The Four Degrees of Prayer

"Mental prayer which, for Saint Teresa, is the essential exercise of the spiritual life, must normally develop with it until it reaches perfection. A classification according to degree of perfection must then be possible and appears to be necessary; yet, how evaluate the perfection of prayer? On what bases establish this classification? Saint Teresa remains faithful to her definition in which she underlined friendly commerce with God as the essential element of mental prayer. It is on this quality of friendship, that is, on the quality of supernatural love and its effects on virtue and in union, that she is going to judge the perfection of prayer itself.

"In the book of her Life she gave a well known classification of the degrees of prayer, illustrated by the gracious comparison of the four ways of watering a garden:

"'It seems to me that the garden can be watered in four ways: by taking the water from a well, which costs us great labor; or by a water-wheel and buckets, when the water is drawn by a windlass (I have sometimes drawn it in this way: it is less laborious than the other and gives more water); or by a stream or a brook, which waters the ground much better, for it saturates it more thoroughly and there is less need to water it often, so that the gardener's labor is much less; or by heavy rain, when the Lord waters it with no labor of ours, a way incomparably better than any of those which have been described.

"'And now I come to my point, which is the application of these four methods of watering by which the garden is to be kept fertile, for if it has no water it will be ruined. It has seemed possible to me in this way to explain something about the four degrees of prayer to which the Lord, of His goodness, has occasionally brought my soul.'" (Life, xi; Peers, I, 65.)

- P. Marie-Eugene, OCD, from I Want to See God, Volume I