Labor of Love
1:
LABOR OF LOVE The familiar expression “labor of love” derives from the KJV translation of 1 Thess. 1:3, where St. Paul commends the Thessalonian church for its “work of faith, and labour of love, and patience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.” The phrase, which recurs in Heb. 6:10 (Gk. tou kopou tēs agapēs), may have been a Pauline coinage. It attracts little exegetical commentary.
The notion of a task prompted and sustained by love (generally human love) is ubiquitous in medieval and Renaissance literature (e.g., chivalric romances), and parodic treatment of sexual love as “labor” appears, e.g., in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale of old January and his nubile May-bride (Canterbury Tales, 4.1830-65). The biblical phrase “labour of love” (which precedes the KJV translation; cf. the Geneva [1557] rendering of Heb. 6:10) may lie behind the title of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost as well as Milton’s reference to “the night-warbling Bird, that now awake / Tunes sweetest his love-labor’d song” (Paradise Lost, 5.40-41).
Among later English poets who use the expression, Alexander Pope (“The First Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated,” 1-2) has a poetic “labor” or achievement inspired by the “love” of a friend (patron) specifically in view. Cowper’s reference to the “labours of his love” (The Task, 5.570) concerns divine rather than human initiative—God’s loving labor for the sake of humanity.
Carlyle and Browning both accord the notion of labor, as prompted and nourished by love, considerable attention. Within the context of Carlyle’s romantic idealism, the “noble chivalry of work” is activated by a love which arises in the human soul apart from divine assistance in the traditional Christian sense (Sartor Resartus; Past and Present, chaps. 1–2). In Browning’s poetry the notion of human endeavor inspired by love acquires a more obviously Christian aspect: allusions to the biblical phrase itself appear in “Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli” (25-29) and “Red Cotton Night-cap Country or Turf and Towers” (3935).
In Trollope’s Barchester Towers Mrs. Proudie muses about the potentially disastrous consequences of Obadiah Slope’s intended marriage, and takes on the task of preventing it with a kind of vocational seriousness; “with her it would be a labour of love to rob Mr. Slope of his wife” (chap. 38). Longfellow, in Evangeline (2.1), may be recalling the wording of the Thessalonians passage, with its commendation of faith, love, and patience, when he enjoins Patience to “accomplish thy labour; accomplish thy work of affection! / Sorrow and silence are strong, and patient endurance is godlike. / Therefore accomplish thy labour of love, till the heart is made godlike.” For most modern writers who employ it, however (including Benjamin Franklin, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Emerson, among others), the expression is merely proverbial, with little or no recollection of its biblical source.
Herbert Giesbrecht
Jeffrey, D. L. (1992). A Dictionary of biblical tradition in English literature. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans.
