Valentine's Day: Discovering the Meaning of Love

               We are a people who are infatuated with love. We love everything about love…whatever those things might be. We write and sing love songs. We devour romantic comedies and stories. We even have a national holiday, which is in essence, a celebration of love. It is safe to say, we are in love with the idea of being in love. It is much less safe to say that we have any idea what we mean when we use, over-use, and abuse this all important four letter word.

               Some 2,500 years ago (It would be so symmetrical if it had been on February 14^th) in ancient Greece, the world witnessed what would be the epic precursor to all Lifetime movie marathons. In one of the greatest pieces of historic literature ever penned, Plato tells the story of a great dinner party. This was more than just an average party; it was a grandiose celebration of love! It was a festival, a feast, a Symposium that gave the great minds of the day a chance to individually honor what mankind loves so much: namely, Love.

The keynote speaker was Socrates of Athens, and the raucous room fell silent as he stood to give his address. It may do us good, especially at this time of year, to follow suit and quiet ourselves so as to hear afresh the words of a man who truly sought to understand what it means to LOVE.

Socrates begins in a way which was almost unimaginable given his place in time. He asserts that the entirety of what he knows of love he has learned from a woman, Diotima. As most men can attest, Socrates was surely on the mark in realizing that the fairer sex is much to be thanked for helping us to understand what love truly is. In this regard a debt of gratitude must be paid to my beautiful wife J.

Socrates goes on to prove that Love must always be the lover of something rather than of nothing. Just as a father must always be the father of someone. If a father was the father of no one, he would not be a father at all. This may seem innocuous enough, but the ramifications of such a truth are far-reaching.

Socrates then asks if Love longs for what it is in love with. The answer to which is clearly yes. But we only long for things that we do not already have. So is it true that once we have the thing or the one we love that we no longer love it or them? Certainly not. Once we have the thing we love, love consists in desiring, in scrapping and crawling, in battling to secure that thing to ourselves forever! This is why marriage is one of the only true expressions of love. It is an open commitment and acceptance of what love is: a securing of something to ourselves forever. This securing to ourselves of something can only be considered love depending on the thing that is secured, but more on that latter.

So we have two points so far:

1.)    Love must always be the love of something

2.)    That thing is something that we lack

 

            The other dinner guests had previously asserted that the actions of the gods were governed by a love of beauty. But if love must be the love of something that it lacks, then love CAN NOT be beautiful! But we would not call love ugly, would we?

Goodness however, is certainly beautiful, but that means that love CAN NOT be good!

             So love is neither beautiful nor good. Would we dare call it ugly and bad?

             God is certainly both beautiful and good. So love CAN NOT be divine!

          So if love is not divine, can we say that it is human? Socrates would, and did, say, certainly not! Love is something that intercedes between the finite and the infinite. Love connects man with the divine. Love is a longing for the beautiful and the good which are eternal and divine.

          But this begs the question: Why do we long for the beautiful and the good? We do so because what is ACTUALLY GOOD and ACTUALLY BEAUTIFUL (see my essay “Fatherly Love”) will make us happy!

           Love then, in essence, is a longing for happiness. Love is a longing for every kind of happiness. The type happiness signified by teddy bears, chocolates, roses and hearts is just one small aspect of TRUE LOVE. When one makes you dinner, cleans your clothes, watches what you want on TV, reads with you, joins you in your favorite activities, THIS IS LOVE, as it is a desire to make you happy! Once again I am indebted to my wife for her unceasing display of daily love.

           As much as Hallmark may have skewed our sensibilities, love IS NOT a searching for our “other half.” Love is a perpetual searching and longing for the Good. Love is wanting the Good and wanting to secure it forever!

         Since goodness is divine, love is our ticket to the divine. It is our gateway. Once again we see the power of love as expressed in marriage. Love’s longing to secure the good forever, is always thwarted by death, yet through procreation, the ultimate expression of human love, death is put at bay (at least temporarily). The birth of a child symbolically defeats death as love has expelled death and momentarily brought a glimpse of immortality to the beloved.

        Death must always be central to a rigorous conception of love. That is why the ultimate demonstration of love was God laying down his life for man. But why? So that man, through this love, can have the good secured to himself FOREVER!

       Because this is the culmination of love, all acts of earthly love are miniature crucifixions. Every act of love is a sign to the world of the fact that God, in Christ, has reconciled the world to himself in absolute, unadulterated love! Any supposed act of “love” is no such thing if it fails to recognize this central truth (“And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.”- 1 Corinthians 13:3).

       The one that you love, the one that loves you, in their love, is a daily reminder of the cross, and that is something worth celebrating.

I love you Julia.

For Torture

For Torture

 

            If we believe that man is nothing but matter, which is the logical consequent of the materialism of the day, I see no problem with torturing known terrorists.

            If we do not hold that man is a supreme being, made imago Dei, then man only becomes a human being based on the arbitrary standards that other human beings have decided upon.

            Given the pro-abortion stance of this country, the “rights of humanity” are not conferred to a first trimester fetus, or for that matter a second or third trimester fetus. In some cases, the rights of humanity are not even conferred to a fetus/child/baby/infant/half-person/ bundle of matter, whatever we wish to call “it”, when it has partially emerged from its mother. Even further, some, like Princeton’s celebrity ethicist Peter Singer, have argued that we should, in certain cases, delay declaring these balls of atoms “humans” until they have lived for a full month outside of their mothers.

            Whatever standard is chosen, being that it is man made, will be in essence arbitrary and susceptible not to the slippery slope fallacy but certainly to the runaway train fallacy. A first trimester fetus does not have the cognitive ability of a one month old. On the same token a one month old does not have the cognitive faculties of a five year old…etc, etc.  

            Mankind is now in the business of deciding when a thing becomes a human. When we grant this molecular mass the “rights of humanity” we are endowing them with both positive and negative rights. They have the right not be killed or raped, but they also lose the right to kill or rape others. They are, without their consent, entered into a pre-determined social contract. They have rules they must follow that they did not have a part in designing or implementing. This is all wildly arbitrary, but these are the rules to the game we are playing.

            Under the current pretenses of this game, what is the problem with torturing terrorists? Why not, for utilitarian purposes, make an amendment to the made up rules to the game? If we are the arbiters and can confer the rights of humanity on things, why can’t we take those rights back? If you are involved in terrorist activities you have violated the made up rules and are henceforth removed from the game. You, the terrorist, no longer being a human, can be tortured and abused in any imaginable way with out any “moral” (whatever this word even means in a world post mortem Dei) repercussions for the torturer.

            It seems to me, that one who is pro-abortion has no basis to be anti-torture.

Family Love

        The most important and primal social unit is the family. The human condition is intrinsically familial; hence the greatest variety and degree of human emotions are experienced in and through the family. It is for this reason that the breakdown of society is always coterminous with the breakdown of the nuclear family.

         In once sense it is odd, given the importance of the family, that it would be so denigrated by the secular world. But on a closer look, the roots of this hatred begin to surface. The family is deeply and uniquely Trinitarian; with its three constituents: father, mother, and child. The Trinity is the foundation for not only the family, but love—it is the cornerstone of all romance. It is the first and only real love story.

         The world hates the Trinity, and as a byproduct begins to hate the family. Yet they are smitten with the idea of love and romance, all the while failing to understand that the only true love and true romance is found within the family. “Falling in love has often been regarded as the supreme adventure, the supreme romantic accident.” Adventure however is something that happens to us, it finds us. The man that goes out looking for an adventure is acting against the very spirit of adventure. It is neither spontaneous nor adventurous to back up one’s belongings and head to Africa in search of a great adventure. It is more adventurous to stay at home and deal with the things that happen to you.

On the same token, falling in love has something to do with us. As much as we may “fall in love”, do we not also jump? “In so far as to some extent we choose…falling in love is not truly romantic…The supreme adventure is not falling in love, it is being born.” This greatest of all adventures, breeds true love and true romance. We do not have the slightest choice in picking our families, just as we have no choice in picking our neighbors. Yet Christ commanded us to love our neighbors. That is because there is a deeper love, a deeper romance formed when our choice is taken out of the equation.

              

     One does not get to choose their R&B singing sister. One does not choose to have a sister with a strange obsession with Asian children. One does not choose a sister who has a deep-rooted psychological obsession with Glen Beck that manifests itself by framing her husband with having a strong hankering for Nancy Grace. One does not choose a sister who fails to see the intrinsic likeability of Taylor Swift or a brother who eats 40 hotdogs in a sitting. Yet with this lack of choice comes Christ-like Trinitarian love.

              

     In heaven there will be no husbands and wives but there will be a family of believers. Maybe this is because there is nothing greater, nothing more romantic, nothing more fundamental than the love of family.

Scientific Detachment and Anthropology

            Science is predicated on detachment. The scientist must remove himself from the equation in order to see facts and data as they are—in and of themselves. Science, like math, searches for indubitable certainty. Two plus two equals four.

            One of the greatest defects of modernity stems from Descartes’ attempt at a philosophical mathematics. Descartes told modernity—and like sheep we followed—that all fields of study could be known in the same way things are known in math or science. Hence we no longer study history; rather we study “social science.” We know longer study politics; rather “political science.” We now teach courses on the “science of religion.” This is a strange phenomenon indeed.

            “For the study of primitive race and religion stand apart in one important respect from all, or nearly all, the ordinary scientific studies. A man can understand astronomy only by being an astronomer; he can understand entomology only by being an entomologist; but he can understand a great deal about anthropology merely by being a man. He is himself the animal which he studies.” (GKC)

            The detachment that is necessary and helpful in the “hard” sciences can be a great detriment to the so called “soft” sciences. It is as if the anthropologist believes he must detach himself from humanity, or make himself inhuman in order to understand humanity. The saddest part of all is that we tend to believe what the anthropologists say.

            For example:

                        “The natives of MumboJumbo Land believe that the dead man can eat, and will require food upon his journey to the other world. This is attested by the fact that they put food in the grave.” (GKC)

            For the anthropologist, having detached himself from his humanity, this makes great sense. To the lay person, the ones who are still acquainted with what it is like to be a human this comes across as madness.

            This is similar to saying:

                        “The 21^st century Americans believed that a dead man could smell. This is attested by the fact that they always covered his grave with lilies, violets, or other flowers.”

            Now it might be the case that ancient men believed the dead could eat, but that is no more a fact than stating that we believe the dead can smell. Mankind does certain things because it is natural for them to do so. It is hard to explain the emotion that brings us to the conclusion that it is natural, but that does not mean it is not so. Most human emotions are irrational and hence can not be explained in scientific terminology.

            Kant showed us that we are restricted to the world of phenomena—we can not get to the noumena or the thing in itself because when we encounter reality it must always be filtered through categories (time, space, the human mind). We take this is a fact, yet we fail to apply its principles to field of anthropology. As soon as matter is perceived and passed through the human mind it is forever irreparably altered. It is spoiled. It is changed and now lacks a sort of objectivity and detachment which is needed for it to be studied as purely scientific data.

            Human emotions, many times being irrational by nature, can not be rationally or scientifically quantified. Maybe those in MumboJumbo land put food in the grave because food is one of the great joys of life. Maybe they did it to attract animals to the bodies in order that the souls of the deceased may live on in another creature. But maybe they did it because it just felt like the proper thing to do. It was natural—and what is natural to man is not the business of science.

The Cowardice Of Nihilism

G. K. Chesterton wrote, “It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter. And this is done universally in the twentieth century.”

               This is a strange age indeed. The world has been turned on its head. The logical man is seen as unprogressive. The man of firm beliefs is seen as narrow minded. The orthodox man is seen as a bigot. Now is the age of feelings. Beliefs have been sacrificed at the altar of inclinations and proclivities. The weeds of Nihilism are overrunning the garden of thought, and the decay of past fruit weighs thick on the air.

               All too often I will hear someone say, “Oh, he is really religious”; as if there was another way to truly be one thing or another. A phrase such as this carries an obvious negative connotation. It is as if they are saying, “I don’t mind if somebody believes something, so long as they don’t actually believe it.” What nonsense. They might as well say “Pink is a running hammer.” We are a generation so removed from truth our language begins to resemble an extended MadLib.

               Nihilism is nothing more than a closet in which cowards hide. We are too scared to stand firm in orthodoxy. It takes guts. It takes grit. It takes real man, of which we are currently running a shortage. The orthodox man, the man who is “really this” or “really that” will always seem absurd in the eyes of the world. That is because he stands firm while the world whips by him, foolishly following trends, only to abandon them for the next trend and the next fad. The orthodox man has “based all his brilliancy and solidity upon the hackneyed, but yet forgotten, fact that truth is stranger than fiction.”

               Truth, by necessity, must be stranger than fiction. For fiction, lies, deceit are made by the hands of men, but truth is divine. Man always knows his own ways better than he knows the way of the Divine. As Aquinas wrote, “God is an infinitely knowable.”

               In this age, men say that another man’s philosophy does not matter. It does not matter if he is an Aristotelian or a Hegelian or a Nietzschean. But is this how we live? A man’s philosophy may state that “Life is not worth living.” But we take this statement in the same way we would react to him saying he prefers coffee to tea. “And yet if that utterance were believed, the world would stand on its head. Murderers would be given medals for saving men from life; firemen would be denounced for keeping men from death; poison would be used as medicine; doctors would be called in when people were well…” One might profess to be a Nihilist, but their every action bellies their espoused belief.

               George Bernard Shaw described this condition by saying, “That the golden rule is that there is no golden rule.” Besides the fact that such a statement is pragmatically unrealistic (as shown above) it is devastating to the artistic and cultural progress of humanity. When nothing can be believed for certain, anything goes. And when ANYTHING goes NOTHING is shocking.

               For something to be shocking it must violate a rule or a standard that one holds to be true. When nothing is true, art can no longer be shocking. We have tried to make it shocking. We have placed toilets in museums and called it art, but does that carry nearly the same thunder as the shockwaves felt when we contemplate the hand of God reaching out to touch that of mans? Can we find in Andy Warhol or Picasso anything more shocking or defiant than Satan’s rejection of God? Or Peter’s denial of Christ? Or the grandure of the incarnation and resurrection? Modern art has the seemingly unlimited freedom because of its nihilism, but this freedom has also defanged the artist. The artist is left with no bite. Defiance is pathetic and lonely when there is no one to defy.

               This nihilistic generation is like Alice, forever trapped in wonderland. We speak a language that was designed to convey truth but now blathers out pure nonsense. The modern, progressive man says, “Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty.” This is logically rendered, “Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it.” (Chesterton) He says, “Neither in religion or morality my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education.” This clearly expressed, means, “We cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children.”

                                         I give in. They are correct. Pink is a running hammer.

Fatherly Love

 

When Christ taught us how to pray in Matthew 6, he started, the now titled: Lord’s Prayer with the words: “Our Father.” These opening words have become somewhat of a rallying cry for a juvenilized generation of Christians. This generation has promulgated and perfected the personalization of a deeply communal religion: Christianity.

            The first Person of the Trinity, the author, and upholder of the universe, the Lord who the Jews so revered that they dared not even write his name (electing rather to call him Yahweh), is now called “Dad” or “Daddy.” This generation of Christians loves their “Daddy” and their “Daddy” loves them back. This soft and cuddly love affair between the Creator and his creatures is great for selling books and mass marketing a religion, but this misguided and childish theology can leave its adherents in the muck of a real existential crisis when pain and suffering crash their love- fest.

            A theology rooted in the belief that God is our buddy, our Daddy who loves us, can not withstand the deep philosophical issue of the problem of pain, hurt, and suffering.

            Part of the problem lies in our current conception of Fatherhood. In today’s culture it is all too common to hear a father say, “I love my son. I do not care about the morality he chooses, as long as it makes him happy.” This is certainly not the type of father Christ was talking about when he taught us to pray.

            The ancient conception of father was far different from the one most of us hold today. C.S. Lewis wrote, “Love between father and son, in this symbol (Father to Christ), means essentially authoritative love on the one side, and obedient love on the other. The father uses his authority to make the son into the sort of human being he, rightly, and in his superior wisdom, wants him to be.”

            Love is not utilitarian in nature. Love does not intrinsically and primarily care about your comfort or misguided conception of happiness. True love, the love that God has for his creatures is a demanding love. It demands the perfecting of the beloved. The “kindness” of a Daddy which tolerates anything except suffering in its child is the furthest thing from the biblical conception of love.

            God is love. All Christians believe it. All Christians have said it. It makes a nice bumper sticker and cute picture to hang above your toilet, but what does it mean? Plato rightly taught us that virtue is one. Someone can not be truly kind or loving unless they are courageous, temperate and just. “Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to cruelty.” God is love. God is also justice and goodness. Love therefore must conform to the justice and goodness that is God.

            True love, the love of God, may forgive all infirmities and wrongdoings and love in spite of them: but he can never cease to will their removal. The love of a father must grind on the son to change him, not into the person the son wants to be, but into the person that the father knows that the son should be. This grinding, this true, deep, all encompassing love can bring about great suffering and pain. The Bible reminds us that we must die unto Christ. He loves us so much that he can not accept us as we are. He is not Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin. He is not a senile benevolence that kicks back in the clouds and wishes for you to choose your own path, find your own happiness, or just be yourself. “His is not the love of a host who feels responsible for his guests, but the consuming fire himself the love that made the worlds.”

            Much of the suffering and pain we experience here on earth is the sanctificatory process leading to true happiness. ‘What we would hear and now call our happiness is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such as he can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.”

            God is Goodness. He wills the goodness of his creatures, and our goodness is to fully love him. To experience the true and eternal love of God is to surrender to his commands. We are commanded to become Christ-like, to put on Christ. That is to say we are to become like God. Whether we like it or not we are to become goodness. For God so loved the world that he wants to make us into himself, to make us love.

            With that being said we should do what we like. We should do what makes us happy. Kant gave us the misguided notion that we should not admire a man for doing a good act if he enjoyed it. The very saying, “but he likes it”, implies that the action has no worth or merit. This modern notion, ushered in largely by Kant, has gained credence due to the rejection of the truth of Aristotelianism. Aristotle taught that a virtuous man will delight in virtue. The more virtuous we are the more we will revel in goodness, justice and truth.

            The love of God and the love of a good earthly father may hurt at first. It may hurt way more for some than other. Why? Read the book of Job. The answer being—We don’t know. But true love can not accept evil. It must demand change. It demands change so that we can be happy--truly happy—happy because we are fulfilling our telos. God is love.

The 300 Year Old Man

      George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “The world will never progress until everyman lives 300 years.” In response G.K. Chesterton quipped that, “If George Bernard Shaw lived 300 years he would undoubtedly be a Catholic.” Part of Chesterton’s genius is his poetic nature; that is his ability to touch on a deep truth in a small economy of space.

            Part of the curse, a side effect of the fall of man, is his now myopic vision. Adam, in wanting equality with God, in wanting God-like knowledge, by being self interested, set the course of mankind on an endless cycle of self-centeredness. It is difficult to avoid the trap of believing that right now is the most important moment; this election is the most important election, if only we could fix this or that problem than everything would change. Shaw may have been right. If everyman could live 300 years, we would see progress. If everyone lived 300 years, everyone might be backed into the truth of the gospel.

            Imagine the now 300 year old man. He would have seen endless revolutions that promised hope but delivered death. He would have seen moments that promised to be climatic that came and went with nothing but a dud. He would have been built up on the back of hope only to be gunned down to the ditches of human depravity.

            Some forty years ago he would have been witness to the promise of hope in the form of the “crowning achievement” of gender equality. He would then proceed to have his body drug through 50 million aborted fetuses. He would have seen capitalism defeat communism, only to result in the greed of the Wall Street hedge funds. He would have seen the achievement of science, of Einstein and Planck, and then 160,000 incinerated Japanese in the streets on Hiroshima. He would have seen the War To End All Wars give birth to the WWII. He would have seen Aristocracies replace monarchies, aristocracies overthrown by dictators, dictators replaced by democracies and bloodshed, greed, and unthinkable feats of human cruelty achieved by each.

            As each well-spring of hope dried up, hopeless, the man, given enough time, might stumble upon an ancient truth—a truth that gave the proper apportionment of power to princes and principalities. He might find a truth that defined the true meaning and application of freedom, of equality, of justice, and of wisdom. He might be taught the only true way to love, to have community, to unite with one voice, to join a unified chorus. Given 300 years, a man would be hard-pressed to deny and suppress the complete catholicity of the covenantal love found in the community that is the Triune God. He would see that there is no solution without ultimate teleology. If there is no design, there is no proper way to fix the individual parts. The man would be forced to humble himself before the cross of grace. He would know, with first hand experience, that there is no solution, and no hope without Christ.