Visitation Spirit

Contemplation according to the Treatise on the Love of God

by | Mar 22, 2018 | Discernment Sundays - Chat Room, Salesian Spirituality, St. Francis de Sales

Why the unlearned bear away heaven

 

 

This week we are continuing with book six (“Of The Exercises Of Holy Love In Prayer.”) from Saint Francis’ Treatise on the Love of God. Be sure to watch the video “Affective Love Practiced in Contemplation” to help deepen your reflection and give you a new way to embrace his timeless wisdom. (If you’d prefer to read St. Francis’ original text, this week’s video covers Chapter 3-15 of Book VI, starting with “A Description Of Contemplation, And Of The First Difference That There Is Between It And Meditation.”)

 
Devotion leads to heavenly love

 

Affective Love Practiced in Contemplation

 

Knowledge is required for the production of love, for we can never love what we do not know; and according as the attentive knowledge of good is augmented, love is also augmented, provided there is nothing to hinder its activity. Yet it happens often, that knowledge having produced holy love, love does not stay within the limits of the knowledge which is in the understanding, but goes forward and passes very far beyond it; so that in this life we are able to have more love than knowledge of God: whence the great S. Thomas assures us, that oftentimes the most simple women abound in devotion, and are ordinarily more capable of heavenly love than clever and learned men…

… The will only perceives good by means of the understanding, but having once perceived it she has no more need of the understanding to practise love, for the force of pleasure which she feels, or expects to feel, from union with her object, draws her powerfully to the love and to the desire of enjoying it; so that the knowledge of good gives birth, but not measure, to love; as we see the knowledge of an injury starts anger, which, if not suppressed, almost always becomes greater than the subject deserves. The passions do not follow the knowledge which moves them, but very often, leaving this quite in the rear, they make towards their object without any measure or limit.

 

Now this happens still more strongly in holy love, inasmuch as our will is not applied to it by a natural knowledge, but by the light of faith, which assuring us of the infinite goodness that is in God, gives us sufficient cause to love him with all our force. We dig the earth to find gold and silver, employing a present labour for a good which as yet is only hoped for; so that an uncertain knowledge sets us upon a present and certain labour, and as we more discover the vein of the mineral, we search and search more earnestly.

 

Even a cold scent serves to move the hound to the game, so, dear Theotimus, a knowledge obscure and involved in clouds, like that of faith, most powerfully stirs our affection to love the goodness which it makes us perceive. O how true it is, according to S. Augustine’s exclamation, that the unlearned bear away heaven, while many of the wise are swallowed up in hell!

 

Questions to ponder

  1. In your opinion, which of the two would love God more: 1) the one born blind, who might know all the discourses that philosophers make of it and the praises they give it, or 2) the farmer, who by a clear sight feels and realizes the agreeable splendor of the rising sun?
  2. If knowledge and learning are good qualities, why do they often obscure the love of God?
  3. If the “clever and learned men” have difficulty abounding in devotion, what can such people to do attain that love?
  4. What can help us to grow in contemplative prayer?