Love reaches up to God.
In The Four Loves (1960) C. S. Lewis contrasts “need-love” like that of a small child for its mother with “gift-love” like that of a mother for her small child and “appreciation-love” like that of a mother and child for each other in maturity. Need-love expresses a need and dependency; gift-love a desire to serve in fulfillment of one’s identity; appreciation-love an admiration, satisfied to view the face forever. Lewis observed that eros, one sort of love for human beings, “transforms what is par excellence a Need-pleasure [that is, mere lust or chemistry] into the most Appreciative of all pleasures,” as the lover grows to see the beloved as desirable in himself.[1]
But the point would apply to the love of any need-pleasuring thing that one comes to savor in a non-gluttonous way, as one “appreciates” wine. Such elevation of the form of love can accompany market-using consumption. Not all consumption is unloving. Even a consumption-scorning academic can get a sense of this if she will fondly bring to mind her variorum edition of Paradise Lost in her professional library, or her new centrifuge in her laboratory.
Yet the need-love for earthly things is of course dangerous. The theologian David Klemm summarizes Augustine so: “Most people . . . . become attached to their objects of desire, and in this way are in fact possessed by them,” needing and dependent. [2] It is, Klemm says elsewhere, “a window-shopping of the soul in which I lose myself in desires for shallow and untrue goods.”[3] But “those who use their private property for the sake of enjoying God become detached from their goods and thereby possess them well,” paradoxically.[4] The attachment we have to the world, the need-love for a fur coat or a trophy wife, is the source of our misery, not of our fulfillment, quite contrary to the tempting glow of pleasure on first acquisition. We arrive in the end at So What? . . . and pack last season’s designer dresses off to the resale shop.
In such system of Love, however, the opposite of attachment to earthly pleasures is not detachment, a mere apathy following a rude version of stoicism. “It is the feeling,” Lewis puts it, “which would make a man unwilling to deface a great painting even if he were the last man alive and himself about to die.”[5] In the 1950s a little boy threw mustard on a Rembrandt print, and the rich, sophisticated father was amused. Someone who loved God’s world would have scolded him.
Love calls us, said Richard Wilbur, to the things of this world. It is a love appreciating the world, yet not dependent on it, which sees the spark of the divine in presentness, the sacred in the profane, the lovingly exercised “pressure” of which Chesterton spoke that keeps worldly things in existence continuously. “He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:/ Praise him.”
* * * *
The modern, post-Romantic, stoic-materialist impulse is to set aside Augustine, C. S. Lewis, and Richard Wilbur, that God stuff, as superstitious nonsense—after all, the real point is the secular loving of others, right? We are put on this planet to help other people, yes? Surveys inquiring into the Meaning of Life regularly evoke that one as a response. You can be a good person, entirely loving, without loving something Transcendent, yes?
No, not in the Christian view of love, or even in a non-Christian philosophy beyond altruistic hedonism. The theologian William Schweiker claims that “overhumanization,” the modern urge to “subdue any ‘outside’ to the human project,” undervalues transcendence.[6] “High modernity aims to dignify human existence and yet, ironically, dislodges human worth from any source other than the mechanisms of social power.”[7] In 1943 Weil wrote,
The collective is the root of all idolatry. This is what chains us to the earth. . . . It is only by entering the transcendental, the supernatural, the authentically spiritual order that man rises above the social. . . . The service of the false God (of the social Beast under whatever form it may be) purifies evil by eliminating its horror. Nothing seems evil to those who serve it except failure in its service. . . . A Pharisee is someone who is virtuous out of obedience to the Great Beast [of the collective]. . . . Rootedness lies in something other than the social.[8]
In other words, the problem with setting aside “God is God” is that then The Great Beast of Society, or My Holier-Than-Thou Self, not to speak of SUVs and antique houses and young lovers, become god substitutes. In the Christian view, from Roman to Quaker, Pride is the problem. It is the same, by the way, in Islam, which regards shirk, idolatry, as the master sin. The god [al-Lah] is god, not wealth or al-Uzza the Mighty One of Nakhlah. To engage in idolatry is to be separated from the true God, which is the point of the terrible punishments for setting up idols discussed in the Pentateuch. What distorts New Age spirituality in its merely therapeutic forms is this apotheosis of the Self, what is good for the self-esteem of Moi and my friends in Marin County. It sets up Moi as a proud little god. To put to a new use the old tag: in materialism Homo homini deus. Man becomes to Man a god.
But on the contrary God, that primal Thou, that Holiness immeasurably different from humanity yet immanent in the universe, and always the proper object of striving, is God. Erasmus of Rotterdam did not lack a sense of humor, but remarked soberly of the Latin tag, Homo homini deus, “Among Christians the name of God ought not to be given to any mortal man even in jest.”[9] The original import of “man is to man a god,” Erasmus explains, is to give “divine honors to those who conferred benefits.” Gods are, so to speak, ring-givers, and so a human ring-giver is to be called a “god.” In monotheism this will not do. As Schweiker says, his (and my) “teleological humanism specifies that the source of goodness is wider than human projects and powers and so [wider than the modern] nightfall of values.”[10]
Monotheism is not merely numerical. What seems to us the bizarre practice of Roman emperors declaring themselves divine is no theological problem at all when gods are N. What Karl Jaspers called the “axial” faiths did bring something new during the millennium before and around the time of Christ, among them Christianity itself. They recommended ethical universalism, they rejected the me-centeredness of magic, and above all they emphasized the difference between the ordinary world and a Truer realm of faith and hope. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Dreaded, and different and detached from us. The word translated into English as “holy”/ “hallowed” is the Hebrew Bible’s kadosh, meaning also “set apart.” Christianity in its various forms is sociologically speaking merely one of these faiths, along with Islam and Judaism and Zoroastrianism and some versions of Hinduism, and even Buddhism and Taoism and Confucianism (the last god-absent but universalistic and certainly anti-magical).
The non-axial, “archaic,” non-universalistic faiths make ring-giving people—chieftains, ancestors, politicians, priests—into gods-to-be-worshipped. Thus the three Japanese generals who founded in the late 16th century the Tokugawa shogunate were all literally worshipped afterwards, in elaborate temples at which one can still pray. Likewise the first restored Meiji emperor has a gigantic shrine in Tokyo, and his General Nogi, who with his wife committed hara-kiri when in 1912 the Emperor died, has a smaller one. Robert Bellah remarks after recounting these facts that “there is nothing surprising in the divinization of human beings in an archaic culture,” by which he means a non-axial culture, that is, one “affirming the world as it is rather than holding it in tension with ultimate reality.” [11]
A non-axial culture lacks attachment to a spiritual Ultimate. Well short of the Ultimate, a society without an Ultimate has many gods to tend each piece of the world and the heavens. By contrast to such polytheism or ancestor worship or a civic religion such as Confucianism, the god of monotheists is jealous. God is on one view of the matter separated from the world, and bids us look upward. What starts in Judaism perhaps as an early nationalism of the Jews ground up between Philistines and Egyptians and Assyrians, and was certainly in Islam a later nationalism of the Arabs ground up between Byzantines and Persians, becomes theological. Our god is The God, al-Lah. In the beginning was The Word.
And to our good, it is said. The chief sin against the Spirit, Augustine declared, is indeed pride. “Pride” does not here mean ordinary self-respect, or even self-love in a modest, God-fearing way, or else there would be no justice in “love thy neighbor as thyself.“ The sinful sort of pride is making oneself into a proud little god.
Even a saintly person can fall prey to “theological pride,” the worst and last temptation. An old New Yorker cartoon shows two monks walking in the cloister, one declaring to the other, “But I am holier than thou!” The Anglican divine of the late 16th century Richard Hooker put the joke this way: “the fall of angels doth make it almost a question whether we might not need a preservative still, lest we should haply wax proud that we are not proud.”[12] The Anglicans of Hooker’s day were complaining of two prideful doctrines. The Puritan said proudly that he was among the saints elected by God at the beginning. Whence proud Cromwell guilty of his country’s blood—and proud reborn Christians now, waiting for the Rapture. The Papists held a doctrine of perfect justification by the soul’s infusion with righteousness and therefore salvation not from the continuing grace of God but salvation earned and merited. Whence proud priests, as meritorious purveyors of merit, from which simony and child abuse.[13]
In the making of a non-prideful character the central step is to love God—not moi or Heathcliff or any other treasure on earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break in. Art or the Revolution or Science cannot really “serve the function of religion,” as non-religious people are always supposing, though of course they do serve similar psychological functions. “No,” declares James Wood, an apostate but someone who understands religion, “the great ‘strength’ of Christianity is not that it offers medicines, but that it is true.”[14]
Worshipping idols here below is bad for our souls. And it is impractical, a fragility of goodness. “There are false suns,” writes Iris Murdoch, “easier to gaze upon and far more comforting than the true one.”[15] The problem is that such things pass. The realest of things are in this sense mirages. “Man is in love and loves what vanishes,” said Yeats. As Martha Nussbaum puts it, “by ascribing value to philia [love as friendship] in a conception of the good life, we make ourselves more vulnerable to loss.”[16] Lovers leave, friends move away, riches get spent. And then what? If your life plan consists of accumulating SUVs and antique houses and young lovers, what is the point?
The great thief is death itself. It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.[17] Whom do you love and who loves you? He will die, or you will, and therefore in one of you each bit of love will be redeemed in sorrow. “These lovely [earthly] things” wrote St. Augustine, “go their way and are no more; and they rend the soul with desires that can destroy it. . . . But in them is no repose, because they do not abide.”[18] The other side of mortal love is mortal loss, every time.
One solution is to deny the fragility of love. And one way of denying it is not to have love in the first place, not to care about the lovely things and the beloved people. It is said that this is the Buddhist solution, the rejection of worldly attachment. It is an element in much Western thought as well, influenced by stoicism. An alternative way of denying the fragility is to imagine a heaven, as the Abrahamic religions do. Its popular if theologically unsound form is a tale of benevolent dead people acting as angels to the living, such as Morley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol. The more sophisticated Christian’s attitude towards love is tragic. The tragedy of God crucified stands for all the impermanences of our loving lives.
Nussbaum admires the solution of pagan Aristotle. “There is a beauty,” she says, “in the willingness to love someone in the face of love’s instability and worldliness that is absent from a completely trustworthy love.”[19] One accepts the tragedy and goes on loving nonetheless. But then isn’t one’s god Beauty, or perhaps Endurance, or Flexibility? The later, Christian step, at least in its theologically sophisticated forms, is to bring out into the open what is implicit in the noblest pagan solutions, an implicit love of God—or, to address the growing unease of my dear non-believing readers, an implicit love of some other transcendent and undying goal, such as Art or Science or Evolution or the Environment or the Life Force or the Revolution or Baseball. A love for the spark of the divine translates the lover into a higher and permanent realm.
Dylan Thomas on the contrary refused to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London. “I shall not murder/ The mankind of her going with a grave truth” is a pagan and anti-Sunday-School declaration, noble and humanistic, admiring of the masculine virtues. It finds a transcendent in stoic humanism. But it lacks a theology, the grave truths, the truths of the grave. Salvation requires the transcendent and a theology, that is, a purpose to life that includes an account of why it should matter. I believe this is as true of a modern bourgeois life as it is of any other. Maybe more. You rich person in a modern economy have time to think.
Think then of this: Paul of Tarsus, and before him Jesus of Nazareth, and a little before him Rabbi Hillel, and long before them all Moses himself said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.” It is literally: “I am the Lord thy God,” amplified by the second, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”; and by the third and fourth about graven images and the sabbath. “And the [new] second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” That is a summary of commandments five through ten, relating to other people rather than to God. “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”[20]
The commandments of Moses are in summary (1.) God is god, which is to say there is a transcendent, a sacred, a kadosh. And (2.) Love thy neighbor as thyself, which is to say that a transcendent entails an ethical universe applying to the level of the non-sacred, the profane. The sacred and the profane in Abrahamic religions are connected by God’s creation—they are separated but they are not alternatives. Your neighbor, too, is in the community of God’s creatures, to be loved on this account if you love God. That is the transcending secular.
At least so people think who are unwilling to adopt the 20th century’s nihilistic materialism. Add even to the materialism a dash of stoicism, as the most proudly materialist among us do, and you find yourself back to a transcendent, a free man’s worship.
In 1952 Paul Tillich called stoicism “the only real alternative to Christianity in the Western world.”[21] (Well. . . Judaism? Buddhism? Socialism? Art?) Noble in its way, stoicism can freeze into a sentimental posture of anti-sentimentality, Being Tough, Hemingway’s “grace under pressure.” Weil called such an attitude “the Roman caricature of [Greek] Stoicism.”[22] In its modern American form, which is influenced by the Christian evaluation of the individual soul but is not in other ways Christian, such stoicism has dropped even the classical elitism of the Wise Man. Any American can be a stoic hero, because, as Tillich the immigrant to the New World explains, “the individual is an infinitely significant representation of the universe.”[23] The Romantic I in America contains multitudes. But there it is again, suddenly—a transcendent, the People.
Even in a wholly secular way of thinking, love of sublunary persons or things is good or bad depending on its association with the other virtues. This is the point Raja Halwani makes in discussing Nel Noddings ethics of “care,” that is, the argument that Love is primary. Critics of Noddings have argued that ethics cannot be collapsed into care—or else the justice of universal ethics or the courage of autonomy necessary for human flourishing are damaged.[24]
Similarly, Adam Smith writes in a well-known passage that if love for our fellow humans was all we had to depend on, then the extermination of the Chinese would trouble us less, really, than the loss of a little finger.[25] It takes a sense of abstract Justice, a virtue separate from Love and not translatable into it, to care for a strange people you have never seen and can never love. The moral sentiment of justice impels the man within to scold a self that is so selfish as to save the finger rather than the entire race of Chinese. “What is it,” he asks,
which prompts the generous upon all occasions and the mean upon many to sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others? It is not. . . that feeble spark of benevolence. . . . It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast. . . . The natural misrepresentations of self-love can be corrected only by the eye of this impartial spectator.[26]
It is the bundled virtues in a soul which ascends. I say “ascend” to my fellow believers in a loving and living God.
But to you others I have at least a practical suggestion, that Love without other virtues is sin and simulacrum. An absorbing love of a child without the virtue of justice, for example, makes the child into a mere source of satisfaction for its mother. You know mothers like this. She “loves” her child, doubtless. But she loves him rather as Screwtape—the imagined middle-management devil giving advice to a junior devil in C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters—describes the “love” his fellow devils have for human souls: “to us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense.”[27] Such increasing of the area of selfhood—in a word, pride—changes love into domination.
“A love relationship,” Murdoch observed, “can occasion extreme selfishness and possessive violence. the attempt to dominate the other . . . so that it is no longer separate; or it can prompt a process of unselfing wherein the lover learns to see, and cherish and respect, what is not himself.”[28] The political theorist Joan Tronto warns liewise about unbalanced and absorbing “love.” She criticizes the communitarians like Nel Noddings and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese for imagining that love conquers all. “Without strong conceptions of right, care-givers are apt to see the world only from their own perspective and to stifle diversity and otherness.”[29] Mother knows best. Yet on the other hand, “justice without a notion of care is incomplete.”[30]
The text above is an excerpt from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, the first volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.
[1] Lewis, Four Loves, 1960, p. 135f.
[2] Klemm, “Material Grace,” 2004, p. 226.
[3] Klemm, “Material Grace,” 2004, p. 233.
[4] Klemm, “Material Grace,” 2004, p. 226.
[5] Lewis, Four Loves, 1960, p. 32.
[6] Schweiker, Theological Ethics, 2004, pp. xii, 201.
[7] Schweiker, Theological Ethics, 2004, p. xv.
[8] Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1942 (1949), pp. 164-65, 166, 168-69.
[9] Erasmus 1500-1533, Adages, selected by William Barker (2001), I I 69, p. 40.
[10] Schweiker, Theological Ethics, 2004, p. xvi.
[11] Bellah, Imagining Japan, 2003, pp. 20, 13.
[12] From his sermons, quoted in Allison, The Rise of Moralism, 1966, p. 4., punctuation modernized.
[13] Allison, The Rise of Moralism, pp. 7, 24. Allison (who, incidentally, was the Episcopal bishop of South Carolina) shows the slide in late 16th-century Anglicanism towards the Catholic view of works, thence to deism and then to atheism, the view that Christ was a Good Man only: “the imputation of our righteousness, not the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, became that by which we are justified” (p. 204).
[14] Wood, Broken Estate, 1999, p. ***.
[15] Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 1967, p. 100.
[16] Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 1986, p. 361.
[17] William Alfred found this on a Vermont tombstone, and made it the motto of his play Agamemnon.
[18] Augustine, Confessions, 398 AD, IV, x.
[19] Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 1986, p. 420.
[20] Matt. 22: 37-40 and a dozen or so other places in the New Testament (for example Matt. 7: 12; re-exposited in Paul’s Letter to the Romans 13: 8); Tractate Shabbos 31a; and Leviticus 19:18.
[21] Tillich, Courage to Be, 1952, pp. 9, 101.
[22] Weil, Waiting for God, 1950, p. 195.
[23] Tillich, Courage to Be, 1952, p. 120.
[24] Halwani, Virtuous Liaisons, 2003, pp. 19, 27, 73ff.
[25] Smith, Moral Sentiments, 1759 (1790), Part III, Chp. iii, para. 4, p. 136. Compare Rousseau Political Economy, 1755, p. 121.
[26] Smith, Wealth, 1776, III.3.5, p. 137. I wish he hadn’t said “reason,” which makes the passage sound Kantian.
[27] Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 1943, p. 37.
[28] Murdoch, Metaphysics, 1992, p. 17.
[29] Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 1993, p. 161; compare p. 135, “the dangers faced by the vulnerable at the hands of their caregivers.”
[30] Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 1993, p. 167.