The human imagination gazes upon infinite possibilities. In this gaze, it may, if directed upwards, be filled with the vision of God, and so be receptive. Or it may look upon the world and recognize in it the created potential for making, and so actively mold the world. In The Cultivating Imagination, we will explore this nexus. On the one hand, these reflections aim to facilitate our openness to the sweet influence of divine grace raining down upon us. On the other, they are directed at the ways we work the land (of our world, societies, families, and hearts) to create desire paths that allow grace to more effectively water the land. In these two ways, the imagination fulfills the twin duties of love to God and neighbor.
When I got my comments back from my editor about my translation of Bonaventure’s Eucharistic theology, one of his comments took issue with my translation of the Latin word caritas. I had translated the word as “love,” and he felt that this was not strong enough. He is a Roman Catholic, and it is common practice among Catholics to use the English word “charity” to represent this Latin word. His fear was that by translating it as “love,” readers would not realize the power and depth of the concept Bonaventure was reaching for. I responded that among Protestants, and in secular culture, the word “charity” has a much reduced sense. The first connotation is that of almsgiving, with the accessory notion of condescension. This is why we have the expression: “I’m not looking for any charity.” My fear was exactly the same as his: that if we used the English word “charity,” the reader would not realize the concept that Bonaventure was reaching for. So my editor and I both agreed about the fact that the word caritas is a powerful one, referencing a very special kind of love; we disagreed about the best way to represent this in English. (To his credit and my satisfaction, he thought my argument a good one and went with my original rendering.)
What my editor and I both know and were trying to safeguard in that moment is the fact that the word caritas is the Latin word that translates the Greek word agape. In The Four Loves, using the contended word “charity,” C. S. Lewis describes this love as a divine gift-love that delights to give: not to fill some lack in itself, but out of pure desire for the blessedness of the other. [1] It has elsewhere been called self-sacrificial love. The point is clear: agape, caritas, and charity (whichever language you prefer) is the word used to describe the highest form of love, the love that God has for others and the love that we are to imitate, to the degree possible for us as creatures. If we start from God’s love for created things, then this love has about it something of condescension (without the negative connotations of that word), and it is from here that it takes on the connotation of stooping that can be so offensive in our contemporary, reduced form of the word.
But if we go back a little further to a moment before the dawn of time, when all that exists is God, we will still see a God of love. But here what is loved is not the creatures He would eventually create, but rather the other persons of the Godhead: the love of the Father for the Son, and the love of both for the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit’s love for both.
This is the true first moment of love, an eternal and ever-existing loving and being loved so intense as to define the persons of the lovers.
And when we look at this love, we see no condescension whatsoever; rather, there is a joyous and spontaneous exaltation in the mutual excellence and blessedness of oneself and both the others. There is no competition here, and no selfishness can arise, because the blessedness of the Father and the blessedness of the Son and the Holy Spirit is the same blessedness. That God is eternally Trinity and thrice-blessed means that there is no blessed Father unless He has His ever-blessed Son and ever-blessed Spirit; likewise, there is no blessed Father unless the Son and the Spirit are themselves blessing, unless the blessing that goes out from the Father to His Son and Spirit comes immediately back to Him as their own spontaneous and personally inflected act of unrestrained loving. The Son need not ever desire anything for Himself apart from His desire to give the Father everything possible, because the Son knows that there is nothing He can possess that is not best possessed through rendering all He has to the Father. What is best for the Father is what is best for the Son, and vice versa, and also with the Holy Spirit.
It is this eternal love that predates any limitation, finitude, or external dependence that should be the ground of our concept of the highest sort of love. When we think of God loving us creatures, we ought to do so on the blueprint of the love of the trinitarian persons for one another. Thus “God loves us” means that God delights to give Himself to us in order that we may be blessed with the blessing that He is. It becomes clear that when He calls us to be what He made us to be, to conform to Christ by conforming to that eternal archetype of each of us that Christ is, He is not asking us to give up ourselves, but to become ourselves for the first time.
And we cannot fully enter into this blessedness unless we love Him in return, because love is restless; its very nature is dynamism, and it exists to be given away: for it is the complete and total gift of self to the other so that the other may be enriched with the beauty of the self that is given.
And just as the Father does not disappear in giving Himself entirely to the Son because the Son also gives Himself entirely to the Father, and so each is grounded in their existence in every moment by both the gift and reception of being, so we too do not lose ourselves or become someone else by giving ourselves entirely to God, but finally enter into the truth of ourselves, which consists not in being a self-contained blip of being, but to be a dynamic giving and receiving to and from the trinitarian God.
So what has all this got to do with almsgiving? Only everything. For when we give of our money to those who are in need, what we give them is not only or primarily our money. According to an older English usage, money or resources are referred to as “substance.” Thus we can say that almsgiving is the sharing of our substance with another. And this usage comes very close to the mark. For while it is not trivial that it is money that I am giving to the person who does not have the means wherewith to eat or clothe themselves or procure shelter, the more significant thing that is happening in that moment is that I am acknowledging that I see them: that I see their plight, that I see their existence, that I see their very worth in the eyes of the God who gave them more than they could ever imagine, and who is giving to them now according to their needs through me, His servant. Almsgiving is charity in the highest sense: it imitates the divine gift of self that aims not at self-blessing, but at blessing the other.
We love our fellow man the way God loves us, and God loves us the way God loves Himself; but each time the partners in the relationship are changed, the relationship itself must change to match the type of being the partners have. God should not love us as God loves Himself, for we are not absolute and infinitely lovable. Likewise, we should not love our neighbors as we love God, for they are not ultimate and cannot be the objects of our worship and total abandonment.
Nevertheless, the quality of our love for our neighbor is measured by the degree to which it conforms to the pattern of divine love that is written on the very heart of existence.
Our love for our neighbor may not look like the type of love we offer to God in its absolute abandonment and making oneself available, but it ought to look a good deal more like this than we usually suppose.
This is true charity, and the Lord demands it of us so absolutely that He has made it the entire focus of His every command to us. But one of the deep secrets of the Trinity is that this love only seems costly to those who have forgotten what real value is; but if we abandon ourselves to it, we will discover that it gives to us quite as much as it demands from us.
[1] C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
The featured image, “Lake District Reflection,” is courtesy of Sam Keyes and is used with his kind permission for Cultivating.
Junius Johnson is a scholar in the fields of historical and philosophical theology and has published four books in those areas. He is also a lover of story, passionate about beauty and the imagination, a seeker of wonder, a musician, and a deeply flawed sinner daily leaning on the grace of God in Christ. A lover of the Middle Ages, he especially loves to be transported to other worlds via fantasy, science fiction, and young adult literature. He teaches online enrichment courses for both children and adults in literature, theology, and Latin through Junius Johnson Academics.
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