Love

Reading these passages

The best known verse in the Bible contains a word that four centuries of English have quietly reassigned.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

So is now heard as an intensifier — loved the world so much. The Greek is houtos, which means thus, in this way, like this. The sentence is not measuring the size of the love. It is pointing at the method: God loved the world in this manner, namely by giving. What follows the comma is not the consequence of the love but the content of it.

The verse survives either reading, which is probably why the drift went unnoticed. But the two say different things, and only one of them can be checked. A quantity of feeling is not the sort of claim anyone can examine. A demonstration is. Spanish translations generally keep the manner sense, and the verse reads slightly differently there as a result.

Which direction it runs

John states the sequence in five words and they are worth taking literally: We love him, because he first loved us.

The claim is causal and it has a direction. Love is not presented as something a person generates and then offers upward; it is presented as a response, with the initiative on the other side. Romans places the timing deliberately: But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

The word rendered commendeth means to demonstrate or prove — the death is treated as evidence submitted rather than as a gesture made, which is exactly the reading houtos asks for two paragraphs ago. And the timing is the whole argument. Not once we had improved. The sentence describes its recipients at their worst in the same clause that describes the act.

Then the flattest statement in the New Testament about God's nature: He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. John does not write that God is loving, which would be an attribute among others. He writes an identity. And he draws the inference in the direction people usually reverse: not that knowing God will teach you to love, but that not loving is evidence of not knowing.

A list with no affection in it

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.

Read the whole passage looking for warmth and you will not find any. There is no attraction in it, no delight in the other person, no preference, no enjoyment. Every item is either something done or something declined, and the majority are declined — of the fifteen or so clauses, most describe restraint.

That is a strange way to define love and a deliberate one. The word Paul is defining is agape, and the list he gives would work just as well as instructions for how to treat someone you cannot stand. Nothing in it requires liking the person. Which means the definition is available to anyone in any relationship, including the ones where the feeling has gone and only the obligation is left.

It also means the definition cannot be satisfied privately. Suffering long, refraining from envy, not keeping account of wrongs — none of these can be performed alone or verified by introspection. Paul has defined the central Christian virtue entirely in terms that require another person to be present.

The clause the King James renders thinketh no evil is worth separating out, because the English has gone vague where the Greek is precise. The verb is logizomai, an accounting term — to reckon, to enter in a ledger, to put on account. It is the same word Paul uses elsewhere for righteousness being credited to Abraham.

So the clause is not about avoiding suspicious thoughts. It is about not keeping the book. Love does not maintain a running total of what it is owed, which is a considerably more specific instruction than thinking well of people, and a harder one, because the ledger is the natural response to being wronged repeatedly and it feels like nothing more than accuracy.

The clause beside it is equally concrete. Seeketh not her own would have read, to the Corinthians, as a direct comment on the lawsuits between members that Paul has already spent a chapter on — going to court being the most literal possible way of seeking one's own.

The strange comparative

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

The sentence is quoted so often that its oddity has worn away. Faith and hope are, in the rest of the New Testament, the load-bearing terms — the things by which a person is saved and sustained. Putting love above them is not the obvious move, and Paul does not soften it.

The reason is in the verses just before, which give the criterion: faith and hope are both oriented toward something not yet had. When the thing arrives, they have done their work. Love does not have that structure. It is the only one of the three that has nothing to become.

Notice also abideth. All three remain — Paul does not say faith and hope expire. He says love outranks them, which is a claim about order rather than duration, and he does not explain it further.

What is new about the new commandment

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.

The obvious question is what is new about it. Loving one's neighbour was already in Leviticus, and Jesus had quoted it as the second greatest commandment. The instruction itself is old.

What is new is the middle clause. As I have loved you replaces the older standard, which was yourself. Leviticus said love your neighbour as you love yourself — a measure everyone carries and roughly understands. This substitutes a different yardstick, external and demonstrated, and the demonstration was still in progress when he said it: he had washed their feet an hour earlier and would be arrested before morning.

The verse that follows makes it the identifying mark: By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. Not by doctrine, and not by conduct in general. The test offered to outsiders is how the members treat each other.

The command that cannot be commanded

Asked which commandment is greatest, Jesus answers with one that requires an emotion: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

This has bothered readers for a long time, because affection does not seem like the kind of thing that can be ordered. Christians have answered it in more than one way, and the answers are not compatible.

One holds that the Hebrew and Greek words are broader than modern English love — that they include loyalty, allegiance and covenant faithfulness, so what is commanded is a settled orientation rather than a feeling, and orientations can be chosen. On this reading the command is addressed to the will.

Another holds that the feeling is genuinely commanded, and that the impossibility is the point: the law shows what cannot be produced on demand, which is exactly its function in Paul's argument elsewhere.

A third takes the three faculties named — heart, soul, mind — as the whole of a person, and reads the command as a claim about totality rather than intensity. Not love harder. Love with nothing held back.

These pull in different directions and this page will not decide among them. What they share is the observation that the command is quoted from Deuteronomy: Jesus is not introducing something new but naming what was already the centre, and the second commandment he adds is quoted from Leviticus. Asked for the greatest, he answers entirely in other people's words.

And the standard for love between people is set by an example rather than a definition: Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. He said it the night before doing it, which means that when he spoke the sentence it was not yet a description of anything. It was a statement about where the ceiling is, made by someone on his way to it.