All love is lost but upon God alone.

When William Dunbar, the Scottish poet of the fifteenth century, wrote, “All love is lost but upon God alone,” he was not speaking from cold detachment, but from the deep well of human experience. In his verse, there echoes both the ache of disappointment and the radiance of revelation. He had seen how mortal love — however passionate, however tender — so often fades like mist before the morning sun. He had lived among kings and courtiers, in a world of ambition, flattery, and betrayal, where affection was often traded like coin. From such a world, Dunbar turned his gaze upward, and in that act of turning, he found wisdom. For he realized that all earthly love, beautiful though it may be, is shadowed by impermanence; only divine love endures, untouched by time or death.

The words are simple, yet they strike like a bell across the centuries. “All love is lost but upon God alone.” What does it mean? It means that every form of human love — the lover’s devotion, the parent’s tenderness, the friend’s loyalty — is destined, at some point, to falter or to end. It may fail because of human weakness, or it may simply fade because all things mortal must pass. Dunbar does not condemn human affection; he sanctifies it by showing its true place. He teaches that love, when placed wholly upon the fragile things of this world, will always break the heart. But when love is rooted in God, it finds eternal soil — it grows beyond death, beyond loss, beyond change.

To understand this, consider the story of Saint Augustine, whose youth was spent in worldly pursuits, in loves both passionate and vain. He sought meaning in the arms of lovers, in the praise of men, and in the pursuit of fame. But when he lost his beloved son, and when the glitter of ambition turned to ash in his hands, he cried out to the heavens, “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” In that cry lies the same truth Dunbar spoke centuries later: all human loves, unanchored to the divine, are restless — they seek permanence in a world that cannot give it. Only in God’s love does the heart find rest, for His love is the origin and the end of all love.

And yet, Dunbar’s wisdom is not cold or loveless. It does not tell us to withdraw from the world or to cease loving one another. Rather, it calls us to love more deeply, but differently — to see the divine reflection within every person we cherish. For when we love others in God, not as possessions but as fellow souls journeying toward eternity, then our love is not lost. It becomes a sacrament, a way of participating in the infinite compassion of the Creator. To love in this way is to love with open hands, knowing that what we give returns not always to us, but to the divine source from which all love flows.

The ancients, too, understood this eternal law. The philosopher Plato, in his dialogue Symposium, spoke of a ladder of love: the soul begins by loving the beauty of one body, but as it ascends, it learns to love beauty itself — the divine, the immortal. The love that begins with desire must, if it matures, end in reverence. This ascent is what Dunbar points toward: a love that begins in the human heart, but ends in heaven. It is not a rejection of earthly love, but its transformation. For every mortal affection is but a fragment of the divine whole, a spark from the eternal flame of God’s heart.

In the quiet twilight of his life, Dunbar likely felt the truth of his own words in the solitude that age brings. Friends die, beauty fades, kingdoms fall. The laughter of youth becomes an echo. But in that silence, there is also peace — the peace of knowing that what is mortal passes so that what is immortal might be revealed. To love God above all is not to lose the world, but to see it rightly: to love all things as reflections of Him, and thus to love without fear of loss. For even when the world crumbles, divine love remains, and the soul that rests upon it is unshaken.

So let this teaching be written upon your heart: love freely, but root your love in eternity. Cherish those around you, but do not bind your peace to their presence. When they falter or depart, let your love rise upward, like smoke from a sacred fire, to the One who never leaves nor changes. In this way, your love will never be lost — for it will have found its true home. And when your own days draw to a close, and the faces you once adored have faded into memory, you will not despair. You will smile, knowing that nothing loved in God is ever gone. For as Dunbar knew, and as the wise of every age have whispered, all love is lost but upon God alone — and that love is never lost at all.