Loving (a very wobbly approximation) Part One

Loving (a very wobbly approximation) Part One

Professor Simon May at King's College London has written two deeply thoughtful books on love, — Love: A History. Yale University Press, 2011 and Love. A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion, Yale University Press, 02 May 2019. I am currently reading the latter. The book is tremendously challenging on so many levels. For today's thought for the day, I will write on some of my thoughts from this brave work and some of the possible implications. For the sake of context, Simon May's project looks at the nature of love as a category.

Quote: “This updated Christian God—a God that took decisive shape only in the nineteenth century, with such thinkers as Kierkegaard, who insists (especially in his Works of Love) on the purely unconditional, disinterested, eternal, and benevolent nature of divine love—is one palatable to an era that, as Nietzsche rightly diagnosed, craves comfort and safety above all else: a one-sided God, forcibly stripped by his votaries of unruly desire, vindictiveness, and a capricious will; a God, always available and always ready to pardon, who no longer sends people to the eternal damnation of Hell promised by many of the greatest Christian authorities, such as Augustine and Aquinas, and set to poetry by such writers as Dante and Milton; a God who is deemed to love only in the unconditional, universal, all-giving, all-forgiving, all-affirming manner of “agape”; and so a God who offers salvation to everyone without exception, as twentieth-century theologians like Karl Barth, Karl Rahner, and Hans Urs von Balthasar insist is the case. Gone is the God who, in Franz Rosenzweig’s words, is “simultaneously the God of retribution and the God of love.”

Quote: “It is a reflection of the historic change in the archetypal object of love that unwavering devotion to a loved one who is destructive and even murderous will now be despised when that loved one is God but attract a measure of admiration when it is revealed to be offspring. And that these divergent judgments will seem, ethically, self-evidently right.”

Two observations from the text I find striking. The motive given in ‘craves comfort and safety above all else’ and the image of the - loved rascal, as the object of love. I’m intrigued by ideas about this archetypal image and in this instance, the story of the prodigal son as deserving love but without the father image (absent the oppressive patriarch) but instead replaced by the loving community (state?) — or think of the marriage symbolized in, Rembrandt, The Jewish Bride or The Kiss, Sculpture by Auguste Rodin, in my mind intimacy  (Adam and Eve like, or Israel and The Lord in the prophets). What sort of thing warrants unconditional love? Is such a thing even possible for man? Simon May suggests that unconditional love like that cannot account for distinctions. Why love this person and not that one? Simon May’s point is that something like Agape is impossible for man as man. For the sake of argument let’s accept Simon May’s thesis — that the child now fits the new object of unwavering devotion archetype. 

This brings us to the definition of love from the book. The why of love, particularly in all its many manifestations, as Simon May suggests — ‘... to glimpse a promise of ontological rootedness in a loved one is to experience them in four ways”. 

As a Source of life

An Ethical home

Toward Transcendence (a power that at the limit feels like one of life or death)

A calling us (to our so far unlived life or destiny)

I believe this definition is going to be helpful in an articulation of what it is to, love the Lord with all your mind. This with particular reference to James K. A. Smith ideas pertaining to Social Imaginaries (which is a more desire oriented perspective on worldview) and the human person as primarily a lover. 

Quote from James K. A. Smith: “My concern is that worldview-talk—particularly in its recently distorted form, but also perhaps even at its best moments—still retains a picture of the human person that situates the center of ‘...gravity of human identity in the cognitive regions of the mind rather than the affective regions of the gut/heart/body… I have suggested that the model of the human person as lover shifts the center of gravity of human identity away from a fixation on thinking, ideas, and doctrines and locates it lower, as it were, in the region of our affective, nonconscious operations.” 

One might think here of the maps of meaning associated with different parts of the brain with particular reference to visual data (Primary Visual Cortex, Ventral Stream, Dorcel Stream, and the Limbic System). For the sake of brevity we will not think of the problems arising from — the fallacy of correlation to causation and the naturalistic explanation of confirmation bias (as represented in the thesis regarding the Reticular Activating System). It is sufficient to note that knowledge of competence as represented in the driving a car example suggests the prioritization of what is foremost in one's mind.

With that said, In an era of willful biblical illiteracy by some, it is not difficult to understand how most people will not have grappled with the appearance of God in scripture in personified terms (Jealous, angry and vengeful). However, it might be more challenging to give an account of why the likes of Karl Barth, Karl Rahner, and Hans Urs von Balthasar seem to have removed the challenging bits from theology. In principle however, the thought is — who deserves to be loved? Tasit to such a question, is an account of the love of God that might explain some of this ‘respectable’ reductionism.

A key distinction then, by way of example of the respectability assumption, think of some of the atheist activists that seem to think it would be ethically justified if one did not want to worship the personified god in the bible (conception of God - jealous, angry and vengeful). This appeal, generally speaking, is made, not as proposing some new value claim but rather exposing the paradox of love and suffering specific to biblical faith. The sceptic then feels justified on grounds that the idea of god seems problematic and  like the capricious gods of the Greek pantheon, the god of the Bible is all too human. But what of this idea of agape stripped of its roots in theology? 

 “A humanist has cast off the ancient yoke of supernaturalism, with its burden of fear and servitude, and he moves on the earth a free man, a child of nature and not of any man-made gods.” From, The Humanist, number 5.

Secular agape then, is a humanistic attempt to make a value claim… something like, justice as fairness. Justice as fairness rests on the assumption of a natural right of all men and women to equality of concern and respect, a right they possess not by virtue of birth or characteristic or merit or excellence but simply as human beings with the capacity to make plans and give justice. The unfairness criteria is use against god in powerful prose in Dostoevsky's, The Brothers Karamazov. This to my mind goes to the heart of the matter. 

Ivan Karamazov, "It's not God I don't accept, understand this, I do not accept the world that He created, this world of God's, and cannot agree with it."

The character Ivan (from Dostoyevsky’s pen) uses the sufferings of children in God's creation together with questioning the utility of free choice, in his argument against God. Putting aside a theodicy or apologetic at this point. What is telling in such examples, is the - being appalled with god claims, rely on the dignity of humanity for their pathos. It is this concern for humanity that brings Dostoyevsky to wrestle with the challenge of evil and the biblical understanding of God. To be ashamed or offended at God is what is in view. This is very different to an atheistic conception of fairness grounded in evolutionary naturalism. Many have pointed out that any appeals to a herd mentality are insufficient grounding for human dignity and so the buttresses of such ‘fairness claims’ fall to the ground.

Neuroscientist Sam Harris writes:

“You seem to be an agent acting of your own free will. As we shall see, however, this point of view cannot be reconciled with what we know about the human brain… All of our behavior can be traced to biological events about which we have no conscious knowledge: this has always suggested that free will is an illusion.” 

I’m interested in the challenge posed by Dostoyevsky regarding evil and the biblical understanding of God because it brings us back to the example of Cain, Abel and the words of Jesus,  “Blessed are those who are not offended in me”. Our desire for fairness, and for love without retribution foremost in my mind. In Determined to Believe by John C Lennox the notion of life view is articulated as follows,

“A key question is the following: are human beings the highest and sole rational authority in the world – or, indeed, in the universe, so far as we know and so far as it affects us? And in that case, are we completely free to decide how we shall behave, what is wrong and what is right, what our ultimate values are, what, if any, is the purpose of our existence, and what our ultimate goal should be? Are we ultimately responsible to none but ourselves? Or is there a God who, having created the universe and us within it, has the right to lay down, and in fact has laid down, not only the physical laws of nature, the boundary conditions of human existence, but also the moral and spiritual laws that are meant to control human behaviour? Are humans held responsible by this God for the way they behave, and will they be called upon at last to render account to him? These answers reflect two different worldviews – atheism and theism”.

I believe John C Lennox could add a third group, the respectable believers who are offended at the God of the Bible. Put another way, it is a popular slogan to say, ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’. It follows, that God is absolutely corrupt metaphysically. It also follows that the ‘all authority’ given by Jesus to the church makes it by definition, the most corrupt organization on earth. What constitutes legitimate authority turns out to be equality of opportunity and outcome. 

As I sit here writing, I ask myself, what do I know of love? It seems very little. This is particularly evident when I think of the heroes of faith who seemed so broken and yet loved. I think the appeal to respectability is a powerful distraction from the biblical data. Likewise, it will impact our hearts, in the area of conviction, if we remove from God retribution in some sense. Furthermore, I wonder if it might be the sexual revolution (which might account for the child archetype), together with suspicion of authority generally in the west that explain some of this. This cultural shaping of our mental maps and that of the social landscape are indeed two sides of the same coin. We think about our thoughts and feel about our thinking.  It is not difficult to see how so many go with the flow, disconnecting sex from relationship, relationship from marriage and freedom from responsibility. In my next thought for the day I hope to look more closely at God as revealed in the Bible, as I feel Simon May’s book invites us to do.