by Johnny Zokovitch
In the missal earlier this week, we read from Paul’s letter to the Galatians (5:18-25). There are some nearly laugh-out-loud moments in Paul’s instruction to the – let’s just say “boisterous” – Galatians. He warns them, apparently for the second time (“I warn you, as I warned you before”), about all sorts of nonsense many of them seem to be wrapped up in: sorcery, rivalries, outbursts of fury, drinking bouts, orgies and “the like.” (When “and the like” follows “orgies,” you’ve got to wonder just what this early Christian community was up to.)
What Paul seemed to be attempting with the Galatians was to walk back an idea that he had planted in their community some time before – namely that now that they were living in the Spirit of love, they were no longer under “the law.” The Galatians evidently took that to mean “anything goes.”
Which made me think of St. Augustine.
The year was 407, and it was Easter week. Augustine had been bishop of Hippo in North Africa for almost 12 years. Before his conversion, long before he was a bishop, Augustine had what we might call “a checkered past.” At 18 he took a concubine, fathered a child out of wedlock, got engaged but felt the engagement was too long and so took another lover. He continually disappointed his mother, Monica, as he skirted around the Church for years, never quite entering it while dabbling in some of the more esoteric philosophies of his day.
While history remembers Augustine as one of the giants of the Church, his path there was quite winding.
Back to Easter 407. Augustine delivered a series of sermons all based on the first letter of John. From John’s letter, Augustine would assert this bold and provocative take on the Christian life:
“Love, and do what you will.”
It comes in his seventh homily on John’s letter, where he expounds on 1 John 4:7-12:
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love. In this way the love of God was revealed to us: God sent God’s only Son into the world so that we might have life through him. In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that God loved us and sent the Son as expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another. No one has ever seen God. Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us, and God’s love is brought to perfection in us.
So… “Love, and do what you will.” Here is the full quote in which this statement is found.
“Once for all, then, a short precept is given you: Love, and do what you will: whether you hold your peace, through love hold your peace; whether you cry out, through love cry out; whether you correct, through love correct; whether you spare, through love do you spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.”
Some suggest that the context for this sermon was a controversy in the early Church known as Donatism. Donatists could not conceive of a Church whose members were tainted by sinfulness, and this was considered to be especially true of the clergy. Donatists embraced an extremely lofty ideal of moral purity, and they claimed holiness as something unique to themselves.
To the Donatists, Augustine offered a challenge. Instead of their rigid moral purity, instead of a strict code of conduct which didn’t allow for brokenness and mistakes, instead of sneering at the failings of others while serving the self-righteousness of those inside their own circle, Augustine preached the essentialness, the centrality, the transformative power of love. He preached a love that brought with itself a “tolerance for imperfection,” as stated by one biographer of Augustine.
Knowing a little of Augustine’s own backstory, maybe we can see why he placed such a high value on an ethic of love rather than an ethic of law or an ethic of purity, ethics designed to draw lines between those of us who are in and those of us who are out.
Knowing full well his own history of missteps and mistakes, Augustine might have been working this out as he worked out his theology. And for some of us who may have a very different image of St. Augustine, it may be a little stunning to find him here speaking of morality in the Christian life by proclaiming, “Love and do what you will.”
But for Augustine, as for Paul, foundational to an ethic of love is human freedom. And out of that freedom, love – chosen freely, not compelled by law – would shape all that followed.
More importantly, in these days when so many embrace a Christianity at ease with deportations and white nationalism, genocide in Gaza and firing squads at home, maybe we can recall where, for Augustine and Paul, it all begins: love. And then do what love wills.
Johnny Zokovitch is the former executive director of Pax Christi USA. He currently serves on the board of the Pax Christi International Fund for Peace and is in pastoral leadership at St. Cronan Catholic Church in St. Louis. Read more from Johnny at https://johnnyzokovitch.substack.com/ and sign up there to receive his articles directly to your email inbox.