86. “My love is my gravity” (Augustine)
86. “MY LOVE IS MY GRAVITY” (AUGUSTINE)
I know love is good, and commanded; but how strong is it? Is it already the strongest desire, the lord of our life, or do we have to struggle to make it that?
Augustine says that all the passions are caused by love, since love yearning for the beloved object is desire, and having and enjoying it is joy (I-II,25,2). . . . All the other emotions of the soul are caused by love, as Augustine says (I-II,27,4). . . every agent, whatever it be, does every action from love of some kind (I-II,28,6).
We have to struggle to straighten out our hearts, but not to make the heart first, and central. That’s what “heart” means literally: the organ in the very center of the body, at the center of the circulatory system, the center of the body’s life. The heart spiritually is the will, not the feelings.
It is under our control. Feelings are not. The love Christ commands is the love we can have simply by choosing it, not the love we can’t control. How could what is not under our control be commanded?
Our job is not to make the heart beat, but to make it beat right. It’s always the heart, the first. All that we are is determined by what we love. That king is always on the throne; our job is to educate the king. He has the final authority; we have to direct it to good rather than evil.
Thus all good is rightly ordered love. To be good is to love (will) the good. And all evil is wrongly ordered love, disordered love. To be evil is to love the evil: to love evil things, or lesser goods more than greater goods: things more than people or self more than God. That wisdom is from Augustine, and St. Thomas is even more Augustinian than he is Aristotelian, on all the most important issues (though not on technical details or terminology).
Augustine writes, “Amor meus, pondus meum”, which means literally “My love [is] my gravity”, or my weight. Love pulls us. We go where our love takes us. Love is our spiritual gravity, our mass, our density—and our destiny. It is earth’s destiny to orbit the sun because it is drawn by the sun’s gravity into a stable orbit. We must do to God what the earth does to the sun. We must have a stable orbit around God, and not leave Him for the darkness of outer space. We do this by love, which is voluntary, unlike physical gravity.
Since all the other movements of the soul are caused by love, we can educate and convert our emotions by educating and converting our love. If we love God with all our heart and our neighbors as ourselves, everything else will follow. Everything. Hillel was once challenged to say the whole of Jewish law while standing on one foot. He said: “Love and hate in your neighbor what you love and hate in yourself. That is the law. All the rest is commentary.”
If our love is right, everything else will be right. Including our emotions. Love is, of course an emotion too, though it is more than that: it is first of all an act of the will, a choice. If our love is right, then everything will be right: our physical, external actions, our inner emotions, and our eternal destiny.
Even our thoughts. We think only if we want to, and we think about what we want to think about. Sin always begins with thinking about the fake joy the sin will bring us, thinking about Satan’s advertisement instead of God’s X-ray. Thinking and loving always causally depend on each other. You will understand God and others only if you love them; but you can love them only if you understand them. You can’t love x, the totally unknown. The more you love God, the more you will understand Him; and the more you understand Him, the more you will love Him.