The Spirit and the Forms of Love by Daniel Day Williams
Chapter 4: Three Forms of Love
When we say that the interpretation of love has taken three major forms in the Christian tradition, we are not seeking to fit the entire history into a neat scheme, but rather to emphasize the fact that the interpretation of love has had a history. In this history three main perspectives have appeared as characteristic forms of the Christian life. Our typology is an instrument of analysis, and, hopefully, of vision. it is not a form to be imposed on the data. It is intended rather to sharpen and organize significant aspects of the data, and thus the analysis tends to produce
‘ideal types’, that is, forms which do not precisely correspond to any historical expression of the type.1 We shall try to discover the
underlying structures in the three types and we shall base each
description upon specific historical sources: St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, and Martin Luther.
A typology can have a further usefulness when the comparison of types with one another discloses relationships which might otherwise remain obscure. Two important insights will emerge from a typological analysis of the conceptions of love. The first is that the history of the Western concept of love has been influenced by the fact that St. Augustine worked out his interpretation of love in relation to the metaphysics of neo-platonism with its doctrine of God as being-itself, the absolute. In criticizing that Augustinian synthesis we are agreeing with Nygren that it is the critical point in the development of Christian doctrine. But where Nygren attacks the synthesis by isolating agape from eros as two utterly different conceptions of love, I shall try to show that he focuses
on the wrong point. The real task is to see whether another ontological synthesis is possible, one freed from the neo-platonism which causes so much trouble for a genuinely historical view of God and man. Our analysis of the historical types will lead to the development of this possibility. The spirit transcends the forms; but the spirit can be obscured when the forms become hardened.
This leads to a second discovery. Each of the additional types has recreated itself in our era, but in each case it betrays an existential restlessness. The classic types do not quite satisfy contemporary man’s self-understanding. We shall examine the factors which have led three modern interpreters of love who stand within the main types to modify the traditional forms: Martin D’Arcy, Albert Schweitzer, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Thus the interpretation of love continues in a history where new forms break through the old.
Every Christian view of love involves the following themes: the meaning of the love of God in the history of Israel and in his action in Jesus Christ and the Church; the relations of faith and knowledge in the understanding of love; the question of the being of God in his relation to the world; the relation of the divine love to human loves and human self- expression; and the ethics of love as the basis of both personal and collective obligation. We shall characterize each type on these topics.
(1) THE AUGUSTINIAN TYPE
St. Augustine formulated the conception of love at the critical point in the development of early Christianity, and his vision in some way informs all subsequent Christian thought in the West.2
Augustine weaves together two major themes. God is the Father of Jesus Christ, and Father and Son are united in the Spirit. The life of the Trinity is the life of absolute love. God graciously pours out his love upon the creation and through it he has come to men in the incarnation of his son for their redemption. This is the personal, active, redemptive side of the doctrine. But God is the fullness of being, ‘being itself’, as St.
Augustine follows the neo-platonic doctrine. God is being, the ground, the ontological structure within all beings. The world then is a system of structures and powers which exist through participation in God’s being.
The fulfilment of anything is the fulfilment of its being in God.
Hence for St. Augustine everything in the created universe shows on its
positive side its participation in being. This is true of human knowledge.
We can know ourselves as existing persons only through the act of knowing that we are, knowing that we know, and rejoicing in this knowledge; and here Augustine finds a reflection of the Trinity — the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. All knowledge, then, whether of logic and mathematics or of the good and the beautiful, is knowledge of patterns of being which participate in God. As the mind moves toward a fuller grasp of the truth it is led toward God. For Augustinians there is never an absolute disjunction between intellectual and mystical
experience, for all experience has the power and truth of God’s being as its ground. To know truly is to experience God. Rationalism and
mysticism are not enemies but two sides of experience which reinforce one another.
The significance of love for knowledge becomes clearer when we
consider the meaning of error and ignorance. Since the mind is properly directed toward being, error is a plunge toward non-being. Now to be is not only to know; it is to love, and indeed love is more fundamental than knowledge. Therefore St. Augustine sees all disorder in human
existence as stemming from a disorder in the j creature’s love for God.
This is why all hearts are restless until they find their rest in God. Love is the weight which bears the creature toward God.3 Since God is to be loved above all else, a rightly ordered life can be founded only upon love for God, not for God as chief value among others, but as the ultimate and absolute good which underlies all the creaturely goods.
Therefore the goal of love is the satisfaction and the culmination of the creature’s life in God. This fruitio dei is the characteristic Augustinian expression of blessedness and peace in God.
An important consequence of Augustine’s teaching is that to love anything, when that love is rightly ordered, is to love that thing or person in God. Nothing is self-sufficient but God. For Augustine, therefore, all truly human love is at the same time the love of God, and its natural uncorrupted intent is to seek the fruition of every finite and proximate love in the absoluteness of God’s being. Augustine is often criticized for this doctrine on the ground that he depersonalizes human love by insisting that we do not love another person for himself alone.
But Augustine’s intention should be remembered. The fulfilment of every love is its destiny in the divine life, which is the life of personal spirit, the Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit. St. Augustine’s superb definition of sacrifice is well known:
Every action which is performed with the aim of inhering in God in one holy society; whose purpose, that is, is to bring us to the end by which we can truly be made blessed.4
Augustine’s God in whom all loves are completed is not impersonal. To love another in God is just to see that other as he truly is, as a participant in God’s eternal life. The difficulties lie, I believe, not in the doctrine that we love others in God, but in Augustine’s failure to develop a metaphysical view which provides for the fully social relationship of God and man.
St. Augustine’s treatment of the love of beauty illustrates as clearly as anything in his philosophy his view of the pilgrimage of human loves.
‘The soul has power to know eternal things as things to which it should cling fast (inhaerendum), but it has not at the same time the power to do so.5 What is the source of this weakness? Augustine explains that we love the beautiful, and beautiful things please by proportion, by number, and by rhythm. We love therefore what Augustine calls ‘active
performance’ when the soul, reacting to the effects of its own body, becomes preoccupied with the pleasures of perception. It is diverted from the contemplation of eternal things and becomes restless, curious, and finally infected with anxiety. Cura, care or anxiety, replaces
securitas.
Now there is much in Augustine about this tendency of the soul to turn toward preoccupation with temporal things, and much in condemnation of the body’s lusts. Yet none of this is explained as caused by any inherent evil in the body or the material world. All things are good because they participate in the creation. Augustine never calls the body bad because it is body. He rejected that view when he rejected
Manichaeism.
No, the real source of the soul’s disorder is pride, ‘the vice which made the soul prefer to imitate God rather than to serve God’.6 Now pride is a failure in love’s proper ordering. When he says that the soul must
indeed find it ‘easy to love God’, Augustine is talking about the soul’s created goodness and harmony with the divine order. The ‘love of this world is far more laborious’ for then we are seeking fulfilment and peace and permanence where they are not to be found. The secret of rightly ordered love is to love our neighbour, ‘the surest step towards an ability to cling to God’.7 The source of disorder is the soul’s turning toward the love of lesser things, and this comes from a desire to imitate
God, that is, to be God, to dominate others, and to win honours and praise through our influence upon them. All this Augustine sees as the soul’s movement away from being. To become distended with pride is to move toward what is outside the soul’s real being and to become empty within, that is, to exist less and less fully, quod est minus minusque esse.8
With this doctrine of the fall from fullness of being Augustine combines another which for him is essential. Since God, being-itself, is immutable and changeless, the fall away from being is an attachment to the
mutable. We turn away from pure eternity and toward non-being
whenever the soul’s affection is directed toward that which is changing.
St. Augustine’s attitude toward the pleasures of the body and toward human desire generally is profoundly affected by this doctrine.
‘Therefore we must not place our joys in carnal pleasures nor in honour and tributes of praise; nor in our thought for anything extrinsic to our body, forinsecus; for we have God within us, and there all that we love is fixed and changeless.’9
While not absolutely disparaging the realm of the changing, Augustine has repeated the theme of Greek religion which seeks salvation in the changelessness of absolute being. Consequently the vision of a
hierarchy of goods appears in which everything in the temporal world is contrasted with the superior value of the non-temporal order. Here a preoccupation with the eternal at the expense of this world has entered into the perspective on love itself. This is why Augustine’s doctrine has at its foundation the distinction between the two loves, the love of God and the love of the world.10 There is indeed a delicate balance in his thought and he believes he has perceived the right use of temporal things; but he is perilously close to saying that to love God is to turn away from love for whatever is changeable. Thus a kind of asceticism of the temporal is introduced into Christian theology, which has affected the whole course of the conception of love.11
The issues concerning this asceticism come out clearly in Augustine’s view of sexual love. There is some point in the view that Augustine had much to do with fastening a negative and morbid attitude toward
sexuality upon the Christian church, but we want to find what it is in his view of love which led to this.12 We have to go deeper than the familiar point that Augustine thought of the stain of original sin as transmitted through the act of procreation. We remember that Augustine never says the body is the source of evil. It is in the soul that evil arises. The body
may weigh down the soul, but sinful actions result from the soul’s misdirection of the body.13 Further, Augustine can write beautifully upon the spiritual significance of marriage. When we compare him with such Fathers as Jerome and Tertullian he seems positively humane and liberal. The goods of marriage, he says, include the bearing and raising of children in the love of the Lord; the family loyalties of husband and wife, parents and children; and the sacramental unity of marriage.
Augustine seems to give to sexual love the same power as that of other loves to participate in the fullness of being.14
We have further to allow to St. Augustine that some of his warnings about the dangers of moral distraction in the human loves come from an essential insight in the Gospel. Jesus’ extreme words about hating father and mother cannot be forgotten in any Christian ethic (Luke 14: 26).
Augustine seems to be giving sensible advice when he says that marriage is not always to be rejected for the sake of the Kingdom.
Rather, he says:
those who put their trust in these things, [i.e. marriage]
who prefer them to God, who for the sake of these things are quick to offend God, these will perish. But those who either do not use these things or who use them as though they used them not, trusting more in Him who gave them than in the things given, understanding in them His
consolation and mercy and who are not absorbed in these gifts lest they fall away from the giver, these are they whom the day will not overtake as a thief unprepared.15 Even Augustine’s doctrine that procreation is the only morally
acceptable goal of sexual intercourse is based in part on his concern lest the satisfactions of the world distract us from our first obligation to God.
It must be admitted here however that along with all the Church Fathers he failed to see sexual expression within human love as sustaining the personal relationship, and thus he fastened a doctrine of the
unimportance of this personal function of sexual expression upon the catholic church which it is only now throwing off.16
The really serious problem in St. Augustine’s view stems from
something other than his concern about single-minded devotion to God.
It lies in his view that since the love of God is the love of the immutable it relegates every other love to a lesser place in a system of values.
Augustine moves from the unchallengeable Christian doctrine that
nothing must stand in the way of love to God to the quite different doctrine that there must be a hierarchy of higher and lower loves. The love of God therefore is intrinsically one that can be expressed more adequately by refraining from sexual love. Here is the basis of
Augustine’s view that virginity is the highest human state, celibacy next, and that there is a scale of nobility in relation to continence after
bereavement, with renunciation always receiving the highest honour.17 Here Augustine’s theology of the Fall and the subsequent redemption of sufficient souls to replenish heaven further confuses his view of the meaning of sex. The divine command to Adam and Eve to be fruitful holds from the Fall until Christ, since the people of God must be propagated in history. But the coming of Christ makes procreation an optional and lesser good for the race. Celibacy can be recommended as the best way of life for all, for redemption is fulfilled in the church whether the race goes on or not.
Augustine does not lose his sense of the moral realities altogether in this glorification of virginity and celibacy. A humble Catholic wife is nearer God than a proud virgin. He allows that there can be a pardoning of sexual gratification sought for its own sake within marriage if it
contributes to the happiness and security of the marriage state.18 What disturbs us is that Augustine needs to hunt for this pragmatic
justification of sexual fulfilment. His reason is that when all the loves are set within a hierarchy of values any love other than the love of God himself is a lesser love which can have only a relative justification.
It is important to trace this theological disparagement of sexual love to its source. The answer lies in the neo-platonic metaphysics which St.
Augustine has taken into his doctrine of God. To love the absolutely immutable good which is above time and growth is of necessity to turn from the mutable and the temporal. Augustine cannot see it otherwise, given his presuppositions about God and the world. Hence he remains in the end double-minded about the human loves. They participate in
God’s being and may lead toward blessedness in him. Yet in themselves as directed toward this world, even toward the beloved in marriage, they are inferior to the love of God and therefore dispensable. No one can say that this doctrine is unheroic or without its insight into the issue of
ultimate concern. But is it in truth the right appraisal of the human loves? Augustine never quite brings his view of sexual love within the range of his deepest insight as to what loving another in God means:
turning the whole current of love for self and neighbour into the channel
of the love of God ‘which suffers no stream to be drawn off from itself by whose diversion its own volume would be diminished’.19 To turn the human loves into the stream of devotion to God is one thing, to set devotion to God apart as one kind of love which makes others inferior is another. It is here that later Christian thought in the Reformation began to seek another solution.
Over against this disparagement of earthly loves it is also characteristic of Augustine’s teaching that he declares the constructive power of love in the moral life. Virtue itself is ‘nothing else than the perfect love of God’ and the classic four virtues are rightly to be understood as four forms of love:
Temperance is love giving itself entirely to that which is loved; fortitude is love readily bearing all things for the sake of the loved object; justice is love serving only the loved object, and therefore ruling rightly; prudence is love distinguishing with sagacity what hinders it and helps it.20 We see even more clearly why St. Augustine can speak with such
freedom of love as the sole rule for the moral life. It is because love takes form in the virtues. It is their inner tendency and spirit. ‘Our root is our charity, our fruits are our works.’21
We are especially interested in the relation of love to justice since much modern discussion of theological ethics has turned upon this point.
Reinhold Niebuhr in particular has pointed out how actual structures of justice in history represent balances of power informed by fear and self- defence as much as by any kind of love.
For St. Augustine it is clear where we must begin. Love as caritas, the love of God and neighbour, is inseparable from justice. ‘The enlarging of the heart is the delight we take in justice.’22 So Augustine has the interesting teaching that justice itself must be loved. As it is loved there is progress in the Christian life.
Inchoate charity, therefore, is inchoate justice; progressing charity is progressing justice; great charity is great justice; perfect charity is perfect justice.23
Now the deep realism of this position comes into view. For the love