Love and/or Charity?

The observance of Valentine’s Day Wednesday moved me to pay a little closer attention to this concept of love, specifically, giving love. Since Valentine’s Day is a day of loving and giving, what do the two have to do with one another? This problem was wrestled with back in the 4th century by St. Jerome.

The story goes that Pope Damasus commissioned ascetic scholar St. Jerome to prepare a Latin translation of the Bible now known as the Vulgate. You see, the translation was into the common people’s “vulgar” Latin. Jerome’s sources were mainly in Greek, and in trying to get from Greek to Latin, one of the first problems he faced was what to do with agape.

Agape is a Greek word meaning “love.” But it’s love of a special species. The ancient Greeks had a number of words for love, each with different implications. For example, a celebration of Valentine’s Day is sopping with the Greek love word eros, and you don’t need a cupid’s bow to bull’s-eye what kind of (erotic) inferences it carried.

Agape, on the other hand, implied a holy or pure love, as in “Love (agape) the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and “Love (agape) your neighbor as yourself.” Jerome’s problem was that he lacked a good Latin equivalent for agape. Latin’s primary love word was amor, but its meaning was very broad. The love of a parent, brother, friend, lover – all sorts of love were amor in Latin. So Jerome turned to caritas instead.

Caritas is a Latin word that used to mean “dearness” or “high price.” By extension, it sometimes meant “esteem,” “affection,” or – in an indisputably chaste sense – “love.”

By choosing it as his Latin agape, Jerome lent great importance to caritas – and to words, like “charity,” that ultimately rose from it. He also inadvertently set up a schism in English Bibles. Some versions, like the King James Bible, talk of charity (“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity“). Others go right from agape to love (“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love“).

However you translate it, agape is one of the three primary Christian virtues, along with faith and hope. In his first letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul writes, “And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13.2).

Give me a little love here, ron

The Parliament of Fowls!

The following is a brief tribute to Geoffrey Chaucer’s ode to love: Parliament of Fowls

The Parliament of Fowls is perhaps the first St. Valentine’s Day poem ever written. It has been suggested that it was begun in May of 1382 and finished for Valentine’s day in 1383. In this famous poem, Chaucer sets forth his love-vision. What follows is a very brief summation of the story of this delightful occasion poem. Alceste says of Chaucer, that he wrote “many an ympne for [Love's] holydayes.”

In the opening verses the poet declares himself to be without direct experience of the ways of the God of Love. “I knowe nat Love in dede.” But, as he goes on to explain, he has learned of the subject from books.. Actually he goes to books for all kinds of knowledge. Of late he has been reading a very helpful book, the Somnium Scipionis, and he relates at some length how the elder Africanus appeared to Scipio the younger in a dream, and took him up into the heavens, where he showed him the mysteries of the future life.

The poet goes on to say that night comes and he puts his book to rest. After falling to asleep, he dreamed that this same Africanus came to him too and stood at his bedside. To reward him for the study of his “olde book totorn,” the Roman took him to a beautiful park, where he saw the temple of Venus, and then to a hillside, where all the birds were assembled before the goddess of Nature on Saint Valentine’s Day.

The birds had come, following Nature’s order, to choose their mates, and then to fly away. The first choice belonged to the royal tercel eagle, who claimed the lovely formel eagle on the goddess’s hand. At once and with little delay a second and a third tercel, both of lower rank, disputed the first one’s claim, and the three noble suitors pleaded their causes before Nature. Then the issue was debated by the general parliament of the birds. Finally Nature ruled that the choice should rest with the formel eagle herself, and she asked for a year’s delay before making her decision.

There you have it in a nutshell! Now if you want to listen to the poem in podcast, read the poem in old English and /or generally know more about the subject of St. Valentine’s Day click on the appropriate links at this address (click here).

The Parliament of Fowls (PDF)

Perhaps you want to read a more up-to-date translation of Chaucer’s famous love poem (click here).

Happy Valentine’s Day, ron