Salesian Literature

Chapter 16:  Our natural tendency to love God more than anything

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If human beings possessed the original perfection and original justice that Adam knew, when God first made him – they would not only have a tendency to love God more than anything; they would be able to achieve it naturally without any other help from God than the ability he gives each creature to perform actions befitting its nature.

 

The author and lord of nature lends his powerful hand to fire to shoot upwards, to water to flow downwards to the sea, to land to sink and settle.  In the same way, he planted in the heart of man a special natural tendency – not only of loving good in general, but of loving in particular and more than anything the goodness of God, better and more lovable than anything else.  The object of this love is God only as he is known by the natural light of reason: author, lord, supreme goal of every creature.  Consequently, the inclination, the instinct to love him, to put before him anything else, would be natural.

 

Human nature, as we know it, lacks the original perfection and justice of Adam’s creation.  It is a badly fallen nature, due to sin; yet the tendency to love God more than anything remains, as does the natural light of reason by which we know that God’s supreme goodness is more lovable than all other things.  The moment a man seriously reflects on God with nothing but his unaided reason to guide him, he is bound to feel his heart instinctively leap with love.  The will, aware of its chief good, is captivated and prompted to seek satisfaction in it.

 

Maternal instinct, or stupidity in not recognizing their own eggs, often drives partridges to steal other partridges’ eggs in order to hatch them (cf. Jer 17:11).  Then a strange thing happens, for which there is ample proof … When the chick first hears the cry of its true mother, it leaves the protecting wing of the thievish partridge and flies to the true one.  Some likeness in its nature draws it to the mother bird – a mysterious dormant likeness that only comes to light when the baby partridge is recalled to its first duty.  And that, Theotimus, is how it is with the human heart… Though born and bred amid the material transitory things of earth – beneath the wings of nature, as it were – yet the first glimpse of God, the first awareness of him, fans to flame the hidden spark of its natural instinct for loving God.

 

As this plays on the will, the soul thrills with charity – love at its highest, the love that is due to the first principle and lord of all.

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