Our hearts are restless until they rest in you—for Augustine, this most Augustinian of sentences is uttered from a mortal particle of creation towards the infinite power and immortal wisdom that created it. Perhaps, however, there is another, equally or more integrally evangelical way to experience this inner discomposure.

Charles de Foucuald (1858–1916) was a person not without some Augustinianism in him. He was someone who could remark that “no saying in the Gospel [has] made a deeper impression on me and more transformed my life” than the phrase “Whatever you did to one of the least of these you did it to me” (Mt 25:40).[1] And the wording of this most Foucauldian of thoughts is effectively an Augustinianism. The saintly bishop of Hippo himself had called the Parable of the Sheep and Goats (Mt 25:31–46) “the Scripture passage that has made the deepest impression on me.”[2] But if that is really so, the restless heart of the author of the Confessions must have been expressed practically in a slightly different form—because the text itself is rather more interested in a vaguely Platonist-adjacent ascension into the realm of the Beyond-Time and the Uncreated.

For Charles, the restlessness of his heart is directly connected to the deepest impression of the dominical saying: “Whatever you did to one of the least of these you did it to me” (Mt 25:40). This tighter integration is remarkable in the history of the Church. It births a new ascetic and contemplative orientation of life, precisely because it takes the divine revelation so seriously. On this feast day of St. Charles de Foucauld, I want to try to unpack that.

The itinerary

The way I see things, it’s not that Charles was sitting in his monastic cell doing lectio divina and coming up with new inspirations—and heartfelt agitations—all disconnected from reality.

To be sure, Charles was an avid reader and meditator of the Bible. We find him saying: “You must seek to be thoroughly filled with the Spirit of Jesus in reading and rereading, meditating on his words and examples over and over again without ceasing. May it be to our souls like the steady drop of water on a stone.”[3] Indeed, spiritual reading of the Scriptures is done, he says, “so that we will have the spirit, deeds, words, and thoughts of Jesus before us so that we may one day think, talk, and act as he did.”[4] This is a deep current of Foucauldian thought.

Still, I don’t think it’s enough to look at gathering ideas from the Gospels themselves. For Charles, there was always a lived component. If I may say so—because, as the Trappist writer Thomas Merton points out, the monastics themselves have historically had little idea what to make of Charles de Foucauld and have accordingly been rather silent on him and not particularly forthcoming with insights into his development and authenticity[5]—there is a Benedictine background that has to be mentioned. Even if we surpass it, this is a real part of Charles’ development. In Benedictine monastic communities, Christ was quite typically sought in hospitality to travellers and in the service of sick monks.[6] The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats did not go unacknowledged.

With this Benedictine root system in place, the tree of Charles’ life met an earthquake. One day, while he was living as a Trappist in a monastery in Syria, Br. Charles was sent outside the monastery to give food to needy neighbours. The situation that he encountered jarred his sensibilities: these people outside the monastery were poorer than him. Soon after, he witnessed precursor events of the Armenian genocide.[7] These two confrontations with reality made Charles question his ascetic ideal. All of a sudden, his idea of poverty was uprooted. Given the Benedictine notion of letting the sick and the travellers come to you, this also tore up—at least this is how I see it—Charles’ impression of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. To use a Gustavo Gutiérrez–ism rooted in Luke rather than Matthew, the sense of hospitality moved to those who were sought, rather than merely those found in one’s way.[8]

This is where things get interesting. Charles becomes utterly restless. His heart will not be quieted until he rests—somewhere. The easy fill-in-the-blank for this somewhere is Nazareth. It’s not wrong. Indeed, it’s the way that Charles, at the conscious level of his mind, gives word to his inspiration. He will live poor as Jesus in Nazareth. Very well!

At this point in his late-nineteenth-century life, everything becomes externally as haywire as the internal disquiet of the heart. Charles leaves monasticism for Palestine.[9] After some years, he moves to a French colonial post in North Africa, living a quasi-cloistered life in interaction with local Arabic Muslims.[10] This isn’t doing the job. Inside, there is still a mismatch, a longing, a tension, an unrealized mission, an intuition that lies latent. Charles isn’t satisfied. To cut a long story short, he plunges deeper into the Sahara and, beneath a millennium of conquest, finds the indigenous Tuareg people.

Finally, Charles stops. He finds himself in one situation for a long time. He lives among the Tuareg. But he still has some French colonial paternalism in him. He wants to bring everything to them. It takes another shock to his system to vapourize this mental block. His Tuareg friends—for at this point they become his friends—save him from death. In this, he discovers how much this was a two-way street and how much they are and were evangelizing him.[11] Here we have one of the themes in Charles’ life that undoubtedly touched Pope Francis:

This is why I want a Church which is poor and for the poor. They have much to teach us. Not only do they share in the sensus fidei, but in their difficulties they know the suffering Christ. We need to let ourselves be evangelized by them. The new evangelization is an invitation to acknowledge the saving power at work in their lives and to put them at the centre of the Church’s pilgrim way. We are called to find Christ in them, to lend our voice to their causes, but also to be their friends, to listen to them, to speak for them and to embrace the mysterious wisdom which God wishes to share with us through them.[12]

At any rate, as far as Charles himself is concerned, in these moments, his vocation finally gels. Finding Jesus in others—going all the way to the last heard and being found by Jesus through them—makes sense. He is not bringing the Lord to where he is not already present. That would hardly be an integral way of reading the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. Whatever we do to the least is done to Jesus, right? Isn’t he—well, isn’t he—the Lord of the world and of history?

When the heart stops being restless

To really understand what is happening here at the deepest levels of Charles’ heart, I find it helpful to take a little glance at liberation theology. It is there that we find parallel, even if slightly more active, spiritual impulses. The spiritual orientation of liberation theology is, according to Gustavo Gutiérrez, sourced in Bartolomé de las Casas. He frequently cited this sixteenth-century Spanish Dominican friar who, in the early days of colonization, called the Taino “the scourged Christs of the Indies.”[13] For Gutiérrez, Las Casas foreshadowed liberation theology, suggesting that “a fertile, imaginative challenge lies in ‘contemplation in action’ by which persons may transform history,” and by this Gutiérrez means contemplating “God in the poor […] in solidarity with the struggle of the oppressed and in a faith full of hope and gladness.”[14] In other words, the primacy of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Mt 25:31–46) is again on display. It becomes a bit more active. But there is very much a contemplative element present. And it is this contemplativeness that is the only means to convert the concerned activist’s restlessness into some measure of peace.

Charles de Foucauld can’t stop until he lives with, among, and as people who are really at the end of the earth, socially and politically speaking—buried under centuries of empire, connected to the land in ways that evade empire, community that brings versions of salvation to those who join them outside the boundaries of empire. His question was always how to live out the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. After all, it made the deepest impression on him. The trouble is, as long as he is frantically trying to do things to Jesus, he isn’t most truly or most freely contemplating Jesus, who is the Lord of all.

The first question to be asked is not necessarily the easiest one to answer. According to Gutiérrez, the first question of liberation theology is how to say to the poor, “God loves you.”[15] The same could be said of Foucauldian spirituality. Indeed, when Jacques and Raïssa Maritain emphasize the need to “put contemplation on the roads of the world”—i.e., the need that society has of contemplatives in its midst in order to become more fully itself—they say that this need cannot bypass the “high significance” of Fr. de Foucauld and his spiritual progeniture.[16] Contemplation has to meet the neighbour, especially Christ present in, as John Paul II would put it, “those with whom he himself wished to be identified.”[17] But well—that’s the kicker, isn’t it? Even if Christ is vulnerable, he is not a helpless object. He is the subject par excellence, the animator of the world and of history.

If it were up to me, I’d suggest that Br. Charles’ itinerary is a gradual perception, punctuated here and there by abrupt flashes and sudden shocks, of where the leaven is found and where the action of the world is. Around the time of Charles de Foucauld’s canonization, Pope Francis remarked that he taught him “a way of Christian life that was simpler, less Pelagian, closer to the Lord.”[18] I think this is exactly right. The spirituality that Charles moves into—step by step, following an instinct that is almost impossible to conceptualize nowadays, let alone with the meagre resources at Charles’ own disposal—allows one to more simply be. It teaches us that it is love which “contemplates other persons as ends in themselves” rather than means, as Pope Francis says elsewhere.[19] There is a correct orientation in the moment.

Moreover, there is a correct orientation to history. As Pope Francis also says, it is “only by identifying with the least [that Charles de Foucauld could] come at last to be the brother of all.”[20] This, I think, is key. There is no end to the search unless the search ends here. Charles was never satisfied with a flat picture of finding Jesus everywhere, in all things, and in everyone tout court. Neither will we be. We need more to calm our restless hearts. In this sense, it is no coincidence that this kind of spirituality was discovered among the Tuareg and the Taino—people beyond empire, people outside empire, people even crushed by empire. Those who are the last to be heard, which usually means those so far outside the bounds of empire that their interpretation of land and community is run over roughshod by it, are “not merely one minority among others.”[21] By being the ultimate social periphery, they are the ultimate social centre.

Our restlessness will seem permanent until all our commitments are lined up and the evangelical inspiration is followed all the way to the end. Pope Leo nails this when he tells us that “contact with those who are lowly and powerless is a fundamental way of encountering the Lord of history.”[22] Christ—as God and in suffering people—is history’s prime mover. He will act anyway. Realizing this addresses any residual anxiety to be effective. It opens horizons. Only in the vast unknown of God is there for us enough space.

Our hearts are restless, truly restless, until they rest in you, maker of heaven and earth, who chooses to be identified with the poor, the lowly, the vulnerable—and all the way to the least, which can never be fully believed in the heart without a commitment to those most marginal to empire, its power, its extractive and dispossessive relationship to land, and its domination of communication itself.

[1] Charles de Foucauld, Letter to Louis Massignon (August 1, 1916), in Little Sister Annie of Jesus, Charles de Foucauld: In the Footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth, trans. Little Sisters of Jesus (London: New City, 2004), 87.

[2] Sermon 389.5, in Thomas F. Martin, Our Restless Heart: The Augustinian Tradition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2003), 30.

[3] Charles de Foucauld, Letter to Louis Massignon (n.d.), in Cathy Wright, Saint Charles de Foucauld: His Life and Spirituality (Boston: Pauline, 2022), 127.

[4] Charles de Foucauld, Essential Writings, ed. Robert Ellsberg (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 81.

[5] Merton’s exact accusation is that Charles has “mystified” the monastic orders, such that they “cannot be sure whether he is a traitor to the cause.” See Thomas Merton, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation, ed. William H. Shannon (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), 144.

[6] See Aquinata Böckmann, From the Tools of Good Works to the Heart of Humility: A Commentary on Chapters 4–7 of Benedict’s Rule, trans. Marianna Burkhard and Andrea Westkamp (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2017), 20; idem, Around the Monastic Table—RB 31–42: Growing in Mutual Service and Love, trans. Matilda Handl and Marianna Burkhard (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2009), 130, 146–48; idem, Perspectives on the Rule of Saint Benedict: Expanding Our Hearts in Christ, trans. Matilda Handl and Marianna Burkhard (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2005), 165, 167, 191.

[7] Little Sister Annie, Charles de Foucauld, 53–59; Wright, Saint Charles de Foucauld, 33–37.

[8] Gustavo Gutiérrez, Essential Writings, ed. James B. Nickoloff (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis 1996), 153.

[9] Little Sister Annie, Charles de Foucauld, 53–59; Wright, Saint Charles de Foucauld, 39–43.

[10] Little Sister Annie, Charles de Foucauld, 70–87; Wright, Saint Charles de Foucauld, 45–57.

[11] Little Sister Annie, Charles de Foucauld, 89–112; Wright, Saint Charles de Foucauld, 59–69.

[12] Francis, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (November 24, 2013), 198.

[13] Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias 3.138, in Obras escogidas (Madrid: BAE, 1957–58), 2:511, trans. in Gustavo Gutiérrez, Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ, trans. Robert R. Barr (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003), 62–63. See Gustavo Gutiérrez, The Power of the Poor in History, trans. Robert R. Barr (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004), 21, 197; idem, We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1984), 162.

[14] Gutiérrez, Power of the Poor, 98.

[15] Paul Farmer and Gustavo Gutiérrez, In the Company of the Poor, ed. Michael Griffin and Jennie Weiss Block (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2013), 27, 165, 167.

[16] Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Liturgy and Contemplation, trans. Joseph W. Evans (New York: Kenedy & Sons, 1960), 74–76.

[17] John Paul II, Apostolic Letter Novo Millennio Ineunte (January 6, 2001), 49.

[18] Francis, Address to the Members of the Charles de Foucauld Spiritual Family Association (May 18, 2022).

[19] Francis, Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia (March 19, 2016), 129.

[20] Francis, Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti (October 3, 2020), 287.

[21] Francis, Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ (May 24, 1015), 146.

[22] Leo XIV, Apostolic Exhortation Dilexi Te (October 4, 2025), 5.