Ancient Love
We encounter here a series of additional "Helpful Links." Each one is threaded
to a particularly telling but steadily dispirited literary-historical text,
ancient, medieval, modern, and postmodern. Related "Lovelinks" follow.
Here are my Ancient Lovelinks.
I Corinthians 13
St. Paul
(? - 63)
If I speak in
the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy
gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand
all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove
mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have,
and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind;
love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does
not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not
rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes
all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends; as for
prophecy, it will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge,
it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect;
but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a
child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a
child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in
a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall
understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope,
love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is
love.