WE PRACTISE LOVE OF BENEVOLENCE BY DESIRING SOMETHING FOR OUR LORD
Benevolence is the beginning of the manifestation of God’s love towards us. He desires and bestows on us all the good which is there by his pure benevolence. Soon after he takes delight in it.[1] God made David according to his heart (1 Sam 13:14) by his benevolent love. Then he found him according to his heart by gratifying love. First he created the universe for humans and humans in the universe. He gave each thing, the degree of goodness that was suitable to it by his benevolence. Then he appreciated all that he had made. He found that everything was good and rested in his work by gratifying love (Gen 1:31; 2:2).
On the contrary, our love for God begins from the delight that we have in the supreme goodness and infinite perfection we know to be in the Divinity. Then we come to the practice of benevolence. God takes delight in his creatures. It is nothing else but a continuation of his benevolence towards them. So too we experience benevolence towards God. It is nothing else but an appreciation and perseverance in the delight we have in him.
This benevolent love towards God is practised in the following manner. We cannot desire any good for God with a true desire. It is because his goodness is infinitely more perfect than we can ever desire or think of. Desire is only for a future good. God cannot have a future good. For all good is present to him to such an extent that the presence of the good in his divine Majesty is nothing else than Divinity itself. It is impossible to have any absolute desire for God. So we have some imaginary and conditional ones. For instance, I have said to you, Lord you are my God. You are entirely full of your infinite goodness. You cannot be in need. You have no need of my goods (Ps 16:2) or anything whatever. I could imagine something impossible: You, God, would stand in need of something good. If so, I would never cease to wish it for you at the cost of my life, my being and all that is in the world.
You are what you are. You can never cease to be. If it were possible that you could receive some increase of good, O, good God, what desire I would have that you should have it! Then, eternal Lord, I would like to turn my heart into wish and my life into sigh to long for you that good. Ah! All the same, O, Beloved of my soul, I do not desire to be able to wish any good for your Majesty. Thus I delight with my whole heart in the supreme degree of goodness that you have. To it, we can add nothing whatever, either by desire or even by thought. If this desire were possible, O infinite Divinity, O Infinity divine, my soul would desire to be this desire and nothing else than that. It would long to desire for you what it infinitely delights itself in being unable to desire. The inability to desire comes from the infinite infinity of the perfection which surpasses all desire and even thought! Ah! I love dearly that impossibility of being able to wish you any good, O, my God. It comes from the incomprehensible immensity of your abundance, which is supremely infinite. If it [my soul] were to find an infinite desire, it would be infinitely content with the infinity of your goodness. It would be changed into an infinite delight.[2]
This desire, therefore, by imagining the impossible, may be sometimes usefully practised in the midst of a profound experience [of God] and unusual fervours. The great St. Augustine often made use of similar expressions. Due to the excess of love, he burst out into these words: “You are God, yet suppose that what is not and what cannot be were possible: I were God and you were Augustine. Then I would change place with you. I become Augustine that you could be God."
There is still another kind of benevolent love towards God. Realizing that we cannot add to his greatness in himself, we desire to exalt him in ourselves. This means to increase more and more and always greater the delight we have in his goodness. Then, my dear Theotimus, we do not desire the delight for the pleasure it gives us. This is only because this joy is in God. We do not desire sympathy for the sorrow it causes in our hearts. Instead, we desire sympathy because this sorrow associates and unites us with our sorrowful Beloved. Similarly, we do not love the delight because of the joy it gives us. But [it is loved] in so far as this joy is taken in union with the joy and good which are in God. To unite ourselves all the more with him, we wish to delight ourselves with a delight infinitely greater. In this we imitate the most holy Queen and Mother of beautiful love (Sir 24:18).[3] Her holy soul glorified and exalted God always. To make known that this glorification was made through the delight which she had in the divine goodness, she declared: My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour (Lk 1: 46,47).
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[1] Taking delight in it is gratifying love
[2] To those who are not familiar with mystical experience or awareness of divine goodness, this paragraph, even the whole chapter, may ap pear a little strange. The human spirit, on the one hand, overwhelmed by the experience of divine goodness and bounty, wishes to make a return to God. It finds it impossible as God is divine fullness infinite perfection or as Indian tradition would say, “from fullness, fullness take away, fullness yet remains." Then what return can you make? Hence these expressions which may seem apparently strange. See St. Augustine next para.
34 See NRSV, footnote