What Is Love?

Last updated on: July 13, 2017 at 1:17 pm by Chase Padusniak

What Is Love? 2017-07-13T13:17:38-04:00 Chase Padusniak

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Far be it from me to assume I’ve understood exactly how this ought to work. I am open to criticism. But personal experience, reading, and, frankly, the desire to live love as best I can (even in all my failures) have brought me to profess (and attempt to enact) a strong weakness as the most useful (rhetoric is, after all, about utility) language of love.

What do I mean by “strong weakness”? I believe Thomas Merton, writing to Dorothy Day, gives us a clue:

To shut out the person and to refuse to consider him as a person, as an other self, we resort to the impersonal “law” and to abstract “nature.” That is to say we block off the reality of the other, we cut the intercommunication of our nature and his nature, and we consider only our own nature with its rights, its claims, it demands. And we justify the evil we do to our brother because he is no longer a brother, he is merely an adversary, an accused. To restore communication, to see our oneness of nature with him, and to respect his personal rights and his integrity, his worthiness of love, we have to see ourselves as similarly accused along with him … and needing, with him, the ineffable gift of grace and mercy to be saved. Then, instead of pushing him down, trying to climb out by using his head as a stepping-stone for ourselves, we help ourselves to rise by helping him to rise. For when we extend our hand to the enemy who is sinking in the abyss, God reaches out to both of us, for it is He first of all who extends our hand to the enemy. It is He who “saves himself” in the enemy, who makes use of us to recover the lost groat which is His image in our enemy.

Speaking of Day, she writes similarly in On Pilgrimage:

I have been disillusioned, however, this long, long time in the means used by any but the saints to live in this world God has made for us.

The “means used by […] the saints” seem to me, chiefly and rhetorically here, to refer to the gamble Merton mentions—the extending of the hand as the means to acknowledge one’s own brokenness. Here there is “weakness” insofar as one does not begin with assertion, with contention, that is, with those things Weil inveighs against as the end of any loving discourse. At the same time, this weakness is strong precisely because it admits of an uncomfortable truth, something too often lost in typical, “weak” rhetorics of love. In brief, it admits of an enemy. Merton says “we extend our hand to the enemy who is sinking in the abyss.” There is an enemy here. Christ says “love your enemy.”

The central distinction is that this person remains an enemy, that is, another who can be expected to be cynical, argumentative, ironic, disabused, wrong-headed, at bottom, downright unpleasant. You don’t need to like this person; there’s no question of locating some superficial commonality (though that may be useful). Love here is predicated on one simple fact: the reality and ubiquity of sin covering over “His image in our enemy [and I’d add, in me].” The strength comes from a conviction apparent in the normal “strong” version of rhetorical love: the reality and damaging nature of sin. Harm, evil, the hell of self-enclosure—all of these are at the forefront here, as we recognize them both in ourselves and in the other. We do not do so superficially, however. It is not that both he and I struggled with x sin, or that by hearing his story I may somehow develop a personal connection with him. No, it is impersonal. It is the impersonality of human nature—and thus sin in general—that binds us. Simone Weil knew this:

There is something sacred in every man, but it is not his person. Nor yet is it the human personality. It is this man; no more and no less.

This is all very abstract. What does this look like? In practice and in my imagination, I picture it as a sort of radical honesty—something very disarming to most of my jaded contemporaries (yours truly included). It means listening to what the other says in full and without critique, but not so that it might be approved. One listens so that the other might recognize openness without judgment. At the same time, this is not an empty openness, predicated merely on the abstraction of love. No, it is rooted in the despair and sin of existence (did somebody say Ecclesiastes?). It labors without the illusion that the other will simply be converted by the act of listening, and is thus less vulnerable to accusations of naïveté. It is confession of one’s own inadequacy to listen even as one listens; it is a rhetoric of love that, perhaps, gets at the root of love itself: that love saves from sin, but that precisely for that reason it is a messy—rhetorical—affair.

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