Love, Charity, To Love

See also: Faith, conviction, Hope, expectation, Virtues.

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See also antonym: To Hate, Hatred, Racism.

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"Joseph was holy. (...) His spirit, all purity, lived in God. Charity in him was ardent and strong. And through his charity, he saved you the Savior (...) by leaving everything in prompt obedience to take Jesus to Egypt."

Love, charity are a central theme of the work of Maria Valtorta. It is extensively evoked in The Gospel as it was revealed to me because it is the major teaching of the Christ to his apostles, who teach them a great truth: God himself is Love.

God is love

Love is God and His Kingdom.    

Saint John says, God is love.

Beloved, let us love one another, because love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.

For his part, Jesus answers a doctor of the Law according to Matthew, a scribe according to Mark, who asked him:

"Master, which is the great commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets. (Matthew 22, 36-39) and (Mark 12, 28-34).

Thus love is the active nature of God, but it is also the essence of public Revelation, which covers the history of Humanity from its creation to its welcome into the "heavenly Jerusalem". It culminates in the Redemption by which "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son" (John 3, 16).  

Since God is integral love, the rejection of God leaves only integral hatred.  

The Kingdom of the Christ is therefore defined within this perimeter:

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept the commandments of my Father and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy be complete. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

The demand of love.    

To love as Jesus has loved us is a demanding commitment that leads us beyond usual conventions:

But I say to you, who listen to me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.      

Wish well to those who curse you, pray for those who slander you.  

To the one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other one.          

To the one who takes your cloak, do not refuse your tunic.    

Give to anyone who asks you, and from the one who takes away your goods do not demand them back.

Do to others what you wish they would do to you.    

If you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Even sinners love those who love them.

If you do good to those who do good to you, what recognition do you have? Even sinners do the same.        

If you lend to those from whom you expect to receive in return, what recognition do you have? Even sinners lend to sinners to get back the equivalent.          

But love your enemies, do good, and lend without expecting anything in return. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because He is kind to the ungrateful and the evil.  

Be merciful as your Father is merciful.  

Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.    

Give, and it will be given to you: a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, will be put into your lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back.

Our era has attempted to mask this love by distorting it. The famous slogan "Make love, not war" caricatures the teaching of Jesus to misdirect from his Word by playing with words.

Ancient Greek, one of the languages in use at the time of Jesus, did not fall into this confusion. It used no fewer than four words to designate love.    

• Agapè which means disinterested, divine, universal, unconditional love.  
• Éros (ἔρως / érôs): carnal love, bodily pleasure.
• Storgê (στοργή / storgế): familial affection, maternal love.      
• Philia (φιλία / philía): friendship, benevolent love, pleasure of company.          

All these attitudes find their place in God’s plan, including carnal love, but not in their distorted form. While the Song of Songs celebrates physical beauty and amorous impulse, it also indicates the relationship that governs them by naming the young woman: "my sister, my bride" indicating thereby that physical union cannot be without mutual respect.        

Jesus’ teaching in Maria Valtorta is comprehensive. It addresses love of God as well as love of the enemy, including conjugal and familial love.

Love is synonymous with Charity

The Greek word Agapé was translated as Caritas in the Vulgate, Saint Jerome’s Latin version that is the basis of most Bibles. Caritas became Charity in French. It thus means love/agapé.      

It is with reason that Paul says that charity/love will never cease, because God is love and is eternal.

Though I have the gift of prophecy,

and understand all mysteries and all knowledge,

and though I have the farthest faith, so as to remove mountains,

if I do not have love, I am nothing.

And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor,

and though I give my body to be burned,

if I do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient,

love is kind,

it does not envy,

it does not boast,

it is not puffed up with pride,

it does not behave rudely,

it does not seek its own interests,

it is not easily angered,

it keeps no record of wrongs,

it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth.

It bears all things,

believes all things,

hopes all things,

endures all things.

Love never ends.

Love is synonymous with Mercy      

As we saw above, Jesus said: "Be merciful as your Father is merciful". Mercy is indeed compassion applied to the guilty. It is redemptive love, a fundamental attribute of the Christ.

This call rings especially in our time. During a vision, on September 13, 1935, Jesus asked Sister Faustina to promote devotion to Divine Mercy and wished a feast in its honor to be established:

My daughter, He said to her, speak to the whole world about my inconceivable Mercy. I desire that the Feast of Mercy be the refuge and shelter for all souls, especially for poor sinners... The Feast of Mercy springs from my very bowels. I desire that it be solemnly celebrated on the first Sunday after Easter. Mankind will not find peace until it turns to the source of my Mercy.

These words regain all their meaning if one understands the significance of the word "Mercy". It is the translation of the Hebrew word rahamim, which refers to a person’s bowels, a word used by Jesus in the revelation to Sister Faustina. These symbolically mean the bowels of the father, the mother or, metaphorically, of God: the generative love, deeply faithful to what or whom He has begotten.        

Intuitively, Sister Faustina rediscovered the biblical meaning of rahamim: the bowels of the Creator God to define mercy in the very sense of the Bible. This gives us the key to understand the word mercy: the carnal and spiritual attitude that summarizes the parental and especially maternal instinct, hence the multiple comparisons of Divine Mercy especially with the mother’s love for her child.    

Mercy thus designates boundless altruism which profoundly polarizes the generator toward the children He created or begotten.        

Sister Faustina interpreted this word in the most theological sense of agapé/charity: the love that loves first, the source-love which remains faithful and comes to the aid of the greatest sinners, which goes out to them to save.  

In His great lesson to His disciples on Love, Jesus affirms that love is the most manifest aspect of God, the kingly attribute and His original attribute, because all other attributes derive from it:

God is united with Charity. It is really, even more intimately and truly than two spouses who intensely love each other, the spirit of His Spirit. God Himself is Charity. Charity is only the most manifest aspect of God, the one that puts Him more in light. Among all His attributes, it is the kingly attribute and the origin attribute, for all the other attributes of God still arise from charity. What is Power, if not charity working? What is Wisdom, if not charity that teaches? What is Mercy, if not charity that forgives? What is Justice, if not charity that governs? And I could go on like this for all the countless attributes of God.

In The Gospel as it was revealed to me

Love of God and neighbor.

• I give you this commandment of love: "Love God and neighbor". It is the primary condition for doing any other good [...] Those who will love in God, who will love God and whose Lord will be God, will have on earth and in Heaven the peace which will be for them a tent and a crown.
• Love is the rope, the line, the branch you speak of. Persist, persist... until he grasps them... A word... a forgiveness... a greater indulgence for fault... only to stop the descent and await the help of God...
• Love is greedy for love [...] To love me only for love's sake will be the privilege of a few.
• It is not the rich and the powerful, as such, who will have honors, but only those who have always loved God by Loving Him more than themselves and more than anything else like money, power, woman, the table; and by loving their fellow men who are all men, rich as poor, known as unknown, wise or uneducated, good or wicked.
• "Increase your love."
• "To love, that is the secret…". First preaching of the apostle John.
• The precept of love must be obligatory for all, but it must be threefold for the servants of God.
• Whoever closes their heart to their brother, closes their heart to God and God to them.

Conjugal love, fidelity

See the antonyms: adultery, infidelity.

• Love conjugal reigns in the holy Family.
• Mary Salome explains with her heart the love of husband and the love of God.
• Whoever lacks affection for his wife, and even for his own daughter, is ninety times out of hundred responsible for the fault of his wife or daughter and will answer for them. 
• Love with patience and submission your troubled husband. Increase your gentleness all the more as the bitterness of human fears ferments in him. Increase your spiritual brightness all the more as he generates shadows of earthly interests. Be faithful for two.

Love your enemies.

See the page Enemies.

Teachings on love

• It is love that makes any enterprise easy.
• Love is the redeemer of the individual. Whoever loves begins his redemption. The Son of Man will complete it.
• The different degrees in love : of God, of parent, of spouse, neighbor, knowledge, work - Difference between loves and hungers–
• Perfect love loves, with the necessary degrees, all humanity, even animals and plants, the stars and waters, because it sees all in God.      
• Love, much more than the fear of punishment, keeps us away from evil.      
• "Love is the secret and the commandment of glory".
• Love is builder. It builds, strengthens, keeps compact, preserves. Love brings hope in God. Love drives away evil. Love leads to prudence toward oneself.     
• There is no other virtue greater and more similar to His Nature. If you love, you will practice all virtues without fatigue.
• One succeeds when one loves. One succeeds little when one loves sparingly. One does not succeed at all when one does not love. In anything. All the more so in the things of God.

In other works of Maria Valtorta

Notebooks 1943

• Catechesis of June 7 : What is extraordinary about loving him now that he loves me so noticeably? Unless you have the heart of Judas, he who feels loved loves. But the highest love is that which knows how to continue loving even if it believes it is no longer loved.
• Catechesis of July 30 : Truly I tell you that dying of love is the most bloody of deaths because one suffers, not from one thing only, but from the things of all creation. One suffers for the interest of God and neighbor. It is the death of your Jesus, for, know this, the most precise word about my death is not scourging, tortures, cross; it is love. It is love that sacrificed the Son of God. The love for you (page 198).
• Catechesis of October 7 : God has no reproaches against you, hence your absolute duty to love Him, since He gives you love, and love demands love in return.

In fundamental Christian texts

In the Bible

Conjugal love:

• How beautiful you are, my companion, how beautiful you are! How lovely is my Beloved, yes, he is full of charms!
• Find joy in the wife of your youth.
• Wives, submit to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives.  
• Mutual duties of spouses.

Catechism of the Catholic Church

• There are three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity (cf. 1 Corinthians 13, 13). 
• The theological virtues ground, animate, and characterize the moral action of the Christian. They inform and vivify all the moral virtues. They are infused by God into the soul of the faithful to make them capable of acting as His children and deserving eternal life. They are the pledge of the presence and action of the Holy Spirit in the faculties of the human being.  
• Virtue of Faith: CCC 1814 to 1816.  
• Virtue of Hope: CCC 1817 to 1821.
• Virtue of Charity: CCC 1822 to 1829.

In other sources

The different words to say "love": note taken from BibleOnLine

Old Testament

It is the deepest expression of personality and intimacy of personal relationships (Genesis 22,2; 37,3). In its non-religious sense, the word is commonly used to speak of love between a man and a woman, its most sublime expression being reached in the Song of Songs. The Old Testament affirms that God loves His people, usually in the collective sense (e.g., Deuteronomy 4,37). Only three times is a man described as personally loved by God (2 Samuel 12,24; Nehemiah 13,26; Isaiah 48,14). God’s love is deeper than that of a mother (Isaiah 49,15). The story of Hosea and Gomer illustrates His faithfulness (Hosea 1-3). Love is part of His character, so that it cannot be influenced by passion or diverted by disobedience (Hosea 11,1 et seq). Although universal, His love is also selective; He chose Israel among all nations solely because of His love for this people (Deuteronomy 4,37; 7,6 et seq). In return, He demands that man love Him with all his being (Deuteronomy 6,5) in a personal piety relationship created and maintained by the work of God in his heart (Deuteronomy 30,6). Man’s love is communion with God (Psalm 18,1), implemented in daily obedience (Joshua 22,5). Love must also be the norm in human relationships (Leviticus 19,18); one must help one’s enemies even if one does not love them (Exodus 23,4).

New Testament

The most common word for all forms of love, agapè, is one of the rarest in classical Greek; on the rare occasions it was used, it denoted the highest and noblest form of love, which sees the loved person as infinitely precious. The Septuagint uses it in 95% of cases to translate the corresponding Hebrew word.

Another word that evokes friendship (the verb philéô) is also used, with a slightly different sense. The relationship between God the Father and God the Son is a relationship of love (John 3,35; 14,31; 15,9). Jesus did not use the word himself to express God’s love for men but revealed it by healing with compassion (Luke 7,13), through His teaching on God’s forgiveness (Luke 15.11 and seq) and by showing friendship to those who were rejected (Luke 7,34). John declares that the work of salvation of Jesus is proof of God’s love (John 3,16). As in the Old Testament, His love is selective, its object the "new Israel," the Church (Ephesians 5,25), and under the new covenant His love extends to the individual members of the Church (Galatians 2,20). God’s love aims to transform man’s natural state, which is enemy of God (Romans 5,10), into a relationship of love (1 John 4,19). Jesus wanted men to love God (Luke 11,42) but preferred to use the word "faith" to speak of man’s relationship with God (Matthew 9,22), perhaps because faith expresses more of humility and trust than the term "love". Love towards neighbor must not be calculated (Luke 10,25 et seq), Jesus affirmed; one must love even one’s enemies (Matthew 5,44). This new attitude is made possible by the action of the Spirit of God in the human heart (Galatians 5,22 et seq). Christians must be united by brotherly love (Romans 12,10) as members of the family of God (Luke 22,32; John 13,34; 15,12). It is a consequence of Jesus’ love (Ephesians 5 et seq) manifested in a unity of thought (Romans 15,5 et seq) and mutual assistance (Romans 12,9 et seq). This love is the proof of the authenticity of the Christian’s faith (1 John 2,9; 3,10; 4,20).

Simone Weil (1909 – 1943)

There was a young English Catholic who gave me for the first time the idea of the supernatural virtue of the sacraments, by the truly angelic radiance with which he seemed adorned after having communicated. Chance – because I always prefer to say chance rather than Providence – made him, for me, truly a messenger. For he made me discover the existence of those 17th century English poets called metaphysical. Later, reading them, I discovered the poem of which I have read you a regrettably insufficient translation, the one entitled Love. I learned it by heart.

LOVE

Love welcomed me; yet my soul recoiled

Guilty of dust and sin.

But enlightened Love, seeing me hesitate

From my first entrance,

Moved closer to me, softly asking

If I was missing anything.

"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here."

Love said: "You shall be him."

Me, the wicked, the ungrateful? Ah! my beloved,

I cannot look at you.

Love took my hand and replied smiling

"Who made these eyes but I?

- It is true, Lord, but I have soiled them; let my shame go where it deserves.

- And do you not know," said Love, "who took upon himself the blame?

- My beloved, then I will serve."

- You must sit down, said Love, and taste my food."

Thus I sat and ate.

Often, at the climax of violent headaches, I practiced reciting it with all my attention and with all my soul adhering to the tenderness it contains. I thought I was merely reciting a beautiful poem, but unknowingly this recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that, as I wrote you, Christ himself descended and took me.

In my reasoning on the insolubility of the problem of God, I had not foreseen the possibility of this, a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God.

Notes and references

Note: Quotations from the work of Maria Valtorta on this page currently use machine-translated text and will gradually be replaced by the official English translation. Until then, the official translation may be consulted through the reference link provided with each quotation.

In-depth research on God, faith, religious Doctrine.

Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992).

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