The twelve fruits of invoking the Holy Name of Jesus
St Bernardine of Siena sets out four special powers of the invocation of the Holy Name, for Beginners, Proficients and the Perfect.
St Bernardine of Siena sets out four special powers of the invocation of the Holy Name, for Beginners, Proficients and the Perfect.
Editor’s Notes
In this passage, Fr. Coleridge tells us:
How St Bernardine of Siena sets forth the Holy Name as a living power for Catholics at all stages of the spiritual life.
That he orders devotion with sobriety and doctrine, showing grace working through faith, perseverance, and rightly ordered prayer.
Why the Name of Jesus restores sinners, steadies the soul in trial, fructifies preaching, and crowns the saints in glory.
He shows us that devotion to the Holy Name is not sentiment, but a disciplined path by which Christ forms, sustains, and consummates the whole Christian life.
For more context, see Part I and Part 5.
The Imposition of the Holy Name
The Thirty Years – Our Lord’s Infancy & Hidden Life
Chapter VII
St. Luke ii. 21; Vita Vite Nostræ, § 10.
Burns and Oates, London 1885 (1915 edition).
Headings and some line breaks added.
St Bernardine of Siena – His treatise on the Holy Name
The devout St. Bernardine of Siena, it is well known, went about Italy in his career as apostolic preacher, using the devotion to this Holy Name as one of his most efficacious means for the pacification and reformation of the people. He carried it inscribed on a tablet, and spoke of it everywhere.
We find among his works a long and elaborate sermon on the glories of this Holy Name, which might well be used as an epitome of all its wonderful effects. It is a treatise rather than a sermon.1
He divides it, as is usual with him, into three articles, each of which contains four chapters. Each chapter is devoted to one “ray” of the glory of the name of Jesus. The first four chapters are for beginners, the second four for the proficient, and the third four for the perfect.
The four virtues of the Holy Name for the first kind of persons are, that it shows to sinners the immense mercifulness of God, that it enables a devout man to gain a victory in every conflict, whether with the devil, the flesh, or the world, that it has the power of healing sickness when used with the requisite circumstances, and that it fills with joy and exultation those who are in any adversity.
The First Part, for Beginners
To illustrate the first of these points, St. Bernardine lays down that to invoke the Holy Name with faith and true contrition will secure remission of sins. He quotes the words of St. Peter, in the Acts, “That through His Name all receive remission of sin, who believe in Him,”2 and of St. John, “Your sins are forgiven you for His Name’s sake,”3 and of St. Peter on another occasion, “There is no other name under heaven given to men whereby we must be saved.”4
But he says the Holy Name must be invoked in a perfect and devout heart, and when this is done, the external invocation increases salvation to the speaker and the hearers, even though there be already contrition in the heart. He recommends the constant use of the Holy Name for this.
The second point he illustrates by an anecdote of St. Bernard casting out a devil in our Lord’s name, and by a beautiful passage from the work of the same Saint on the Canticles.5
“Is any one of us sad? Let Jesus come into his heart, and thence mount up into his mouth, and behold, when the light of that Name arises, it scatters all the cloud and makes all calm. Does any one lose courage, and run in despair to the halter, does he not, if he call on this Name of life, at once breathe again unto life…
“There is nothing that so well restrains the impetus of anger, that calms the swelling of pride, that heals the wound of envy, that restrains the flood of luxury, that extinguishes the flame of lust. For when I name Jesus, I set before myself One Who is meek and humble of Heart, kind, temperate, chaste, merciful, conspicuous, in short, for all that is noble and holy.”
In the third place, St. Bernardine tells us that the Holy Name has the power, under certain circumstances, of restoring bodily health and the like. Concupiscence and sickness remain in our nature as the effects of original sin, after the guilt of that and any other sin may have been removed. But these are the effects of sin, and so it falls under the power of our Redeemer to cancel them, if it so please Him. Therefore we may have recourse to this Name of might under such afflictions, and the experience of the Church shows that it can give light to the blind, hearing to the deaf, the use of their limbs to the lame, and of their tongue to the dumb, that it can restore life to the dead, and drive out the devils from the possessed.
We are not to despise the natural remedies of disease, but we may also have recourse to the invocation of the Holy Name. The Church prayed to God at the time of the beginning of the persecution of the Apostles by the Jews, that He would “stretch forth His hand to signs and cures and wonders, to be done by the name of Thy Holy Son Jesus.”6
St. Bernardine tells us that this is often the effect of its pious invocation, though he adds that prayer to be made efficaciously must have four conditions. It must be made for ourselves, it must be made for things in order to salvation, it must be made with confidence, humility, and fervour, and it must be made with perseverance. The fourth power of the Holy Name was said to be that it fills those who are devout to it with joy and exultation under any adversity.
Thus we find that the Apostles, on the occasion just now named, after they had been scourged by order of the chief priests, went forth from “the presence of the Council, rejoicing that they were accounted worthy to suffer reproach for the name of Jesus.” And he illustrates the truth from the story of St. Agatha and other martyrs.
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