THE LOVING AFFECTIONATE LANGUISHING[1] OF THE HEART WOUNDED BY LOVE
It is well known that human love has power to wound the heart. It also makes the body sick, leading to death. The passion and the dispositions of the body have great strength to induce the soul and drag it after it. So, too, the spiritual emotions of the soul have great power to stir up dispositions and change the characteristics of the body. Besides, love, when it is vehement, carries away the soul so forcefully into the object loved. Love engages it so deeply that its all other activities, both sensitive and intellectual, cease. To nourish this love and strengthen it, it seems that the soul abandons all other concerns, all other practices and even itself. Hence Plato said that love is “poor, ragged, naked, barefooted, mean, homeless, lying outside on hard ground, at the gates, always in need."
Love is “poor” because it abandons everything for the sake of the object loved. It is “homeless” because it makes the soul go out of its home to always follow its beloved. It is “mean”, pale, lean and worn out. For love causes [the lover] to lose sleep, food and drink. It is “naked and barefooted” since it renounces all other emotions to take up those of the object loved. It lies “outside on hard ground” as it causes the heart which loves to be open. Love makes the heart to reveal its passions by sighs, complaints, praises, suspicions, jealousies. It is stretched out like a destitute “at the gates” because the lover is always attentive to the eyes and to the mouth of the person loved. The lover always remains attached to the ears to speak to it and beg some favours of which love is never satisfied. The eyes, the ears and the mouth are the gates of the soul. Finally, it is its life to be “always in need”. For, once satisfied, love is no longer fervent, consequently it is no longer love.
I am well aware, Theotimus, that Plato was speaking in this way about the base, mean, wretched love of the worldly people. Nevertheless these characteristics do not cease to be found in the heavenly and divine love. Think a little of those first masters of Christian doctrine, that is , the first doctors of holy, evangelical love. Listen to one of them who had the hardest work: To the present hour we are hungry and thirsty, we are poorly clothed and beaten and homeless. We have become like the rubbish of the world, the dregs of all things to this day (1Cor 4:11,13). It is as if he was saying: We are extremely miserable. If the world is a palace, we are considered as the rubbish swept away. If the world is an apple, we are like the peelings.
What reduced them to this state, I entreat you, if not love? It was love that threw St. Francis [of Assisi] naked before his bishop and made him die naked on the ground. It was love that made him a beggar all his life. It was love that sent the great [St.] Francis Xavier, poor, needy, in rags here and there in the Indies and among the Japanese. It was love that reduced the great cardinal St. Charles, Archbishop of Milan, to extreme poverty. In fact it was in the midst of all the riches which his birth and dignity gave him. The eloquent preacher of Italy Panigarola[2] said that St. Charles was like a dog in the house of its Master. He ate only a little bread and drank a little water. He was lying only on a little straw.
Let us listen, I entreat you, to the saintly Sulamite as she cries out more or less in this manner: My love gives me thousands of consolations. Because of them I am more beautiful than the rich tents of my Solomon. I may say more beautiful than the sky which is only a lifeless tent of his royal majesty. For I am his living tent, even though I am completely black, in rags, covered with dust and disfigured by so many wounds and strokes which this same love gives me. Do not pay attention to my colour. For I am indeed brown as my Beloved who is my sun. He has sent the rays of his sun on me. These rays illuminate by their light. By their heat they have made me sunburnt and black. Touching me by their brightness, they have taken away my colour (Song 1:5). Passionate love made me extremely happy to give myself to such a Bridegroom who is my king. This same passionate love holds the place of my mother. She alone has given me in marriage and not my merits. She has other children who subject me to serious attacks and hard trials. They reduce me to helplessness. Hence, seen from one angle, I look like queen by the side of her king. From the other, I am like vine dresser who in a miserable hut guards the vineyard, a vineyard which is not her own (Song 1:6).
Assuredly, Theotimus, when the wounds and pangs of love are frequent and deep, they make us pine away with love. They make us suffer from the sickness of love. Who could ever describe the languishing transports of love of Saints Catherine of Siena and of Genoa, or of St. Angela of Foligno or of St. Christina or the Blessed Mother [St] Teresa [of Avila] or St. Bernard or St. Francis [of Assisi]? As regards the last mentioned, his life was nothing else than tears, sighs, groans, languishings, swoons, fainting fits of love. But nothing is more marvellous in all these than this admirable communication of the loving and precious pains which the gentle Jesus granted to him by the impression of his wounds and stigmata.
Theotimus, I have often meditated on this marvel and made this reflection. This great servant of God, St. Francis of Assisi, entirely seraphic, saw the image of his Saviour crucified in the form of a shining Seraph. It was on the mountain of Alverna. He was moved to the core beyond all that we can imagine. He was seized with supreme consolation and compassion. For he was contemplating this beautiful mirror of love which the angels are never satisfied in beholding (1Pet 1:12). Ah, he fainted out of sweetness and joy. He also saw the living image of the wounds and bruises of his crucified Saviour. He felt in his heart this sword which pierced the Immaculate Heart of the Virgin Mary (Lk 2:35) on the day of his passion. It was with so much interior pain that he felt as though crucified with his dear Savoiur. O God, Theotimus, the image of Abraham raising his hand to strike his only son to sacrifice him was painted by human hands. Yet it had the power to move the great St. Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa to tears. If so, how great was the extreme tenderness of the great St. Francis when he saw the image of Our Lord, sacrificing himself on the cross not drawn by human hands but by the skilful hand of a heavenly Seraph, representing the original itself? It represented so vividly and naturally the divine King of angels wounded, bruised, pierced, crucified, murdered.
The soul of St. Francis was softened, made tender and almost completely melted away in this loving pain. By this it found itself extremely disposed to receive the impressions and marks of the love and pain of its supreme lover. For his memory was totally steeped in the remembrance of this divine love. His imagination concentrated on forcefully representing to itself the wounds and bruises which his eyes were contemplating so perfectly expressed in the image present before him. His understanding received forms infinitely lively which imagination was supplying to it. Finally his love used all the powers of the will to delight in and be assimilated to the passion of the Beloved. The soul, doubtless, found itself completely transformed into another crucified. The human spirit is the form and master of the body. So the soul, using its power over the body, imprinted on it the pains of the wounds by which it was wounded. It was in places corresponding to those in which its Beloved had suffered them. Love is wonderful in sharpening the imagination so that it penetrates even to the exterior.
The ewes of Laban warmed by love had a very strong imagination. This imagination engraved the stripes on the little lambs with which they were pregnant. The lambs be came white or spotted depending on the rods the ewes were looking at in the troughs from which they were drinking (Gen 30:38,39). Pregnant women who have imagination sharpened by love impress on the bodies of their babies what they desire. A powerful imagination makes a person grey in a single night, spoil his health and dispositions.
Love made the interior sufferings of this great lover, St. Francis, pass to the exterior. It wounded his body by the same arrow of pain which had wounded his heart. But it was not possible for love deep within to simply make openings in the flesh. So the burning Seraph came to help. It flashed rays of intense penetrating brightness, making the wounds of the crucified appear externally in his body. Love had already imprinted these wounds in his soul. Likewise a Seraph came to Isaiah, seeing that he did not dare to speak as he felt that his lips were impure. It came in the name of God to touch and purify his lips with a coal taken from the altar. In this way, the Seraph assisted Isaiah to fulfill his desire (Is 6:5-7). The myrrh tree produces its gum and the first sap like sweat and perspiration. But to make it yield all its juice, it has to be helped by cutting the bark open. In the same way, the divine love of St. Francis appeared throughout his life like sweat. For in all his actions he breathed only sacred love. But to make it appear in its inexhaustible abundance, the heavenly Seraph came to cut open and wound. In order to make it known that these wounds were wounds of heavenly love, they were made not with a weapon but by rays of light. My God, Theotimus, what loving pain and what painful love! Not only then but all the rest of his life, this poor saint always went about dragging along and languishing like one very sick with love.
The Blessed [St] Philip Neri, aged 80 years, had much inflammation of the heart due to divine love. It was such that the heat passing through the ribs enlarged them very strongly and broke the fourth and fifth rib. It happened so that he might receive more air to refresh himself. Blessed [St] Stanislaus Koska a young boy of 14 was so strongly assaulted by the love for his Saviour that many times he fell down and fainted. He was forced to apply on his breast linen soaked in cold water to cool the intensity of the love he was experiencing.
To conclude, Theotimus, how do you think about a soul that has once tasted a little divine consolations to its hearts content? Can it live in this world full of so many miseries without feeling constant pain and pining away? Many times this great man of God, Francis Xavier, was heard crying out to heaven when he thought he was all alone: “Ah, my Lord, no, please do not overwhelm me with such an abundance of consolations. Or if it pleases your infinite goodness to grant me such abundance of delights, then take me to heaven. For he who has tasted well deep within your sweetness is forced to live in bitterness, when he does not enjoy you." God has given a soul a little generously his divine sweetness. When he takes it away from the soul, he wounds it by this privation. Soon after it remains languishing and sighing with David:
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and behold the face of God (Ps 42: 2).[3]
And with the great apostle: Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? (Rom 7:24).
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[1] La langueur amoureuse translated as “The Affectionate Languishing,” (Mackey), “Loving Languor,” Ryan, “The Wounded Heart Pines Away With Love,” (Kerns) is very difficult to translate as it expresses a mystical experience difficult to describe. La Langueur in French literally means weakness, weariness, decline in health caused by lingering illness. Amoureux(m), amoureuse (f), means loving, smitten with love, showing love or tenderness. We have translated la langueur amoureuse as “The Loving, Affectionate Languishing.” It is a kind of physical weakness caused by intense, tender lingering experience of the love of God, of a heart wounded with love love sickness. See also TLG Bk VII, Ch.11. It will shed further light.
[2] Francis Panigarola, a Franciscan from Milan, later bishop of Asti (1548 94). He Preached the panegyric at the funeral of St. Charles Borromeo (Kerns, TLG, P. 261).
[3] NRSV. The following is in the French text:
Alas! When will the day come,
that the sweetness of a return
will take away this suffering (Ps 41:3).
END OF BOOK SIX