Year: 2021

“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.

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“If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities”

Temperance is the virtue that concerns the mastery of our appetites, of our bodily desires. It is about self-mastery, but to what end?, we might ask, which is why it was coupled with parable of the labourers in the vineyard last Sunday about what is right; in short, justice. Courage, highlighted wonderfully and to the point of deliberate exaggeration, is set before us in today’s Epistle from 2nd Corinthians. It is complemented by Luke’s parable of the sower and the seed which considers the virtue of prudence; necessary, we might say, in relation to courage.

Courage speaks to our hearts. Cor is Latin for the heart. The cardinal or classical virtues belong to a way of thinking about the constituent elements of our humanity, about what it means to be human in terms of the activities of the soul. Thus temperance pertains to the body; courage to the heart; prudence to the mind; and justice to the proper relation of each of them without which, as Augustine suggests, the virtues become splenditia vitiae, splendid vices. Paul suggests something of this in his litany of courage, noting that he is speaking foolishly, even recklessly, even with a kind of madness. He is alluding to the problem of courage. Courage can be reckless folly if it is not tempered by prudence and justice. You can be brave but foolish.

Yet even that is not enough. The virtues undergo a kind of “sea-change into something rich and strange” (Shakespeare, The Tempest, I. ii) in these ‘gesima’ Sundays and in ways that belong to the itinerarium of our souls in the pilgrimage of Lent, itself the concentration of the journey of our souls to God within the span of forty days. In other words, these readings speak profoundly to the entirety of our lives in relation to God and one another. They reveal the deep struggles of the soul in the awareness of the limitations of its own activities. In that lies the awareness of the principle of the Good upon which all our doings depend and to which all our doings are ordered. As the Collect trenchantly puts it, “we put not our trust in any thing that we do.” This opens us out to the power of God and to the movement of God’s grace in us. Such is the transformation of the virtues into the forms of love. Divine love seeks the perfection of our human loves in and through the reordering of the virtues to their end in God.

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