The Steps Up to Love

“If anyone, then, is aiming at perfection, he should begin from that first stage of fear, which we rightly called slavish, of which it is said: ‘When you have done all things, say: We are unprofitable servants.’ From there he should advance a step and climb to the higher path of hope. Hope is compared not to a slave but to a hired worker, because it looks for the payment of its reward. It is as though it were free from care about the absolution of its sins and the fear of punishment, and aware of its own good works. Yet though it seems to look for the promised reward, it cannot reach that love of a son who trusts in his father’s kindness and generosity and has no doubt that all his father has is his. That prodigal, who had lost the very name of son along with his father’s property, did not dare to aspire to this when he said: ‘I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ After the husks that the pigs ate, that is, the disgusting food of sin, of which he was denied even his fill, he ‘came to himself’ and was overcome by a wholesome fear. He already began to loathe the filth of the pigs and to dread the punishment of gnawing hunger. And as if he had already been made a servant, he longs for the condition of a hired worker, and thinks about the wages, and says: ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have plenty of bread, and here I am dying of hunger! I will go back to my father and say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.”’ But his father ran to meet him and received those words of humble repentance with greater affection than that with which they were spoken. He was not content to grant him the lesser things, but passed through the two stages without delay and restored him to his former dignity as a son. [a]

We too ought to hurry on at once, so that by the grace of love that cannot be broken we may climb to that third stage, of sonship, which believes that all that the father has is its own. In this way we may be counted worthy to receive the image and likeness of our heavenly Father, and to be able to say, after the likeness of the true Son: ‘All that the Father has is mine.’ The blessed apostle also declares this of us when he says: ‘All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours.’ And the commands of our Savior also call us to this likeness: ‘Be perfect,’ he says, ‘even as your Father in heaven is perfect.’ For in these people the love of goodness is sometimes found to be interrupted, when the vigor of the soul is relaxed by some coldness, or joy, or delight, and so, for the time, it loses either the fear of hell or the desire of the blessings to come. There is indeed in these a stage that leads to some progress. When we begin to avoid sin from fear of punishment or from hope of reward, it enables us to pass on to the stage of love. For, as one says, ‘There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has torment, and the one who fears is not perfect in love. We therefore love because God first loved us.’ So we can climb to that true perfection only when, as he first loved us for no other reason than our salvation, we too have loved him for the sake of nothing but his own love alone. That is why we must do our best to climb with perfect ardor of mind from this fear to hope, and from hope to the love of God and the love of the virtues themselves. Then, as we pass steadily on to the love of goodness itself, we may keep a firm hold on what is good, as far as human nature allows.”