XXVII — THE PRECEPT OF CHARITY

Presence of God. — O Lord, teach me truly to love You with all my heart, with all my soul, with all my strength.

Meditation

1 — “Virtue lies in the middle.” This saying, so right for the moral virtues, cannot be applied to the theological virtues, which, having as their object the infinite God, can have no limit. The measure of believing in God, of hoping in God, as the measure of loving Him, is to place no measure on faith, hope, or love. However much you love God, you can never love Him too much, nor can you love Him as much as He is lovable. By its very nature, then, the precept of charity admits no limit, and you can never say: I will love God up to a certain point and then no more, because in that way you would renounce tending toward the perfection of charity, which consists in drawing as near as possible to loving God in a way proportioned to his infinite lovableness. Therefore it is necessary that in the exercise of charity you never stop, but always grow, committing yourself to it with all your strength. Precisely because it is a matter of loving the infinite God, the precept of charity admits no limits: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength” (Mk. 12:30).

If your nature is so limited, and you do not employ all that you have and all that you are, how will you be able to tend toward perfection in charity? If it is not in your power to love God as much as He is lovable, it is in your power to love Him with all your strength; and the perfection of love that God requires consists in this.

Moreover, human love by its nature is total. The more intimate and deep a friendship is, the more it demands totality of love; and when a friend begins to yield and to give his affection to others, friendship grows cold and can even be extinguished. So that there may be no coldness in your friendship with God, seek to love wholly for Him with all your heart. Keep watch so as truly to commit yourself to loving Him with all your strength. It is true: only in heaven will you be able to love God with that totality and stability of love that earth does not permit you; but you can and must always tend toward Him, and whenever you become aware of it, bring back to Him your heart, your affections, your will, your desires.

2 — Jesus said: “He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” Charity requires loving God above all things. This can be understood in two senses: to love God more than anything, rather than gravely offend Him. This is the first degree of charity, indispensable in order to be God’s friend and preserve grace, and therefore it is required of all. In a higher sense, however, loving God above all things means giving Him preference over everything, and not only over what can be an occasion of grave or venial sin, but even over all that does not fully correspond to his good pleasure. This is the degree of perfect charity to which every soul that aspires to intimate friendship with God must tend, a degree that requires absolute renunciation and absolute purity from every shadow of sin and attachment to creatures. The exercise of perfect charity therefore demands, and accomplishes in us, a work of total purification: “Perfect charity,” says St. John of the Cross, “empties the will of all things because it obliges us to love God above them” (Ascent II, 6, 4).

You must be persuaded that here below the exercise of love is intimately joined to that of renunciation and proceeds side by side with it. Indeed, the more intense and perfect charity is, the more it demands total renunciation; but this is precisely how the soul comes to love God with all its strength. “The soul’s strength,” says the mystical Doctor, “consists in its faculties, passions, and appetites, all of which are governed by the will. Therefore, when the will (through love) directs them toward God, turning them away from all that is not Him, then indeed it truly loves Him with all its strength” (Ascent III, 16, 2). Here is the great function of renunciation: to free the soul’s powers so that they may love and serve God. If you truly want to be very generous in charity, all your powers must be engaged in loving God with all your heart, in renunciation and detachment. This too is an exercise of love, because it disposes the soul to perfect charity.

Colloquy

“O Lord God, was it not enough that You permitted us to love You, without deigning to invite us to it with exhortations, to oblige us by commandments? But no, divine Goodness: so that neither your greatness nor our lowliness, nor any other pretext, might hold us back from loving You, You have commanded it to us. O good God, if we knew how to understand the happiness and honor of being able to love You, how bound we would feel to You, who not only permit us, but command us, to love You! O my God, I do not know whether I should love more your infinite beauty, which by your divine goodness I am commanded to love, or this your goodness that commands me to love so infinite a beauty. O beauty of my God, how lovable you are, granted to me by so immense a goodness; O goodness, how lovable you are in communicating to me so eminent a beauty!

“O Lord, how sweet is this commandment, since if it were addressed by You to the damned, they would at once be freed from their greatest misfortune; and the blessed, solely by fulfilling it, are blessed. O heavenly love, how lovable you are to our souls! O divine Goodness, be blessed forever, You who with such care command us to love You, although your love is so desirable and so necessary to our happiness that without it we can only be unhappy.

“O Lord, in heaven we shall have no need of any commandment to love You, since our hearts, drawn and ravished by the vision of your supreme beauty and goodness, will find themselves in a most sweet necessity of loving You eternally. There we shall have a heart entirely cleared of passions, a soul wholly free from distractions, a spirit free from contrarieties, powers exempt from repugnances, and therefore we shall love You with perpetual and uninterrupted delight. But in this mortal life we cannot reach so perfect a degree of love, since we do not yet have the heart, soul, spirit, and strength of the blessed. Nevertheless, You want that in this life we do not fail to do what lies in us to love You with all our heart and with all the strength we have. This is not only possible, but very easy, because to love You, O God, is supremely lovable” (cf. St. Francis de Sales).