Monologium, on the Being of God52 Chapter LII. This love is as great as the supreme Spirit himself.

St Anselm († 1109) · Monologion · 1075-1076

Chapter LII. This love is as great as the supreme Spirit himself.

How great, then, is this love of the supreme Spirit, common as it is to Father and Son! But, if he loves himself as much as he remembers and conceives of himself; and, moreover, remembers and conceives of himself in as great a degree as that in which his essence exists, since otherwise it cannot exist; undoubtedly his love is as great as he himself is.

Quantus ergo est amor iste summi Spiritus, sic communis Patri et Filio! Sed si se tantum diligit, quantum sui meminit et se intelligit: tantum autem sui memor est et intelligit se, quanta est ejus essentia, quod aliter esse non potest: profecto tantus est amor ejus, quantus ipse est.

Sidney Norton Deane (1878–1943), Chicago: Open Court, 1903. Digital text: English Wikisource transcription of the 1903 edition (each chapter checked against the OCR of the Internet Archive scan stanselmeproslog00anseuoft). Original text: Corpus Corporum (University of Zurich) TEI of the Patrologia Latina, via the CatholicCorpus mirror. Public domain in the US and Canada: published 1903; translator died 1943. Latin: Migne, PL 158 (1853), public domain.