Salesian Literature

Chapter 5  :  The Second type of rapture

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The sun’s beauty and goodness are to be found in its light; but for that light, there would be nothing beautiful, nothing good, in this physical world of ours. By reason of its beauty the sunlight illuminates all things; by reason of its goodness it warms and quickens all.  The sun’s shining beauty catches the eye of every creature endowed with sight; its blazing goodness attracts every physical appetite, every physical instinct.

 

God, in the same way, the Father of all that gives light (Jas. 1:17), supremely good and beautiful, in his beauty leads our minds to contemplate him, in his goodness leads our wills to love him.  His beauty, delighting our minds, brings to birth in our wills a love for him; his goodness, filling our wills with love for him, stimulates our minds to contemplate him – love prompting contemplation, contemplation prompting love.

 

Love’s rapture seizes upon the will in this way … God touches it with the charms of his loving kindness; then, just as a compass needle, forgetting it cannot feel, turns towards the pole ... so the will, stricken with love for heavenly things, soars up, reaches out towards God, turning its back on all earthly attachments.  In this way it begins to experience a rapture, not of wonderment but of fervour, not of perception but of experience, not of sight but of taste, of relish.  Indeed, as I have already pointed out, the mind sometimes begins to wonder at the delight which the will experiences during an ecstasy; just as the will often thrills with pleasure when it perceives that the mind is lost in wonderment.  So that these two faculties transmit their raptures each to the other: the contemplation of beauty leads us to love it, the love of beauty leads us to contemplate it.  Rarely does the sun warm a man without shining on him, nor shine upon him without warming him; so love leads easily to wonderment, while wonderment leads naturally to love.

 

For all that, these two ecstasies of intellect and will are not so essentially inseparable that one cannot often exist without the other.  Just as philosophers have had greater knowledge of the Creator than love for him, so good Christians have many a time had more love than knowledge.  Consequently, exceptional knowledge is not always followed by tremendous love, any more than a tremendous love is always followed by exceptional knowledge – as I have said before[1].  If the ecstasy of wonderment is all that we experience, we are none the better for it – according to that man who was carried up into the third heaven (2 Cor. 12:2).  … No secret hidden from me, no knowledge too deep for me, he said; yet if I lack charity, I count of nothing (1 Cor. 13:2).

 

Therefore, the evil spirit cause us to fall into ecstasy, so to speak; he can enrapture the mind, showing it wonders that keep it uplifted, suspended above its natural powers.  By enlightenment like this the devil can also give the will a kind of love that is empty, effeminate, feeble, imperfect – a love that shows itself by gratification, satisfaction, sense pleasure.

 

Only that supreme Spirit, however, by whom the love of God has been poured out in our hearts (Rom. 5:5), can afford the will its true ecstasy, in which it is firmly attached to the divine goodness, and to naught beside.

 

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[1]  Book 6, Chapter 4.

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