These Essays: The Love of God and Neighbor

When we talk about love we do not often mean the word in the same way that Augustine did. Augustine said caritas, which we now call charity or Christian love. But when he did so he did not mean a love among loves, in the way that Christians think about agape and eros and philia today. What he meant instead was something like the love behind the loves, the desire that orients our desires. One can even, in Augustine’s thinking, love the wrong things.  

But because we have the love commandment in mind, we are concerned about the love of God and neighbor. And these are quite clearly the right things to love, for us and for Augustine. In the case of Scripture, he wrote of the love of God and neighbor that not a single word of Scripture became clear to him if he did not meet both parts of Christ’s love commandment. 

I am interested in this connection between love and clarity. For although it is not obvious, it seems to be helpful. If we recall our analogy of the therapist, we find that the client goes to the therapist for the purpose of gaining insight or knowledge, of understanding a problem so that something can be changed.

Now Augustine famously wrote that we are restless until we find our rest in God. He did not mean, and I do not mean, that we find God and understanding on our own and disappear our own difficulties. Indeed, quite the opposite often seems to occur: we ourselves are sought, found and understood by the divine, and then our problems alter, increase or recur regardless.

What I am saying is that we search nonetheless, often despite ourselves, because we are not well in ways we do not even understand. We do not clearly see ourselves, our emotions or our behavior. Still less do we satisfactorily understand the world in which we live. What Christ may bring to our lives is the perhaps unpleasant ability to see ourselves as we are. That few experience this ability as constant should not lead us to despair. It simply means that we need not expect human knowledge of any kind to be perfect or complete. God intends for us to grow.  

And God means that growth to happen, at least in part, by new understanding. So it is crucial for therapy. But understanding is also key for reading, and still more for reading texts from which we hope to learn and be transformed. Understanding was Augustine’s immediate and foundational reason for interpreting Scripture. Scripture was, always and everywhere, for the purpose of instructing either the interpreter or the interpreter’s audience.

We can see this in the half of the famous passage of Christian Doctrine. “Whoever thinks he has understood the Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them...does not yet understand them as he ought.” (emphasis mine). We are to discern the truth of Scripture through interpretation. And we are to share our understanding with others: “love itself, which binds men into the bond of unity, would have no means of pouring soul into soul and, as it were, mingling them one with another, if men never learned anything from their fellow men.”

Understanding comes first. As he says quite clearly, there are two things on which every interpretation of scripture depends: the mode of discovering what should be understood and the mode of presenting what has been understood. It is no accident that understanding precedes explication, that reading precedes rhetoric, when one reads Scripture in Augustine’s footsteps.

This establishes the structure of On Christian Doctrine. Understanding is our way of loving God; rhetoric is our way of loving neighbor. We read Scripture because our love seeks understanding. We explain Scripture because love seeks out our neighbor. Augustinian understanding is the understanding between lovers, not only logical but also experiential, existential, and oriented between lover and beloved. It may be difficult for us to understand today, but for Augustine both understanding and love were ways of being, and better ways of being than any alternatives.

It may also seem strange to us that Augustine most often used the sermon in Christian Doctrine to explain what caritas might look like, but this is certainly the case. Scripture expounded rhetorically remains Augustine’s central interpretive image. Augustine continues Cicero’s understanding of the purpose of rhetoric being to teach, to delight, and to move. We have certainly covered the teaching part, and its importance cannot be overstated.

But  delight and movement cannot be ignored by the preacher: “He, then, shall be eloquent, who can say little things in a subdued style, in order to give instruction, moderate things in a temperate style, in order to give pleasure, and great things in a majestic style, in order to sway the mind.”

There is a comparable analogy is love of one’s own body in Augustine. It is not evil, he thought, to love one’s own body. What is evil is not caring for the bodies of others as if they were our own. It may not be too much to say that in the Augustinian understanding, we have inherited the love and care of self precisely so that we will understand how to love and care for others. One can, perhaps, see the analogy: one will understand the Scriptures for oneself so that one will know how to best teach others. Understanding is for sharing.

Augustine’s hermeneutic includes an interpreter receiving a gift of understanding that is incomplete until given to another. Such doubleness of Augustine’s mirrors the love of God, which is incomplete until it becomes the love of the neighbor, and the love of the neighbor which expresses, and so requires, but cannot supersede, the given love of God.  

Page a Day: One Hundred Eight

            I walk the streets of Sepira bored. Even the highest security post on loyal Thaeron oversees nothing but a steady stream of recruits for the citadels and tourists for the coastal cities. Cadets want their stars and bars. Tourists want peace and ease. Few even consider doing anything illegal. The only malcontents are the backward religious types who colonized the world to start with. And there aren’t many of those left, having mostly died off or ventured out into the Profusion to proselytize. But the Church of the Blood has stayed put, and there isn’t supposed to be anyone like them anywhere. So when I come to their building I walk over toward it, as much to get out of the rain as see something utterly archaic.  

              But their building brings me up short. It’s strange and square, as off-putting as the rumors. They believe, supposedly, that the Profusion is on the wrong damned track. Everyone should contemplate the inward path, rather than explore the outward one. The Profusion, constantly expanding, only serves to drive human beings apart. Technology dictates how and when we think instead of helping us to do so.

              They should be glad no one takes them seriously. Dissent is the Rim Rebellions, out on the edge of the Galaxy. Eight hundred years and still going on. This little church wouldn’t stand a chance. 

            There is indeed a service going on when I walk into the dimness. They sit four to six to a table, arranged so that most face a stage, where an elderly woman stands with her eyes closed. She speaks an indecipherable language in solemn tones. I duck down and take a seat from the nearest table, far to the rear. 

              I don’t understand. I can’t tell the priests from the pastors or the deacons from the brothers. The service proceeds with everyone making a lot of flowing elaborate motions that must have been choreographed. Three times, the entire gathering stands and sings and dances. A long segment consists of people sitting and sharing personal anecdotes under the firm direction of a priest or brother. Everyone constantly eats bread and drinks wine, passing both around. I keep refusing. 

              After the service, a young man of very dark skin walks over. “This blood is for everyone,” he says, though I can’t see any blood anywhere. I lose no time in leaving. 

              I come back weeks later, not really knowing why. The morning service is entirely different from the evening one. Mostly, people read or chant from old books, presumably sacred texts. The only common element is the bread and wine and the time for common anecdotes. I leave again when an old priest heads my way. Never had much tolerance for holy writ. Either what’s said is true or it isn’t.   

Page a Day: One Hundred Seven

PART THREE

Chapter Ten

In death,

            My dead lover came to me. She returned not as in life, of course, but as she had been transformed. I have not described her in this book. On the night she died I lay across her body until the Temple guards came and dragged me from her rooms. They left her where she lay. While the city fell, from my Temple prison I saw her wake. In my mind’s eye her skin turned gold, her face flowed like water. The blood that drained from her wrist poured out blue and green. When she stood, her wings unfurled across the room. Her form was tall and lithe and filled with grace. She moved with a purpose both beautiful and dread. She left my rooms and I saw her cross two extra arms behind her back.

            In the rioting streets they uncrossed as scimitars, and she spun and carved a path to me. Her dance was the dance of death, and those who fell never saw her in their midst. She broke the Temple wall with a fist; she parted the bars of my cell as though they were made of wax. She dropped a bundle at my feet, and I saw it contained my dagger and my journals. In a voice of a thousand tongues she told me to rise, and led me from that place. She took me to a Well of the Blood of the Profusion and the memories of ten thousand dead. She waited while they turned white. When that was done, she led me with a dagger in my hand to the Well of Faith’s Healing, where the current Faith had hidden.

            Now she stood over me where I lay in darkness. Her brilliance made me squint as I sat up. Light both white and gold poured out through her skin. She held out a delicate hand, and touched her finger to my forehead.

            “Del...Tanich,” she said, every word a complex song, “it is...time...youmetyour...father.”

            She withdrew her hand, and I tumbled backward into darkness.

These Essays: The Interpretation of Love

He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and

 with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment.

And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

- Matthew 22:37-38

Whoever, then, thinks that he understand the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them,

but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold

love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.

- Augustine, On Christian Doctrine

Almost any loving interpretation might pass through On Christian Doctrine. Augustine’s guidance agrees with Scripture itself, wherein Christ’s injunction to love both God and neighbor is already an interpretive guide. Jesus clearly uses his instruction as a way to read Scripture: love is the most important of the laws, the Torah and Talmud of Pharasaic Judaism. More, the double love of God and neighbor in Matthew’s gospel goes one step further: Jesus will himself fulfill the law as love. Jesus becomes the double love of God and neighbor. 

So Christians can interpret the Old Testament in light of the New. Did Jesus fulfill the law and the prophets? If so, what was the nature of this fulfillment? One answer might be that through the fulfillment of God’s love of the world, Christ accomplishes God’s purposes. Christ is the promised Messiah of Israel and all of humankind. 

But to even ask these questions is to begin a kind of reading. Scripture becomes a text that refers to itself. In practical terms, this requires a codex, a book, rather than a scroll. And this, among other things, made early Christians so distinct in the ancient world. Seeking Christ defined Christianity in a very practical way.

Of course the gospels and epistles contain other instances of intertextuality, but the love commandment emphasizes Christ. John’s gospel and epistles identify God with love, and Paul elevates love as the highest Christian virtue. Love can lay a good a claim as any as a rule for interpreting Scripture. If the immediate purpose of Scripture for Christians is to identify the Christ, then its ultimate aim would be to identify that to which Christ points: the loving goodness of the Father, and our human need of it.

This does not meant that Christian love or charity is the only possible theological purpose of Christian Scripture. But building love cannot be an indefensible purpose for interpreting Scripture. Indeed, on the merits of emphatic passages of Scripture as well as its place in Christian tradition, it seems just as arguable as any of those other second-tier criteria. 

An emphasis of the broadest Christian traditions has been that Christians interpret Scripture together. Indeed it may be one of the things that makes Christians Christian. So any rule of interpretation which openly solicits a communal understanding of interpretation has much to say in its own defense. And an interpreter who seeks to love the neighbor would certainly not deny his or her interpretation out of hand, far more so if one’s neighbor is also a brother or sister in Christ diligently seeking to understand the Scriptures.

Such meetings mark the beginnings of the church, as Christians discussed the Scriptures together, or met to hear those interpretations proclaimed. Here begins the traditional appropriation of reading Scripture in worship, and the later Protestant fascination with the Word of God bringing communities together. An Augustinian understanding of the purpose of Scriptural interpretation as the building up of caritas speaks to basic Christian desires toward understanding, community, and transformed life together.