LOVE OF GOD.
The Love of God is the perfection of the interior life. It is this
which unites the soul with God, and the more intense it is, the closer
is the union and the greater the consequent perfection. It is the
crown and, consummation of all the virtues. Where it exists we shall,
as a matter of consequence, find all the other virtues; and to
describe it is implicitly to portray them all. Hence, when we shall
have treated of St. Bonaventure's love for God, we shall consider
ourselves absolved from the necessity of discussing his other virtues,
especially as there is such a scarcity of data to lay under
contribution. And even concerning the virtue under consideration, we
must be content with reviewing the Saint's teaching upon it.
[Illustration:
The Papal Envoy presenting St. Bonaventure with the
Cardinal's hat.]
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None realized better than Bonaventure the supremacy of charity.
"Charity alone," he writes, [Footnote 33] "renders us pleasing to God.
Of all the virtues charity alone makes its possessor wealthy and
blessed. If it is absent, in vain are all the other virtues present;
if only it be present, all is present--for whoso possesses it
possesses the Holy Ghost. If virtue constitute the blessed
life--virtue, I should add, is nothing else but the highest love of
God." Since charity is so excellent it must be insisted upon beyond
all the other virtues. Nor ought any kind of charity to be considered
sufficient but that alone by which we love God above all things and
our neighbour as ourselves for God's sake. The Saint insists,
particularly, on the exclusive nature of the love of God. No interest
in creatures and no affection for them should be allowed to interfere
with it. "We should love God," he says, "with the whole heart, the
whole mind and the whole soul. To love anything not in God and for God
is to be wanting in His love." He quotes with approval the remarkable
utterance of St. Augustine: "He loveth Thee less, O Lord! who loveth
anything along with Thee which he does not love because of Thee". He
assigns as the proof of perfect love willingness to lay down one's
life for God: "We love God with our whole soul when for the love of
Jesus Christ we freely expose ourselves to death {76} when
circumstances demand it. To love God with our whole mind is to be ever
mindful of Him, to love Him unceasingly and without forgetfulness or
neglect." Such is the substance of Bonaventure's general teachings on
charity.
[Footnote 33: "Opera Omnia," Tom. VIII, "De Perfectione Vitae," Cap.
VII, p. 124.]
Elsewhere in his treatise, "The Triple Way, or the Fire of Love," he
treats of the subject more in detail. He writes, no doubt, from the
fulness of his heart and describes, the love which dominated his own
soul. He distinguishes [Footnote 34] six stages or degrees of perfect
charity.
[Footnote 34: "Opera Omnia," Tom. VIII, "De Triplici Via," Cap. II,
Sec.4, p. 10.]
The first stage is that of _sweetness_ when the soul learns to "taste
and see how sweet the Lord is".
The second consists in the _yearning_ of the soul for God. Having
become accustomed to spiritual sweetness, it is filled with a longing
which nothing save the perfect possession of that which it loves can
satisfy. And as this cannot be attained to here below the soul is
continually transported out of itself by ecstatic love, and exclaims
in the words of the Psalmist: "As the hart panteth after the fountains
of water, so my soul panteth after Thee, O God!" (Ps. XLI. 2).
The third degree is _satiety_ which succeeds to the yearning just
described. As the soul most vehemently desires God and is lifted up
towards Him, everything that tends to hold it down becomes distasteful
to it. It can find no pleasure in {77} anything save its beloved. It
is like one whose appetite has been fully appeased: if he attempt to
take more food it produces disgust rather than pleasure. Such is the
attitude of the soul at this stage towards all earthly things.
The fourth degree is that of spiritual _inebriation_ which follows
upon the aforesaid satiety. Inebriation consists in this: The soul's
love for God is so great that not only does it reject all comfort and
pleasure but it delights in suffering. For its consolation it embraces
pain, and, as the Apostle did of old, it rejoices in reproaches and
scourgings and torments for the love of its beloved.
The fifth degree of perfect charity is _security_. When the soul
realizes that it loves God so greatly that it would willingly bear
every pain and opprobrium for Him, it conceives such confidence in the
divine assistance that it casts out all fear and assures itself that
it can never by any means be separated from God. The Apostle had
reached this stage when he exclaimed: "Who shall separate me from the
love of Christ? I am certain that neither life nor death can separate
us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
The sixth and last degree is found in true and perfect _tranquillity_,
wherein such peace and quiet reign that the soul appears to lie in
peaceful slumber from which there is nothing to disturb it. For what
can disturb the soul which no movement of passion assails and no pang
of fear disquiets? {78} In such a soul peace and quiet reign. It has
reached the final stage--"His place is in peace". It is impossible to
reach such perfect tranquillity save by perfect charity. When this is
attained it is very easy for a man to fulfil all that appertains to
perfection--whether it be to do or to suffer, to live or to die.
Here indeed we have disclosed to us the dizziest heights of spiritual
perfection. No more intimate union with God can we conceive, and yet
may we not justly conjecture that it is a faithful portrayal of the
personal experience of the Saint himself. The title of _Seraphic_
Doctor bestowed upon Bonaventure is an undeniable tribute to his
all-absorbing love for God. To the minds of his contemporaries,
impregnated with the mysticism and supernatural atmosphere of the
Middle Ages, the spirit that breathed in his writings seemed to find
its parallel only in the lives of those heavenly beings--the
Seraphim--whose existence is depicted as like to a glowing flame of
divine love.
Furthermore, in his utterances concerning the workings of the soul in
prayer, there is what I consider a very striking revelation of the
intensity of Bonaventure's love for God. It is the love of God that
vivifies prayer. Prayer is more or less perfect according to the
charity that reigns in the soul--it reaches its highest perfection
where love is all-pervading. Then we look for raptures and ecstasies
such as marked the lives of the greatest saints. {79} Bonaventure's
reflections on prayer imply this most burning love. The following
utterances, [Footnote 35] of which I give the substance, are clearly
indicative of this.
[Footnote 35: "Opera Omnia," Tom. VIII, "De Perfectione Vitae," Cap.
V, _passim_.]
"In prayer we must enter with the Beloved into the chamber of the
heart and there remain alone with Him. We must forget all external
things, and with our whole heart and all our mind and all our
affections and desires endeavour to lift our souls up to God. We
should endeavour by the ardour of our devotion to mount higher and
higher until we enter even into the heavenly court, and there with the
eyes of the soul having caught sight of our Beloved, and having tasted
how sweet the Lord is, we should rush into His embrace, kissing Him
with the lips of tenderest devotion. Thus are we carried out of
ourselves, rapt up to Heaven, and as it were, transformed into
Christ." The Saint proceeds to explain how the ecstatic state is
reached. "It sometimes happens," he says, "that the mind is rapt out
of itself when we are so inflamed with heavenly desires that
everything earthly becomes distasteful, and the fire of divine love
burns beyond measure, so that the soul melts like wax, and is
dissolved--ascending up before the throne of God like the fumes of
fragrant incense. Again, it sometimes arrives that the soul is so
flooded with divine light and overwhelmed by the vision of God's
beauty that it is stricken with {80} bewilderment and dislodged from
its bearings. And the deeper it sinks down by self-abasement in the
presence of God's beauty, like a streak of lightning, the quicker it
is caught up and rapt out of itself. Finally, it occurs that the soul
inebriated by the fulness of interior sweetness utterly forgets what
it is and what it has been, and is transported into a state of
ineffable beatitude and entirely permeated with uncreated love. It is
forced to cry out with the Prophet: 'How lovely are Thy tabernacles, O
Lord of Hosts. My soul longeth and fainteth for the Courts of the
Lord. My heart and my flesh have rejoiced in the living God'" (Ps.
LXXXIII.).
Effusions such as these assuredly give us an insight into the
extraordinary love that burned in the soul of Bonaventure. From the
spiritual tepidity that oppresses us we can only contemplate it with
wistful admiration. It proves to us indeed "how wonderful is God in
His Saints," and how profoundly and intimately He influences the
hearts of His chosen ones and attaches them inseparably to Himself.
It will be fitting to bring this chapter to a close by quoting, as
outside testimony, the tribute which Cardinal Wiseman paid [Footnote
36] to this feature of our Saint's life. "There is another writer upon
this inexhaustible subject," said His Eminence, "who more than any
other will justify all that I have {81} said; and, moreover, prove the
influence which these festivals of the Passion may exercise upon the
habitual feelings of a Christian. I speak of the exquisite meditations
of St. Bonaventure upon the life of Christ, a work in which it is
difficult what most to admire, the riches of imagination surpassed by
no poet, or the tenderness of sentiment, or the variety of adaptation.
After having led us through the affecting incidents of Our Saviour's
infancy and life, and brought us to the last moving scenes, his steps
become slower from the variety of his beautiful but melancholy
fancies; he now proceeds, not from year to year, or from month to
month, or from day to day, but each hour has its meditations, and
every act of the last tragedy affords him matter for pathetic
imagination. But when at the conclusion, he comes to propose to us the
method of practising his holy contemplations, he so distributes them,
that from Monday to Wednesday shall embrace the whole, of Our
Saviour's life; but from Thursday to Sunday inclusive each day shall
be entirely taken up with the mystery which the Church in Holy Week
has allotted to it. In this manner did he, with many others, extend
throughout the whole year the solemn commemorations of Holy Week, for
the promotion of individual devotion and sanctification, even as the
Church had done for the public welfare."
[Footnote 36: Four Lectures on the Offices and Ceremonies of Holy
Week. Lecture the Fourth.]
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