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4 POPPIES AND ROSEMARY Love 189. Which are the two great commandments that contain the whole law of God? The two great commandments that contain the whole law of God are: first, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength; second, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. And one of them, a doctor of the Law, putting him to the test, asked him, ‘‘Master, which is the great commandment in the Law?’’ Jesus said to him, ‘‘‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind.’ This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like it, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.’’ (Matthew 22:35–40) —A Catechism of Christian Doctrine, Revised Edition of the Baltimore Catechism, Part 2, Lesson 15 Curious Commandments I perceive that the distinction between lover and loveable is beyond the wall of the coincidence of unity and otherness. —Nicholas Cusanus, The Vision of God There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray, love, remember. —William Shakespeare, Hamlet The commandment to love, referred to in this chapter’s catechismic query and response, is given in several New Testament gospels,1 largely repeating Leviticus 19:18 (‘‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself ’’). Yet love seems even less readily commanded than does forgiveness , and in fact the passages cited here don’t legislate in a conventional sense. Eckhart writes of Luke’s version (‘‘Love God above all and your neighbor as yourself’’): ‘‘This is a commandment from God. But I say that it is not only a commandment but that God has given us this as a 84 L O V E gift and has promised to give us it.’’2 This commandment comes as forgiveness does: with the force not of penalty but of promise, more gift than order to give, more twist in time than causal chain. ‘‘Love,’’ in the imperative, is less an order than a substitution for orders, for regulations, for laws—which is not to say that it countermands them, as then it would simply be another order. The Catechism suggests, rather, that if one has managed to keep these commandments to love, then all other commandment keeping will follow: ‘‘all the other Commandments are given either to help us to keep these two, or to direct us how to shun what is opposed to them.’’3 But of course the only reason one would manage to keep them would be if one loved already. This sort of twist, this already-there demand/gift of love, is central to this chapter. Love can be an imperative only if it is already present, can be a promise only if it is already kept. Love’s promise is not one we make after careful consideration of relevant data, but a promise in which we find ourselves already. ‘‘I was astonished to find that already I loved you, not a phantom surrogate for you,’’4 writes Augustine to God, precisely in his discussion of memory, and this amazement is perhaps characteristic of love, which comes as a discovery of what already is, however gradually it may have crept up on us. How in the world did I get here? one wonders in love, and somehow one never remembers. Love’s promise, which is in large measure a promise not to forget, is given as something remembered. Like the promise of forgiveness, that of love is elusive: it promises only itself. It is a promise of memory against loss, a promise that sustains the possibility of the (shared) future yet also twists out of time; a promise that the lover finds has been made, without subjective intentionality, in some strange ‘‘already’’ whenever one loves (a promise we do not remember making, a commandment we find ourselves obeying already), a promise that forgets the mortality implicit in it; finally, a promise that is ‘‘kept’’ simply by its remaking, by the once more of what was made before the knowing of it. The eternity of love, that is, is an eternity of implication: promise (with its futurity), joyous affirmation (of the ampli- fied present and its infinite splitting), and memory (of a past that is bigger than information could contain). Memory is promised to the future to allow the present...

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