Annotatio CCXVI

”Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth.” — Canticle 1:1

The words of Bernard, from the seventh homily on the Canticle of Canticles, the Scholastics are wont to use when, for the sake of disputing, they contend that the guardian Angels sometimes desert the custody of those whom they have received to guard.¹ They run thus: “I grieve, likewise, that some of us are weighed down by a heavy sleep in the sacred vigils, and reverence not the citizens of heaven, and appear in the presence of the princes as [it were] disorderly: I fear lest [the angels], sometime abominating our sloth, depart with indignation, and each one of us begin, too late, to say with groaning, ‘Thou hast put my acquaintances far from me: they have made me an abomination to themselves,’² and that [other], ‘Thou hast put away from me my friend,’³ etc.” Albert the Great, in the first volume of the Summa, question 8, weighing this passage, says that men are deserted by the guardian Angels not according to place, or local custody, but according to [the angel’s] power and efficacy⁴ — and this not from the Angel’s sloth, but from the man’s fault, in that manner in which the saints are wont to say that a sinner departs from God “into the region of unlikeness,” not by distance of place, but of merit.