Surangama Sutra
This identity out of the One into the One and with the One is the source and fountainhead and breaking forth of glowing Love.
Eckhart
Spiritual progress, as we have had occasion to discover in several other contexts, is always spiral and reciprocal. Peace from distractions and emotional agitations is the way to charity; and charity, or unitive love-knowledge, is the way to the higher peace of God. And the same is true of humility, which is the third characteristic mark of charity. Humility is a necessary condition of the highest form of love, and the highest form of love makes possible the consummation of humility in a total self-naughting.
Would you become a pilgrim on the road of Love? The first condition is that you make yourself humble as dust and ashes.
Ansari of Herat
I have but one word to say to you concerning love for your neighbour, namely that nothing save humility can mould you to it; nothing but the consciousness of your own weakness can make you indulgent and pitiful to that of others. You will answer, I quite understand that humility should produce forbearance towards others, but how am I first to acquire humility? Two things combined will bring that about; you must never separate them. The first is contemplation of the deep gulf, whence God’s all-powerful hand has drawn you out, and over which He ever holds you, so to say, suspended.
The second is the presence of that all-penetrating God. It is only in beholding and loving God that we can learn forgetfulness of self, measure duly the nothingness which has dazzled us, and accustom ourselves thankfully to decrease beneath that great Majesty which absorbs all things. Love God and you will be humble; love God and you will throw off the love of self; love God and you will love all that He gives you to love for love of Him.
Ftnelon
Feelings, as we have seen, may be of service as motives of charity; but charity as charity has its beginning in the will— will to peace and humility in oneself, will to patience and kindness towards one’s fellow-creatures, will to that disinterested love of God which ‘asks nothing and refuses nothing.’ But the will can be strengthened by exercise and confirmed by perseverance. This is very clearly brought out in the following record—delightful for its Boswellian vividness—of a conversation between the young Bishop of Belley and his beloved friend and master, Francis de Sales.
I once asked the Bishop of Geneva what one must do to attain perfection. * You must love God with all your heart,’ he answered, ‘and your neighbour as yourself,’
‘I did not ask wherein perfection lies,’ I rejoined, ‘but how to attain it.’ ‘ Charity,’ he said again, * that is both the means and the end, the only way by which we can reach that perfection which is, after all, but Charity itself. . . . Just as the soul is the life of the body, so charity is the life of the soul.’
‘ I know all that,’ I said. ‘ But I want to know how one is to love God with all one’s heart and one’s neighbour as oneself.’
But again he answered, ‘We must love God with all our hearts, and our neighbour as ourselves.’
‘I am no further than I was,’ I replied. ‘Tell me how to acquire such love.’
‘ The best way, the shortest and easiest way of loving God with all one’s heart is to love Him wholly and heartily!’
He would give no other answer. At last, however, the Bishop said, ‘There are many besides you who want me to tell them of methods and systems and secret ways of becoming perfect, and I can only tell them that the sole secret is a hearty love of God, and the only way of attaining that love is by loving. You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so you learn to love God and man by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves. If you want to love God, go on loving Him more and more. Begin as a mere apprentice, and the very power of love will lead you on to become a master in the art. Those who have made most progress will continually press on, never believing themselves to have reached their end; for charity should go on increasing until we draw our last breath.’
Jean Pierre Camus
The passage from what St. Bernard calls the ‘carnal love* of the sacred humanity to the spiritual love of the Godhead, from the emotional love that can only unite lover and beloved in act to the perfect charity which unifies them in spiritual substance, is reflected in religious practice as the passage from meditation, discursive and affective, to infused contemplation. All Christian writers insist that the spiritual love of the Godhead is superior to the carnal love of the humanity, which serves as introduction and means to man’s final end in unitive love-knowledge of the divine Ground; but all insist no less strongly that carnal love is a necessary introduction and an indispensable means. Oriental writers would agree that this is true for many persons, but not for all, since there are some born contem-platives who are able to ‘harmonize their starting point with their goal’ and to embark directly upon the Yoga of Knowledge. It is from the point of view of the born contemplative that the greatest of Taoist philosophers writes in the following passage.
Those men who in a special way regard Heaven as Father and have, as it were, a personal love for it, how much more should they love what is above Heaven as Father! Other men in a special way regard their rulers as better than themselves and they, as it were, personally die for them. How much more should they die for what is truer than a ruler! When the springs dry up, the fish are all together on dry land. They then moisten each other with their dampness and keep each other wet with their slime. But this is not to be compared with forgetting each other in a river or lake.
Chuang Tzu
The slime of personal afnd emotional love is remotely similar to the water of the Godhead’s spiritual being, but of inferior quality and (precisely because the love is emotional and therefore personal) of insufficient quantity. Having, by their voluntary ignorance, wrong-doing and wrong being, caused the divine springs to dry up, human beings can do something to mitigate the horrors of their situation by 4 keeping one another wet with their slime.’ But there can be no happiness or safety in time and no deliverance into eternity, until they give up thinking that slime is enough and, by abandoning themselves to what is in fact their element, call back the eternal waters. To those who seek first the Kingdom of God, all the rest will be added. From those who, like the modern idolaters of progress, seek first all the rest in the expectation that (after the harnessing of atomic power and the next revolution but three) the Kingdom of God will be added, everything will be taken away. And yet we continue to trust in progress, to regard personal slime as the highest form of spiritual moisture and to prefer an agonizing and impossible existence on dry land to love, joy and peace in our native ocean.
The sect of lovers is distinct from all others; Lovers have a religion and a faith all their own.
Jalal-uddin Rumi
The soul lives by that which it loves rather than in the body which it animates. For it has not its life in the body, but rather gives it to the body and lives in that which it loves.
St. John of the Cross
Temperance is love surrendering itself wholly to Him who is its object; courage is love bearing all things gladly for the sake of Him who is its object; justice is love serving only Him who is its object, and therefore rightly ruling; prudence is love making wise distinctions between what hinders and what helps itself.
St. Augustine
The distinguishing marks of charity are disinterestedness, tranquillity and humility. But where there is disinterestedness there is neither greed for personal advantage nor fear for personal loss or punishment; where there is tranquillity, there is neither craving nor aversion, but a steady will to conform to the divine Tao or Logos on every level of existence and a steady awareness of the divine Suchness and what should be one’s own relations to it; and where there is humility there is no censoriousness and no glorification of the ego or any projected alter-ego at the expense of others, who are recognized as having the same weaknesses and faults, but also the same capacity for transcending them in the unitive knowledge of God, as one has oneself. From all this it follows that charity is the root and substance of morality, and that where there is little charity there will be much avoidable evil. All this has been summed up in Augustine’s formula: ‘Love, and do what you like.’
Among the later elaborations of the Augustinian theme we may cite the following from the writings of John Everard, one of those spiritually minded seventeenth-century divines whose teachings
