Logos & Muse

N HER DUO OF POEMS FOR QUINQUAGESIMA SUNDAY (the first of them a son­net), Christina Ros­setti med­i­tates on what she calls “the law of love,” in con­trast to “all other laws”:

Love is alone the wor­thy law of love:
All other laws have pre­sup­posed a taint:
Love is the law from kin­dled saint to saint,
From lamb to lamb, from dove to answer­ing dove.
Love is the motive of all things that move
Har­mo­nious by free will with­out con­straint:
Love learns and teaches: love shall man acquaint
With all he lacks, which all his lack is love.
Because Love is the foun­tain, I dis­cern
The stream as love: for what but love should flow
From foun­tain Love? not bit­ter from the sweet!
I igno­rant, have I laid claim to know?
Oh, teach me, Love, such knowl­edge as is meet
For one to know who is fain to love and learn.

Piteous my rhyme is
What while I muse of love and pain,
Of love mis­spent, of love in vain,
Of love that is not loved again:
And is this all then?
As long as time is,
Love loveth. Time is but a span,
The dal­liance space of dying man:
And is this all immor­tals can?
The gain were small then.

Love loves for ever,
And finds a sort of joy in pain,
And gives with nought to take again,
And loves too well to end in vain:
Is the gain small then?
Love laughs at Never,
Out­lives our life, exceeds the span
Appointed to mere mor­tal man:
All which love is and does and can
Is all in all then.

Accord­ing to Peter Kreeft, in a talk he gave about C.S. Lewis’s Mere Chris­tian­ity, St. John the Apos­tle was often crit­i­cized by dis­ci­ples of his for being “too sim­ple.” “All you talk about is love,” they would say. His reply to them was, “That’s right. That’s all there is to talk about.” Christina Ros­setti would agree. She is, in my esti­ma­tion, the great­est Vic­to­rian poet; and I real­ize that that puts her ahead of Lord Ten­nyson, Robert Brown­ing, and Matthew Arnold. Yet if you read her poems from cover to cover–all one thou­sand pages–you will soon dis­cover that, like St. John, all she talks about is God and love. The final cou­plet of her Quin­qua­ges­ima poems could be a fit­ting epi­taph to her work: “All which love is and does and can / Is all in all then.”

But there is a very decep­tive sim­plic­ity in that. “Love is alone the wor­thy law of love,” Ros­setti begins; and here is why: “All other laws have pre­sup­posed a taint.” The entire his­tory of God and man is writ­ten in that first cou­plet. St. Paul says that very thing when he tells the Gala­tians the the law “was added because of trans­gres­sions” (Gal. 3:19) It is only because we are sin­ners that we need the law; it “presuppose[s] a taint,” in this case, the taint of orig­i­nal sin. Paul con­tin­ues: “If a law had been given which could make alive, then right­eous­ness would indeed be by the law” (v. 21). In other words, the law can reveal to us our taint, but it can’t remove it. Only Christ can do that; “the law,” Paul con­cludes (in the KJV ren­der­ing), “was our school­mas­ter to bring us to Christ” (v. 24). God, who is love (1 John 4:8), ful­fills the law (Rom. 10:4) and so removes our taint (Rom. 5:17). “All our lack is love,” Ros­setti puts it; all we lacked was Christ. What St. John and St. Paul say in the lan­guage of the­ol­ogy, Christina Ros­setti says in the lan­guage of poetry: “Love is alone the wor­thy law of love, / All other laws have pre­sup­posed a taint.”

The rea­son that love is the ful­fill­ment of the law is because all sin comes from a fail­ure to love. Christ explains this to the lawyer who asks him, “Teacher, which is the great com­mand­ment in the law?” Christ answers:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first com­mand­ment. And the sec­ond is like it, You shall love your neigh­bor as your­self. On these two com­mand­ments depend all the law and the prophets. (Matt. 22:36–40)

It is herein that we can under­stand the tra­di­tional Catholic divi­sion of the Ten Com­mand­ments into our duty toward God (the first of the two great com­mand­ments) and our duty toward our fel­low man (the sec­ond of the two great com­mand­ments). Our duty is love, and we sin to the extent that we with­hold any part of that love for what Fr. in his homily today called the orig­i­nal taint of Adam and Eve: pride and self-regard. Love is alone the wor­thy law of love.

And it is, as Christina Ros­setti con­tin­ues, “har­mo­nious by free will with­out con­straint.” It only has mean­ing to the extent that we choose it freely, uncon­strained by neces­sity. Ros­setti was no Calvin­ist. But still, the law of love is as absolute and strict as the Law of Moses; indeed, the demands are often more severe. When was the last time you read the Ser­mon on the Mount? If it has been some time, per­haps it might be a good prac­tice this Lent to read it slowly and medi­ate upon its demands–possibly even to do so before the Blessed Sacra­ment in Eucharis­tic Ado­ra­tion. Jesus reminds us that the law is to be ful­filled, not relaxed:

Think not that I have come to abol­ish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abol­ish them but to ful­fil them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accom­plished. Who­ever then relaxes one of the least of these com­mand­ments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the king­dom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the king­dom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your right­eous­ness exceeds that of the scribes and Phar­isees, you will never enter the king­dom of heaven. (Matt. 5:17–20)

Christ goes on to remind us that “thou shalt not kill” has a much stricter appli­ca­tion than a mere surface-level read­ing would sug­gest. The pro­hi­bi­tion against killing includes even a pro­hi­bi­tion against anger and insults–even a pro­hi­bi­tion against call­ing some­one a fool. If there is dis­cord between you and your brother, Christ says, the neces­sity of being rec­on­ciled is so impor­tant that you should even delay bring­ing your gift to the altar in order that you first make amends (Matt. 5:21–26).

The com­mand­ment “thou shalt not com­mit adul­tery” has a much stricter appli­ca­tion than not hav­ing sex out­side of mar­riage. It even includes “look[ing] at a woman lust­fully”; even the desire is sin­ful. And the com­mand­ment is so strict that Christ tells us–no doubt with some hyperbole–“If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away” (adul­tery includes voyeurism); He tells us, “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away” (adul­tery includes mas­tur­ba­tion) (Matt. 5:27–30).

Christ con­tin­ues in the same spirit for sev­eral chap­ters, defin­ing with very strict bound­aries the law con­cern­ing oath-taking, retal­i­a­tion, love for your fellow-men (includ­ing ene­mies), alms­giv­ing, prayer, fast­ing, anx­i­ety, judg­ing, and pro­fa­na­tion. He makes them more, not less, strict. One could say that his point is not that we could pos­si­bly keep such strict watch over our own thoughts and behav­iors, but rather to remind us of how help­less we are before the strict­ness of the law of love; and there is a point in that. But another point can be made, too, which is that Christ is show­ing us that the law is not merely a set of arbi­trary pro­hi­bi­tions; it stems from a pos­i­tive and absolute com­mand to love both God and neighbor.

HESE ARE IMPORTANT THOUGHTS to con­sider for the last Sun­day before Lent begins: Not just “what will I give up?” but “how have I failed?” Over the forty days to come, I will spend some time in med­i­ta­tion on all the ways in which I have failed the law of love. For the prac­tices of fast­ing and alms­giv­ing are, at their heart, meant to direct us away from self-love and toward love of God and love of neigh­bor. On Ash Wednes­day, when we receive the sign of the cross in ashes on our head, the priest says, “Remem­ber, O man, that thou art dust, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Christina Ros­setti, in the sec­ond of her two poems for Quin­qua­ges­ima, puts it this way: “Time is but a span / The dal­liance space of dying man.”

There is only so much time, and then we stand at the par­tic­u­lar judg­ment. The Psalmist writes, “As for man, his days are like grass; he flour­ishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.” Then he adds: “But the stead­fast love of the Lord is from ever­last­ing to ever­last­ing” (Psalm 103:15–17), a sen­ti­ment Ros­setti also echoes when she says that love “exceeds the span / Appointed to mere mor­tal man.” In striv­ing to keep the law of love, we reach toward our eter­nal life, our own res­ur­rec­tion day, and at our par­tic­u­lar judg­ment hear the words, “Well done, thou good and faith­ful ser­vant” (Matt. 25:23). Through the law of love, we step beyond what Ros­setti calls our “piteous rhyme” into the very life of Christ.

My favorite line in these two poems–possibly my favorite line in all of Christina Ros­setti; pos­si­bly my favorite line in all the poetry I have read–is the third line of the son­net: “Love is the law from kin­dled saint to saint.” The imagery of being on fire appeals to me because of the allu­sion to the seraphim of Isa­iah chap­ter 6, whose love for God is so com­plete that they are lit­er­ally enkin­dled by it; the min­is­ters of God, as David says else­where, are a “flam­ing fire” (Psalm 104:4). But it appeals to me more because of the–very purgatorial–concept of hav­ing one’s pride and self-love burned away for love of God. These are the saints: the ones who have over­come the self and its lusts and have given every­thing up for love of God, even to the point (as with Padre Pio, or St. Cather­ine of Siena) of receiv­ing the mor­ti­fi­ca­tion of the flesh in the stig­mata; or even–as with St. Max­i­m­il­ian Kolbe–to the point of death.

As a lover of lan­guage and of poetry, I also love refrains; my refrain through­out Lent this year, as I strive to live more fully the “wor­thy law of love,” will be that one: “Love is the law from kin­dled saint to saint.”

Photo Credit: (1) Por­trait of Christina Ros­setti, by her brother Dante Gabriel Ros­setti. Por­trait with chalk, 1866. Pub­lic domain. (2) St. Cather­ine of Siena, by Gio­vanni Bat­tista Tiepolo. Oil on can­vas, ca. 1746. Pub­lic domain.