The Burning Babe
As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorchèd with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed,
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
‘Alas,’ quoth he, ‘but newly born in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire as I.
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns;
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel justice layeth on, and mercy blows the coals;
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defilèd souls:
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.’
With this he vanished out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I callèd unto mind that it was Christmas day.
—Robert Southwell (1561-1595)
Anthologized in The Oxford Book of English Verse
Christopher Ricks, ed. Oxford U. Press (1999)
COMMENTARY
“We shall describe the doctrine of fides caritate formata according to the form it received in Saint Thomas’ Summa contra gentiles. Saint Thomas puts the essence of faith in the amicitia, the friendship between God and man. True faith has an intellectual component insofar as loving, voluntary adherence to God is impossible without intellectual apprehension of the beatific vision as the summum bonum, as the end towards which the life of man is oriented; intellectual apprehension, however, needs completion through the volitional adherence of love “for by means of his will man, as it were, rests in what he has apprehended by intellect.” The relationship of amicitia is mutual; it cannot be forced through an élan of human passion but presupposed the love of God toward man, an act of grace through which the nature of man is heightened by a supernatural forma. The loving orientation of man toward God is possible only when the faith of man is formed through the prior love of God toward man." Eric Voegelin in Renaissance and Reformation, CW Vol 22, p. 255. (History of Political Ideas, Vol IV)