CHAPTER XXIII
THAT PERFECT LOVE MINGLES NOTHING WITH GOD: AND WHY. AND THAT
IT IS NEEDFUL TO LOVE: AND OF THE BLINDNESS OF FLESHLY
LOVE
If we perfectly forsake the filth of sins
and the vices of this world, we love nothing but God. How truly should God be
all in all if anything were in man beside His love? No man truly has joy unless
he loves the good.
The more therefore that a man loves God, no
marvel the more plenteously he shall joy in Him; because the more busily and
fervently we desire anything, it being gotten, the more heartily we joy.
Therefore truly has a man joy because he has God; and God truly is that Joy:
the which forsooth none of them have that seek anything besides God. For if I
desire anything for myself, and I set not my God as the end of that desire,
sicker it is that I have made a traitor of myself, and my hidden guilt is
openly shown.
God truly will be loved in this wise: that no man
be mingled with Him in His love. For if thou dividest thy heart and dreadest
not to love another thing with Him, without doubt know well that thy love is
forsaken of God; the which vouchsafes not for to behold a part of love. All the
whole truly or nought He takes; for He gainbought the whole. For in the sin of
Father Adam forsooth thy body and thy soul were damned; wherefore God is come
down into a Maiden's body and become man, and has given the price of thy
deliverance, that not only He might deliver thy soul from the power of the
fiends, but also He might make thy body with thy soul blessed at the end of the
world. Therefore thou hast the commandments of eternal life. If thou wilt enter
the kingdom, lost, and after reparalled with Christ's blood, it behoves thee to
keep God's commandments.
And truly as thou desirest after thy death to
ascend into full and perfect joy, so it behoves thee in this life to have mind
to love God with a whole and perfect heart. Else as now thou art not given to
God's love, so then not perfect joy but endless torment shalt thou have. For
truly whiles thou takest not heed to thy Maker with whole love and mind, thou
art proved soothly to love some creature of God more than is honest or lawful.
A soul can not be reasonable without love whiles it is in this life: wherefore
the love thereof is the foot of the soul, by which, after this pilgrimage, it
is borne to God or the fiend; that it may be subject to him whose will here it
served.
Nothing truly can be loved but for the goodness
that it has, or else seems that it has, and which is either in the loved or
certainly thought to be in that that is loved. Herefore truly it is that lovers
of bodily beauty or worldly riches are beguiled as it were by witchcraft; for
delight is not those things the which we think we feel or see, nor the joy that
is feigned, nor the good name that we give it.
No man therefore more damnably forgets his soul
than he that sets his eye on woman for lechery; truly whilst the sight of the
eye kindles the soul, anon from the things seen thought enters and engenders
desire in the heart, and defiles the inward beauty. Wherefore suddenly with
burning of a noyous fire it is umbelapped and blinded, that it may not see the
sentence of the strait Judge. And thus the soul, taken from heavenly sight by
evil and unclean love, stints not to show tokens of her error; and unless she
may bring forth the filth that is conceived, she mistrusts of her
prosperity.
Filth forsooth she conceived, that is to say
wicked desire; thereby shall wickedness worthily be brought forth, because the
soul the sooner slides to slippery lust inasmuch as she takes no heed to the
great peril in which she errs. The dooms of God are withdrawn also from her
face. Whiles truly she begins to take pleasure in fleshly desires, she sees not
into how great a pit of wretchedness she casts herself.
Soothly the doom of God is that he who wilfully
despised God, casting himself down into deadly sin, shall, God deeming,
unwillingly be damned after this life. In the time to come truly he can not
defend himself from the pains of hell, that, set in this life, would not, when
he could, with all his power forsake deadly sins, and wholly hate all
wickedness.