Discourse VI: The Soul United to God

The Soul, Having Surmounted All Impediments, Has No Longer Need of Remedies, but Remains United to God and Absorbed in Him by a Perfect Devotion

AT last the soul has arrived at so great a perfection of devotion, that no pleasure of the world moves her, no appearance seduces her, no praise weakens her, no labour terrifies her, no human respect restrains her: but in sight of the whole

IBtscourse FE 37 world she freely displays her love for her Spouse, and dances before the Ark, not troubling herself when the wisdom of the world, after having said to her:

Who is this that cometh up from the desert, flowing with delights? Also follows her to rebuke her, because she is:

Leaning upon her beloved.

On the contrary, she ever talks with her Beloved of the great sign of love He gives in the very place where He had been the most offended, and when He resolved to die for us after Adam and Eve had disobeyed Him:

Under the apple tree I raised thee up:

there thy mother was corrupted, there she was deflowered that bore thee. The soul will no longer find any difficulty in labours; for nothing is difficult to the love which she holds deeply graven on her heart, and even in exterior actions:

Put me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thy arm, So that love combats death:

Love is strong as death, Hell cannot daunt it:

Jealousy as hard as hell,

Flames and fires are frozen in comparison with her love:

The lamps thereof are fire and flames. The sea could not extinguish it:

Many waters cannot quench charity, neither can the floods drown it:

3 8 JHjjsttcal Explanation of tfje ffianttcles

Nothing is comparable to it:

If a man should give all the substance of his house for love, he shall despise it as nothing.

As to the praises which are given her, the soul troubles not herself with them, because she says within herself: What are these imperfect souls, who having no good of their own would deck themselves out with external adornments? My little sisters, that is, imperfect souls, should think of this; for they have no breasts of themselves, no virtues or merits of their own:

Our sister is little, and hath no breasts. What shall we do to our sister in the day when she is to be spoken to? In them one can supply the defect with praises, just as if one covered with silver a broken and dilapidated wall, with cedar a door which had rotted:

If she be a wall, let us build upon it bulwarks of silver: if she be a door, let us join it together with boards of cedar. But I, happy I, says the soul, concern myself very little with pleasing men, my Beloved having made me as a wall and as a tower of such kind, that I am very pleasing and agreeable:

I am a wall: and my breasts are as a tower since I am become in his presence as one finding peace. Then come sensible and temporal things, against which the soul perfect in mental prayer has taken such a disposition, that considering them as vile and of low price in comparison with her rich object, she only thinks of them in so far as they can modestly serve her necessities. For the rest, no care of herself can turn her aside. Little, says the soul, is necessary to one who seeks to live in the peace of Our Lord and with moderation. A thousand pieces of silver, or some other great price, is a thing of too little value:

The peaceable had a vineyard, in that which hath poplars: * he let out the same to keepers, every man bringeth for the fruit thereof a thousand pieces of silver. But I, says the soul, I have no need of so many things:

My vineyard before me is thy thousand peaceful ones,t

On the contrary I will further give two hundred as alms to these poor, who by their prayers guard for us our goods:

And two hundred for them that keep the fruit thereof.

And indeed, being abstracted from all sensible things, I would have not one of them able to distract me or to trouble me.

And finally, if we would pass to worldly pleasures — I know, says the soul, that my

• Populos; our version has people.

t Vinea mea coram me est mille, tui pacifici. Our version has, My vineyard is before me. A thousand are for theet the peaceable.

40 Jfflgsttcal (Sxplanatton of tfje Canticles

Beloved will not endure rivals, and that with the consolations He gives me, He will not have me mingle the consolations which other than He could give me: and thus He commands me that rising up, and resigning myself totally to Him with a clear and open protestation, I renounce all other lovers:

Thou that dwellest in the gardens, the friends hearken: make me hear thy voice.

And at once here am I, ready to obey Him. No longer the world or its pleasures, no longer any mortal thing, 0 God, my God! Thou alone art my Well-Beloved. Thou alone art all my good: it is Thou alone whom I seek:

Fly * (that is, come, but come lightly) 0 my beloved, and be like to the roe, and to the young hart upon the mountains of aromatical spices.

In which last protestation and perfect resignation of the soul into and unto God consists the end of mental prayer, and the highest degree of spirituality, which is this close union of the soul with God by devotion.

And, to conclude, there remains no more to do except to pray Our Lord to deign by His mercy to draw us to Him by these degrees of mental prayer, so that being already united with Him in this world by grace, we may be so also by devotion; in order that after our death we

• Fuge; our version has, flee away.

IBtscottrse 5JE 41 may be so by glory, and that in all these holy unions He may kiss us, this divine Beloved, with a kiss of His sacred mouth. AMEN.

Translated from Blaise, (Euvres completes de Saint Francois de Sales, but corrected by the excellent edition at end of the Traite de I'amour de Dieu, in possession of the Sisters of the Visitation of Harrow-on-the-Hill. (Bookplate, " Lord Arundell of Wardour.") Paris, Sebastian Hure, Pere et Fils, Rue S. Jacques au cceurbon, et a la Visitation, 1647. [Henry Benedict MackeyJ]

Compared also with the oldest known edition extant, Paris, 1643. Preserved at the First Convent of the Visitation of Rouen, Rue de Joyeuse 24 [Ed.].

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