Salesian Literature

Chapter 7  :  Love is the life of the soul

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Love is the active principle of the spiritual life, the life of devotion; it gives us vitality, sensitivity, emotion.  Our spiritual lives are what love’s activity makes them: a heart devoid of emotion is devoid of love; while a loving heart cannot be devoid of love’s emotion.  So that as soon as we have given our love to Jesus Christ, we have – by the fact itself – given into his keeping our spiritual life.  At present, however, he is hidden away with God in heaven, just as the divinity was hidden in him during his earthly life.  That is why our life is hidden away now in him; but when he is made manifest in glory, our life and our love will also be made manifest with him in God.

 

So St. Ignatius of Antioch (as St. Denis tells us[1]) used to say that his love was crucified.  It was as though he were saying: “My natural human love, with all its passions, is fastened to the cross.  I have put it to death for the mortal love it is; the life it gave my heart was only mortal.  As my Saviour was crucified, as he died to his mortal life to rise to one that is immortal, I have died with him on the cross to my natural love, my soul’s mortal life, so as to rise to the supernatural life of a love that – active as it will be in heaven – is consequently immortal too.”

 

Therefore, if we see someone experiencing raptures in prayer, being carried out to self into God, and yet experiencing no ecstasy of life – in other words, failing to live a life that is self-sacrificing, devoted to God, by renouncing all worldly lusts, by mortifying all desires, all natural tendencies, by an inward meekness, simplicity, humility, but most of all by unceasing charity – depend upon it, Theotimus, all those raptures are extremely dubious, fraught with danger.

 

Raptures of that kind pander to human wonderment, but do not make for holiness.  What is the good of being rapt in God at prayer, if our lives, our activities, are rapt in the love of earthly, shallow, natural things?  To be lifted above self in prayer, but to fall below self in life, in activity; to be angelic in meditation, but beastly in company – what is that but to waver between two loyalties, to take oaths to the Lord (2 Kings 18:21) and swear by Melchom? (Soph. 1:5)  It is a genuine sign, after all, that such raptures, such ecstasies are nothing but deceptions and delusions of the evil one.

 

Blessed are those who live a supernatural ecstatic life, surpassing themselves, yet have never been rapt above themselves in prayer!  There are many souls in heaven who never had an ecstasy, never experienced a rapture in contemplation.  History is full of martyrs, of very saintly people of both sexes, whose only privilege in prayer was to experience devotion and fervour.  However, there has never been a saint who did not know the ecstasy, the rapture of life, of activity, by rising above self and its natural tendencies.

 

It should be quite clear to everybody, you will agree, that this ecstasy of life and activity was in the forefront of St. Paul’s mind, when he wrote: I am alive; or rather, not I; it is Christ that lives in me (Gal. 2:20).  He gives the explanation himself, in different words, to the Romans.  Our former nature has been crucified with him, he tells them; we have died with Christ to sin; we have also risen with him, that we too might live and move in a new kind of existence, so that we are the slaves of guilt no longer (Rom. 6:4-11).

 

This means that each one of us typifies two people; and, consequently, appears to have two lives. One of them is the old self (Col. 3:9-10), our old life; the other is the new self, our new life.

 

In the first of these lives we live by the pattern of the old self – in other words, the defects, the want of character, the failings that we inherit from the sin of our first parent; consequently, we are living under the shadow of Adam’s sin, and our life is a mortal life, or rather a living death.  In the second of these lives we live by the pattern of the new self – in other words, the graces, blessings, providence and will of our Saviour; as a result, we are living in the light of salvation, of redemption, and this new life is a spirited, energetic, invigorating one.

 

However, the man who means to rise to the new life must do so by dint of dying to the old one, crucifying nature, with all its passions, all its impulses (Gal. 5:24), burying it in the waters of baptism or of penance.  He must imitate Naaman (cf. 2 Kings 5:14), who drowned his former life, tainted with leprosy, in the waters of Jordan in order to enjoy a new life that was clean and healthy. Naaman, it could be said, was never his old self again.

 

Any man, therefore, who is raised up to the Saviour’s new life, no linger lives by, in, or for self; rather, he is living with, in, and for his Saviour. And you, too, says St. Paul, must think of yourselves as dead to sin, and alive with a life that looks towards God, through Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 6:11).

 

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[1]  Cf. Book 1, Chapter 14.

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