Which comes first: love of God or love of neighbour?
The saints have put the question in various ways. For example, Saint Bernard says,
It is surely justice to share our natural gifts with those who share our nature.
But if we are to love our neighbours as we ought, we must have regard to God also: for it is only in God that we can pay that debt of love aright. Now a man cannot love his neighbour in God, except he love God Himself; wherefore we must love God first, in order to love our neighbours in Him.
It is true and easily seen, that from the point of view of the value of the love in ourselves and the ultimate, final focus, we must love God “first”.
However, what about first in time? Not first in value, but first in time. Saint Bernard’s own words tend to give credibility to this: he suggests that “once” we have “tasted and seen how gracious the Lord is”, “it will not be difficult to fulfil the command touching love to our neighbours”.
If we interpret “first love God” here to mean a kind of chronology or storytelling time, then that squares with the life stories of Charles de Foucauld, as well as Catherine of Siena and Clement Hofbauer. They, for example, had definite itineraries towards predominantly learning to love God in himself first, then later learning to love God in his children. There are distinct periods in the lives of these saints where anyone can notice a divine intimacy prior to an apostolic, neighbour-focused exteriority. This is not to say that they experienced any disconnect of discontinuity between the two loves. In fact, the love of God and love if neighbour pertain to one and the same commandment: “And this command we have from God, that he who loves God, loves also his brother” (1 Jn 4:21). As one love grows, the other must also.
But it does still remain true that the saints, without imposing any rigid boxes, do tend to sketch the idea, the path, the trajectory, the itinerary, or the story, that we will typically first learn to better love God – in whatever ways and by whatever paths are appropriate to our state and to God’s Providence – and that this will overflow into our interactions with our neighbours. In the beginning, it is actually harder to love our neighbours, because we contemplate less. We see less. We see less of Jesus in our neighbours. But that sight, which is itself a gift that comes only by knowing Jesus, makes the love of neighbour accelerate. It becomes less hard to love our neighbour when we explicitly love God more.
True, love of neighbour makes love of God accelerate, too. Any serious, dangerous lack of the virtues must be meted out, destroyed, and alienated from our hearts. But the saints seem to insist – without actively insisting – on a rather more common approach to heaven. We may end up learning, or thinking that we are learning, to love God first.
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Contemplative in the Mud 