Friday, December 15th, 2006
The Fire of Love (XXIII, ii) by Richard Rolle
Friday, December 15th, 2006
The Fire of Love (XXIII, ii) by Richard Rolle
Continuation of the medieval exhortation to holiness set as a book length poem by Jabez L. Van Cleef.
The Fire of Love (XXIII, ii) by Richard Rolle
Truly as you desire after your death
To ascend to full and perfect joy,
So it behooves you in this earthly life
To love God with a whole and perfect heart.
Else as now, you are not giv’n to God,
So then shall you not have your perfect joy,
But endless torment be your bread and meat.
For truly while you heed not here your Maker
With whole love and mind, you are proved soothly
To love some creature more than it is lawful.
A soul can not have reason without love
Whilst it is in this life finding its way:
Wherefore the love thereof is the soul’s foot,
By which it shall be borne to God or fiend;
Subject to him whose will it has served here.
Nothing truly can be loved complete,
But for the goodness that it has, or seems,
Which goodness is either in the one beloved
Or thought to be in that, that is beloved.
Herefore truly is it, that they who love
Bodily beauty or worldly riches, fall,
Beguilèd as it were by strong witchcraft;
For truly delight is not part of those things
The which we think we feel or see in them,
Nor is the joy we feign when we behold them,
Nor the good name we give to what we see,
But only as we tell ourselves they are.
No man therefore more damnably forgets
His own soul than the one who sets his eye
On woman, however innocent, for lechery;
Truly, the eye’s taper kindles the soul,
Anon, from things we see, then thought comes in,
Engendering desire within the heart,
Together, these defile the inward beauty.
Wherefore suddenly with a noyous burning
In fire we are enfolded and made blind,
That we see not the sentence of the Judge.
And thus the soul, taken from heavenly sight
By countenance of evil, unclean love,
Stints not to show the tokens of her error:
Unless she may bring forth the filth conceived,
She is mistrustful of her own prosperity.
Filth your soul has conceived, and wicked desire;
Thereby shall wickedness thrust him ahead;
That sooner the soul may slide in slippery lust,
Inasmuch as she then takes no heed
To the great peril in which she errs,
The sooner does God’s countenance withdraw;
Whilst truly she begins to take her pleasure
In copious fleshly desires, then she sees not
Into how great a pit of wretchedness,
From small conception, she has cast herself.
He who has so willingly despised God,
Casting himself down into deadly sin,
God shall reject unwillingly after this life.
Truly his soul cannot defend herself,
In the time to come, from pains of hell;
That, set in this life, would not, when he could,
With all his power, forsake those deadly sins.
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