I’ve recently been re-reading Von Balthasar’s Love Alone Is Credible. In it Von Balthasar points out the undeniable presence of true love in the created order, over against those who would offer skeptical protests, holding any such examples to be reducible to will to power or a subtle self-interest. Eros, he insists, is found throughout nature and in ways that go beyond mere utility. The animal’s devotion to it’s young, the individual’s self-sacrificial act committed on behalf of the whole, these are just a couple examples. Even more striking is the ability of an ultimately fleeting erotic desire to pass into a lifelong relationship characterized by fidelity that long outlasts the conditions that created the eroticism in the first place. Looks, charm, successes and achievements that act as aphrodisiacs, these may be the occasion for beginning a relationship that will give way to marital commitment, but they will never be sufficient to sustain it.
But as finite creatures love is not the only thing that contends for our passions:
…the fight for one’s place under the sun; the terrible stifling of the individual by the surrounding relations, the clan, and even by the family; the struggle of natural selection, for which nature itself provides the strength and the arms; the laws of time’s decay: friendships, once thought to be forever, grow cold, people grow apart, views and perspectives and thus hearts too become estranged. Geographic distances create and additional burden, and love must be strong and single-minded in order to withstand it; pledges of love, meant to be eternal, get broken, because the rising wave of eros gave way and another newer love came in between; the beloved’s faults and limitations become unbearable, and perhaps even worstened because the finitude of love seemed to be a contradiction: Why love just one woman when there are thousands that could be loved? (p. 62)
Love for one’s beloved, family, clan or people can motivate cultural activity. Love can inspire one to farm or hunt, to engage in statecraft, diplomacy, even war. It can offer impetus to tend to domestic chores, business deals or artistic endeavors, but “it cannot form the activities from top to bottom and domesticate them.” Other forces and powers that are perennially present in human existence contend against love. Human being is characterized at best by a sort of tense coexistence between love and self-interest. And that’s on a good day.
But even on our best day where love seems to be conquer all, or at least most, or just some of of its rivals, we find ourselves in an insoluble contradiction. The sort of love that the lover pledges to the beloved has a kind of eternal quality existentially. Pledging eternal love that will only exists for a moment or series of moments in history seem like an oxymoron. But nothing in the economy of nature indicates that we will exist eternally. But love seems to require something like the continuation of our embodied selves and that of our beloved (non corporal souls won’t do, for it would be like “loving” in virtual reality). The human heart, gripped by love, exists in contradiction. Eternity dwells in hearts that will all one day stop beating.
Such contradictions stand out glaringly before we even consider our own proclivity to sin. At a deep level we are all aware of our “heart’s paralysis, falleness, and frigidity”, and our general incapacity to fulfill any true law of love.
The finite nature of our existence, marked as it is by the tragedy of our fallen state, seems “immediately to justify the finitude of love, and since life in the world as a whole cannot be interpreted as love, it withdraws into islands of reciprocal sympathy: the island of eros, of friendship, of love of country, and ultimately the island of a certain universal love based on the single human nature that all people share, and even based on the single physis…that belongs to all of the beings in the universe.”
Our existential predicament makes the revelation of divine love illuminating and scandalous. Because of the real, albeit contradictory, experiences of love that we all have in our mortal lives, our ears “prick up” at the sound of the message of an absolute, unconditional and determined divine love. And yet the scandal comes when one realizes that the uniqueness of divine love not only reveals something about God, but about us. It shows our inchoate creaturely love for what it really is: nonlove. It’s only when we embrace the sordid and ambiguous nature of what seem to us to be our truest loves that we come to know what divine love is, and it’s only with the gift of divine love that the truly ambiguous nature of such loves is truly known.
I suppose C.S. Lewis was getting at a similar notion in The Four Loves:
William Morris wrote a poem called “Love is Enough” and someone is said to have reviewed it briefly in the words “It isn’t.” Such has been the burden of this book. The natural loves aren’t self-sufficient. [He goes on]…To say this is not to belittle the natural loves but to indicate where their glory lies. It is no disparagement to a garden to say that it will not fence itself and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor roll and cut its own lawns. A garden is a good thing but that is not the sort of goodness it has…Its real glory is of quite a different kind.
So perhaps a true profession of love involves confessing, quite literally, that you don’t know what you’re talking about.