Lyrics
My God, I love Thee; not because
I hope for Heav'n thereby,
Nor yet because who love Thee not
May eternally die.
Thou, O my Jesus, Thou didst me
Upon the cross embrace;
For me didst bear the nails and spear,
And manifold disgrace.
And griefs and torments numberless,
And sweat of agony;
E'en death itself; and all for man
Who was Thine enemy.
Then why, O blessèd Jesus Christ
Should I not love Thee well?
Not for the hope of winning Heaven,
Nor of escaping hell.
Not with the hope of gaining aught,
Nor seeking a reward,
But as Thyself hast lovèd me,
O everlasting Lord!
E'en so I love Thee, and will love,
And in Thy praise will sing,
Solely because Thou art my God,
And my eternal king.
Public domain hymn text (17th century Latin origin; English translation 1849), based on John 21:15.
The Story Behind the Hymn
"My God, I Love Thee" comes from a Latin text, "O Deus, ego amo Te," whose true author is unknown despite a long-running tradition attributing it to St. Francis Xavier, the sixteenth-century co-founder of the Society of Jesus. That attribution has no solid supporting evidence, and the text has also been separately credited, without confirmation, to the Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila. The earliest documented appearance of the Latin form is in a 1669 collection by the Jesuit priest Wilhelmus Nakatenus, though it may well be older still.
Edward Caswall translated the text from Latin into English and published it in 1849 in his collection Lyra Catholica. Caswall had converted from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism only two years earlier, in 1847, and joined the Birmingham Oratory under John Henry Newman shortly after — Lyra Catholica was among his first major projects following that conversion, a collection of translated hymns meant to bring Catholic devotional poetry into English-language use.
The hymn's theological argument is unusually pointed for a devotional text: it explicitly sets aside the ordinary motives for loving God — the hope of Heaven, the fear of hell — and insists on a love offered for no reason but God's own prior love, demonstrated on the cross. Twice in six short stanzas the text repeats this same renunciation, as if anticipating that the reader might assume some hidden self-interest was still at work, and needed to say plainly that none was.
Whoever wrote the original Latin verses, centuries before Caswall ever translated them, left behind a text built entirely around a single, sharpened claim: that love for God, rightly understood, asks for nothing back.
