Marriage, says: “Here begins an eternal hunger. which is never appeased; it is an inner craving and hankering of the loving power and the created spirit for an uncreated good.... Those that experience it are the poorest of men; for they are eager and greedy and they have an insatiable hunger. Whatever they eat and drink, they never become satiated by it, for this hunger is eternal.” The metaphor may be inverted, so that the hunger is Christ’s, as in The Mirror of Eternal Salvation. “His hunger is immensely great; He consumes us entirely to the bottom, for He is a greedy glutton with a voracious hunger; He devours even the marrow of our bones.... First He prepares His repast and in His love He burns up all our sins and our faults. Next, when we are purified and roasted by the fire of love, He opens his mouth like a voracious being who wishes to swallow all.”
A little insistence on the details of the metaphor will make it ridiculous. “You will eat Him,” says Le Livre de Crainte Amoureuse of Jean Berthelemy, in speaking of the Eucharist, “roasted at the fire, well baked, not at all overdone or burnt. For just as the Easter lamb was properly baked and roasted between two fires of wood or of charcoal, thus was gentle Jesus on Good Friday placed on the spit of the worthy cross, and tied between the two fires of His very fearful death and passion, and of the very ardent charity and love which He felt for our souls and our salvation; He was, as it were, roasted and slowly baked to save us.”
The infusion of divine grace is described under the image of the absorption of food, and also of being bathed. A nun feels quite deluged in the blood of Christ and faints. All the red and warm blood of the five wounds flowed through the mouth of Saint Henry Suso into his heart. Catherine of Siena drunk from the wound in His side. Others drunk of the Virgin’s milk, like Saint Bernard, Henry Suso, Alain de la Roche.
The Breton, Alain de la Roche, a Dominican, born about 1428, is a very typical representative of this religious imagery, both ultra-concrete and ultra-fantastic. He was the zealous promoter of the use of the rosary, with a view to which he founded the Universal Brotherhood of the Psalter of Our Lady. The description of his numerous visions is characterized at the same time by an excess of sexual imagination and by the absence of
