Sermon for Quinquagesima
“If I have not charity, I am nothing”
Charity – Love. Love is in the air. I know, so is the snow, indeed, snow upon snow, but also love upon love! Quinquagesima Sunday is commonly known as Love Sunday because of St. Paul’s great hymn of love in 1st Corinthians 13. This year it follows upon Valentine’s Day, the great Hallmark festival of commercialized romance and sentiment. But love, to be sure, is in the air. But what is love? That is the great question that connects St. Paul’s great hymn to the great ethical turn in philosophy to the good life and, more specifically, to Plato’s great treatise on love, The Symposium.
Plato’s word is eros; Paul’s is agape, the Latin translation of which is caritas which has carried over into English as charity. The word is used eight times in what is one of the greatest passages of English prose, poetic prose, I would add, in the King James Version of the Scriptures which became the text for the epistles and gospels in The Book of Common Prayer in 1662 and contributed to the enormous influence of the King James Version on the many, many different forms of the English language right down to our own day.
Much ink has been spilt in trying to draw a large distinction between the Platonic Eros and the Pauline Agape. I prefer to see them in a more complementary way. For both Plato and Paul, love is about the good, about the good life and never simply about self-love. The question, ‘what is love?’ is a question for both and for us and both Plato and Paul offer, I suggest, a way of seeing how divine love ultimately gathers up all of the forms of love into the highest love, the love of God. Plato, to be sure, emphasizes love not as a god but as desire, the passionate desire to know which always entails truth and beauty. Such insights cannot be ignored. To say that “God is love” is not the same as to say love is a god. Paul emphasizes in a more direct way the divine love which seeks the perfection of our human loves without which our human loves, as Augustine saw so clearly, are not only incomplete but empty and end in despair.
