God is Love: in theory.

Matthew Del Nevo

Let’s start with art

In a discussion of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, Roger Scruton writes: “The look of love is the source of love’s enchantment and it has a metaphysical resonance beyond the reach of words.”^{^[1]}

This may be so, nevertheless, I shall use words here to reach into this “metaphysical resonance” with respect to the definitive saying (as far as the Christian God is concerned), of those words from the first letter of John that are so familiar “God is love.” (1 John 4:8)

Theorization 1: Preliminaries

What I want to do in what follows is to theorize this saying. Let me start then by stirring up some theoretical difficulties central to our subject. That God is love is said too easily. We say it and we hear it and it is assumed that we know what we are talking about: we know what God is and what love is. But do we? A look at any newspaper would suggest otherwise. To explain one thing we do not know in terms of another is a confusion, not a definition. Moreover, to add to the confusion, both God and love are words and this sets up a further difficulty for those who wish to pass off “God is love” to be a self-evident bit of parlance that stands to reason, because it is also written in the New Testament by the same author that the word (logos) was “in the beginning” with God and indeed “was God.” This makes God two things: love and word. But love and word are not the same, in fact they are quite different. If anything, as Max Picard pointed out, silence is much closer to love than words. But let us push our theorisation further and ask the obvious question: what is a word that is “in the beginning”? Surely being is not in the beginning to begin with or something must have already begun, logically. Such a word therefore that is (or was) in the beginning with God and was God, must be metaphorical. A word as such or language as such (if one takes a broader definition of logos) could not be in the beginning with God, let alone be God, whatever that might mean, which we still do not know But let us go a step further and ask the simple question: what would such a word be a metaphor of? Well I think an answer is this: it is word that comes forth from a mouth with the breath, on the breath, as the shape and sound of the breath: speech. So it is metaphor for a source and something spiritual issuing from the source: spiritual because breath-pneuma = spirit. However this tells us nothing about love as yet, or God as such, except God means something like an apriori condition for speech; such would be being itself.

The word beginning adds further confusion: God is love and word and beginning, but this is problematic for understanding because these refer to quite different semantic settings and existential connotations. The mention of the beginning in an absolute sense, as inferred in the Prologue to John’s Gospel, connotes time and therefore the time before the beginning, the time before the word was decided. Every child has tested the infinite regress that lurks here on their weary parents. These are theoretical difficulties that never become theological difficulties, because theology is a pre-established pre-critical discourse. Any “difficulties,” therefore, merely get assumed into an idiom, like Mary into Heaven. Before we get into definitions of love, which we shall shortly, I want to advance some further preliminaries that will open up the topic theoretically.

Theorization 2: Opinions

In 2006 Pope Benedict XVI wrote an Encyclical, which is an authoritative document for Catholics, the most numerous and united Christian group, entitled Deus Caritas Est (God is love). But what strikes the theoretical mind here is that the word for love in the subtitle ‘On Christian Love’ is amor: de Christiano amore. Just to clarify: amor is Latin, amour French, amore Italian. The love that is incarnate in Christ is amor, not caritas, “Jesus Christ - the Incarnate Love (amor) of God” (n.12). Love of God is amor Dei and love of neighbour is proximi amor. Yet Christian love (and the true meaning of love in this Encyclical we are told to believe) is defined in terms of eros-agape-caritas. What about amore? The word love which is the term of reference throughout the discussion, amor, is not discussed. Moreover, this discrepancy is not noticed. There is something unconscious going on therefore which theory can surface and I mean to surface it in this article. Amor in the Encyclical is taken for granted, while the value of eros-agape-caritas are completely determined and constituted by it, without amore the triumvirate; eros-agape-caritas would have no space to breath as it were. But quelle est amour? It is not caritas obviously, yet according to the encyclical, Deus caritas est.

This is puzzling.

The most oft cited popular book on this subject is C. S. Lewis’ The Four Loves (1960). The loves are: storge (affection) phileo (friendship), eros (romantic love) and agape (unconditional love). Caritas is the Latin translation of the Greek agape. But surely, there are five loves, not four? Where is amor? So readers of C. S. Lewis wanting to bone up on Christian love, actually get nothing about it. C. S. Lewis and Pope Benedict both assume the same thing. Because they are unconscious does not mean they are wrong; we should bear this in mind. It means they are right as far as they go, but time stands still for no Church.

Theorization 3: Love is a duet

Love is a duet. Wagner realized this. It is the truth of the best operas.

The word that comes from the source, following John’s metaphor from the Prologue to his Gospel therefore is gendered. The breathings of the language have male or female endings. This gives rise to the neutered possibility in between.

Thinking operatically for a moment so as to continue stirring up theoretical difficulties: to love God, he would need a soul, but where would we look in order to look into his eyes? No one has ever seen God, according to Benedict.^{^[2]} I hesitate to say “his” eyes for God, because it is different for a man to look into a man’s eyes with love, than it is for a woman to look into a man’s eyes with love, for the former it is same-sex love. It may be asked: is this the inherent homosexual element in Christianity? For it is different for men to declare their love for Jesus than for a woman to do so. What do young men imagine when they say, “I love Jesus with all my heart”? What image is in their mind? If it is a man with a beard, then that is same-sex love that is springing within their bosom. If a young woman says she loves Jesus with all her heart, what she imagines is heterosexual, perhaps an indistinct image of a future husband. However, if love is a duet, let us not pretend the sexual difference is not there. There are two points here. One is logical. One is psychological.

The logical point, not known I suspect to most Christians is that early on in the Church (and subscribed to by ALL theology) is the idea from Aristotle, which divides phenomena according to perception into genus, species, differentia, properties accidents. This goes from the broadest most inclusive category down to the detail. For example, the genus is animal, the species is fish, the differentia is dolphins and whales, the properties are breathing underwater, fins, eating planktum, the accidents are the specific differences between two fish that tells them apart. With humanity, the genus is animal, the species is human, the differentia is male and female, the accidents are brown or blue eyes, fair or dark skin etc. And the problem here is that what works with “species” generally does not work like that for humanity. With humanity the differential male and female, logically comes before species. That is to say, male and female are not basically the same, but fundamentally different. Different in their essence, in the old metaphysics theology relies on.

We will not track the effect of this logical problem here, but just point to it with one example. If men and women are fundamentally different the relation between them is dialogical. If men and women are essentially the same “of one substance” (i.e.. if differentia follows species) then the weaker will naturally conform to the will of the stronger and the “relation” of what is basically (logically) “the same” will be one of power and overpowering.

Now theology has taken the second of these options, both Catholic and Protestant alike. But the myth of origins in Genesis seems to me to point to the difference. Adam and Eve are constituted differently: she more beautifully than he. Also, they both come before the species that they name. Of course the Bible proves nothing, it is all in the interpretation; Genesis has been interpreted along logical lines that follow Aristotle, but this does not necessarily need to be the case, and maybe it needs change.

If love is a duet as Wagner suggests, the voices sound different – soprano and tenor are not interchangeable. This would suggest the dialogical relationship and the possibility of harmony, rather than the essentialist interpretation of classic theology.

The second point is psychological. Christianity has historically failed to separate sex from religion although it has tried its darnedest. As Freud said: the repressed will return. This is a fact and Christianity in the modern age neglects to take cognizance of it at its peril. Psycho-analysis recognizes that spirituality is a form of sexuality; and vice versa (something we are apt to forget with our eroticized notions of sexuality, as Naomi Wolf has pointed out in several worthwhile books.) In short, and cutting back to my framing comment: if we are to say God is love, is that homosexual or heterosexual love? Because love is a differential term, not inclusive. The differentia come before the species. If God is love, but only a Father’s love, it is not enough. The differential nature of love, maternal and paternal is necessary, but Christianity only offers the latter, the symbolic “love” of the Father and the Son. How do we conceive a gendered Jesus theologically? How is his love sexed? Theology has never even wondered.

My point is that the question of sex is not just one of power (obedience, conformity, sheepishness) as it was for Paul and the Church historically. It is one of dialogue and difference. If that is true then it ought to be manifest in spirituality and in religion. But such is hardly the case.

Theorization 4: What Matters is the Song

Theory in theology is not a “flat” discourse, even traditionally, it speaks in the symbolic register; or sings, in the metaphor of the duet. God is love, but love is duet is what we have asserted and this is the viewpoint of our reflection qua Truth. Truth with a symbolic capital T to say: truth consonant with God, rather than truth with a small t, where discourse can represent it at the level of the signifiers. To the symbolic level we move.

When one sings, if one sings the world and oneself a world - that is, if we sing soulfully – we are accompanied by the silence of God. This is no dead silence. The silence of God is an accompaniment, like the space out into which we sound, that is totally unconfined. Our song is not language, it is the song of that silence. In this sense the song of a whole choir is a duet. In this sense as well, the song without words, or the symphony is a duet. Traditionally we recognized this kind of music as having inspiration. It has breath in it. It breathes God – or God breathes in it. This is perhaps as close as we can get to God. This is perhaps as close as we need to get.

That God is beyond the reach of words does not make God beyond reach, but puts God more easily within reach. A little baby is beyond words, but not beyond love, or smiling, or adoration on both sides. God is like this. Mothers are closer to God in that respect as their passion – if they are balanced people – moves in this realm. Traditionally in Christianity (therefore not in Protestantism, which is a modernism) this truth finds its speculative and imaginative basis in the reflections upon the intimacy of Mary and Jesus.^{^[3]} To be imaginatively close to Mary in our reading of the Bible and religious reflection is to be close to Jesus in this logic, which makes sense from this point of view, where God is not a pagan deity, but the One who we know through the soul of the world, with which every soul is bound. This binding to the soul of the world is what religion from the Latin religio to bind originally meant. The word “religion” has the knowledge of the soul of the world bound into it. When we lose our religion, we lose the soul of the world. If we lose the soul of the world, the soul becomes just an intellectualist abstraction, like the Scholastic idea that the soul is a principle. Then intellectualized reduction of soul is the death of the soul in the Real, and the death of God will follow hard upon its heels, as was indeed the case in our intellectual history of God. When Nietzsche underlined “and we have killed him,” he meant not just bourgeois domestication, but prior to that, setting the conditions, discursive reason.

Fathers are at more of a distance from love in that, psychologically and philosophically, the Father understood through the Lacanian “paternal metaphor” stands at the level of the Symbolic (of language in its objective sense which a child must enter into body and soul). The immediate perception – the Imaginary in Lacan - defers its reality, its shape to the Symbolic register. But we have this double register, Father and Mother, male and female, a couple, a duet (tracing our initial metaphor), but creating this third, and not the audience as it would be for a duet, but the next generation.

Reality takes shape to begin with between the mother and the child, under the aegis of “motherhood”, even if the mother may “desire something other.” Julia Kristeva writes: “Maternal passion is perhaps the only passion that is not virtual and subject to spectacular manipulation and which constitutes the prototype for the love relationship.”^{^[4]} What Lacan calls lalanguage, the burbling mother and baby may do together is the song, theirs is the initial duet, which will be carried all the way to language and law. The Symbolic in which the father stands, beyond motherhood, is the father’s calm, his reason, his “standing” in the world, as we say. The Symbolic in and for which the father stands in the proper sense means “the hallowing of the real.”^{^[5]} Translating this into our previous terms of discussion: for the father, for a man, it is through the mother that he feels God within easy reach. Mary mediatrix, in tradition, which has always known this truth, lost to the scientistic age. For a man in the proper sense, the soul of the world has a maternal or feminine face.

This face is not the primordial mother or the mother goddess. No, it is Mallarmé’s perception in the opening line of L’Après-Midi d’un Faune (1876): Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer (These nymphs, I want to perpetuate them). These words, writes James H. Rubin, “coming just before the description of a vision, invokes the artistic enterprise. In the French, the positioning of the word les (them) before veux (want), conflates the desire the nymphs themselves arouse with the artistic desire to preserve their memory. Helen Waddell makes this same point in the introduction to one of her books on the Latin lyric: “The medieval Venus is less the royal goddess of the Aenid than the glimmering gracious figure of the Pervigilium Veneris, the Dione of the April woods.”^{^[6]} In the world between waking and dream, of the siesta hour, reality and memory are both confused and merged; perpetuation creates as effective a world as original experience. And, as the poem proves, original experience has no more reality than art.”^{^[7]}

The man’s world, the Symbolic, is one confused between reality and memory, in the Platonic-Augustinian sense of memoria (collective/cultural unconscious).^{^[8]} The man’s world is “a world as original experience” for which we have the names of the discoveries of science as ciphers, as well as the revelations of art. The man’s world – because of these nymphs he wishes to perpetuate – is inspired. The man is bent on the tireless quest for what Julia Kristeva refers to as “the impossible object identifiable with the feminine.”^{^[9]} The quest, often heroic in man’s own eyes, may claim poetic names and coalesce within cultural poetics into myths, such as that of the Holy Grail, the histoires d’amour, or of modern science, or psychoanalytical explorations of the unconscious.

On the other hand, when we call God “Father”, God himself become distant and more like a pagan deity or more like the tribal God of the Jewish Bible, who in the exoteric interpretation of the narrative would rule the world, or at least the Middle East, like Solomon in all his glory. Women then are chattels and at best, property, which is how women have been under Christian patriarchalism pretty much until the 19^th century.

Theorization 5: the Feminine Voice

The man’s knowledge and know-how is not wisdom. It is the priestess that tells man about love.

The priest ordains. The priestess does not ordain, she teaches, like Diotima of Mantinea in Plato’s Symposium. This is the foundational text on love in the Western tradition. The priest is ordained by hands and ordains by the laying on of hands. The priestess is ordained by Nature. The priestess’s sign is intuitive wisdom. The priest’s sign is an insignia. These two go together. As in a duet. Not one without the other. The priest’s knowledge is of the law and the command of the ceremonial order. The priestess’s knowledge is wisdom, sound judgement. The priest stands in tradition. The priestess mediates worlds. So Diotima teaches Socrates how love mediates heaven and earth. The priest sees with his eyes, knows by his senses. The priestess can see through. Wisdom penetrates maya (the skein of illusion we call “things”). But this is not to be thought as the “phallic” power of the female, in the Lacanian sense. Such power belongs to the Empress not the priestess in old Christian lore. The Empress represents the legitimacy of white magic, which is love’s magic. The priestess is to be distinguished from the Empress as she is the guardian of the threshold between worlds that correspond: higher and lower, inner and outer, above and below. Diotima in Plato’s Symposium has an authority beyond Socrates and beyond the wisdom of Socratic ignorance. The priestess has an oracular status because of her power of discernment, intuitive mind and insight. The man’s dialectic and logic do not yield this.

The priestess Diotima in Plato’s Symposium is a figure of biblical and Christian Sophia, Wisdom Herself. Diotima is not just a literary figure, she pre-figures the possibility of incarnation: of the divine word heard. The cultural memory of Sophia is held in Russian Orthodox iconography as well as in the dedication of churches to Holy Sophia – the old Cathedral in what is now Istanbul being an example – or Novgorod, or Kiev, where there are famous icons of her. In old Europe, traditionally, Sophia is the priestess of the 2nd Arcana of the Tarot, and therefore part of Catholic lore and implicitly, what we know as psychoanalysis – as this is the purpose of the Tarot, to divine the soul; it is not spiritual, but soulful.

With respect to the question of love posed in the Symposium and pursued by Socrates and his friends, Sophia/Diotima brings the axial bearing within that Tao of God and man, heaven and earth in their correspondences. She brings this as word. It is the birth-giving word (logos spermatikos), because it births truth in the world, in culture, and it is in this metaphorical frame as well that it is true to say Mary birthed Jesus who is called the Word, and Truth, and Life and Son of God, epithets for a theological wisdom that St. Paul is the first to start to discourse upon.

The priestess brings an authority that Plato shows, through the drama of his dialogue that the terminologically-based philosophy, systematics, and more specifically the genre of the treatise cannot reach, because it has too little evocative power, it does poetically suffice. Also, with regard to the question of this authority, just like Christian grace or salvation, or like Christ the Son of God, the authoritative word must come to us. We must be visited by such a word, of revelation, we shall not produce it. We wait for it like the Jews waiting for the Messiah. Or like the Virgin Mary not expecting the angel Gabriel, but recognizing him when he comes. This receptivity on the part of thinking, and humankind’s quest, that there must be waiting for something is the yin or feminine factor in the Tao of correspondences between God and man; heaven and earth, to which we may add, past and future.

It is because of the priestess that we talk about eros and agape, the two words for love. Agape is ordered and ordering love, a sheltering love, unconditional love. Erotic love is jouissance the love of being alive and of aliveness. In the 1950s Anders Nygren wrote Eros and Agape to try and determine the sort of love God’s love is. The debate has never abated. The importance of eros has tended to wax and wane, while the importance of agape as the distinctively Christian word for love has established itself. Hence, Pope Benedict XVI’s Deus Caritas Est and C. S. Lewis finding agape is the rightful Christian form of love.

We shall examine these two words in turn.

Theorization 6: Eros

The authority of the priestess does not terminate in the word as law does in the Name of the Father, or as the Jewish law terminated - or was “fulfilled” in Jesus the only Son - according to Christian doctrine. The priestess brings a benediction not of the word but the cosmos: she gives orientation. The orientation is the intrinsic aspect, the meditative and inward wordless pointing. Diotima points by means of a myth.^{^[10]} She tells the story of Eros being born on the birthday of Aphrodite or Beauty, so that Eros naturally loves beauty. Eros was born of Poros or Plenty, the son of Metis or Sagacity, and Penia or Poverty. Eros is always attendant upon beauty but is something of a wild child, easily falling into distress like his mother, but easy-going and happy-go-lucky like his father. Eros flows between want and wealth. This is the key point I think. Eros is dynamic. Eros drives change culture. In her story Eros (love) is also a philosopher or lover of wisdom, for, says Diotima, wisdom is the most beautiful thing; but love is not wise or it would not love wisdom. Love is not that which is loved but that which loves.

Elsewhere, in the Philebus, Socrates deals with the difficulty of the thinking out the difference and the similarity between loving wisdom and pleasure.

If we love pleasure for its own sake (usually defined as “happiness”) then eros equates easily with “the sins of the flesh” (concupiscence), or eroticism.^{^[11]} This is why God is usually disequated from this love, God is not Eros. For Eros is the son of Poros and Penia, not the Father of Jesus or the progenitor of the Holy Spirit. However, the myth of the birth of eros shows the truth of the soul’s dynamics. It is a myth that bears a psychological truth. Whereas God as love in the form of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is a conceptualization, and an hypostasization with a meta-physical acosmic meaning that is purely declaratory. But these hypostasizations came only centuries later (not really until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 were they finally ratified).

In the Christian story love is born of the purity of Mary, of a woman but no man. No man can be as pure as she. The Virgin Mary is not a priestess, she is a praeredemptress according to John Duns Scotus, the leading Scholastic authority. Pre-redemptress is distinct from co-redemptress, although “co-redemptress” can be taken as an interpretation of pre-redemptress because of the crucial significance of the role Mary plays.^{^[12]} In fact this idea of pre-redeemer has the danger of falling into infinite regress: prophets, kings, mothers and so on. Mary, as is the most obvious pre-redemptress as she clearly knows no sin and she does not die according to tradition. She has no cross other than her son’s. She has no need to rise from the dead, instead, the Church always believed until the 16^th century, she was assumed into heaven. Mary has the better part, not just over Martha, but even over her Jesus, her son and the Son of God. “Mary does not die, but as if to echo oriental beliefs, Taoist’s among others, according to which human bodies pass from one place to another in an eternal flow that constitutes a carbon copy of the maternal receptacle – she is transported.”^{^[13]} The “receptacle” is the encompassment of the pairings God/man, heaven/earth, past/future, the unity of life, the All of the One.^{^[14]} The priestess merely orients with regard to this encompassment, with respect to love. The priestess can point out the star that will guide the wise men to what they seek: Christmas on earth.

Pagan eros, Christian agape is often the way it is thought out. But agape/charity with no eros, is cold, it is not com-passionate, it cannot mediate worlds or pairings. Agape - ordered and ordering love - must incorporate eros if it is to be a living flame of love.^{^[15]} The great metaphysician of divine darkness, St. Gregory of Nyssa, a better authority on eros and agape in my view than Anders Nygren,^{^[16]} writes in his Commentary on the Song of Songs:

The bride then puts the veil from her eyes and with pure vision sees the ineffable beauty of her Spouse. And thus she is wounded by a spiritual and fiery dart of desire (Eros). For love (Agape) that is strained to intensity is called desire (Eros).^{^[17]}

Cardinal Daniélou s. j. comments:

Eros expresses the experience of the soul as the infinite beauty of God become more and more present to it. The more the soul is aware of this beauty, the more it sees that it is inaccessible. And it then realizes that it attains this beauty more by desire than by actual possession, just as it comprehends it rather by darkness than by light.^{^[18]}

St. Gregory’s theology is a metaphysics of night, because of its fine attunement to love and beauty and truth in these respects. If God is love He is fallible, because love is spun of desire. Love is vulnerability before anything else.

Theorization 7: Sacred Love

Agape is sacred love, “unconditional” love is sacred and that is God’s love.

What is sacred is hallowed. The hallowed is not worshipped but treasured. If treasured in the object, then that is reification, which is the source of idolatry; for Christianity hallowing is done in the heart. What is hallowed may be personal, but may not be individually based; hallowing is a discourse, a social connection.

Paul’s “hymn” to agape in First Corinthians 13 is curious for what it lacks. It hardly seems like “love” he is talking about, but a spiritual ideal related to spiritual gifts and powers that he calls love. Sticking to the parent-child metaphor at the heart of Christian theological metaphoricity, we can say, with Paul, love is generous and giving and while it is also patient and kind it can also jump ahead of itself and lose patience – the parent loses patience with his or her child often not because of a lack of patience, but from love. Men get angry and murder because they love. St. Paul paints a one-sided idealization of “love” which becomes definitive for agape. In Paul, his one-sided idealization of love plays into his other idealizations, particularly of good and evil as opposites, so love is good and what does not live up to this “good” becomes bad or evil (and moralistic judgement kicks in, and religious fanaticism is in the offing). It would be interesting to read a study of Pauline idealizations and the language (and corresponding behaviour) of religious fanaticism. I for one am not convinced Paul was such a changed man after his conversion; fanatically against Christianity beforehand he became a fanatical proponent of it, foisting his new beliefs not just on other disciples, so they had to call a conference in Jerusalem, but throughout half of Asia Minor, with ambition to get as far as Spain. This does not just model Christian fanaticism but becomes constitutive of what Christians recognize to be the action of the Holy Spirit which goes on to take grotesque proportions under colonialism, for example in South America, and even one might argue, North America. Retrospectively the Holy Spirit is often less holy than it seemed at the time. But the disregard of this fact is ubiquitous and effects Pentecostalism too, manifest in a dearth of reflection or reflective practices, but a “feel-good” activism based on amorphic idealizations baptized as inspirations. So Paul’s agape – like all one-sided idealizations - is not without its problems or its inadvertent fatal consequences.

Augustine owes his conversion to Paul, as he believed himself devastatingly convicted by the moralistic injunctions of Paul that he read as a message especially for him from God, who he conceived as a being beyond the sky according the Ptolomaic world view of his day (which still persists along with Christian theism today). Nygren in his great study of agape which is so much commented on writes: “Augustine’s doctrine of Caritas is undeniably one of the most interesting and important junctures in the whole history of ideas.” (London, SPCK, 1957, 501) He is absolutely correct. With Augustine agape becomes caritas. The Greek word already meant caritas in other writers, but what is significant is that Augustine theorizes it. Subsequently, this theory becomes sacralised as theology and then, when Augustine becomes a saint and the most important Latin saint, the theology becomes “truth”. After that, not to see the Bible Augustine’s way is not to see it right. Both St. Thomas Aquinas and Luther for all their difference, are close to Augustine.

God is love means God is the highest Good. Good is ordered and ordering, as we see in “Creation” that all is ordered. Modern science only bears this out more accurately and unarguably. The highest good is not something we attain, but something we possess, if granted. This is basically the position, the traditional position, that any Protestant would be at home with as well, enunciated by Benedict XVI’s Encyclical Deus Caritas Est. It is an Augustinian piece of work, skirting around the Thomist re-vision, which sees this world and the next in rather a sharper light, where “man” is very much at the centre. We can certainly draw a line of influence between Thomism and Italian (later European) humanism. Augustine is more pessimistic, his God is interventionist, his hope apocalyptic. He lived a thousand years before humanism after all. Whenever times seem dark to theologians (Luther, Pope Benedict) there is the tendency to reiterate this kind of Augustinianism.

C. S. Lewis’s sense of caritas owes nothing to Augustine,^{^[19]} but more to a sense of gentlemanly decency and order of his England. Caritas is what one decent chap owes another and all men in common owe the weaker sex. When he turns to metaphysics, which is not his forte, he writes of caritas: “We begin with the real beginning, with love as the Divine Energy.” C. S. Lewis Collins Fontana 1976, 116. Love then is a metaphor, our human interpretation of God who we do not know in terms of word we have experience of but is not reducible to “knowing”. Love is our interpretation of primal encompassing energy of life. Jesus who we do know of enjoined us to love, as did St. John leading the early church, “brethren love one another”. Life is Lewis’s “gift love,” for how can we think life? And “gift love” as interpretation shows a special orientation within life, toward life, by those willing or determined to take life as such as their starting point. This is true of Christian culture and of the Church. This is what it has attempted to do. God is love is not true in any objective sense, even if it is written in the Bible. God is love is a double metaphor for life, which has to be presupposed when we talk, whatever we talk about. God is love means life is sacred, that we treasure the moment in which one or the other is. Actually force is a better word than energy that C.S Lewis uses, as being conceptually regarded as prior. Caritas for C. S. Lewis is the presupposition of the question of being, of metaphysics, why is there something rather than nothing? The Christian answer is love, therefore “God is love.”

This interpretation of C. S. Lewis has nothing to do with theism as such, it is non-theistic. In this way C. S. Lewis is untraditional, while appealing to a modern English public readership, making sense of mere Christianity Theism, I remark in passing, is an invention of religion, only the Christian version is much cruder than the rabbinic and Orthodox Jewish version, and the Protestant cruder than the Catholic. At least in Catholicism God is shrouded in Mystery: his love, his being. In Protestantism you get (with Calvin) a rationalism where the mystery is explained and is not Mysterious but reduces to a set of creedal beliefs. This is the beginning of the death of God. The crude anthropomorphisms which are all taken literally in Protestantism as to do with a God “up there” watching, a managerial God, as C. S. Lewis says, and a literal judgement day, are all interpreted, all theorized, in Judaism. God is spelt G-d to remind us the word does not refer to anything. Judaism is non-theistic or does not have a representational metaphysics like Christianity, but an immanent hermeneutics.

Theorization 8: True Love

So if God is love what is the love that He is said to be? This question was still outstanding at the end of the first millennium.

Let us turn our attention to amour. St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622) calls amour a “sacred” love, by which he means that it is a love that lights or that enlightens or that lights the way. There is other love that matters (whether from the mind or the body, agape or eros) but sacred love is Christian love, love that holds love sacred. This the lesson St. Francis de Sales learned as theological heir to the Troubadour tradition and to St. Thomas. St. Thomas Aquinas had provided a unified, coherent, clear and detailed theory of humanitas by virtue of his great Summa for the age of humanism that would supersede his own age. In his Summa Theologica the whole of the massive central sections, the bulk of the work, are to do with the human in a grounded (Aristotelian) and positive (optimistic) showing. But the work itself, its voice, is dispassionate, impersonal and monotone. St. Francis de Sales joined the humanistic core of the Summa to the new sense of real love, which is only partly agape-caritas and only partly eros-concupiscence, it is l’amour. St. Francis de Sales rewrites the whole of Christian thought through amour. In this way he refines (rather than redefines) Christian thought (doctrine) and at the same time grounds humanitarian love, and binds humanitarian love to Western Christian cultural understanding. While paying court to caritas (charité) as “principal et plus éminent de tous les amours”/ “the first and most eminent of all the loves” (I. 14),^{^[20]} amour, he says, is the more actual and inclusive term, which is why, he says, he called his little treatise, Traité de l’amour de Dieu. The modesty of this revolution passes under the radar of the Church councils and is scarcely picked up in theological treatises. It is an historic moment in culture when theologically St. Francis de Sales establishes amour as what love is. Christianity is redefined by it, more truthfully. Finally God ceases to be the deity He never was anyway, and God become attuned to humanity.

Amour is the love we love to love; this is love that is sacred. When I say ‘love’ in English, I mean amour. It is only possible to talk about caritas, or eros or agape now in terms of love, the real meaning: Dieu est Dieu du coeur humain / God is God of the human heart (I.15). What is the essence of such love? It is a correspondence (1: 8). “The attunement (covenance) therefore that is the cause of love, does not consist always in resemblance [as the interpretation of being made ‘in the image and likeness’ of God] but in proportion, rapport or correspondence.” (1.8) In other words: a matching. Things match (heaven and earth) and people match and this quality or attunement (convenance) is the “spirituality” of light or love. But light is a good metaphor, because it denotes coming from somewhere. God is love means this love comes from somewhere - a Source - that we call God and know as God. Now we might be quite confused in this. Some say we do not know God at all, the fool has said in his heart there is no God. In any case, whether we do or we do not know God, it has to be said that we do not and cannot know God better than we know this love. We only know God insofar as we know this love. If we know God as agape, we only partly know God. The priestess Diotima does not claim that if we know Eros we know God, but that we know life. Especially, we know life in its creative aspect.

If this love did not come from somewhere – so the lover is smitten, so the Holy Spirit falls on the gathering at Pentecost – it would not be sacred. If love is a brain secretion it is not sacred. If love is an illusion, as Freud feigned, it is not sacred. Traditionally therefore this love has been called “supernatural” but actually it is not beyond the natural, it is what is most perfectly natural, what could not be more natural. Every lover knows this. It is the great wonder of love. We are not really living until we know it. Grace does not complete nature, grace invigorates nature. Such love makes us full of new life. Love can be impersonal and still be sacred, so long as it falls on someone or something, so long as it has an object that can co-respond.

Theorization 9: The Revolution of Love in St. Francis de Sales

Although the revolution of love started at the beginning of the 17^th century with St. Francis de Sales, the Church has not been able to contain the revolution, which has taken place not on the streets but as a social phenomenon, in the hearts of men and women.

Let’s date the revolution of love to St. Francis’ seminal text, Traité de l’amour de Dieu/Treatise on the Love of God (1616). A century after the start of the Reformation, when Christianity was laying waste central Europe with religious war, all totally contrary to the teaching of Christ, but right in line with religious fundamentalism, which resides in the fact of taking words literally, taking doctrines at face value, and having a sectarian exclusivist (i.e. basically selfish) mentality. The secular world stepped in to end the wars, which while politics had gotten mixed up in them, were essentially fuelled by religious fanaticism, Catholic and Protestant. In the thick of all this St. Francis de Sales launched his silent revolution of love, already at work in the heart of his spiritual companion, St. Jane Chantal. In a sense, the book is a duet. We can hear her accompaniment when we listen.

Attunement is to the symbolic resonances of language, not just in verbalization – which can be dead letter (as in book religion) but vocalization. In the days of St. John of Damascus (8^th century) it was thought a theology that cannot be sung is untrue. How much untrue theology have we produced in the West given this criteria? The whole lot of it! It is all book religion. It is this that Pentecostalism has the opportunity created by the Spirit to move beyond. But the courage to do so is our responsibility, it may not be pushed off on an interventionist God. The days of that childish version of Christian religion are over, the Spirit has moved on.

This sense of correspondence is how St. Francis de Sales understands and refuses the dualism of love taken up by Paul and established for theology by Augustine. Paul identified sin with sarx (flesh) or the lower nature and conceived the human predicament in terms of his personal predicament, perhaps, or so he says, as a struggle between the flesh (sarx) and the spirit (pneuma) as he explains at length in various passages throughout his letters, for example in Romans 7. For Augustine, and subsequent theology this dualism regards a rational or God-given good coming from the rational faculty (natural law in accordance with divine ordinance) and “base” love, cupidity, concupiscence, as coming from the bodily urges. In the 17^th century this became the divide, still very much with us, between body and mind.

St. Francis de Sales, the generation before Descartes has a different idea: he starts with freedom. The primacy of freedom was an idea of Italian humanism that spread north. In fact what it really means is that in our essential freedom we are pulled in two different ways. Perhaps this is what Paul and Augustine really meant; but it is not characteristic of theology to think from the primary category of freedom, but as synthesized in St. Thomas the “correspondence” between divine and natural law, which is where St. Francis takes the idea of correspondence. St. Thomas was completely caught up with substance metaphysics. St. Augustine always thought freedom in terms of the will and its relations. Like St. Thomas and St. Augustine, St. Francis de Sales teaches that there is a dimension of height (freedom from and freedom to) with respect to the psychology of our well-being. The dualism referred to before is merely the difference between that by which we are controlled and that which we control. Our freedom pertains to both, but we are more free the more we are in control.

But for St. Francis (and here he differs from modern tradition) the control is not that of the ego, but the subservience of the ego to the inspirations that come down through the soul ‘within’ or ‘above’ us. It is essentially a creative model of the personality that had been at work in Florence in the arts communities patronized by the Medici, and would dominate in the 19^th century, Wagner being a primary example of a man who worked musically solely under inspiration. Our self (ego) is not our real self. Our self is to be identified with the soul. The soul is therefore not a principle as in substance metaphysics. The soul is a locus of energy, unconscious to the little self, yet over-shadowing it. The meaning of life for the religious is to attune the self to the soul. The love of God, as we call this supra-light energy, comes through the soul. It may never reach the self if we are unattuned. Prayer and meditation have to do with such attunement (convenance), that is, with the love of God. “This attunement of similitude is a correspondence beyond compare between God and each person, for their reciprocal perfection.” (1.15) There is a correspondence between the light above and the light in us and between us. God is not objective. God is love. “God is whole in the whole world and whole in each part of the world.” (1. 15) God is the God of the human heart. No human heart, no God.

Fin’ amor

St. Francis de Sales is heir not just to St. Paul, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas, but just as importantly, to the troubadours. The missing link between the end of the first millennium and St. Francis des Sales is the creation and definition of fin’ amor , courtly love as the harbinger of amore or true love that we understand today, and suspect God might fall short of if we stick to the traditional theologizations. Troubadours celebrated love in song and music. The man would be smitten by the feminine, symbolized by a woman in particular and he would come under her redeeming influence. The redemption was essentially from the male propensity to violence, and was a civilising influence. She cast the spell of peace not war. For this to happen it needed her.

The fact I am stating is that if God’s love is that of only a Father or a Son or both, then it cannot be redemptive for men – while it may be redemptive for women; that I cannot say. Only beauty can redeem man from violence and that is the beauty of the feminine incarnate in a woman not a man. So our logical point about species and differential comes into force here to make a significant religious difference. But where is the theology on any of this?

Amour comes from the song of the heart, it is Orphic, it is Christianized by the Troubadours in Catholic Europe, especially from the turn of the Millennium. Fin’ amor is not agape or eros. Courtly love humanized agape in the tradition of the Song of Songs. St. Francis de Sales puts it perfectly: “Le baiser, de tout temps, comme par instinct naturel, a été employé pour représenter l’amour parfait, c’est à dire l’union des coeurs, et non sans cause.” / The kiss has always by a natural instinct been employed to represent perfect love, which is to say, the union of hearts, and not without reason. (1. 9) Agape is humanized into a kiss, two breath as one, which is not so much thought as deeply felt and consummating. This kiss is symbolic of how the sexual governing structural difference in language and human being is overcome. This kiss is the bodily (incarnate) symbol of love. Eros is elevated or redeemed from the “erotic” in our sense and in the sense of ancient Christianity, which for the main part regarded the body negatively, and illegitimately, as the source of concupiscence, synonymous with the worst of sin. Fin’ amor is love of man for the feminine, as the awakening in man of his own feminine side. So that he puts down his arms.

This is Deus amore est according to St. Francis de Sales and as it worked its way through French Devout Humanism, in figures (usually persecuted by ecclesiastical careerists) like Fénélon. It comes out in the 19^th century, after the French Revolution in its post-Christendom form in opera, for example in Wagner and Verdi.

The revolution of love that started with the Troubadours took place in the 11^th century. The essence of it is exclusive love for a lady, obedience to her (unto death) and a total respect, which may or may not involve sexual intercourse, depending on the lady. Jean Markale writes, “the lady’s desire surpasses all else, and desire is a command.”^{^[21]} Just as in St. Francis de Sales later, where he differentiates amour from charité (caritas) Markale says, “love according to courtly theory is not a state (habitude) but an action (acte).”^{^[22]} Strictly speaking, according to the code of honour sexual intercourse was forbidden, so the erotic was sublimated. The erotic drive or pleasure principle was sublimated for the sake of the worthiness of the loved one, or more precisely, because of her beauty.

What is absolutely central here is beauty. The magnificence of the woman’s court, the wealth of her husband, her purity and untouchability and unobtainability, pertained to her beauty and only made her more beautiful. Beauty became perceptible only by the sublimation of desire. Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura are very much in this tradition. Abelard, as he well knew, failed in courtly love with Heloise. This was what was really so tragic about the affair. The troubadour tradition was well known to Abelard, a popular song writer in his day. The tragedy with Abelard was not as modern people think that he seduced his student (professional misconduct), but that in doing so he lost his inspiration, given that she should have been his inspiration. The failure was not one of morals, but of courtly love.

Fin’ amor literally means fine or refined love. “Love with finesse and a certain end (fin) in mind.”^{^[23]} In religious context, that end is God. Not we love beauty for the sake of God, but the other way round: we love God for the sake of beauty. You give charity, but you make love (faire l’amour). Again, as in St. Francis de Sales, the focus on the act. The charity that is given is based on power and authority, it belongs to another world. How do you make love to God? This is what St. Francis de Sales treatise is about. Its point is, you can. Each of the chapters give us some indication of how. Let us take just one for example: Book 2 chapter 16 entitled, ‘Like the Love (amour) Practised in Hope’. St. Francis de Sales is addressing Theotime, as he does throughout the book, giving the book an intimate feel. “The soul makes a holy cry: that he would kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. (Cant. 1: 2). It is to God that I sigh; this God that my heart desires. (Psalm 42.1) ... This desire is just, Theotime, who would not desire a good so desirable? But it would be a useless desire and a continual martyrdom of the heart if we did not have the assurance that one day we should assuage it ... By the sacred promises the divine good has made us, we are balanced, and this balance is the root of the very holy virtue we call hope; because the will is assured by faith that it can enjoy the sovereign good, along the lines set out for it, so it makes two great acts of virtue: in one it waits on God for the enjoyment (jouissance) of his sovereign good; and by the other, it aspires to that holy enjoyment (jouissance).” (1. 14) We note the language of desire and enjoyment, typical of St. Francis de Sales. Also we note the correspondence between the two modes of jouissance. Doubtless, one involves the other. One is active (aspiring) the other passive (waiting). This is the double energy (anima and animus or yin and yang) of the inward life or dynamic, by which the little self attunes to the soul higher life. This is one example from a large masterful book of instruction on how to make love to God.^{^[24]}

Conclusion

What may we draw from these theorizations? That it is impossible to say God is love in the sense of the New Testament. This sense was already twisted to mean something else when it went West, into Latin and then the European, including English of course, vernacular. And that was a long time ago. If God is love, it must be true love, not some kind of “sacred” love hemmed in by theological definitions; this is the death of God. If God is sacralised agape as in Benedict’s Encyclical, then he is of scant interest to the world, and such a Church must be on the back foot. St. Francis de Sales started a revolution in love that is still breaking consciousness, even in the Church, although many outside the Church have wind of it, which is why, quite possibly, they have been converted out of the Church altogether. The Holy Spirit converts people out of Church, not just into it. We should realize that. The Troubadours were outside the Church.

God is amore, true love. C. S. Lewis is not quite right. Love is a gift, yes, in the broadest sense, but more to the point one must fall in love. This is pre-requisite. There is no love without the fall of man: this is not the moralistic Christian interpretation of the Adam and Eve and the apple, the subtext of which is that non-conformity, disobedience, will lose you heaven, a myth that has kept people sitting still and frightened in their pews for over a millennia until the Enlightenment, when suddenly people woke up. We have to fall in love, lose our heart; so many contemporary love songs enliven and embolden and enrich this great theme, and all of them draw from the revolution in love that started in the Church, but that the Church with its fixated narrow views could not contain, and still cannot contain today in some quarters, as we have noticed.

One of the strengths of popular culture, to which Pentecostalism is the only kind of Christianity even remotely in touch, is that it understands love. Love is a duet. It needs two people. You can only fall in love with one at a time. But the song is right; “when I fall in love, it will be forever.” Love is tied to eternity, falling in love that is. First one has to be smitten though. At the cultural level love needs a religious base. Christianity has provided this for secularity. So one conclusion is that although a culture of love, which needs a religious base, started with Jesus and Christianity out of Judaism, and Jesus is the world teacher of love, love has broken out of theological constrictions. True love is better understood outside Church than inside. Inside Church there is only partial understanding, because love is only caritas, not amore. Caritas is sublated in amore, which is to say it is lost there, but also continues there, raised to a higher level of perfection and experience.

It was in 19^th century where what I am saying became historically manifest as event. In Verdi’s operas, and in Wagner’s music dramas, and to single out an example, in that exchange of looks between Tristan and Isolde. The story of Tristan is one, Scruton says, “whose desire broke through every conventional barrier, every courtesy, every demand of honour, reason, and morality, while remaining faithful, sacrificial, and (in a strange way) chaste. A like fascination animated Wagner’s reworking of the legend, and his conception of erotic love is, like that of his medieval sources, a truthful attempt to display the human universal.”^{^[25]}

Wagner is as true to the courtly love tradition as he is to his philosophical master Schopenhauer. The meaning of the look that sets the whole drama in motion is not so much erotic as amorous, “aspiring toward and resolved in chastity,”^{^[26]} indeed in death, which is not so much an end but a return to the Urvergessen “the original darkness from which all things emerge and to which all things return.”^{^[27]} Erotic love, as Scruton points out, is individualizing, it is specific, this woman. Amorous love is also specific, that is the erotic element, but it is also sublimating, as I have pointed out, and that is precisely what we find in their look as well. Their love is not consummated in each other, but in the All, Wagner’s sense for God. As in courtly love the love triangle (King Marke being the third party in Tristan and Isolde) is actually a quaternary, God is in fourth place, in other words there is an openness on all three sides above. This is shown in Tristan and Isolde by the easy way King Marke forgives Tristan’s adultery, even while it is being pointed out to him by at the beginning of Act 2 Scene 3. The provocations of Melot belong to another order by contrast of petty worldliness. And this is why, although Tristan and Isolde all ends in death, it is strangely affirmative. The music shows this above all, with the “Tristan chord” at the start of the music-drama eventually being resolved at the last, after several hours.

The popularity of Verdi and Wagner everywhere in world is precisely because their work is a revelation about love. This is revelation in a full sense on a par with the Bible, although as I have pointed out, the Bible does not give this full sense and if we confine our reception of revelation to reading the Bible we will be seriously short-changing ourselves and not find any greater revelations of love, such as we find in Augustine (more dubiously), in St. Francis de Sales (most certainly) and for sure in the great literature and art works of the 19^th century.