Treatise on the Love of God

OF THE WOUND OF LOVE.

All these terms of love are drawn from the resemblance there is between the affections of the mind and the passions of the body. Grief, fear, hope, hatred, and the rest of the affections of the soul, only enter the heart when love draws them after it. We do not hate evil except because it is contrary to the good which we love: we fear future evil because it will deprive us of the good we love. Though an evil be extreme yet we never hate it except in so far as we love the good to which it is opposed. He who does not much love the commonwealth is not much troubled to see it ruined: he who scarcely loves God, scarcely also hates sin. Love is the first, yea the principle and origin, of all the passions, and therefore it is love that first enters the heart; and because it penetrates and pierces down to the very bottom of the will where its seat is, we say it wounds the heart. "It is sharp," says the apostle of France,³⁰⁴ "and enters into the spirit most deeply." The other affections enter indeed, but by the agency of love, for it is this which piercing the heart makes a passage for them. It is only the point of the dart that wounds, the rest only increases the wound and the pain.

Now, if it wound, it consequently gives pain. Pomegranates, by their vermilion colour, by the multitude of their seeds, so close set and ranked, and by their fair crowns, vividly represent, as S. Gregory says, most holy charity, all red by reason of its ardour towards God, loaded with all the variety of virtues, and alone bearing away the crown of eternal rewards: but the juice of pomegranates, which as we know is so agreeable both to the healthy and to the sick, is so mingled of sweet and sour that one can hardly discern whether it delights the taste more because it has a sweet tartness or because it has a tart sweetness. Verily, Theotimus, love is thus bitter-sweet, and while we live in this world it never has a sweetness perfectly sweet, because it is not perfect, nor ever purely satiated and satisfied: and yet it fails not to be of very agreeable taste, its tartness correcting the lusciousness of its sweetness, as its sweetness heightens the relish of its tartness. But how can this be? You shall see a young man enter into a company, free, hearty, and in the best of spirits, who, being off his guard, feels, before he goes away, that love, making use of the glances, the gestures, the words, yea even of the hair of a silly and weak creature, as of so many darts, has smitten and wounded his poor heart, so that there he is, all sad, gloomy and depressed. Why I pray you is he sad? Without doubt because he is wounded. And what has wounded him? Love. But love being the child of complacency, how can it wound and give pain? Sometimes the beloved object is absent, and then, my dear Theotimus, love wounds the heart by the desire which it excites; this it is which, being unable to satiate itself, grievously torments the spirit.

If a bee had stung a child, it were to poor purpose to say to him: Ah! my child, the bee that stung you is the very same that makes the honey you are so fond of. For he might say: it is true, that its honey is very pleasant to my taste, but its sting is very painful, and while its sting remains in my cheek I cannot be at peace, and do you not see that my face is all swollen with it? Theotimus, love is indeed a complacency, and consequently very delightful, provided that it does not leave in our heart the sting of desire; for when it leaves this, it leaves therewith a great pain. True it is this pain proceeds from love, and therefore is a loveable and beloved pain. Hear the painful yet love-full ejaculations of a royal lover. My soul hath thirsted after the strong living God; when shall I come and appear before the face of God? My tears have been my bread day and night, whilst it is said to me daily: where is thy God?³⁰⁵ And the sacred Sulamitess, wholly steeped in her dolorous loves, speaking to the daughters of Jerusalem: Ah! says she, I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, that you tell him that I languish with love.³⁰⁶ Hope that is deferred afflicteth the soul.³⁰⁷

Now the painful wounds of love are of many sorts. 1. The first strokes we receive from love are called wounds, because the heart which appeared sound, entire and all its own before it loved, being struck with love begins to separate and divide itself from itself, to give itself to the beloved object. Now this separation cannot be made without pain, seeing that pain is nothing but the division of living things which belong to one another. 2. Desire incessantly stings and wounds the heart in which it is, as we have said. 3. But, Theotimus, speaking of heavenly love, there is in the practice of it a kind of wound given by God himself to the soul which he would highly perfect. For he gives her admirable sentiments of and incomparable attractions for his sovereign goodness, as if pressing and soliciting her to love him; and then she forcibly lifts herself up as if to soar higher towards her divine object; but stopping short, because she cannot love as much as she desires:—O God! she feels a pain which has no equal. At the same time that she is powerfully drawn to fly towards her dear well-beloved, she is also powerfully kept back and cannot fly, being chained to the base miseries of this mortal life and of her own powerlessness: she desires the wings of a dove that she may fly away and be at rest,³⁰⁸ and she finds not. There then she is, rudely tormented between the violence of her desires and her own powerlessness. Unhappy man that I am, said one of those who had experienced this torture, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?³⁰⁹ In this case, if you notice, Theotimus, it is not the desire of a thing absent that wounds the heart, for the soul feels that her God is present; he has already led her into his wine-cellar, he has planted upon her heart the banner of love: but still, though already he sees her wholly his, he urges her, and from time to time casts a thousand thousand darts of his love, showing her in new ways, how much more he is lovable than loved. And she, who has not so much force to love as love to force herself, seeing her forces so weak in respect of the desire she has to love worthily him whom no force of love can love enough,—Ah! she feels herself tortured with an incomparable pain; for, as many efforts as she makes to fly higher in her desiring love, so many thrills of pain does she receive.

This heart in love with its God, desiring infinitely to love, sees notwithstanding that it can neither love nor desire sufficiently. And this desire which cannot come to effect is as a dart in the side of a noble spirit; yet the pain which proceeds from it is welcome, because whosoever desires earnestly to love, loves also earnestly to desire, and would esteem himself the most miserable man in the universe, if he did not continually desire to love that which is so sovereignly worthy of love. Desiring to love, he receives pain; but loving to desire, he receives sweetness.

304. S. Denis (Tr.)

305. Ps. xli. 3.

306. Cant. v. 8.

307. Prov. xiii. 12.

308. Ps. liv. 7.

309. Rom. vii. 24.