The intention of these notes is to sketch an approach to the figure of St. Camillus de Lellis from ‘below’, an analysis that describes his spiritual experience and his holiness not ‘separately from’ or ‘despite’ certain characteristics of his personality but specifically ‘starting with them’, so as to perceive ‘in them’ the unfolding of the action of grace.² Indeed, there has been no absence of people who have sought to render a service to grace by silencing a discourse about man, forgetting that: ‘God chose what is foolish in the world…what is weak in the world…what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not’ (l Cor 1:27-28). This is something that Camillus himself seemed to be aware of for he wrote: ‘this foundation is an evident miracle of God: in particular that should have used me, a great sinner, ignorant, full of so many defects and failings, worthy of a thousand hells…Nobody should be amazed that God worked through such an instrument, given that it is to His greater glory that he does admirable things, using a nobody such as I am’.³

      Probably a prior discussion about the relationship between the action of supernatural grace and individual and social natural structures would be necessary.⁴  What relationship exists between the life of grace and the personality of an individual? In what way does grace enter natural structures? What is changed in nature and what appears that is new? How does a transformation of man by the work of grace take place? Here I will make only a few comments in order to demonstrate the complexity of a problem that certainly cannot be addressed here.

Spiritual theology has pointed in this area to a methodological principle that forms a background to my analysis: Gratia supponit naturam eamque perficit. In man there are natural structures of varying degrees of duration which constitute the pre-condition for the possibility of the spiritual life. In other words, the capacity of man to go beyond himself in order to fulfil himself in gift and in union with God is subject to the ‘law of incarnation’, which, in essential terms, is a ‘law of mediation’. For this reason, one cannot ascend to God directly but only by way of created things, history and, in definitive terms, man himself.⁵ On the basis of this law, one deduces that the life of grace in itself does not interrupt the natural course of things but, instead, respects the laws of physical and psychological development, as well as sociological structures. When God infuses grace He never radically changes the deep tendencies of man: in a certain sense, what man is, is a spiritual person. From this point of view, the common view of things conceals a certain truth: if man is not there, it is difficult for a saint or a spiritual man to be there.

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