ON LOVE, AND THE REPRESSING OF OUR DESIRES.
“The decorous tendency of our philanthropy, therefore,” according to
Clement, “seeks the common good;” whether by suffering martyrdom, or
by teaching by deed and word,--the latter being twofold, unwritten and
written. This is love, to love God and our neighbour. “This conducts to
the height which is unutterable. ‘Love covers a multitude of sins.[613]
Love beareth all things, suffereth all things.’[614] Love joins us to
God, does all things in concord. In love, all the chosen of God were
perfected. Apart from love, nothing is well pleasing to God.” “Of its
perfection there is no unfolding,” it is said. “Who is fit to be found
in it, except those whom God counts worthy?” To the point the Apostle
Paul speaks, “If I give my body, and have not love, I am sounding
brass, and a tinkling cymbal.”[615] If it is not from a disposition
determined by gnostic love that I shall testify, he means; but if
through fear and expected reward, moving my lips in order to testify
to the Lord that I shall confess the Lord, I am a common man, sounding
the Lord’s name, not knowing Him. “For there is the people that loveth
with the lips; and there is another which gives the body to be burned.”
“And if I give all my goods in alms,” he says, not according to the
principle of loving communication, but on account of recompense, either
from him who has received the benefit, or the Lord who has promised;
“and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains,” and cast away
obscuring passions, and be not faithful to the Lord from love, “I am
nothing,” as in comparison of him who testifies as a Gnostic, and the
crowd, and being reckoned nothing better.
“Now all the generations from Adam to this day are gone. But they who
have been perfected in love, through the grace of God, hold the place
of the godly, who shall be manifested at the visitation of the kingdom
of Christ.” Love permits not to sin; but if it fall into any such case,
by reason of the interference of the adversary, in imitation of David,
it will sing: “I will confess unto the Lord, and it will please Him
above a young bullock that has horns and hoofs. Let the poor see it,
and be glad.” For he says, “Sacrifice to God a sacrifice of praise, and
pay to the Lord thy vows; and call upon me in the day of trouble, and I
will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.”[616] “For the sacrifice
of God is a broken spirit.”[617]
“God,” then, being good, “is love,” it is said.[618] Whose “love
worketh no ill to his neighbour,”[619] neither injuring nor revenging
ever, but, in a word, doing good to all according to the image of God.
“Love is,” then, “the fulfilling of the law;”[619] like as Christ,
that is the presence of the Lord who loves us; and our loving teaching
of, and discipline according to Christ. By love, then, the commands
not to commit adultery, and not to covet one’s neighbour’s wife, are
fulfilled, [these sins being] formerly prohibited by fear.
The same work, then, presents a difference, according as it is done
by fear, or accomplished by love, and is wrought by faith or by
knowledge. Rightly, therefore, their rewards are different. To the
Gnostic “are prepared what eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath
entered into the heart of man;” but to him who has exercised simple
faith He testifies a hundred-fold in return for what he has left,--a
promise which has turned out to fall within human comprehension.
Come to this point, I recollect one who called himself a Gnostic.
For, expounding the words, “But I say unto you, he that looketh on
a woman to lust after, hath committed adultery,”[620] he thought
that it was not bare desire that was condemned; but if through the
desire the act that results from it proceeding beyond the desire
is accomplished in it. For dream employs phantasy and the body.
Accordingly, the historians relate the following decision of Bocchoris
the just. A youth, falling in love with a courtezan, persuades the
girl, for a stipulated reward, to come to him next day. But his
desire being unexpectedly satiated, by laying hold of the girl in a
dream, by anticipation, when the object of his love came according to
stipulation, he prohibited her from coming in. But she, on learning
what had taken place, demanded the reward, saying that in this way she
had sated the lover’s desire. They came accordingly to the judge. He,
ordering the youth to hold out the purse containing the reward in the
sun, bade the courtezan take hold of the shadow; facetiously bidding
him pay the image of a reward for the image of an embrace.
Accordingly one dreams, the soul assenting to the vision. But he
dreams waking, who looks so as to lust; not only, as that Gnostic
said, if along with the sight of the woman he imagine in his mind
intercourse, for this is already the act of lust, as lust; but if one
looks on beauty of person (the Word says), and the flesh seem to him
in the way of lust to be fair, looking on carnally and sinfully, he is
judged because he admired. For, on the other hand, he who in chaste
love looks on beauty, thinks not that the flesh is beautiful, but the
spirit, admiring, as I judge, the body as an image, by whose beauty he
transports himself to the Artist, and to the true beauty; exhibiting
the sacred symbol, the bright impress of righteousness to the angels
that wait on the ascension;[621] I mean the unction of acceptance, the
quality of disposition which resides in the soul that is gladdened by
the communication of the Holy Spirit. This glory, which shone forth on
the face of Moses, the people could not look on. Wherefore he took a
veil for the glory, to those who looked carnally. For those, who demand
toll, detain those who bring in any worldly things, who are burdened
with their own passions. But him that is free of all things which are
subject to duty, and is full of knowledge, and of the righteousness
of works, they pass on with their good wishes, blessing the man with
his work. “And his life shall not fall away”--the leaf of the living
tree that is nourished “by the water-courses.”[622] Now the righteous
is likened to fruit-bearing trees, and not only to such as are of the
nature[623] of tall-growing ones. And in the sacrificial oblations,
according to the law, there were those who looked for blemishes in
the sacrifices. They who are skilled in such matters distinguish
propension[624] (ὄρεξις) from lust (έπιθυμία); and assign the latter,
as being irrational, to pleasures and licentiousness; and propension,
as being a rational movement, they assign to the necessities of nature.