Love, the Foundation of All

Before this book takes up the canon and the wall, one thing must be set beneath everything else, because without it everything else turns to poison. That thing is love.

It is possible to be right about the Church, right about communion, right about heresy and schism and the fifteenth canon, and to be lost. Right in every fact, and ruined in the soul. The only thing that keeps the confession of the truth from curdling into the pride of the Pharisee is the love of God poured into the heart; and the Apostle said it once for all, of the very gifts this book most concerns:

THE WARNING TO THE ZEALOUS

Read the words slowly, for they are aimed at the confessor more sharply than at any other man. To understand all mysteries and all knowledge: this is the very thing the zealous soul prizes, the knowledge of the canons, the councils, the Fathers, the precise anatomy of every heresy. And the Apostle says that a man may have all of it and be nothing. Not deficient. Nothing.

Truth held without love does not merely lose its savour. It changes sides. It becomes a weapon in the hands of pride; and the man who wields it becomes hard, contemptuous, quick to condemn, delighted to be right, a noise of brass in the ears of God. The devil, the Fathers observed, has perfect theology and no love; and a confessor without love has begun, in that one respect, to resemble the enemy of the confession.

THE WARNING TO THE TENDER

But the sword cuts the other way with equal force, and our age must feel that edge especially. Love and truth are not rivals, and a love that abandons the truth is no longer love.

What shall we say of a physician who, from tenderness, tells the dying man he is well? Of a mother who, to keep peace at the table, lets her child drink what she knows is poison? Their gentleness is a form of cruelty. Love wills the true good of the beloved; and the truth is the good of the mind, as health is the good of the body. Therefore to confirm a man in a false confession, to tell him, for peace's sake, that his error does not matter, is not charity but betrayal with a kiss. The false teachers of every age have always preached love against truth, as though the two could be enemies, when in God they are one.

The same hymn of charity sings that love rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth. And the Apostle joined what men keep tearing apart: speaking the truth in love. Four words, and the whole balance of the Christian life is in them. Truth without love wounds. Love without truth kills softly. Truth in love heals.

THE HEART THAT KEEPS THE BALANCE

The desert kept the two edges of this chapter in a single story. Visitors once came to Abba Agathon to test his humility. They called him a fornicator: he accepted it. Proud: he accepted it. A slanderer: he accepted it. Then they called him a heretic, and the old man answered, I am not a heretic. Asked why he had borne every insult but that one, he said:

There is the whole balance, kept by a man who could not have recited a canon. Humility bows to every charge against the self, however unjust; it cannot bow to the one charge that would consent to separation from God. And Saint Theophan the Recluse, asked whether the heterodox would be saved, held the same two edges in a single sentence, refusing to judge, and refusing to move:

Learn both refusals together. The saint will not sit on God's judgment seat over another soul; and he will not step one pace off the rock on which his own soul stands. Everything this book asks of the reader lives between those two refusals.

Hear how a saint of our own days held the balance, a man who never wrote a canon, and kept the whole law of this chapter:

Weeps and prays for the whole world: that is the heart in which alone the teaching of this book is safe. Hate the heresy with a perfect hatred, and love the heretic. Refuse the false communion, and pray with tears for those you must stand apart from. Guard the confession like a fortress, and keep the gate of the fortress open toward every repentance.

If, in reading the chapters ahead, the reader ever feels the pleasure of condemnation warming in him, let him close the book, and return to this page, and not go on until the warmth has turned back to grief. The wall this book describes is raised weeping, or it must not be raised at all; for a wall built without love is built of pride, and saves no one, least of all its builder.