KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 12 February
If I have not love, I am nothing
Love, it seems, is in the air, whatever that means. ‘Spirit Week’ at King’s-Edgehill School brings us to Valentine’s Day following upon the Headmaster’s Valentine Dinner and Dance on Thursday night. The challenge in Chapel has been to place the events of this week upon the foundation of divine love which seeks the perfection of all our human loves. This suggests that there is something radically incomplete about our human loves and that, no doubt, is a challenging concept to students and faculty alike.
On Monday and Tuesday, the reading in Chapel was St. Paul’s great encomium or praise of love from 1st Corinthians 13. “If I have not love, I am nothing.” Caritas. Charity, as the King James Version puts it, is love. In English the little word, love, has to bear a great weight of meaning. For the Greeks and the Latins, there are a host of words that express a sense of the different kinds of love, love as defined by its relation to the object of love. Therein lies the problem as Plato intuited in using, provocatively and deliberately, the word eros to speak about the movement of our souls to the truth. Eros which we associate with sexual passion and desire is used intentionally to highlight “the passionate desire to know.” Brilliant.
So what do we mean by love? How do we think about love? For our culture, I suspect that the demand to think about love is exactly the problem whereas for earlier times not to think about love was precisely the problem. St. Paul’s great and profound praise of love is about the divine love which perfects our human loves. This recognizes the painful truth that our human loves are incomplete and even destructive. We often hurt those whom we love the most. So what Paul is saying here is quite important about the qualities of love. “Love is not boastful … love seeketh not her own …thinketh no evil … Love rejoices in the truth,” and so on. It is a powerful hymn of praise about the power of love which perfects our humanity and belongs to the building up of a community of love. 1st Corinthians 13 is “the still more excellent way” for the understanding of our lives together as a body, as a school, and for our self-understanding as well. “We see in a glass darkly; but then face to face.” Faith, hope, charity are the theological virtues which perfect the cardinal virtues or qualities of human excellence, the ancient virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice. Charity or love is the greatest of the three.