SPLENDORS OF LOVE
PIERRE-MARIE DUMONT I would particularly like to thank: Gabrielle Charaudeau and Lou Trullard for their remarkable support in editing this book; Romain Lizé, whose suggestions for revisions were always welcome and often necessary; Anne-Lise Girard, who expertly revised everything related to biblical Greek; Marie-Laure Martin Saint-Léon, David Gabillet, Father White, and Father Nolan for their critical proofreading; Isabelle Mascaras for her insightful iconographic research; Gauthier Delauné for his layout; Mathilde Corre for the cover; Jean de Saint-Cheron, for her insights on Claude Monetʼs Water Lilies; and Stéphane Arthur for his research on poetry. SPLENDORS OF LOVE Publisher: Romain Lizé Editor: Gabrielle Charaudeau Graphic design: Gauthier Delauné Cover design: Mathilde Corre Editorial assistant: Lou Trullard Iconography : Isabelle Mascaras Translation: Michael J. Miller Proofreading: Samuel Wigutow Production: Thierry Dubus and Julia Mirenda Photo-engraving: Les Caméléons First edition: October 2025 Edition number: 25L1086 ISBN: 978-1-63967-192-2 Copyright © 2025 by Magnificat Inc. All right reserved. Printed in September 2025 by GPS GROUP in Slovenia. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For more information, write to Magnificat, PO Box 834, Yonkers, NY 10702. www.magnificat.com Notes: • On page 202, Eloi Leclerc comments on Chagall's stained-glass window, the sketch of which is reproduced on page 22. • The text notes are grouped together on page 204, at the end of the volume. • Artwork captions and credits can also be found at the end of the volume, on page 206. • All Monet's Water Lilies come from the Musée de l'Orangerie. • Scripture quotations are usually given in the author's own translation, or are taken from the Lectionary. Paris • New York • Oxford • Madrid Magnificat®
“In our life there is a single color, as on an artistʼs palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.” Marc Chagall (1887 - 1985) “I will come back to earth to make love loved.” Last words of Thérèse of Lisieux Foreword. ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 6 I - THE MORE EXCELLENT WAY IS LOVE. ....................................... 8 1 - Paul of Tarsus, author of the hymn to Love......................................................................................10 2 - The First Letter to the Corinthians, backdrop of the hymn to Love. ............16 3 - To love, yes...but with what kind of love?.............................................................................................22 4 - To live by imitating Jesus Christ, yes, but to what point?............................................26 5 - The living portrait of Jesus of Nazareth, in deed and in truth...............................30 II - TO HAVE OR NOT TO HAVE LOVE...............................................34 If I have not Love, I am nothing. ...............................................................................................................................36 III - TO LOVE IN DEED AND TRUTH..................................................42 1 - Love makes time for time...........................................................................................................................................44 2 - Love cherishes with thoughtfulness and kindness.................................................................. 54 3 - Love does not envy, nor is it jealous.............................................................................................................66 4 - Love does not boast, nor inflate itself. ......................................................................................................82 5 - Love does not behave in an unseemly manner............................................................................. 94 6 - Love does not seek its own interest. ......................................................................................................... 106 7 - Love does not loose its temper, nor does it take offense.................................................116 8 - Love does not tally evil deeds, nor does it even retain them. .................................128 9 - Love does not revel in iniquity, but finds its joy in fidelity........................................... 146 10 - Love always bears, always trusts, always hopes, always endures. ..............164 11 - Love never disappoints or fails. .................................................................................................................. 180 Epilogue...................................................................................................................................................................................................198 Depicting His love that carries us off. ............................................................................................................200 Appendices...........................................................................................................................................................................................202 Text notes...............................................................................................................................................................................................204 Artwork captions and credits.....................................................................................................................................206 Contents
Foreword Chapter 13 of the First Letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians is like Mount Everest: Not everybody gets to tackle it. When Thérèse of Lisieux commented on the passage and pointed out not only its incandescent power but also its consoling properties, she revealed to an age that had forgotten—even in many parishes—that the essential thing was found not in morality, nor in the liturgical rites, nor in any of our human actions or rules, but in the unique source of all good: love. For our Creator is Love, and he calls us to live as he does. That is the only possible path to happiness. Love created us through love and for love: He knows nothing else. This is our human condition. Unfortunately, man by himself, weighed down by sin, is incapable of such love. He is ignorant of its dimensions, since love, unlike the human intellect, has no limits. Hence it was necessary for Saint Paul, at the end of chapter 12 and all through chapter 13 of the First Letter to the Corinthians, to sings its praises, in a masterpiece of theology, poetry, and pragmatism that has traditionally been called the “Hymn to Love.” This love that is worth singing about is, of course, agápè, charity, God’s love, the love that is God—God himself. The verses by Saint Paul thus form a “portrait of Jesus,” as Pierre-Marie Dumont puts it. And this supernatural Love, which the author capitalizes so as to distinguish it not only from our fleeting feelings but also from our ever-imperfect acts, is our only prospect and our only hope—these are the unfathomable stakes of the Christian life. But Love is also our strength even here on earth, inasmuch as grace is given to us by Love in person for the sole purpose of loving. Grace does not invalidate nature, however; through our imperfect liberty and our wobbly actions, little by little the life of Christ will unfold in our life, if we decide to let it. A life of Trinitarian love in our humanity. “For Love has a face,” Pierre-Marie Dumont notes in a powerful formula. This is the heart of Christian life. This is Christianity. And this is indeed what the author insistently repeats in this book, whose primary mode of expression is certainly not moral discourse, but beauty. For the way of beauty is also the way of love. Beauty attracts a person to love and, by an extraordinary mechanism, keeps the lover there: the more you see the other person’s beauty, the more you love; the more you love the other person, the more you see the beauty. Hence the room that is made in the following pages for art, in keeping with Magnificat’s profound mission. Great artistic creations, indeed, the works made possible by the gift of genius deployed in human work, speak about God and about love in an almost transcendent language, to which it is good to hand over one’s mind and human senses, at the boundary of the ineffable. That is what Monet and Chagall speak to us about, as well as the artists from the Middle Ages. Finally, besides the author’s magnificent, innovative commentary on the hymn to Love, verse by verse, to reveal its essence, its unrecognized meanings, its concrete implications, one of the most outstanding features of this book by Pierre-Marie Dumont is the place it assigns to human love in its conjugal reality. If the Hymn to Love is the “magna carta of the civilization of love” (Saint John Paul II), the author suggests here that it is even more importantly the charter of every Christian marriage, in which the commandment of love is called to unfold in humble, everyday life as well as in the great moments, so as to blossom unceasingly, despite temporal trials and weariness, in the innermost intimacy of the two spouses. And so it is that the Splendors of Love claims to be also, in the author’s own words, “a particular clarification that highlights the specific way in which Christians joined in marriage are called to travel together ‘the more excellent way’ (Saint Paul) which is the way of Love.” His text is also, among many other things, a strong invitation to us to convert, in other words, to love one another as brothers and sisters. We must never despair of this, because “everything is possible for God, who is Almighty Love.” Only in this way will we be authentic Christians; only in this way will we proclaim life and happiness credibly. Only in this way, as Jesus taught us, will we speak about Love to the world. Jean de Saint-Cheron
9 The apostle explains how all gifts, even the most perfect, are nothing without love... At last I had found rest... I understood that love embraces all vocations, that love is all things, that it embraces all times and all places... in a word, that it is eternal! Thérèse of Lisieux PART ONE THE MORE EXCELLENT WAY IS LOVE
Chapter 1 Paul of Tarsus, author of the hymn to Love Paul1 was born five or ten years after Jesus of Nazareth, in Tarsus, the capital of the Roman province of Cilicia (today on the Mediterranean shores of Turkey), a place of sophisticated Hellenic civilization. In Judea, Herod the Great had just died. In Rome, Augustus would still be emperor for a few more years. Paul’s father was a zealous Jew, a Pharisee, and a well-to-do weaver who had acquired Roman citizenship. He handed down to his son, along with a devotion to the faithful observance of the Torah, a certain esteem for Roman civilization (cf. Rom 13:1-7). Paul learned to speak fluent Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and most likely Latin. His letters, also referred to as “epistles,” reflect Hellenic ways of thinking and are written in good Greek.2 His Semitic name is Saul. Later he would adopt also the Roman name Paulus, Paul. Saul the persecutor When he was about twenty or twenty-five years old, around the time of the public life of Jesus, Saul set out for Jerusalem to enroll in the school of the Pharisee Gamaliel, one of the most renowned teachers of that time, who initiated him into biblical modes of expression and Scriptural interpretation. Paul himself became a notable Pharisee. Several years after the crucifixion of Jesus and Pentecost (which took place probably in a.d. 30 or 33), when the preaching of the apostles had met with some success, Saul became radicalized. Unlike his teacher Gamaliel (Acts 5:34-39), he became a relentless persecutor of the first Christians. Indeed, the religious authorities of Jerusalem, and later of the whole Diaspora,3 accused the first Christians of trying to lead people to worship the God of the Jews in a way
contrary to the Law (cf. Acts 18:12-13). Saul had become one of the leaders of the repression, and he laid waste the Church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison (Acts 8:3). Around the age of thirty-two or thirty-six, Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, set out on the road to Damascus in Syria at the head of a band of armed men, to arrest anyone there belonging to the Way [of the Lord] (Acts 9:1-2). According to his own testimony, while traveling he was “enlightened” by the Lord and “seized” by Jesus Christ. It was a “revelation” for him: from now on he knew that he was an “apostle” because he had seen the Lord and had been made a witness to his Resurrection (1 Cor 15:8-9). And now Jesus, the Christ, ordered him explicitly to proclaim to the nations (to the Gentiles, the pagans) the plan of salvation that had been accomplished in him. The Acts of the Apostles relates this event at length: his fall to the ground, the vision and the voice addressing him, and the consequences of what happened to him on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-30). Paul, a missionary apostle When he returned to Jerusalem after a long stay in Arabia, Paul met Peter at the instigation of Barnabas, a converted Levite who in Acts (4:36-37) is held up as an example because he had given all his possessions to the community. He became Paul’s mentor, then his collaborator during his first journey. But Paul had a lukewarm reception from the Christian community, given his past as a persecutor. He departed then for Tarsus, his birthplace. Later Barnabas came to meet him to bring him to Antioch in Syria. From there Saul launched his three missionary journeys, each covering a distance of about 900 miles, mainly on foot. From then on he preferred to be called Paul. On his first journey (a.d. 45–49), Paul evangelized modern-day Syria, Cyprus, and Turkey. Upon his return, he vehemently opposed James the “But the Lord stood by me and gave me strength, so that through me the proclamation might be completed.” (2 Ti 4:17) Just, “the brother of the Lord,” who supervised the Church in Jerusalem, and Peter, “the head of the apostles,” concerning the rules prescribed in the Torah, which were being observed by the new Christian converts from paganism—particularly the obligation to be circumcised. For Paul, in Jesus Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, nor slave nor freeman; neither man nor woman (Gal 3:28). Paul assigns to the Mosaic Law only the role of a custodian, which became obsolete after Christ’s Resurrection (Gal 3:23-25), and he says that faith in Christ that is expressed in active charity is enough to be justified (Gal 5:6). Paul maintains (although he met with some resistance) that the debates were decided by Peter in his favor, which the history of the early Church went on to confirm. This whole affair, called the Council of Jerusalem, is narrated in detail by the Acts of the Apostles in chapter 15. For his second journey (a.d. 50–52), Paul departed from Caesarea Maritima and returned to it. He evangelized modern-day Libya, Syria, Turkey, and Greece, with a long stay in Corinth. At the start of the journey, he had a serious clash with Barnabas. Paul did not want Mark, one of their faithful coworkers, to be part of the journey, but Barnabas refused to participate in it without him. Finally Barnabas separated from Paul (Acts 15:36-39). For his third journey (a.d. 53–58), he departed from Antioch in Syria, visited more or less the same towns he did during his second journey, and returned to Jerusalem by sea. There he was welcomed rather coolly by James the Just and the Elders of the Church of Jerusalem, who still blamed him for driving the Jews of the diaspora to apostatize from the Mosaic Law. His final years While Paul was still in Jerusalem, he was accused of taking a pagan into the Temple, a crime punishable by death. He was arrested and taken prisoner. The Acts of the Apostles relate his arrest, his multiple appearances in court, and his transfer to Caesarea Maritima, the residence of the Roman Procurator Porcius Festus (Acts 22–28). In a.d. 60, Festus arranged an appearance before the king of Chalcis, Peraea, and part of Galilee, Agrippa II, and his sister Berenice. Finally, after asserting his Roman citizenship and appealing to the emperor, Paul was sent to Rome, under escort, to be judged there. Traveling there brought 12 Part I • The more excellent way is Love Ch. 1 • Paul of Tarsus, author of the hymn to Love 13
real tribulation, with a shipwreck and a winter spent on Malta (Acts 27–28). Nevertheless Paul continued his missionary activity wherever he went. In Rome, it seems that Paul was fortunate enough to have his case dismissed for lack of evidence. After that we know nothing certain about his apostolate, in Rome or elsewhere. Did he travel to Spain, then considered one of the ends of the Earth, to which the Lord had sent his apostles before leaving this world to go to his Father? A number of Spanish traditions seem to indicate that he did. Similarly, the tradition that mentions a new captivity after a.d. 64 and the burning of Rome is plausible. Paul died by the sword in Rome in a.d. 67 or 68, a martyr. He was immediately venerated— with Saint Peter, who was also executed in Rome, by crucifixion, around a.d. 65–67—as one of the two “pillars of the Church.” Indeed, both men, each according to his grace, proclaimed magisterially to the world the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and they contributed admirably to the building up of his newborn Church, by rooting it firmly in Love. 14 Part I • The more excellent way is Love
Chapter 2 The First Letter to the Corinthians, backdrop of the hymn to Love During his second journey (a.d. 50–52), Paul evangelized Corinth, where he stayed for a year and a half, while earning his living as a tent-maker. There he founded a community that quickly flourished. Corinth was a large port city, equidistant from Athens and Sparta. Refounded by Caesar in 44 b.c., it was populated both by Romans and by native Greeks. The city became very prosperous, and Corinth was famous throughout the Roman Empire as a city for tourism, the joy of life, and pleasures. During his third missionary journey, around a.d. 57–58, while staying in Ephesus (today near Izmir, on the Turkish coast across from Athens), Paul learned that serious troubles were agitating the community in Corinth. He tried to remedy them by writing to the Corinthians a long letter4 in which he simultaneously intends to correct abuses, to restore peace in the community, and to clarify a number of questions concerning community life, worship, the spiritual life, faith in the Resurrection, and cases of practical morality. Right in the middle of this letter, cutting short his discourse on the exercise of the charisms5 and on the value of the different spiritual paths, he declares: I will show you a still more excellent way! And to extol this more excellent way, apart from which even the most devout and the most virtuous Christian is nothing, Saint Paul writes what to this day is one of the most beautiful passages both in Sacred Scripture and in world literature: his hymn to Love. So much so that almost two thousand years after it was written, “the hymn to Love in the First Letter to the Corinthians remains the Magna Carta of the civilization of love” (Saint John Paul II, see text box on the following page).
We will become “extractors of the essence” of this hymn The hymn to Love is therefore a remarkable part of a letter sent by Saint Paul to the Christian community in Corinth. This text is historically situated and “dated,” written in a context and in a language that have not been current for almost two millennia. Nevertheless it remains timeless and universal, and it challenges all Christians and all people of good will in every age. In order to reconcile these two realities we must inevitably ask questions about translation and interpretation, and then propose an equivalent in contemporary language, an equivalent that will enable us, to paraphrase Rabelais, “to read it correctly and to weigh carefully what follows from it, so as then, by profound meditation, to break the bone and to taste its substantial marrow.” In the 13th century, along with the whole Christian Bible, this Letter to the Corinthians was divided into chapters—sixteen of them, each divided into verses. These divisions are sometimes arbitrary; although they greatly facilitate study, they are not always felicitous. Thus the hymn to Love begins with the last sentence of the last verse of chapter 12: And I will show you a still more excellent way. Then the hymn proper continues until the first phrase in verse 8 of chapter 13: Love never ends [i.e., it never disappoints or fails]. However, the rest of chapter 13, from verse 8b to verse 13, is an explanation of the hymn and a development which concludes: So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. The hymn to Love, Magna Carta of Christian marriage In his Letter to Families (1994), Saint John Paul II declares, in the heading of chapter 2, that “The family [is] the way of the Church.” He explains: “This way... leads to the kingdom of heaven (cf. Mt 7:14) through conjugal and family life,” and from this perspective, “the hymn to Love in the First Letter to the Corinthians remains the Magna Carta of the civilization of love” (n. 14). On May 3, 1980, the pilgrim pope had said in a homily in Kinshasa, Zaire: “By conforming themselves to Christ, who out of love gave himself up for his Church, spouses attain the love that the Gospel tells us about: Love one another, as I have loved you, and more precisely to the perfection of their union which is indissoluble at all its levels. Christian spouses have made the promise to communicate to one another all they are and all that they have. This is the most daring contract that exists, and also the most marvelous one!” In his Letter to Families, Saint John Paul II also points out: “When we speak about ‘fairest love,’ we are also speaking about beauty: the beauty of love and the beauty of the human being who, by the power of the Holy Spirit, is capable of such love. We are speaking of the beauty of man and woman: their beauty as brother or sister, as a couple about to be married, as husband and wife” (n. 20). Finally, in his Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris consortio, Saint John Paul II shows how the Holy Spirit makes spouses capable of loving one another, as Christ loved us, which is the way of loving that Saint Paul’s hymn to Love extols, one behavior after another: “God is love and in himself he lives a mystery of personal loving communion. Creating the human race in his own image and continually keeping it in being, God inscribed in the humanity of man and woman the vocation, Ch. 2 • The First Letter to the Corinthians, showcase of the hymn to Love 19 18 Part I • The more excellent way is Love
and thus the capacity and responsibility, of love and communion. Love is therefore the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being” (n. 11). “The communion between God and his people finds its definitive fulfillment in Jesus Christ, the Bridegroom who loves and gives himself as the Savior of humanity, uniting it to himself as his body. He reveals the original truth of marriage, the truth of the ‘beginning,’ and, freeing man from his hardness of heart, he makes man capable of realizing this truth in its entirety. “This revelation reaches its definitive fullness in the gift of love which the Word of God makes to humanity in assuming a human nature, and in the sacrifice which Jesus Christ makes of himself on the cross for his Bride, the Church. In this sacrifice there is entirely revealed that plan which God has imprinted on the humanity of man and woman since their creation; the marriage of baptized persons thus becomes a real symbol of that new and eternal covenant sanctioned in the blood of Christ. The Spirit which the Lord pours forth gives a new heart, and renders man and woman capable of loving one another as Christ has loved us. Conjugal love reaches that fullness to which it is interiorly ordained, conjugal charity, which is the proper and specific way in which the spouses participate in and are called to live the very charity of Christ who gave himself on the cross” (n. 13). Building on the insights of Saint John Paul II, each chapter of Part III will propose a particular clarification that highlights the specific way in which Christians joined in marriage are called to travel together “the more excellent way” which is the way of Love. Of what love? The love “of Christ the Redeemer and Bridegroom, who ‘loved us to the end’ (cf. Jn 13:1). Let us be deeply convinced that this love is the greatest of all (cf. 1 Cor 13:13), and let us believe that it is really capable of triumphing over everything that is not love” (Letter to Families, n. 5). 20 Part I • The more excellent way is Love
Chapter 3 To love, yes... but with what kind of love? Love... Has there ever been a word which, over the course of human history, has been celebrated and praised so much, but also tarnished, ruined, and profaned so often? Is there any word that has become so worn out, abused, equivocal, ambiguous... yet is the bearer of such great hope when someone wishes to rhyme “love” [amour] with “always” [toujours] in his life—and in an exemplary way in marriage? This word accounts for realities which are so diverse that ancient Greek had no less than four words to signify them: Chrèstotès: the love of goodness, benevolence, thoughtfulness, and generosity that desires and does good for others, regardless of one’s likes and dislikes.6 Philia: the elective love of deep, faithful friendship that is born of sympathy and is expressed, like chrèstotès, in fundamental benevolence. Storgè: the love of familial affection, including conjugal, filial, and fraternal affection, that is expressed in tenderness, devotion, and fidelity. Eros: the love of the attraction to join the other person, born of the sexual impulse and carnal desire. It is expressed ideally in marriage by sexual union and procreation, but also in fornication (sexual relations between two persons who are not married) and in all the sexual relations that were considered by many pagan moralists, and subsequently by the Christians, as forms of depravity (porneia in Greek). In Alexandria, in the third century before Christ, when learned men undertook the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, they asked how to translate the Hebrew word ‘ahabah, “love,” when
the context indicated that it was specifically about divine love. They chose the noun agápē, based on the verb agapân (to have affection for, to hold in high esteem, to venerate). God is Love The word agápē was in a way reinvented by the New Testament (originally written in Greek), which gave it all its Christian depth: agápē is love with a capital “L,” on earth as it is in heaven, truly divine and truly human. It is the Love of the New Commandment instituted by Jesus.7 It is the Love that Saint John magnifies when in his First Letter he makes this startling revelation: God is Love (agape) (4:8). It is again the Love that the Letter to the Ephesians speaks of when it exalts the union of spouses in marriage and concludes: [As Scripture says:] “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’’ This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the Church (Eph 5:3132). Finally, it is in an exemplary way the Love Saint Paul points out to us in his hymn to Love as the spiritual way that surpasses all others.8 Agápē, as the New Testament speaks to us about it, is not opposed to any of the four forms of love designated in Greek by different words; on the contrary, it takes up the best in each so as to transcend its meaning. Like chrèstotès, agápē is a universal, benevolent, and beneficent love. Like philia, agápē is a love of election and dedication. Like storgè, agápè is a love of “familial” communion in unconditional fidelity. Like eros, agápē is the efficient cause of unity and its bond. Finally, throughout the New Testament, to love with agápē means to love in the communion of the Holy Spirit. And therefore, as we will see, in Saint Paul’s hymn to Love, agápē signifies the way of loving that the Son of God exemplified when he lived among us, as well as the way of loving which we, his disciples, have been commanded to put into practice by conforming ourselves to Jesus Christ, so as to make our lives a hymn to agápē. “Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.” (1 Jn 4:8) God is Charity Unfortunately we cannot use the word agape in English to signify agápē in the sense in which the New Testament uses it. Indeed, in modern European languages the noun “agape” refers to the common meal eaten by the early Christians in memory of Jesus, a meal during which the Eucharistic rite was celebrated, so as to commune in Christ’s agápē. In the 4th century, when Saint Jerome translated the New Testament from Greek into Latin (the Vulgate), he translated agápē either as dilectio or as caritas. In English, caritas is translated as “charity.” Since the Vulgate was adopted as the official translation of the Bible for the Catholic Church, for centuries “charity” became, in the English language, the highest expression of love and the most eminent of the theological virtues. Unfortunately, with the passage of time, “charity” has taken on, in common usage, the restricted sense of an act of beneficence, sometimes with overtones of the condescending attitude of the right-thinking rich toward the poor. It has therefore become difficult to speak about Love—which is ultimately about loving in the communion of the Holy Spirit—with this word that has been devalued in everyday language. And finally, most Christian Bibles, in English at least, have used the word “love,” instead of “charity,” to translate the Greek agápē. The hymn to Charity thus became the hymn to Love. This brings us back to the beginning of our reflection: can we dare to use a word as tarnished and ambiguous as “love” to account for what authentic agápē is? Certainly, agápē is very much about love. In fact, it is only about love. We cannot help therefore but resolve to translate agápē with “love.” But let us make sure to capitalize it, so as to elevate it above itself: isn’t its vocation now to reveal the very life of God? Welcome, then, to the more excellent way, the one extolled by the hymn to Love. Ch. 3 • To love, yes... but with what kind of love? 25 24 Part I • The more excellent way is Love
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