Love's Sacred Order: The Four Loves Revisited

By Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis

When seeking to understand Christian love with some precision, we inevitably come to speak about order in loving. The title of this book, Love's Sacred Order, is intended to address the problem of the need for clarification in the matter of love, above all the question of the relationship among the different kinds of love, all of which make their legitimate claim on us. A central concern of these reflections is the fact that we can do as much harm to ourselves by being too restrictive as by being too permissive in what we allow to come under the heading of Christian love.

The main intent of these meditations is to explore what the hierarchy might be that God established among all our human loves, on the one hand, and between these and the gratuitously revealed love of Godthat uncreated mystery, "kept secret for long ages", to which we could not have had access if God himself had not taken the initiative to manifest it in Christ Jesus.

The author approaches this subject pondering and responding to issues raised in the widely known work of C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, of which the year 2000 marks the fortieth anniversary of publication. This volume, then, is offered as a modest contribution to our celebration of this year of the Great Jubilee of our redemption, as well as an homage to the great Christian writer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Jan 13, 2010
• ISBN: 9781681493176

Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis

Father Simeon, O.C.S.O. (formerly Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis) obtained his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Theology from Emory University. Formerly a Professor of Literature and Theology at the University of San Francisco, he is now a Trappist monk at St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Mass. In addition to Vols. 1 & 2 of Fire of Mercy, he is the author of several other books including The Way of the Discipleand Love's Sacred Order.  

Book preview

LOVE’S SACRED ORDER

LOVE’S SACRED ORDER

FOUR MEDITATIONS

by

Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis

IGNATIUS PRESS    SAN FRANCISCO

Cover art: Encounter at the Golden Gate

(detail, SS. Joachim and Anne)

Giotto di Bondone,

Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy

Alinari / Art Resource, N.Y.

Cover design by Roxanne Mei Lum

© 2000 Ignatius Press, San Francisco

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-0-89870-791-5

Library of Congress control number 99-68616

Printed in the United States of America

To POPE JOHN PAUL II

masterful teacher of Love

both human and divine

according to the Heart of CHRIST

and to

MIREYA CECILIA

who teaches by just being

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

Love—but What Love?

I

The Highest Cannot Stand without the Lowest

II

The Elixir of Life

III

The Love That Would Be God

IV

A God Crushed by Love

EPILOGUE

Prayer of William St. Thierry

NOTES

PROLOGUE

Love—but What Love?

IF I GIVE AWAY all I have, St. Paul writes in his famous Hymn to Charity, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing"¹ The absolute centrality of love in human life—not just anything that goes by the name of love, but heroic love, selfless charity, agapē as delineated in the New Testament—may be the one truth readily agreed upon by all Christians and persons of goodwill. In practice, however, difficulties begin emerging the moment we try to specify, not only what love according to Christ’s Heart looks like in the concrete, but above all the spiritual evolution and interior processes that transform a human heart so that it can indeed live out, instant by instant, the love in which it has always believed.

Is not this agonizing tension between clear belief and murky existence the chief burden of our lives as Christians, the chief source of strain but also the chief stimulus for continual conversion? Indeed, simply to climb the happy bandwagon of love is a delusion, for we can be guilty of phariseeism in connection with love as much as with any other aspect of Christian revelation. For this reason, anyone pretending to speak about love with any understanding had first better be alerted by Paul’s censure: If I speak about love "in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal".²

It is significant, in fact, that St. Paul’s Hymn to Charity begins with a series of negative caveats, as if he were protecting the delicacy and precious nature of his subject by radically distancing authentic, Christlike love from its many possible misunderstandings and endless forgeries. For instance, I have often pondered the apparent contradictoriness of the verse I have put at the head of this prologue. How could anyone possibly give away everything he owns, to the poor presumably, and then make a gift even of his body, presumably in martyrdom for his Lord, unless such utterly generous actions were the fruit of a profound love abiding in his soul?

Is not too much being asked of us here? Is Paul not going too far, not only in expecting the Corinthians to perform quite radical exterior actions, but then in adding to that a very precise expectation about their inmost state of soul? In other words, for Paul the material accomplishment of even a heroic deed of charity and self-sacrifice—one that will surely benefit the needy—is simply not enough to make it qualify as being authentically Christian, that is, as authentically deriving from the same source in the eternal Father as the actions of Jesus. By such standards, even the most successful and efficient social welfare program is not necessarily a sacrifice of praise to the Father, any more than the most impassioned, eloquent and orthodox of sermons is necessarily a proclamation of the gospel.

Why not? Because, at heart, Christianity is not about alleviating physical misery or imparting an exciting and consoling message. At heart, Christianity is a communication of life, a communion in the divine Life, and every Christian deed and every Christian word is called to become an instrument whereby the doer and the speaker gives to the other the substance of his person, which is Christ. St. Paul’s doctrine here makes it a matter of relative indifference whether it is in the thick of city life or in the solitude of the desert that a Christian strives to allow the life and power of Christ to transform him wholly. If the fire of God’s love, communicated in Christ, comes to inhabit my being, that fire shall surely know how to follow the logic of its nature and ignite conflagrations wherever it is meant to do so. Some fires are visibly set with a match; others—one thinks of volcanoes—erupt from the depths of silence and tranquillity to make the whole world a brazier.

Thus, when seeking to understand Christian love with some precision, we inevitably come to speak about order in loving. The title of this book, Love’s Sacred Order, is intended to address the need for clarification in the matter of love, above all the question of the relationship among the different kinds of love, all of which make their legitimate claim on us. A central concern of my reflections is the fact that we can do as much harm to ourselves by being too restrictive as by being too permissive in what we will allow to come under the heading of Christian Love. Human beings can no more live on agapē alone than they can live on eros alone, and I take this to be one of the truths about human nature sealed by the Word’s Incarnation.

Sacred order is an attempt to render in more comprehensible English the Greek word hierarchy. In our secular understanding of the term, we do not often remember that the word arose in an exclusively religious context as an attempt to see all creatures in the whole created order, from cherubim and seraphim to the humblest pebble on the ocean’s floor, in their relationship to their uncreated Source and to one another. The thinker with whom we chiefly associate the notion of hierarchy is an anonymous Greek writer of about A.D. 500 who goes by the name of Denys (or, more clumsily, Pseudo-Dionysius) the Areopagite. Most notable in Denys’ writings is the manner in which hierarchy appears in thoroughly christianized form. To simplify a rather complex subject: in previous Neoplatonist writers, such as Plotinus, hierarchy connoted a series of downward-plunging spheres of being, each of which possessed a more and more reduced participation in the truth and light of the supreme One, from which all the spheres had emanated, until we arrive at totally inanimate, purely material beings with no consciousness and therefore no participation in the divine. Some Neoplatonic systems, such as the Gnostic, were radically dualistic, and these saw the descent from the One as implying a fall from the pure goodness of immaterial, impassible spirit into the greater and greater evil of dull matter and desire.

Nothing could be further from the hierarchical vision of Denys, which, despite the Neoplatonist terminology used, is at its core thoroughly biblical and Christian. For him, the descending hierarchies signify the difference from God and from each other proper to each kind of being, but not distance or estrangement from God, since the whole order of hierarchies came about, not as a result of a defect, emanation or degradation of the Divine Being, but indeed as a result of the wise and good act whereby God freely chose to create a world, this particular world. Thus, an order results that is sacred both because it has God as absolute Source and because it is the order willed by God. Such a world and such an order, in turn, are an incessant source of glory for God, because all beings within it abide at their posts fulfilling the tasks assigned them by the Creator.

For the purposes of the present book, perhaps the crucial contrast between the Dionysian and the Gnostic understanding of hierarchy is the fact that Denys does not see each order of being as an obstacle separating every lower order from the life and light of the One. Quite the contrary: each superior order of being (say, the angels) has the God-assigned and joyfully embraced task of communicating, in the fashion of an abundant cascade, the life and the love it receives from above to all beings located beneath itself. What we have here is the reaching out, the embrace in charity, that binds the stronger and the weaker members of the great cosmic community to one another, constituting a magnificent chorus of praise. And Denys does not hesitate to give the name ekklēsia (church) to this living communion of all creatures willed into being by the love of God, so that he sees the visible liturgy celebrated in temples of stone on earth as the sacramental manifestation of the one eucharistic activity that occupies all creatures continually at the core of their being. Thus, to a hierarchy of different beings there corresponds a hierarchy of different loves, none of which by nature excludes the others but all of which have the capacity of functioning symphonically, so to speak, to the greater glory of God. And man, whose makeup is both spiritual and carnal, is the very point of intersection of creation, the microcosm of the whole created order, and thus the creature in whom the different love-faculties intersect. One way of describing the redemption would be to say that Christ came to set all man’s loves in order.

The one masterful insight that Denys reaches is this vision of the eternal and uncreated Love of God flowing outward from the Godhead with divine energy into the whole created order, in such a way that each creature, according to its nature, both receives God’s vivifying love into itself and, as concrete thanksgiving, communicates such love further to its fellow creatures. God’s love in me, for Denys, paradoxically can never be purely God’s love in me: it is much too dynamic a reality, for it has reached me, first, by means of the Sacred Humanity of the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, and even this never occurs in isolation from the concrete members of the Body of Christ through whom God’s Providence has chosen specifically to communicate his love to me. In other words, as Christians we can never speak of God in isolation from the Church that is the centerpiece of God’s second creation by grace.

Such considerations are far from being idle speculation in connection with this book, since they have the greatest relevance for the subject of Christian love. We live in a moment in the history of the world when, I suspect, the great majority of people, certainly most Americans and Europeans of our post-modern age, would wince at my yoking the notions of love and order in the same phrase.

Order, for quite understandable reasons, acquired in the last century connotations of totalitarian repression and the brutal imposition of ideological constructs, so that greater popularity is enjoyed instead by very questionable ideals such as anarchy and even chaos. To destroy a sham and murderous order, yes; but anarchy and chaos for their own sake? Of what civilization could they ever be the foundation? True order, however—and not its repressive forgery, spawned by degenerate minds, but rather God-willed, God-created order—is essential to the very possibility of life, which cannot thrive at any