PaddlingPadre

Love of God and love of neighbor. These constitute the two great commandments, those commandments on which, as we learn in Matthew’s gospel, depend all the law and the prophets, and which this scholar of the law in our present gospel rightly recognizes as the prerequisites for inheriting eternal life.

Now, notice that the necessity of loving God comes first, for this must be the primary and overriding concern of all human life. And not to love God with a weak or half-hearted love, which is not truly love in the fullest sense, but rather you shall love the Lord, your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind. This is a total love, a love that reaches to every corner of our being and animates every moment of our lives. It is an absolute and uncompromising love; it isn’t that love of God must be the most important thing in our lives, but rather that love of God must be the thing that vivifies and underlies everything that we do, everything that we are.

Now it may sound strange to us that such a love is commanded. After all, love is something that of its nature must be freely given. But if the need to love God is phrased as a command, this is done only by way of pedagogy; it is only to help us to recognize, against the force of worldly confusions and allurements, that it is truly in the love of God wherein true human happiness is found, that it is in loving God above things, rather than in making mere creatures or passing vanities our highest good, wherein, to quote St. Augustine, our restless hearts may find true repose.

This is a truth that is often seen only with difficulty, and the more worldly one is the greater the difficulty will be, which is why it is that, as a mercy to our slowness and to our dullness, love of God is put to us a command. But surely once this truth is seen, no command is necessary, for to love God with our entire selves is the very thing that perfects our nature, it is the thing that we were created for, such that to will our own happiness and to love God are in fact the very same thing, for it is only in loving God that we can be truly happy. And so, the more rightly we come to see things, indeed the more fully human that we become, the more we find that love of God is not something that is onerous or difficult, but rather something that is delightful and easy, and we come to recognize too that to fail to love God, to love other things in place of him, is the greatest of human tragedies.

And just as the love of God is the perfecting of human nature, so is the glory of God, in the celebrated phrase of St. Irenaeus, man fully alive. God, that is to say, is glorified in his saints, is glorified in the flourishing of the human family. And so one can see how these two great commands, love and God and love of neighbor, are intimately connected, since the thing that glorifies God, the thing that delights our beloved, is the flourishing of our brothers and sisters. And so if we love God, we must also love one another, we must also will the good of one another, because it is in the good of our brothers and sisters that God is glorified.

And so the true lover of humanity, the one who truly loves his brothers, will be a lover of God above all else, which is to say that any true humanism must be a theistic and, ultimately, a Christian humanism. For as the Second Vatican Council taught in Gaudium et spes, “Only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.” For Christ Jesus, who, as St. Paul writes in are second reading, is the image of the invisible God, is himself the perfect man. In other words, just as the fullness of divinity is revealed to us in Christ, for he was fully divine, so too is the fullness of humanity revealed to us in him, for he was fully human. It is in him, in his humanity, that we learn what really means to be human, and what we learn is this: that he came not do his own will, but rather the will of his Father in all things, and that having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end, even to the point of death on a cross. In other words, Christ’s entire life was defined by his love of God the Father and his love for his brothers and sisters. And so if you want to be all that you were created to be, if you want to be all that you are capable of being, if you want to be fully yourself and fully alive then you will go and do likewise: you will love the Lord, you God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.

This is, it hardly needs to be said, a somewhat countercultural view of what makes for human flourishing. Indeed, if you listen to many so-called champions of humanity, you are more likely to encounter an idolization of human freedom, falsely understood as a bare capacity for choosing either this or that, with the attendant denial of every aspect of our nature that does not accord with this view of the human person as an isolated, independent, self-determining agent. And so, in the name of humanity, every aspect of our nature and our experience that would challenge this understanding is denied, with particular dire consequences for the young and the elderly, since the radical dependence exhibited both by infants and the aged are a reproach to the idea that to be human is to be totally independent and self-possessed. And this isn’t even speak of the distortions that this sort of thinking leads to in the realm of sexuality, since it leads people to think that our human nature, and especially our nature as gendered beings, is something that we create rather than a gift that we receive.

But then, we shouldn’t merely, as Christians, lament that what it means to be human is so badly misunderstood in our culture, and we certainly shouldn’t be moved to a self-righteous, self-satisfied sort of anger. Rather, we ought to rejoice that we have good news to share with a world that desperately needs to hear it, that to a humanity so confused as to its purpose and its destiny, so often given to disillusion and despair, we have the privilege of announcing Jesus Christ, in whom and through whom, as the Council taught, the riddles of sorrow and death, which, apart from his gospel, are overwhelming, grow meaningful.

Of course, having said that, we cannot credibly announce this good news to the world if we do not live it ourselves, if we are not, that is, totally given over to love of God and love of neighbor. “See how the Christians love one another,” Tertullian records the ancient pagans as saying. Thus, we must always be vigilant to make sure that we ourselves are running well in the race, that we are not mere resounding gongs or clashing cymbals, but that we are truly marked in our inmost selves by Christian charity. And in this, there is a test ready at hand, for as St. John says in his first epistle: Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. This too is the challenge of the parable: do we truly love of our fellow men? Or do we allow our love to be limited, to be circumscribed by the limits of our family or tribe, to be limited to those who look like us or think like us, who speak the same language as us or were born in the same country as we were? For truly the love of Christ was not limited to some, but rather he died for all, and so if our love is limited, then we do not yet love God as we ought, and it is only in loving God as we ought, in loving all of our brothers and sisters for whom Christ suffered, that we will be able to announce to the world with a credible voice the good news of Jesus Christ. For truly, there is no true lover of humanity who is not also a lover of God, and there is no true lover of God who is not also a lover of humanity.