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CHARITY AS SPIRITUAL LOVE
When man places himself in the neighbor, God places Himself in man; to abolish what separates us from the neighbor is to abolish what separates us from God.
Charity in our day has been too often equated with the giving of money or material goods to the poor. When we trace the word to its ancient roots, however, we find that it has to do primarily with an immaterial transaction. Charity is spiritual love. I use the adjective to distinguish this kind of love from the loves of romance, friendship, and family – all of them loves which feed the ego, unless tempered by the selfless love of charity. When I provide something good for you with no expectation of return or thanks and without consideration for whether I desire you or like your companionship or am related to you or have grown accustomed to your habits and moods, and without even being concerned whether you think that what I have provided is good, I am practicing the love of charity. Such love is the second fundamental virtue: a second mode of assimilating the Truth, a second means of drawing near to God, and a second way of becoming what we already are….
There are two mistakes about love that you will have to avoid if you want to understand its significance in the spiritual life. Both mistakes are very common today. One is thinking that the spiritual life is a purely selfish affair and therefore opposed to love. The other is thinking that love means being soft and gentle. Each of these popular errors results from cutting off charity towards other people, what we might call horizontal love, from the vertical love we are to have for God. Loving God with the whole of our being is the first and great commandment, …for it alone gives meaning and value to the second commandment, which is that we love our neighbor as ourselves. “Charity is in essence to love God more than ourselves, thus to love ourselves, but less than God; not to love our neighbor more than ourselves, and not to feel ourselves obliged to give him what, in our opinion, we would not deserve if we were in his place.” Let us try to see what this means.
Many of our contemporaries seem to think that the contemplative life is pursued only by those who despise other people, and the hermit or recluse is often held in derision for his supposed misanthropy. This mistake is frequently made by religious believers themselves, whose models of spirituality tend to be drawn from the ranks of philanthropists and other visible helpers, people engaged in charitable works of various kinds: caring for the sick, feeding the hungry, and so forth. But if you think about it, this is clearly shortsighted. Those who equate the spiritual path with selfishness or who suggest that contemplativity is incomplete in itself, requiring as its complement a life of service in the world, have forgotten that “the busy activity of human kind is a very small thing” which can “neither create good nor destroy evil.” They appear not to realize that social action as such does “no more than switch around bad things and good.” The only act of charity which can have permanent consequences is the act which seeks “to rid the soul of illusions and passions and thus rid the world of a maleficent being; it is to make a void so that God may fill it and, by this fullness, give Himself.” The greatest gift of love is the one which has the greatest good in view. But the greatest good is salvation, and mine is the only soul which with God’s help I can certainly save. “Since it is impossible that we do to others as much good as we can do to ourselves—sanctity being incommunicable—it would be senseless to love others more than ourselves; a love which does not answer to any objective reality is an empty thing, bound to go astray.”
Empty love seems the rule of our times. Appeals to charitable action are common, but they are just as commonly linked with moralistic self-righteousness. Demagogues and social engineers of assorted political persuasions, taking advantage of our culture’s prevailing concern for physical comfort and material well-being, deliberately manipulate our feelings of pity and guilt, and the result is that charity is almost exclusively identified with the redistribution of ephemeral goods and power. But “this is merely a defiance hurled at God.” Fundamentally it is an attempt “to show that man is better than God, or than man alone is good—man ‘despiritualized’ and thereby ‘dehumanized.’” Please do not misunderstand me. There is obviously nothing wrong with doing good for one’s neighbor. All the traditions require it, and the perennial philosopher is quick to point out that material gifts and works of mercy, besides helping other people, are of immeasurable benefit to the giver’s own soul. Nevertheless the man whose understanding of charity is strictly confined to this horizontal dimension has failed to realize that his good works, however commendable, contain inevitably “a poison which is eliminated only by the conviction that God has no need of all this.”
What God wants, “while wanting nothing of course,” is our immortal soul. “In the final analysis, God wants Himself in us. One must therefore beware of any materialistic and demagogic conception of charity and never forget that what ‘interests’ God—and the sole thing that can ‘interest’ Him—is the eternal life of him who gives and the eternal life of him who receives.” Nor should we forget that these two lives are intimately connected. I have said that sanctity is incommunicable. It is equally true, however, that the holiness of a given man may well attract others to undertake the spiritual journey themselves and to attain by God’s grace their own sanctity. “He who is capable of becoming a saint but neglects to become one cannot save anyone; it is hypocrisy pure and simple to hide one’s own weakness and lukewarmness behind a screen of good works.” Much that would pass for altruism is in fact just another form of egoism.
A second obstacle to understanding true charity is the popular fallacy that love means never causing pain and never feeling anger. Love is equated with softness and tolerance, and tolerance itself, far from meaning that one has agreed to bear the weight of some error or vice, has become tantamount to thinking that there are actually no errors or vices at all. The man who objects to sin is the only real sinner in this scheme, for his so-called dogmatism represents a failure to love. You are familiar with this attitude, I am sure, and as you have almost certainly noticed, it too has infected contemporary religious belief. The faithful seem more and more willing to compromise their traditions in the interest of what they take to be charity, tolerance, and open-mindedness. Here again the problem comes from trying to have the horizontal without the vertical, love of man without love of Truth, and the result is the familiar substitute called being nice.
“To love creatures outside of God is as senseless as wishing to enclose the sun’s rays in a box,” for the creature is relative, and all relativity points beyond itself to the Absolute, upon which it is continuously and entirely dependent for its existence. In our last meditation, humility was described as seeing ourselves as if we were someone else, and treating ourselves as severely as the Truth will allow, but not more. True charity can be defined as the converse. It is seeing other people as if they were ourselves, and treating them as indulgently as the Truth will allow, but not more. Once again, the concluding qualification is important. To give in to the vices of the neighbor, or to encourage him to think that anything and everything is acceptable provided only that he sincerely wants it, is to assist in cutting him off from his true Source, the one God who is Truth, and this could hardly be called an act of charity. What I am to love in my neighbor is “the potentiality of the Divine presence,” and not the constellation of desires and habits and complaints that constitute his ego, for this ego is illusory and impermanent. I am to love my neighbor as myself, and this means that “charity starts fromthe truth that my neighbor is not other than myself.” Recalling what was said about the theophanic phenomenon of consciousness, I am obliged to admit that “in the sight of God,” my neighbor “is neither more nor less ‘I’ than I am myself” and therefore that “what is given to ‘another’ is given to ‘myself.’” In short, “my neighbor is also made in the image of God.”
What all this means, practically speaking, is that “charity or ‘compassion’ is not flabbiness” and that real love may hate and hurt. It may hate the sin, though not the sinner. Metaphysically, this amounts to hating a given ego and not the ego as such. Indeed true love may in some cases be required to injure the empirical ego, its own above all, as it seeks to be the means of lasting good. Whatever special response might be demanded by a given set of circumstances, love must be solid, and it may need to be hard. For “goodness due to weakness or dreaming is not a virtue; generosity is beautiful to the extent that man is strong and lucid.” And this strength cannot but express itself sometimes as anger and indignation. “There is a hatred which is lucid and thus has nothing passional about it, and this is the aversion to our own faults and to what corresponds to them in the world around us.” Notice that the force of our anger is to be directed in the first instance toward what is inside of us, and then toward those things in the world outside which are either the effects or the causes of the ego’s own maladies. There is no question here of wishing to encourage self-righteousness. The point is simply that “just contempt is both a weapon and a means of protection,” and it is a weapon of special importance to those of us who are engaged in spiritual warfare while still living and working in the world. There is certainly also such a thing as dispassion or indifference, but “this is an eremitical attitude that is not necessarily practicable or good in human society.” Maya is what it must be, and from that point of view, we are all obliged to cultivate a spirit of detachment. But this inward resignation to the play of possibilities in no way excludes knowing that some things are good and others are bad, nor is spiritual indifference inconsistent with our loving the former and hating the latter. “In a spiritual man, there is continuity between his inward impassibility—resulting from the consciousness of the Immutable—and his emotion: when a spiritual man becomes angry, it is so to speak on the basis of his contemplative impassibility and not in a manner contrary to it, whereas a profane man becomes totally enclosed in his anger.”…
Charity is a fundamental virtue, essential to the spiritual life. It is the soul loving God above all, and then loving man, and through these loves seeing, tasting, touching—and finally becoming—the Truth. Intent upon the greatest of goods, charity looks to salvation, loving our neighbors by first loving ourselves: loving with a love that would burn like fire all that stands between God and His creatures. “In the last analysis, charity is to make a gift of God to God by means of the ego and through beings. It communicates a blessing the source of which is God and communicates it to the neighbor who, insofar as he is the object of love, is God’s representative.”
The above essay is a selection from the chapter “Charity” in Advice to the Serious Seeker, Meditations on the Teaching of Frithjof Schuon, by James S. Cutsinger (State University of New York Press, 1997). The author is a Christian professor of religion who advocates the view (taught by Schuon) that there is a transcendent unity of religions, enabling unity with the Divine Reality by way of adherence to any of the orthodox religions. His website address is: www.cutsinger.net.
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