“Love First”? — No!
By DEACON JAMES H. TONER
“You are no God who loves evil; no sinner is your guest. . . . You hate all who do evil; you destroy all who lie” (Psalm 5:4-6).
- + + A nearby nondenominational religious assembly chooses “Love First” as its mantra. Such an assembly, rather like Buridan’s ass (which could not make rational differentiations), is unable to distinguish among the one Church (Catechism of the Catholic Church, nn. 816, 845), sundry denominations, and motley ecclesial communities (see Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus, 2000, n. 17). The assembly members, therefore, under the tutelage of a pastor or two or three, essentially declare themselves independent, except for the Bible alone (Sola Scriptura), the interpretation of which rests incontestably with those local leaders.
In their declaration of “Love First,” this nondenominational religious assembly — deprived as it is both of philosophical tradition and of Sacred Tradition —will not understand St. Augustine’s exhortation: “Love and do what you will.” Love is a divine teacher, disciplining its students’ characters, and inculcating the habit of virtue, so that love prescribes what is right and true, neither permitting nor encouraging what is morally defective or deranged. Human love emanates from the authority and the order of God; it is, then, not “first.” A person who is properly formed in love will do nothing to injure the One who is the foundation and the fountain of such love; love abjures sin. Love, then, is never moral license or licentiousness.
As Catholics, we know that we are to love only that which is good — and to hate what is evil (Romans 12:9). To “hate” means revulsion at sin and avoidance of occasions of it. (The venerable Baltimore Catechism defined occasion of sin as “all the persons, places, and things that may easily lead us into sin.”) Therefore, love, which is of, in and through God, must be pure (agape — see C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves). Love must never be reduced to lust or to disordered passions (CCC, n. 2357).
If we may understand hatred as intense hostility and aversion, then it is to (a form of) “hatred” that all Christians are, indeed, called. About the need for intense hostility, the Bible is clear. Proverbs tells us that “fear of the Lord is hatred of evil” (8:13), Psalms teaches us that God loves those who hate evil (97:10), the prophet Amos instructs us to “hate evil [and] love good,” (5:15), and St. Paul similarly commands us to “hate what is evil” (Romans 12:9).
Hatred as intense hostility is commended, also, in the Book of Revelation, in which the works of the Nicolaitans are said to be justifiably loathed and excoriated (2:6). The Nicolaitans were Apostolic impostors, practical antinomians, and probable Gnostics who had a concupiscent attitude about sexual immorality and an ardor for idolatry, thus corrupting others (2:15).
These heretics are reincarnated today in the guise of progressive and permissive clergy whose depraved idea of “love and do what you will” is utterly at odds, of course, with Augustinian teaching (cf. CCC, n. 2526).
Hatred as aversion is lauded by St. Paul, who tells us to “take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them” (Eph. 5:11) and, who, similarly, admonishes us against association with those who are immoral (1 Cor. 5:9) and with unbelievers. “What fellowship has light with darkness?” (2 Cor. 6:14). Hatred, here, hyperbolically means commendable desire to be separated from, and not overwhelmed or unduly influenced by, secular passions (as in Luke 14:26 and 1 John 2:15-17).
The apothegm “hate the sin but love the sinner” is not directly scriptural, but is so indirectly, for it is a collage which incorporates a number of key tropological teachings. We are to test everything, holding fast to what is good and abstaining from every kind of evil (1 Thess. 5:21-22). In saying that we hate the sin but love the sinner, we effectively invite those committed to evil to despise us, and they often do so, calling us “self-righteous.” But those who hate sin and call sinful what is sinful are doing what they ought to do as Christ’s “ambassadors” and as the “righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:20-21). The self-righteous base their beliefs upon personal judgment and private taste; the righteous, by vivid contrast, consult natural law and divine positive law. - + + To say, “Love first,” then, is both logically defective (because, as a shallow and overly simplistic slogan, it deceives us into thinking, as the Beatles might have put it, that “love is all you need”) and morally deleterious (because, perhaps inadvertently, the slogan champions both subjectivism and relativism).
A requisite Christian duty, as St. James (4:7-10, 5:19-20) and St. Paul (Gal. 6:1) tell us, is to warn people about the soul-searing dangers of sin (cf. Ezek. 33:7-9). Admonishing the sinner is, indeed, a spiritual work of mercy. Love of what is good and hatred of what is evil both proceed from knowledge of, and commitment to, divine order, which, truly, is first. Get that wrong, and all else cataclysmically follows. If, as St. John Paul told us, freedom “consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought,” then knowing “what we ought” means believing that God’s will, not ours, must be done (Matt. 6:10) and that veracious thought, word, and deed will conform to it (Romans 12:2).
“God’s will” — and His divine wisdom, His perfect Providence — are beautifully and succinctly captured by the Book of Wisdom, which tells us that God’s Mandate “reacheth therefore from end to end mightily and ordereth all things sweetly” (8:1 DRB). God has plans and purposes for — and a majestic sovereignty over — His creation and His creatures (cf. Jer. 29:11). We know this plan as Order (Gen. 1:2, Isaiah 45:18-19, Col. 1:17, Heb. 1:3), for God is not the author of confusion (1 Cor. 14:33).
“Order First” does not have the visual appeal or the verbal snap & crackle of “Love First.” Love that is not grounded in the truth of divine Order, however, is deranged: It is always eros, never agape; it is always selfish, never selfless; it is always evanescent, never eternal; it is always sybaritic, never spiritual; and it is always a servant of the profane, never of the sacred.
Of the vital connection between love and truth, Bishop Athanasius Schneider has written: “The crisis in the Church today is due to a neglect of the truth and specifically a reversal of the order of truth and love. Today, a new principle of pastoral life is being propagated in the Church which says: love and mercy are the highest criteria and truth has to be subordinated to them. According to this new theory, if there is conflict between love and truth, truth must be sacrificed. This is a reversal and a perversion in the literal sense of the word.”
The bishop concludes that “the right order of truth and love — as it is reflected in the life of the Holy Trinity, where Love proceeds from Truth — is the basic law of the Church and Christianity and all pastoral efforts” (Christus Vincit, 2019, pp. 166-167).
God’s Order must precede human love. God’s sublime will must guide, guard, and govern human love, which finds its purpose in complementing and reflecting divine love, not in the indulgence of the flesh (Exodus 20:14, Matt. 5:28, Gal. 5:17, 1 John 2:16). Therefore, human love must always be the servant of divine order (Matt. 6:10), and never the slave of libido (Romans 1:25, Jude 1:7) or the instrument of mawkish and maniacal social policy.
What I call the “paired power principle” tells us that whatever can do great good can also effect grave evil. So it is with “love” which, when hijacked by those who use it to cloak nefarious notions (such as contending that abortion and euthanasia are acts of love), is thus prostituted into camouflage for mortal sin. To divorce love from justice and truth is to play the part of a spiritual Dr. Frankenstein. Love emanating from divine order, though, is, as St. Paul famously told us, the greatest of the virtues (1 Cor. 13:14; cf. 1 Tim. 1:5), serving as the heart of noble ethics and of prudential politics.
