--- title: "The Greatest of These" description: "The year I decided to read the religious texts properly rather than have opinions about them, and the three words at the end of 1 Corinthians 13 that I have not got past since." date: 2024-06-02 category: Arts readingTime: "5 min read" --- A while ago I decided that having opinions about religion without having read any of it was not a position, it was a habit. So I started reading. Not one of them. All of them, as far as I could manage, in whatever translation I could get hold of, at the pace of someone with school and work and no particular deadline. I was not looking for a religion. I want to be honest about that, because it changes what follows. I was looking for what these texts are actually like as texts, given that more human thought has been poured into them than into anything else we have written, and given that almost everything I had heard about them came secondhand from people who were arguing. Most of it was harder and stranger than I expected. Much of it was law, genealogy, dispute, administration. And then, somewhere in the middle of a letter written to a quarrelling congregation in Corinth, there is a chapter that stops. ## The chapter This is the King James, which is four hundred years old and out of copyright, and which uses a word modern translations have abandoned. I will come back to that. > **1** Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. **2** And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. **3** And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. > > **4** Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, **5** Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; **6** Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; **7** Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. > > **8** Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. **9** For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. **10** But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. **11** When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. **12** For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. > > **13** And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. > > 1 Corinthians 13, King James Version You know parts of it even if you did not know you knew them. Sounding brass. Through a glass, darkly. Putting away childish things. It is read at weddings, which has worn it smooth. It is worth remembering what it is actually doing there, which is not romantic in the slightest. Paul is writing to a community that has been competing over spiritual gifts, over who can do the more impressive thing, and the chapter is an interruption aimed squarely at them. It opens by taking every accomplishment they are proud of, prophecy, knowledge, faith that moves mountains, giving away everything you own, and pricing each one at zero without love. Not diminished. Zero. *I am nothing.* The half-line that caught me hardest was not one of the famous ones. The King James has *thinketh no evil*, which is vague enough to slide past. The New International Version renders the same clause as *keeps no record of wrongs*, and that stopped me. I had never encountered a description of love that included an explicit instruction about bookkeeping, and once I noticed it I could not stop noticing how much of what I call being reasonable is, in fact, a ledger. ## And the greatest of these It ends on a ranking, which is the part I have not got past: > And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. > > 1 Corinthians 13:13, New International Version The ranking is the argument. It would have been easy and unobjectionable to say that the three go together. He does not. He puts them in order and names a winner, in a letter to people who had been ranking themselves by the wrong measure, which is a deliberate and slightly savage piece of construction. And I think the ordering is defensible on its own terms, without any theology at all. Faith and hope are both oriented at something you cannot currently see: one at what you hold to be true, the other at what you would like to come. Both require the future to cooperate. Love is the only one of the three that operates entirely on what is in the room. It is the only one that does not need the world to turn out a particular way in order to have been worth doing. ## What the translators do to it Here is where I got properly stuck, and it is a language problem rather than a religious one. The word in the Greek is *agape*, and you will have noticed that the chapter above never once says love. It says **charity**, thirteen verses of it, and the modern version I quoted a moment ago says love in every one of the same places. *Charity*, from the Latin *caritas*, which the Vulgate used for *agape*. In 1611 that word meant something like regard for another person's good, held steadily and without reference to how you feel about them. Four centuries later it means a registered organisation you give money to at Christmas, so modern translations moved to *love*, which is the right call and also a loss, because *love* now arrives soaked in feeling. Paul's list is behavioural almost throughout: patient, kind, not boastful, keeps no record. It is a description of conduct, not of a sensation. The old word carried that better and can no longer be used. The new word is understood and quietly imports the wrong thing. Turkish has its own version of the trouble. *Aşk* is the consuming kind and would be absurd here. *Sevgi* is warmer and gentler and closer, but it still sits in the register of how you feel about someone. Neither quite reaches a word that means: act for this person's good, as a practice, whether or not you are moved to. I have written before about [words that arrive from another field and bring their old meaning with them](/blog/emergence-is-a-borrowed-word). This is the opposite failure and a worse one. The word did not change fields. It stayed exactly where it was and the language moved underneath it. ## What I did with it Nothing, is the honest answer. I did not convert. I finished the reading, went on with things, and this chapter stayed. What it changed is smaller and more awkward than a belief. It is that I now have a definition of love that I did not choose, that is not about how I feel, and that I can be measured against on any given day without much room to argue. Patient. Kind. Not envious. Keeps no record of wrongs. I fail most of that most weeks. The ledger in particular. But I notice now that I am failing something specific, rather than being vaguely worse than I would like, and the specificity turns out to matter. A standard you cannot wriggle out of is worth more than one you agree with.