Sermons on the Song of Songs

O Christians, learn from Christ how you ought to love Christ. Learn to love Him with a love that is tender, and prudent, and strong. Unless your love of the Lord is tender, you may renounce it under the seductive influence of counter-attractions; unless prudent, you may be misled, and lose it through fraud; unless strong, it will yield to violence. If you wish to avoid being seduced and alienated from Christ, by the glory of this world and the delights of the flesh, you must find in Him Who is the Wisdom of the Father, a relish more alluringly sweet than either of these. If you would not be led astray by the spirit of deceit and error, Christ, Who is truth, must enlighten your minds. And lest you sink and faint under adversity, the same Christ, Who is the Power of God, must strengthen and support you. Let your zeal borrow fervour from charity, light from knowledge, strength from constancy. Let it be ardent, let it be prudent, let it be unconquerable. Let it be equally free from sloth, from temerity, and from timidity. And consider now, if these qualities of love, namely, tenderness, prudence and constancy, be not prescribed in the Law, where God gives the command, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with all thy strength.” It appears to me (although perhaps some of you can discover a more reasonable explanation of this threefold distinction) that love of the heart refers to ardour or tenderness in our affection, and love of the soul to the activity or judgment of our reason; whilst love of our strength may possibly relate to constancy or vigour of mind. Therefore, love the Lord with the full and entire affection of your hearts, that is to say, tenderly; love Him with all the vigilance and circumspection of your understanding, and so prudently; love Him with your whole strength, so that you may be ready even to give your lives for His love. Thus we read in a subsequent verse of this Canticle, “for love is strong as death, jealousy as hard as hell.” My brethren, let the Lord Jesus be sweet and agreeable to your affections, in order that He may serve you as a countercharm against the dangerously attractive delights of the flesh. Let sweetness be overcome by sweetness, as one nail drives out another. But Jesus must also be the guiding Light of your intellects and the Director of your minds, not only that you may avoid the contemptible frauds of heretical deception, and preserve the purity of your faith from its cunning impostures, but also to enable you to walk with caution, guarding yourselves against indiscreet and excessive zeal in your conversation. And your love of Him ought, moreover, to possess strength and constancy, neither yielding to fears nor fainting under labours. Let us, therefore, love Jesus tenderly, wisely, and strongly, as knowing that the love of the heart, which I describe as tender, is sweet indeed, but liable to seduction if unaccompanied by what I call the love of the soul; just as this, without the love of strength, is prudent certainly, but lacking in vigour.

I will prove to you by evident examples the truth of what I have been saying. When the disciples were grieving at the thought of losing their Master, Who had been speaking to them of His Ascension, He said, “If you love Me you would rejoice because I go to the Father.” What! Is it meant that they had no love for Him Whose departure they so bemoaned? No, my brethren, but they loved Him in one way, and in another they did not love Him. I mean, they loved Him tenderly, but not prudently. They loved Him according to the flesh, not according to reason. They loved Him with their whole hearts, yet not with their whole souls. Such love was an obstacle to their perfection. Hence He told them, “It is expedient for you that I go,” whereby He censured, not the tenderness, but the imprudence of their affection. On another occasion, when He was speaking of His approaching death, and Peter, out of love, attempted to hold Him back and was making opposition to His purpose, in the reproof, wherewith, as you remember, He checked the Apostle, what else did He condemn but his imprudence? For what means the expression, “Thou savourest not the things that are of God,” except this, “thou lovest not wisely, following human affection to the disregard of the divine counsel”? And He called Peter Satan, because like an adversary, albeit unwittingly, he was placing obstacles in the way of his own and our salvation, by trying to hinder the Saviour’s death. Hence, after this correction, when Christ was again making allusion to the same sad subject of His Passion, the disciple no longer raised any objection, but rather promised to die with Him. But the promise was not fulfilled, because he had not yet attained to that third degree of charity in which we love with our whole strength. He had been taught to love with his whole soul, but his love was still weak. He had received light enough to know his duty but not, as yet, enough spiritual strength to act up to his knowledge. He was not so much in ignorance of the mystery of Redemption as in terror of the pains of martyrdom. Manifestly, that love was not “strong as death,” which yielded to the fear of death. But it became so afterwards, when Peter, fortified with virtue from above, according to the promise of Jesus Christ, began to love with so much strength, that, when forbidden by the Jewish Council to preach the holy name, he boldly replied, “we ought to obey God rather than men.” Then in truth he loved with all his strength, when he was willing to sacrifice even his life for his love, since “greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” For although he did not then actually lay down his life, he at least exposed it to imminent danger. Therefore, to love with one’s whole heart, with one’s whole soul, and with all one’s strength, is to love with a love that can neither be seduced by pleasure, nor deceived by error, nor overpowered by the violence of any persecution.

And take notice that the love of the heart is, in some sense, carnal, because it tends to turn the hearts of men towards the Flesh of Christ, and towards His example and precepts, given in the flesh. One that is filled with this love is easily affected by every discourse on such subjects. There is nothing he more willingly hears, more attentively reads, more frequently calls to mind, more affectionately ponders. With this love, as with the fat of the “fatted calf,” he enriches his holocausts of prayer. He has before his mind, as he prays, the sacred image of the God-Man, in the manger, or on His mother’s breast, or teaching, or dying, or, rising from the tomb, or ascending into heaven. Every such representation must necessarily urge his soul to the love of virtue, or help to repress the carnal passions, put temptations to flight, and extinguish evil desires. To my thinking, this appears to have been one of the main reasons why the invisible God willed to appear in visible flesh, and as Man to converse amongst men, that, namely. He might draw all the affections of carnal men, who knew how to love only in a carnal manner, first to a salutary love of His own Flesh, and thence lead them gradually to a more spiritual love of His Divinity. Was not the former the degree of charity in which they still stood, who said, “Behold we have left all things and followed Thee”? Surely we must admit that it was the love of Christ’s sensible presence alone that had led them to leave all things, since they could not listen patiently to a single word about His saving Passion and death before the events, nor afterwards witness even the glory of His Ascension without oppressive sorrow. This is what He Himself meant when He said, “Because I have spoken these things to you, sorrow hath filled your heart.” Thus, it was as yet only by the power and the grace of His own presence in the flesh that He had withdrawn them from all other love according to the flesh.