By PAUL KRAUSE
What is love? This short but profound question has vexed humans since the dawn of writing and thinking. It is, I would argue, the most important question humans can ask. For the longest time, humans considered love to be related to marriage. Not anymore, much to the detriment of souls and society.
It could be easy to be pessimistic over the state of decay. Polarization. Pandemics. War. Drag Queen Story Hours. Broken souls abound in a seemingly broken society. Is there a cause for hope?
Yes! Peter Kwasniewski, in his new book Treasuring the Goods of Marriage in a Throwaway Society, sees hope in the possibility of rebuilding love and marriage in a world desperate for love but drowning in its many false counterfeits. Hope is never a static reality; it is always something one is working toward and progressing into.
In a phone call with a friend and fellow writer and editor, the topic of Catholic views of love and marriage came up. I belabored the point that love and sex should be understood as a gift, the human body a mystical gift, or, in the words of Kwasniewski, “The human body is a liturgical vessel.”
The point I was making was that your body is so important, so sacred, so imbued with meaning that it isn’t something to haphazardly throw away — but that’s exactly what has happened in the modern world. There is no care for the self.
Recovering the theological and philosophical, even “mystical” understanding of the body, self, and love is desperately needed in our de-mystified and de-spiritualized world of crude and vulgar materialism. The triumph of materialism, in its Marxist and liberal utilitarian forms, has brought significant harm to humans who are, first and foremost, spiritual beings. We are creatures made in the image of love and wisdom for love and wisdom.
Recovering and promoting this understanding of who we are is what Kwasniewski does in a little over 250 pages of his insightful, even if at times technical, book.
This returns us to the question of love. What is love? According to materialism, love can be nothing more than feelings stimulated by bodily sensations, a sort of pathological high where emotions soar because of the titillations of the body. Emotional love is a powerful thing, but it never endures, and thus for many who are under its spell the constant pursuit of that pathological high becomes life’s only pursuit. Inevitably, it withers away to ash and dust.
The Catholic view of love and marriage, while it doesn’t shun the goods of emotions, goes deeper. “Spouses must make sacrifices for each other’s goods,” Kwasniewski reminds us. This sacrificing for the good of one another is part of the process of perfection, divinization through love. Love, as should be obvious, requires another. Love is more than just oneself.
To love another means to transcend the mere self and embrace God and others, “The only way we can begin to love as we should is to ask God unceasingly for the grace to be transformed within.” Love begins, then, with the recognition of God, who is Love itself, and the images of love in the world: other human beings. From here, “belonging to each other” rather than simply belonging to oneself can manifest. As Jesus said: love God and love your neighbor.
How often, though, do we hear the opposite? “Love yourself.” “I can love me better.” “I am my own lover.” Our culture is steeped in the idea of self-love which ignores all others and takes love and turns it into lust, the self-centered desire to control all things and be master and creator of our own values. One just need look at the past 150 years of Western history to see where this road leads.
Kwasniewski is also aware of the additional ramifications of a theology of love and the sacred. For those concerned with the state of political society and encroaching totalitarianism, our sagacious author writes, “Freedom can survive only in a climate of love.” This is very true, an understanding shared by the best of ancient and modern political philosophers.
When love vanishes and lust replaces it, resentment, envy, and jealousy eventually take over. Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost is a tyrant because he lacks the good of love in marriage and therefore seeks to destroy the world by destroying love and marriage. If he cannot enjoy “the happier Eden” and “bliss on bliss” of Adam and Eve, then he shall ruin what causes the happy bliss to take hold in our lives. Thus, Satan separates man and woman. That is the Fall.
The task of restoring a sacred and mystic understanding of love is no easy task. But it is a journey worth embarking on. It is a work that will fill us with hope because we are dedicated to working for love rather than against love.
Treasuring the Goods of Marriage in a Throwaway Society is both an easy and a dense read. The basic problems of love in our loveless modern world are presented with clarity and vigor. At the same time, the remedy to this problem dives into the deep intellectual oasis that has informed Catholic theology over the millennia: St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. John Paul II, Plato, and Aristotle.
Amid the ruins of the “anti-mysticism” of lust veiled as love, Kwasniewski’s book is another important contribution in both defending love and marriage and promoting it for those with the eyes to see and ears to hear. We would do well to see, hear, and listen. The book is available at sophiainstitute.com and at amazon.com.
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