“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.
“In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,” Shakespeare says in one of his great love sonnets, “for they in thee a thousand errors note.” Probably not one of the best opening lines for budding Romeos and Juliets! “But ’tis my heart that loves what they despise,/ who in despite of view is pleased to dote.” A tad better, perhaps, and might win some hearing in those so romantically disposed. But then, “Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted”, he goes on to suggest. Definitely not going to get you anywhere with that line. “Nor tender feelings to base touches prone”. Well, no groping, either, it seems. To be more direct, “Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited/ to any sensual feast with thee alone.” What then?
“But my five wits nor my five senses can/Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee./ who leaves unswayed the likeness of a man,/ Thy proud heart’s slave and vassal wretch to be.” We are in the thrall of love, it seems. “Only my plague thus far I count my gain,/That she that makes me sin awards me pain.” Suddenly we are opened out to what is, perhaps, something more than what is just romantic and erotic. Suddenly the language of sin appears, the language that belongs to love and the good, the language that confronts us with the limitations of human desire and opens us out to the need for the divine love. Divine love is celebrated in the Scriptures. Divine love seeks the good of our humanity in spite of ourselves. Divine love overcomes all the horror and the sadnesses of human sin, which are about nothing more than the faults and failings of human love.
We read St. Paul on Love Sunday, Quinquagesima Sunday, because it signals the very nature of the Lenten journey. It is the pilgrimage of love, the divine love of Christ seeking and accomplishing the redemption of our human loves, the redemption of desire in all its forms. It isn’t simply about sentiment and feeling. It is about “faith, hope and charity, the greatest of which is charity” – love – without which we are truly and radically nothing – nothing worth and empty and lost in ourselves and without a voice and vision for our world and day. It is not just that we see “in a glass darkly”; we have chosen not to see, chosen not to see the splendour of love revealed in the witness of the Scriptures. Paul’s hymn is a profound reflection on the whole pageant of divine love in the Jewish Scriptures and seen in a new light in Christ. Love, not just as suffering, but love as sacrifice, love as our participation in the new covenant of divine love accomplished in the heart-blood of Christ. This is the love of the Lenten journey.
Lent is the clarion call for you and me to embrace the divine love without which we are nothing and as the Collect says, “nothing worth”. As another poet puts it, namely George Herbert, “Philosophers have measured mountains/Fathom’d the depths of seas” – natural philosophy, as it were, “of states and kings” – political philosophy surely, “Walk’d with a stave to heaven and traced fountains” – metaphysical philosophy, ancient and modern in its inquiry into the origins and the ends of things. But there are he says, “two vast and spacious things,/the which to measure it doth more behove”, about which it takes much more to think. And what are those two vast and spacious things? “Sinne and love”.
Lent is the project of our contemplating the horror of human sin and the glory of divine love, the divine love which enters into the sadness and the sorrow, the pain and the grief, the sin and the wickedness of each and every age to redeem and save, to show the conquering power of the goodness of God. I cannot think of the close conjunction of Love Sunday – Quinquagesima – and Valentine’s Day without recalling the haunting and disturbing words of Leonard Cohen’s “Dance me to the end of Love”.
“Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin,/ Dance me through the panic till I am safely gathered in/ Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove/ Dance me to the end of love.” Wonderful words made even more wonderful, powerful and poignant when one notes that they refer to the horror of the holocaust, specifically to Jewish musicians, formed and committed but betrayed by European culture, to play the music of Mozart and Haydn while their families and friends and co-religionists were being marched off to be gassed and burned, knowing full well that was the fate that awaited them as well.
Charity – love – is “patient and kind and suffereth long”. Lent is the reminder to us about the long-suffering love of God who out of his infinite goodness wills to suffer for us that his goodness may redeem us. In the Christian understanding, Christ wills to suffer the hideous and horrible sins of our humanity. In the Christian understanding, his sufferings embrace the full and complete horror of human sin. The contemporary world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries shows us the horror of our humanity. Only the love of God in Christ can, perhaps, teach our hearts about the love which redeems and sanctifies. The challenge, too, is for us to act out of the divine goodness in our relationships with one another. The divine love cannot be taken for granted. Lent signals the journey of our lives to God and with God. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus say says. It is the journey of love in which we learn the lessons of love, if ever we will. Without it we are nothing.
“If I have not charity, I am nothing”
Fr. David Curry
Quinquagesima
February 15th, 2015