If you fulfill the royal law according to the scripture,
You shall love your neighbor as yourself,
you do well:
All Commentaries on James 2:8 Go To James 2
Hilary of Arles
AD 449
Love your neighbor means three different things. The first is corporal, that is, the literal sense of the words. The second is spiritual, according to which we love those close to us even though we may be absent from them. The third is contemplative, by which love itself is beheld. But we have to understand that one leads to another. The corporal inspires us to go on to the spiritual, and that in turn lifts us up to the contemplative. The spiritual may sometimes regress to the merely corporal, but the contemplative never fails us. The corporal and spiritual forms of love are common to human beings and have analogies in animals, but the contemplative is reserved for humans alone.
