The Hidden Life of Love and How Its Fruits Disclose It

If conceited shrewdness were right—proud as it is of escaping deception—that nothing should be believed unless the bodily eye can see it, then belief in love would be the first thing one ought to relinquish. And if one did so out of fear, in order not to be deceived, would that not itself be deception? Deception, after all, takes many forms. One can be deceived by believing the false; but surely failure to believe the true also deceives. Appearance can deceive; so can the appearance of shrewdness, the flattering conceit that regards itself as wholly protected from deception. Which deception, then, is the more dangerous? Whose cure is more doubtful: the cure of one who does not see, or of one who sees and nevertheless does not see? Which is harder: waking someone asleep, or waking someone who, while awake, dreams that they are awake? Which spectacle is sadder? Is it the one that moves us at once and unconditionally to tears—the person unhappily deceived in love? Or is it the sight that could in one sense tempt us to laughter—the self-deceived person, whose foolish confidence that they have escaped deception is certainly ludicrous and laughable—if that very ludicrousness were not an even stronger expression of horror, marking them as unworthy of tears?

Nothing is more terrible than shutting oneself out of love through self-deception. It is an eternal loss, beyond redress in time or eternity. Someone deceived in love still remains related to love, whatever form the deception takes; the mistake was to suppose love present where it was not. The self-deceiver, by contrast, has barred themselves from love and goes on doing so.

People also speak of being deceived by life, or in life; but the person who, through self-deception, deprived themselves of living has suffered an irreplaceable loss. Even someone deceived by life throughout their life may find abundant compensation stored up by eternity. But the self-deceived person has prevented themselves from gaining what is eternal. The person who, precisely through their love, became a victim of human deception—what have they really lost when in eternity it becomes clear that love remains while the deception has ceased? But the person who shrewdly deceived themselves by cleverly walking into cleverness’s own snare—even if throughout their life they congratulated themselves in their delusion, what have they not lost when in eternity it becomes clear that they deceived themselves?

For in temporality a human being may perhaps succeed in doing without love; they may perhaps get through time without discovering the self-deception; they may perhaps succeed—terrible thought—in remaining in a delusion, proud of being in it. But in eternity they cannot do without love and cannot avoid discovering that they have squandered everything. How serious existence is, and how most terrible, precisely when, as punishment, it allows the self-willed person to rule themselves, so that they are permitted to live on, proud of being deceived, until one day they are permitted to learn the truth: that they deceived themselves for eternity.

Truly, eternity will not be mocked. It does not even need to use force; in its omnipotence it uses a little mockery to punish the presumptuous person terribly. What, then, links the temporal order with eternity? Love alone: it is there before all things and endures after everything else has passed. But precisely because love is the bond of eternity, and precisely because temporality and eternity are unlike in kind, love can seem a burden to the earthly shrewdness of temporality; and in temporality it can seem an immense relief to the sensuous person to cast off this bond of eternity.

The self-deceived person certainly thinks they can comfort themselves, indeed that they have more than conquered. Their foolish delusion conceals from them the utter desolation of their life. Granted, they have “stopped grieving”; but what good is that, when salvation would require them to begin grieving in earnest over their own condition? They may even imagine themselves able to offer consolation to others who have been betrayed by unfaithfulness. But what madness, when someone who has themselves suffered loss where the eternal is concerned wants to heal someone who, at worst, is sick unto death. The self-deceived person may even think, in a strange self-contradiction, that they sympathise with the unhappily deceived. But if you attend to their consoling speech and healing wisdom, then you will know love by the fruits: the bitterness of mockery, the sharpness of calculating good sense, the poisonous spirit of mistrust, the biting cold of hardheartedness. By these fruits it will be recognisable that there is no love within.

By the fruits one knows the tree: “grapes are not gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles” (Matthew 7:16). If you try to gather them there, you will not only gather in vain; the thorns themselves will show you that you gather in vain. For every tree is known by its own fruit.

Two fruits may resemble one another very closely: one wholesome and pleasant-tasting, the other acrid and poisonous. At times the poisonous one is highly palatable, while the wholesome one tastes somewhat bitter. Love, too, is known by the fruit that is its own. A mistake must arise either from failure to distinguish the fruits or from faulty discernment in the individual case.

So it is when a person mistakes for love what is really self-love: when they loudly declare that they cannot live without the beloved, but will hear nothing of love’s task and demand, which is to deny oneself and give up this self-love within erotic love. Or so it is when a person mistakenly gives the name of love to weak indulgence, ruinous whining, harmful solidarity, vain display, the alliances of morbid self-absorption, the bribes of flattery, the appearances of the moment, or merely temporal relations.

One flower is called “the flower of eternity”. Strangely, there is also a so-called “everlasting flower”; like flowers that perish, it comes into bloom only during a particular season of the year. To call this second one a flower of eternity—what an error! Yet while it is in bloom, its appearance can readily deceive. Still, each tree is known by its own fruit, as is love; and Christian love is known by the fruit proper to it: it holds eternity’s truth within it.

Every other love is perishable. Humanly speaking, it may finish flowering early and change, or it may lovingly preserve itself through the season of temporality; either way it does no more than bloom. Herein lie its frailty and melancholy: an hour or seventy years, it is still only a flowering. Christian love, however, is eternal. A person with self-understanding would never speak of Christian love as something that blossoms; nor would a poet with self-understanding celebrate it in verse. Whatever a poet is to sing must possess the melancholy that is the riddle of the poet’s own life: it must blossom—and, alas, must pass away. Christian love abides, and precisely in abiding it is. Whatever passes away comes into flower, and whatever comes into flower passes away; but what truly is is not for song. It must be believed and it must be lived.

Yet when one says that love is known by the fruits, one also says thereby that love itself, in a certain sense, is hidden, and precisely for that reason is to be known only by the fruits that reveal it. This is indeed the case. Every life, and so also love’s life, is hidden as such, but manifest in something else. The plant’s life is hidden; the fruit is the revelation. Thought has a hidden life; speech is the expression that discloses it. The holy words just read therefore speak of two things, even though only one is spoken of openly. One thought is plainly contained in the statement, while another lies hidden within it.

Let us now set both thoughts before us for reflection, as we speak of:

The Hidden Life of Love and How Its Fruits Disclose It.

What is the source from which love comes? What are its origin and its wellspring? Where does it have its abiding place, from which it goes out? This place is hidden; it is in concealment. Somewhere in a human being’s innermost lies the place from which love’s life proceeds, for “from the heart life goes forth”. But you cannot see it. However deeply you press inward, the origin withdraws into remoteness and concealment. Even at your furthest inward point, it always remains, as it were, a little further in, like the spring’s source, which is further away just when you are nearest to it.

Love issues from this place by many routes; none of them, however, allows you to press back into the hiddenness of its coming-to-be. God inhabits a light from which every world-illuminating ray goes out; yet no one can penetrate back by those ways to behold God, for the ways made by light become darkness when one faces the light itself. So love has its dwelling in concealment, hidden in the innermost.

A spring’s welling flow, with the soft persuasion of its murmur, entices—almost implores—a person to follow its course instead of intruding out of curiosity to find the source and expose its secret; the sunbeam invites a person, with its help, to behold the glory of the world, yet gives warning by striking with blindness the presumptuous person who turns about with inquisitive audacity to discover light’s origin; faith beckons, offering to accompany a human being along the road of life, yet petrifies the overbold person who turns back, presuming to comprehend: in the same way, love wishes and prays that its concealed source and the hidden life within the innermost should remain a secret. No one is to intrude upon it with that same inquisitive audacity and disturb it in order to see what cannot be seen; through such curiosity, however, one can forfeit the joy and blessing that come from it.

Suffering is always most painful when a physician is compelled to penetrate by cutting apart the body’s nobler, and for that very reason hidden, parts. The suffering is likewise most painful—and most ruinous—when someone, rather than rejoicing in love through its manifestations, seeks pleasure in probing love to its depths—that is, in destroying it.

Love’s hidden life is in the innermost, beyond fathoming, and in turn has an unfathomable connection with existence as a whole. As the still lake is grounded deep in hidden springs that no eye has seen, so human love is grounded more deeply still—in God’s love. If there were no spring at the bottom, if God were not love, neither the little lake nor human love would exist. As the still lake has its dark ground in the deep spring, so human love has its mysterious ground in God’s love. The lake invites you to contemplate it, yet its dark reflection prevents you from seeing through it. In the same way, the mysterious origin of human love in God’s love forbids sight of its ground. Whenever you suppose you have seen that ground, a reflection has deceived you: what merely conceals the deeper ground has appeared to be the ground itself. Think of the cleverly made lid of a secret compartment: precisely so that it may hide the compartment completely, the lid looks like the bottom. In just this way, what only covers a greater depth deceptively appears to be the bottommost ground.

Thus love’s life remains hidden; yet its hidden life is movement in itself and contains eternity. However placid the lake may lie, it is in truth flowing water—for is there not a spring at the bottom? In the same way love, however still within its concealment, continues to flow. A lake may dry up should its spring cease; love’s life, by contrast, possesses an eternal spring. This life is fresh and everlasting. No chill can turn it to ice, so great is its inward warmth; no heat can make it languid, so fresh is its coolness. Yet hidden it is. When the Gospel speaks of this life’s recognisability by its fruits, the meaning above all is not that we should unsettle or disturb its concealment, or surrender ourselves to observation and self-examination bent on discovery, which only “grieves the spirit” and retards growth.

Yet this hidden life of love can be recognised by its fruits; indeed, love needs to be capable of recognition by them. O, how beautiful that the same thing which signifies the utmost wretchedness also signifies the highest wealth! Need—to feel a need and to be needy—how reluctant a person is to have this said of them. And yet we say something of the highest order when we say that the poet has a need to make poetry, the orator a need to speak, and the young woman a need to love. Ah, how rich was the life even of the neediest person who ever lived, provided they had love, compared with the sole truly poor person: the one who passed through life without ever needing anything.

The young woman’s greatest wealth is precisely that she needs the beloved. For the devout person, the highest and truest riches lie in needing God. Put the question to them. Ask the young woman whether she could be just as happy if she were equally able to do without the beloved; ask the devout person whether they can understand, or can wish, that they might equally well do without God. So also with love’s recognisability by its fruits. When the relation is right, this recognisability is said to “press forward”; once again the expression signifies wealth.

It would indeed be the greatest torment if love itself could harbour this contradiction: commanding love to be kept hidden, commanding it to be made unrecognisable. Would that not resemble a plant which felt within itself the life and blessing of luxuriant growth but dared not let them become known, and so had to keep the blessing as though it were a curse—alas, keep it secret while it inexplicably withered? But matters do not stand so. Even if one definite manifestation of love, even a shoot of the heart, had for love’s sake to be forced back into painful concealment, the same life of love would find another manifestation and would still be recognised by its fruits. O silent martyrs of unhappy erotic love! What you endured in having, for love’s sake, to hide a love did indeed remain secret and never became known. So great was the love that made this sacrifice. Nevertheless its fruits made your love known; and perhaps the fruits ripened in the quiet fire of hidden pain were precisely the most precious.

The tree is recognised by its fruits. It can indeed also be recognised from its leaves, but fruit remains the essential mark. Suppose, then, that the leaves led you to identify a tree as one particular kind, but in fruiting season you discovered that it bore nothing: you would know it was not really the tree it had presented itself as through the leaves. The same is true of love’s recognisability. The apostle John says (1 John 3:18), “My children, let us not love with word or tongue, but in deed and truth.” With what could this love in words and phrases be compared more aptly than with the tree’s leaves? Words, expressions, and the inventions of language may serve as marks of love, but the evidence is uncertain.

Spoken by one person, the same word may be full of meaning and entirely trustworthy; spoken by another, it may amount to no more than the indistinct rustle of foliage. From one mouth the word may resemble the “blessed nourishing grain”; from another it has the sterile loveliness of a leaf. Yet this does not license you to hold back words, any more than you should hide an outward stirring when it is genuine. Doing so may itself be an unloving wrong, like withholding what another person is owed. Your friend, your beloved, your child—or anyone else who is the object of your love—has a claim upon love’s expression in words as well, when love genuinely moves you inwardly. That inward stirring is not your property but the other person’s; its expression is what they are owed, for in the stirring you belong to the person who moves you and become conscious of belonging to them.

When the heart is full, you must not press your lips together and silently injure the other, enviously and loftily depriving that person of what is due. You must let the mouth speak from the heart’s abundance. You must not be ashamed of your feeling, and still less of honestly giving each person what is theirs. But we must not love in words and phrases, nor should we take these as proof of love. Rather, from this sort of fruit—or from the fact that there are only leaves—we should recognise that love has not been given its time to grow. Sirach warns (6:4), “Devour your leaves, and you shall lose your fruits and leave yourself standing as a dry tree.” When words and phrases are love’s only fruit, they show that a person has stripped off the leaves prematurely and so will bear no fruit—not to mention the more terrible possibility that words and phrases sometimes disclose the deceiver. Immature and deceptive love, then, is recognisable by having words and phrases as its only fruit.

Some plants, we are told, have to “form a heart”. The same must be said of human love: if it is truly to bear fruit, and thus to be recognised by the fruit, it must first form a heart. Love certainly proceeds from the heart; but let us not hastily forget the eternal truth that love forms the heart. Every person has the fleeting stirrings of an indeterminate heart, but possessing a heart by nature in this sense differs infinitely from forming one in eternity’s sense. And how rare it may be for the eternal to gain such mastery over a person that love becomes eternally established within them—or forms a heart.

Only when this has happened can love bear its own fruit and thereby become recognisable. For just as love itself cannot be seen, which is why one must believe in it, neither can any particular expression make it known unconditionally and directly. There is no word in human language—not one, not even the holiest—of which we can say: when a person uses this word, love within them is thereby proved without qualification. Indeed, one person may disclose love by saying one thing while another discloses love by saying its opposite. Conversely, identical words may disclose love in one speaker and its absence in another.

Nor is there any deed—not one, not even the best—about which we dare say without qualification: whoever does this proves love by doing it. Everything depends on how the deed is done. Certain deeds are, of course, called “works of love” in a special sense. But giving alms, visiting the widow, and clothing the naked do not by themselves prove or reveal a person’s love. Works of love can be performed unlovingly, even in a manner governed by self-love; when that happens, the deed bearing the name “work of love” is no work belonging to love.

You have surely seen this sorrowful thing often enough; perhaps at times you have caught yourself in it. Every honest person will admit as much, precisely because they are not so unloving and hardened that they overlook what is essential, becoming so intent on what they do that they forget how they do it. Ah, Luther is said to have said that not once in his life had he prayed wholly undisturbed by a distracting thought. In the same way, honest people will admit that, however often, willingly, and gladly they have given alms, frailty has always entered in: perhaps some chance impression distracted them; perhaps they acted with capricious partiality; perhaps they sought to buy themselves free; perhaps their face was turned away—but not in the biblical sense; perhaps the left hand remained unaware—but only through thoughtlessness; perhaps their own sorrow occupied them instead of the poor person’s; perhaps they sought relief by almsgiving rather than seeking to relieve poverty. Thus the deed called a “work of love” failed, in the highest sense, to become a work belonging to love.

Thus, how the word is spoken and, above all, how it is meant; how the deed is done: this is decisive in determining and knowing love by its fruits. Yet here too there is no particular “how” of which it can be said unconditionally that it proves love is present, or proves that love is absent.

And yet it remains established that love is to be known by its fruits. The sacred words of the text are not meant to set us busily judging one another. Rather, they admonish the single individual—you, my listener, and me—so that each will not let love become fruitless but will labour for it to be capable of recognition by its fruits, whether those fruits are recognised by others or not. The individual must not labour so that love becomes known by its fruits, but must labour so that it can be known by them. While labouring, each person must watch themselves, lest love’s being recognised become more important than the one essential matter: that love has the fruits and consequently can be known.

One thing is the prudent advice that may be given about caution against deception by others. Something else, and something far more important, is the Gospel’s summons to the single individual: take to heart that the tree is known by its fruits, and that the tree to which the Gospel compares someone is you—or your love. As shrewd discourse would phrase it, the Gospel does not say, “You—or people in general—are to recognise the tree by the fruits.” It says, “The tree is to be recognised by the fruits.” Unfolded, it says: you, reader of this Gospel sentence—you are the tree. The prophet Nathan added to his parable, “You are the man”; the Gospel needs no such addition, for the saying’s grammatical form and its very character as Gospel already contain it. The Gospel’s divine authority never makes one human being the audience for discourse about another—not you, my listener, for discourse about me, nor me for discourse about you. No: when the Gospel speaks, its address is to the single individual. It does not take us human beings—you and me—as its topic; it addresses us, you and me. Its subject is love’s recognisability in the fruits it bears.

Suppose, then, that someone—overwrought and fanatical, or hypocritical—were to teach that love is a feeling so hidden that it is too exalted to bear fruit, or hidden in such a way that fruits prove neither for nor against it—indeed, even poisonous fruits prove nothing. We would call to mind the Gospel’s words: “The tree is to be known by the fruits.” We would do so not to attack such people but to defend ourselves against them, remembering that what holds for every Gospel word holds here: “the one who acts accordingly is like a man who builds upon a rock”. When the downpour comes and destroys the exalted frailty of that delicately sensitive love, when the winds blow and beat against hypocrisy’s web, then true love will be recognisable by its fruits.

Truly, love is to be recognisable by its fruits; but it surely does not follow that you must assume the role of the expert. A tree, too, is to be known by its fruits; yet it does not follow that one tree should undertake to pass judgement on the rest. Quite the reverse: the task of each separate tree is to—bear fruit. A person is to fear neither the one who can kill the body nor the hypocrite. Only One is to be feared: God; and there is only one of whom a person should be afraid: themselves.

Truly, no hypocrite has ever deceived one who, in fear and trembling before God, was afraid of themselves. But whoever becomes busy hunting hypocrites, whether the hunt succeeds or not, must take care that this activity is not itself hypocrisy; such discoveries are scarcely fruits of love. True fruit-bearing love, by contrast, discloses any hypocrite who draws near—without the loving person’s willing or seeking it—or at least puts the hypocrite to shame. The loving person may remain unaware of this. The poorest protection against hypocrisy is cleverness; indeed, it is hardly protection at all, but rather a dangerous proximity to hypocrisy. The best protection is love. Love is not merely a defence: it is a gulf that swallows, and through all eternity it has nothing to do with hypocrisy. This too is a fruit by which love becomes known: it keeps the loving person from falling into the hypocrite’s snare.

Even granted that love is recognisable by its fruits, let us not, in any relation of love between us, demand impatiently, mistrustfully, and judgementally to see those fruits again and again. This discourse began by developing the claim that one must believe in love; otherwise one does not even notice its existence. The discourse now circles back to that beginning and repeats: believe in love! This is both the first and the last thing to be said about love when one is to know it. At its first occurrence, the claim opposed the brazen rationality that would deny love’s existence. Now, after the recognisability of love by its fruits has been developed, it opposes the morbid, anxious, exacting narrow-heartedness which, in petty and wretched mistrust, insists upon seeing the fruits.

Do not forget: it would be a beautiful, a noble, a holy fruit by which love in you became recognisable if another person’s love bore inferior fruit and your own love enabled you to regard theirs as fairer than it was. If mistrust can indeed see something as less than it is, love can also see something as greater than it is.

Do not forget that even when love’s fruits give you joy, when through them you know that love dwells in another person, believing in love is nevertheless more blessed still. Here is a new expression of love’s depth: having learnt to know love by its fruits, one returns to the beginning, and returns to it as to the highest—to believe in love. The fruits do indeed make love’s life manifest; yet that life exceeds any single fruit and exceeds the sum of all its fruits at any one moment. The final, most blessed, unconditionally convincing sign is therefore love itself, known and recognised by the love present in another. What is like is known by like alone. Only one who abides in love is able to know love, just as that person’s love is itself capable of being known.