If you have ever been deeply in love, then you know that there is a texture to the experience that is different from any other.
Love is not simple. There are different kinds of love and each has its own beloved.
To be simple: there is erotic desire, deep love, and the love of God. Each is similar, but each has a different feel and a different longing. Erotic love demands physical pleasure, deeper love demands romance, and religious longing demands God.
The love of the greater Some Thing, which I shall call God, is for a Beauty that goes beyond the beauty of one person or a short time. It demands eternity in which to love and it is such a deep longing that it makes a man sane in his desire for it.
A man or a woman will live a very simple and moderate life in order to love this greater thing.
One might be able to explain away the basic experience of loving another person deeply (selfish genes looking for survival or some such nonsense), but it is explaining it away, not accounting for it. Why explain it away? Why not accept our deepest and most profound experiences as real?
There is a gloomy prejudice in modern times that bad news is more likely true than good news, but it is an unjustified prejudice.
Every moment of self-sacrificing love suggests that there is more to the world than matter and energy in mindless motion. I came to see that is more rational to defend our best hopes, than to retreat into simplistic gloom. My goal was to avoid becoming an Eeyore of the spirit, a gloomy ass regardless of reality!
I want to be part of the reality based community, but need to account for all of reality. If I must explain something away, then better not to explain away the reality of love. This desire, like the desire for food, does not prove that the object of love exists, but it strongly creates a prejudice in favor of His existence.
There may be no food when we are hungry, but we cannot help but believe there at least once was and that we might find it if we look hard enough.
There may be no drink when we are thirsty, but we cannot avoid searching for water even if the universe is dry, because we long for a drink.
If we have to look, then we might as well be optimistic about it.
We find that the cosmos contains food, water, and I have found that it also contains the object of love.
I could never be an atheist, because, despite my respect for some of their arguments, they seem to miss the texture of the deeper loves utterly. The popular atheist usually tries to reduce love to something else.
I understand this, because I have done it. At one point my friends and I confused lust with love, but the feelings were totally different. Like Dr. House on the television show, we did not know deeper love so we assumed that it could be explained by feelings that were like it, but not it.
We looked at those in ecstasy and imagined that our little pleasure were just smaller versions of it or that they were somehow deluded.
We were like people eating at McDonalds who assumed that gourmet food was just expensive fast food.
Most people know at least the second kind of love . . . and that should make them skeptical of simple minded folk (with limited experience) who try to reduce one kind of love to another. Erotic love is good as far as it goes, but it is nothing like romance.
What is this feeling of deeper romantic love?
John Donne describes it so:
WHERE, like a pillow on a bed,
A pregnant bank swell’d up, to rest
The violet’s reclining head,
Sat we two, one another’s best.Our hands were firmly cemented
By a fast balm, which thence did spring ;
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string.So to engraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one ;
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.As, ‘twixt two equal armies, Fate
Suspends uncertain victory,
Our souls—which to advance their state,
Were gone out—hung ‘twixt her and me.And whilst our souls negotiate there,
We like sepulchral statues lay ;
All day, the same our postures were,
And we said nothing, all the day.If any, so by love refined,
That he soul’s language understood,
And by good love were grown all mind,
Within convenient distance stood,He—though he knew not which soul spake,
Because both meant, both spake the same—
Might thence a new concoction take,
And part far purer than he came.This ecstasy doth unperplex
(We said) and tell us what we love ;
We see by this, it was not sex ;
We see, we saw not, what did move :But as all several souls contain
Mixture of things they know not what,
Love these mix’d souls doth mix again,
And makes both one, each this, and that.A single violet transplant,
The strength, the colour, and the size—
All which before was poor and scant—
Redoubles still, and multiplies.When love with one another so
Interanimates two souls,
That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
Defects of loneliness controls.We then, who are this new soul, know,
Of what we are composed, and made,
For th’ atomies of which we grow
Are souls, whom no change can invade.But, O alas ! so long, so far,
Our bodies why do we forbear?
They are ours, though not we ; we are
Th’ intelligences, they the spheres.We owe them thanks, because they thus
Did us, to us, at first convey,
Yielded their senses’ force to us,
Nor are dross to us, but allay.On man heaven’s influence works not so,
But that it first imprints the air ;
For soul into the soul may flow,
Though it to body first repair.As our blood labours to beget
Spirits, as like souls as it can ;
Because such fingers need to knit
That subtle knot, which makes us man ;So must pure lovers’ souls descend
To affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great prince in prison lies.To our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love reveal’d may look ;
Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.And if some lover, such as we,
Have heard this dialogue of one,
Let him still mark us, he shall see
Small change when we’re to bodies gone.
Wait! If you are like I was, you tend to skip the block quotes, especially if they are poetry, and get on with the argument. Don’t do it. Go back and slowly read the whole thing.
Try to see what Donne was saying: physical love is good, but there is something better. The higher love is often expressed in physical love, but cannot be reduced to it.
Donne understood the power of sexual desire and that it is was very good and great fun! As a result, he knew the difference when he finally found deeper love. That does not mean erotic desire is nothing or bad, but that it is not the same as the deeper love. You can get bored with the merely erotic, but you can never get bored of love.
If you have experienced it, then you know what I mean.
Later John Donne experienced an even greater love: the love of God. Because he had known the first two kinds, he knew the difference between the love of God and any other kind.
The texture of the feeling was similar, but different. It was higher and more thrilling. It inspired his very best poetry. Sometimes I think that a great danger of our culture is that we have become so awash in the merely erotic (good in its place), that we do not have space or time to experience the deeper kinds of love. We are in danger of becoming a culture of jaded Las Vegas lounge lizards looking for eroticism when we should have grown up enough to find love.
There is, or can be, a progression in love.
I cannot write like Donne, but I had a similar journey into love.
When I was walking away from Christianity, hostile to it actually, I read Plato’s Symposium , because it talked about love. Socrates was a hero to me, because he was always willing to follow an argument where it led regardless of the personal cost. This is one of the most important qualities a human can have. Socrates was critical of easy answers and religious platitudes.
I still admire him for these virtues, but have seen that there are other goods as well. Being skeptical is good, but it only one good. I found it could not account for another side of human personality: the power of romance. Was there a way inquire and yet to love?
Socrates, in the great Platonic dialog Symposium, showed me a way to combine these two passions. Socrates would not stop questioning, but he found a Beloved that could encourage his quests and also give him perfect rest. A restless mind is best in a man with a contented heart.
This hero knew the divine love and believed that it must be of Some Thing. He could not be satisfied with the eroticism of Athens, because he wanted something more. Those who sneered at him were simply boors who could not imagine something other than what they had found in physical pleasures.
This search for the Higher Love led me back to God. When I found God, I discovered that Jesus Christ tied together the greater loves. God became a human being in Jesus Christ and knew our desires directly. He could love us as we love, because He became one of us. At the same time, He was not just us, so we could find the greater, eternal love for which we longed.
Jesus was the end of my heart’s deeper longing. I had looked for love in many dead ends. I had hurt other people and had been religious.
“Being religious” was not enough. I needed to find love . . . something that cannot be faked or “hyped up.” It could not come to me in a single service or by being “zapped” by some power. It is not so much a feeling, some much greater Christians than I lose the “feeling” for most of their lives, but a longing. It is a longing that cannot fundamentally doubt that it has found its Beloved, even when feelings are scanty and doubts multiply.
Love can doubt, it can be skeptical, but it cannot stop loving and so it cannot abandon the Beloved.
In this way, my Socratic self fell in love with Jesus! I was able to remain cynical, the Beloved loved me after all with all my cynicism and not somebody else, but not able to stop loving. Jesus was my heart’s final longing.
It is no credit to me that I found this deep fulfillment. I could only love God, because He planted this longing in my heart. I don’t know why everybody doesn’t find love, but I do know not everyone looks. Sometimes we are so busy pursuing other things, that we starve our hearts. I know, because I did that too.
God tries to call us to the Higher Loves.
He created every beautiful thing as a Signpost to Him. He sent me a beautiful wife as a Signpost to Him. He gave me four lovely children as a Signpost to Him. He loved me first so I could love Him.
This is why I no longer fear death in the same way I once did. Once I feared as a man without love fears lonely old age, now I hope as a man with a young spouse hopes . . . terror is mingled with joy.
Death may mark an end to this biological life. That is all science can tell us. Love tells me that it marks the beginning of a new life with the Beloved.
Of course, my mind often questions what is there in the “undiscovered country.” Is there nothing?
Is the television character, House, right in his cynicism and doubt? He is right, no doubt, to be dubious about certain religious claims. He is right to question, but he does not seem to know deep love. This deep love serves no purpose in this life . . . and so House cannot see deep love is rational, but only in the light of eternity.
It is reality based, but it refuses to limit reality to what science can say.
A man can fear death, but a man in love also has hope in death.
He may, just may, see his Beloved.
I find myself, more and more, looking forward to dying and seeing my Beloved Jesus. Hard to believe?
Greater souls have known it better than I do.
Read Donne again:
Thou hast made me, and shall Thy work decay?
Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste;
I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday.
I dare not move my dim eyes any way,
Despair behind, and death before doth cast
Such terror, and my feeble flesh doth waste
By sin in it, which it towards hell doth weigh.
Only Thou art above, and when towards Thee
By Thy leave I can look, I rise again;
But our old subtle foe so tempteth me
That not one hour myself I can sustain.
Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art,
And Thou like adamant to draw mine iron heart
This is realistic. It does not pretend religion draws off the mental terrors of death. It does face those terrors within a bigger reality.
This ability to see the whole of reality is rare in this age. Some think only “science” can give knowledge, others think knowledge is only to be found in the arts. Christianity values both within their limits.
Christianity values science, but is not slave to it. Too often fundamentalist secularists fail to notice the limits of science’s methodology, confusing what it discovers with everything that can be discovered. Even if everything mainstream science teaches today is true, little would be said regarding the reality of the great world of metaphysics by modern physics.
There is a reality that science, by it nature cannot discover. It is blind to it, not through evil, but through limits due to method. There is great truth, help, and beauty to be discovered using that methodology (whether it should be limited as it is or not), but it is not the only truth, help, or beauty.
There is another world, the world of the spirit. You feel the difference when you say “I” and do not reduce yourself to matter and energy in mindless motion. You sense the difference, however imprecisely, when you love and do not just desire.
Christianity values the humanities, but is not willing to ignore science. I am willing to consider ideas at the fringe of science and religion, but need not have done so to be a Christian.
Christianity loves pleasure and ends with a vision of joy for all who will be changed, but it is not blinded by pleasure. It recognizes that greater pleasures almost always come with the sacrifice of lesser pleasures.
All of this is very intellectual, but that is not the totality of what is to be a man and a woman. We must account for what our hearts tell us and not just our heads.
Christianity values both. We will argue with the critic and listen to the poet, because love is never afraid.
Christianity is ultimately about love. God loves us and so we can love God in an absolute romance that never fails. Not even the dread ghoul, Death, can temper this passion.
Death, be not proud, though some have callèd thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which yet thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more, must low
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men
And dost with poison, war and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then ?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
(An aside: There are, of course, purely rational reasons to be a Christian and to believe life after death. If they did not exist, then mere experience of love would not be enough. Combined with the experience, they are very powerful indeed.
Check out the work of Richard Swinburne and J.P. Moreland. They are two of my favorite Christian philosophers. They are reasonable and able people, certainly as well educated and thoughtful as most of the critics of Christendom. Moreland’s work is more readable, but Swinburne is worth the effort.
My friends at Stand to Reason do great work as well. )