Love Is All You Need: Motive Power of Western Civilization

Some Eastern Churches have icons of Socrates, whom St Justin Martyr called a "Christian before Christ". Dr Birzer explains the connection.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Bradley J. Birzer, PhD

In the modern world, love is often ignored or perverted into lust. When we talk of governance, when we talk of relationships, when we talk of societal structures, we never mention love. What happened? How could the modern West be so very different from the ancient and medieval West?

One of my greatest joys in life is teaching the freshman core course at Hillsdale College, the Western Heritage, required in the first semester. I’ve just finished my 27^th year teaching it, and I gain something from it every time it’s taught. In the course, we go through a series of primary texts: Hammurabi’s code, Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, 1^st and 2^nd Samuel, the Greeks, the Stoics, the Romans, the early Christians, the Patristics, the Medievals, the men of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Early Modern. It’s a lot to cover, a journey, a whirlwind, but so utterly beautiful. How it works on a day by day basis: I assign the texts before each class, the students read them, and then we discuss them in the following class. It’s the perfect way to introduce students to the college and its mission to uphold the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman aspects of Western civilization.

Though our first document is the Code of Hammurabi—the oldest extent text we have in the West—I always start the first class by discussing pages 86 and 87 of our primary source reader, the dialogue between Socrates and his best friend, Crito, on the nature of Ethics. In it—the fullest expression of pre-Christian ethics in the West—Socrates reveals that one must never do wrong, even when wronged. Further, he says, anytime anyone does an ill—even with the best of intentions and in the search for a higher good—he has utterly tainted the good. In other words, in no way, shape, or form, must one ever do ill. It’s an incredibly hard teaching, but it truly is the beginning of ethics in the West

Socrates is only three days away from the end of his life when he has this conversation, and he is willing to be a martyr for the God, the one who has commanded him to pursue truth, no matter the cost. The cost is his execution by the polis he loves, Athens.

Not surprisingly, the early Christians, especially the Roman Stoics, thought that Socrates was a proto-Christian, with St. Justin Martyr going so far as to label him a “Christian before Christ.” He had, after all, argued that one should turn the other cheek a full four centuries before Christ would, and he died for his God and for his community.

What we in the twenty-first century should recognize is that Socrates did everything he did out of love: love of his fellows, love of his community, and love of his God. As I mentioned in my previous essay in these pages, the West is not rooted in racism, sexism, colonialism, imperialism or any form of denigration, but rather in love and dignity. Again, in this piece, let me stress this. If there was a guiding principle in the very beginnings of Western civilization, it is in love and sacrifice, and a desire to find the universal good of the human person in all of his or her manifestations, regardless of the accidents of birth (skin color, gender, religion, etc.)

Love defined Socrates’ thought and his action, but it also guided the Greeks who would follow him, especially the Stoics, who adopted the Logos of Heraclitus (dating back to roughly 510BC) as their god, their guiding principle of the universe and of creation. One of the greatest of the Roman Stoics, Virgil, after predicting Christ in Eclogue 4—the child of the God and the virgin who will erase sin from the world through the merits of his Father—proclaims in Eclogue 10: Omnia vincit Amor: et nos cedamus Amori. Love conquers all; let us, too, yield to love.

A half-century later, God does exactly this, offering us the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, the Incarnate Word, as the savior of all. God, love itself, had come into the world, as we, of course, celebrate this Christmas season. Not only was Jesus love personified, but He, too, would give His absolute everything for the redemption of mankind on a grim Friday afternoon, only to arise on the third day, death shattered by love itself.

As such, the conception and the birth of the Incarnate Word is the still point, the very center, of all history. He was, after all, the “light that lighteth up every man,” the Greek Logos baptized by pure grace. It must be noted, God’s love does not extend only toward the future, but it enlightens every man, past, present and future. God, of course, is not bound by time, and neither is His grace.

Christian love animated the Western world from Pentecost through St. Perpetua and the martyrs, through St. Augustine, through King Alfred the Great, through Thomas Aquinas, and, of course, through Dante. Without exaggeration, one can draw a direct line from Socrates through Christ (above, of course, all comparison, being fully man and fully God), and to Dante. Dante in the final canto of Paradiso explains what Dante saw, when he gazed upon the Most Blessed Trinity: “At this point my towering fantasy lots its power, but my will and desire came together like a perfectly balanced wheel turned by that Love which moves the sun and all the stars.” Everything that lives, and move, and breaths does so only because love upholds the very universe itself.

In the modern world, though, love is often ignored or perverted into lust. When we talk of governance, when we talk of relationships, when we talk of societal structures, we never mention love. What happened? How could the modern West be so very different from the ancient and medieval West?

While there are a myriad of reasons for this loss and decay, I would argue that we can at least center much of the change on the words of Nicolo Machiavelli. In his powerful and influence The Prince, Machiavelli tells us that the ethics of Socrates will only lead to the harm of society. While it is good to be good, the effective ruler knows when to employ evil for a greater good. For Machiavelli, is it power, not love, that moves us.

Tragically, to a great extent, Machiavelli has become right. Whether he was the instigator or merely the recorder, the last six centuries of the Western tradition have been radically different from the first several thousand years of the Western tradition. The left, especially, has embraced power—power to rule and power to explain relations in society. It’s hard to imagine any statesmen, especially since the French Revolution, proclaiming love as the motive power of society. To talk of love is to engage in superstition, folly, and romance. Often on the Left, folks will even say such hideous things as “rest in power.”

The irony, however, is that those who love love are, in the long run, the realists, while those who love power are deluding themselves and hindering the paths to eternity. To conclude, let’s turn to timeless words of wisdom, taken from St. John the Beloved, his first letter, chapter 4:

⁷ Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸ Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹ In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. ¹⁰ In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. ¹¹ Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹² No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

I’ll take St. John any day over Machiavelli. Heck, even the Marxian-inspired Beatles, got it right: “Love is all you need.”

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The featured image is “The Last of England” (between 1852 and 1855), by Ford Madox Brown, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Pictured (top): A Romanian icon of Pythagoras & Socrates