There is a love so deep that a moment’s experience of it makes all other loves seem cheap and shallow. That is the love I want and anything that gets in the way must go.
Some desires, such as this one, are hard to communicate. When I speak or write of chastity, purity, and deep intimacy, it is easy to be misunderstood. I am using language that does not merely fail to communicate, but means something different to most of my listeners or readers.
Let me be clear from the start that I have often failed love . . . badly, but this has only deepened my determination to seek it.
Somehow the traditional Christian sexual ethic of Dante and Donne has become confused with repression or being undersexed. Nothing could be further from the truth. If my email box is any indication, libertine sexual rules have not made us happier or better lovers. It has made things worse. It certainly did for me.
Chastity is a positive thing, not the lack of something. It is, I think, the active nourishment of love to prepare it for the appropriate beloved. It is a great gift. For some that other is God directly, for the rest of us (less fit perhaps for great things) this love is expressed through an intermediate beloved person.
Our culture has changed in what it thinks desirable or possible when it comes to love, but I have not changed. There is a vision of love in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale that is so beautiful and redemptive that even the hope of it is worth a risk.
In old movies, making love was about intimacy and might culminate in marriage. Marriage was more, so much more, than the sex act, though it was not less than that. In modern terms, making love is merely a nice way to say the f-word.
(I am also aware that my failure to use the f-word will make this essay too precious for some readers. Crudity is now mandatory in American pop culture, but that is not my culture. I hope readers can show my language the same tolerance they would show in listening to a speaker from another country trying to express his values in a foreign tongue.)
Our culture has settled for the merely erotic and made it very, very hard to have the greater love that Dante and Donne wrote about in their poetry. We sneer at the possibility without worrying that perhaps our actions, especially when we were young made that love very difficult for us. Perhaps the divorce and selfishness around us have caused us to give up, but surely great love could redeem us even from that.
Christianity at least dares to love enough to argue that it is possible. There is redemption even for the losers such as I am whose selfishness has harmed their own souls and that of others. Still, despair can tempt us all.
Married love seems so often to end in boredom or in misery. Why try? Why not settle for quick and certain pleasures, even if in the end they are not so very pleasurable? At least it is something.
My response is that the pleasure of success and the doors it opens to greater goods are so marvelous that it is worth the try. The loss, if my experience is any indication, is slight. A culture of “hooking up” or porn is not, I think, so wonderful and joyous for most that missing out on it is any great danger.
Every pleasure, even the most simple, becomes better and more intense when it finds itself part of a greater whole. This is not just true of the work of love, but of every other work.
I love the hard work of understanding (at least superficially) a difficult passage of Plato. That mental work makes the physical pleasure of my workout (at dear LA Fitness!) more intense. The same thing is true of making love. In the context of giving up everything, of sacrificing other beauties for the one beloved, even the simple pleasures become greater.
We do not yet live in paradise, so the payoff is not always there, but it is sometimes and once having experienced such intense “rightness,” it is difficult to imagine wanting to go back.
Really great wine spoils a man for boxed dollar store hooch.
It is true that there is beauty all around and that one can superficially enjoy it, but the great lover, centuries of poetry teaches us, becomes expert in one beloved. He is able to see her age and enjoy the many stages of her life. His love matures with her. If this is possible, then it is a marvelous thing.
What if one wants to “make love” and have a life-long relationship with one person?
What if one desires a passion so great that it is willing to restrain other very real desires in order to experience a union more profound than that which can be experienced quickly?
What if the love ancient poets wrote about in places like Song of Solomon is possible?
It is possible and as I have grown older (and a bit wiser) I have learned to get rid of anything that stands in the way of this deep intimacy. There is much that would distract me from this love, but all of those things (some of which may be good in themselves) must go just as an athlete who would win a great prize must sacrifice much in order to win.
Porn, for example, distracts me from the beloved by arguing that I can, in my mind, love someone else. Why would the lover place something, even an image or an imagination, between himself and the beloved? The discipline of learning to love just one person is hard enough without distraction.
If someone asks me why I should want to love just one person, then I can only say that they have never been in love the way the poets traditionally wrote of it. No one needs to say to the lover, “You must love with all your heart.” The trouble is that many of us (God forgive me!) give up on this great goal when it becomes difficult.
In a culture where most of us cannot be bothered to learn a second language, there is no reason to wonder why, having had a goal, so many of us give up. The great joy of fifty years of real intimacy is available and it is priceless (as my parents are demonstrating), but it is not easy.
It might be argued that porn is a help to erotic sensibility, but I have never found that desire needed much encouragement. It was the desire for other things, the things that require effort and discipline, that needed help and cheering. Life itself, by God’s grace, brings enough physical beauty for most of us.
Natural desires in a healthy person, including things like wanting to eat and a desire for sex, are just “there.” As a result, most of us must spend more time thinking about what to do with them, how best to make use of them in a good life, than in cultivating them. I at least find the greater need to cultivate the higher virtues such as a desire to do justice to my neighbor or to act with compassion to the less fortunate.
When they are not there, then a splendid opportunity is presented to do something else. Our culture is odd in demanding continual (and I think tedious) performance of the same physical pleasures. We keep eating, for example, even when we are not hungry. Some of us have the misfortune of never being hungry!
Making love in the old sense to one person over a lifetime is a complicated business with many seasons, actions, and turns.
The natural desires are powerful drives, but also ones that demand the application of reason to their use. From Plato to C.S. Lewis, it is obvious that physical pleasures demand moderation in their use or they stop being pleasures and can become harmful. The problem is that the harm, like that from smoking in the physical realm, is gradual.
Nor is this merely a “religious” perspective, since the best of the ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato would have held that over indulgence in sensual pleasures might so mar the soul that higher pursuits would be more difficult.
In a culture driven by marketing, moderation is not popular. Like many good things, it is difficult to practice and can be made even more difficult when the surrounding culture is determined to prevent it.
Moderation does not reject physical pleasure, in fact it rejoices in it. However, it recognizes that every pleasure (mental, physical, and spiritual) has a time and place. Too often we proclaim freedom when all we have done is take one good pleasure and use it merely to satisfy self.
This is tolerable in children, but there is nothing adult about it.
Can there be more than this?
My goal, shared with Hope, is to become intimate: to experience the high love of the poets. We are very average people in terms of intellect and looks. If we can achieve grand passion (at our level), then most anybody can.
We have achieved this level of intimacy at times. It is very good, so good that we can no longer be truly satisfied with less.
Of course, that does not mean that we do not often “settle” for less. I especially often fail the vision of this love. When I glance away from beauty is not because I despise it, but because I am not yet mature enough to see it without objectifying it and desiring it for self. I am able to see most great art without longing to steal it and bring it home, but some beauty (for me) is even more piercing. I cannot yet handle it and be true to my love for Hope.
I am learning.
My goal is for all beauty to illuminate me and deepen my intimacy with Hope. Of course, as a Christian, this intimacy itself is a mere sign post to the deeper intimacy I can know in loving God. Just as erotic love is just the first (though important) stage of my intimacy with Hope, so my very deepest and most spiritual love for her is just a shallow beginning of the possible love I can have for God.
I have tasted just enough of all of this to long for it and to long to share this possibility with others.
Our culture is teaching us to settle . . . and to shout about what we have settled for while the sonnets of Shakespeare and the memoirs of Sheldon Vanauken remind us that perhaps there is something missing.
It is not helpful when the culture makes it harder. Public space is, after all, public. There are millions of us trying for the “greater love.” For us, some things get in the way.
A former student, brilliant, married, and no prude at a fine grad school comments:
After seeing the article on ND hosting the VM, I recalled that . . . recently did so. While it's no scandal that a avowedly secular school hosted the play, I was disgusted every day when I walked by . . . where the entire wall had been painted with "colorful" language related to the subject. I worked at . . . , among about as liberal an environment as you might hope for in Southern CA, but it hardly prepared me for the degree of nearly institutionalized licentiousness that exists at . . .It's sick, really. I've caught pornography in my peripheral vision being passed around at mixed-gendered tables of undergrads. The newspaper offers sex advice - even arguing against hooking up behind your boyfriend's back only based on how it will make you feel. My pagan coworkers were positively prudes compared to this. I guess I'm not in Kansas anymore. I really mourn for this generation.
Granted this undergraduate experience might be fun, but will it be beneficial? Will it produce the sort of mothers and fathers our culture will need to sustain itself?
Going back from such experiences, the kind of socialization that many undergraduates are given is very difficult. Past leaders, even ones not particularly religiously devote, would be horrified at the chance we are taking.
In his autobiography, Theodore Roosevelt writes fondly of the books and magazines his parents gave him. He also chortles about trying to sneak a peak at some “dime novels” and expresses gratitude for his parent’s and culture’s watch care.
He was glad to have grown up in a wholesome way. Degenerating from such an upbringing is pretty easy, but regeneration (as some of us know from experience) is very hard. Most children and young adults today do not have Roosevelt’s choice.
They are assaulted with ads and images that pander to the short term. If there is anything to the “higher love” of the poets, what makes us think that they will understand it or want it after we have beaten it out of them with our pervasive cultural pollution?
Why would anyone want to live for a cause bigger than self when self has been swollen to mammoth proportions?
This is a lesson that Notre Dame, of all places, should understand and why the Vagina Monologues issue is important to some of us. We don’t deny the right of others to pursue their ends, but we wish for a few places where the alternative is not just allowed but nurtured. Notre Dame should be that kind of place.
It might be that prudery is bad, but freedom cannot be found in moving from defect to excess.
Folk who believe shouting crudities from a stage will help them finally find happiness are welcome to try. Here is hoping that we are still welcome to try to live as Shakespeare, Aquinas, and Dorothy Sayers would have suggested.
This is not all about denying what is true. It is true that almost all of us (except for great saints!) are awash in desires that will cause us to miss achieving our objectives.
This is not, of course, true only in love, but in our culture may especially be true there. We all fall short of what we wish. The fact that most of us never master Mozart’s operas would not be a sufficient excuse not to try, since the failure brings glories with it!
It seems not so controversial that short term pleasures often block our long term goals. Why wouldn’t this be true in the area of love?
We do not have to be controlled by these desires, but can use them to power our goals. To use an analogy, psychic energy (or at least time) is limited. Time spent on communicating with my wife, changing to meet her needs, and learning to be less of a jerk is time well spent if I want to reach my goal of the deepest intimacy.
Sadly, there is not enough time in one human life to achieve what I desire with even one soul, let alone with many!
Of course, few of us live up to this lofty ambition. I certainly have not. I say that not merely to remove the charge of hypocrisy, but because I can testify about the two kinds of pleasure. The greater good of the one makes short term sacrifices worth while, even if I do not always (or even often!) have the discipline to act for my own good.
Here is hoping that there are more havens where young adults who wish to strive for higher love, love of Donne and Dante, can find rest and support. It is not easy in our time, but then it probably never has been. The goal, however, justifies the difficulty of the journey.
