May 1967

God is Love (1 John 4:16)

It is agreed by all the scholars that St. John, in this fourth chapter of his epistle, reaches the heights of the Revelation of God. St. Augustine comments: Brevis laus et magna laus, brevis in sermone et magna in intellectu - "short and great praise, short in its saying, great in its depth".

But what exactly do these words mean, which St. John wrote after his many years of meditation and prayer following on Jesus and Mary going to heaven? If we want to discover something of the riches of this phrase, I think we must dispose our souls in the face of mystery.

John had already said in the Gospel (4:24) "God is Spirit" and in this first epistle (Chapter 1:5) "God is Light".

If however one only understands these words in the light of human understanding, that is, taking them to have the meaning - God is benevolent, God is goodness, God is sweetness - I believe we would begin to stray from St. John's true thought; this would lead to all untrue religiosity and understanding to Christianity.

"God is Charity" - the word charity is not to be understood in the everyday way we understand it. The word has lost the original sense it had in the language when the disciples in particular Paul and John, first coined it to express the richness and vitality of Christianity. They did not find in the Greek language of the time a word fitting enough, so taking one word, they transformed and enriched it, giving it a particular and precise meaning.

One could say that they created the word "agape", even if a word something like it was already in use when speaking of human or religious love. But for Paul and John the word did not have the usual meaning 'love' for them - did not mean something sweet or nice - it was for them a conception of life. Christian love/agape took man's very being and 'raised it up' making it dynamically active and outgoing towards others, not only in external communication of one's own faith, or only in spiritual and material giving. For John and Paul, charity was EVERYTHING for man. Paul had written in his first Epistle to the Corinthians, (Chapter 13:1) - "If I have all the eloquence of men or of Angels, but speak without love, I am simply a gong booming or a cymbal clashing".

Christian charity, is something which inserts in human, raises it up, and makes man a "new Creature". There is no need, however, to think of charity as something contrary to human nature, almost as if Grace were an alteration of what man ought to be naturally. No. The Divine Charity which enters man joins with his natural tendencies and aspirations in a harmonious synthesis as Grace and nature have come from the hands of the One God. This is why agape/ charity in St. Paul and St. John takes over all of man. This is why Paul says: "If I am without love, I am nothing. (Cor. 13:1)

It would be impossible to make this affirmation if charity was merely an exterior act, only a moral way of living, or only something which concerned supernatural man. But the Christian conception of charity takes over all of man. It is as though he were non-existent, if he does not love. But if this conception of charity as presented to us in the New Testament, coincides with the very being of man, it is because man in a certain fashion participates in that agape-being that is God. So from man one passes to God and then God to man, in both Paul and John. John - 1st Epistle - 4:18 "love one another since love comes from God and everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God", ANYONE who fails to love can never have known God.

God is charity does not only show that God possesses love, in the same way as he possesses justice, 'forced ''power. John could have written "God has charity" or, "in God there is charity", that they form in Him what is quite simply a perfect unity. But John did not reveal this to us, he wanted to specify for us clearly what is the intimate nature of God's being, His being love.

This precisely is what the mystery is for us, since when we think of being, we always see it as a separate and distinct from something which already exists. But to think that being is love, to think that God is Love, this is for us a mystery.

So we see from this how much more we must deepen our understanding of Christianity, an understanding which is not only made up of notions but of life. John has no doubt on this point - "He who does not love has not learnt to know God".

We are so used to seeing valued, indeed overvalued, the solely intellectual aspect of man's soul that John's words could seem to be only metaphoric allegory or an accepted literary genre in the first century after Christ, when the Gnostic crisis demanded a particular language. But we must convince ourselves that John wrote these words under divine inspiration; that these words were dictated by the Holy Spirit. Again, we must consider these words were transmitted from age to age by the Church, without ever changing, so that they should teach us in the 20th century something as well.

We too need to give the right importance to reason and love as John has explained. We know if we love. If, as some say, John wrote these words in this form because of a Gnostic crisis, we must recognise that we in this century are affected by this Gnostic crisis, that is to say, by reason overcoming spirit, by the rationalism that wants to restrain and restrict revelation in rigid formulae. We must not change the genuine meaning of Paul and John's words "God is Charity". It is necessary to meditate and live them to understand them. Then we discover how Christian revelation has a deep and vital ideology, it has an ideology which can not simply be identified with Platonic or Aristolian philosophy, for Jesus' philosophy is able to surpass and contain both. It is our reason which must raise itself up to God's level, not that we must lower God's revelation to the level of our reasoning. So humility is a necessity, we must approach John's words with a trembling heart, with mind and heart purified, not only from attachment to the senses but also to the mind, in order to allow us to be flooded with that divine light which is at the same time, love and being, life and wisdom.

(Unknown author)