What does it mean when Jesus says, concerning the two commandments of love of God and love of neighbor: “On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets” (Matt. 22:40)?
I propose that Jesus was not using hyperbole to make a point. No, I firmly believe that, far from merely engaging in compelling rhetoric, Our Lord was stating a simple fact about the metaphysical structure of the entire Old Testament — and, in fact, of all true religion. All the sacraments, all of our liturgy, all the virtues, both infused and acquired, all the gifts of the Holy Ghost, and the Beatitudes — all of it fits into this framework which is the Christological bond joining man to the Triune God.
The Encounter
The statement takes place in an encounter between Jesus and a “Doctor of the Law.” While both Saint Matthew and Saint Mark narrate the conversation, it is the former evangelist who writes the verse we here consider. The setting is Holy Week, when Jesus’ enemies are growing increasingly hostile. Just before the Doctor of the Law asks his question, two other attempts had been made to catch the Master: The Pharisees conspired with their enemies, the Herodians, to entrap Our Lord with their question concerning paying tribute to Caesar. When these were confounded, the Sadducees attempted to ensnare Jesus on the question of the resurrection, using their scenario of a woman who had married seven brothers. It is after the Master silenced the Sadducees, who erred “not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God” (Matt. 22:29), that the Pharisees made a last attempt, this time putting up an expert as their champion:
But the Pharisees hearing that he had silenced the Sadducees, came together. And one of them, a doctor of the law, asking him, tempting him, Master, which is the greatest 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 to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets. (Matt. 22:34–40)
Saint Mark tells us that Jesus said, “There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:31), which certainly agrees with “On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets,” but it does not say as much as what Saint Matthew relates.
The two laws that we know as the first and second commandments of the Gospel are found in the Mosaic Law, and come respectively from Deuteronomy 6:51 and Leviticus 19:18.2
The Law and the Prophets
In order to answer the bigger question before us, we first have to answer another: What did Jesus mean by “the law and the prophets”? The Hebrew Scriptures are made up of the Torah (Law), Nevi’im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings). Collectively, they are called the Tanakh, which is an acronym made up of all three words. Because the Ketuvim were the last of the Hebrew books to be considered canonical, and because the phrase “the law and the prophets,” referring to the Torah and the Nevi’im, was already a consecrated phrase (used as such in the wisdom books, Maccabees, and the Dead Sea Scrolls), Jesus was following a contemporary Jewish shorthand that referred to the entire Jewish canon, or whole Old Testament. Thus, in the Transfiguration, we see Moses (the Law) and Elias (the Prophets) both present with Jesus on Mount Tabor, dramatically depicting the testimony of the entirety of the Old Testament giving witness to the Christ.
It Depends
The word in Saint Matthew’s Greek for “depends” is κρέμαται (krematai), from κρεμάννυμι (kremannumi), which means “to hang, [or] suspend.” The verb is employed in reference to many things that literally hang in the Bible — millstones around a neck in Matt. 18:6, Jesus’ body on the Cross in Acts 5:30, etc. Transferring the concept of hanging from its more literal use in the realm of material objects to a more figurative use in the realm of ideas, the concept of “hang” connotes depend.3
For the entire law and prophets to “hang” or “depend” on the twofold precept of charity implies more than just prominence or importance; it implies something that is structural or tectonic.
Cornelius à Lapide comments on how these two commandments of charity not only support as foundations but even contain as principles the whole of the law and prophets:
All the precepts of the Law and the Prophets are based on and supported by these two commandments of love. Indeed, they spring and grow out of them, just as many branches spring from and depend upon one tree and one root. Wherefore in these two precepts all are contained, just as conclusions are contained in their principles and premises. For all commandments are included in the Decalogue. And the Decalogue contains nothing else except precepts of love of God and our neighbour. The three commandments of the first table deal with love of God. The seven commandments of the second table deal with love of our neighbour, as S. Augustine says (lib. 8 de Trinit. c. 7). Wherefore the Apostle says (Rom. 13:8–9), For he that loveth his neighbour, hath fulfilled the law. For: Thou shalt not commit adultery: Thou shalt not kill: Thou shalt not steal: Thou shalt not bear false witness: Thou shalt not covet. And if there be any other commandment, it is comprised in this word: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Hence all the precepts of mercy, and of all the other virtues, natural and supernatural, have to do with these two commandments concerning love of God and neighbour, and are contained in them. The precepts of faith, hope, charity and religion are included in the commandment to love God, whereas the precepts of justice, truth, fidelity, friendship, mercy, gratitude, etc., are included in the commandment to love neighbour. Christ, therefore, signifies that these two precepts ought to be always in every one’s heart and before one’s eyes, and that he ought to direct all of his thoughts, words and deeds by them, and arrange and lead his whole life accordingly.
Jesus Christ: Alpha and Omega
We can gain deeper insights into the question if we consider it from the perspective of the Absolute Primacy of Christ — that is, the theological position that Jesus Christ was predestined as the supreme glorifier of the Blessed Trinity before creation and before God had foreseen the fall of man. In the words on an indulgenced prayer we will soon be praying in our novena to Christ the King, “O Christ Jesus, I acknowledge Thee to be the king of the universe; all that hath been made is created for Thee.…”
If God had foreseen and predestinated Jesus Christ as such, and had predestinated us in Him4 — to be sacramentally united to Him in His Mystical Body — then certain things follow.
One of these is that before the Law and the Prophets came into existence, and before God even foresaw them as preparing the way for Jesus Christ, God saw Jesus and He saw all the predestined in Him, beginning with the Blessed Virgin, who is the first of the predestined, and who was predestined with Jesus. As Blessed Pius IX declared, “God, by one and the same decree, had established the origin of Mary and the Incarnation of Divine Wisdom.” Everything else in the economy of salvation, and even in the economy of creation is — as engineers would say today — “built out” from Jesus.
The love of Jesus Christ has a primacy before and above all other loves. In eternity, the Father loves the Logos first and that love is the Holy Ghost. For the elect, the Incarnate Logos was predestined, in keeping with His two Natures, to be loved as both our God and our Neighbor. All other created reality flows from that.
Some may object that I am confusing the order of nature and the order of grace here. I am not. Respecting this fundamental distinction — and flatly rejecting the Modernist tendency to make grace virtually implicit in nature — we can say that the created order was made with a supernatural purpose in the Divine Mind. That is certainly the Scotist view.
David’s Son and Lord, the Messianic King
Note what follows immediately after the passage in Matthew 22 that we are considering:
And the Pharisees being gathered together, Jesus asked them, saying: What think you of Christ? Whose son is he? They say to him: David’s. He saith to them: How then doth David in spirit call him Lord, saying: The Lord said to my Lord, Sit on my right hand, until I make thy enemies thy footstool? If David then call him Lord, how is he his son? And no man was able to answer him a word; neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions.” (Matt. 22:41–45)
The answer that these Pharisees dared not give is one they likely saw only a faint glimmer of in their Scriptures: The Christ would be David’s Lord as God and David’s son as Man. In other words, the eternal Son of God would enter time as the Messianic King and Son of David fulfilling that mysterious passage from Psalm 109.
Saint Matthews’ juxtaposition of these two things — the challenge of Our Lord to the Pharisees concerning Psalm 109 and His answer to the question on the greatest commandment — strikes me as very significant. I propose that they constitute a continuum of thought, and that the two great commandments meet in the love of Jesus Christ, David’s Divine Lord and human son.
As if to drive home the supreme importance of these commandments in the Messianic kingdom, Saint Mark — who usually gives us less information than Saint Matthew — adds an additional exchange that took place between Jesus and the Doctor of the Law after the words of Jesus on the two commandments:
And the scribe said to him: Well, Master, thou hast said in truth, that there is one God, and there is no other besides him. And that he should be loved with the whole heart, and with the whole understanding, and with the whole soul, and with the whole strength; and to love one’s neighbour as one’s self, is a greater thing than all holocausts and sacrifices. And Jesus seeing that he had answered wisely, said to him: Thou art not far from the kingdom of God. And no man after that durst ask him any question” (Mark 12:32–34).
The Doctor of the Law was not far from God’s kingdom because, in recognizing the truth of what Our Lord was saying about love of God and neighbor, he was in principle — and in spite of his apparent ill will — very close to accepting Our Lord Himself, the object of both loves. Perhaps he struggled within himself. Perhaps he was one of those three thousand baptized on Pentecost; perhaps he was added later.
‘What Must I Do to Possess Eternal Life?’
In Luke 10, a slightly different question is raised (v. 25): “Master, what must I do to possess eternal life?” As the question is different, and as the surrounding circumstances are different, à Lapide and other commentators hold that this is a different incident in the life of Our Lord. That question in Saint Luke’s Gospel and its ensuing discussion give rise to Our Lord’s Parable of the Good Samaritan. In light of what we said above about the Absolute Primacy of Christ and the two commandments of the Gospel being foundational to the very metaphysical structure of true religion, it is noteworthy that Jesus responds to the question, “And who is my neighbour?” with a parable that describes Himself: numerous Fathers and commentators see Jesus as the Good Samaritan.
One subtlety in the Luccan passage that heightens the Christological nature of the evangelical commandments is that, where Matthew and Mark have them being two commandments, Saint Luke elides them into one: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind: and thy neighbour as thyself” (Luke 10:27). These are the words of the “certain lawyer” who initially asked the question, but Jesus approved them when He replied, “Thou hast answered right” (v. 28).
As the two natures are united in one (Divine) Person in Christ, the two commandments that correspond to those two natures are joined into one. Cleaving to that one Person by obeying that one commandment is what we must do to posess eternal life.
‘The Love That Moves the Sun and the Other Stars’
So where does this leave us? This two-fold precept that has Jesus as its object is both the metaphysical foundation of the entire true religion and what we must do to possess eternal life.5
In Canto 33 of Dante’s Paradiso — the conclusion of the entire Divine Comedy — Saint Bernard begs Our Lady to obtain for the poet a glimpse of the Beatific Vision. The Virgin consents and Bernard smiles at Dante, bidding him look. Then Dante’s vision is transformed and he beholds the three mysteries of Creation, the Trinity and the Incarnation of the Logos. At the end, we have his famous description of God as, “L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle. — The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” In the Esolen translation, the last four verses read thus:
Here ceased the powers of my high fantasy. Already were all my will and my desires turned — as a wheel in equal balance — by The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.
Dorothy Sayers summarizes Dante’s vision of the Trinity and the Incarnation and the effect that this vision has on him:
He sees three circles, of three colours, yet of one dimension. One seems to be reflected from the other, and the third, like flame, proceeds equally from both (the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost). Then, as he gazes, the reflected circle shows within itself the human form, coloured with the circle’s own hue. As Dante strives to comprehend how human nature is united with the Word, a ray of divine light so floods his mind that his desire is at rest. At this point the vision eases, and the story ends with the poet’s will and desire moving in perfect coordination with the love of God.
Again, the two-fold precept that has Jesus as its object is both the metaphysical foundation of the entire true religion and what we must do to possess eternal life. It is also eternal life itself. For if we really love the Son, we will love His Father and Their Holy Ghost, who is Their Substantial Love. And, if we really love the Son, we will love His members: those who are in His Mystical Body, the Church. (And all men are members of His Body, if not in act, then in potency.6) If we abide in this love of God and neighbor, then we, like Dante in the Commedia, will eventually be flooded with divine light in Beatitude and find our desires at rest because they move with His.
— Footnotes —
1. The verse immediately preceding it (Deut. 6:4), “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord,” is the famous Shema Yisrael (“Hear, O Israel), which is an important prayer for modern Jews.
2. The Hebrew word רֵעַ (rēaʿ) has a variety of related meanings, including friend and neighbor, which explains the different translations of the word used in Lev. 19:18 and Matt. 22:39.
3. In fact, the word depend in English actually comes, via French, from the Latin verb, pendere, which means — you guessed it! — to hang.
4. Eph. 1:3–6: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with spiritual blessings in heavenly places, in Christ: As he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and unspotted in his sight in charity. Who hath predestinated us unto the adoption of children through Jesus Christ unto himself: according to the purpose of his will unto the praise of the glory of his grace, in which he hath graced us in his beloved son.”
5. Some may object that Jesus says that the knowledge of God, not the love of God constitutes eternal life. In His High Priestly Prayer recorded in John 17, Jesus said this to His Father: “Now this is eternal life: That they may know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). But “knowledge” in the Bible is not merely knowledge as of facts; in Scripture, to “know” a person is to be his friend, his intimate; it is to love him. “And Adam knew Eve his wife: who conceived and brought forth Cain…” (Gen. 4:1). Pharaoh “knew not Joseph” (Ex. 1:8) — not that Joseph was a stranger to him or someone whom he could not identify; he hated Joseph and his numerous kin. Jesus Himself says that He will tell the damned, “I know you not, whence you are: depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity” (Luke 13:27). That is not ignorance, it is an absence of love. Therefore, the knowledge that Jesus speaks of in the High Priestly Prayer includes all three theological virtues. It is “faith that worketh by charity” (Gal. 5:6). To those who may be surprised that a disciple of Father Feeney would put such an emphasis on this matter of charity, when our raison d’être is extra ecclesiam nulla salus, let me say that it is all of a piece. The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ, or “the Whole Christ” as Saint Augustine says. That Father also wrote, “Thus the end will be the one Christ, loving himself; for the love of the members for one another is the love of the Body for itself.” (See here for translation, and here for the entire sermon in a different translation.) As for those “outside” who call themselves Christian, they fit into two categories: heretics and schismatics. Heresy is a sin against faith, the undermining of which entirely destroys hope and charity, thus undermining the supernatural life at its very beginning, for faith is the initium salutis, “the beginning of human salvation.” This doctrine comes to us from the Council of Trent, which cites Saint Fulgentius of Ruspe (468–533) as its source. Schism — which is quite distinct both canonically and theologically from mere disobedience — is a sin against theological charity and undermines the bond of unity in the Church. Saint Thomas distinguishes schism from heresy in this way: “Heresy and schism are distinguished in respect of those things to which each is opposed essentially and directly. For heresy is essentially opposed to faith, while schism is essentially opposed to the unity of ecclesiastical charity. Wherefore, just as faith and charity are different virtues, although whoever lacks faith lacks charity, so too schism and heresy are different vices, although whoever is a heretic is also a schismatic, but not conversely” (ST II IIae Q. 39 Art. 1, ad 3).
6. This is part of Saint Thomas’ answer to his own question, “Whether Christ is the Head of all men?” (cf. esp. the respondeo of this article).
