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“God loves, not as I love, but as an emerald is green. And I too, if I were in a state of perfection, would love as an emerald is green. I would be an impersonal person.” —Simone Weil
There is something immediately attractive about the French mystic Simone Weil’s plea in her notebooks that she might learn to love “as an emerald is green”: to achieve a love that is as steady, unconscious, and enduring as a color. The green profusion of nature is both unwavering and impersonal, unconscious and unchoosing, the “green fuse that drives the flower.” Weil could have chosen an organic object as a fitting image of love: a pear, a jade plant, an inchworm. So why a stone? Apart from the obvious fact that emeralds are, quite simply, more beautiful and rarer than pears or jade plants or inchworms, their sheer mineral imperviousness to desire, to wishy-washy fleshly touchiness, is clearly key to Weil’s choice. The steadiness of an emerald’s color evokes a love arising from no weak human region of desire or repulsion, governed as these movements are by a craven concern for the self, but following, instead, the blank rigor of molecular bond and refracted light. Organic forms flinch; gems are reliably unflinching.
The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, whose Historia Naturalis is often considered the first Western encyclopedia, speculated that gems have been “hardened by excessively intense freezing,” noting “that they are a kind of ice is certain; the Greeks have named it accordingly”—krystallos, or frost. Emeralds represent a particularly striking case of rock-ice: “Their special asset is their colour,” Pliny observes, “which is limpid without being at all faint,” “uniform[ly] deep,” with the “transparency of seawater.” He admires the sheer uniformity of a good emerald’s color—an endless, almost monotonous green without breach or flaw or break to interrupt the gaze.
Still, Weil’s metaphor is perplexing when one stops to think about it. It is difficult to imagine a love thus stripped of heart and flesh. What does love have to do with the austere, endless cool—the monochrome expanse—of a green crystal?
Almost nothing if we are talking about “love” in the everyday human sense of the term. I love my daughters and my best friend from grad school. I love, in a more diluted way, our family’s pet turtle Sweeney. I love Emily Dickinson’s poetry and toast with butter and wading in ocean surf. These loves are spontaneous, unforced movement toward that which feels like it is close to the sun, close to the center—what pulls us in with the resistless force of gravity. It is love as a wave of warmth and fellow-feeling.
But you don’t get points—theologically, anyway—for loving what is easy to love. God loves with an impersonal, even-handed equality that is almost wholly alien to human love. “For He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust,” writes the evangelist (Matthew 5:45). If we want to love like God, we must love what is unlovely, what is ragged, what is difficult or even impossible to love. The Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor understood this, noting that most people fail to recognize “how much religion costs”—how much discomfort and pain it demands of our pampered persons. “[People] think faith is a big electric blanket,” she wrote in a 1959 letter to Louise Abbott, “when of course it is the cross.”
I received a lesson in the cross that is Christian love when I was maybe twelve or thirteen years old. My family took trips to Europe almost every summer when I was growing up, with my mother in charge of organizing the itineraries. While she normally abhorred anything that smacked of commercial tourism, one summer she yielded to a group bus tour to visit a remote castle outside of the southern French city where we were staying. After we had toured the castle and were being hustled to a restaurant in town for lunch, my father, who spoke Spanish, struck up a conversation with a thirty-something-year-old Spanish man from the tour group. I have only the vaguest image of him in my mind, but I recall jet-black hair, a shiny forehead, and tinted sunglasses that barely concealed a purplish black eye. He may have also had a butterfly bandage holding the split skin above the eye together—but maybe I have invented that detail. My father translated the Spaniard’s story for us: he had been jumped, beaten, and robbed outside of his hotel. This was his first time in France. He appeared lonely, with a loneliness that felt like hunger.
I knew enough from homilies and catechism class to be familiar with the parable of the good Samaritan, and that knowledge lent what happened next the feel of a biblical test. As we shuffled herd-like into the lunch canteen, an unspoken question hung in the air—in my memory of the scene, at least: Would my family be the proverbial compassionate stranger to this man who had fallen among thieves on the road to Jericho? Or would we rather, like the Levite and the priest, choose to “pass by on the other side of the road” (Luke 10:30)?
My mother had already decided on the latter, for reasons I intuited without having to ask: because he was a lone man, and lone men are suspect. Because it would have made lunch awkward. Because she had her two young girls to think of, after all, and she was tired, and it would be all-around easier and pleasanter and safer not to have to extend our charity in just this one instance. She zeroed in on a section of the room-length table where only four contiguous place settings remained. “One, two, three, four,” she pronounced, squinting purposefully as she counted off each chair with an index finger, summoning the bare-bones fact of arithmetic to repel the interloper. My father hesitated for a moment, but then obediently took his seat. I remember—or maybe I’ve invented this too—a brief bruised look on the man’s face before he turned and found a place by himself further down the table.
I didn’t blame my mother. I was a shy child, fearful of strangers, and so I felt relief and even admiration for the swift brutality of a decision that allowed us all to eat our lunch in peace. But the scene stayed with me. So this is what life would look like, I recall thinking: an interminable series of small daily tests—comfort weighed against charity—with charity ending up, more often than not, the loser.
“Charitie” was the earliest English translation of the Latin Bible’s caritas, itself a translation of the original Greek agape, or “love.” New Testament writers chose agape among the many words for “love” available in the Greek language—philia, brother-love, and eros, sexual love—because it best captured the universal, disinterested love of God “shed abroad in our hearts” (Romans 5:5) by the Holy Spirit. Early Latin translations chose caritas as opposed to amor for the same reason: amor smacked of pining, romantic love, physical desire for individual persons or for material things, while caritas better captured the broad, impersonal embrace of God’s love.
Today the word “charity” has a dusty, old-fashioned ring to it. We associate charity with ritualized pity: the perfunctory act of distributing alms to the poor (and receiving a yearly tax break for it). And, indeed, even by the sixteenth century, the English word “charity” had begun to drift away from its medieval theological meaning, narrowing in scope to connote the specific “charitable” act of alms-giving.
How to properly translate agape of the New Testament formed the basis of a very public dispute between the Reformation-minded William Tyndale and Thomas More during England’s religious wars. In 1526, Tyndall’s English translation of the New Testament directly from the Greek broke with more than a thousand years of Church tradition by rendering agape not as charity, but as love. Thomas More responded in A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, upbraiding Tyndall for his choice of this “common” and “lewd” substitution. “If he called charity sometimes by the bare name of ‘love,’” More conceded, “I would not stick thereat.”
But, now, whereas “charity” signifieth in Englishmen’s ears not every common love, but a good, virtuous, and well-ordered love: he that will studiously flee from that name of good love, and always speak of “love” and always leave out “good,” I would surely say that he meaneth naught.
The dispute continues (less bloodily, to be sure) up to this day, with most Protestant translations choosing love, and not charity, as the most appropriate equivalent of agape. The risk, of course, is that love turns not “lewd” or sexual, as More feared, but banal and sentimental. To wit: a quick Google search of “love is patient, love is kind” (1 Corinthians 13:4) returns all manner of Valentine’s Day merchandise (greeting cards, T-shirts, wall hangings) that revel in the feel-good quality of this verse, so translated. (Other card options in this category include a pastel image of two rose-breasted birds kissing, with the caption “It Takes Two to Make a Dream Come True!”)
“Charity suffereth long, and is kind”—the King James translation—wouldn’t cut it on a T-shirt. There is a hardness to charity—a kind of rigor or discipline or impersonality—that “love” lacks. Love is easy, and warm; charity is hard, and formal. Of course, both matter in our day-to-day lives, but formality is core, not incidental, to the verse’s original theological meaning. Charity reminds us that God “maketh his Sun to shine on the just and the unjust” alike, and that we are commanded to love our enemies as well as our friends. Charity reminds us, with Weil, that in a state of perfection, we will love as impersonal persons.
On October 14, 1963, Flannery O’Connor travelled to Hollins College in Virginia to give a reading of her short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” She prefaced the reading with a few remarks addressing a quality of her writing that early reviewers found baffling: the grotesque violence that so frequently befalls her protagonists. O’Connor’s characters meet a motley of grim fates: Mrs. May is gored by a bull; Hazel Motes burns his eyes out with lye; a grandmother meets death at the business end of a serial killer’s pistol. “In my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace,” O’Connor explained to the assembled crowd. The idea that “reality”—for O’Connor, the truth of the Incarnation, our oneness with Christ’s body—is something “to which we must be returned at considerable cost,” is difficult to fathom for the average modern secular reader. But such hardness is inseparable from what she called “the Christian world view.” “The stories are hard,” she concedes to her critics, “but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.”
In O’Connor’s 1954 story “A Circle in the Fire,” Mrs. Cope is a trim, neat little woman who owns an extensive farm with a copse of woods at its edge. When the story first opens, she is furiously weeding nutgrass from her flowerbeds and trying to tune out the prattling of her neighbor Mrs. Pritchard, whose penchant for “calamitous stories”—in this case, of a woman who gave birth in an iron lung and subsequently died, along with the baby—wears Mrs. Cope “to a frazzle.” Mrs. Cope believes in focusing on the positive, in counting one’s blessings. “Every day I say a prayer of thanksgiving,” she replies to Mrs. Pritchard’s catastrophizing. “‘Think of all we have, Lord,’ she said and sighed, ‘we have everything.’”
Just at that moment, three scruffy teenaged boys, carrying a large valise, appear around the side of the house. Thirteen-year-old Powell had lived on Mrs. Cope’s farm as a child when his father worked for her as a hired hand; his family had since relocated “out to one of them developments in Atlanta.” Now he has come back to visit, with two friends in tow. The boys are, sociologically speaking, textbook charity cases: poor and fatherless, stuck in a soulless urban housing complex made not for living but for warehousing people. The boys are the proverbial “poor things” upon whom, from her privileged position of middle-class comfort, Mrs. Cope knows she must bestow charity.
Yet from the very beginning, Powell evinces a disconcerting, vaguely menacing obsession with the farm that sets off a silent panic in Mrs. Cope’s soul. One of Powell’s eyes has “a slight cast to it,” so that “it seemed to be making a circle of the place, examining the house and the white-water tower beyond and the chicken houses and the pastures that rolled away on either side until they met the first line of woods.” “The other eye,” the narrator writes, “looked at [Mrs. Cope],” such that his gaze “seemed to be coming from two directions at once as if it had them surrounded.” “Never shuts his trap about this place,” the biggest of the three boys grunts, explaining why they had made the trek from Atlanta, and the smallest one chimes in: “Say, lady, you know what he said one time? He said when he died he wanted to come here!”
Anxious to know what, exactly, will be required of her as a result of this surprise visit, Mrs. Cope is relieved when she thinks she has landed on the secret to the boys’ searching, sullen stares: “They were staring because they were hungry!” she gasps, and immediately asks if the boys want something to eat. “They said they would but their expressions, composed and unsatisfied, didn’t lighten any.” It may be that Powell’s desire will not be so easily satisfied; that it will require more than a plate of crackers and a bottle of cola.
Mrs. Cope forbids them from sleeping in the barn or the woods—she worries their cigarettes might start a fire—and reluctantly offers that they might camp out in the field for one night only. When she finds them still roving about her fields the next morning, Mrs. Cope is distressed. “They had the same look of hardened hunger that had pained her yesterday,” the narrator writes, “but today she felt faintly provoked.” She has reached the limit of what she believes is, by any rational measure, her charitable duty towards the boys, and hardens accordingly. “You boys know that I am glad to have you…but I expect you to behave,” she warns. “‘After all,’ she said in a suddenly high voice, ‘this is my place.’”
But the boys don’t behave; they proceed to show Mrs. Cope precisely to what extent “God owns them woods and her too,” as the littlest boy mutters before all three shuffle off to wreak havoc on her property. They ride her horses bareback; they drink the cow’s milk; they let the bull out of the pen; they throw stones at her mailbox. Finally, they set fire to her woods, whooping and hollering at the destruction, not so much of the farm, but of Mrs. Cope’s pride. Mrs. Cope’s adolescent daughter, who had been spying on the boys when they started the fire, races out of the woods and “stare[s] up at her [mother’s] face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might belong to anybody.”
Charity, as God requires it of us, is not a big electric blanket. It is an immolation: a burning off of one’s person in the fire of a giving that does not have its point of origin in the narrow, possessing self.
The mineral hardness of an emerald is a fitting image for the implacable, impersonal nature of what God’s love demands of us at its most extreme—to give that with which we do not willingly part.
Yet the first thing one notices in the presence of an actual emerald is not its hardness, but its light: an illumination so dazzling, the beholder feels like they are being (softly) swallowed whole. I recently visited the Gem and Mineral Hall at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum. Like all gem and mineral exhibits I have ever visited, this one, too, was staged to mimic the experience of walking into a darkened cavern—the proverbial womb of the earth where crystals grow. In this setting, the stones within their hushed glass cases wink and jump like the rarest of stars against a velvet darkness.
The exhibit’s cut emeralds (and green aquamarines and peridots and topazes) pulsed with light—tiny, ceaselessly shifting pinpoint constellations—such that I felt I would need a thousand eyes to properly catch and hold it all. No matter how long or how longingly one looks, there is no getting to the bottom of an emerald’s light. “In a gemstone,” writes Pliny, “the whole majesty of nature is encompassed in minute space.” The emerald is an emblem of compressed infinity that leaves you emptied, impotent, speechless—temporarily stunned into forgetting your own small, private self, with your own small, private ends.
But this weakness is also, when we allow ourselves to be moved by it, an opening-out and an opening-up. True charity, when we learn to live it properly, is the opposite of mineral hardness; it is an openness to the Incarnation, the truth of our shared body—we are a constellation, not separate stars—so total that it dissolves all the protective mineral feints and shields we throw up around ourselves. Caritas is, rather than hardness, a softness so soft that the very distinction of self and other melts away.
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