Fr. David Curry delivered this homily at King’s College Chapel, Thursday, March 6th, 2025.
“Charity never faileth”
Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains…
With such a summary of natural philosophy – measuring the heights of mountains, fathoming the depths of seas, of ethical and political philosophy – the measuring and fathoming “of states, and kings,” of metaphysics or natural theology – “walking with a staffe to heav’n and tracing fountains,” the causes of things, Herbert begins his poem, The Agonie. Then by way of complete contrast to such a summa of philosophical thought, he immediately adds an important ‘but.’ But what? “But there are,” he says, “two vast, spacious things,/ the which to measure it doth more behove”, things that are more significant and more necessary for us to ponder, “yet few there are that sound them.” And what are those “two vast, spacious things?” They are “Sinne and Love.”
We meet just after Ash Wednesday to commemorate this evening, Thomas Aquinas, Doctor and Poet, as the Prayer Book calendar puts it, and the martyrs St. Perpetua and her Companions. Aquinas is one of the great theologians of the western church, one who, I think it is fair to say, has taken much care to sound out, meaning to inquire into and make known, sin and love in his theological writings and commentaries. But what might such a 13th century giant of medieval thought have to do with Anglican thinking and devotion? Rather a lot and as testimony to our essential catholicism. It would be hard to make sense of Richard Hooker’s Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity or John Pearson’s On the Creed, to name but two of many, without an understanding and appreciation of the works of Thomas Aquinas. It was Pearson who, as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford just after the English Civil War, argued for using Thomas’ Summa Theologiae for teaching systematic theology to those entering the church rather than the Sentences of Peter Lombard.
The structure and images of Herbert’s poem are profoundly Thomistic. The poem references the philosophical sciences as derived from Aristotle and as taken up by Thomas: in short, physics, ethics, and metaphysics. Like Thomas, he argues for the necessity of another science, what Thomas calls sacra doctrina, namely, what is revealed through the Scriptures. As Herbert suggests, Scripture teaches most clearly about what we most need to know, sin and love.
Thomas’ thinking has exercised a considerable influence on Anglican theology and on other reformed traditions. As a poet, his influence is strongly felt in his hymns which have shaped so much our devotional traditions, especially in terms of sacramental theology, as for instance, in his three eucharistic hymns – Adoro Te, Pange Lingua (Tantum ergo), and Verbum Supernum (O salutaris hostia) – found in many of our hymnals. There is as well his Corpus Christi sequence, Lauda Sion, having encouraged Pope Urban IV to have the feast instituted for the whole church in 1264. If you will pardon a personal reminiscence, it was with amused delight that Marilyn and I processed around the Cathedral in Firenze (Florence) on the Feast of Corpus Christi many years ago singing with the multitudes Luther’s great hymn, Ein Fest’ Burg; a kind of ecumenical reciprocity, we might say. This was just after our first year at King’s as Deans, and after my first year of teaching in FYP.
The readings for Quinquagesima Sunday usher us into the Lenten Season and provide the underlying logic of Lent as the pilgrimage of love. What is that love? It is the divine love. “Charity never faileth”, Paul tells us in listing a wonderful collection of the attributes and properties of love which not only never fails but always abides. This is the love that belongs to the unity of fellowship, and, ultimately, to the divine friendship which constitutes the Communion of Saints. The charity that never faileth stands in stark contrast to the disorders and incompleteness of our human loves, to our failures in love, and, no doubt, to the darkness and uncertainties of our world and day.
The question about what is love is an ancient and modern question. 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 the Epistle. Now that would be a symposium par excellence! And it would be an even more wonderful symposium if we were to bring Thomas Aquinas and George Herbert to the party. For the love which they contemplate in their various registers of expression is the divine love which ultimately seeks the perfection or the end and purpose of our human loves. This is not an add on or something imposed on top of our natural lives 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’s love comes down to gather us into his love. God is love.
To say that ‘love is love’ in the contemporary fashion is to say nothing, a tautology. Love of what, in what way, and for what end? Love is not static but dynamic. It is the virtue, indeed, the highest virtue or activity of our souls, as Thomas teaches. It is the desire or the eros of our souls, though the word Paul uses here is not eros but agape, a love that signals more the unity of the human community, the love that is fellowship and friendship. 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 now seen 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 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.
Thomas reflects deeply upon charity both in his Summa Theologiae, which is meant for beginners in theology, and more comprehensively and exhaustively in the Quaestiones Disputatae de Caritate. What he is doing is taking the ethical wisdom of Aristotle in particular and putting it on a new foundation, the foundation of love. It is a reworking, a kind of transformation that does not negate Aristotle’s Ethics so much as a re-ordering of the virtues.
Charity or love is one of the theological virtues, indeed the greatest of the three, “faith, hope, and charity.” But even more in Thomas’ teaching, “charity is the form, mover, mother, and root of all the virtues” (de caritate, Art. III, respondeo). Why? Because it belongs to the participation of our humanity in its highest end or purpose.
“Man is ordered to God as to an end that surpasses the grasp of his reason,” he says in the first question of the Summa Theologiae, which means that it is above or beyond what can be obtained through the philosophical sciences of human reason. “Hence it was necessary for the salvation of man that certain truths which exceed human reason should be made known by divine revelation.” This is the context for his consideration of charity as the highest virtue and for friendship as its essential characteristic. Charity as a virtue perfects all the virtues or activities of our souls by directing them to our end in the divine fellowship.
The Second Article of de Caritate considers “whether charity is a virtue?” In the Fifteenth Objection to charity as a virtue, Thomas quotes Aristotle’s Ethics (Nic.Eth, VIII,8) that “friendship consists in a certain equality. But there is the greatest inequality between God and us, as between beings who are infinitely separated. Therefore there can be no friendship of God for us, or us for God.” Consequently, the objection concludes that charity is not a virtue. Aquinas in his sed contra shows us the foundational shift that results in charity as the moving principle of all the virtues towards our highest end. “Charity,” he argues, “is not a virtue of man considered as man, but of man as considered as becoming, through participation in grace, like to God and the Son of God.” This is the divine friendship in which we participate through grace. “Man, through grace, becomes as it were a citizen and a sharer in this blessed society which is called the heavenly Jerusalem” (Art. II, Respondeo). As Jesus says, “Behold, we go up to Jerusalem,” but only by way of the most burning love of the crucified, only by way of Christ’s Passion. It is the way of love in love and with love and for love. Such is the charity of Christ.
It is both in us and above us, beyond us. “The love of the highest good, considered as the principle of natural being, is in us from nature, “Thomas says, “however, considered as the object of that beatitude which exceeds the total capacity of created nature, it is not in us from nature but is above nature” (de caritate, Art. III, reply to obj. 16).
He notes that “Charity because it is the most perfect friendship, extends itself to God and to all who are able to know God; it includes not only those whom we know, but also our enemies,” (de caritate, Art. IV, reply to obj. 11). It belongs to the highest form of friendship – beyond utility and pleasure to virtue, to the good of the other – now extended to the good itself and to our participation in it. “I have called you friends,” Jesus says (Jn 15.15). “This friendship, what is it but charity?” Thomas says (ST. 2a-2ae.xxiii.1).
Divine love seeks our good in the awareness of the darkness of sin and evil. God makes something good out of our evil. Herbert in his poem, The Agonie, points to the Passion of Christ as the ultimate lesson in the meaning of sin and love. In so doing he reveals an essential feature of the whole pageant of Scripture. What the American novelist and theologian Marilynne Robinson astutely observes about The Book of Genesis belongs to the whole story of God’s engagement with our humanity. It is really nothing less and nothing more than “the reconciliation of the essential goodness of God and of creation itself with the darkest aspects of human experience.” She suggests that Genesis never really ends but “is carried forward in the law, in the psalms, in the prophets” and certainly into the Christian Scriptures and into the theological reflections of theologians like Thomas Aquinas. It is at once foundational and formative for the understanding of those “two vast, spacious things, sin and love.”
Genesis, she notes, is largely “framed by two stories of remarkable forgiveness, the forgiveness of Cain by the Lord, and [the forgiveness] of his ten brothers by Joseph.” They help our understanding of sin and love revealed in its greatest intensity in the Passion of Christ. The story of Joseph and his brothers is most poignant and one which we read in the Offices, starting tonight just after Ash Wednesday. What she emphasizes in her reading of Genesis is divine restraint rather than divine retribution. The idea of revenge and retribution in terms of the ancient idea of Hammarabi’s code of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life,” is constantly questioned in Genesis but is not allowed to diminish the sanctity of human life as God-given. She highlights the paradox. “Adam kills Adam for killing Adam, an image of God destroys an image of God for having destroyed an image of God.” The story of the flood, she observes, ends not with the extinction of creation through our humanity’s abuse of existence but with the setting of the bounds of covenant and law around human conduct and behaviour. As Thomas reminds us, echoing Paul in Romans, “the end of the law is love.”
It is, she says, “a given of the text that God is interested in human beings. If they are granted individuality, agency, freedom, meaningful existence as human beings, then God must practice almost limitless restraint.” Joseph, in making himself known to his brothers who had sought his harm, does not seek revenge but reconciliation. “Do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here,” he says to them, “for God sent me before you to preserve life” (Gen. 45. 5). It is a hard lesson for his brothers to comprehend having had to confront their own sin and evil. They worry that after the death of their father Jacob, Joseph, now all powerful in Egypt, may then seek revenge and destroy them. But Joseph says to them in the final chapter of Genesis, “Fear not, for am I in the place of God?” he asks, though in a way he is. “As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good” (Gen. 50.19,20). In other words, Joseph chooses to act as God acts – with restraint and with the overriding intention of reconciliation. As Robinson says, “To refrain, to put aside power is Godlike.” Is this not the divine charity?
Divine love seeks our good as found in God. Unlike our human loves, “charity never faileth” and always “abideth.” All works of charity are really the works of corporal mercy, acts of the body of Christ for the body of Christ and in the body of Christ. They are all acts of love which seek the good of one another in the abiding love of God. They are the motions of divine love active and at work in us. Such is the meaning of the virtues; they are activities of the soul.
Without the divine love all our human loves and actions, from the greatest to the least, are nothing. Why? Because they are radically incomplete and utterly disconnected from the source of all goodness and truth. Charity unites our knowing, faith, and our willing, hope, and suggests that we already participate in the mystery of perfect and perfecting love. But only if we continue on the way of love, constantly seeking to learn the lessons of love in our lives. Like the brothers of Joseph, the lessons are not always easy to learn. They can only be learned through suffering and through the passionate desire for learning.
This requires us to sound out the meaning of those “two vast, spacious things, sin and love.” Herbert points us to the charity of Christ revealed in Christ’s Passion in the agony of Gethsemane and on the Cross. “Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain/ to hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.” And love? He speaks of what flows out of the agony of the Cross for us and which we participate in sacramentally. “Love is that liquor sweet and most divine, / Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.” This is the charity of Christ that seeks the perfection of all our loves, the charity that never fails.
“Charity never faileth.”
Fr. David Curry
King’s College Chapel
(Comm. of Thomas Aquinas/St. Perpetua & her Companions)
March 6th, 2025