It is precisely because love is an essential ingredient of a good human life that St. Paul places it above hope and faith which I have already shown are desirable, but not essential for a good life. But we must not stop at these paltry remarks, we need to dig deeper and explain what it is that love does among human beings which neither faith nor hope can do? I think that there are three of them, although they could be more. First, is that only in love can we find completion. Second, only in love can we take up uncoerced responsibility, and finally, only with love can justice be realised and self-realisation possible.
It was not always easy for me to understand why St. Paul said that love is greater than faith and hope, after all, the basic ministry of the church, if you look at it well, is to spread faith not love. Jesus gave his apostles the mandate: go and spread the good news to the world, and the good news is the faith that the son of God has died for our sins so that we can be saved.
Whereas love is NECESSARY for human life, faith and hope are not. Atheists who have no faith can live well, just as materialists who have no hope; but no one can live without love. If we say that new born babies need the love of their mother to be alive, it would seem to be an obvious proposition because of their vulnerability. But we can also say that of husbands in relation to their wives, and human beings in relation to the society in which they live. Women would not survive if men withdrew the love that they have for them, and so with men if the women did. Members of society need love to be able to live within a given society. Victims of racism and all manners of disrespect endure an excruciating agony that does damage to their life. Hence love is quite necessary for having a good life.
It is precisely because love is an essential ingredient of a good human life that St. Paul places it above hope and faith which I have already shown are desirable, but not essential for a good life. But we must not stop at these paltry remarks, we need to dig deeper and explain what it is that love does among human beings which neither faith nor hope can do? I think that there are three of them, although they could be more. First, is that only in love can we find completion. Second, only in love can we take up uncoerced responsibility, and finally, only with love can justice be realised and self-realisation possible.
Individual human life is incomplete, which means that no one can live entirely on his own. Economically this is obviously the case, but it is also true emotionally and spiritually. It is true economically because markets exists to enable us enjoy what we cannot produce and offer what we can. It is a form of completion. There is something in us that hungers for others, which we cannot satisfy by ourselves, hence we need others to complete our lives. We live in society precisely because we are incomplete in ourselves and need others to complete us. I am saying therefore that love makes this completion possible among human beings in a proper manner.
We also find out that for those that we love, we take a favourable disposition towards them. When a man is in love, no one reminds him to be kind and fair to his lover; in fact people urge him towards reasonableness. Or when a woman has children, no one reminds her to be nice to them. Of her own accord she protects these children. So it is within families or societies, once there is love, we take a kind disposition towards others. And here, responsibility is undertaken by one on his own accord. A man who fends for his family is called a responsible man. It is self-compulsion, and not by police or any external force. But it is important to note that the driver of this responsibility is love.
I urge all of us in Nigeria, families, businesses, government to look in the direction of love. Governors will never develop their states if they do not first love it and their people. Only love can move them to VOLUNTARILY work for the betterment of people. They can escape EFCC if they set out to. But love makes them to act for, rather than, against the people. Employers of labour can only pay their workers just wages if they love them, and truly see that the labour they use helps them (the employers) to realise their individual plans; and it is only proper that workers should realise their own plans as well.
The third point is that love brings justice to us. Love brings everything to equilibrium – and this is justice – and hence to happiness and self-realisation. To use the husband/wife relationship analogy: when you see a happy woman, then you see a woman who is loved. The same is with happy children and the amount of love they enjoy. But the reverse might be the case. Justice seems to measure the amount of love that exists in a given relationship. Justice therefore occurs when people get what is their due, and in this case, what is their due is love.
It is not surprising that Jesus says that God is love, and in fact that the greatest of all commandments is to love one another. It is interesting to expound the nature of God as love following the rubrics we have laid down already, but we shall leave this for another day. Jesus was surely right to say that the greatest of all commandments is for us to love one another, not only in our families, and as friends, but also in businesses and societies, because love is no less important in those shperes of action. Without love, business will always be counted in terms of ‘gainers’ and ‘losers’, whereas with love everyone sees himself as ‘completed’ by another, and hence the obligation of love. Love essentially entails placing ourselves in the position of others; or to put it in the words of Jesus again: “do unto others what you would want them to do for you”.
It is not surprising that St. Paul adds that even if we have all the gifts of this world, and have all the positions of this world it would be impossible to do anything meaningful if the basic condition of love is absent. Indeed without love, human life would be scary. I urge all of us in Nigeria, families, businesses, government to look in the direction of love. Governors will never develop their states if they do not first love it and their people. Only love can move them to VOLUNTARILY work for the betterment of people. They can escape EFCC if they set out to. But love makes them to act for, rather than, against the people. Employers of labour can only pay their workers just wages if they love them, and truly see that the labour they use helps them (the employers) to realise their individual plans; and it is only proper that workers should realise their own plans as well.
Hate is the opposite of love. Hate is the wrong assumption that you can do without others, and then actually wish to get rid of them. Getting rid of others, of course, means denying them justice and refusing to control/restrict your desires for their sake. This is the meaning of irresponsibility, in the manner in which we have explored it here. I do not want to explore further the obvious evil of hate or the absence of love in human society. It is better imagined, and the looting and diversion of funds in Nigeria is for me the story of the absence of love. Churches and schools should go back to the drawing board and begin to teach the necessity of the basic norm of love for human life and human society.
Ikechukwu Odigbo Is of the Catholic Diocese of Enugu.
