Henry Osborn Taylor

“ The joy of love, new to us both, brought no satiety. The more I was taken up with this pleasure, the less time I gave to philosophy and the schools—how tiresome had all that become! I became unproductive, merely repeating my old lectures, and if I composed any verses, love was their subject, and not the secrets of philosophy; you know how popular and widely sung these have become. But the students! what groans and laments arose from them at my distraction! A passion so plain was not to be concealed; every one knew of it except Fulbert. A man is often the last to know of his own shame. ”

“ So Christian joy might have an absoluteness which it never had under the pause-giving mortal limitations of paganism.
Within the compass of pagan joyfulness there had been no deeper passion than the love of beauty. That had its sensuous phases, and its far blue heights, where Plato saw the beauty of order, justice, and proportion. For the Christian, the beauty of the flesh became a veil through which he looked for the beauty of the soul. If a face testified to the beauty of holiness within, it was fair. Better the pale, drawn visages of monk and nun than the red lip too quickly smiling. ”

“ Had it not been for the full and varied city life in which he was born and bred, the quick-eyed youth would not have had that fund of human interest and intuition which makes him so pleasant and so different from any one north of the Alps in the thirteenth century. A city boy indeed, and what a full personality! He was to be a man of human curiosity, a tireless sight-seer. His interest is universal; his human love quick enough—for those he loved; for he was no saint, although a Minorite. His detestation is vivid, illuminating; it brings the hated man before us. ”

“ From age to age the religious soul finds traces of its God in nature and in its inmost self. Its ways of finding change, varying with the prevailing currents of knowledge; yet still it ever finds these vestigia, which represent the widest deductions of its reasoning, the ultimate resultants of its thought, and its own brooding peace. Therefore may we not follow sympathetically the Itinerarium of Bonaventura’s mind as it traces the footprints of its God? Thus far the way has advanced by reason, uplifted by grace, and yet still reason. ”

“ From the beginning Lancelot’s love is worship, it is holy; and almost from the beginning it is unholy. From the beginning, too, it is the man’s inspiration, it is his strength; it makes him the peerless knight, peerless in courtesy, peerless in emprise; this love gives him the single eye, the unswerving heart, the resistless valour to accomplish those adventures wherein all other knights had found their shame—they were not perfect lovers! Only through his perfect love could Lancelot have accomplished that greatest adventure of the Val des faux amants;—Val sans retour for all other knights. ”

“ His mind was filled with the figures of Romance; a knight would he be at least; why not a paladin, whom all the world should wonder at? So he dreamed, and so he acted out his whim as best he might on the little stage of Assisi; for Francis was a poet, and a poet even more in deed than in words. He was endowed with exquisite fancy, and he did its dictates never doubting. His life was to prove an almost unexampled inspiration to art, because it was itself a poem by reason of its unfailing realization of the conceptions of a fervent and beautiful imagination. ”

“ I confess, sinner as I am, with mind befouled in flesh, that I am moved with spiritual sweetness toward the creator and ruler of this world, and honour Him with greater veneration, when I behold at once the magnitude, and beauty and permanence of His creation. For the mind, lifting itself from the dunghill of its affections, and rising, as it is able, into the light of speculation, sees as from a height the greatness of the universe containing in itself infinite places filled with the divers orders of creatures. ”

“ Is any one troubled, let Jesus come into the heart and thence leap to the lips, and behold! at the rising of that bright name the clouds scatter and the air is again serene. If any one slips in crime, and then desponds amid the snares of death, will he not, invoking that name of life, regain the breath of life? In whom can hardness of heart, sloth, rancour, languishment stand before that name? In whom at its invocation will not the dried fount of tears burst forth more abundantly and sweetly? ”

“ Dante’s mind was always turning from the obvious sense-actuality of the fact to its symbolism; which held the truer reality. With such a man it is not strange that the beloved and adored woman, the love of whom was virtue and enlightenment, should, when dead to earth, become that divine wisdom which opens Heaven to the lover who would follow, for all eternity, whither his beloved has so surely gone. ”

“ When the Weaver of wiles failed to cause me utterly to despair, he tried with other arguments of guile to lead me to blaspheme the divine justice, suggesting thoughts, as if condoling with my misery: ‘O most unhappy youth, whose grief no man deigns to consider—but men are not to blame, for they do not know your trouble. God alone knows, and since He can do all things, why does He not aid you in tribulation, when for love of Him you have surrendered the world and now endure this agony? ”

“ Black-coloured the unsteadfast comrade; white the man whose thoughts keep troth. False comradeship is fit for hell fire. Likewise let women heed whither they carry their honour, and on whom they bestow their love, that they may not rue their troth. Before God, I counsel good women to observe right measure. Their fortress is shame: I cannot wish them better weal. The false one gains false reward; her praise vanishes. Wide is the fame of many a fair; but if her heart be counterfeit, ’tis a false gem set in gold. The woman true to womanhood, be hers the praise—not lessened by her outside hue. ”

“ The truly consequent person who made theology a practical matter, was such a one as Francis of Assisi, with his ceaselessly-burning Christlike love actualizing itself in living act and word—or possibly such a one as Bonaventura with his piety. But can it ever seem other than fantastic, to state this principle, and then bulwark it with volumes of dialectic and a metaphysics beyond the grasp of human understanding? Not from such does one learn to do the will of God. This was scarcely the way to make good the ultimate practical character of religion, as against Thomas’s frankly intellectual view. ”

“ The pain of the Soul severed, not yet a bride, is deeper than the abyss, bitterer than the world; but her joy shall exceed that of seraphs, she, Bride of the Trinity. [45]
The Soul must surrender herself, and become sheer desire for God. [46] God's own yearning has begotten this desire. As glorious prince, as knight, as emperor, God comes; also in other forms:
"I come to my Beloved
As dew upon the flowers." [47]
For each other are these lovers wounded, for each other these lovers bleed, and each to the other is joy unspeakable and unforgettable. ”

“ No one versed in medicine will judge of inner disease from outward view. Thy praise is the more perilous because I love it, and desire to please thee always. Be fearful rather than confident regarding me, so that I may have the help of your care. Do not seek to spur me on, by quoting, ‘For strength is made perfect in weakness,’ or ‘He is not crowned unless he have contended lawfully.’ I am not looking for the crown of victory; enough for me to escape peril;—safer to shun peril than to wage war! In whatever little corner of heaven God puts me, that will satisfy me. ”

“ Thou shalt be the Grail’s lord; with thee thy wife Condwiramurs, and thy sons Lohengrin and Kardeiz, whom she bore to thee after thy going. Thy mouth shall question Anfortas—unto his joy. Now the planets favour thee; thy grief is spent. The Grail and the Grail’s power shall let thee have no part in evil. When young, thou didst get thee sorrow, which betrayed thy joy as it came;—thou hast won thy soul’s peace, and in sorrow thou hast endured unto thy life’s joy. ”

“ For the dew of tears cleanses the soul from every stain and makes fruitful the meadows of our hearts so that they bring forth the sprouts of virtue. For often as under an icy frost the wretched soul sheds its foliage, and, grace departing, it is left to itself barren and stripped of its shortlived blossoms. But anon tears given by the Tester of hearts burst forth, and this same soul is loosed from the cold of its slothful torpor, and becomes green again with the renewed leafage of its virtues, as a tree in spring kindled by the south wind. ”

“ We marvel to see a language which once had told the stately tale of Rome here lowered to fantastic incident and dull stupidity, then with almost gospel simplicity telling the moving story of some saintly life; again sonorously uttering thoughts to lift men from the earth and denunciations crushing them to hell; quivering with hope and fear and love, and chanting the last verities of the human soul. ”

“ But the Soul feeling its nature and its affinity with God, through love, makes answer boldly: “The fish cannot drown in the water, nor the bird sink in the air, nor gold perish in the flame, where it gains its bright clarity and colour. God has granted to all creatures to follow their natures; how can I withstand mine? To God will I go, who is my Father by nature, my Brother through His humility, my Bridegroom through love, and I am His forever.” ”

“ Dost thou recoil at the weight of thy arms, O delicate soldier! Before the enemy's darts the shield is no burden, nor the helmet heavy. The bravest soldiers tremble when the trumpet is heard before the battle is joined; but then hope of victory and fear of defeat make them brave. How canst thou tremble, walled round with the zeal of thy armed brethren, angels bearing aid at thy right hand, and thy leader Christ? There shalt thou safely fight, secure of victory. ”

“ For there is no bound to the idealizing of the love which first transfuses a youth’s nature with a mortal golden flame, and awakens it to new understanding. Out of whatever of experience of life and joy and sorrow may come to the man, this first love may still vivify itself anew—often in dreams—and become again living and beautiful, in tears, and will awaken new perceptions and disclose further vistas of the intelligenza nuova which love never ceases to impart to him who has loved. ”

“ I have read that God is love; not that He is honour, or dignity. God indeed demands to be feared as Lord, to be honoured as Father, and as Bridegroom to be loved. Which excels the rest? Love, surely. Without it, fear is penal, and honour graceless. Fear is slavish till manumitted by love; and the honour which does not rise from love is adulation. To God alone belong honour and glory; but He will accept neither unless it is flavoured with love’s honey.
“Love asks neither cause nor fruit beyond itself. I love because I love; I love that I may love. A great thing is love. ”

“ Elsewhere Damiani suggests how the hermit may acquire the "grace of tears":
"Seclude thyself from the turmoil of secular affairs and often even from talk with thy brethren. Cut off the cares and anxieties of mundane action; clear them away as a heap of rubbish which stops the fountain's flow. As water in a cavern of the earth wells up from the abyss, so sadness (tristitia) wells in a human heart from contemplation of the profundity of God's Judgment, and yet will not flow forth in tears if checked by the clods of earthly hindrance. Sadness is the material of tears. ”

“ There lay their romance, thither pointed their veriest thinking, thither drew their utter yearning.
Is it possible that the Middle Ages should speak to us, as through a common humanity? Their mask is by no means dumb: in full voice speaks the noble beauty of Chartres Cathedral. Such mediaeval product, we hope, is of the universal human, and therefore of us as well as of the bygone craftsmen. Why it moves us, we are not certain, being ignorant, perhaps, of the building’s formative and earnestly intended meaning. ”

“ History, through the ensample which it gives of perfect men, incites the reader to the imitation of holiness; allegory, in the revelation of faith, leads to a knowledge of truth; tropology, in the instruction of morals, to a love of virtue; anagogy, in the display of everlasting joys, to a desire of eternal felicity. In the house of our soul, history lays the foundation, allegory erects the walls, anagogy puts on the roof, while tropology provides ornament, within through the disposition, without through the effect of the good work. ”

“ But as nature is frail and weak, love is compelled by necessity first to serve itself. This is carnal love, whereby, above everything, man loves himself for his own sake. It is not set forth by precept, but is rooted in nature; for who hates his own flesh? As love becomes more ready and profuse, it is not content with the channel of necessity, but will pour forth and overspread the broad fields of pleasure. At once the overflow is bridled by the command, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' This is just and needful, lest what is part of nature should have no part in grace. ”

“ Thus salvation not only requires the action of the whole man, but is in and of his entire nature. It presents a unity primarily because of its agreement with the will of God, and then because of its unqualified and universal insistence that it, salvation, life eternal, be set absolutely first in man’s endeavour. What indeed could be more irrational, and more loveless and faithless, than that any desire should prevail over the entire good of man and the will of God as well? Oneness and peace consist in singleness of purpose and endeavour for salvation. ”

“ In that age, the hopes and fears and wonderment of men looked to the recluse as the perfected saint. No wonder that those Italian lands, so blithely sinful and so grievously penitent, were moved by this volcanic tempest of a man, fierce, merciless to the flesh, convulsed with scorching tears, famed for austerities and miracles. He lashed men from their sins; men feared before one whose presence was a threat of hell. Said the Marquis of Tuscany: “Not the emperor nor any mortal man, can put such fear in me as Romuald’s look. ”

“ There has never been a passion between a man and woman more famous than that which brought happiness and sorrow to the lives of Abaelard and Heloïse. Here fame is just. It was a great love, and its course was a perfect soul’s tragedy. Abaelard was a celebrity, the intellectual glory of an active-minded epoch. His love-story has done as much for his posthumous fame as all his intellectual activities. Heloïse became known in her time through her relations with Abaelard; in his songs her name was wafted far. She has come down to us as one of the world’s love-heroines. ”

“ With Adam’s seed came sorrow and joy; through him our lineage is from God, but through him, too, we carry sin, for which God took man’s image, and so suffered, battling with troth against untroth. Turn to Him if you would not be lost. Plato, Sibyl the prophetess, foretold Him. With divine love His mighty hand plucked us from hell. The joyful news they tell of Him the True Lover is this: He is radiant light, and wavers not in His love. Men may have either His love or hate. The unrepentant sinner flees the divine faithfulness; he who does penance wins His clemency. ”