How Powerful the love of God Is

How powerful the love of God is

All that is said above and whatever is necessary for salvation cannot
be better, more immediately and more securely achieved than by love,
through which whatever is lacking of what is necessary for salvation
can be made good. In love we possess the fullness of all good and the
realisation of our highest longing is not denied us. After all it is
love alone by which we turn back to God, are changed into God, cleave
to God, and are united to God in such a way that we become one spirit
with him, and are by him and through him made blessed here by grace and
hereafter in glory.

Now love is such that it cannot rest except in the
beloved, but it does when it wins the beloved in full and peaceful
possession. For love, which itself is charity, is the way of God to men
and the way of man to God. God cannot house where there is no love. So
if we have love, we have God, for God is love. Furthermore nothing is
sharper than love, nothing is more subtle, nothing more penetrating. It
will not rest until it has by its very nature penetrated the whole
power, the depth and the totality of the loved one. It wants to make
itself one with the beloved, and itself, if it were possible, to be
what the beloved is too. Thus it cannot bear that anything should stand
between itself and the beloved object, which is God, but presses
eagerly towards him. As a result it never rests until it has left
everything else behind and come to him alone.

For the nature of love is
of a unitive and transforming power which transforms the lover into
what he loves, or alternatively, makes the lover one with the other,
and vice versa, in so far as is possible. This is manifest in the first
place with regard to the mental powers, depending on how much the
beloved is in the lover, in other words depending on how sweetly and
delightfully the beloved is recalled in the mind of the lover, and in
direct proportion, that is, with how much the lover strives to grasp
all the things that relate to the beloved not just superficially but
intimately, and to enter, as it were, into his innermost secrets. It is
also manifest with regard to the emotional and affective powers when
the beloved is said to be in the lover, in other words when the desire
to please the beloved is found in the will and established within by
the happy enjoyment of him. Alternatively, the lover is in the beloved
when he is united with him by all his desire and compliance in
agreement with the beloved's willing and not willing, and finds his own
pleasure and pain in that of the beloved. For love draws the lover out
of himself (since love is strong as death), and establishes him in the
beloved, causing him to cleave closely to him. For the soul is more
where it loves than where it lives, since it is in what it loves in
accordance with its very nature, understanding and will, while it is in
where it lives only with regard to form, which is even true for animals
as well.

There is nothing therefore which draws us away from the
exterior senses to within ourselves, and from there to Jesus Christ and
things divine, more than the love of Christ and the desire for the
sweetness of Christ, for the experience, awareness and enjoyment of the
presence of Christ's divinity. For there is nothing but the power of
love which can lead the soul from the things of earth to the lofty
summit of heaven. Nor can anyone attain the supreme beatitude unless
summoned to it by love and yearning. Love after all is the life of the
soul, the wedding garment and the soul's perfection, containing all the
law and the prophets and our Lord's teaching. That is why Paul says to
the Romans, Love is the fulfilling of the law, (Rom. 13.8) and in the
first letter to Timothy, The end of the commandment is love. (1 Timothy
1.5)
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