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For Thoughts Like These from François Nepveu, S.J.

For Thoughts Like These from François Nepveu, S.J.

Last updated on: June 7, 2015 at 10:39 pm by Frank Weathers

For Thoughts Like These from François Nepveu, S.J. 2015-06-07T22:39:27-05:00 Frank Weathers

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—Feast of All Saints of Africa

I love discovering devotional works that bring the Catholic perspective on Christianity directly onto the center stage. That’s what this book by Jesuit Father François Nepveu does.

Translated from the French by Henry Coleridge, S.J. (poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s brother), it is entitled Of the Love of Our Lord Jesus Christ, And the Means of Acquiring It.

Father Nepveu presents us with the motives for loving Our Savior. What follows is the first motive he describes, which is pretty straight-forward and right on the mark.

We Should Love Jesus Christ: Because He is Loveable.

Everything that is beautiful, and everything that is perfect, is naturally loveable. Everything that is infinitely beautiful and infinitely perfect, is therefore infinitely and necessarily loveable. Hence it follows that the Blessed, who see clearly the beauty and perfections of God, love Him so necessarily that it is out of their power to refrain from doing so. They would love Him infinitely if they were capable of an infinite love.

Were we then to study more often, were we to know more perfectly Thy perfections, O Jesus! Should we not find ourselves under a sweet obligation of loving Thee, since Thou dost contain in Thyself all perfections, created and uncreated, human and divine, spiritual, absolute and relative, and consequently all that can not only satisfy our minds and win our hearts, but even please our affections, and captivate our senses, in a word, all that can attract our love?

Is it not, then, wonderful that in spite of so many reasons for loving Thee, we can possibly avoid doing so? Jesus is God. He possesses, therefore, infinite beauty, infinite goodness, infinite power, holiness, wisdom, and, in a word, every perfection to an infinite degree. Thus, then, my soul, thou canst find in Him wherewith to Satisfy thy desires, however vast, however ambitious they may be; wherewith to fill that immense craving of the human heart which cannot be filled with any created or finite good. What then dost thou seek for elsewhere?

But Jesus is also man. In taking a body and a nature like ours, He makes these beauties and perfections of His—all divine as they are—material, sensible, adapted to our weakness, and proportioned to our faculties. How, then, can we refuse to love Jesus, or excuse ourselves from doing so, though we be ever so earthly, material, or attached to the objects of sense? For we have in Jesus, as the object of our love, something which is both divine and human, spiritual and sensible; something which can, consequently, satisfy our minds, our hearts, our reason, and our senses, and attract at the same time our veneration, our love, our admiration, and our tenderness.

How comes it, then, that the effect upon us is so often different from this? What are we to think or say of this strange marvel? Only that there is something in the malice of man, and in the insensibility of his heart towards Jesus, as incomprehensible as there is in the goodness and beauty of God.

God became Man, says St. Augustine, in order that man, who is composed of two such different parts, one altogether spiritual the other altogether material, finding in a God-Man all that was wanting to make the happiness of both his own natures, should not be obliged to divide his heart, and thereby to divide his love, between God and the creature; but that, finding in the Humanity of Jesus a holy occupation for his affections, pleasure for his senses, satisfaction for his mind, and enough to content his heart, he might place all his joy in Him, and find his happiness in loving Him. What then!

If one touch of beauty, if the smallest trace of perfection found in a wretched creature, can dazzle our eyes, take possession of our minds, and allure our hearts with a kind of enchantment; what strange sort of enchantment is this of which we speak, that the accumulation of every beauty and all perfections, divine and human, spiritual and material, all of which are found in Thee, most lovely Jesus, is unable to satisfy our mind, win our heart, or earn our love? Is it madness? Or blindness? or insensibility? Or, rather, is it not all three at once?

For, indeed, how is it conceivable that, while we can no more help loving that which is loveable, than help seeing that which is visible, yet Jesus, Who has done everything to make Himself beloved by us, or rather, is Himself alone worthy of love, should be about the only one unloved by us! Unloved! Rather, Who is neglected, scorned, forsaken!

It is this pitiable blindness which the Prophet foresaw and deplored in those touching words—”Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and ye gates thereof, be very desolate, saith the Lord. For my people have done two evils. They have foresaken Me, the fountain of living water, and have digged to themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water”(Jer. ii. 12, 13).

This is what happens daily, when we forsake Jesus, infinitely lovely, to run after creatures, the possession of which never contents us, and the love of which, far from making us happy, makes us miserable and even criminal. This horrible confusion and strange insensibility which no one can comprehend, and which yet we see every day, touches to the quick those souls who are penetrated with the love of our Lord. We ourselves should bitterly lament it, if we had not ourselves a share in this insensibility.

This thought, that a God infinitely lovely should not be loved by men, so inconsolably afflicted the Saints, such as St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa, and St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi, as to cause them sometimes to sigh for death, and to cry out in their holy transports of zeal, love, and suffering: “Love is not loved, Love is not loved!”

Oh, sons of men! How long will your minds be so blinded, and your hearts so weighed down by earthly things, as to have no wish to see the One True Beauty, and to love the One True Love! Thus it must be, my sweet and adorable Jesus, till Thou Thyself, Who art the Light of the World, shalt so enlighten, elevate, and fortify our minds as to render them capable of knowing Thee; until Thou shalt so detach, purify, and warm our hearts as to render them capable of loving Thee; until Thou shalt not only make known to our minds Thy Beauty, but also make our hearts sensible to the power of its charms, so that we shall confess that there is none but Thee Who art beautiful, and perfect, and lovely, and that consequently Thou only dost deserve our love.

Have a look at the rest of the book here.

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