Faith must be animated by love (credere in Deum est credendo amare).

Faith without love is useless. Love is so essential to a life of faith that without it, it can not exist and will die.

Love, which already exists in the essence of faith, is shown in the act of contemplation as the ardent desire for God (appetitus regni), which, for the saint, is one of the four "wings" that allow a just man to escape from the anxieties of life to emerge himself fully in God.

While on the one hand Anthony puts love in first place, in line with the Franciscan school of thought, on the other hand he does not diminish intelligence. In fact, he associates it intimately with love, as its inseparable companion on the mystic path towards God.Contemplation is, for him, and act of knowledge and love, and of loving cognition. This, he repeats in many ways, is a taste, but also an intuition, an intellectual vision, for which the soul fixes its eye in the sun of the divinity. The soul of the contemplative is like an aqueduct through which the waters of "spiritual knowledge" pass. This, in simplicity, contemplates God.

In the Sermones there is a sculpting expression that finds complete harmony with Anthony's whole doctrine on the primacy of love, "God places the eye above the heart when he instils... the light of contemplation." Here, on earth, the eye of the soul is love, the only thing to exceed every veil. Where the intellect stops, love proceeds and, with its heat, leads to a union with God. Naturally, the soul does not have the immediate vision of the divine essence or substance, it does not see God for himself (perhaps that happened only to Moses and Saint Paul); but in the power of love it unites with God, becoming one with him, according to the famous passage of Paul's, as reported by Anthony, "He who joins the Lord forms a single spirit with him." (1Cor 6, 17). The knowledge that the soul has of divinity is mediated: that is, God is known experimentally for the effects of the kindness and spiritual bliss that the union with God produce in the soul.

Text by Antonio Giuseppe Nocilli, adapted by Father Paolo Floretta.