“Charity never faileth”
There is a pleasing coincidence to the conjunction of Quinquagesima Sunday, commonly called Love Sunday, with Valentine’s Day, however dubious St. Valentine as Bishop and Martyr might be. In the Prayer Book calendar, this “ancient memorial” is bracketed indicating that its historical character is obscure, however popular its commemoration has been over many centuries. It has, of course, become highly commercialized and monetized in our secular culture. Nonetheless its coincidence with Quinquagesima Sunday is instructive and belongs to an essential feature of the pilgrimage of our souls concentrated in the season of Lent which begins on Ash Wednesday. Somehow these coincidences of commemoration belong to that pilgrimage.
Love is in the air, to be sure. But what do we mean by love? Paul’s great hymn to love in First Corinthians, one of the great literary and spiritual classics especially in the King James version, belongs to a long and profound tradition of spiritual and intellectual reflection on the nature of love. Coincident with the sentimental, romantic and sensual effusions of Valentine’s Day, it helps to redeem such aspects of love and to deepen them into something spiritual and intellectual. There is more here than simply the contrast between the sacred and the secular; there is the idea of a connection signalling the redemption of all our loves. “If I have not love,” Paul tells us ever so bluntly and strongly, “I am nothing.” Love is all. “Charity” – meaning love – “never faileth.”
What is this love? One of our hymns captures in a phrase Paul’s meaning: “Love Divine, all loves excelling/ Joy of heaven, to earth come down” (# 470). The divine love, the love that is God, is not only beyond and above, but perfects all and every form of love, from the lowest to the highest. Thus Valentine’s Day belongs to something greater than what appears in the sentiments and feelings of the day, something which the poets emphasize over and over again. The spiritual idea is that every form of love ultimately participates in that which is greater. Our all too imperfect human loves find their perfection and truth in God’s love. As our opening hymn teaches (# 475), the whole life of Christ is the story of love written out for us to read.
Thus the more challenging feature of this conjunction of Love Sunday with Valentine’s Day is that love is something to be known, to be grasped intellectually. We are meant to be like the blind man sitting by the way-side near Jericho, the Biblical image of the earthly city in contrast to Jerusalem which becomes the image of the heavenly city. He knows three things: first, that he is blind; secondly, that he wants to see; and thirdly, that the restoration of his sight is a mercy, a grace or a gift from God which he ‘knows’ is in Jesus. Wanting to see is wanting to know. And it is about healing and thus wholeness or completeness. Knowing and desiring or loving, we might say, are intimately and necessarily intertwined, a point which Plato makes in the Symposium, his great dialogue on the nature of love as the eros, the passionate desire to know. This is what we see in the blind man. In a way, he sees, like us, “in a glass darkly.” His ‘seeing’ is in what he knows and seeks. Without that there is no healing, no sight.
What Paul and Plato are getting at is the essential intellectual quality of love. Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore. “Ladies who have intelligence of love” is the beginning of a celebrated poem in Dante’s La Vita Nuova, the New Life. The phrase marks the transition in the traditions of courtly love – the shards and fragments of which are present in the commercialisation of Valentine’s Day – from the idea of the lover seeking some reward or favour from the beloved, whether a smile, a condescending glance or gesture, to the idea of the lover desiring to give what is worthy of love and honour to the beloved. It is not too much to see in this transition an important insight into the true nature of love.
It means that love is not about the possession of the beloved, as if love is an object, a thing. That idea leads to all of the problems of abuse and misuse in the ways in which we use and manipulate one another. Dante is reminding us of love not as a thing but as the quintessential activity of our souls in seeking the good of one another. That can only be found in the divine love which reaches down and perfects all our imperfect human loves. This means that there is a necessary contrast without which we cannot appreciate the connection.
“In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,/ for they in thee a thousand errors note,” Shakespeare says in one of his sonnets (# 141). It is not, perhaps, the best opening gambit in matters of romance on Valentine’s Day. “But ‘tis my heart that loves what they despise/ who, in despite of view, is pleased to dote”; this probably doesn’t make things much better, however touching it might seem. “Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted,/ nor tender feeling, to base touches prone”; is even worse. “Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited/ To any sensual feast with thee alone”; but here, here is the point. Love is more than the sensual though not less than it and cannot be dependent upon the vagaries of sense perception. “For 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.” Here Shakespeare points us to something beyond the limits of the senses as essential to love; to something intellectual that unites in love beyond the forms of discursive reasoning.
Charity – love – is “the very bond of peace and of all virtues,” as the Collect beautifully puts it, drawing explicitly upon Paul’s hymn. “If I have not love, I am nothing.” “All our doings without charity are nothing worth.” These are strong statements that challenge our understanding but without which we cannot have “intelligence of love.” Lent is the pilgrimage of love in this deeper sense and understanding of love. It is nothing less than the pilgrimage of love in the intelligence of love, learning to know even as we are known in God’s knowing and loving. We give ourselves to love in love’s own giving of himself to us. Only so do “we go up to Jerusalem” that we might know and love more dearly, more deeply, more truly. For “charity never faileth.” Love is greater than us yet seeks our good, our perfection. It means to have a kind of grasp of what the blind man on the way knows and seeks. He glimpses, sees, however blindly, the truth and power of the love which never faileth.
“Charity never faileth”
Fr. David Curry
Quinquagesima Sunday 2021