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
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.
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
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,
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