Crucified to Holiness Itself

But perhaps the most decisive mark of the truly crucified man is, that he is crucified even to holiness itself. That is to say, he desires God only, seeks God only, is satisfied and can be satisfied with God only, in distinction from those truly spiritual gifts or graces, which God by his Holy Spirit imparts to the soul.

The truly devout man, for instance, exercises penitence, submission, gratitude, forgiveness, and other Christian graces on their appropriate occasions; and he has great reason to be thankful to God that he is enabled to do it. But if in some moment of inward forgetfulness, of religious “irrecollection,” if we may so term it, he turns the thoughts and the interests of his heart from God to the graces which God gives, and begins to take complacency in his religious exercises, and to be happy in his holiness and to love his holiness, instead of a fixed and exclusive love for the Author of his holiness, I think we may confidently say, he is no longer a man dead to self, no longer in the proper sense of the terms a man inwardly crucified. 

“The purer our gifts are,” says Fenelon, “the more jealous God is of our appropriating or directing them to ourselves. The most eminent graces are the most deadly poisons, if we rest in them and regard them with complacency. It is the sin of the fallen angels. They only turned to themselves, and regarded their state with complacency. At that instant they fell from heaven, and became the enemies of God.”

— from The Life of Faith, Part 2, Chapter 12.