OF A CERTAIN REMNANT OF LOVE OFTEN CONTINUING IN A SOUL THAT HAS LOST HOLY CHARITY
The life of a person who is completely worn out and who is dying little by little in his bed, hardly deserves to be called life. Though it is life, it is, however, so mingled with death that one can hardly say whether it is a death still living or a life dying. Alas! It is indeed a pitiful sight, Theotimus. But still more lamentable is the state of a person who, ungrateful to its Saviour goes backward from moment to moment. He withdraws himself from God’s love by certain stages of impiety and disloyalty. At last he completely forsakes it [God’s love] and remains in the terrible darkness of perdition. This love which is in its decline, which is weakening and perishing, is called imperfect love. Though it is entire in the soul, it does not seem to be there entirely. That is, it is hardly in the soul any longer and is on the point of forsaking it. When charity is separated from the soul by sin, there remains often a certain appearance of charity which can deceive us and keep us occupied uselessly. I shall now tell you what it is. Charity, while it is in us, produces many actions of love towards God. By the frequent exercise of these, our soul forms a certain habit and custom of loving God. This is not charity, but only a tendency and inclination which the multitude of actions have given to our heart.
Having formed over a long period of time a habit of preaching or celebrating Mass with deliberation, it often happens to us, in dreaming, to speak and say the same things which we would say in preaching or celebrating. Thus the custom and habit acquired by choice and virtue, is in some way practised afterwards without choice and without virtue. In fact, the actions done in sleep do not have, generally speaking, anything of virtue except an apparent image and are only phantoms and representations of it. Similarly, charity, by the multitude of acts which it produces, imprints in us a certain facility in loving. This charity leaves in us even after we are deprived of its presence.
As a young student, I saw in a village close to Paris a certain well in which an echo would repeat several times the words spoken by us there nearby. If an ordinary, inexperienced person were to hear these repetitions of words, he would believe that there was someone inside the well who was doing this. But we knew already from philosophy that there was no one in the well who repeated our words. It was only that there were hollows there, in one of which our voices got collected. Unable to pass through, and in order that they might not completely perish but make use of the force left to them, they produced second voices. These second voices gathered together in another hollow produced third voices. These third in the same way produced fourth voices and so consecutively up to eleven. So then, these voices made in the well were no longer our voices but their resemblances and images. In fact, there was a great difference between our voices and those voices. When we said a long succession of words, they repeated only a few of them, shortening the pronunciation of the syllables, speaking them very quickly and with tones and accents quite different from ours. And they did not begin to form these words until we had quite finished pronouncing them. In short, they were not the words of a living person, but so to say, of a hollow and useless rock. Nevertheless, they reproduced so well the human voice from which they sprang that an ignorant person would have been misled and deceived.
Now this is what I want to say. When the holy love of charity meets a submissive soul and stays there for a long time, it produces a second love which is not a love of charity, though it issues from charity. Rather, it is a human love which is yet so like charity that, though afterwards charity perishes in the soul, it seems to be still there always. This is because it leaves behind a picture and likeness of itself which represents charity. So one who was ignorant would be deceived by it just as the birds were by the grapes in Zeuxis’ painting, which they took to be real grapes, so exactly had art imitated nature.
And yet there is a great difference between charity and the human love it produces in us. The voice of charity declares, makes known and puts into practice God’s commandments in our hearts. The human love which remains after it does indeed declare and make known sometimes all the commandments but it never puts them all into practice, but only some. Charity pronounces and puts together all the syllables, that is, all the circumstances of God’s commandments. This human love always leaves out some of them, especially that of a right and pure intention. As regards the tone, charity keeps it steady, gentle and pleasant, but this human love goes too high in earthly things or too low in heavenly things. Moreover, it never begins its work until charity has finished its own. As long as charity is in the soul, it makes use of this human love which is its creature. It employs it to make progress in its own operations. So during that time the works of this love, like those of a servant, belong to charity, its mistress. When charity goes away, then the actions of this love are entirely its own and no longer have honour and value of charity. The staff of Elisha, though in the hand of his servant Gehazi, who had received it from the hand of Elisha, did not work any miracle in the absence of Elisha (2 Kings 4:29-31). So also, actions done in the absence of charity, by the simple habit of human love, are of no merit and have no value for eternal life. This happens even though human love has learned to do them from charity and is only the servant of charity. This is because such human love, in the absence of charity, has no supernatural strength to raise the soul to the excellent action of the love of God above all things.