By PAUL KRAUSE
We our currently drowning in the language of love. This is ironic, for only a people rooted in the seed of Christianity talks so incessantly about love and nothing else. Especially now, during Lent, we ought to reclaim love from the vandals who speak a counterfeit to realities of Divine Love.
Moderns seem to have become saturated with two prevailing notions of love, neither of which fit with the Christian understanding of love. Even many clerics speak of an abstracted and affirming love devoid of substance.
The first love is related to romantic love rooted in sexual desire. Sexual desire is no love at all. Sexual desire is the manifestation of human nature, this is true, but the contemporary idea of sex without consequences is the realization of sexual slavery. People are controlled by their disordered desire which no longer serve their supernatural end but their self-centered and vain pursuits for fleeing pleasure, passion, and, oftentimes, domination.
The second prevailing notion of love in the modern world, and perhaps the most novel and pernicious, is a love centered in self-affirmation (often related to a sexual identity).
This affirming love is the result of mid-twentieth century pop psychology. It draws, predominately, from psychologist Abraham Maslow. He placed esteem and self-actualization, rather vague and abstract concepts, above love. We have all probably heard, now, how we need to affirm oneself (in our sin, mind you) and that God loves you just the way you are (without the need to turn away from sin, mind you).
Drawing and developing from Maslow, this affirmation theology conflates biblical love with esteem and self-actualization. Since self-actualization, which is nothing but a fancy word for narcissism, is the highest value of humans, any reproach to the person is seen as harmful to this need.
Maslow’s self-actualization theory amends itself well with liberalism. Liberalism’s highest goal is non-harm. Any reader of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, through John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, would know that the highest good that all the liberals — classical and modern — agree is that non-harm is the highest good humans seek. Self-actualization amends itself nicely with liberal sentiments because any form of reproach to the individual’s narcissistic thrust can be deemed as harmful. This self-affirmation is the new idol of “love me.”
Disordered sexual desire is nothing new. This affirmation of esteem and the ego, however, is very new. It is deeply pernicious. It is also something that Christians have become corrupted with. To love another, we are told, is to openly affirm others and never preach the gospel of repentance and conversion to them lest they be offended.
God’s love, Christian love, stands against both unmoored sexual desires outside of the end of the natural law (only to be actualized in the Sacrament of Marriage) and this affirmation theory of the narcissistic self.
The patriarchs and people of God, throughout the Old Testament, experience God’s love through discipline. Discipline is one of the key elements of Christian love because discipline keeps one on the straight and narrow path of salvation. Isaac is routinely disciplined throughout his life. So are the Israelites as they traverse the Wilderness to Canaan. So too are the Israelites after the establishment of the kingdom. But God’s love keeps calling them back to the path of holiness and dwelling with the Lord rather than letting them go off into torrential abyss of the depth of the sea.
Discipline, however, points to the true reality of God’s love: sacrifice (or suffering). God suffers the pain of His peoples’ sin, both in the Old Testament and, of course, in the flesh come the New Testament. God’s love was so great that He took on flesh, dwelt among men, and died a gruesome and horrible death on the cross.
“Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” Christ tells His followers in St. John’s Gospel. Christ would later lay down His life for His beloved.
St. Paul also tells us, in his First Epistle to Timothy “if any man have not care of his own, and especially of those of his house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” Paul, here, reminds us of the importance of sacrifice and suffering for, and with, others as the highest testament of love.
When Christ informed all that the Law rested on love of God and neighbors, he meant that we had sacrificial duties to God and to our neighbors. It is hard, especially nowadays, to keep His Sabbath holy; to express our love of God through the sacraments, which takes commitment, in other words, sacrifice of our time and labor; and to labor and sacrifice with our neighbors in friendship, religiosity, and hospitality. All such expressions of the Christian vision of love are hard, not easy. They do not affirm, they demand sacrifice and putting one’s own desires aside for the need of others.
When people speak incessantly about love we must ask ourselves, what love is being discussed? Christians, especially, must ponder what other people mean by love — a word that has entered in Western vocabulary because of Christianity — and whether it conforms to the Christian understanding of love revealed to us by God through the patriarchs and prophets, His Son Incarnate and the suffering He undertook on the cross, and the apostles who preach the same message of discipline, sacrifice, and suffering.
Christian love, moreover, teaches and instructs rather than affirms. Paul beseeches the wayward brethren in Rome, Corinth, and Galatia because he loves them to the degree that he does not want to see their immortal souls damned because of false beliefs leading to wrong actions. If Paul’s love was the affirming love that we are force-fed today, Paul would have let the Romans, Corinthians, and Galatians drown in their sins in the name of tolerance and affirmation. Instead, Paul sacrifices his time, his efforts, indeed, his life, to help instruct and discipline wayward Christians to the true love demanded of us by God.
God’s love is a love of sacrifice and suffering, a love that inculcates discipline precisely because love does not wish to see one drift wayward on the path of oblivion. The love that most moderns speak of is no love at all. It is, as St. Augustine long ago reflected, a corrupt parody of love called lust. But rather than call it the lust to satiate the passions, or the lust to be affirmed in sinful egoistic ways, we call it “love” in mockery to the Divine.
Fear of the Lord is the beginning of love and wisdom. Even now as we move through Lent toward that most holy day of God’s love manifested for us, we ought to remember the reality of God’s love in sacrifice and suffering. That is the road we are called to take.
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