KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 11 February
If I have not love, I am nothing.
Love is in the air and snow is on the ground. It is hard to know of which there is more – love or snow? Paul’s great hymn to love in 1st Corinthians 13 has been the traditional scripture passage for the week of winter carnival and the attendant Valentine’s Day celebrations at King’s-Edgehill School. It is one of the great literary classics and perhaps one of the more familiar passages of Scripture even in our spiritual-lite and religious adverse age.
What is love? It is the question of Plato’s Symposium and belongs to a serious reflection upon the understanding of our humanity in its desires and drives that concern our relation with one another. Love is a big little word. Paul uses the word ‘love’ explicitly ten times and refers to it another seven times. In other words, love is emphatically front and center in 1st Corinthians seventeen times in seventeen verses. What does he mean by love?
As with Plato, love means more than simply the romantic and the sensual even as it shapes and informs those aspects of our humanity. As with Plato, Paul is not arguing for the idea of love as an object, a thing, even love as the beloved, but as an activity of the soul. There are a great number of words for love that the ancient Greeks have bequeathed to us and which have carried over into a variety of Latin terms as well. Ordinarily in English we have to make do with the big little word love to cover a whole range of meanings.
In Greek, there is eros, for instance, from which we get the idea of the erotic and the sensual; there is philos, or friendship love, we might say, and which extends to a whole host of words like philosophy, the love of wisdom, or philanthropy, the love of our humanity associated with generosity; there is storge, the love of family or nation or community; and there is agape, the social and communal love which extends to matters spiritual. That is the word which Paul uses but which is translated as caritas in the Latin with its connotations about grace, and rendered rather beautifully in the King James version as charity. But it would be a mistake to place these different terms for love in tight little boxes, sequestered and isolated from one another. Plato deliberately, it seems to me, uses the word eros with all of its sensual connotations to embark upon the journey of love which is spiritual and intellectual but as such embraces all the forms of love, from the lowest to the highest.