Spiritual Love

 A(nother) perceptive post by Bruce Charlton prompted a comment from me and since it concerns the most important spiritual quality and the one that is often turned against itself in the modern world I thought I would repeat it here.

My comment was:

I don't think most people know what love in the spiritual sense is. We think of it as empathy or compassion or something like that but these are the smoke of love rather than its fire. Or else you could say they are the reflection of love in the ordinary human mind. But when these reflections are mistaken for their true source all sorts of confusion and misunderstandings arise. What I mean here is that we tend to act in imitation of how we think love might act rather than how love really does act because love, to be spiritually based and therefore real, must be directed first of all to God. If that does not exist then the secondary love which is love of neighbour does not properly exist either though an imitation of it might. But that originates in thought rather than the heart.

Comment on the comment:

Everyone, religious or otherwise, wants to be thought loving. It's the primary Christian quality and the one that has been hijacked by secularism to be worn as a badge of authenticity and goodness. For that reason it is the most abused, trivialised, watered-down and imitated of the virtues. Because we all know love on the human level we think that gives us an insight into spiritual love but really it does not. We should have a totally different word. Some people like agape but I find this too academic and remote, as though it belongs in a theological study rather than real life, so we are stuck with love. But still we have to understand that spiritual love is rooted in the love of God. The fact that God is love does not mean that love is God. Love can only be known for what it really is when the heart is open to God. Then God enters that heart and love is known. Otherwise all you have is an earthly imitation of it, like the image of sunlight in water but the reflected image is still made of water not light.

Love is Love

 If there was ever a cliché then this is it. Yes, love is love but what is love? I saw on a comment thread recently a claim by one of the participants that God or Jesus had told him that there was complete moral equivalence between homosexuality and heterosexuality because we are all evolving into a state in which sex (or gender as people say nowadays) will not exist. I've heard this before, that homosexuals represent a kind of enlightened vanguard blazing a trail into the future. It's an old delusion.

The only place that sex, as in masculine and feminine or their initiating equivalents on the spiritual level, cannot exist is the unmanifest state, the one in which spirit and matter are not yet sundered and nothing is. The very act of creation involves a division which, whether you call it consciousness and form or spirit and matter or God and Nature, is the root of the sex difference. That goes right down to the very ground of reality in that for creation to take place, one must become two. If you don't want sex to exist then you don't want life to exist. 

A rejoinder to this might be that we will all become androgynous but that is a category error in that it forces a pre-manifested condition into the world of manifestation which word I use here as an equivalent for creation even if they are somewhat different, metaphysically speaking. But if life is to be expressed there must be this duality of subject and object and that, right there, is the sex difference. It cannot be dispensed with if life is to be known and seen and touched and tasted and all the rest.

It may be that as humanity evolves each sex will become more refined in its form and expression, and people might confuse this as each one of them becoming more like the other, but the unique categories of masculine and feminine will remain. In Luke chapter 13 God is compared to a hen who gathers her brood under her wings but that does not make him any less God the Father. Great men can have great compassion but they are no less men. Great women can have high intelligence but they are no less women. One androgynous being can never complement and complete another androgynous being and it is this completing and complementing that makes the love between man and woman what it is. Apart from being a necessity for creation, the sexual division of beings is a great gift from God because it takes love to a new level.

Love is love but what people often mean when they say this is that love is sex. They smuggle in one thing by claiming it is another. My teachers told me that love was indeed love if it was pure and did not degenerate. Most of what is called love by propagandists is degenerated love that arises from and is intended to satisfy the ego not the soul.

A New Creation

 At the end of my last post I mentioned that what Christ offers to those who follow him is a new Creation - worth capitalising I think. I would like to pursue this thought here. It's hardly a new thought but it has relevance in the context of a general spirituality v. Christianity debate which is pertinent in our time. I have written on several occasions about how the teachings and person (because the two are linked) of Christ go further than any other form of spirituality, including those of the Buddha. This idea of a new Creation gets to the heart of it. The Buddha saw the reality of suffering and showed a way to escape that. The way involved leaving a fallen creation behind. Basically, it entailed rejecting the goods of creation for entry into the non-created or pre-creation state. We tend to overlook the fact that original Buddhism was a monastic religion. This is a valid response to the evils of this world and/or the demands of the spiritual quest but it is not the only one or even the best one. The best is that offered by Christ in which matter and spirit or creation and uncreated divine being are joined together to make something new. Here matter is sanctified rather than rejected. Latter forms of Buddhism approach this idea but they never fully embrace it. Other spiritual traditions incorporate elements of this approach but they all have a fundamental drawback. They lack Christ, and it would be my contention that it is only through Christ that one can fully enter the new Creation. I firmly believe he is present in other religions to the extent that they are open to his spirit but he can never be as fully present as he is in Christianity where he stands revealed as himself.

This difference has never been more important than it is today in the context of the world as it is now. That is because we are in the middle of a battle between good and evil. A general spirituality which seeks to rise above the world will either be neutral in the face of this battle, beyond good and evil as those aiming at spiritual transcendence might put it, or else it will be sucked into evil. In fact, as genuine neutrality is no longer possible, if it ever was, they will inevitably be drawn onto the side of evil. Now, if you don't stand against evil, you stand with it, and if you would stand against evil you can only really do that by standing with Christ. Why can't you be good without Christ? Because he is goodness. It resides in him as the face and form of God. Other forms might approach or echo that but he is the living template. If you understand what the Good is you must see it is centred in him and the more it is separated from him the less good it is.

The new Creation came into being when Christ defeated the Prince of this World which is what he did with his life and death. This is why there was no path to it before his time. It didn't exist. This means that any form of spirituality which originated before Christ does not offer a path to it unless, as I say above, that form has opened itself to the spirit of Christ. This is a controversial position to take in the modern world because the egalitarian dogma has spread into every area of life including religion. Also, because we in the West reacted to human misinterpretations and distortions of Christianity either by turning to atheism or by seeking spiritual nourishment elsewhere. But go back to Christ himself and the Gospels, particularly that of St John, and you will discover a spiritual truth that goes beyond all others, one that does not just offer a way out of the material world but purifies that world so rendering it capable of being lifted up into spirit and becoming something new, a new Adam, a new Jerusalem, a new world.

When Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven it was this new Creation he spoke of. Heaven is not just the oneness of spiritual consciousness. It is that but it goes beyond that because it brings to that oneness the qualities and colours of creation. And it brings relationship to oneness which means it brings love. Love existed before Christ but it did not exist in the same way as it did after him because he made it possible for the self, hitherto a centre of egotism which could only be escaped from, to be holy. No self means no love. Christ made the individual spiritually beautiful and potentially godlike instead of being a disturbance in the placid waters of divine oneness. Heaven is full of individuals because it is the abode of love and this was the new Creation brought by Christ. 

Love and Compassion

Love and compassion are often confused these days but they are not the same thing and it is important to distinguish between the two or love will be reduced to compassion and thereby diminished considerably.

Compassion is usually directed towards suffering, seeking to relieve that or, at least, support the one who suffers. This means it is focussed on what a person is experiencing here and now. It responds to what a person is.

Love aims to encourage a person towards realising what he could and should be. It doesn't necessarily support the person as he is now, enabling that person to be happy and not suffer in his current state. It may even see that suffering is what is necessary to move that person on to a better, more evolved place, a place in which he is more what he should be. This implies that we are not all right as we are now. There is something we should be growing towards. Love is directed towards realising that.

There is no love outside of God. He is the source of love and what our love should be principally directed towards. Without him love would not exist. (Nor would anything, of course, but that's a different matter.) If God is love does he not love us? And yet we suffer. How can this be? It is because God loves us that we suffer. I am not saying he causes it but he allows it and he does so in order that we may become more like him. Love wants the good of the beloved. Good is spiritual. There is no good without the spiritual. Therefore love is always pushing for spiritual growth. Compassion would leave a person where he is, only removing the suffering, but love wants to bring a person up to where happiness is exchanged for joy and compassion/empathy for divine love. Compassion would heal the pain of material suffering. Love wants the caterpillar to become a butterfly even if that hurts.

Note: The point here is not that you should have love instead of compassion. You should have both but compassion should be seen in the light of love not in its own light.

Divine Love

 Religious people need to recapture the idea of love from secular humanists who have taken it over and recast it according to their limited conception of what a human being is and what it should be doing with its life.  We all feel love to some degree. It seems that even some animals, dogs in particular, are capable of love of a sort. Love is clearly a basic reality of conscious existence, specifically of self-conscious existence, but there are aspects of love and we need to be aware of it in its spiritual form which is the root and source of all lesser forms.

When Christ came to this world his principal message was one of love. Love God and love your neighbour as yourself are the two great commandments, but what was this love of which he spoke? Nowadays we tend to understand spiritual love in terms of empathy or compassion but I believe that is a mistake. Divine love is fully personal and directed like a powerful beam of light whereas empathy and compassion have a diffused all things to all men quality to them. They are a warm blanket as opposed to a passionate intensity. The moon, shining by reflected light, as opposed to the sun blazing away with its own fire. They are kind but they do not cast out fear or lay down their lives for their friends. Before you point out times when they might have done just that I would ask you to distinguish between being motivated by genuine love and being motivated by a kind of compassion ideology. There is even in some people a pathology of compassion that arises when a person falls victim to the glamour of love and of being the one who loves and who therefore loves as a self-conscious act. Such a person might not be aware of this so it is not necessarily simply a pose but nor is it a response of spontaneous, unaffected innocence.

Divine love or humanitarian compassion? Which do we choose? One important difference between the two lies in full acceptance of freedom and suffering for the sake of spiritual good. Those who respond to divine love see man's destiny in God and will accept anything to follow that path. By contrast, the merely compassionate look for happiness and well-being in this world. So, do we seek our end in this life or in the higher life in God. Do we seek freedom and responsibility in terms of divine being and creation or is it just the removal of suffering that motivates us and determines our feelings?

The first commandment is to love God. This points to the fact, unknown or ignored by humanitarians, that real love is only possible in God. Only when you love God who is the source of love can you begin to know love as it really is and not just as it is reflected in the mortal human heart. We are back to the moon and the sun. Divine love cannot be known by those who do not love God, and the more we respond to divine love the more will that love affect all other loves which only exist because of God's love. Humanitarian compassion is a good thing in its own limited way but it is only for those who do not understand the love of God and it can never be a proper substitute for that.

Liberty and Equality

 It should be obvious to anyone nowadays that the modern evils known as racism and sexism are being promoted as the deadliest of secular sins as part of the attempt to dismantle Western civilisation and install a new mindset in which nothing is better than anything else so everything is mediocre and therefore more controllable by our overlords, worldly and otherwise. Just like the mad crow disease of present times these secular sins were not built on nothing which gives them a certain viability if not examined too closely, but they have been grossly exaggerated and used as a means to destroy any idea of difference and even make difference itself a bad thing.

Equality is the great dogma on which liberal Western democracies are built. It might have seemed like a step forward at a time when the gap between rich and poor, powerful and weak was as great as it was, and the movement towards less inequality surely did bring certain benefits in the short term. But the flaw that lies at its heart is now being revealed. If equality, and equality alone, is taken as the foundation of a culture then that culture will collapse into the lowest common denominator and it will eventually collapse altogether. Equality is totally contrary to human nature and to enforce it is to force human beings to live against both their natural and their spiritual instincts. It becomes a tool to push the higher down to the level of the lower. This does not mean that the higher should dominate the lower (except spiritually) but liberty and equality are not natural bedfellows despite what the ideals of the Enlightenment may pretend, and it is liberty that is the great spiritual quality as far as human beings are concerned.

Equality is often said to be rooted in Christianity. If it were how strange it is that it is never mentioned in the Bible and was only discovered to be a Christian virtue 1800 years after the time of Christ. Oneness in Christ is a Christian virtue but that is not equality which is a materialistic distortion of it. Equality is actually a property of unformed matter, matter untouched by the creative breath of spirit, which is why you see it most at lower levels of evolution. The more life evolves, the more unequal it becomes because the freer it becomes and yet within that inequality there is also a spiritual oneness. To realise the truth of this apparent contradiction is one of the major goals of the spiritual path. It and it alone explains the mystery of love.

Against Love

Yes, you read that correctly. This is an article by someone who believes in God and Jesus Christ and wishes to follow them that is going to argue against love. Of course, there is a catch. It is not real love I am arguing against but the fake variety that would actually establish the kingdom of Satan in this world.

Love is a spiritual thing. It must be because it is based on the reality of the individual and in strict materialism there is no room for a true individual. What might seem to be an individual is just the product of many mechanical forces. There is no intrinsic centre, nothing which cannot be reduced to mindless matter. Therefore, love should be directed towards the spiritual fulfillment of the human being; that is to say, his or her spiritual good and development. (If you love someone, you wish them well. Parents who love their children want to help them grow not self-indulgently keep them as infants.) This does not preclude other sorts of good but the spiritual always has prior claim and is the directed end. Anything that works against the spiritual must be specifically rejected. However, love in the modern world has been weaponised to turn against itself. This has been done by making it relate to the earthly man and his fulfillment and protection. Love is now concerned with material well-being and avoidance of material suffering to the detriment of spiritual good. To give an extreme analogy, this is like loving a cancer as it eats into a person's body. I am not comparing the earthly man and his physical self to a cancer but if you give love to and support the lesser at the expense of the greater, body as opposed to soul, you are effectively attacking the greater. Those useless clergymen who put social justice at the front of their agenda and parrot worldly concerns about equality and saving lives above all else clearly have no idea of true spiritual values because if they did they could not possibly aid and support a worldly agenda as they do. For them the earthly man has become the soul and religion just means making this man better, more 'loving' on a horizontal this worldly level. Their concerns are indistinguishable from those of a secular person. They have reduced spirituality to social matters and politics just as Judas did. True spirituality, as anyone should know, is about being born again into an entirely new being. Not just believing a different thing but being a different thing. The old self is not destroyed but it is transformed not simply changed.

Ultimately, all love must be love of God. If you love your neighbour it is precisely because you see God in him, and if you really do see God in him and your love is not just words then you wish to do whatever is necessary to bring God out into greater expression in his life. Supporting him as a worldly being will not do that which is why both John the Baptist and Jesus called on people to repent. If you don't repent of your worldly ways and attachments you are rejecting God, and if you are supported in that lack of repentance then the one doing the supporting is also rejecting God.

It's very simple. Either you believe the spiritual is just an extension of the material as most contemporary Christians and their leaders seem to do, something that has been brought out and made clear by their response to the coronavirus panic, or you realise that the spiritual is a higher and totally different reality. One that is only known by seeing yourself as a new being with new priorities. This means that love directed towards things in the unredeemed, material world in their unredeemed and material state is actually directed against love in the spiritual world. The first commandment is to love God. If you don't first of all love God and what he stands for, what he is, then loving your neighbour is actually anti-spiritual for you are directing love to the world using that word to mean fallen man and his concerns. Christians who are confused about this, as many of them seem to be because of, let's face it, spiritual ignorance are supporting evil, much as that might shock them.

I attack misdirected love which is love used as a weapon against the spiritual and a means of separating men and women from their true life in God. Needless to say, real love which is love grounded in God cannot be used like this but the idea of love can be and it has been corrupted. Reject this false earthly love and know that the only true love comes from above. Perhaps the rhyme isn't just coincidence.

Good and Evil

 Does this make sense? 

The strong antipathy and disgust that good has for evil comes from a love of the good. The hatred that evil has for good comes from resentment, pride, fear and the desire to bring down and destroy. Two emotions that may, on the face of it, seem similar but which come from very different sources.

Love Must Be Spiritual or It's Nothing

If we believe in God and we believe that God is love then we have to question what exactly love is. Because if God really is love then love acts in some strange ways or so it seems. But first, can we accept that there was no real idea of love outside religion until recently when secular thought borrowed it and made it its own? But secular thought interprets love or compassion as a universal, equally applicable to everyone which doesn't make sense because only a universal God can really love universally. This tells us that the secular idea of love is not actually love at all. It's just a theory about love. And love as a theory is meaningless. Love cannot be reduced to an ideology. At least, it can but then it is killed.

If God really is love what then is this love? It cannot be something that wants to make everyone happy all the time because that is not how things are. So, if we accept that God is love we must also accept that love involves suffering or, at least, acquiesces in suffering. It is not just about being empathetic or compassionate but something a lot deeper and more mysterious than that.

I think we can attempt a definition and say that love, spiritually considered, wishes for the increase of good in the loved one. It doesn't just want happiness. It wants goodness and truth and it wants them to be established in the person loved. Now, this leads us to the critical question of what are goodness and truth? Is it good always to remove suffering? Then God is not good. Is it good always to bring joy and peace? Then God is not good. We have to explore further.

You see, we can't understand love without a proper metaphysics. Everything comes down to the matter of first principles and what a human being actually is. If you don't understand that then you cannot understand love and how it works in the world. Love can only be a spiritual thing because it depends on the unique individuality of the one loved. Secular thought which does not recognise God denies spirit and is on that account materialistic but there is no individuality in materialism. We are all just the product of natural forces with no real core identity. Individuality has to be a spiritual thing if it is real. There can be no love without spirit and so there can be no love in a world without God.

The good that love seeks to increase is spiritual good. We don't understand this. We understand material good but to seek to increase material good will often work against spiritual good because it will obscure, or even supplant, it. Spiritual good relates to our reality as spiritual beings and so it seems that really to understand love we have to see ourselves as spiritual beings and know what that means. What it chiefly means is loving the true good which is God. From this love flows all other love. 

Love of God

Bruce Charlton has been writing recently in his usual illuminating style about the love of God and this set me thinking because, in a way, this is the only important question for the whole of life. Love of God, the intuitive recognition of and opening up of the heart to our Creator, is the key to everything.

Here is a paradox. You must be virtuous to get to heaven but the virtuous man does not go to heaven. All civilisations worthy of the name acknowledge the law which is right behaviour or what C.S. Lewis in his short but important work The Abolition of Man called the Tao. This is the correct way to act with regard to the gods, the universe and one's fellow man. Details may alter but the essentials are remarkably similar everywhere. And yet this is not enough. Observing the 10 Commandments will not get you to heaven. The Pharisees do not go to heaven and this is true even of the good Pharisees not just the ones who observe the letter of the law but neglect its spirit.

The only thing that will get you to heaven is the love of God. Nothing you can do, nothing you can think, no belief you have will get you to heaven but handing yourself over to God in absolute faith and trust and love will. A good person is still himself but you can only enter heaven when you give yourself to God, empty yourself of self and  are filled with love for your Creator. That is because this love is the only thing that will cure the stain of ego that blocks your entry to heaven.

Good people do not go to heaven. Consider that for a moment.

Don't think this is an impossible task. God is always there, waiting to respond to any overture we might make. Even a little attempt to love on our part. All we have to do is turn towards him in truth and love and he will respond. There will still remain much work to be done because the ego self, the swollen self-regarding me, is very powerful but once love for God has risen in our heart then we are facing in the right direction. In fact, even the recognition that we lack this love and the sincere desire to acquire it is an important first step in the purification of the self and its preparation for eventual entry into the Kingdom of Heaven.

I'll tell you the reason for this. It's just common sense really. Love of God shows that you actually recognise and want what heaven is. If you don't even want it, how can you expect to go there?

Unconditional Love

Here's a question. If God loves everything unconditionally, does he love evil?

Obviously not. God loves something because it is. Existence is good. It comes from him and it is him. But a creature's free will can deform that goodness into evil. God still loves the creature for the goodness that is inherent in the fact of its existence but he does not love the form in which it has chosen to express itself, and the more it identifies with that form the more it separates itself from him. God's love is always there but it has been rejected and that rejection is fundamentally an act of hatred. God does not love hatred. How can you love hatred since hatred is the denial of love? How can you love evil since evil is the rejection of good and love is the recognition of good? God is not beyond good and evil as the popular fallacy has it it. In God there is only good. Evil is the refusal of God. It is the shadow cast by good in a world in which good must be consciously chosen.

Does God love a saint more than a sinner? Yes he does for he only loves the good and in the saint there is both existential good and expressed good while in the sinner there is only the former.  God still loves the sinner because of his existential good but while the saint is shining God's light back to him, the sinner has put up a dark barrier that kills that light  The saint reflects God but the sinner rejects him. God does not love sin because it is the denial of his own reality which is truth but he loves the sinner which is why he sent his Son to the world.  If he loved the sinner for himself qua sinner, as he loves the saint for himself, he would not have needed to do this. Christ would not have been necessary. But Christ was necessary. Christ shows that God does not love evil. He only loves the good.

Empathy is Not Love

We live in a very empathetic age. Or rather an age in which empathy is regarded as a most desirable characteristic which is not quite the same thing. This leads me to ask, what is empathy? Is it the mark of an evolved human being or perhaps something else?

None of what I say here should be taken as implying that empathy is not, in the main, a good thing. To be able to think of others is clearly the sign of a civilised person. Nevertheless, I would suggest it is not always an unqualified good thing. It is not to be admired under all circumstances. In fact, too much empathy or misdirected empathy can be not only foolish but positively harmful.

Is empathy really about caring for others or is there something in it of an automatic response to the herd instinct of a social animal? Lack of empathy shows selfishness but some people do like to cosset their feelings and to feel good about themselves. Empathy in the modern world often seems to be as much about the empathiser as the empathised

Empathy is associated more with the feminine mentality than the masculine. The Western world has become increasingly feminised over the last few decades and this is inevitably leading to civilisational decline. If you don't believe that then study history. It is unlikely to be arrested as it is part of cyclical movement associated with the end of an age but we should still understand processes at work so we are not swept up by them and can remain aloof inwardly.

One reason for the decline alluded to is that the feminine approach favours empathy over truth and soft feelings over hard reality.  It portrays what it thinks should be as what is and prefers the nice to the real.  Now, it is certain that truth needs to be balanced by empathy (which I am not calling love because it isn't love) but truth must be the dominating principle. If truth is given a subsidiary position, or even sacrificed altogether as it tends to be now, we become separated from reality and the inevitable result is decline and disorder.

When a civilisation has been built up by male energy and creativity to a certain level of accomplishment there is then enough of a surplus or 'fat' in the system to allow women to escape their previous roles of wives and mothers and start to become more active members of the society. This might have individual benefits (though maybe not from a spiritual point of view) but it does not benefit the civilisation over the long run which becomes unbalanced in the sense that it loses a grounding in reality, reality requiring a harmonious interaction between masculine and feminine each fulfilling its proper role, a role indicated both by biology and spiritual insight for the two are both grounded in the same ultimate reality of God. The society will become more empathetic and lose the firm strength it requires to preserve itself from inner decay and outer attack. In this sense, empathy is actually destructive. If it favours the short term and immediate to the deeper view then it is little more than a form of self-indulgence.

Empathy is a form of love but it is an immature form. It needs to develop into something that is rooted in an awareness of God and a recognition of his will for human beings. It is really just the secular version of a spiritual quality and, as such, can actually get in the way of deeper feeling if not outgrown.

Justice and Mercy

This is in part a continuation or restatement of the previous post, Love and Law. Sometimes expressing the same thing in a slightly different way brings it into greater focus.

Everything in this world is a form of some divine reality. Often a highly distorted or even perverted form, but nothing takes its rise from nothing. Everything is based on something real. For example, in the political arena, liberalism can be seen as the secularisation of mercy. Likewise, conservatism takes a similar role with regard to justice.

Thus, we can say that secularisation drives a wedge between divine justice and mercy, separating them and turning them into rivals instead of two halves of one whole. This separation can only be resolved in God. Only in him can justice and mercy be properly reconciled so that each is given its due and neither takes too dominant a position. Justice and mercy have their rise in the spiritual and when politicised or brought down to the secular world they can give birth to false and counterfeit forms which distort what they are.

In this way extreme liberalism turns into immorality and hates virtue while extreme conservatism becomes tyrannical and oppressive. In the West today, the modern irreligious liberal uses the excuse of tolerance and unity to dismantle truth (necessarily a separative thing since because there is the true, there must also be the false) and weaken real spirituality, though he may accept a version that panders to his political ideology and therefore isn't spiritual at all. In certain Islamic countries, the extreme conservative, through too fixed an adherence to the letter of the law, banishes mercy and compassion from his heart (notwithstanding their mention in his scripture) and so his religion is hard, unyielding and crushes openness to the spirit.

Each detests the other but neither is acceptable to God who is truth and love combined. And yet it seems clear that, although God is Love, he must primarily be Truth since love is part of truth more than truth is part of love. Just as duality (love) must be rooted in unity (truth). At the same time, in practical terms you cannot separate the two. They are always and forever part of the same root reality.

Justice and mercy can only properly be understood as expressions of the One God which means that only those who acknowledge God can balance the two correctly within themselves or even understand what they really are. This, it should be understood, is not an intellectual matter. When your heart and will are aligned with God, when you situate your being in his, you will automatically respond to life in terms of justice and mercy. You won't have to think about how much of each one should apply to any given situation. That is for the ideologues who look at life through the distorting prism of a theory to which they then have to force themselves and everything else to adapt. But for the spiritual person, all responses are completely natural with no thought required and no theory to be obeyed.

If God were not just, there could be no truth. If he were not merciful, there would be no love. But justice must come before mercy even if mercy may sometimes override justice. That is because mercy only makes sense in the context of justice. Its very existence implies the prior existence of justice since without justice there would be no need for mercy. That is not to say one is more true than the other for both are fully true, fully real. But in the same way as the Father comes before the Son, so it is with justice and mercy. There are both aspects of divine reality but there is still a kind of hierarchy and this relationship has implications for things both in this world and the next.

Love and Law

It's a great shame there is only one word for love in English. It has led to all kinds of misapprehensions with earthly love being confused for spiritual love and then love itself regarded as the prime virtue which overrides all other considerations. It is an excuse for anything, even what has always been regarded as sin.

The first focus of love must be God. Without this love no others can be called spiritual, however meritorious they might appear on their own level. But spiritual love is directed primarily to God and only then out towards the creation which is always seen in the light of God not its own light (though it has its own secondary light too. That is the point of it, after all).

The modern liberal Christian says a lot about love but little about the law forgetting that the one without the other is impossible in a spiritual context. The two must always go together and cannot be separated. Considered apart, they are not spiritual but material corruptions of the spiritual.

A fine case in point was the preacher at the royal wedding last year. (See here for a post on that). He was a typical example of the false teacher leading his flock astray. For him (apparently) the human version of love was little different to spiritual love even though the one is clearly based on the earthly self while the other is centred in God. Obviously, the two are not wholly different since the former partakes of the latter but it does so as filtered through the worldly ego often taking on several false ideas in the process, one of which being that any love that makes us feel good emotionally is spiritually justified.

If people knew the difference between agape and other forms of love we might not have this kind of confusion or muddying of the water. Jesus defined true spiritual love for us when he said that "if you love me, you keep my commandments". Any love that does not inspire the one loving to keep the commandments (and to do so with joy) is not agape. True love always inspires the lover to purity.

Love of Humanity

I find it telling that Jesus told us to love our neighbour and to love our enemies but he did not tell us to love humanity. This must be because love cannot be directed to everyone without ceasing to be love. Not for human beings anyway. For God, of course, it can. But for us love must involve a personal relationship of some kind and so Jesus told us to direct it towards those with whom we actually had some kind of real contact. 

Nowadays it often seems that the idea of spiritual love is understood (or, I should say, misunderstood) as an abstract thing, something that should be directed towards all men and women equally. I may be mistaken but I don't think this is what Jesus taught. He was not a theoretician like many people today. He was completely involved in the real, the true and the practical, and so he spoke of love as an active, living thing that opens up the heart in a genuine way. Who can love humanity? Can you love this abstract concept in any real way? No, you can only love real men and real women. Love of humanity is just a theory for those who don't understand love and confuse it for a bland benevolence or, worse, see it as a badge to prove their worthiness. You cannot love humanity. You can only act as if you love humanity but then that is just acting. You can love your neighbour and you can love your enemy (or try to) but you cannot love humanity, and if you attempt that you may well end up a self-conscious fake as many spiritual people seem to do.

The fact that you cannot love humanity does not mean you should have no regard for people on the other side of the world with whom you will never have any kind of relationship. You should, of course, always recognise their common humanity and do to them as you would have them do to you. But that's a different thing. Charity begins at home, both in the modern sense of giving help to those in need and the Christian sense of spiritual love. When you can love those near to you, whether neighbour or enemy, then you can extend that circle but don't think abstract, impersonal love can be used as an excuse not to love the annoying, foolish, selfish people (as they may appear) who God actually puts in your way. He sends us what we need and, if these are the people we encounter, they are probably the ones through whom we can learn some kind of lesson.