Someone once found my blog searching for

perfect love casts out fear, contemplative interpretations

… What can I say? Well, this is a blog post for that!

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If “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Ps 110:10; Prov 9:10; Eccl 1:19), why does the first letter of Saint John say that “there is no fear in love”? The wisdom literature of the Jewish people certainly makes the claim regarding fear; meanwhile, the Apostle certainly says this:

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. (1 Jn 4:18)

When I first started to think as a Christian, this puzzled me. How can fear and love then coexist and both be given as part of our relationship with God? One possibility, which Saint John of Ávila notes in a letter to a scrupulous woman, is that there are fears and anxieties caused by scruples: love must cast them out!

But not all of us suffer from scruples (and it truly is a deep suffering). There is something more general. There is a more general spiritual relationship between fear and love of God. And really, Saint John the Apostle himself gives the answer: perfect love casts out fear. It is process. It describes a term to reach. Something is not cast out without a history and a time evolution.

As we become more and more perfected in love – and all of spiritual perfection is love – this divine love thrown into our soul and body pushes the servile fear out of us. We begin, like Saint Catherine of Sienna forcefully and repeatedly said, with a great fear of God. It is the only place human beings begin, wounded as we are. We love God for the sake of avoiding punishment and difficulty in this life, and perhaps also in the next. We fear. We are slaves – not quite friends and spouses. We act rightly, but to a considerable extent out of fear of God, of punishment, and of difficulty.

The Gospel law is different – or, perhaps more precisely, the Gospel law evolves beyond this.

As we journey through the spiritual life and as the so-called “dark nights of the soul” progressively strip our attachments to created things and to spiritual consolations, our actions come more from love, which is in the will, than from fear and our disordered appetites and a desire for safety, easiness, or consolation.

It is, for us, impossible to begin without a desire for safety, easiness, or consolation. That is the law of a fallen and wounded humanity. We are poor in virtue and very weak. But as we grow spiritually, these desire for safety, easiness, or consolation diminish. Initially, the purification and simplification of our lives target our senses; then they target our will itself. (These are the two so-called “dark nights” of Saint John of the Cross.)

But the perfection of love, towards which we journey, casts out the laws of fear! We can come to do things for the sake of union with the will of God, rather than for the sake of sense or spiritual consolation.

In other words, the Scriptures say it simply: perfect love casts out fear. This is one description – there are many in the Bible – of the progress and spiritual journey. Life in Christ is not static. It is a transformation, with typical stages and ways and paths. The variations are, of course, many. But the typical explanations are contained in the Bible. Anyone who pretends that there is no journey and progressive transformation is speaking against God’s Word.

Sadly, I speak in a lot of big words. In point of fact, do we need flowery or intellectual language to understand all this?

No, the secrets are open to little children! One great lover of God with a childlike heart was the Vietnamese Redemptorist brother, Little Văn. What does he say about “fear” and “perfect love”?

In his Conversations with Jesus, Marcel Văn asks Jesus,

How is it that I hear certain brothers say that they have a great fear of you? (224)

And he records Jesus’ answer as he understands it:

Yes, Marcel, it is very strange. I find it strange myself and do not understand why a good number of souls have such a fear of me… They do not have enough love for me… If they really loved me, they would have no reason to be afraid. In fact, it is simply because they compare my love with that of earthly creatures, that they fear in that way. If, on the contrary, they used the glance of love to probe the depths of my love, their fear would disappear. (224–225)

Why, then, do they not love?

If, in the presence of love, these souls continue to fear it is because, for them, my love is not love… Only sinners are afraid of God; but those who really love him never say they are afraid of him… When some say they are afraid of God, it is because they consider God as being sin [which is the only thing to fear]. (225–226)

Fear, then, involves thinking of God as one ought to think about sin; fear involves a lack of confidence in God’s all-powerful ability at all times. No wonder perfect love and confidence do away with it!

May we progress, as all Christians are called to, towards perfection. May Jesus bring us there, to the land where perfect love casts out fear.