You may recall earlier in the semester that we watched the Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors. Allen has become "persona non grata" in many circles these days, perhaps
justifiably so, but it's a shame that his movies are now viewed as politically
unfashionable as well, because they offer an insightful glimpse into the
Modern mind that should make all of us a little uncomfortable. Regardless of
one's opinion of Allen as a person, Crimes and Misdemeanors is
considered by many critics and cinephiles (such as me) to be the best of his
movies, and it raises all sorts of philosophical questions about morality,
"privilege," art and its relationship to culture, love, religion, the meaning
of life…it's an ambitious film, with a provocative conclusion.
A quick recap: Crimes and Misdemeanors intertwines two plotlines
about two marriages. One story, that of Judah Rosenthal, is about adultery
and its consequences. It's a serious story, in which Judah decides to cover
up an affair by having his mistress Delores murdered before she exposes
their relationship and destroys his marriage and reputation. The other
story, mostly comedic, is about Cliff Stern (played by Allen himself), a
mediocre documentary film director wallowing in the misery of a loveless
marriage until he falls in love with Halle, the producer of a TV series for
which he is directing an episode. Allen jumps back and forth between both
stories, using clips from old films to mark the transitions…powerfully
suggesting just how much our assumptions about "real life" are shaped by the
entertainment we consume. He further blurs the line between reality and
fiction by placing scenes throughout the film where Judah seems to recall
important moments from his past, at one point even engaging in dialogue with
his father at a seder meal over the consequences of his choice to commit
murder. It becomes unclear as the plot progresses whether these scenes
represent authentic memories, or the imaginings of a mind trying to
rationalize the consequences of a horrible decision that cannot be
undone.
One such scene is particularly interesting, in which Judah discusses the
moral implications of murdering his mistress with a rabbi, named Ben. Some
of the dialogue recalls an earlier scene in which Judah had confessed his
adultery to Ben, but a later scene in which Ben is unaware that Judah did in
fact have Delores murdered suggests that their discussion is in Judah's
imagination more so than his memory. Ben tells Judah that he could
confess his adultery to those he hurt and ask forgiveness. The dialogue
contains an interesting verb choice- Ben seems to assume that Judah's family
has already been hurt by him even though they don't know what he has
done, whereas Judah seems to believe that "what they don't know can't hurt them"; so long as his secret remains a secret, no harm is done. This is why
Judah wants Delores silenced- If she doesn't reveal the affair, Judah keeps
his family, and keeps his "wealth and privilege," as he calls it. Everything
is the same just because it looks the same, because the
"appearance" is maintained. How things appear, and the truth lying behind
them, is a key theme in this film, punctuated by Judah's occupation as an
ophthalmologist, Ben's progressing and inevitable blindness, and occasional
dialogue about the eyes, and "what lies behind them."
[Here's the scene]
Implicitly, two worldviews are being contrasted in this scene, whether
Allen intended it or not. Each of those worldviews is rooted in
metaphysical assumptions that inform the choices of those who hold them,
right down to the intimate day-to-day decisions they make about how to
interact within their own families. There is a relevant life lesson in
this: Two people with different worldviews can see the same situation
through different eyes, both reaching equally rational but radically
different conclusions about that situation, and about how best to act in
response to it. Only if they are aware of those assumptions and the
possibility that they are not shared by others can they make sense of how
someone else's response might be so very different, yet worthy of being
taken seriously. With a little humility, one might even come to see the
other's perspective as better, or (gasp) Truer. I capitalized that word on
purpose.
Judah's worldview might best be labelled as Naturalist, or Modernist. What
is real for him is what he can see, or what his senses confirm to exist.
He recalls a past conversation with Delores in which she tells him that
her eyes "weren't so good." She says to Judah, "Well, you're an
ophthalmologist. Do you agree the eyes are the windows of the soul?" He
responds, "Well, I believe they're windows, but I'm not sure it's a soul I
see." Later, Judah admits to his brother Jack who orchestrated the murder
that he went to Delores' apartment to collect some incriminating evidence
of their affair, and he saw her dead body lying on the floor. "There was
nothing behind her eyes if you looked into them," he says, "All you saw
was a black void." This, in the end, is Judah's reality. There is nothing
behind or beyond the physical universe, beyond what the scientist studies,
what the senses perceive. Ben, on the other hand, might best be labelled a
Classical Realist, and for him there is not only more than the physical
universe, it's the "more than" that matters. In the scene of their
imagined conversation, Ben tells Judah that "I couldn't go on living if I
didn't feel with all my heart a moral structure with real meaning and
forgiveness, and some kind of higher power. Otherwise, there's no basis to
know how to live." It's ironic that Allen chose to portray the religious
voice in the film as a person gradually going blind. Perhaps he meant to
suggest that religiosity is itself a kind of willful blindness, a refusal
to accept the brute fact of an indifferent and meaningless existence. But
maybe Allen doesn't really understand the worldview he's having Ben
portray, a worldview in which what is most real is known with the
intellect rather than being seen with the eyes.
At any rate, here is why I find this particular scene so interesting- It
exposes the potential consequences of the very different ways in which we
can understand the phenomenon to which we have given the label
"love," both how we define the word, and how that definition either
expands or contracts the horizon of influence that love can have on how we
choose to live. And that is interesting because, as a Catholic, I think
that ultimately our very purpose for existing is to love, and to be loved.
I'll even go so far as to assert that love is the thing all of us (have
been created to) really want the most, and those who would deny that are,
I am convinced, just fooling themselves. They are either afraid of the
risk of love (maybe because they believe they've been burned by it in the
past) or skeptical of its possibility, but it is, behind the indifferent
façade, really what they want, regardless. If I am right, what we
understand love to be and how that understanding should direct the way we
live is of great, if not the highest, importance. But let's hold that
thought for a moment…
First, I have a proposition for your consideration, which is that
to love (and to be loved) requires an extraordinary
amount of honesty. Let's apply this proposition to an obvious type of love, which we might
call "romantic." If you pretend to be someone you are not in order to lure
someone into loving you (if you hide what you fear will be perceived as
flaws, or you assume that your past choices are "nobody else's business"
and can be kept hidden, or you deceive a loved one through infidelity as
Judah did, for examples), you will inevitably be faced with the
probability that if you succeed, the person you have deceived doesn't
really love you at all, but rather
the illusion of who you are that you have created. And then there
is the risk that they will only continue to love "you" to the extent that
you are able to perpetuate that deception. You wind up in a trap of your
own making: You may know that you've found someone who loves the deception
you're presenting, but you cannot know if they will really love you
without admitting the lie, and revealing that you are a liar in the
process (which now becomes part of the complete picture of who you really
are, and who they must be willing to accept in order to love the real
you). If this doesn't matter to you, and you are fine with deceiving
another person about your true self to possess them, I suggest that the
person you claim to love isn't really a person to you at all, but more of
a means to an end- specifically, the end of self-gratification. And you do
not really love them, except in the sense that you might "love" chocolate
chip cookie dough ice cream, or taking copious notes in Foundations class
(sarcasm, folks).
There is an inescapable conclusion from this proposition:
No one who ever even partially deceives another can ever be fully loved
by them. Complete love requires complete honesty. Anything less is
a compromise, and that compromise is like a flesh wound- if deep enough,
it must either be treated (with the truth), or it will fester, and given
sufficient time, it will ultimately kill its host. The moment Judah is
unfaithful to his wife he becomes someone other than the person she
believes him to be, and it is no longer the real him that she loves. This
is precisely why Ben thinks the damage has already been done. The person
Judah's wife thinks he is doesn't exist; the object of her love and
commitment is a phantom. Conventional wisdom says she is the victim, but
Socrates says that the opposite is true- it's better to be lied to than to
be a liar, and Judah, by lying, becomes the victim of his own choices: By
concealing his true self, he makes it impossible for his wife to love him.
His "cave" is of his own making, and he is a prisoner in it by his own
choice, forced to hold up the "puppet" of marital fidelity and love so
that his wife will see its shadow as real, so he can keep something he
needs at the expense of another human being's freedom to make an informed
choice in the light of the truth. And if he's not bothered by that
prospect, then it isn't really her love that he wants, and he's no
different from Delores- he has used his wife to satisfy himself, just as
he and Delores mutually used one another, and Delores is no more
"needy" or "emotionally hungry" than he is. Not only does his choice make
it impossible for his wife to love the real him- if Socrates is right,
he's also corrupted his own soul by choosing injustice, making the real
him less worthy of being loved in the process.
To clarify my position, let's dispense with a key misconception about what
love, actually is (okay, a bad and increasingly obscure joke): It simply
cannot be merely a feeling or an emotion. I understand this
misconception, because there is one feeling that is generally
characteristic of love, which is the feeling of attraction. I say
generally characteristic because attraction is also characteristic
of lust, which is outside my present scope, and if you can be honest with
yourself, you probably already know the distinction I'm making anyway. But
a little reflection should make it clear that love cannot be just
attraction, and that attraction isn't even essential to it. If I were to
learn that my daughter had suffered the accident in my infamous exam
question, I would feel just what the question describes- fear and anguish.
I would feel it precisely because I love my daughter. And there are
other times when I have had other feelings, like anger and frustration,
because of choices my daughter has made that I thought were foolish,
short-sighted, or just plain wrong, that I wished she hadn't made
because I love her. I suspect your parents have felt the same way
in similar circumstances, and you will too, if/when you become a parent
yourself. So, if love is a feeling, which one is it? Attraction? Fear?
Anger? Frustration?
In the Catholic worldview, love is not a feeling at all. It is a choice-
the conscious decision to put another person's well-being before one's
own, to "will the good of another." The more that choice is freely and
rationally made, rather than being coerced, the more authentically it is
an expression of love. And as such, love is a lens through which one's
view of reality is brought into focus, rather than a filter that alters or
distorts that view ("rose colored glasses"), because it shifts the locus
of that reality from the self to the other- to
someone else…and, in its most perfect form, to
everyone else, including those who might consider themselves your
"enemies." Love therefore is not, and cannot ever be, something that we
"fall into" or surrender to, as if we have no control over it, and as it
is romantically (mis)understood. We must have complete control over
ourselves for the choice to be truly free, and authentic. But when that
choice is made, it alters the way we perceive everything else. You can
choose to believe that the alteration is a distortion of "the way things
really are" if you want, but that is also to assume that your perception
of reality without the "lens" of love is closer to the truth…and how do
you know that? How would you prove that? Did you miss the whole point of
the "Problem of Perception"?
I might put this another way, and suggest that love as classically defined
is just as valid as a metaphysical "fundamental principle" for
understanding all of reality as any other principle proposed by any
philosopher we have discussed…and I might also mention that at least one
"philosopher" actually did propose it, when he left as his only
commandment to his followers to "love one another," even to the point of
loving your "enemies," and he demonstrated his commitment to that
principle by dying on a cross not only for them, but for the very people
who crucified him. There is a reason that early Christianity came to use
the Greek term "Logos" for Jesus, a term used to refer to "Word" as the
means by which the intelligibility of reality is made knowable. They
believed that his choice to die was the perfect manifestation of divine
love, and that it revealed the essence and nature of the God whose
intellect is manifested in his creation. By that reasoning it is love, not
the atom, or matter, or particles, or gravity, or "symmetry," or
"mechanism," or "entanglement," or "number" that is the key to explaining
why there is something, rather than nothing.
I should mention at this point that a prevailing view -the romantic notion
that love is something to which we surrender- in addition to being
mistaken, is also devastating to Theology, because it distorts the concept
of divine love in a way that severs the link between love and virtue (more
on this link in a moment) as completely as it erases the essentiality of
unclouded reason to free will. To see my point, consider that, in romantic
relationships, the person who is more "in love" is always less "in power."
The more in love, the more you might need the other person to perpetuate
the feeling to which you have become addicted, and if they are not
as-in-love with you, they may become aware that your need gives them a
degree of control over you. You know this if you've ever had someone tell
you that "if you really love me, you'll do X," with X being whatever it is
that they want and that they know you would otherwise not choose to do. If
you don't do X, so this person is telling you, they will interpret it as
an indication that you don't "really" love them, and you will risk losing
them. It's a manipulation -a threat really- based on the implicit control
they have by being less emotionally invested in the relationship than you
are (unless, of course, you are the one doing the manipulating…), and
therefore knowing that they have less to lose, and less to risk. Children
do this to their parents as well (and vice versa)- they can demand
forgiveness from their parents for whatever transgression, or demand the
fulfillment of any wish, by saying that if mom and dad don't comply, "you
must not love me." An insecure parent who needs the approval of their
child to validate their self-perception as a good parent will inevitably
comply, out of fear that their child will "feel unloved" if they
don't.
Extrapolate the essence from this model, and you get the fundamental
problem with misunderstanding love for understanding God: It
gives you a God whom you can guilt-manipulate. If He really loves you, so
the reasoning goes, he must forgive your every transgression, without
demanding anything of you that might make you "feel bad," like the
humility of confession, or the difficult change of authentic repentance.
So why not indulge? Love-as-feeling is your Get Out of Jail Free Card.
This is such a distortion that it is almost the exact opposite of the
Christian philosophic notion of divine love. If God loves us, and to love
us is to will our good, then a personal God will be angry with us, and
will punish us if it is just to do so,
precisely because He loves us, if that is what it takes for us be
honest with ourselves in order to be authentic and open to being really
loved, to draw us closer to Him, and to ultimately actualize our own self
perfection. But a God who loves us perfectly must also ultimately respect
our freedom to choose to love Him (freedom again being essential to love)
or to not love Him (thus, if Hell is the absence of God, it follows that
there must be a Hell precisely because God loves us, and not
despite it). The God-as-indulgent-parent model gives us in Theology
exactly what it gives us in parenting- a God so needy and lacking in
self-esteem that he can never be respected, much less obeyed. And
ultimately, believers in such a God do so out of opportunistic utility
rather than rationality. The Modern model of love-as-feeling has arguably
done more damage to belief in God than any Atheist philosopher or any
scientific theory.
So…by now, you're probably starting to worry a little bit about the time
you have to read this and respond to it, right? Okay, fair enough. I'll
try to "cut to the chase," which is simply to draw out an implication of
what I have already said:
There is no possibility of real love without the courage to be honest
about who you are, and to accept the risk that you might be deceived or
rejected or otherwise taken advantage of by someone who uses you and
your willingness to trust for their own ends. You have to accept this, and walk that path. Take the risk, embrace the
potential pain, embarrassment, humiliation, hurt, and rejection. And if
love is what you want in return (and you should), you can never do
anything that will compromise the freedom of another person to freely
choose to love you just because it is what they want. So- no guilt,
no manipulation, no force or control. Nothing that causes someone to say
they love you just so you can delude yourself with the lie you forced them
to tell. That lie is not real love, and it will blossom into resentment,
and inevitably, hatred. That's what Judah was saying to Delores when he
asked her if her idea of love was "stupid threats and slander," and why I
suggest that Delores had already lost him, if she was having to resort to
guilt or shame to keep him. "If you love someone, set them free," so the
saying goes.
Does that make sense to you? If not, then I'm afraid I can't offer you
much more. You're wise to pick another test question at this point. But if
it does make sense, then there is an additional point that follows from
what I have been saying: God is love. Put another way, love is not what God does, love is what God
is. I'm not just making that up- it's a claim about God found in
the Bible, in 1 John 4:8, "Whoever is without love does not know God, for
God is love." If true, then by a kind of theological transitive property,
if love is the fundamental principle, and God is love, then God is the
fundamental principle. Hence, God is not a "thing" to be rendered
intelligible in a manner that conforms him to some accepted model of
reality from Physics or Philosophy, rather God is the principle of
intelligibility that must determine the structure and content of any such
model. Love is the compass, the map, and destination. It's not a quaint,
charming roadside stop along the way.
The apostle Paul describes the kind of love I'm talking about, in 1
Corinthians 13,
If I speak in human and angelic tongues- but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing.Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, [love] is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.Love never fails. If there are prophecies, they will be brought to nothing; if tongues, they will cease; if knowledge, it will be brought to nothing. For we know partially, and we prophesy partially, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things. At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known. So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
I know that by this point in your life there's a real chance that when
someone starts quoting Bible passages to you, your mind switches into
"Yeah-yeah-yeah-Jesus-wants-us-to-be-nice-to-each-other-blah-blah-blah-I-get-it"
mode. But if you read that description and take it seriously, you'll see
it is a fundamentally different understanding of love from one rooted in
feelings or emotion. In fact, Paul claims in that last paragraph that love
is, in effect, the maturation of the human capacity to reason. It's not a
delusion to fall into or an intoxicant with which to self-medicate, rather
it "rejoices with the truth." It is what clears away delusion and
clarifies the mind. It's what the Greeks called a virtue. Again, love is a
lens that brings the Truth into sharper focus, not a filter that distorts
it. It's cliché to say that "love is blind," and in fact it's the
opposite- love is more like metaphysical LASIK surgery…but good luck
writing a love song with those lyrics.
Seriously though, if it's true that God is love –and I believe that it is-
then our flawed, imperfect experiences of love should nevertheless offer
some insight into the nature of God. Each experience of love -even the
romantic ones, at least to the extent that they make us want to
make someone else happy- should point beyond itself to Love Itself
(Love Actually? Uhg.), and therefore to God, like particulars pointing to
a Platonic Form. We glimpse God (or recollect him?) with every experience
of love, however imperfect it might be, so long as we are willing to learn
from them. And this is as it should be. If God truly loves us, he wants us
to freely choose to love him in return- so no dropping down out of the sky
and making us believe out of fear or awe…rather, we must choose to seek
him out and want to be loved by him…otherwise it's just not the real
thing. He must, paradoxically, remain hidden from us, in order that we
remain free to choose to find him. But with each experience of love he can
subtly, patiently help us to trust the compass and stay on the path to the
right destination, walking with us all the while.
You might call that the paradox of faith, and it has a parallel in the
"faith" required in the love we have for one another- in marriage, for
example. A faithful spouse is not just one who is sexually exclusive- that
concept of fidelity is so objectifying that it essentially turns a spouse
into property. Rather, a faith-full spouse is
uncompromisingly authentic- someone who hides nothing about who
they are, accepting the risk of rejection that comes with such openness,
and uncompromisingly trusting, recognizing that fear,
doubt and suspicion are what cause us to conceal the most important parts
of ourselves, in order to protect those parts from the pain of betrayal,
and in the process of that concealment, to tell the very lie that destroys
the genuine love that we sought in the first place. Again, to love fully
and be fully loved, you must dive in, you must be real, and you must trust
completely. It is an extraordinary risk, and it takes great courage. If
you think of love as sappy, or sentimental, or mushy, or irrational,
you've simply got the wrong idea.
Of course, as Paul suggests, it takes a kind of philosophical maturity to
think about love in this way, and it can often require stumbling through a
lot of (youthful?) mistakes to arrive at such insight…all of which one
must be honest about when such insight is acquired, and authentic love is
at stake. Let's be honest- this is why the Church takes the stance that it
does on so many issues regarding human sexuality and the consequences of
treating it "casually." Empty sex of the metaphysical significance it has
in the expression of authentic love, treat it as an act whose meaning can
be relative to the circumstances in which it happens, and it cannot
conveniently reassume its objective meaning and its unitive purpose just
because you want it to later on in life, when you decide that such an
understanding serves the purpose of imposing an obligation of fidelity on
someone by whom you do not want to be deceived…because of the very fear of
betrayal I mentioned earlier.
Let's suppose I'm right (and the Bible is right), that God is love, and
love is our purpose, and love is a lens through which all of reality can
be seen differently and perhaps more clearly, rather than a filter
of emotion that clouds our judgment, that takes control of us, and
that deludes us. Rather than being antithetical to knowing, love would be
a different way of knowing, maybe even a deeper way, like the
difference between knowing how to make a musical instrument, as
opposed to knowing how to play one…if I "do not have love, I am a
resounding gong or a clashing cymbal," as Paul says. What's the point of
knowing how to make a violin, when no one knows how to play it? One is a
mechanistic, material (scientific) kind of knowledge, while the other is a
purposive, intentional, philosophic kind of knowledge. But are both not
necessary? And is not one (the former) dependent on the other (the
latter)? To put it in Aristotelian terms, Science may set aside Formal and
Final causality to properly understand Material and Efficient causality,
but science itself is infused to its core with intentionality, or a Final
cause- namely, understanding the cosmos (or universe, or multiverse, or
"ultimate reality").
Then there's this: Speaking of science, you know that the Modern period,
whose twilight you and I are possibly witnessing, is typically
characterized by a triumphalist view of the accomplishments of the natural
sciences, the Scientific "Method," and the cross-pollination of that
method in other academic disciplines -pioneered by Rene Descartes- in the
effort to purge them of error in the pursuit of knowledge…as Modernism has
defined it. It's an inspiring story (myth?) we've been telling ourselves
for centuries now, in which Science triumphs over Superstition in the name
of Truth, and Descartes' "method" offers us the assurance that we are
liberated from the repressive power claims of those who would seek to
control us for purposes of preserving that power, especially when they
claim to do so in the name of some supposed "God."
And yet, is it not possible –just maybe- that the Modern obsession with
science and scientific thinking is rooted not in systematic doubt, but in
a kind of systematic fear, as in the fear of being
deceived? After all, was fear not what Descartes was trying to
assuage with his "Method"? A worldview rooted in "systematic doubt" holds
out the promise of liberation from living a lie that serves the purposes
of others, but it also produces a "systematic suspicion" that any truth
claims not laundered through the "method" are likely to be just such a
lie…and in the height of historical irony, it appears that the transition
to the Postmodern worldview has simply extended that suspicion to include
the authority of science itself.
But what about a worldview rooted in systematic fear…what promise does
that offer? To hammer my point home, try to imagine approaching any
relationship in which one hopes to experience love as I (and the Bible)
have described it with the kind of systematic doubt or suspicion that
Modernism (and, really, Postmodernism) has exalted. Imagine telling your
spouse that you cannot trust their claim to love you or to be faithful,
until such claims are "proven true." The very suspicion would render the
hope absurd. If it would undermine the possibility of authentic love in
such a relationship with another person, how could it possibly not
undermine the possibility of a relationship with the God who is love?
So riddle me this: Is it not at least possible that love itself
(again, as I have described it, not as it is portrayed in popular culture)
constitutes sufficient evidence for God's existence? Is it not equally
possible that belief in God has declined in the West not because such
belief is irrational in principle, but because we are immersed in a
worldview that has systematically taught us to approach the very
experience of reality in such a way that it rules out the possibility of
belief in the first place? Have concepts like God, faith, love, and truth
been redefined for us in ways that implicitly categorize them in the realm
of the subjective, in a sort of cultural Newspeak dictionary whose
existence is so pervasive that it has become invisible, precisely because
it is everywhere?
And if it is possible that belief in God is rational, if -and only if-
viewed through the reality-focusing power of the lens of love as
classically understood, what more convincing proof would there be of God's
love for you than his emptying himself, by coming in the form of a
powerless (suffering) servant, and sacrificing himself, by dying on a
cross, in order to show you that love is what he is? What happened
to Jesus on the cross is the ultimate realization of self-exposure and
rejection, the perfect example of the courage required to risk offering
love and having it rejected. And as such, it provides the necessary
insight to realize both what we must be willing to do to get what we want
(if love is what we want, as I suggested at the start of this), and why it
is worth doing (and why love is worth having) in the first place. I know
Descartes thought that what he was doing would strengthen Catholic belief
by providing a rational basis for it rather than assuming its truth on the
authority of the "powers that be," but I wonder if, in the end, he lost
sight of the most important and authentic manifestation of Jesus' perfect
love- his willingness to die on the cross at the hands of the "powers that
be." Maybe his method of doubt was as much about the fear of being
like Jesus as it was about the fear that he was being deceived by
those who claimed to speak in His name. "Then Jesus said to his disciples,
'Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and
follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever
loses his life for my sake will find it.'" Yikes. Suddenly those words
take on a whole new meaning…
Well, I guess it's time for some sort of "prompt," so here it is. Look at
the essence of the gospel story, the truth it is ultimately trying to
convey, examine it philosophically rather than
scientifically, and tell me:
What exactly is the real difficulty with believing that God exists, and
that he came into the world in the person of Jesus, and that he died on
the cross out of love for you, so that you could come to know how to love
him, and to fulfill the very purpose for which you exist? Where am I
"wrong" on this? What is the "flaw" in my logic? Am I even madder than the
madman in Nietzsche's parable? More to the point, why has belief in God
become such a problem in the Modern world? Is it not at least possible
that it is because we have effectively collapsed our understanding of love
into a mechanistic and biological understanding of ourselves, redefining
love in an Orwellian fashion, so that it rules out the possibility of
belief in the God of Classical Theism from the outset? Answer as you see
fit, but put those philosophic skills to good use in doing so.
To be consistent with the importance of honesty to my own position, I'll
make explicit some implicit assumptions in what I am proposing, but I
won't explain them in so much as I will hope you recall numerous
enthralling class presentations that were intended to do so. Here they
are:
-
The Problem of Perception. Our knowledge of reality-in-itself
seems to be indirect. Truth claims about that reality, as well as the
evidence for those claims, is contingent upon how "truth" is defined
and understood, which is contingent upon…
-
The Problem of Context. You and I were born into and remain
immersed in a specific worldview context, with its own assumed
solution to (1), which isn't so much proven true as
internally consistent. But different assumed solutions can
produce different yet just as internally consistent worldviews. Or as
Halle claims in Crimes and Misdemeanors, "I was thinking. No
matter how elaborate a philosophical system you work out, in the end,
it's gotta be incomplete."
-
Not Truer, more compelling. Premodernism recognized (2) when
presented with the mutually incompatible philosophies of Heraclitus
(who denied Being and insisted that reality was only Becoming, or
change) and Parmenides (who denied Becoming and insisted that reality
was only Being, which he described as uncreated, unchanging,
motionless, indivisible, timeless, and singular- all later attributes
for God). Each philosopher's argument for his position was seen as
equally logical given its assumptions, but the conclusions were
obviously irreconcilable. The solution? From that point forward in the
history of Western thought, internal logical consistency was no longer
sufficient by itself as a justification for seeing one Metaphysical
system as "truer" than another. Instead, the system also had to
account for as much of reality-as-it-is-experienced as possible.
Simply denying the existence of the aspects of reality that your
theory cannot account for, or labelling them illusions, was seen at
best as incomplete, at worst as a copout. Hence the Democritus
problem, and therefore the Modernism/Naturalism problem (as in Judah
Rosenthal)- was Atomism's denial of the objective existence of
"qualia" or value a copout, or an incomplete system? You decide.
-
There must be a logos, or fundamental principle (or a limited, knowable plurality of such)
by means of which all of reality can be explained, and which is itself
either self-evidently true or assumed to be such, so that no prior
explanation for the logos is thought to be necessary or possible.
Given that any conceivable such logos is at least in principle a
reasonable candidate, the criterion for determining which is correct
(or best, or truest) cannot be the ability to logically construct a
metaphysics on its basis (see #3 above), but rather the extent to
which such a metaphysics accounts for the totality of reality as
experienced (matter, value, consciousness, intelligence, order,
etc.).
-
Given (#1-4),
I propose love as classically understood as the logos. Love as such is defined as "to will the good of another," but I
acknowledge this definition as first and foremost an attempt to put
into words a universal human experience that cannot be adequately
articulated. In effect, this is better understood as an attempt to
render intelligible the phenomenon of love within the context of human
relationships, but I contend that love as I am using it exists beyond
that context. Definitions for love that limit it to specifically human
relationships run the risk of being reductionist, as is the case with
Modernist attempts to define love in terms of human emotional
responses, biological or neurological processes, evolutionary
suitability, etc. Those attempts define love in such a way that its
existence outside the context of human relationships becomes
impossible by the definition (except to the extent that
non-human animal behaviors that correspond to human behaviors that are
attributable to love are seen as plausibly expressing the same
phenomenon. But love as I assume it exists beyond that context as
well). I further propose that, in Classical Christian Theism, Love is
not merely evidence of God, like fingerprints on glass or footprints
in snow might constitute evidence of where someone had been or once
was. Rather, Love is a manifestation of the imminent presence of God,
like (only by analogy) heat and light indicate the presence of the
sun. In other words, Love is God, and the experience of love in human
relationships points to God's existence, presence, and nature.
Classical Christian Theism also recognized the thought of Plato as
pointing to the same reality, and as such, came to identify Plato's
concept of the "Good" as God. Given that Plato was resistant to define
the Good (seeing it as the source of all intelligibility in reality,
and therefore as the wellspring from which such intelligibility as
manifest in human consciousness, thought, and language would flow, and
therefore itself undefinable, as it is the reason anything
is definable), I am similarly resistant to defining Love. So,
as Plato saw the Good as like the sun, in that it illumines the
objects of the intellect in a manner analogous to how the sun
illumines the objects of sight, and therefore believed it could be
known to exist indirectly because it is that by means of which
anything else can be known, I suggest that Love, being synonymous with
God and with The Good, is similarly known to be real via the
experiences of Love in which we participate, but not only via those
experiences. As, for example, when Jesus' death on the cross is
understood as a perfect manifestation of divine love (rather than,
say, a humiliating mockery) once the concept of love is grasped via
the intellect.
-
I further propose that Modernism, as a worldview and as the basis
for any philosophic system that might be classified as Modernist,
cannot serve as a foundation for Love as Classically understood. By reducing the real to the observable, Modernism rules out the
transcendent a priori, and can only understand love in the ways
described above (human emotional responses, biological or neurological
processes, evolutionary suitability, etc.). But this is because of the
assumptions about what is real (ontology) and how we can know
(epistemology) that are "baked into" Modernism from the outset, not
because these assumptions have been proven to be true, or at least
truer than the assumptions of Classical Theism. Therefore, to believe
that love can only be defined or experienced in the way that Modernism
understands it is to rule out God from the outset, not to prove his
nonexistence.
- For Love to serve as logos, it must do a better job of explaining all of reality as we experience it than the alternatives. I propose that it does exactly that, and more to the point, Love is superior to any Modernist/Materialist metaphysics in that it can inform any understanding of Final causality in any phenomenon that falls within its explanatory power, which I further propose as limitless, even if language limits our capacity to articulate it. Love can reasonably explain why belief in God is rational; what the nature of that God is; why there is something rather than nothing; why the cosmos is ordered and intelligible rather than chaos; why human reason can discern that order and intelligibility; why the person is not merely the body but also the soul; why the soul is immaterial and continues beyond bodily death; why the body experiences suffering and death; why, despite this, there is a human longing for meaning and purpose; why Jesus came when he did, taught what did, suffered and died as he did, and was resurrected. All this, and much more if not everything, can be reasonably explained if the starting point, the fundamental principle, is love.
But what love can explain is currently beside the point, if you do not
believe that it exists as classically defined in the first place…if you
are a Judah and not a Ben. Of course, you'll have to be honest with
yourself about that, and as I believe I have mentioned, honesty of that
sort takes great courage.
[1] Yes, this is a thinly veiled reference to my infamous test
question.
