Salesian Literature

Chapter 11  :  How charity breeds love of our neighbour

​

God made men wearing his own image and likeness, so he also provided men with a power of loving which clearly reflects the love due to the godhead.  Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, he said, with thy whole heart and thy whole soul and thy whole mind.  This is the greatest of the commandments and the first.  And the second, its like, is this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself (Mt. 22:37-39).

 

Why do we love God?  “The reason we love God,” says St. Bernard, “is God himself” – meaning that we love God because he is the supreme and infinite goodness.  But why does charity include love of ourselves?  Why, because we are wearing God’s image and likeness; and since all men enjoy the same noble dignity, we love them too as we love ourselves – in other words, as devoted living likenesses of the godhead.

 

It is in this capacity, after all, that we belong to God, closely bound to him, lovingly dependent on him, so that he raises no objection to calling himself our Father, to counting us as his sons (cf. 1 Jn. 3:1-2).  It is in this capacity that we are capable of being essentially united to God by enjoying the possession of his supreme goodness and bliss.  It is in this capacity that we receive his grace, that our spirits are taken into partnership with his Holy Spirit, and that we are enabled in a sense to share the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4) – as St. Leo reminds us.

 

So it is, then, that the same charity which gives rise to acts of love of God also breeds love of our neighbour.  Exactly as Jacob saw a single ladder stretching from earth to heaven, a stairway for the angels to go up and come down (cf. Gen. 28:12), so we know that the one virtue of charity plays its part in loving dearly both God and our neighbour.  It lifts us up to union of soul with God; it brings us back again to loving companionship with those around us – always on the understanding, however, that we love our neighbour as wearing God’s image and likeness, as made for union with the divine goodness, to share in his grace and enjoy the possession of his glory.

 

Heaven knows, then, we should draw one another’s attention to the fact that each person we see is wearing God’s image and likeness!  We should embrace our neighbour, weep over him.  We should heap endless blessings upon his head.  And why? – out of love for him?  Oh dear, no; after all, we cannot tell whether, in himself, he deserves love or displeasure (cf. Eccl. 9:1).  Why, then? Out of love for God, of course! – for God, who fashioned him to his own image and likeness, and so made him fit to share in the divine goodness, grace and glory.  Out of love for God, I repeat: from whom he comes, to whom he will go, through whom he exists, in whom he dwells, for whom he lives, and whom he resembles in a most intimate way.

 

That is why charity not only many a time commands us to love our neighbour, but itself breeds and spreads this love in our human heart as its own image and likeness; for just as man wears God’s image, so does man’s charity towards his fellow-man wear the true likeness of man’s charity towards God.

 

Love of our neighbour, however, demands a treatise to itself.  I pray that mankind’s supreme lover may deign to inspire some saintly man to write it.  The measure of our love for the divine goodness of our Father in heaven, you see, rests in the perfection of our love for our brethren and companions on earth.

​

Back to Top

​