Treatise on the Love of God

OF THE AFFECTIONATE LANGUISHING OF THE HEART WOUNDED WITH LOVE.

It is a thing very well known that human love not only wounds the heart, but even makes the body sick unto death; because, as the passion and temperament of the body have great power to incline the soul and draw her after it, so the affections of the soul have great force to stir the humours and change the qualities of the body. But besides this, love when it is violent bears away the soul to the thing beloved with such impetuosity, and so strongly possesses her, that she fails in all her other operations, be they sensitive or intellectual; so that to feed and second this love, the soul seems to abandon all other care, all other exercises, yea and herself too, whence Plato said that love was poor, ragged, naked, barefoot, miserable, houseless, that it lies without doors upon the hard ground, always in want. It is poor, because it makes one quit all for the thing beloved; it is houseless, because it urges the soul to leave her own habitation to follow continually him who is loved; it is miserable, pale, lean and broken down, because it makes one lose sleep, meat and drink; it is naked and barefoot, since it makes one forsake all other affections to embrace those of the thing beloved; it lies without upon the hard ground because it causes the heart that is in love to lie open, making it manifest its passion by sighs, plaints, praises, suspicions, jealousies; it lies along at the gate like a beggar, because it makes the lover perpetually attentive to the eyes and mouth of the thing which it loves, keeping continually to the ears thereof to speak to it and beg favours, wherewith love is never satiated; now the eyes, ears, and mouth are the gates of the soul. In fine the condition of its life is to be ever indigent, for if ever it is satiated it is no longer ardent, nor, consequently, love.

True it is, Theotimus, that Plato spoke thus of the abject, vile and miserable love of worldlings; yet the same properties fail not to be found in heavenly and divine love. For turn your eyes a little upon those first masters of Christian doctrine, I mean those first doctors of holy evangelical love, and mark what one of them who had laboured the most said: Even unto this hour, says he, we both hunger, and thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no fixed abode. And we labour working with our own hands: we are reviled, and we bless: we are persecuted, and we suffer it. We are blasphemed, and we entreat: we are made as the refuse of this world, the off-scouring, and as it were the parings, of all even until now.³¹⁵ As though he had said we are so abject that if the world be a palace we are held the sweepings thereof, if the world be an apple we are its parings. What I pray you had brought them to this state but love? It was love that threw S. Francis naked before his bishop, and made him die naked upon the ground; it was love that made him a beggar all his life; it was love that sent the great S. Francis Xavier poor, needy, ragged, through the Indies and amongst the Japanese; it was love that brought the great Cardinal S. Charles, Archbishop of Milan, to that extremity of poverty amidst the riches which his birth and dignity gave him, that, as says the eloquent orator of Italy, Master (Monseigneur) Pancirola, he was as a dog in his master's house, eating but a bit of bread, drinking but a drop of water, and lying upon a little straw.

Let us hear, I beseech you, the holy Sulamitess, who cries almost in this manner: Although by reason of a thousand consolations which my love gives me I be more fair than the rich tents of my Solomon (I mean more fair than heaven, which is the inanimate pavilion of his royal majesty, while I am his animated pavilion), yet am I all black, rent, dust-worn, and all spoilt by so many wounds and blows given me by the same love. Ah! regard not my hue, for truly I am brown, because my beloved, who is my sun, has darted the rays of his love upon me; rays which by their light illuminate, but which by their heat have made me sunburnt and swarthy, and touching me with their splendour they have bereft me of my colour. The passion of love has made me too happy in giving me a spouse such as is my king, but the same passion which is a mother to me (seeing she alone gave me in marriage, and not my merits), has other children which fiercely assault and trouble me, bringing me to such a languor, that as, on the one hand, I am like to a queen who is beside her king, so on the other hand I am as a vineyard-keeper who, in a miserable hut, looks to a vineyard, and a vineyard that is not his own.

Truly, Theotimus, when the wounds and strokes of love are frequent and strong they put us into a languor, and into love's well-beloved sickness. Who could ever describe the loving languors of the SS. Catharine of Siena and Genoa, or of a S. Angela of Foligno, or S. Christina, or the Blessed Mother (S.) Teresa, a S. Bernard, a S. Francis. And as for this last, his life was nothing but tears, sighs, plaints, languors, wastings, love-trances. But in all this nothing is so wonderful as that admirable communication which the sweet Jesus made him of his loving and precious pains, by the impression of his wounds and stigmata. Theotimus, I have often pondered this wonder, and have made this conception of it. That great servant of God, a man wholly seraphical, beholding the lively picture of his crucified Saviour, represented in a shining seraph, who appeared unto him upon Mount Alverno, was touched beyond what could be imagined, being taken with a sovereign consolation and compassion, in beholding this bright mirror of love, which the angels cannot satisfy themselves in beholding. Ah! he as it were swooned away with sweetness and contentment. But seeing also the lively representation of the marks and wounds of his Saviour crucified, he felt in his soul the merciless sword which transfixed the sacred breast of the virgin-mother on the day of the passion, with as much interior pain as though he had been crucified with his dear Saviour. O God! Theotimus, if the picture of Abraham holding the death-stroke over his dear only-begotten, to sacrifice him, a picture drawn by mortal hand, had the power to touch and make weep the great S. Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, as often as he beheld it,—Ah! how extreme was the tenderness of the great S. Francis when he beheld the picture of our Saviour sacrificing himself upon the cross, a picture which not a mortal hand, but the master-hand of a heavenly seraph, had drawn and traced from its very original, representing to the life and to nature the divine king of angels, bruised, wounded, pierced, broken, crucified.

315. 1 Cor. iv. 11.