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Member 3 Charity Combining All Three Kinds of Love Pleasant Profitable And…

This, therefore, is true love indeed, the cause of every good for mortal people. It reconciles all creatures and binds them together in lasting friendship and firm alliance. It can no more tolerate bitterness, hatred and malice than fair and foul weather, light and darkness, barrenness and abundance can coexist. As the sun is in the heavens, I say, so love is in the world. For this reason it is love without qualification, love above all: love of God and love of humankind.

“Love of God gives birth to love of humankind; and through this love of our neighbour, love of God is nourished and increased.” Through love’s happy union, “all well-governed families and cities are bound together, the heavens joined, divine souls intertwined, the world itself ordered, and everything in it united in God and brought together as one.”

“This love produces true and perfect virtues; it is the life, spirit and root of every virtuous action. It completes prosperity, eases adversity and remedies all natural hindrances and difficulties.” It is sustained by faith and hope, which, with this love of ours, form an unbreakable cord, a Gordian knot, an equilateral triangle; “and yet the greatest of them is love,” 1 Corinthians 13:13.

It “sets our souls aflame with divine heat and, once they are so inflamed, purifies them; thus purifying, it lifts them to God, brings reconciliation and reconciles us to him.” “That other love troubles the human soul; this cleanses it. That casts it down; this raises it. That causes cares and troubles; this brings peace of mind. This gives our life its proper form; that disfigures it. That leads to repentance; this to heaven.”

For once we are truly bound together and touched by this charity, we shall love God above all and our neighbour as ourselves, as we are commanded in Mark 12:31 and Matthew 19:19. We shall perform those duties and practices, all the actions of a good Christian.

“This love is patient and generous; it does not envy or boast, is not conceited, does not deceive or seek its own advantage, is not provoked to anger, thinks no evil and rejoices in truth rather than wrongdoing. It bears all things, believes all things and hopes all things,” 1 Corinthians 13:4–7. “It covers all offences,” Proverbs 10:12, “a multitude of sins,” 1 Peter 4.

As our Saviour told the woman in the Gospel who washed his feet, “her many sins were forgiven because she loved much,” Luke 7:47. Love “will defend the orphan and the widow,” Isaiah 1:17; “will take no revenge or harbour a grudge,” Leviticus 19:18; “will bring home a brother’s ox if it strays, as commanded,” Deuteronomy 22:1; “will resist evil, give to anyone who asks, never turn away a borrower, bless those who curse him and love his enemy,” Matthew 5; “bear his brother’s burden,” Galatians 6:7.

One who loves in this way will be hospitable and contribute to the needs of the saints. If possible, he will live at peace with everyone, “feed his enemy if he is hungry and give him drink if he is thirsty.” He will perform the seven works of mercy, “place himself on equal terms with the lowly, rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep,” Romans 12.

He will speak truth to his neighbour and be courteous and tender-hearted, “forgiving others for Christ’s sake, as God forgave him,” Ephesians 4:32. “He will be like-minded,” Philippians 2:2, “of one judgement; humble, meek and patient,” Colossians 3. “Bear with one another, forget and forgive,” verses 12, 13 and 23; whatever he does will be done wholeheartedly for God, not for people. “Be compassionate and courteous,” 1 Peter 3. “Seek peace and pursue it.”

He will love his brother in deed and truth, not merely in words, John 3:18; “and he who loves God, Christ, will love the one begotten of him,” John 5:1, and so on. We should willingly do all this if we truly felt this charity, this divine love; if we would carry out what we are commanded, forget and forgive, and bring our conduct into accord with these Christian laws of love.

O happy human race, If your hearts were ruled by the love That rules the heavens!

Angelic souls! How blessed and happy we should be if we loved like this; how we might triumph over the devil and have another heaven on earth!

But we cannot do this; and the cause of all our woes, miseries, discontent and melancholy is the lack of this charity.

We “oppress one another,” despise, plot, vex, torture, harass and press one another’s noses hard to the grindstone; provoke, rail, mock, slander, challenge, hate and abuse. Hard-hearted, implacable, malicious, spiteful and unrelenting as we are, we expend ourselves, our goods, friends and fortunes to satisfy our desires or private resentment, over toys, trifles and irrelevant occasions, to revenge ourselves on an enemy and ruin him and his family.

All our thought, effort and business goes into plotting mischief: mining and countermining, defending and attacking, protecting ourselves, injuring others, harming everyone, as though we were born to do harm. We pursue our designs with such eagerness and bitterness, such rancour, malice, rage and fury, that neither marriage nor blood ties, neither love nor fear of God or humankind can restrain us. No reparation or settlement is accepted, no service will suffice, no submission.

Though he fall on his knees, as Sarpedon did to Glaucus in Homer, admit his error, surrender with tears in his eyes and beg pardon, we will not relent, forgive or forget until we have destroyed him and his family, “made dice of his bones,” as the saying goes, seen him rot in prison, banished his friends, followers “and all the hated race,” and rooted out him and all his descendants.

8472.The Greek κατ’ ἐξοχὴν means pre-eminently or above all. Love without an addition means love without a limiting qualification. Glews and league extend Burton’s recurrent imagery of love as a bond joining otherwise separate beings.

8475.Complicated here means intertwined, from the idea of folding together; reduced to one means brought into unity. The margins identify Gregory and Piccolomini, the latter by grade 7, chapter 27. These are Burton’s attributions; their precise source passages remain unresolved.

8477.Absolute means complete or perfect; finisheth means brings to fulfilment. The intertwined cord, Gordian knot and equilateral triangle illustrate the union of faith, hope and charity. Burton nevertheless follows 1 Corinthians 13:13 in ranking love highest. His knot image stresses strength of union.

8480.Attonement means reconciliation or making at one. The modern wording of the first sentence follows the sequence clarified by its Latin margin: kindling, purification, elevation and reconciliation; the printed English syntax is compressed. Erears means raises up; informs means gives form to. The following margin contrasts infecting with perfecting, where Burton’s English contrasts troubling with cleansing; each version is retained.

8481.Burton strings together scriptural phrases in his own wording. His “it deceiveth not” is retained rather than replaced by the wording about unseemly behaviour in 1 Corinthians 13:5. The final references extend Paul’s account with Proverbs 10:12 and 1 Peter 4:8. This edition modernizes Burton’s text rather than substituting a single modern Bible translation.

8482.The printed “will resist evil” is retained, although Matthew 5:39 gives the opposite injunction, “resist not evil.” Bearing burdens is Galatians 6:2, rather than the printed 6:7. In Luke 7:47 Jesus speaks about the woman to Simon; he addresses her directly in verse 48. Burton compresses these moments. His other biblical applications are likewise paraphrastic.

8483.The saints are the community of believers. Burton’s seven works of mercy invokes the traditional bodily works of care, including feeding the hungry, sheltering strangers and caring for the sick. His surrounding phrases draw on Romans 12, especially verses 13–20; the sevenfold list is not itself given there.

8484.Burton assembles several exhortations: truth-speaking as well as kindness and forgiveness in Ephesians 4; unity in Philippians 2; patience and forgiveness in Colossians 3:12–13, followed by wholehearted work in verse 23; compassion and the pursuit of peace in 1 Peter 3. The wording “forget” is part of his expansion, not an instruction to erase memory.

8485.The printed John 3:18 and 5:1 refer in substance to 1 John 3:18 and 5:1, not to those verses in the Gospel of John. The second phrase is syntactically compressed and includes “Christ,” which has no corresponding position in 1 John 5:1. That word and Burton’s locators are retained; the verse connects love of the begetter with love of the begotten.

8487.Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy 2, metre 8, final three lines. The poem describes love holding the cosmos together and wishes that the same power might govern human hearts. Burton adds his own Christian exclamation about an earthly heaven, bringing this ideal account of charity to a close.

8489.This begins Burton’s account of the failure to practise the charity described in Block 111. Want means lack. The marginal deliquium can suggest fainting or an eclipse: love gives way to hatred.

8491.Angariare means to impose burdens or forced service. Consult here is read in the older sense of taking counsel or plotting. Spleen means resentment; peevish means malicious or perverse. The marginal bulrush proverb describes finding grievances where none need exist.

8492.Mine and countermine borrow the language of siege warfare. Offend means attack; composition means a negotiated settlement; offices means acts of service or kindness. Burton describes revenge that refuses every means of reconciliation.

8493.The example of Sarpedon asking Glaucus’s pardon has not been verified in Homer. It is retained without substituting a different supplicant. Made dice of his bones is an image of total destruction. The Latin adds the whole hated family or race to the victim’s friends and descendants.