Charity never faileth
“Never that which is shall die,” is a fragment from a lost play by Euripides. It serves as an epigram for Timothy Findley’s classic anti-war novel, The Wars. It complements Paul’s wonderful hymn of love in 1 Corinthians 13 which was read in Chapel this week which happens to be Spirit Week at the School and includes the Valentine’s Dinner and Dance. Love is in the air, we might say, but what do we mean by love? “Never that which is shall die” highlights the idea that love conquers all, that love is forever, that love is stronger than death; in short, that love never faileth. Charity means love.
Paul is talking about the divine love which is transcendent and transformative. It seeks the perfection of our human loves which are invariably limited and incomplete, partial like our knowing. We know in part. Here is love as wisdom which is about our being open to what is greater than ourselves and which seeks to better us not destroy us. Here is the idea of a love which does not make us other than ourselves but seeks the perfection of our humanity individually and collectively. Paul uses the metaphor of the body to talk about the human community where each part of the body plays its role for the good of the whole body. No one part is to be despised but each is to be respected. He recognizes that we all have different gifts, different talents, that are to be used for the good of all. But he ends the previous chapter with the phrase that introduces his famous hymn to love. “I will show you a still more excellent way.” That still more excellent way is charity, an Englishing of one of the Latin words for love, caritas, itself a translation of one of the Greek words for love, agape.
That still more excellent way does not negate our humanity by making us other than human which is one of the struggles of our times in relation to technology and AI which sometimes risks turning us into bots or machines, training us to think like machines. There is the danger of outsourcing our own thinking which negates the idea that we are fundamentally knowers. This is the reverse of the Turing Test. Instead of making computers that can be mistaken for being humans, we turn ourselves into machines, into thinking like machines. This is the point made in “Re-engineering Humanity,” the 2018 book by Brett Frischman and Evan Selinger. But Paul was already countering the things that dehumanize us in a tradition that looks back to Plato and which belongs to a whole way of ethical thinking. It speaks to the truth of our humanity in terms of our being open to wonder, to wisdom.
There is no wisdom in techne, in technology, as Plato painstakingly shows. To reduce everything to technique is to betray the real nature and purpose of education because we reduce ourselves to mere things, to objects that are to be manipulated and used as means to other ends. We effectively reduce ourselves to parts and negate the whole without which the parts are nothing and make no sense.
Paul’s celebration of the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity shows us how the classical virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice are transformed into forms of love. As such they belong to a vision of our being made whole in and through our lives together. Instead of division there is unity, a unity which perfects each part and which unites us in a community of charity. It gathers us to the God who is love, as John says. That divine love is what Paul, too, is celebrating, the love which unites and makes us whole. This is love as wisdom, knowing even as we are known in the loving knowledge of God himself.
All that remains of Euripides’ ancient play is this fragment, a part. And yet it opens us out to what makes us whole, for “never that which is shall die.” Thus ancient wisdom speaks to our fragmented world and to the still more excellent way of love. Charity never faileth.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy