Day: March 2, 2025

“If I have not charity, I am nothing”

Such strong and yet compelling words. They shape the great Collect for today. Love is simply everything and without it we are simply nothing. What? How can that be? It is an extraordinary statement yet it goes to the very heart of the Christian Faith. Without love, we are nothing. But what is love?

It is an ancient and modern question, perhaps considered more deeply by the ancients than the moderns, but then you would expect me to say that, wouldn’t you? Plato treats the question in his famous dialogue, The Symposium. It belongs, I think, at least alongside or in a kind of reciprocal engagement with Paul’s great hymn to love in today’s Epistle. That would be a symposium par excellence! But what is the love that Paul celebrates? It is nothing less than the love of God, the divine love which seeks the perfection of our human loves. This is not an add on but the underlying truth of all our loves, of all love and desire. All love and desire is for the good but our seeking is only one part of the equation. For our seeking is something given by God. God moves our souls to seek what our souls most desire which is nothing less than God. God is love.

But you will protest in contemporary fashion: Isn’t love, love? Love is love? But that is to say nothing, a tautology. Love of what, in what way, and for what end?, we have to ask. Love is not static but dynamic. It is the desire or the eros of our souls, though the word Paul uses is not eros but agape, a love that signals more the unity of the human community, the love that is fellowship. The preceding chapter ends with the words: “I will show you a still more excellent way,” having exhaustively gone through an analysis of the human community by way of analogy with the unity of the parts of the body yet as belonging to something more. For “now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” All our human attempts at justice and right, about a unity of diversities, to put contemporary social justice and identitarian concerns in the most positive light, is ultimately and only found in God.

Divine charity perfects human charity; it is its true end and meaning. The true desire of our souls for the unity that unites all differences is accomplished and concluded in the divine fellowship. That unity of differences is not quite the same thing as “diversities,” which Andrewes points out is just “a heap of things,” indefinite and indeterminant. But love cannot be indifferent to the realities of our lives and the lives of those around us. Love indifferent is imperfect love. What is love if it doesn’t care?

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