Jean-Pierre de Caussade, an eighteenth-century French Jesuittheologian, provided a seminal study of God’s will in Abandonment to Divine Providence. Caussade writes that to sense God in each present moment that connects the past and future moments sets the mind to work to know that each moment is an entrance into a knowledge and awareness of God, by which to act accordingly.

Caussade was born but a century after Michel de Montaigne; interestingly, the philosophy of the presence of divine providence suggested in Montaigne’s Essays is found in Caussade’s thought; or rather, Montaigne’s Essays reflect Catholic teachings on providence that Caussade elucidates so brilliantly. In Montaigne’s last essay, “Of Experience,” he anticipates Caussade when he has a person worry that they have not done great deeds, to which Montaigne responds, “What, have you not lived?” The act of living, and the act of living appropriately according to God’s will, is the great task of life, Montaigne argued, as did Caussade.

It is easy today, at a time of “influencers” in social media, of people who hunger for instant fame and fortune, to feel oppressed by time and its passing, that life is going by without any great, noteworthy accomplishments that are news headlines. The love for the future, when a person cannot wait for the moments to pass to get to another time, another day, another week, which Montaigne argued was a disease in his time, as it is in ours, prevents people from actually experiencing the present moment. Each moment is a gift from God and should be savored—one doesn’t know how many such moments one has in life, how many are left.

Caussade argues that each moment is an entrance into the divine, into God’s singular moment. How? Imagine the following: To accept God’s will, accept the presence of God’s will in each and every moment, is to accept the moment, and to accept is to find peace. If each moment is up to me then I resist because of my uncertainty and powerlessness. But if each moment is God’s will, and I don’t resist it but accept it, then the moment, now, as well as what will happen, as well as what has happened, is not up to me. To surrender to God’s will is to surrender to the moment, and to embrace the infinite and the eternal. Caussade teaches that God’s will and my will can be simultaneous in operation. God gives us free will to accept His will. I can use free will and resist, but that is when anxiety and confusion take over. To allow fear and anxiety to control in the moment is to resist, to not accept, because of the assumption that my will, or another’s, is in control, and not God. Such is sin.

Jean-Pierre de Caussade was a spiritual director to the Nuns of the Visitation at Nancy, France; he was a priest and college professor and rector, a director of theological study for Jesuits. His surviving works are his short book Abandonment to Divine Providence as well as letters to the Sisters at Nancy. Caussade’s Abandonment reads like a manual for students, for those engaging the religious life as members of a religious order, but his book also is addressed to everyday people living in a secular world. One can sense in reading his work that he experienced the failures and successes that he describes, and that his understanding of divine providence came about from a life of intense devotion and prayer.

Abandonment to divine providence is the “Sacrament of the present moment.” To abandon oneself can be by the active duty of embracing God’s will in the church sacraments, or it can be by the passive duty of accepting in each moment what one discerns as God’s will. It might involve pain and suffering, but in acceptance one is doing one’s duty. Here saintliness is not in great deeds, rather in willingness to accept God’s will. To accept God’s will is to discover an inner contentment; but the exact opposite is true: to deny God’s will is to find the ultimate punishment of anger, frustration, discontent, self-persecution. To be focused on self is “to prevent God from finding an entrance.”

Faith and love are the tools for discovering God’s will, Caussade writes. Faith provides us with the intuitive knowledge of God’s will and of the mysteries of the universe. Those with faith have a different source of information, a different knowledge, from those who examine the world by the senses alone. “To consider God equally good in things that are petty and ordinary as in those that are great and uncommon is to have a faith that is not ordinary, but great and extraordinary.”

God’s will encompasses all things. Caussade provides a fascinating argument that echoes the writings of Pope Francis on “Our Common Home” that “the divine activity permeates the whole universe, it pervades every creature; wherever they are it is there; it goes before them, with them, and it follows them; all they have to do is to let the waves bear them on.” The key to life (which all creatures know, but do humans?) is “to submit with faith and love to the designs of Providence in all those things that have to be done or suffered without going out of their way to seek occasions for themselves.” To do God’s will, no matter if animal or human, is to be sanctified.

Pope Francis could have easily written these words from Abandonment to Divine Providence: “All creatures that exist are in the hands of God.” “The action of the creature is a veil which covers the profound mysteries of the divine operation.” “If only we had faith we should show good-will to all creatures; we should cherish them and be interiorly grateful to them as serving, by God’s will, for our perfection.”

Another welcome and astonishing argument that Caussade provides regards history. His arguments reflect the writings of Pope Benedict XVI. “The sacred Scripture,” Caussade writes, “is the mysterious utterance of a God yet more mysterious and the events of the world are the obscure language of this same hidden and unknown God.” As a professor of history, I particularly cherish the arguments that Caussade makes that just as nature is “Elder Scripture, writ by God’s own hand” (Edward ), likewise human history is a scripture, a tale of God’s will, and it is wrong for us to neglect this way to interpret the past, that is, to assign all events in history to human will rather than to God’s will. “All the events which form the world’s history show forth these divine attributes,” Caussade writes; “all teach the same adorable word.”

Caussade also does not ignore the role of the Logos in time. For He through Whom all things exist has a continuous role in the history of the universe. As Caussade writes, “That which God does at each moment is a divine thought expressed by a created thing, therefore all those things by which He intimates His will to us are so many names and words by which He makes known His wishes.” How the Logos, the Word, acts in time is a mystery that far surpasses human understanding, even awareness. Caussade counsels us to accept that “The divine action beholds in the Word the idea after which you ought to be formed and this example is always before it.”

An important argument in Abandonment to Divine Providence is that those are blessed who abide by God’s will in whatever role in life God assigns: “The more assiduously do they apply themselves to their little work, so simple, so hidden, so secret, and outwardly contemptible, the more does God embroider and embellish it with brilliant colors. On the surface of this simple canvas of love and obedience His hand traces the most beautiful design, the most delicate, and intricate patterns, the most divine figures.” There is beauty in every task. There is wonder in every job. Disappointment, being laid off, failing to get a promotion, finding one’s cherished dream hitting a wall: these are all part of God’s will. Caussade argues that to question such disappointments, or to condemn God for unexpected tragedies, is to blaspheme.

The ultimate teaching of Jean-Pierre de Caussade is love. To accept God’s will in the moment is to accept God’s love, to decide to live in that moment in love. Faith allows us to recognize the love God has for us in each moment. There is “the real presence of divine love in all creatures, and in all the events of life.”

After reading Abandonment to Divine Providence, this is my mantra: “The divine will is a deep abyss of which the present moment is the entrance.”

(Abandonment to Divine Providence, trans. E. J. Strickland (Tan Books, 2010).)