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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.(1)
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.
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
crucifled, 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?(2) And with the great
Apostle: Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me
from the body of this death?(3)
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