All through the Verba
Seniorum we find a repeated insistence on the primacy of love over
everything else in the spiritual life: over knowledge, gnosis, asceticism,
contemplation, solitude, prayer. Love in fact is the spiritual life, and
without it all the other exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of
content and become mere illusions. The more lofty they are, the more dangerous
the illusion.
Love, of course, means something much more than mere sentiment,
much more than token favours and perfunctory almsdeeds. Love means an interior
and spiritual identification with one’s brother, so that he is not regarded as
an “object” to “which” one “does good.” The fact is that good done to another
as to an object is of little or no spiritual value. Love takes one’s neighbour
as one’s other self, and loves him with all the immense humility and discretion
and reserve and reverence without which no one can presume to enter into the
sanctuary of another’s subjectivity. From such love all authoritarian brutality,
all exploitation, domineering and condescension must necessarily be absent. The
saints of the desert were enemies of every subtle or gross expedient by which
“the spiritual man” contrives to bully those he thinks inferior to himself,
thus gratifying his own ego. They had renounced everything that savoured of
punishment and revenge, however hidden it might be.
Thomas
Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert, Introduction
pp17-8
