Salesian Literature

Chapter 4:  Love determines the activity of emotions and passions;  It even controls the will, in spite of being determined by it

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Love, as I shall explain presently, is the first feeling of satisfaction at the awareness of good; so, obviously it comes before desire – in fact, we only desire things when we love them.  It comes before pleasure; for would we find pleasure or joy in anything if we did not love it?  It comes before hope, because hope reaches out only to a future good that we love.  It comes before hatred, for we only hate evil because we love good; evil is only evil, because it is opposed to good.  It is the same with the other passions or emotions; they come form love – their root, the source of all their activity.

 

That is why our passions, our emotions are good or bad, vicious or virtuous, in exact proportion to the goodness or badness of the love from which they spring.  Love clothes them with its own characteristic to such an extent that you cannot tell the difference.  In other words, Theotimus, love determines the will to such an extent as to turn that faculty into something like itself.

 

A wife usually takes her rank and title from her husband – queen, if he is king; duchess, if he is a duke; lady, if he is a lord.  The will also takes on the quality of the love to which it is wedded – carnal, if it is carnal; spiritual, if it is spiritual – and all the motions of desire, joy, hope, fear, sorrow, the offspring of the union between love and the will, take their characteristics from love.

 

For all that, however, it does not follow that the will has no mastery over love.  Only by deliberate choice does the will love; it can cling to the one love (out of the many set before it) which it approves – otherwise love could never be forbidden or commanded.  The will behaves towards its love like a young lady towards her suitors: she can choose which one she will have.  But when the girl is married, she loses her freedom of choice – mistress once, she is now under her husband’s authority; the prize now of one who was her prize.  The will, in the same way, once it has chosen the love it fancies, and holds to it, is its slave.

 

And just as a wife is subject to her husband during his lifetime, and only after his death regains her freedom to marry another (cf. 1 Cor. 7:39); so any one love, during its life in the will, reigns supreme, the will obedient to its impulses; but when that love dies, the will can take another.  However, the will enjoys a freedom unknown to a wife; where it pleases, it can set its love aside by letting the mind dwell on grounds for dislike, by deciding to turn to something else.

 

In this way, when we want God’s love to live and reign in us, we deaden self-love.  If we cannot suppress self-love altogether, at least we weaken it; still alive it may be, but it has ceased to reign.  Similarly, we can do the opposite: we can forgo charity and cling to creature loves – the despicable adultery with which the heavenly bridegroom so frequently upbraids sinners.

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