Love and semantics

It is no secret to say that love is one of the premiere themes of human life. In all of its manifold--and variously interpreted--forms, it is everywhere. In fact love really appears to be the quintessential harmonic of movies, books, television, indeed reality. It is in everything, tangible and intangible. This is not to deny pain and suffering. In fact a majority of pain and suffering, I would argue, stem from various manifestations (and perversions) of love. As Augustine says of the city of God and the earthly city, they are both driven by loves, the heavenly city of God is ordered by a love of God, and the other, earthly city, by a love of the self. It is perhaps hopelessly obvious to say that love, whatever it may be, is complicated and has as many shades and stories as there are people to tell of it.

But this isnt meant to be a post on Love in general. What has always struck me (perhaps in my most egocentric and selfish moments) is something of a distaste to any concept of "universal," or "unconditional," love. This of course seems bizarre. Who in their right mind would deny the goodness of unconditional love, of, say, a mother for her child, or God for His people? Without belaboring the point, my aversion to it rests in interpretations which present unconditional love like this: there is a universal thing, called love, and I, along with everyone else, happen to fall under this blanketing condition. But can we really distinguish this form of love from total indifference to the particular?

I dont want this post to get too technical (it is really an off-the-cuff sort of thing) but let me just give an example. If you had a friend who has left long ago and moved away, and they write to you and a group of your friends "I miss you all," and then, one by one, say they miss each of you, how are we to interpret this? Which statement interprets which? Does the long lost friend miss you because they miss your whole group? If this is the case, this interpretation would appear congruent with many discussions on unconditional love (which I believe to be a fundamental misunderstanding of love). "We are all equal in the eyes of God," is the mantra so trenchantly recycled (at least to my ears in my church). But the meaning of this is never unpacked, and one is left with the impression that this commentary on gradation is in reality also a commentary on difference and identity. Namely the equality of love is based on an indifference of the content of the love. "There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female," is here taken quite literally. This type of interpretation is repugnant to me. And I am not using hyperbole here for emphasis, it is repulsive and a wholly unloving way to look at it. If it is indeed the case that you are missed (or loved) as you are part of a group that is missed or loved, or there is a general universal feeling of love or missing that then extends generally to each particular in an aggregate, then your particularity is destroyed. You are not loved or missed in this sense, because your own particular stands now as only an empty cipher that is equally replaceable by any member in the group, and vice-versa: any member in the group's particularity is a cipher that could equally be replaced by you.

I was watching an episode of the TV series Heroes the other day, and one of the characters, Peter, mentions to his mother that her other son, Nathan, will always unconditionally love her. And she said something quite remarkable (at least I thought): "Well thats the problem, isnt it, unconditional love isnt really love at all." We might say that absolute or unconditional love, understood in this sense as a universal category that is then extended to particulars, destroys in the very act of love. Because I, for example, am a particular, conditioned agent, so my identity is wrapped up in a very specific network of interactions. If a love directed toward me is unconditional in this sense, my particularity as conditioned is overlooked and so, to extend this logic, I cannot be loved as myself. I would only be loved in the identical sense that everything (or everyone) else is loved by this universal, unconditional love.

In a pretty hilarious interview, Slavoj Zizek speaks of the inherent violence of love in order to link it up to the particular thing that is loved. "Isnt love precisely a type of cosmic imbalance? I was always disgusted with this notion of 'I love the whole world.' or universal love. I dont like the world. I am between I dont like the world...basically.. I hate the world or I am indifferent towards it. But the whole of reality, its stupid, I dont care about it. Love, for me, is an extremely violent act. Love is not I love you all, love means I pick out something, it is this structure of imbalance...I say I love you more than anything else. In this quite formal sense love is evil."

While I completely disagree with the link of violence and love, Zizek's point is well taken: love is not a universal act, it is a very particular act. I love you and I want you to love me for myself. Love in each instance is an act of election, so to speak. We might say, to hearken back to our earlier example, when the long lost friend says "I miss/love you all," and then says to each one "I miss/love you" the only true way to interpret this and maintain any semblance of love, is to say "I love you all," is "I love each of you for yourselves," so that the "universal" feeling presides precisely in the finite and particular identities within the group. There is no sublimation or mactation of the particular into a universal. Nor is this merely a semantic game. If I am not loved for myself, then precisely by definition I am not loved. This is the ultimate idiocy of many narratives of religious tolerance, or postmodern discourses of the absolute Other. If every other is Absolutely Other, then they are devoid of content, and hence are unloveable. A complete religious toleration or devotion to all religions, precisely destroys the particularity of any given religion upon the alter of the universal.

This is why the Incarnation has always been so beautiful to me. While we must also avoid the pitfalls of individualism, tat God became a particular man at a particular point in history, and set off a series of concrete and particular relations, means that God's love for the world in sending His Son reinterprets how we understand unconditional love. This unconditional love is not a destruction of our particularity, but precisely its highest affirmation. I am loved. You are loved. And while both of these loves are God's love, but this love is as differentiated as are our particular relationships to Christ through the Spirit as we are gathered into the Church, the proleptic appearance of the eschatological kingdom of God.