“The Four Loves” - 6 - Charity
The natural loves are not self-sufficient — but they are powerful
William Morris wrote a poem called Love is Enough and someone is said to have reviewed it briefly in the words “It isn’t”.
Not that natural loves are belittled, but that their real glory is not in itself. A garden is only beautiful, distinct from a wilderness, only when it is tended. With a beauty that a gardener (without nature’s resources) could never create nor imagine. But his share, though small, is (1) indispensable and (2) laborious.
God sets man to tend to this garden, but nature does more work than our tools. Even Eden needed tending. We tend to make it what it is meant to be.
- We need super-natural Love to rule over our natural loves
- Yet, natural loves possess/produces a (reflected) beauty unlike anything we have, nor can do, of/in ourselves
- Yet, we still need to tend and upkeep our natural loves; or else they die
Natural loves vs. love of God
Two reasons for delay:
ONE. Natural love is tough enough, let alone super-natural love. It is easy to naturally hate, in the name of super-natural love.
It is dangerous to press upon a man the duty of getting beyond earthly love, when his real difficulty lies in getting so far.
TWO. The natural loves are already so pathetic in their claim to divinity, for they cannot stand without it.
Moderns think “love conquers all”, “all for love”. Ancients warn that we can love others too much idolatrously. Augustine warns to not let happiness depend on a beloved that can pass away; but love should be an incorruptible blessing, never a misery. “Careful! This might lead you to suffering”.
But how can love be so prudential (and so inhumane)? Lawless Eros prefers the Beloved to happiness, which seems more like Love. Perhaps Augustine had leftover from Stoics and neo-Platonism. The Bible champions natural love for each other, though mourning and suffering results from it.
To love at all is to be vulnerable. You want to keep it safe, give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it and lock it away in a casket. Safe, dark, motionless, airless. It will still change. Unbroken, yes—but unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
[!hint]
Wait this sounds just like The Oh Hellos - Hello My Old Heart Lyrics | AZLyrics.com…Hello my old heart
How have you been?
How is it, being locked away?
Well don’t you worry
In there, you’re safe
And it’s true, you’ll never beat
But you’ll never break
All natural loves can be inordinate. Qualitative in nature. Impossible to love a human “too much”—only too much in proportion to our better Love. But it is the smallness of that Love, not the greatness of our love for man, that constitutes the inordinacy.
As so often, Our Lord’s own words are both far fiercer and far more tolerable than those of the theologians. (banger)
He says nothing about guarding against earthly loves for fear that we might be hurt; He says something (that cracks like a whip) about trampling them all under-foot, the moment they hold us back from following Him. [[Luke 14#26]] (broken link, note not found)
What is hate that Love commands us? Not “hope for destruction”. Rather rejection and being stone-faced to sweet pitiable promptings. Loving Jacob and hating Esau? Esau never mentioned having bad end nor unsaved; OT only mentions Esau’s earthly life was blessed—more than Jacob’s. It is Jacob who suffered; but having something Esau does not, he is the high (and painful) vocation of being a Patriarch. And so we must disqualify our nearest and dearest natural loves, blind to tears and deaf to pleadings, when they rival our true Love.
We must organise our nautral loves
Is this too hard? Some find it too easy. Some hard beyond endurance.
When should we “hate”? Feelings deceive. Doormats never “hate”. Bullies, too soon.
We need to pre-establish our natural loves with super-natural conditions for offending “love’s law”. Then when the moment comes, it’s only a matter of, “is this the correct moment?”
I could not love thee, dear, so much
Loved I not honour more.
It is too late, during crisis, to inform your beloved that your love had all along a secrete reservation—“under God” or “so far as a higher Love permits”. They ought to have been warned, explicitly otherwise implicitly by a thousand talks and principles underlying hundreds of small matters. A real disagreement on “love’s meta-laws” should come early enough to prevent such a Marriage or Friendship from even coming.
If “All”—quite seriously all—“for love” is implicitly in the Beloved’s attitude, his or her love is not worth having.
How do we know this Love?
How do we relate and understand the super-natural Love?
Models? [[“All models are wrong, but some are useful”]] (broken link, note not found). We only have analogies… we cannot see light, though by light we can see things.
C.S. Lewis concedes the following unconfident and provisional remarks.
Christianity claims God is love. In God there is no Need-love, only Gift-love. Not a machine-like Divine Administrator of the universe. Rather, Christianity paints a God like a “host” who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and “take advantage of” Him.
Natural Gift-loves are biased in the favour of the good itself, the pre-conceived picture of the life they want the object to lead. But super-natural gift-love just wants what’s best for the beloved.
Natural Gift-lovers only direct to objects they find intrinsically lovable. But Divine Gift-love enables man to love what is not naturally lovable.
God gives man a supernatural Gift-love and Need-love.
Man seems to naturally pursue this supernatural Charity
Like a river making its own channel, like a magic wine which in being poured out should simultaneously create the glass that was to hold it, God turns our need of Him into Need-love of him.
Need is so near greed and we are so greedy already that is seems a strange grace.
Christian practice puts words in our mouths to cry and claim our unworthiness, but our nature is to believe that we are intrinsically attractive and lovable. (There’s probs more to expound here)
There is a kind of Need-love that delights to be in Need, “jolly beggars”.
The good man is sorry for the sins which have increased his Need. He is not entirely sorry for the fresh Need they have produced. And he is not sorry at all for the innocent Need that is inherent in his creaturely condition.