"Love has no errors, for all errors are the want for love"
About this Quote
Love is framed here less as a feeling than as a diagnostic tool: a moral solvent so complete it dissolves the very category of “error.” William Law, an Anglican cleric writing in an age obsessed with sin, self-scrutiny, and spiritual bookkeeping, flips the ledger. He doesn’t argue that love makes you behave better; he argues that the behaviors we condemn are symptoms of a prior absence. Error, in this view, isn’t a rogue decision so much as a vacancy.
The line works because it quietly relocates blame. Instead of treating wrongdoing as proof of a corrupt will, it treats it as evidence of deprivation: the “want for love.” That word “want” matters. It carries both need and lack, making moral failure less like a crime scene and more like malnutrition. Law’s Christianity is not the punitive courtroom version; it’s closer to a pastoral medicine, where the cure is not stricter accounting but a different kind of attention.
There’s also a strategic absoluteness in “Love has no errors.” It’s not empirically true in the everyday sense (people do plenty of damage while claiming love), but as a spiritual claim it’s doing rhetorical work: purifying love into a divine quality rather than a messy human motive. If what you’re doing produces harm, Law implies, it may be attachment, vanity, fear, or appetite wearing love’s name.
Under the piety sits a practical ethic: to reduce harm, don’t just police outcomes; repair the deficit that breeds them. It’s a theology with modern psychological instincts, insisting that the root problem is not wickedness but unmet belonging.
The line works because it quietly relocates blame. Instead of treating wrongdoing as proof of a corrupt will, it treats it as evidence of deprivation: the “want for love.” That word “want” matters. It carries both need and lack, making moral failure less like a crime scene and more like malnutrition. Law’s Christianity is not the punitive courtroom version; it’s closer to a pastoral medicine, where the cure is not stricter accounting but a different kind of attention.
There’s also a strategic absoluteness in “Love has no errors.” It’s not empirically true in the everyday sense (people do plenty of damage while claiming love), but as a spiritual claim it’s doing rhetorical work: purifying love into a divine quality rather than a messy human motive. If what you’re doing produces harm, Law implies, it may be attachment, vanity, fear, or appetite wearing love’s name.
Under the piety sits a practical ethic: to reduce harm, don’t just police outcomes; repair the deficit that breeds them. It’s a theology with modern psychological instincts, insisting that the root problem is not wickedness but unmet belonging.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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