Millions of Christian church-goers today would have heard what, for many Dylan fans, might be called the Watered-Down Love reading. It’s Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13:

1: If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
2: And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
3: If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
4: Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful;
5: it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
6: it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.
7: Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8: Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
9: For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect;
10: but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.
11: When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
12: For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.
13: So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

That’s from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. It’s pretty clear the degree to which Dylan’s 1981 song, Watered-Down Love echoes this passage. (Click here to hear a YouTube version, from 1981, slightly cut at the start.)

Love that’s pure hopes all things,
Believes all things, won’t pull no strings,
Won’t sneak up into your room, tall, dark and handsome,
Capture your heart and hold it for ransom.

Love that’s pure, it don’t make no claims,
Intercedes for you ’stead of casting you blame,
Will not deceive you or lead you to transgression,
Won’t write it up and make you sign a false confession.

Now, Dylan generally seems to favor the King James translation of the Bible (as witnessed by his quotes on “Theme Time Radio Hour”) where, instead of “love,” the word “charity” is used. That good old atheist, Christopher Ricks, explains all this as well as anyone (while at the same time showing little charity to the designers of the Memorial Church at Stanford University):

At Stanford University in California, the Memorial Church is decked with allegorical figures: Faith, Hope, Charity, and Love. Designed by the great architect Maximus Crassus Ignoramus (of Soloi, birthplace of the solecism), the Memorial Church is certainly a memorial to something. A memorial to the railroad millionaire Leland Stanford’s wish to railroad St. Paul by erecting not just the Christian trinity of graces, Faith, Hope, and Charity, but a quadrangle that can then grace the university expansion. Fourfold! Billfold! A memorial to institutional indifference towards the English language as well as towards history, including the history that it purports to honor. For charity is love, or certainly was so (and therefore is so, if you respect the enduring life of the tradition that you are invoking), within the supreme sequence voiced in St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 13: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”

But now abideth in an educational establishment not just these three but these four. And once Love is to be granted a separate spot, what is left for Charity to undertake? Up there on the facade of the Memorial Church, she is apparently doling out soup to the unfortunate. Well worth doing, and the great virtue that is Charity does not disdain such compassionate doing of good. But this is not because she is distinct from Love, it is because she incorporates such love within the many kinds and kindnesses of her patient love. “Charity suffereth long, and is kind.” Charity is pure love.

Love that’s pure hopes all things
Believes all things

The opening words of Watered-Down Love are themselves an act of hope and of belief: in the simplest way, the hope that those who hear the song will recognize (in both sense of recognize) what is being alluded to, together with the belief that St. Paul is to be believed when (in the words of that glory of the language, the King James translation) the saint speaks with such divine eloquence of this the highest form of Love, the form that the English language then called Charity so as to distinguish it from, for instance, the love that is erotic love.

The four verses highlighted above read thusly in the King James:

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

Ricks says of this:

Those closing clauses constitute one of the most noble progressions ever realized. Dylan’s song does nothing to demean this but does have the courage to play mischievously with it (as against competing with it) when calling it into play.

All of the above is from his 2003 book, "Dylan’s Visions of Sin".

There’s also something in the first lines of this same chapter from Paul that would ring a bell with many Dylan listeners:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

That would be Dylan’s 1991 song Dignity:

Heard the tongues of angels and the tongues of men
Wasn’t any difference to me

(Click here for a YouTube version, from 2000)

Dylan’s reference is consistent with St. Paul’s meaning, if you assume that the reason there “wasn’t any difference,” is because, without love, both the tongues of men and of angels sounded to the singer just like those clanging cymbals.

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