech was once a living power of that word. The spirit man is the one in whom the word has begun to live again, and his ministry is to restore it, first in himself, then in those around him, and through them in the creation that waits.

The light of Böhme

In the books of Jakob Böhme he found, late in life, the teacher he had been seeking, and he spoke of him as the greatest light to appear on earth after the one who is the light itself. From Böhme he took the teaching of an eternal nature in God, from whose working all things come, and of the divine Wisdom, the Sophia, who meets the soul that seeks her, and he joined these to his own inward way, the way his later readers called the way of the heart.