by CCW | 13 February 2019 15:00
In the bleak cold of the mid-winter, we all need a touch of love. Such is the purpose of spirit week at the School. Thus in Chapel, we always read in this week St. Paul’s great hymn to love, 1 Corinthians 13. It is not specifically about Valentine’s Day, if by that one means a focus on the romantic or the erotic, not to mention the commercial. The love which Paul celebrates, however, includes and informs all and every form of love for it speaks about the true nature of love which seeks the good and the perfection of our humanity.
The power of this passage of Scripture in our world and day is intriguing. Often times a couple will want it read at a wedding, even though it is by no means specific to marriage. Yet it seems to speak to a deep sense of the power of the transcendent, of a love which is not simply of us but speaks to the deeper yearnings of the soul. Love, literally and properly, moves us towards one another. Years and years ago, I was particularly struck by how moved a very bright and outstanding student from China was by this passage which he read in Chapel. It moved him to tears and made him see things in an entirely new way.
The word for ‘love’ in the King James’ Version derived from Tyndale is charity which comes from the Latin caritas. The word, charity, has been somewhat cheapened in our own culture by limiting it to the forms of our outreach and care for the poor and the destitute. While such things are most important and belong to charity, they are only a part of its meaning and range. Paul is actually talking about grace, about what comes from God to us precisely in the realization of our own incompleteness and failings, including our failures to love one another as ourselves. He is opening us out to the transcendent power of the divine love which moves in us, if we will be open to it.
The three theological virtues of “faith, hope and charity” are the forms of grace that complement and perfect the four cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice. Those ancient qualities of excellence speak to the nature of human character and form a critical part of the ethical understanding of the ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as becoming part of the moral discourse of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic worlds. But without love, such virtues are radically incomplete. Augustine captures that sensibility in saying that without love, divine love, the virtues are splendida vitia, splendid vices.
Paul’s hymn to love is about our life together as an intellectual and spiritual community. It relates specifically to the transforming power of love and to the idea of maturing and growing up into love. “When I was a child, I spake a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things,” he observes because “now we see in a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” Notice the connection to knowing. This is to be aware of the need for a transcendent principle that is truly transformative, something which the poets get.
One of Shakespeare’s sonnets captures beautifully the idea of the transforming power of love, a love which is grounded in God and which shapes our loves, a love which makes all the difference in our lives. “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state, / And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,/ And look upon myself and curse my fate,” he begins, describing only too well a sense of despair and isolation and longing, “Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, / featured like him, like him with friends possessed, / Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope, / With what I most enjoy contented least”. It expresses concisely the anxieties of the human situation, “in these thoughts myself almost despising”. What is the counter? “Yet”, he says, despite these realities, it is “Thy sweet love remembered” that lifts the soul to “sing hymns at heaven’s gate” and to “scorn to change [his] state with kings”. Love makes all the difference even in the bleak mid-winter.
The transformative power of love extends most especially to the love of learning, to the very dynamic of a school in which education is not merely a means to an end but a virtue in and of itself because it is about character, about souls shaped and informed with a sense of respect and care for one another. Just as in Plato’s Republic the philosopher/king must return to the cave of our uncertainties because justice is about the common good, so charity demands our compassionate and principled engagement with one another in the community of learning. It cannot be something self-seeking. Charity “seeketh not her own.” As John in a complementary passage in his first Epistle puts it, “beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.” Love connects us to one another. Without it, we are nothing.
This is what Paul means by “a still more excellent way”; it is the way of love, a love which is transformative, a love which makes all the difference in our lives no matter what the circumstances.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
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