"LOVE FULFILS THE LAW" (ROMANS 13:10)

This is the tightest condensation of Yeshua’s teaching yet. Remember, he said “I come not to abolish the Law but to fulfil it”? Well, now we know what that means. In Romans, it is linked to the love of neighbour – which, of course, is what we always gravitate to. But we ought to remember more often that that is the second Great Commandment: the First is that we must love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength. 

 

            I have written about this before, wondering how we can be commanded to love, when the essence of love is precisely that it cannot be commanded, that it must be free. That, after all, is the reason that however appalling Man gets, he must still be allowed free will, because the God he offends is Love, and Love can do no other than accord freedom. How, then, can we be commanded to love God (or, indeed, our neighbour)?

 

            It occurred to me that perhaps the word “commandment” is, for our understanding, inaccurate. I remember my late father saying that to him the Ten Commandments were not so much laws in the juridical sense as natural laws, such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, so memorably resumed by Flanders and Swann: “Heat can’t pass from a cooler to a hotter:/You can try if you like but you’d far better notta”. Or another image might be the points made in the User Manual of a complex machine. Is it a “commandment” to say “Do not attempt a gear change without depressing the clutch pedal”? What it means is “If you do X, something will go seriously wrong” (in this case in the harmony of your condition as a created and loved being).

 

            So if we are commanded to love God as described above, what does that mean? First of all, that “love” here probably does not mean a great wave of serotonin, a tsunami of emotion. Still, it does involve all our heart. It helps, perhaps, to remember that we are encouraged to be childlike. A small child does not reason its love for its parent: it jumps into a waiting lap and snuggles. Even a brief counting of blessings will produce a similar effect in us. Hearts do not reason. 

 

            What about all your soul? At first sight, that seems more abstract; and yet, my soul is, almost by definition, nearer to God than my heart is. Here, I think, we go to the core of the Meshiach’s teaching and action. “For God so loved the world/us/me, that he gave his only-begotten son” etc. “Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven.” If we can really take this on board, how can we not love the Father who has given us such a gift?

 

            Now for all your mind. For many people, the mind is the seat of unbelief: how can you go on believing if you use your adult, aware, reasoning mind? Look at the Universe (on the one hand); look at Auschwitz (on the other): believe? you must be joking. And yet we are told to love God with all our mind. I think that this is where the User Manual comes in. If you love God with everything but your mind, either your faith is weak and vulnerable or you have abdicated your adult human judgement. The world, the universe, life, will be wholly without meaning. Yet, as Joseph Ratzinger has so often pointed out, if you love God with all your mind, everything falls into place, and even reason becomes both more rational and more reasonable. 

 

            Finally, all your strength. What strength? we sometimes ask. We feel puny, and weak, and tired, and worn out. Daily living is bad enough, and takes almost all of our strength: do we have any left for loving God? Well, again the User Manual chips in. If you put all your strength into loving God (in all the ways mentioned above), to your absolute surprise you find that you have more strength; that loving God produces an excess, an overplus of strength that allows you to fulfil all the other things that await you as well, and quite possibly better. 

 

           And as a consequence, fulfilling this first commandment itself helps you, gives you the discernment and the strength, needed for the second one. Which is why it’s the First. Q.E.D. 

Image: restored Torah scroll guaranteed kosher by a modern scribe, for sale on Amazon at $28,000

THE REASONABLE GENIUS

Today is the feast of St Thomas Aquinas, not every modern person's favourite saint. But note him well; find something to read by or even about him: the Wikipedia article is a decent start. He is HUGE. In every sense: his fellow-students at Cologne called him "the dumb ox" because he was very large (if good-looking) and taciturn. But for the next 30 years or so he got up before Mattins every morning and read, thought, and wrote. And wrote, and wrote. It's not his fault that he became the Church's Official Spokesperson at the Council of Trent and got co-opted by every anti-modernist since. He is beyond brilliant. And his junction of faith and reason should be mandatory reading for everyone worried about how to live faith in a supposedly rational (and "therefore faithless") world today. He is a feast for the mind -- a faculty all too often exiled from our sentimental devotion. (I remember leaving an otherwise admirable Catholic prayer group because they lived as if God had created every bit of them except their mind.) And if you look at current cutting-edge images of the Universe, there is nothing there to contradict Thomas's ideas on the Creator and his Creation. Dumb Ox, indeed. From a castle in Sicily to a tomb in Toulouse, this was one stupendous Doctor Ecclesiæ.

Image: Fra Angelico, Virgin & Child with St Dominic and St Thomas Aquinas (detail)

THOU BLOODY WELL SHALT

Ἀγαπήσεις κύριον τὸν θεόν σου ἐν ὅλῃ ^]τῇ καρδίᾳ σου καὶ ἐν ὅλῃ ^]τῇ ψυχῇ σου καὶ ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ διανοίᾳ σου

I was pondering love, and thinking of writing about it, when I remembered I had in fact already done so. So I dug into the blog's archives, and found a post that said at least the first part of what I was going to write, and said it in such a way I couldn't do better now. So for those who weren't around the first time, or who have forgotten it, here it is again. And there will be a sequel soon.

We all know the commandment “Love thy neighbour as thyself” and most of us have heard it explained by the parable of the Samaritan. But we tend to shy away from the fact that it’s the second commandment, because the first is, well, more bothering. I checked a few of the Greek words used in the passage from Matthew 22, and they are interesting. “Commandment” is entolè: an order or an instruction. So there is no getting away from it: we are ordered, or at least instructed, to love God. How, we ask (or we damn well should), can one be ordered to love anyone? Moreover, we are instructed to do so not in any half-hearted way, but with our kardia, our heart; our  psuchè, our breath, life, or soul; and our dianoia, our intelligence. What on earth (well, maybe not entirely on earth) are we to make of that?

Perhaps in the first place we’d do well to look at “love”. The Greek word used is agapao, which is used in the senses of “to have affection for, to care for” (for example, one’s children or one’s parents), “to honour” and very occasionally “to love” (a lover or a spouse). I remember reading a commentary on St Paul that interpreted the New Testament “love” as not so much an emotion as a being-there-for someone. The Samaritan, in that sense, “loved” the beaten traveller. So if we are told to “love” God it means we are to be there for Him, to care for Him as for a child or a parent, to be such that He can depend on us as they would. You can “love” a parent, or a sibling, you don’t much like on a daily basis: in a pinch you’d be there for them.

But why? Why would we do all that for someone whom we can’t even see, who half the time doesn’t answer our prayers, and who expects us to be “good” all the time? Because, when you get down to it and listen to the people who know Him better, in the first place He loved, and loves, us. (More about this in a minute.) Secondly, we can see Him: we can see Him in His Son, the celebration of Whose birth we are even now preparing. He sent His Son, part of Himself, not just to repair the broken toy we had made of the world, but to show us what He is like, in a form our tiny brains can handle. He couldn’t really have done more.

OK, that was then, a couple of thousand years back; but as the Carthusians I love to read (they are the guys who really spend time on this) tell me, He is still doing it, every hour of every day. Doesn’t much feel like it, we grouch. And the Carthusian says, “Don’t get Him wrong. Don’t confuse receiving His love with feeling His love. Sometimes you feel it, and that’s marvellous. But even when you don’t, you are still receiving it. And if you can get your kardia, your psuchè, and your dianoia round that, how can you not love Him back? He is giving you the example. However grouchy you are, however miserable you are, however much of a shit you are, He is there, loving you and hoping to God you will return His love.”

           

         So how about that entolè, that instruction? Perhaps it’s an instruction in a different sense. My father used to say that he thought moral laws were not so much like penal laws as like natural laws, showing the consequences of certain types of behaviour: if you stick your fingers into the candle-flame, you will get burnt and feel serious pain; if you jump off a cliff, you will fall until the rocks stop you and crack your spine, and you will die. Something like this perhaps applies also to the instruction to love God. It may be an instruction of the kind put in owner’s manuals: if you want your car to work properly, as the manufacturer intended, change the oil every 3,000 miles. If you want your life to work properly, as the Maker intended, accept Him as your parent and treat Him accordingly. Things will then tend to fall into place, often surprisingly. And who knows? You may even end up “loving” Him in the way we small humans normally understand it, as a vast feeling that lights our day.