Now I know that good is cause of love and that which is good is defined by knowledge, and you can only love what you have learned is good, whereas I had, indeed, learned that the girl was the good of the irascible appetite, but the evil of the will. But I was in the grip of so many and such conflicting emotions, because what I felt was like the holiest love just as the doctors describe it: it produced in me that ecstasy in which lover and beloved want the same thing (and by mysterious enlightenment I, in that moment, knew that the girl, wherever she was, wanted the same things I myself wanted), and for her I felt jealousy, but not the evil kind, condemned by Paul in I Corinthians, but that which Dionysius speaks of in The Divine Names whereby God also is called jealous because of the great love He feels for all creation (and I loved the girl precisely because she existed, and I was happy, not envious, that she existed): I was jealous in the way in which, for the angelic doctor, jealousy is motus in amatum, the jealousy of friendship, which inspires us to move against all that harms the beloved (and I dreamed, at that moment; only of freeing the girl from the power of him who was buying her flesh and befouling it with his own infamous passions).
Now I know, as the doctor says, that love can harm the lover when it is excessive. And mine was excessive. I have tried to explain what I felt then, not in the least to justify what I felt. I am speaking of what were my sinful ardors of youth. They were bad, but truth obliges me to say that at the time I felt them to be extremely good. And let this serve to instruct anyone who may fall, as I did, into the nets of temptation. Today, an old man, I would know a thousand ways of evading such seductions. And I wonder how proud of them I should be, since I am free of the temptations of the noontime Devil; but not free from others, so that I ask myself whether what I am now doing is not a sinful succumbing to the terrestrial passion of recollection, a foolish attempt to elude the flow of time, and death.
Then, I saved myself as if by miraculous instinct. The girl appeared to me in nature and in the works of man that surrounded me. I sought then, thanks to a happy intuition of my soul, to lose myself in the relaxed contemplation of those works. I observed the cowherds as they led the oxen out of the stable, the swineherds taking food to the pigs, the shepherds shouting to the dogs to collect the sheep, peasants carrying cracked wheat and millet to the mills and coming out with sacks of good food. I lost myself in the contemplation of nature, trying to forget my thoughts and to look only at beings as they appear, and to forget myself, joyfully, in the sight of them.
How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!
I saw the lamb, to which this name was given as if in recognition of its purity and goodness. In fact the noun “agnus” derives from the fact that this animal “agnoscit”; it recognizes its mother, and recognizes her voice in the midst of the flock while the mother, among many lambs of the same form, with the same bleating, recognizes always and only her offspring, and nourishes him. I saw the sheep, which is called from “ab oblatione” because from earliest times it served for sacrificial rites; the sheep, which, as is its habit as winter approaches, seeks grass greedily and stuffs itself with forage before the pastures are seared by frost. And the flocks were watched by dogs, called “canes” from the verb “canor” because of their barking. The perfect animal among animals, with superior gifts of perception, the dog recognizes its master and is trained to hunt wild animals in the forests, to guard flocks against wolves; it protects the master’s house and his children, and sometimes in its office of defense it is killed. King Garamant, who had been taken away to prison by his enemies, was brought back to his homeland by a pack of two hundred dogs who made their way past the enemy troops; the dog of, Jason Licius, after its master’s death, persisted in refusing food until it died of starvation; and the dog of King Lysimachus threw himself on his master’s funeral pyre, to die with him. The dog has the power to heal wounds by licking them with his tongue, and the tongue of his puppies can heal intestinal lesions. By nature he is accustomed to making second use of the same food, after vomiting it. His sobriety is the symbol of perfection of spirit, as the thaumaturgical power of his tongue is the symbol of the purification of sins through confession and penance. But the dog’s returning to his vomit is also a sign that, after confession, we return to the same sins as before, and this moral was very useful to me that morning to admonish my heart, as I admired the wonders of nature.
Meanwhile, my steps were taking me to the oxen’s stable, where they were coming out in great number, led by their drovers. They immediately appeared to me as they were and are, symbols of friendship and goodness, because every ox at his work turns to seek his companion at the plow; if by chance the partner is absent at that moment, the ox calls him with affectionate lowing. Oxen learn obediently to go back by, themselves to the barn when it rains, and when they take refuge at the manger, they constantly stretch their necks to look out and see whether the bad weather has stopped, because they are eager to resume work. With the oxen at that moment also came from the barn the calves, whose name, “vituli,” derives from “viriditas,” or from “virgo,” because at that age they are still fresh, young, and chaste, and I had done wrong and was still wrong, I said to myself, to see in their graceful movements an image of the girl who was not chaste. I thought of these things, again at peace with the world and with myself, observing the merry toil of that morning hour. And I thought no more of the girl, or, rather, I made an effort to transform the ardor I felt for her into a sense of inner happiness and devout peace.
I said to myself that the world was good and admirable. That the goodness of God is made manifest also in the most horrid beasts, as Honorius Augustoduniensis explains. It is true, there are serpents so huge that they devour stags and swim across the ocean, there is the bestia cenocroca with an ass’s body, the horns of an ibex, the chest and maw of a lion, a horse’s hoofs but cloven like an ox’s, a slit from the mouth that reaches the ears, an almost human voice, and in the place of teeth a single, solid bone. And there is the manticore, with a man’s face, triple set of teeth, lion’s body, scorpion’s tail, glaucous eyes the color of blood, and a voice like the hissing of snakes, greedy for human flesh. And there are monsters with eight toes, wolfs muzzle, hooked talons, sheep’s fleece, and dog’s back, who in old age turn black instead of white, and who outlive us by many years. And there are creatures with eyes on their shoulders and two holes in the chest instead of nostrils, because they lack a head, and others that dwell along the river Ganges who live only on the odor of a certain apple, and when they go away from it they die. But even all these foul beasts sing in their variety the praises of the Creator and His wisdom, as do the dog and the ox, the sheep and the lamb and the lynx. How great, I said to myself then, repeating the words of Vincent Belovacensis, the humblest beauty of this world, and how pleasing to the eye of reason the consideration of not only the modes and numbers and orders of things, so decorously established for the whole universe, but also the cycle of times that constantly unravel through successions and lapses, marked by the death of what has been born. I confess that, sinner as I am, my soul only for a little while still prisoner of the flesh, I was moved then by spiritual sweetness toward the Creator and the rule of this world, and with joyous veneration I admired the greatness and the stability of creation.