Vigils Reading – Office for the Dead

THE DEGREES OF LOVE

By St John of the Cross

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The soul is right in daring to say: “may the vision of Your beauty be my

death“, since she knows that at the instant she sees this beauty she will be

carried away by it, and absorbed in this very beauty, and transformed in this

same beauty, and made beautiful like this beauty itself, and enriched and

provided for like this very beauty.

David declares, consequently, that the death of the saints is precious in

the sight of the Lord. This would not be true if they did not participate in His

very grandeurs, for in the sight of God nothing is precious but what God in

Himself is.

Accordingly, the soul does not fear death when she loves, rather she

desires it. Yet sinners are always fearful of death. They foresee that death will

take everything away and bring them all evils. As David says, the death of

sinners is very evil. And hence, as the Wise Man says, the remembrance of it is

bitter. Since sinners love the life of this world intensely and have little love for

that of the other, they have an immense fear of death.

The soul that loves God lives more in the next life than in this, for the soul

lives where it loves more than where it gives life, and thus has but little esteem

for this temporal life. She says then, “may the vision of Your beauty be my

death. For the sickness of love is not cured except by your presence and image.”

The reason love sickness has no other remedy than the presence and the

image of the Beloved is that, since this sickness differs from others, its medicine

also differs. In other sicknesses, following sound philosophy, contraries are

cured by contraries, but love is incurable except by what is in accord with love.

The reason for this is that love of God is the soul’s health, and the soul

does not have full health until loves is complete. Sickness is nothing but a want

of health, and when the soul has not even a single degree of love, she is dead.

but when she possesses some degrees of love of God, no matter how few, she is

then alive, yet very weak and infirm because of her little love. In the measure

that love increases she will be healthier, and when love is perfect she will have

full health.

The soul does well to call imperfect love “sickness.” for just as the sick is

too weak for work, so is the soul, feeble in love, too weak to practice heroic

virtue. It is also noteworthy that the soul who feels the sickness of love, a lack of

love, shows that she has some love, because she is aware of what she lacks

through what she has. The soul who does not feel this sickness shows that she

either has no love or is perfect in love.