The Source of Love

“Love is begotten of detachment, detachment of hope in God, hope of patient endurance and long-suffering, these of general self-mastery, self-mastery of fear of God, and the fear of God of faith in the Lord” (The Four Hundred Chapters on Love, First Century 2, St. Maximos the Confessor)

Most if not all of the holy fathers of our faith have been translated into English; however, it takes several more stages of effort in order to squeeze the sweet nectar of their meaning into the juice of modern Christian understanding. This great spiritual genius, St. Maximos the Confessor, has to be interpreted from his time to ours and from monastic assumptions to what 21st century Americans can accept and utilize for their spiritual growth.

He wrote: “Love is begotten of detachment.” We’re all for love. It’s the basis of nearly all modern songs, but detachment? Isn’t love the opposite—passion and emotions, losing one’s head by falling in love? But the monk means the relationship between the Lord and us. Not eroticism, but total immersion in the other: That form of love called agape. It requires self-control rather than delirium, and serenity instead of panic over losing one’s lover. It demands an inner freedom from everything excessive or out of control. That sort of detachment is the parent of true love, because it wants nothing for itself. Such a love is other-directed. It’s a love that doesn’t beg or plead, nor does it make demands. A love like that doesn’t use or abuse the one whom it loves.

How does one acquire the detachment needed in order to love? It is born from the womb of hope—hope in God, implying complete trust that only God can provide a person in love with everything needed for a wholesome, fulfilling, rewarding lifetime, opening onto another more complete and glorious life when this one is ended. Hope often appears as the weakest and least understood of that sacred trinity of virtues. Her sisters, faith and love, we more easily understand and share with others. Hope, however, is unconditional surrender to the will of the Lord and the plan that the Holy Trinity had for each person on earth, who ever lived or shall come into being, even before the universe came into existence.

It’s always easy enough to hope when all seems to be going according to our own design for life. Then we thank the Lord, if indeed we do, and go on living, enjoying the good times. But what happens when life doesn’t quite mark an upward line on the chart of our existence? When we pray, but what we pray for doesn’t come about? When somebody dear to us suffers and doesn’t seem to rally from pain or despair? St. Maximos describes what we must do, even if he doesn’t explain why the turn of events: Hope [is begotten of] patient endurance. And that’s the test of agape love. To wait out the dark days and the bad times—to be patient and endure, survive all that is thrown at us like the anvil of a blacksmith being pounded by the heavy mallet and not breaking. Not just holding on until the storm ends and the sun comes out again, but to have the patient endurance to accept and not be crushed, by long-suffering. How long? The Lord alone knows how long. To suffer in His time and not complain is the description of that agape love we claim to have for the Lord.

And finally, what is the good of it all? Self-mastery [begotten of] the fear of God. So when we fear God, we gain control over our bodies, minds and souls. By that kind of fear the saint is explaining the love that is afraid to do anything to offend the God of love. Not that the Lord intimidates us, frightens us or demands that we love Him—no, rather that we ourselves are so filled with love for Him that we take care not to do anything to pervert, reduce or modify that love, because it will go with us to eternity.