July 2007 Print

Ten Minutes with Fr. de Chivré

 

St. Thomas Aquinas's definition of marriage is "conjunctio et vinculum animarum et relatio conjungum–the indissoluble union of souls and relation of spouses." There is a joy of permanence when he is speaking of the soul of the spouses: vinculum–bond. St. Thomas saves the notion of love: a mutual and definitive engagement between two souls, bringing about a permanent and practically accidental right of the two sensibilities over each other.

Since perfection implies a state–therefore a duration, a permanence, we have to seek the principle of the perfection of love in the spiritual life of the two spouses. The reason? Perfect love consists in a certain forgetfulness in the gift of self. Now, sensibility does not know such gratuity; it represents the interested form of love, that which demands its salary, its emotion, its impressions; it is the love of concupiscence, the love whose act reveals that one is concerned more with oneself than with one's partner, who is limited to being the means producing one's personal joy–which one is seeking legitimately, moreover. In a love inspired primarily by the sensibility of each, there is first a personal self-seeking by way of another. The initiative goes from oneself to the spouse, and comes back to oneself (the bee gathering nectar from a flower).

This form of love fosters fidelity by the physical and psychological awareness which one takes from the agreeable reciprocity of sensible exchanges existing between two spouses, but it does not involve the depth of their souls; it is a relation not a bond; it leaves their judgment free regarding each other; it does not engage them on the deepest level.

Now, the only sure love is the love that exhausts the reasons to give oneself, the substantial reasons that engage the soul to give itself and call upon the love of benevolence, that perfected form of love. Contrary to the love of concupiscence, the love of benevolence goes out from the heart of the spouse as a proof of attachment so spontaneous and so gratuitous that it demands no salary, no obligatory response, no sensible gain.

It regards solely that which involves benevolence toward the other: the good which it will bring to the other, the virtue which it will foster in the other, the joy which it will cause the other, the help which it will procure for the other, the lightening of a burden which it will produce for the other. It is a supremely disinterested attitude, fruit of an intensity of affection having reached the point where one sees only the beloved without any concern for oneself.

This gratuity, this attention to gratuity in a love, is the signature of its moral superiority and its authenticity. What is the origin of this gratuity?

The flesh, because it is material, therefore because it is perishable, has no notion of gratuity. Even in its generosities it seeks a pledge of duration, an opportunity to verify that it still exists and that we are not forgetting about it, in the form of a sensible benefit, a pleasant emotion, or an interesting gift. It has no notion of gratuity. With the flesh, everything has a price. Gratuity has its origin and flows spontaneously from the value of a being: the diamond gratuitously shines its fires, the sun gratuitously shines its light, God gratuitously shines His goodness, because, in varying degrees, they are beings of value, finite or infinite.

Now, nothing binds, nothing confirms a relation like gratuity; why? Because it is the expression of beauty, and beauty binds us to it. Two spouses whose supernatural value is true will experience, spontaneously and reciprocally, the need to prove their love gratuitously, and so they will give one another proofs of the moral beauty of their soul, which will bind them more and more to one another with a freshness, an enthusiasm, and a youth that are forever increasing. The love of concupiscence–legitimate for all that, but not immune to selfishness and the callousness of selfishness that separates more or less according as it inspires more or less these proofs of interested love–will have ceded to an undercurrent, composed of so great a reciprocal benevolence that the two spouses will come to a greater and greater appreciation of each other in a joy without parallel.

Even in the love of benevolence we have to make distinctions. It, too, has its duties: the marriage debt, mutual support, obligatory help to one another. These duties are at one and the same time the conjunction of the two aforementioned forms of love: concupiscence and benevolence are both involved.

The duties of love are freely chosen engagements, without a doubt, therefore retaining an echo of gratuity, but rendered obligatory by the sacrament of which they are not yet the full blossoming. However, to the extent that each of the spouses is intent on accomplishing his duty with virtue, to that extent he prepares himself, by the virtuous aspect of that duty, to awaken in himself more than the notion of affection owed: the notion of affection offered by pure gratuity.

This affection spontaneously offered over and above duty, outside of duty, proves itself by attitudes from which is excluded all idea of interested seeking on the part of our sensibility–and this is precisely what will render affection more and more interesting: disinterestedness in service, sacrifices, kind and thoughtful initiatives, affectionate and unexpected decision. And this at the expense, perhaps, of a personal pleasure, of time "for self," of work "for self." The art of self-forgetting engenders the art of loving, and the art of loving engenders the art of making oneself loved without running after it.

The hallmark of pure love turns out to be, then, the need to do more than one's duty–for value is a thing of life, and life has no reason not to prove itself. The duration and the development of love therefore demand the moral and supernatural perfection of our faculties, to maintain them in a state of gratuity. The role of prayer and the sacraments is intimately tied to the life of love in marriage and source of its density–its weight.

Marriage begins with the love of concupiscence, progresses into the love of concupiscence qualified by a beginning of benevolence, and comes at last into its own with a very sweet and very strong friendship, recompense of a love of benevolence in full activity taking more and more the place of the love of concupiscence.

Two people physically young felt themselves attracted toward one another to the benefit of their reciprocal sensibility; it was the time of passionate proofs of affection in which, without suspecting it, their heart, too, began to engage values of its own, though still entangled in the necessary sensations and emotions. Little by little these values became aware of their relative independence from the flesh, as the scent is relatively independent from the flower; then, the years going by and sensibilities calming, these values came loose of themselves from any carnal demands, as the fruit comes loose from the tree. Sufficiently noble and sufficiently supernatural, they proved to be living of a life all their own, a pure life, a life of the heart and the soul, an intense life emerged from the sensible cocoon and become independent and free to give itself entirely.

These values blossomed in the sunshine of God, of His adoration, of His imitation; then, as God entered into the love of these young people, and as the divine reasons to love each other settled into their understanding, they passed beyond the phase of culpable hesitations and enervating lassitudes; they eternalized their affection by nourishing it with the immortality of their personal value. This value, composed of the state of grace, the state of gift, the state of offertory, pervaded their intentions and their actions. They begin to know each other more and more deeply by a more and more absolute appreciation silently brought to bear on the delightfully Christian attitudes of each one. They begin no longer to desire each other for being continually together whether separated or apart. They begin to read each other even before they speak, so much do both know the other ready to be of service. The shameful dreams of guilty distractions no longer even darken the horizon of their heart, for their heart is content, and a contented heart no longer dreams of being guilty. Is not this the sweetest and most real emotion of Christian love, to have so entirely interwoven two lives in the energy of a love more and more gratuitous, that there is no longer any other reason for living than steadily to strengthen that love?

When you look closely, very closely, we are always the architects of our unhappiness and of our happiness by the inferior or superior manner with which we envision the usage of the means destined for its construction.

 

Translated exclusively for Angelus Press from Carnets Spirituels, No. 8, pp. 3-7. Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P. (say: Sheave-ray´) was ordained in 1930. He was an ardent Thomist, student of Scripture, retreat master, and friend of Archbishop Lefebvre. He died in 1984.