Treatise on the Love of God

This soul then being thus mollified, softened and almost melted away in this love-full pain, was thereby extremely disposed to receive the impressions and marks of the love and pain of his sovereign lover; for his memory was wholly steeped in the remembrance of this divine love, his imagination forcibly applied to represent unto himself the wounds and livid bruises which his eyes then saw so perfectly expressed in the picture before him; the understanding received those most vivid images which the imagination furnished to it; and, finally, love employed all the forces of the will to enter into and conform itself to the passion of her well-beloved; whence without doubt the soul found herself transformed into a second crucified. Now the soul, as the form and mistress of the body, exercising her authority over it, impressed the pains of the wounds with which she was struck, on the parts corresponding to those wherein her beloved had endured them. Love is admirable in sharpening the imagination to penetrate to the exterior. In Laban's ewes the imagination had a corporal effect upon the lambs, and the imagination of human mothers affects their children. A strong imagination makes a man become grey in one night, and disturbs his health and all his humours. Love then drove the interior torment of this great lover S. Francis to the exterior, and wounded the body with the same dart of pain with which it had wounded the heart; but love being within could not well make the holes in the flesh without, and therefore the burning seraph coming to its help, darted rays of so penetrating a light, that it really made in the flesh the exterior wounds of the crucified, which love had imprinted interiorly in the soul. So the seraph seeing that Isaias did not dare to speak, because he perceived his lips defiled, came in the name of God to touch and purify his lips with a burning coal taken from off the altar, seconding in this sort his desire. The myrrh tree brings forth its gum and first liquor by way of sweat and transpiration, but that it may let out all its juice, it must be helped by incision. In the same way the divine love of S. Francis appeared in his whole life, after the manner of a sweating, for in all his actions he showed nothing but this sacred affection; but to make the incomparable abundance of it plainly appear, the divine seraph came to make the incision and wounds. And to the end it might be known that these wounds were wounds of Heaven's love, they were made not with the steel, but with rays of light. O true God! Theotimus, what amorous dolours and dolorous loves! For not only at that instant, but also his whole life after, this poor Saint went pining and languishing, as sick with very love.

The Blessed (S.) Philip Neri, at fourscore years of age, had such an inflammation of heart through divine love, that the heat making the ribs give way to it, greatly enlarged them, and broke the fourth and fifth, that the heart might receive air and be refreshed. B. (S.) Stanislaus Kotska, a youth of fourteen years, was so assaulted by the love of his Saviour that he often fainted away and fell down, and he was constrained to apply linen steeped in cold water to his breast, to moderate the violence of the burning which he felt.

To conclude, Theotimus, how do you think that a soul which has once tasted divine consolations at all freely, can live in this world so full of miseries, without an almost continual pain and languishing? That great man of God, Francis Xavier, was often heard lifting up his voice to Heaven, when he thought himself all alone, in this sort: Ah! my God, do not, for pity, do not bear me down with so great abundance of consolations; or if through thy infinite goodness it please thee to make me so abound in delights, draw me then into Paradise; for he who has once tasted thy sweetness must necessarily live in bitterness while he does not enjoy thee. And therefore when God has somewhat largely bestowed his heavenly sweetnesses upon a soul, and afterwards withdraws them, he wounds her by this privation, and she afterwards is left pining; sighing out with David: My soul hath thirsted after the strong living God; when shall I come and appear before the face of God?³¹⁶ And with the great Apostle: Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?³¹⁷

316. Ps. xli. 3.

317. Rom. vii. 24.