The Four Loves: Charity

Excerpt from The Four Loves

God is love. Again, ​“Here­in is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us” (I John 4:10). We must not begin with mys­ti­cism, with the crea­ture’s love for God, or with the won­der­ful fore­tastes of the fruition of God vouch­safed to some in their earth­ly life. We begin at the real begin­ning, with love as the Divine ener­gy. This Pri­mal love is Gift-love. In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plen­teous­ness that desires to give. 

The doc­trine that God was under no neces­si­ty to cre­ate is not a piece of dry scholas­tic spec­u­la­tion. It is essen­tial. With­out it we can hard­ly avoid the con­cep­tion of what I can only call a ​“man­age­r­i­al” God; a Being whose func­tion or nature is to ​“run” the uni­verse, who stands to it as a head­mas­ter to a school or a hote­lier to a hotel. But to be sov­er­eign of the uni­verse is no great mat­ter to God. In Him­self, at home in ​“the land of the Trin­i­ty”, he is Sov­er­eign of a far greater realm. We must keep always before our eyes that vision of Lady Julian’s in which God car­ried in His hand a lit­tle object like a nut, and that nut was ​“all that is made”. 

God, who needs noth­ing, loves into exis­tence whol­ly super­flu­ous crea­tures in order that He may love and per­fect them. He cre­ates the uni­verse, already fore­see­ing – or should we say ​“see­ing”? there are no tens­es in God – the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails dri­ven through the medi­al nerves, the repeat­ed incip­i­ent suf­fo­ca­tion as the body droops, the repeat­ed tor­ture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake, hitched up. If I may dare the bio­log­i­cal image, God is a ​“host” who delib­er­ate­ly cre­ates His own par­a­sites; caus­es us to be that we may exploit and ​“take advan­tage of” Him. Here­in is love. This is the dia­gram of Love Him­self, the inven­tor of all loves.

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For the dream of find­ing our end, the thing we were made for, in a Heav­en of pure­ly human love could not be true unless our whole Faith were wrong. We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a man­i­fes­ta­tion of His beau­ty, lov­ingkind­ness, wis­dom or good­ness, has any earth­ly Beloved excit­ed our love. It is not that we have loved them too much, but that we did not quite under­stand what we were lov­ing. It is not that we shall be asked to turn from them, so dear­ly famil­iar, to a Stranger. When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it. He has been a par­ty to, has made, sus­tained and moved moment by moment with­in, all our earth­ly expe­ri­ences of inno­cent love. All that was true love in them was, even on earth, far more His than ours, and ours only because His. 

In Heav­en there will be no anguish and no duty of turn­ing away from our earth­ly Beloveds. First, because we shall have turned already; from the por­traits to the Orig­i­nal, from the rivulets to the Foun­tain, from the crea­tures He made lov­able to Love Him­self. But sec­ond­ly, because we shall find them all in Him. By lov­ing Him more than them we shall love them more than we now do. But all that is far away in ​“the land of the Trin­i­ty”, not here in exile, in the weep­ing val­ley. Down here it is all loss and renun­ci­a­tion. The very pur­pose of the Bereave­ment (so far as it affects our­selves) may have been to force this upon us. 

We are then com­pelled to try to believe, what we can­not yet feel, that God is our true Beloved. That is why bereave­ment is in some ways eas­i­er for the unbe­liev­er than for us. He can storm and rage and shake his fist at the uni­verse, and (if he is a genius) write poems like Hous­man­’s or Hardy’s. But we, at our low­est ebb, when the least effort seems too much for us, must begin to attempt what seem impos­si­bil­i­ties. ​“Is it easy to love God?” asks an old author. ​“It is easy,” he replies, ​“to those who do it” I have includ­ed two Graces under the word Char­i­ty. But God can give a third. He can awake in man, towards Him­self, a super­nat­ur­al Appre­cia­tive Love. This is of all gifts the most to be desired. Here, not in our nat­ur­al loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true cen­ter of all human and angel­ic life. With this all things are pos­si­ble. And with this, where a bet­ter book would begin, mine must end. I dare not pro­ceed. God knows, not I, whether I have ever tast­ed this love. 

Per­haps I have only imag­ined the tast­ing. Those like myself whose imag­i­na­tion far exceeds their obe­di­ence are sub­ject to a just penal­ty; we eas­i­ly imag­ine con­di­tions far high­er than any we have real­ly reached. If we describe what we have imag­ined we may make oth­ers, and make our­selves, believe that we have real­ly been there. And if I have only imag­ined it, is it a fur­ther delu­sion that even the imag­in­ing has at some moments made all oth­er objects of desire — yes, even peace, even to have no more fears — look like bro­ken toys and fad­ed flow­ers? Perhaps. 

Per­haps, for many of us, all expe­ri­ence mere­ly defines, so to speak, the shape of that gap where our love of God ought to be. It is not enough. It is some­thing. If we can­not ​“prac­tice the pres­ence of God”, it is some­thing to prac­tice the absence of God, to become increas­ing­ly aware of our unaware­ness till we feel like men who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a sto­ry who looks in a mir­ror and finds no face there; or a man in a dream who stretch­es out his hand to vis­i­ble objects and gets no sen­sa­tion of touch. To know that one is dream­ing is to be no longer per­fect­ly asleep. But for news of the ful­ly wak­ing world you must go to my betters.