“I was miserable, and miserable is every soul which is fettered by the love of perishable things; he is torn to pieces when he loses them, and then he perceives how miserable he was in reality while he possessed them. And so was I then, and I wept most bitterly, and in that bitterness I found rest. Thus was I miserable, and that miserable life I held dearer than my friend. For though I would fain have changed it, yet to it I clung even more than to him; and I cannot say whether I would have parted with it for his sake, as it is related, if true, that Orestes and Pylades were willing to do, for they would gladly have died for each other, or together, for they preferred death to separation from each other. But in me a feeling which I cannot explain, and one of a contradictory nature had arisen; for I had at once an unbearable weariness of living, and a fear of dying. For I believe the more I loved him, the more I hated and dreaded death which had taken him from me, and regarded it as a most cruel enemy; and I felt as if it would soon devour all men, now that its power had reached him.... For I marvelled that other mortals lived, because he whom I had loved, without thought of his ever dying, was dead; and that I still lived—I who was another self—when he was gone, was a greater marvel still. Well said a certain one of his friend, ‘Thou half of my soul;’ for I felt that his soul and mine were ‘one soul in two bodies’: and therefore life was to me horrible, because I hated to live as half of a life; and therefore perhaps I feared to die, lest he should wholly die whom I had loved so greatly.” Ibid, ch. vi.
Montalembert on the Monks
It is interesting to see, in these extracts from S. Augustine, and in those which follow from Montalembert, the points of likeness and difference between the Christian ideal of love and that of Plato. Both are highly transcendental, both seem to contemplate an inner union of souls, beyond the reach of space and time; but in Plato the union is in contemplation of the Eternal Beauty, while in the Christian teachers it is in devotion to a personal God.
“If inanimate nature was to them an abundant source of pleasure they had a life still more lively and elevated in the life of the heart, in the double love which burned in them—the love of their brethren inspired and consecrated by the love of God.” Monks of the West, introdn., ch. v.
“Everything invited and encouraged them to choose one or several souls as the intimate companions of their life.... And to prove how little the divine love, thus understood and practised, tends to exclude or chill the love of man for man, never was human eloquence more touching or more sincere than in that immortal elegy by which S. Bernard laments a lost brother snatched by death from the cloister:—‘Flow, flow my tears, so eager to flow! he who prevented your flowing is here no more! It is not he who is dead, it is I who now live only to die. Why, O why have we loved, and why have we lost each other.’” Ibid.
“The mutual affection which reigned among the monks flowed as a mighty stream through the annals of the cloister. It has left its trace even in the ‘formulas,’ collected with care by modern erudition.... The correspondence of the most illustrious, of Geoffrey de Vendôme, of Pierre le Vénérable, and of S. Bernard, give proofs of it at every page.” Ibid.
Saint Anselm
Saint Anselm’s letters to brother monks are full of expressions of the same ardent affection. Montalembert gives several examples:—