Conjugial Love #68

68. 6. Moreover, into this love have been gathered all joys and all delights, from the first to the last of them. All the delights a person feels, of whatever kind, have to do with his love. Love reveals itself through delights; indeed, it exists and lives through them.

People know that delights rise and deepen in the degree that love rises and deepens, and also as incidental affections touch more closely the dominant love.

Now because conjugial love is the fundamental love of all good loves, and because, as we showed above, it is engraved on even the smallest aspects of a person, it follows that its delights surpass the delights of all other loves, and also that it gives delight to these other loves according as it is present and at the same time united with them. For it swells the inmost feelings of the mind and at the same time the inmost feelings of the body, as the pleasurable stream of its fountain flows through and opens them.

[2] All delights have been gathered into this love, from the first to the last of them, because of the excellence of the use it serves, surpassing that of all other loves. The use it serves is the propagation of the human race and so of the angelic heaven. And because this use or purpose was the ultimate goal in creation, it follows that all blessings, felicities, delights, gratifications and pleasures, which could ever have been conferred on mankind by the Lord the Creator, have been gathered into this, its accompanying love.

It is apparent from the delights of the five senses - sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch - that delights accompany the use they serve and are delightful to a person in accordance with the love he has for it. Each of these senses experiences delights, with variations, according to the particular uses these senses serve. Why not the sensation of conjugial love, whose use or purpose embraces those of all the other senses?