Reflective Love

This beautiful argument for the importance of active love as ‘a more excellent way’ (1 Corinthians 12:31) is part of an extended discussion about how Christians are to live in unity and use the charismatic gifts the Spirit has brought for the common good.

Paul, who has himself the gift of tongues (14:18), begins by comparing his ability for angelic speech to what might seem its opposite: a ‘noisy gong or a clanging cymbal’ (v.1). These instruments are far from the joyful cymbals of Jewish worship in the Psalms but shockingly evoke the cymbala of the ecstatic mystery cults of Cybele, all too familiar to Paul’s Corinthian audience. Rhea/Cybele’s guards originally clashed their brass weapons—and, taken literally, Paul’s words indicate ‘sounding brass’ (v.1, KJV)—to conceal the cries of the infant Zeus from being heard by his murderous father, Cronos, and the goddess’s initiates imitated this clamour in their rituals. References to ‘mysteries’ and moving mountains may refer to this story. This is sound intended to confuse and it embodies what Paul finds amiss about the charismatic gifts: they do not give themselves in the act of communication but rather enjoy their own self-expression.

A Roman terracotta relief illustrates the scene at Mount Ida with Rhea’s guards absorbed in their protective dance, their heads bowed, feet carefully aligned. Despite the sense of movement in the rippling cloaks against their muscular bodies, there is something hermetic and enclosed about their self-involvement, which is how Paul envisages his sounding brass, shorn of its relation to other instruments.

The middle section of this chapter climaxes in a sense of fullness and inclusion, with the fourfold repetition of ‘all things’ matched by a fourth use of agapē in verse 8, where we learn that love never ends—literally, does not fall apart. This is contrasted to our own partial, transient human charismatic gifts and knowledge, which will not be needed in the eschatological future.

The practical centre of the chapter then modulates to the enigmatic and mysterious as it looks forward to a fuller understanding through love, which has an eternal value.

Nick Turpin’s photograph of a child looking through the blurred glass of the bus window embodies our present existential lack of knowledge. It is part of a sequence, ‘Through a glass darkly’, which plays on the pun possible in the King James translation of verse 12, between transparent windowpane and opaque-looking glass.

We glimpse the young girl through a medium of misted glass as if we were passengers on another passing vehicle, but intimately, catching her thinking. Holding a mobile telephone, she is distanced from us as she attends to another person and situation. Her gaze, however, is unfocused, as if she looked inward to regard a mirror of reflection.

The Greek for ‘in a mirror dimly’ is ‘in a riddle’ (ainigma). Like that mysterious child on the bus, we are all enigmas to ourselves and other people. Paradoxically it is the eyes of love which acknowledge the mysterious depths in the other; to realise that we are all children in our limited understanding of the world is the beginning of wisdom. To be aware of partial vision is to open that long vista of meaning that makes a clear halo round the girl’s head, as though gesturing to that loving circling of the divine persons, in which she, like us, is fully known.

In 1 Corinthians 13:4–8, Paul lays out what love should be, which is embodied vividly in a drawing by Pieter Bruegel the Elder for a series of engravings on the virtues. It is composed of scenes depicting the seven acts of mercy originating in the parable of the sheep and the goats from Matthew 25; here they are all directed by the central figure of Love or Charity/Caritas.

The child who conventionally clings to personified Charity at the centre of the composition, here pulls at her skirts to urge her to action. This parallels the structure of the Greek, for where RSV/NRSV uses a noun and adjective for clauses such as ‘love is patient’, they should more properly be rendered by active verbs and adverbs, so that ‘love waits patiently’.

As is typical of Bruegel’s busy scenes of peasant life, all is a whirl of activity, and each person engaged in charitable activity is eager to give—this is no patronising act of distant benevolence but ordinary people helping each other. Shirts are pulled over the heads and shoulders of the naked; loaves are proffered urgently in both hands by those feeding the hungry, their eyes directed at the needy. Two respectable citizens shake hands with the shamed criminals in the stocks. This is a hopeful scene of people communicating a sense of loving kindness.

Charity has a pelican on her head, an image of Christ’s self-giving as the pelican was popularly believed to feed her young from her own breast. It reminds us that verses 4–7 in which love ‘bears all things … endures all things’ refers above all to Christ. The Greek word for ‘love’ or ‘charity’ is agapē, used throughout the New Testament for God’s gratuitous outflowing of love, which Paul here offers as a way for humans to follow by participation.