What is love (charity)?
The short answer
Love — what the Church calls charity — is the virtue by which we love God above all things and love every person for God's sake. It is the greatest of the virtues, the one that gives all the others their life and direction, and it is ultimately a share in the very love that God himself is.
Full explanation
When the New Testament talks about love, it usually doesn't mean an emotion or an attraction. It means a deliberate, self-giving willing of what is good for another — choosing their true good and acting on it, even when no warm feeling is present. This is why Jesus can command love. You cannot command a feeling, but you can command a way of treating people, and that is exactly what charity is.
The Church calls charity the greatest of the three theological virtues, and it helps to see why. Faith lets us know God; hope lets us trust him and reach toward him; but love is the actual union — it is faith and hope arriving at their destination. Think of an arch made of stones. Every stone matters, but there is one stone at the top, the keystone, that locks all the others in place; remove it and the whole arch falls. Charity is the keystone of the Christian life. The other virtues are real and good, but love is what holds them together and directs them toward their purpose. A courage without love can be mere recklessness; a generosity without love can be mere showing off. Love is what makes the rest genuinely good.
Charity is also not something we drum up from our own emotional reserves. We can only love this way because God loved us first; his love is poured into us, and ours becomes a kind of echo or overflow of his. Picture a fire. A fire doesn't strain to give off warmth — warmth is simply what fire does. When God's love truly takes hold in a person, love for others stops being a grim duty squeezed out by willpower and starts becoming the natural radiance of a heart that has been set alight. We still have to choose it, and often it costs us, but its deepest source is not us; it is God burning in us.
Finally, charity has a particular shape: it always travels in two directions at once. We love God above everything, and for his sake we love every human being — including the difficult, the undeserving, and the enemy. The two cannot be separated. Anyone who claims to love God while despising the person in front of them has misunderstood the whole thing, because the same love reaches in both directions. To love God truly is to find yourself, sooner or later, loving the people he loves.
Why this matters
It is possible to be religiously busy — correct in belief, disciplined in practice — and still be cold. Charity is the safeguard against that. It is what keeps faith from hardening into mere opinions and keeps moral effort from curdling into pride. Love is also the one thing that lasts: knowledge fades, projects end, but a life spent in genuine love is a life that has touched the eternal, because it has touched God. Everything else in the Christian life is meant to flow into this.
Myth Common misunderstanding
People often equate love with strong feeling, and then conclude that they "can't" love someone they don't like. But charity lives in the will, not merely in the emotions. You can will and seek another person's good — pray for them, refuse to harm them, help them concretely — long before you feel any affection, and sometimes you never feel it at all. The feelings are a welcome gift when they come, but the substance of love is the steady choice to seek what is truly good for the other.
Scripture connections
- 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 — Paul's portrait of love as patient, kind, and enduring describes charity as action and disposition, not feeling.
- John 13:34-35 — Jesus makes love the identifying mark of his followers.
- 1 John 4:7-8 — love comes from God, and "God is love," grounding charity in God's own nature.
- Matthew 22:37-39 — the two great commandments bind love of God and love of neighbour together.
- John 15:13 — the greatest love lays down its life for others, showing love as self-gift.
Church teaching references
Reflect
Is there one person you find it genuinely hard to love right now — and what is one concrete good you could will and do for them this week, regardless of how you feel?