Our Duty to Love the People We See

1 Joh. IV, 20. Dersom Nogen siger: jeg elsker Gud, og hader sin Broder, han er en Løgner; thi hvo, som ikke elsker sin Broder, som han haver seet, hvorledes kan han elske Gud, som han ikke haver seet?

1 John 4:20. If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for if he does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?

How deeply the need for love is rooted in human nature! The first observation, if we may put it this way, ever made about a human being was made about the first human being by the only One who could truly make it: God. It says precisely this. Holy Scripture tells us: “God said, It is not good for the human being to be alone.” The woman was then taken from the man’s side and given to him as companion — for love and shared life first take something from a person before they give.

In every age, anyone who has reflected deeply upon human nature has recognised this need for companionship. Again and again people have lamented the solitary person and portrayed the pain and misery of solitude. Again and again, wearied by corrupt, noisy, and confusing social life, they have let thought wander to some solitary place — only to learn once more to long for company. They have continually returned to God’s first thought about the human being.

The busy, teeming crowd offers both too much company and too little, and a person grows weary of it. The cure is not to discover that God’s thought was mistaken. No: the cure is to learn the first thing again from the beginning, to understand oneself as someone who longs for company. This need is so deeply rooted in human nature that nothing has changed and nothing new has been discovered since the creation of the first human being. The one original observation has simply been confirmed in countless ways, taking different forms from generation to generation in expression, presentation, and turns of thought.

This need is so deeply rooted in human nature, so essential to being human, that even our Lord Jesus Christ felt the human need to love and to be loved by one particular person. He was one with the Father, in love’s communion with the Father and the Spirit, and he loved the whole human race. He is the God-Man, eternally different from every human being; yet he was also truly human and was tested in everything human. His experience of this need is itself evidence that it belongs essentially to humanity.

Christ was an actual human being and could therefore share in everything human. He was not an airy figure beckoning from a cloud, unable or unwilling to understand what happens to a person in human life. He had compassion, in a wholly human way, upon the hungry crowd, for he had himself hungered in the wilderness. In the same way he could share our need to love and to be loved.

John’s Gospel describes this (21:15 ff.): “Jesus says to Simon Peter, ‘Simon, son of Jonas, do you love me more than these?’ Peter says to him, ‘Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.’” How moving this is. Christ’s question, “Do you love me more than these?”, sounds almost like a plea for love, spoken by someone for whom it matters to be loved above all others. Peter himself recognises this and also the disparity between them, like the disparity when John was to baptise Christ. He therefore answers not merely “Yes,” but “Lord, you know that I love you.” His answer acknowledges the disparity.

In an ordinary human relationship, a person may know that he is loved because he has already heard the “yes” he longs to hear and therefore wishes to hear again. Or he may know it from something other than that bare “yes”, though he still returns to it, longing to hear it. Either way, Christ can be said to know that Peter loves him in a different sense.

Still, Christ asks a second time, “Simon, son of Jonas, do you love me?” Peter answers, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” What else can he say? The disparity only becomes more obvious when the question is repeated. “Christ says to him a third time, ‘Simon, son of Jonas, do you love me?’ Peter was grieved because he said to him a third time, ‘Do you love me?’ And he said to him, ‘Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.’” Peter no longer says “yes”, nor does he appeal merely to what Christ may have learned about his character: “You know that I love you.” Instead he says, “You know all things; you know that I love you.” Thus Peter no longer answers “yes”; he almost shudders at the disparity. A “yes” ordinarily answers a real question and tells the questioner something new, or makes him more certain than before. But how can the one who knows all things learn anything or be made more certain by another person’s assurance?

Yet if Christ cannot receive such assurance, he cannot love in a fully human way. This is love’s riddle: no certainty is higher than the beloved’s renewed assurance. Humanly speaking, to stand unconditionally certain of being loved is not to love, for it places one above the equal relation of friend to friend. What a fearful contradiction: the one who is God loves humanly. Human love loves one particular person and wishes to be the one whom that person loves most.

Why, then, was Peter grieved by the third question? Between two human beings in love’s equal relation, asking a third time is a fresh joy, and answering a third time is a fresh joy. If a question is repeated too often, it may instead grieve because it suggests mistrust. But when the one who knows everything finds it necessary to ask three times, Peter may think that Christ knows his love is not strong, inward, or ardent enough — Peter, after all, denied him three times. Surely the Lord cannot ask because he himself needs to hear the “yes” for a third time. That thought exceeds human strength; even when permitted, it seems to forbid itself.

And yet, how human it is. Before the high priests who condemned him to death, and before Pilate who held his life in his hand, Christ had not one word to answer. But he asks three times whether he is loved. He asks whether Peter loves him “more than these”.

Love is so deeply rooted in human nature and belongs so essentially to humanity — yet people so often invent evasions to escape this blessedness. They devise deceptions in order to deceive themselves, or make themselves unhappy. Sometimes the evasion wears the form of melancholy: a person sighs over humanity and his own misfortune in finding no one to love. It is always easier to sigh over the world and one’s misfortune than to beat one’s breast and sigh over oneself. Sometimes self-deception becomes accusation: people are said not to be worth loving. One “sighs against” them, for it is always easier to accuse than to stand accused. Sometimes it takes the form of proud self-satisfaction, which claims to search in vain for anyone worthy of it. It is easier to prove one’s excellence by being fastidious about everyone else than by being strict with oneself.

Yet all such people agree that their condition is a misfortune and that something is wrong. What is wrong if not their searching and rejecting? They do not hear that their words mock them. To say that one cannot find any person to love is to confess that one is entirely without love. Is love something to be found outside oneself? I had thought that to love was to bring love with you. A person who brings love when seeking its object—for otherwise it is untrue that he is seeking an object for his love—will readily find that object; and the greater the love within him, the more readily he will find the other person lovable. To love someone despite weaknesses, faults, and imperfections is not yet perfection. Perfection is to find that person lovable despite and together with those weaknesses, faults, and imperfections.

Consider food. It is one thing fastidiously to eat only the most exquisite dish, prepared in the finest way, and perhaps even then to discover some fault in it. It is another not merely to eat a plain dish but to find it the most excellent, because the task is not to refine one’s fastidiousness but to transform oneself and one’s taste.

Or imagine two artists. The first says: “I have travelled widely and looked all over the world, but nowhere have I found a person worth painting. No face has been so perfect an image of beauty that I could bring myself to draw it. Every face has some little fault, so my search has been in vain.” Does this prove that he is a great artist? The other says: “I do not really call myself an artist and I have never travelled abroad. I have stayed among the small circle of people nearest to me. Yet I have never found a face so insignificant or faulty that I could not draw out a more beautiful side and discover some radiance within it. I take delight in the art I practise, which satisfies me, though I make no claim to be an artist.” Is he not the true artist? He brought something with him and found on the spot what the travelled artist found nowhere — perhaps because that artist did not bring the necessary something. Thus the second of the two was the artist.

How sad if art, whose purpose is to beautify life, became a curse upon it and merely made the fastidious discovery that none of us is beautiful. Sadder and more confused still if love became a curse whose only achievement was to show that none of us is worth loving. Love should instead be recognised by its being loving enough to find something lovable in us all — and therefore loving enough to love us all.

It is a sad and all too common inversion to speak endlessly about what love’s object must be like in order to be lovable, rather than asking what love must be like in order to be love. This occurs not only in daily life. How often even someone who calls himself a poet makes his whole achievement consist in a refined, self-indulgent, and genteel fastidiousness. Inhumanly he learns to reject and reject wherever love is concerned, and takes it as his task to initiate others into all the ugly secrets of pickiness.

That anyone should trouble to teach this — and that so many should be eager and curious to learn it! They acquire knowledge that serves only to embitter life for themselves and others. How many things in life would have seemed beautiful, or at least more beautiful, had we never been taught otherwise. Once initiated into the contamination of fastidiousness, how difficult it is to regain what has been lost: the God-given endowment of good nature and love that fundamentally belongs to every human being.

If no one else can or will guide us rightly here, an apostle always can. The right way enables us both to do justice to others and to make ourselves happy. We have therefore chosen these words of the Apostle John: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for if he does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?” Gladly taking up this task, we shall make these words the subject of our consideration and speak of

our duty to love the people we see—

not in the sense that we are speaking about loving every person we see, since that is love for the neighbour, which has already been discussed. We mean the duty, within the actual world, to find the people whom we may love in a special way and, in loving them, to love the people we truly see. Once this is a duty, the task is not to find a lovable object. It is to find lovable the person already given to us or chosen by us, and to go on finding that person lovable however he or she may change.

First, however, let us raise a small difficulty about the apostolic words that have been read. Earthly cleverness, conceited perhaps in its own acuteness, might devise the objection whether or not anyone has actually made it. When the Apostle says, “If someone does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?”, the clever person might object that this is a deceptive turn of thought. By seeing his brother, he has satisfied himself that this brother is not lovable. If he does not love someone whom he can see does not deserve love, how can that prevent him from loving the God he has not seen? Yet the Apostle does think that it prevents him. By “his brother” he is certainly not referring only to one particular person, but to the love of human beings as such.

When someone claims to love the Invisible but proves not to love visible people, the Apostle enters a divine challenge to the credibility of that claim. It may appear exaltedly religious to express one’s exclusive love for the Invisible by loving no visible person. But this is human religious enthusiasm under God’s judgement, even when it is not hypocrisy. The matter is simple. A person must begin by loving the Invisible, God, for in this way he learns what love is. But whether he actually loves the Invisible is shown precisely by his loving the brother he sees. The more he loves the Invisible, the more he will love the people he sees—not the other way round, as though rejecting more visible people meant loving the Invisible more. In that case God has been turned into something unreal, a product of the imagination.

Only a hypocrite or deceiver seeking an escape could devise this, or else someone who falsifies God as though God jealously wanted love kept for himself. The blessed God is merciful and always, as it were, directs us away from himself: “If you wish to love me, then love the people you see. What you do to them, you do to me.” God is too exalted to receive a person’s love directly, still less to delight in what a religious enthusiast finds gratifying. If someone declares “Corban”—dedicated to God—the gift with which he could have helped his parents, that does not please God. To show that the gift is dedicated to God, give it away with God in mind. To show that your life is dedicated to God’s service, let it serve human beings, always with God in mind. God is not one party within existence demanding a private share. He demands everything; but when you bring it, you immediately receive, so to speak, the forwarding direction that tells you where it must next be delivered. God demands nothing for himself, though he demands everything from you. Rightly understood, then, the Apostle’s words lead directly to our subject.

If it is our duty to love the people we see, then above all we must abandon every imaginary and overwrought idea of a dream-world where love’s object is supposedly to be sought and found. We must sober up and gain actuality and truth by finding and remaining in the actual world as the task assigned to us.

The most dangerous evasion in love is to want to love only the Invisible, or what one has not seen. This evasion soars so high that it flies completely over actuality. It is so intoxicating that it readily tempts us and mistakes itself for the very highest and most perfect kind of love. People seldom have the effrontery to speak ill of love. Far more common is the deception by which they talk so rapturously about loving and about love that they cheat themselves out of ever actually loving. The cause lies much deeper than we think; otherwise one confusion could not have become so firmly fixed—the habit of calling a misfortune what is really guilt: the failure to find anyone to love. This prevents people still further from finding someone, for once they recognised the failure as their own guilt, they would surely find the person.

We generally imagine love as admiration’s open eye, searching for excellences and perfections. Then we complain that our search is fruitless. We need not decide whether each person is right about this—whether the lovable excellences and perfections being sought can in fact be found, or whether seeking has been confused with fastidiousness. We will not argue within that conception, because the conception itself is an error. Love is instead the closed eye of forbearance and gentleness, which does not see deficiencies and imperfections.

The difference between these two conceptions is fundamental. It is a world of difference, a complete reversal. Only the second is true; the first is an error. Error never stops of its own accord. It leads us farther and farther astray, making the return to truth increasingly difficult. The path into error is easy to find, but the way back is hard—like the legendary Mountain of Pleasure somewhere upon earth, from which no one who found the way in could find the way out again. A person who ventures into the world with a mistaken idea of love searches, believing that he is searching for love’s object, but also believing that his search is fruitless. He does not change his conception. Enriched instead by fastidiousness’s varied knowledge, he grows more fastidious and continues what he takes to be a fruitless search.

It never occurs to him that the fault may lie in himself or in his mistaken idea. The more refined his fastidiousness becomes, the more highly he thinks of himself and of his idea’s perfection. Does it not show him clearly how imperfect people are—and surely only perfection could reveal that! He remains assured that this is not his fault and that no evil or hateful intention motivates him: after all, he is searching for love. Far be it from him to abandon love when he feels so vividly that his conception is becoming more and more exaltedly enthusiastic. And what could be more enthusiastic than an error?

He has not arrested the error. Quite the opposite: with its help he has made himself dizzy and drifted out into loving the Invisible, a mirage that cannot be seen. Is seeing a mirage not the same as not seeing? Remove the mirage and, as he admits, he sees nothing. Remove the seeing, however, and he sees a mirage—a fact he forgets. Yet he refuses either to abandon love or to disparage it. He will speak rapturously about love and preserve it—love for the Invisible. What a sad error!

We say that worldly honour and power, wealth and happiness, are vapour, and so they are. But love is the strongest power within a person, and by its purpose it is the very opposite of vapour, for it is life and strength. For love to be turned into vapour, while someone intoxicated by those fumes proudly imagines that he has grasped the Highest—though he has grasped only a cloud and an illusion flying high above actuality—is terrible. We are piously warned not to waste God’s gifts; but what divine gift can compare with love, which God has placed in the human heart? And then to see it wasted in this way! Cleverness foolishly supposes that loving imperfect and weak people wastes our love. I would have thought that this is precisely how love is employed and put to use. To find no one, to squander love in a fruitless search, to waste it in empty space by loving the Invisible—that is truly to waste love.

Sober up, then, and come to yourself. Understand that the fault lies in your conception of love as a claim—one supposedly most glorious when the whole of existence cannot pay it, though you are no more able to prove your right to collect it. The instant you understand love as the opposite of a claim—as a debt that God binds you to pay—you find actuality. This is precisely the duty: with closed eye, since in love you close your eye to weakness, frailty, and imperfection, to find actuality rather than to stare with the open eye of a sleepwalker and overlook it.

This duty is the first condition if, in loving, you are ever to love the people you see. You must find a foothold in actuality. Error always floats; because it is airy, it can appear light and spiritual. Truth takes firm and therefore sometimes difficult steps. It stands upon solid ground and can therefore appear simple. It is a profound change: to receive a duty to fulfil instead of holding a claim to collect; to take something like a whole world upon yourself instead of rushing across the world; patiently to bear with deficiencies instead of eagerly seeking admiration’s delightful fruit. What a change! Yet this is the change through which love comes into being—the love that can fulfil the duty to love, in the act of loving, the people we see.

If our duty is, in loving, to love the people we see, we must not replace the actual individual with an imagined picture of what we think or wish that person ought to be. Whoever does that does not love the person he sees, but once again loves something invisible—his own idea or something of the kind.

There is a way of behaving in love that introduces a troubling mixture of ambiguity and fastidiousness. It is one thing to reject one person after another and never find anyone to love. It is another to call someone the object of one’s love and then, in loving that person, to fulfil exactly and sincerely the duty of loving what one sees. Certainly it is always worth wishing—and wishing again—that the person we are to love may possess lovable perfections. We wish this not only for our own sake but also for the other person’s. Above all, we should wish and pray that the person we love may always act and be in ways we can wholly approve and affirm. But in God’s name, let us not forget that we deserve no credit if the person is like this, and deserve still less credit for demanding it. If any merit of ours could be mentioned—though merit is an unseemly notion and unseemly language in love—it would lie precisely in loving with undiminished faithfulness and tenderness.

But one kind of fastidiousness continually works against love and tries to prevent it from loving what it sees. Its gaze is uncertain yet, in another sense, excessively exacting. It dissolves the actual person’s form, or takes offence at it and then slyly demands to see something else. Some people, we must say, have not yet taken form; their actuality has not become firm because in their innermost being they are divided about what they are and what they wish to be. But the way we look at another person can also make that person’s form unstable or unreal. Love, which ought to love the person it sees, cannot make up its mind: now it wants one fault removed from its object, now one more perfection added, as though the purchase had not quite been completed. Whoever loves with this kind of fastidiousness does not love the person he sees, and readily makes his own love repugnant to himself and burdensome to the beloved.

The beloved or the friend is, in the wider sense, also a human being and exists as such for the rest of us. But for you that person should essentially exist as the beloved if you are to fulfil the duty of loving the person you see. If your relation is divided—if the person is partly just this individual in the general sense and partly, in a special sense, your beloved—then you do not love the person you see. It is as if you had two ears but, instead of hearing the same thing with both, heard one thing with one and something else with the other. With one ear you listen to what the beloved says and ask whether it is wise, correct, acute, spirited, and so forth. Alas, only with the other do you hear that it is the beloved’s voice. With one eye you test, investigate, and scrutinise the person. Alas, only with the other do you see the beloved. To divide your attention in this way is not to love the person you see.

It is as though a third person were always present even when the two are alone: a cold examiner who tests and rejects, disturbs their inwardness, and sometimes makes the person concerned disgusted with himself and with the fastidiousness of his own love. If the beloved knew this third person was present, it would make him anxious. What does this third person’s presence mean? Does it mean that if—if this or that failed to meet your wishes, you could no longer love? Does the third person therefore signify divorce and separation, so that the thought of separation is present within intimacy—like the pagan madness that introduces a destructive being into the divinity’s unity? Does the third person mean that the love-relation is, in a certain sense, no relation at all, because you stand above it and put the beloved to the test? Remember that something else is being tested in that case: whether you truly possess love. Or rather, something has already been decided—you do not truly possess it.

Life provides trials enough. Those trials should find lover and beloved, friend and friend, united so that they can endure the trial together. If the trial is brought inside the relation, a betrayal has been committed. This secretive reserve is truly the most dangerous kind of unfaithfulness. Such a person does not break faith outright, but continually leaves it unsettled whether he is bound by his pledge. Is it not unfaithfulness when your friend offers you his hand and something indefinite enters your handshake? It is indeed your friend pressing your hand, yet whether you return the pressure in the same way depends upon whether, at that moment, he matches your conception. Is this what it means to be in a relation—to begin again every moment as though you were only now entering it? Is this loving the person you see—to examine him every moment as if seeing him for the first time?

It is repugnant to watch a fastidious person reject every dish. But it is also repugnant to watch someone eat the food kindly offered and yet, in a certain sense, not eat it. Though the food fills him, he merely keeps tasting it—or tries to taste a finer dish in his mouth while the plainer one nourishes him.

No. To fulfil the duty of loving, in the act of love, the people he sees, a person must do more than find his loved ones among actual human beings. He must eradicate every ambiguity and fastidiousness from his love, truly and earnestly loving them as they are and grasping the task of finding lovable the person already given or chosen. We are not commending a childish infatuation with every accidental feature of the beloved, still less a pampering indulgence where it does not belong. Far from it. Earnestness means that the relation itself, with united strength, struggles against what is imperfect, overcomes what is deficient, and removes what is incongruous. This is earnestness; fastidiousness makes the relation itself ambiguous.

One person’s weakness or fault does not make that person alien to the other. Their union treats the weakness as the alien element, which it matters equally to both to overcome and remove. You should not withdraw from the beloved because of the beloved’s weakness or make your relation more distant. On the contrary, the two of you should hold still more firmly and inwardly together in order to remove the weakness. Once the relation itself becomes ambiguous, you no longer love the person you see; you appear to demand something else before you can love. But when a fault or weakness makes the relation more inward—not because the fault is to be preserved, but precisely so that it may be overcome—then you love the person you see. You see the fault, yet your relation grows more inward; this shows that you love the very person in whom you see the fault, weakness, or imperfection.

Just as tears can be hypocritical, and sighs and laments over the world can be hypocritical, so too can grief over the beloved’s weaknesses and imperfections. It is very easy and self-indulgent to wish that the beloved possessed every possible perfection. When something is lacking, it is equally easy and self-indulgent to sigh and grieve, making oneself important in one’s own eyes by means of supposedly pure and profound sorrow. Perhaps one of the more common forms of self-indulgence is the selfish wish to adorn oneself with one’s beloved or friend and then to despair over every trifle. But can this mean loving the people we see? No. The people we see—and this includes us as others see us—are not so perfect. Yet a person so often cultivates a pampered fragility equipped to love only the complete sum of perfections. Although every one of us is imperfect, how rarely we see the healthy, strong, capable love equipped to love the less perfect—that is, the people we see.

If our duty is, in loving, to love the people we see, then love has no limit. To fulfil the duty, love must remain boundless and unchanged however the person loved may change.

Let us return to what the introduction recalled: the relation between Christ and Peter. Was Peter, especially in relation to Christ, the sum of every perfection? Christ surely knew his faults. Let us consider this relation in thoroughly human terms. God knows what trifles—insignificant yet carefully collected and stored—prompt us to accuse one another of selfishness, unfaithfulness, and betrayal, whether immediately or, just as sadly, after many years. God knows how seldom the complainant makes even a small effort to take the accused person’s place, so that the severe and merciless judgement might not be hasty but at least thoughtful enough to know precisely what it judges. God knows how often we see this sad spectacle: passion gives even an otherwise limited person who thinks himself wronged an astonishing acuteness, yet, when even an otherwise perceptive person thinks himself wronged, strikes him with stupidity towards every mitigating, excusing, or justifying view of the wrong. Injured passion delights in its blindly acute vision.

Yet surely we would all agree that if what passed between Christ and Peter happened between two friends, there would be reason enough to break with such a betrayer. Suppose your life had reached its utmost crisis. A friend had freely and solemnly sworn loyalty, even promising to risk life and blood for you. At the moment of danger he did not stay away—that would almost have been more forgivable. He came and was present, but did not lift a hand. He stood calmly watching—yet no, he was not calm, because his one thought was to save himself at any cost. He did not flee—which would almost have been more forgivable. No, he remained a spectator, having secured that position by denying you. What then? Let us not yet complete the conditional sentence. Let us picture the relation vividly and speak of it in human terms.

You stood accused and condemned by your enemies, literally surrounded by enemies on every side. The powerful, who perhaps could have understood you, had hardened themselves against you and now hated you. While you stood accused and condemned, a blinded and raging crowd howled insults. Insanely, they rejoiced that your blood should come upon them and their children. This pleased the powerful, who otherwise deeply despised the crowd, because the animal savagery and lowest wretchedness that had made you its quarry satisfied their hatred. You had become reconciled to your fate and understood that there was not a single word you could say. The abuse merely sought an occasion. A magnanimous word about your innocence would be treated as defiance; the clearest proof that you were in the right would embitter the abusers and make them still more furious; an outburst of pain would furnish another occasion and be called cowardice.

You stood expelled from human society, and yet not expelled, for people surrounded you. Not one of them saw a human being in you—though in another sense they did, since they would not have treated an animal so inhumanly. What horror, more terrible than falling among wild beasts! Is the wild nocturnal howl of the most bloodthirsty predator as terrible as the inhumanity of a raging crowd? Can one predator incite another beyond the savagery natural to each, as one person in a remorseless crowd can incite another to bloodthirstiness more than animal? Does even the darkest or most glittering predatory eye hold the fire of evil kindled in an individual’s eye when, both incited and inciting, he joins the savage crowd’s frenzy?

There you stood—accused, condemned, insulted. In vain you searched for a form that at least resembled a human being, much less a kindly face on which your eye could rest. Then you saw him, your friend, but he denied you; and the insults that had already sounded loudly now seemed magnified a hundredfold by an echo. If this had happened to you, would you not consider yourself magnanimous if, rather than contemplate revenge, you simply looked away and said: “I cannot bear the sight of that betrayer”? How differently Christ acted. He did not look away in order to make himself unaware that Peter existed. He did not say that he would not look at the betrayer or leave Peter to fend for himself. No, Christ “looked at him” and immediately reached him with a glance. Had speech been possible, Christ surely would have spoken to him.

How did Christ look at Peter? Was the glance repelling, a farewell? No. It was like the glance of a mother who sees her child endangered by its own carelessness. Unable to reach and grasp the child, she reaches it with a look that reproaches but also saves. Peter, then, was in danger. Who cannot understand how heavy it is for someone to have denied a friend? Yet anger can prevent the wronged friend from seeing that the person who denied him is in danger. The one called the Saviour of the World always saw clearly where the danger lay. Peter was in danger; Peter needed to be saved. The Saviour did not mistakenly regard his own cause as lost unless Peter hurried to help him. He saw Peter as lost unless he himself hurried to save Peter. Is there anyone living, or who has ever lived, who cannot understand something so clear and evident? Yet Christ alone saw it in the decisive moment, when he himself was accused, condemned, insulted, and denied.

We are rarely tested in a matter of life and death, and so rarely have occasion to test friendship’s devotion at this extreme. But even in an important moment, suppose you find cowardice and calculating prudence where the friendship entitled you to expect courage and resolution; ambiguity, double-mindedness, and evasion instead of openness, decisiveness, and support; mere silliness instead of a composed grasp of the whole. In the haste of the moment and the rush of passion, how difficult it is to see immediately where the danger lies—which friend is in greater danger, you or the one who has left you in the lurch. How difficult it is to love the person you see when you see that person so changed!

We are accustomed now to praise Christ’s relation to Peter. But we must guard against making this praise an illusion produced by our inability or unwillingness to imagine ourselves contemporary with the event. We might praise Christ while acting and thinking quite differently whenever we can become contemporary with something similar. No account of the contemporaries’ view of Christ’s conduct has been preserved. But if you meet those contemporaries, ask them. You will hear that on this occasion, as with almost everything Christ did, they said: “The fool! Even if his cause was hopelessly lost, did he lack the strength to gather all his remaining power into one last glance that could crush this betrayer? What whining weakness! Is that how a man acts?” That was the judgement, and the mockery found a new expression.

Or a powerful person who believed he understood the whole relation would say: “Why did he seek company with sinners and tax collectors and find his followers among the lowest part of the people? He should have joined us, the synagogue of the distinguished. Now he receives what he deserves, since we see how much that kind of person can be trusted. But he has always abandoned himself, and he does so to the end; even such base unfaithfulness cannot make him bitter.” A cleverer person, one who even regarded himself as kindly, might say: “The chief priests have had him seized. Enthusiast that he was, seeing everything lost must have weakened his understanding and broken his courage. He has collapsed into a womanish, powerless lassitude. That explains why he forgives such a betrayal—for no man behaves like that!”

It is only too true: no man acts like that. Christ’s life is therefore the one case in which a teacher, at the very moment when his life and his cause are lost and everything is forfeited—most terribly through his disciple’s denial—wins, by a glance and in that very disciple, his most zealous follower, and thereby in great part wins his cause, though this remains hidden from everyone.

Christ’s love for Peter was boundless. By loving Peter, he fulfilled the duty to love the person one sees. He did not say, “Peter must first change and become a different person before I can love him again.” He said the exact opposite: “Peter is Peter, and I love him. My love, if anything can, is precisely what will help him become a different person.” Christ did not end the friendship in the hope of perhaps beginning it again once Peter had changed. He preserved the friendship unchanged and, by doing so, helped Peter to change. Do you think Peter would have been won back without Christ’s faithful friendship?

It is easy to be a friend if friendship means only demanding something definite from the other and ending the friendship whenever the friend fails to meet the demand, perhaps beginning it again once he does. Is that a relation of friendship? Who is better placed to help someone who has gone astray than the person who calls himself that person’s friend—even when the wrong was done against the friend? Yet the friend withdraws and says—as though the cold third person were speaking again—“When he has become a different person, perhaps he can become my friend again.” We are even inclined to regard such conduct as magnanimous. But it is far from true that such a friend, in loving, loves the person he sees.

Christ’s love was boundless, as love must be if it is to fulfil the duty to love, in the act of loving, the person one sees. This is easy to understand. However much and in whatever way someone changes, that person surely does not become invisible. Unless this impossibility occurs, we still see the person, and our duty is to love the person we see. We generally suppose that when someone has changed essentially for the worse, the change releases us from loving. What confused language: to be released from loving, as though love were compulsory labour, a burden we wanted to throw off!

Christianity asks whether the change has made the person invisible to you. You must answer: “Of course I can see him. I can see precisely that he is no longer worth loving.” But if that is what you see, you do not truly see him—though in another sense you cannot deny that you do. You see only unworthiness and imperfection. You thereby admit that even when you loved him you did not, in another sense, see him; you saw and loved only his excellences and perfections. Christianly understood, to love is precisely to love the person one sees. The emphasis does not fall upon the perfections visible in a person but upon the person who is visible, whether you see perfections or imperfections in that person. However sadly someone has changed, that person has not ceased to be the same human being.

Whoever loves the perfections seen in someone does not see the person and therefore stops loving when the perfections disappear and change arrives. But even the saddest change does not mean that the person ceases to exist. The wisest and most ingenious merely human view of love still flies high and floats. Christian love descends instead from heaven to earth; its direction is the opposite. It does not soar towards heaven, because it comes from heaven and brings heaven with it. By descending, it becomes able to love the same person through every change, because through all those changes it sees the same person. Merely human love is always ready to fly away after, or fly away with, the beloved’s perfections. We say that a seducer steals a girl’s heart. Even the most beautiful merely human love has something thievish about it, because it steals the beloved’s perfections. Christian love, by contrast, forgives the beloved all his imperfections and weaknesses and remains with him through every change, loving the person it sees.

If this were not so, Christ would never have begun to love—for where would he have found the perfect person? What a wonder! What prevented Christ from finding the perfect person? Was it not that he himself was the Perfect One, as we know from the way he loved the person he saw without limit? What a strange crossing of ideas. In speaking of love, we continually speak about the perfect person and the perfect person; Christianity too continually speaks about the perfect person and the perfect person. But we human beings speak of finding the perfect person in order to love; Christianity speaks of being the perfect person who loves without limit the person he sees.

We look upward for perfection’s object, always directing our gaze towards the invisible. In Christ, however, perfection looked down to earth and loved the person it saw. We must learn from Christianity, because in a much broader sense than the original saying, no one ascends into heaven except the one who descends from heaven. However rapturous the talk about soaring to heaven may sound, it is an illusion unless you first descend from heaven in the Christian way. To descend from heaven in the Christian way is to love without limit the person you see, just as you see that person. If you wish to become perfect in love, strive to fulfil this duty: in loving, love the person you see. Love that person as you see him, with all his imperfections and weaknesses. Love him as you see him when he has entirely changed, when he no longer loves you but turns away indifferently or turns away to love someone else. Love him as you see him when he betrays and denies you.