BOOK THE TWO CHIEF EXERCISES OF SACRED LOVE, WHICH ARE DONE BY COMPLACENCE AND BENEVOLENCE

Book > BOOK THE TWO CHIEF EXERCISES OF SACRED LOVE, WHICH ARE DONE BY COMPLACENCE AND BENEVOLENCE

Lehigh University BIOS 345 Concerning the Sacred Complacence of Love, and First, of What It Consists in As we have already stated, love is simply the heart’s movement and outward flow when turned towards the good because of complacence we find in it. Hence complacence is the great motive of love, just as love is the great movement of complacence. This move ...[Show More]

Lehigh University
BIOS 345
Concerning the Sacred Complacence of Love, and First, of What It Consists in

As we have already stated, love is simply the heart’s movement and outward flow when turned towards the good because of complacence we find in it. Hence complacence is the great motive of love, just as love is the great movement of complacence.

This movement is directed to God in the following way. By faith we know that the divinity is an incomprehensible abyss of every perfection, supremely infinite in excellence and infinitely supreme in goodness. This truth taught to us by faith we attentively consider in meditation. We behold the immense goods that are in God, either taking them collectively as an assemblage of all perfections, or considering his excellences distinctly one after the other. For example, we consider his omnipotence, his omniscience, his absolute goodness, his eternity, or his infinity. When we have brought our intellect to be truly attentive to the grandeur of the goods in this divine object, it is impossible for our will not to be touched by complacence in such good. We then use our liberty and authority over ourselves and arouse our heart to redouble and reinforce its first complacence by acts of approval and rejoicing. The devout soul says: “Ah, you are beautiful, my beloved, you are beautiful! You are all desirable; you are even desire itself! Such is my beloved, and he is the friend of my heart, O you daughters of Jerusalem.(This is a quotation from the Song of Songs) Blessed be my God forever because he is so good! Ah, whether I die or whether I live, I am supremely happy to know that my God is so rich in all that is good and that his goodness is so infinite and his infinity so good.”

Thus, when we approve the good that we see in God and find joy in it, we make an act of love called complacence for we find infinitely greater pleasure in the divine pleasure than in our own. It is this love which gives such contentment to the saints when they can recount the perfections of their beloved. It is this that makes them proclaim with so much delight that God is God, “Know that the Lord is God,” they say. “O God, my God, my God, you are my God. I have said to the Lord, You are my God, the God of my heart and my God is the portion of my inheritance forever.” He is the God of our heart because of such complacence, since by it our heart embraces him and makes him its own. He is our

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