I wonder if the Beatles read St. Augustine, who once
famously said “Love, and do what you want?”[1] This is one of St. Augustine’s most famous, and often
abused and misquoted lines.
No one who has actually read Augustine’s homily, where this
quote appears, would think he meant that one could "do as you please"
as long as you have the right sentiment. The line is a rhetorical flourish on
Augustine’s part, intended to shock his listeners. For Augustine, love is not
merely a sentiment but a rightly ordered virtue. If you like, there is a kind
of grammar to love. In the mind of St Augustine, love needs to be rightly
ordered to be a genuine kind of love.
We might want to note that as humans our capacity to love is
quite diverse. We can love our dog, or football, or perhaps even wine or cars.
When it comes to loving people however, we generally talk of family and friendship.
In a more special sense, we have deeper relationships in which there is a lover
and a beloved. Love is not something fuzzy and disengaged from our life. We
cannot love what we do not know.[2]
Knowledge of the other thing or person leads to a kind of desire to be closer
and to grasp the thing we see, or in the case of persons, to allow them to
enter our thoughts and feelings and so in a sense become part of us. We hold
them in our heart and we join ourselves to them in love.
As I mentioned, rightly ordering our love for St.
Augustine is a way of acknowledging the movement of our heart with its desires.
The things that we do, or our behavior is always a response to what is going on
in the heart – of what we love. If our heart I rightly ordered, then it seeks
to love God and neighbor. This movement begins in our heart but is
supernaturalized by God through the grace of the Holy Spirit. Sacramental grace
and interior conversion lead us to new life.
For St. Augustine, this grace is the source of Christian
love. God loved us first. While we were still sinners, Jesus Christ came
and sacrificed himself for our sins (Roman 5:8, 1 John 4:9). By this sacrifice,
we received his love. Love is born in our hearts as we receive his gift.
As St. John notes in his letter, “Beloved, let us love one
another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and
knows God. Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love. (1
John 4:7–8). St. Augustine comments, “Love is from God and Love is God. … But
when you hear from God, either the Son or the Holy Spirit is understood.” [3] As St. Paul tells us, “hope does
not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through
the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5). The newness that Jesus
refers to in our Gospel is the supernatural grace of the Holy Spirit working
through his disciples as they imitate our Lord. “As I have loved you, so you
also should love one another” (John 13:34).
This love only occurs in relationships. It involves a lover
and the beloved. The foundation of love is relationship. As St Thomas notes,
“But the effect of love, when the beloved object is possessed, is pleasure: when
it is not possessed, it is desire” (STh., I-II q.25 a.2 resp.).
For Christian love, that relationship is first with God. It is the mission of the Son to make this relationship possible. Jesus makes it possible for us to know God and enter a relationship with him. More than this even to enjoy friendship with him (John 15:15).
Yet it is the specific continuing mission of the Holy Spirit to share God’s love with us in the realm of desire (Romans 5:5). Love is not merely an intellectual knowledge of the faith followed by obedience, but certain inclinations and desires, even passions of the heart towards God. The Son reveals the saving knowledge of God, while the Spirit imparts God’s desire, as we all return to the mercy and love of Father. In the end, the love of God is a personal experience of each of the three persons of the Holy Trinity. “If you see charity, you see the Trinity”, wrote Saint Augustine. (De Trinitate, VIII, 8, 12).
We must grasp the newness of this relational idea of love.
Love does not act out of fear and obey God in order to gain his acceptance.
Rules without relationship, do not lead to love. Instead, the beloved
experiences love and acceptance and with joy obeys out of love.
We obey God in order to deepen our relationship with him.
Humility demands that I recognize my shortcomings and failures, but at
the same time, I must depend on God’s grace to overcome these faults, trust in
his love for me. He has made me a child of God (Romans 8:15, Galatians 4:16).
My heart is not something I need to reject or suppress in
order to be holy, but a living canvas upon which the Holy Spirit slowly paints
a new and deeper understanding of the world as God sees it. By redeeming
and rightly ordering our hearts, we are able to embrace all of the creation,
which God has made good from the beginning. By rightly ordering the things of
creation, we avoid the sin of idolatry, and offer them back to God in praise to
the Creator.
As St. Augustine notes,
“Think of ordinary human love; think of it as the hand of the soul. If it’s holding one thing, it can’t hold another. To be able to hold something it’s given, it must let go of what it is already holding.” [4]
In friendship and love with God, how can we allow our human
loves to be truly the hand of the soul? This can only occur in interior
surrender to God in our prayer. “Lord, your will be done not mine.” Yet if our
friendship with God has grown, we will know that he loves us, and trust that he
desires only good things for his children (Matthew 7:11). As Jesus reminded the
crowds a few chapters earlier in John, “I came so that they might have life and
have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).
Lord, you created life in all its beauty and abundance. May
we praise you Lord, as we stand in awe of your Greatness. We trust in your love
for each one of us. Let my heart rest in your love and may this love
overflow to the world around me!
[1](dilige, et quod vis fac) Saint Augustine, Homilies on the First Epistle of John (Tractatus in Epistolam Joannis Ad Parthos), ed. Daniel E. Doyle, Thomas Martin, and Boniface Ramsey, trans. Boniface Ramsey, vol. 14, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2008), 110.
[2] “For if it does not know itself, it does not love itself.” Augustine of Hippo, The Trinity, ed. Hermigild Dressler, trans. Stephen McKenna, vol. 45, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1963), 274.
[3] Saint Augustine, Homilies on the First Epistle of John (Tractatus in Epistolam Joannis Ad Parthos), ed. Daniel E. Doyle, Thomas Martin, and Boniface Ramsey, trans. Boniface Ramsey, vol. 14, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2008), 108.
[4] Saint Augustine, Sermons 94A–147A on the New Testament, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Edmund Hill, vol. 4, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1992), 258.
No comments:
Post a Comment