The Fear That Comes from Love

Whoever has been established in this perfect love is sure to climb, by a higher step, to that still more sublime fear that belongs to love. This fear comes not from dread of punishment or greed for reward but from the greatest love. It is the fear with which a son, out of earnest affection, fears a most kind father, or a brother fears his brother, a friend his friend, or a wife her husband. There is no dread of blows or rebukes, only of some slight injury to love. In every word as well as every act, anxious affection is always careful that the warmth of love should not cool in the very slightest degree toward the one loved. [a]

One of the prophets has finely described the grandeur of this fear, saying: “Wisdom and knowledge are the riches of salvation; the fear of the Lord is his treasure.” He could not have described the worth and value of that fear more clearly than by saying that the riches of our salvation, which consist in true wisdom and knowledge of God, can be kept only by the fear of the Lord.

To this fear, then, the prophetic word invites not sinners but saints, where the psalmist says: “Fear the Lord, all you his saints, for those who fear him lack nothing.” Where a man fears the Lord with this fear, it is certain that nothing is lacking to his perfection. For it was clearly of that other fear, the fear of punishment, that the apostle John said: “Whoever fears is not made perfect in love, for fear has punishment.”

There is, then, a great difference between this fear, which lacks nothing and is the treasure of wisdom and knowledge, and that imperfect fear which is called “the beginning of wisdom.” That fear has punishment in it, and so it is driven out of the hearts of the perfect when the fullness of love comes in. For “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” And truly, if the beginning of wisdom consists in fear, in what will its perfection consist but in the love of Christ? Since that love holds within it the fear that belongs to perfect love, it is called not the beginning but the treasure of wisdom and knowledge.

So there are two stages of fear. The one is for beginners, that is, for those who are still under the yoke and a slave’s terror. Of this we read, “And the servant will fear his lord,” and in the Gospel, “I no longer call you servants, for the servant does not know what his lord is doing.” And so, he tells us, “the servant does not remain in the house forever, but the Son remains forever.” For he is teaching us to pass on from that fear of punishment to the fullest freedom of love, and to the confidence of the friends and sons of God.

Finally, the blessed apostle, who by the power of the Lord’s love had already passed through the slavish stage of fear, scorns lower things and declares that he has been enriched with good things by the Lord: “For God has not given us,” he says, “a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” And to those who burn with a perfect love for their heavenly Father, whom adoption by God has already made sons instead of servants, he says: “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery again to fear, but you received the spirit of adoption, by which we cry, Abba, Father.”

It is of this fear too that the prophet spoke when he described that sevenfold Spirit which, by the mystery of the Incarnation, most surely came down on the God-man: “And the Spirit of the Lord will rest on him: the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of knowledge and of true godliness.” And last of all he adds, as something special: “And the Spirit of the fear of the Lord will fill him.”

Here we must first notice carefully that he does not say, “And the Spirit of fear will rest on him,” as he said in the earlier cases, but, “The Spirit of the fear of the Lord will fill him.” For so great is the richness of this fear that once it has seized a man by its power, it takes possession not of a part but of his whole mind. And not without good reason. Since it is closely joined to that love which “never fails,” it not only fills the man but takes lasting, inseparable and continual possession of him in whom it has begun. It is not lessened by any enticements of passing joy or pleasure, as sometimes happens with that fear which is cast out.

This, then, is the fear that belongs to perfection, with which, we are told, the God-man was filled, who came not only to redeem mankind but also to give us a pattern of perfection and an example of goodness. For the true Son of God, “who did no sin, nor was deceit found in his mouth,” could not feel that slavish fear of punishment.