“You are so deeply engraved on my heart that the more I realize how truly you love me from the depths of your soul, the more incapable I am of forgetting you, and the more constantly you are in my thoughts; for your love moves me deeply, and makes my love for you burn more strongly.” Ardent sentiments. Are these the words of a Romeo for his Juliette? No. What about a newly married Louis Martin for his Zelie? No again. Believe it or not, these are the words of a priest for one of his penitents — a nun, in fact.
Are you scandalized? That is understandable. If language like this appeared in the letter of a priest corresponding with a married woman―and, therefore, a fortiori with a Bride of Christ — it would normally be scandalous. However, when a man as holy as Blessed Jordan of Saxony expresses his true and sincere love for a woman as holy as Blessed Diana D’Andalo, his words ought not be a cause of scandal to us but of edification.
The Danger of Inordinate Natural Love
Countless saints and spiritual writers tell us that the danger of inordinate natural love is very, very real. The whirlpool of misery that one can get sucked into, to the detriment and even all-out destruction of one’s spiritual life, is of such concern that even after long vigilance, and grace having stabilized God’s chosen ones to whatever blessed extent, we are warned that a future fall is always possible. No matter how far one has advanced in the spiritual life, the devil never sleeps, the world never relents, and the flesh does not die until we do. Dom François de Sales Pollien speaks for all of us when he says, “By the fact of the seat of concupiscence which still remains in me, by the fact of my habits, especially by the fact of self-love, I shall again be led to rely on myself, and to act apart from grace, and I shall fall; the seeking of my own satisfaction will drag me more or less deeply into disorder” (The Interior Life Reduced to Its Fundamental Principle [ILSR], 342). This is why the saints never grew out of keeping their guard up. They knew their own weakness. St. Alphonsus even shows how living among the beautiful safeguards of religious life is no guarantee against temptations; in The True Spouse of Jesus Christ (TS), this great Doctor describes the subtle development of criminal affections between nuns and their confessors: always the beginnings are innocent.
But innocent love can be corrupted. The question that interests us here is — at what point does that happen? When does loving another person actually begin to jeopardize or compromise our love of God?
A Question of Quality Not Quantity
Fr. Gerald Vann, O.P., offers us a key insight when he says the following in his introduction to the book To Heaven with Diana: A Study of Jordan of Saxony and Diana d’Andalo (THWD): “Sometimes an intense and deep human love comes into a life which has hitherto been wholly wrapt up in the love of God. Then the question may be asked: Does this mean that in the opening of my heart to this love I am being unfaithful to God…? [N]o: the difficulty arises from the fact that you put the love of God and the love of man on a level, as though they were the same kind of love, but they are not…. The love of God is essentially in the will, though the other levels of the personality may incidentally be involved at times. That is why the test of whether you love God is not whether you feel very loving, but whether you do His will” (THWD, 43).
This squares perfectly with what Saint Francis de Sales says in Treatise on the Love of God (TLG): “This is what God requires of us — that among all our loves His be the dearest, holding the first place in our hearts; the warmest, occupying our whole soul; the most general, employing all our powers; the highest, filling our whole spirit; and the strongest, exercising all our strength and vigor” (TLG, 426). And again: “[N]ever does any love take our hearts away from God, save that which is contrary to Him. Sara is not offended when she sees Ishmael about her dear Isaac, so long as his play does not go on striking and hurting the boy: and the divine goodness is not offended by seeing in us other loves besides His, so long as we preserve for Him the reverence and submission due to Him” (ibid, 415).
The right ordering of our loves is not, therefore, a question of quantity, but of quality. A little fish in the ocean might love another fish very much, but it is not the same kind of love that he has for the ocean. How could it be? The one is a consolation, but the other is his very life.
Motive Is Everything
Our happiness or misery now is not just a matter of the objects of our love (cf. My Way of Life [MWL], 99), but also of the motivations behind our love. St. Bernard says, “A good man is never deceived except by the similitude of good” (True Spouse of Jesus Christ, 418). In loving the created goods around us, particularly people, do we not often experience that it is sweet to love and sweet to be loved? The danger lies in the addictive power of this sweetness: as soon as we find ourselves loving for the sake of the pleasure we receive from it, then we are loving selfishly, and nothing could be more detrimental for us, even if the object of our love is itself holy. As Dom Pollien says, “I am a slave in the measure in which I seek my own pleasure; unhappy exactly in proportion to the way in which I desire to place human happiness in the forefront of my life. Such is the just punishment for broken order!” (ILSR, 69).
All the good that is in creatures, whether in our fellow man, (or, as Fr. Vann points out, in music or art or nature), was put there to raise our minds and aspirations to God. Since the Fall, we are inclined to find our complacency in these things instead of in their Creator. Hence the disorder. Based on St. Francis de Sales’ definition of love as “the movement and outflowing of the heart towards good by means of the complacency which we take in it” (TLG, 196), we can understand why the saints would put us on guard against “natural” love. Our hearts were made for God and are meant to be restless until they rest in Him. To attempt to find the peace we crave outside of and apart from the Prince of Peace is to overthrow His reign within our hearts. The little fish, thinking it can breathe air when it was meant only for the purity of the ocean’s water, is headed for disaster. Where, then, is his safety?
Our Safety Lies in Contemplation
Answer: If, as St. Francis de Sales says, “moral or spiritual death makes its entry into the soul by want of reflection” (TLG, 482), then our surely safety lies precisely in contemplation.
The Gentleman Doctor also says that “the heart is fed by what delights it” (TLG, 199). To grow, therefore, in the love of God, our hearts must be fed on the love of God. Bl. Dom Columba Marmion says this happens precisely in contemplation: holy immersion in the thought of God. Consider for a moment Whom it is we were made to love. “The good God…that ravishingly attractive Being who is resisted only when He is not seen…is infinite enticement, rapturous beyond a man’s most extravagant desires, captivating lovableness to tear the heart out of a man. Confronted by divine goodness, the heart of man bursts into such a flame as to make a torch of his whole life” (MWL, 8–9).
What could be more encouraging? When we think on God’s goodness, when we take complacency in His love for us, then we are deepening and enriching our interior lives. We are like the little fish who swims far enough out into the depths of the sea that he is no longer in danger of scratching himself on the sharp rocks of the shoals; he is not in danger of being dragged inland by the waves of passion and trapped in a tide pool of egoism at the mercy of hungry birds and crabs. These are Dom Marmion’s words, some of the most consoling we may ever read: “The measure whereby, through faith, we live in the contemplation of God, and remain united to Jesus Christ, in this same measure, we become invulnerable to temptation” (Christ in His Mysteries, 193).
Love Is Our Word
Bottom line? Christians own the word love — it is the rest of the world that has no idea what it really means.
Yes, hedges must remain in place. A respect for hedges shows a commitment to progress. God’s will, initially sought, progressively submitted to, and eventually embraced, must be ultimately delighted in. It is the laws, the rules, the hedges, that make real freedom possible (cf. MWL #38), especially the freedom of which St. Augustine speaks when he famously said, “Love, then do what you will.” Nor does one achieve this freedom quickly. It is only after long fidelity to little things that the liberty of the sons of God is able to blossom in its fullness, and language such as what Jordan used with Diana carries no potential divert one’s supernatural focus. Until those heights are reached, yes, is it far more prudent to emphasize, as St. Alphonsus did, “Love which is divided is not true,” (TS, 717), and, “In order to save ourselves we must be in constant fear of falling” (ibid., 724).
Not all fear is evil. The basic cause of fear is love of good. A man fears something because it will deprive him of some good (MWL, 210). And if that good of which he fears the deprivation is intimacy with le bon Dieu, union with that Tremendous Lover Whom he knows will not be satisfied with anything less than everything (cf. Dom Mary Eugene Boylan, This Tremendous Lover [TTL], 268), how could his fear be rationally discouraged?
As a person grows in virtue, when he advances in union with Our Lord, things change for that person from the inside. This is why the same Saint Therese who thanked God that she had never found aught but disappointment in human friendships (cf. Daily Meditations [DM], Aug. 19), could say towards the end of her life, “I no longer feel the need of denying myself the solace of affection, because my heart is firmly established in God. Now that my whole heart is His, it has become enlarged, and I am able to love those dear to me with a love incomparably greater than if it had sprung from a selfish, sterile affection” (DM, Feb. 5).
Once grace has achieved in us the sublime integration of our natural and supernatural loves, our earthly relationships become things of joy and immense helps in getting us to love God still more: every love we have is an added way of loving and worshiping God, bearing in mind that the Lord Who gives is free to take away and ought always be blessed forever (cf. THWD, 45). It is as though, once Christ within you has communicated His own eternal wisdom to you so as to grant you a breadth of vision, a clear-sightedness with regards all the things He has made (cf. MWL, 362), you see the goodness of the thing you love and immediately delight — not in it — but in the goodness of the God who made it so good, and Who, in His goodness, entrusted it to you. At this level there is nothing to fear in human love for it has become one with God’s love. It has become what it was always intended to be: divinely human. God Himself is loving you through this other person. And you get to love Him back the same way.
Such was the chaste and holy love of Bl. Jordan of Saxony for his friend Bl. Diana. God grant that our loves may be half as edifying as theirs!
