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Catholic Commentary
The Primacy of Love Among the Theological Virtues
13But now faith, hope, and love remain—these three. The greatest of these is love.
In 1 Corinthians 13:13, Paul declares that faith, hope, and love endure permanently, unlike the temporary spiritual gifts discussed earlier, with love being the greatest because it reflects God's very nature. These three theological virtues participate in divine reality itself and form the foundation of the Christian moral life.
Love is not just the highest virtue—it is the only one that survives death unchanged, because God himself is love, and in heaven we will do nothing but love.
Why is love the greatest? Because love alone, of the three, is identical with the very nature of God: "God is love" (ho Theos agapē estin, 1 John 4:8, 16). Faith is our response to God's self-revelation; hope is our orientation toward his promises; but love is the very substance of what God is. To love with agapē is to participate most directly in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). As the Council of Trent affirmed (Session VI, ch. 7), it is charity—not faith alone—that formally justifies the soul, because charity is the form (forma) of all the virtues, giving them their ultimate direction and worth. Paul made this explicit just three verses earlier: "If I have all faith…but do not have love, I am nothing" (v. 2).
Spiritually, this verse functions as the thesis statement of the entire Christian moral life: the charisms of chapter 12 serve love, and the eschatological hope of chapters 15–16 is grounded in love. Love is simultaneously the motive, the means, and the goal of all Christian striving.
Catholic tradition has drawn upon 1 Corinthians 13:13 as a cornerstone text for the theology of the theological virtues and the doctrine of caritas as the forma virtutum—the form or animating soul of all the virtues.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§1826–1827) cites this verse directly, teaching that charity "upholds and purifies our human ability to love, and raises it to the supernatural perfection of divine love." It is charity that gives living substance to faith and hope; without it, they do not achieve their salvific end.
St. Augustine saw in the three theological virtues a faint vestige (vestigium) of the Trinity—faith relating to the Son who reveals, hope to the Spirit who sustains us in longing, and love to the Father who is the source of all. But he consistently taught that love holds primacy because it is the only virtue that will endure in heaven without transformation: in heaven we shall not believe what we cannot yet see, nor hope for what we already possess, but we shall love with a perfection we can only approximate now (De Trinitate, VIII.8).
St. Thomas Aquinas (ST I-II, q. 62; II-II, q. 23) argued that charity is the greatest virtue not merely in degree but in kind, because it unites the soul immediately to God as its final end, whereas faith and hope unite us to God as the source of truth and good yet to be possessed. Charity thus has the formal character of the highest friendship (amicitia) with God himself.
Pope Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est (2005, §1) opened his first encyclical by declaring: "God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him" (1 Jn 4:16)—making Pauline agapē the lens through which to interpret the entire Christian moral and social vision. The encyclical is in many ways an extended meditation on why love is, and must be, the greatest.
Contemporary Catholic life is saturated with activity—parish committees, social media apostolates, theological debates, and devotional practices—all of which risk becoming the "noisy gong" of verse 1 if they are not animated by genuine love. Paul's declaration that love is the greatest virtue is a direct challenge to the modern temptation to reduce Christian faithfulness to doctrinal correctness, liturgical preference, or activist zeal.
Concretely, this verse invites an examination of conscience: Am I performing acts of faith (Mass attendance, rosary, apologetics) out of love for God, or out of habit, identity, or fear? Do I hold onto hope as an active trust in a personal God who loves me, or has it curdled into mere optimism or, worse, despair?
Practically, St. Thérèse of Lisieux—declared a Doctor of the Church in 1997—understood this verse as her vocation: "My vocation is love." She proposed that in the Body of Christ, while others serve as hands or eyes, she would be the heart. For the ordinary Catholic today, this means choosing one relationship, one daily encounter, one seemingly small act, and investing it with deliberate, selfless agapē—not because it produces results, but because love is its own eschatological end. Love is not a means to heaven; it is the substance of heaven, begun here.
Commentary
"But now faith, hope, and love remain—these three."
The adversative "but now" (Greek: νυνὶ δέ, nyni de) provides the decisive contrast to all that Paul has catalogued as passing away in verses 8–12: prophecies that "will cease," tongues that "will be stilled," knowledge that "will pass away." Against the impermanence of every charismatic gift, Paul sets three realities that remain (menei—present tense, signifying enduring existence). These are not arbitrary virtues but what Catholic tradition identifies as the three theological virtues: faith (pistis), hope (elpis), and love (agapē). They are called "theological" precisely because their object is God himself—they proceed from God, lead to God, and find their fullness only in him (CCC 1812–1813).
The verb menei ("remains" or "abides") deserves careful attention. In Paul's vocabulary and in the broader New Testament, the same root (menō) describes the indwelling of the Spirit (John 14:17), the abiding of the Word (1 John 2:14), and the eternal love within the Trinity (John 15:9–10). That faith, hope, and love remain signals that they belong to a different order than the charisms—they are participations in the divine life itself, not merely instruments of it.
A classic exegetical question arises: if faith gives way to sight and hope is fulfilled in possession at the eschaton, in what sense do they "remain"? St. Thomas Aquinas addresses this directly in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, q. 18, a. 2): faith and hope, as currently exercised under the veil of unknowing and longing, will be transformed and perfected, not annihilated, in the beatific vision. They are fulfilled, not destroyed—their virtue passes into a higher mode of knowing and enjoying God. This reading is confirmed by the typological sense: the Israelites' faith in God's promises was not abolished by the Incarnation but fulfilled and elevated.
"The greatest of these is love."
The superlative claim—meizōn in the Greek comparative, functioning as a true superlative in Koine—crowns the entire chapter. Paul does not say merely that love is "more useful" or "more impressive" but that it is the greatest (meizōn). This word choice echoes the Synoptic "greatest commandment" discourse (Matthew 22:36–40), reinforcing that Paul is not departing from Jesus' own teaching but illuminating its inner logic.