A young Catholic today inherits a long, long tradition of reflection on love that is unmatched in any other culture in the world, beginning with the sublime “Song of Songs” of the Jewish Testament, and the many sections of the Christian Testament dedicated to the theme. In more recent times, if I may include that great writer in the English Catholic tradition, The Allegory of Love (1936) by C.S. Lewis. In that dazzling history Lewis traces the invention of the story of romantic love—now the most standard of all loves recognized in the Western world. Romantic love is a Western invention, a near-obsession, supposedly the key to all happiness. For Lewis, the invention of romantic love in the age of the troubadours (the age of the Crusades) was far more momentous for the development of the West, and far more broadly influential than, say, the Protestant Reformation. Lewis compares the Reformation to a ripple on the vast ocean of romantic love.
As a result of this invention, we Westerners have come to think that the central fire of human happiness is romantic love, love forever and ever (love “happily ever after”). Imagination ends with the romantic couple walking hand in hand across the fields toward the sunlight. Many people spend their entire lives looking for such love, wanting to feel such love, wondering, when they are first attracted to another, if that’s what they’re now feeling. Above all, most people love being in love, love the feeling of loving, love even the mad passion of being in love.
Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World (1940) first opened my eyes to the phenomenon of romantic love. In pointing out several features of romantic love he offered a useful vocabulary for analyzing the meaning most often attached to the term “love” in literature, theatre, and cinema today. Central among these is the fact that it consists in falling in love with love, not with a concrete person. In its pure form it scorns mere bodily, erotic, sexual love. It prides itself on being “above” the biological love that is satisfied by pornography or by groping interaction with another human being. This ill-starred higher love entails
a factor having the power to make instinct turn away from its natural goal and to transform desire into limitless aspiration, into something, that is to say, which does not serve, and indeed operates against, biological ends.
Romantic love loves the higher passion, the spiritual ecstasy of love, not the body. A woman in romantic love loves being swept off her feet, longing for more, to the point of death. “I would rather die” than lose the feeling of loving him and being loved by him.
Passion means suffering, something undergone, the mastery of fate over a free and responsible person. To love love more than the object of love, to love passion for its own sake, has been to love to suffer and to court suffering, all the way from Augustine's amabam amare down to modern romanticism.
To feel the ecstasy of passion, romantic love entails a boundless desire, a longing for the infinite, a longing to “slip the surly bonds of Time,” to escape from bodily limitations into the realm of the forever and the infinite. De Rougemont describes it as “complete Desire, luminous Aspiration, the primitive religious soaring carried to its loftiest perch. . . . a desire that never relapses, that nothing can satisfy, that even rejects and flees the temptation to obtain its fulfillment in the world.” It is a revolt against mere flesh, against the limits of the human condition. The body, it finds gross. What it loves is the rarefied spiritual passion that only romantic lovers know. It loves feeling lifted “above the herd,” into a higher sphere. Romantic love is “a transfiguring force, something beyond delight and pain, an ardent beatitude,” purer, more spiritual, more uplifting than physical “hooking up.” It is not a sated appetite, but in fact quite the opposite. It loves the feeling of never being satisfied, of being always caught up in the longing, of dwelling in the sweetness of desire. It feels a kind of murderous hostility toward rude awakenings.
This is why romantic love desperately needs obstacles. If romantic love were to lead too quickly to physical consummation, it would cease being romantic. For then it would require dealing with clothing in disarray, a mess to clean up, bad breath, and hair all disheveled. Then there would be a meal to fix, and—bump!—romance has fallen back to the lumpen earth. No, for the sake of romantic love, it is much better for fulfillment to be delayed, for obstacles to be put up, for a sword to be laid down between the longing couple, or a curtain drawn between them. For their romantic passion to persist, lovers must be kept away from one another. De Rougemont comments on romantic lovers: “Their need of one another is in order to be aflame, and they do not need one another as they are. What they need is not one another’s presence, but one another’s absence.” This is the story of love perennially facing obstacles, never having to get down to the nitty-gritty of daily life.
If and when eros does vanquish all obstacles, it ceases to be romantic love. It now must choose between commitment to a concrete other with all the limitations of that other, or a once-and-for-all break-up. For with consummation, illusion is shattered. Flesh meets flesh. The reality of the human condition sets in. As a result, the most satisfactory ending for the tale of romantic love is not, as one would think, physical consummation or even “growing old together.” It is, actually, death, while longing still pierces the heart. For then the living member of the couple can go on loving infinitely, forever, above the ordinariness of mere earth. Or else, if that empty fate is simply unbearable, the remaining beloved can also meet a tragic death. Now that is really satisfying: when a man and a woman continue in romantic love eternally, by means of the untimely death of both. That is real tragedy, a real arrow of love to the heart, the best of all Western tales.
Do not too many of the young persons you know believe that true happiness is to be found in true romantic love? (They may not know how to distinguish true romantic love, but they seek desperately to try it out, so that at last they can become “happy.” For so many, “happiness” means romantic love.) Do not many long to be “swept off their feet”? Be honest, you almost certainly remember this wistfulness in yourself, long ago. Perhaps, still, even at your present age, you tend to think that romantic love, a true passion as the French used to call it, was once, or still is, the highest, sweetest peak in your life. We all know people who refuse to be bound by an earthly commitment to any one concrete, imperfect human being. Instead, they fall in love with love, over and over again. Until death brings them rest.
Romantic love is to be contrasted with the Christian vision of human love. Unlike romantic love, it is plain from scripture that God expected—nay, commanded—his followers to consummate their relationships: “Increase and multiply and fill the earth.” Sexuality is a crucial part of human life, both for deeply personal growth and, second, for the continuance and prospering of the human community as a whole. The Christian (and emphatically the Catholic) view of the human being is that sex is a natural expression, not only of the body, but of the soul. In fact, the Christian faith does not hold to the view that the body is separate from the soul. On the contrary, in the Christian view, the human person is one, not two: an embodied spirit, a spirited body—one. The notion that there is an errant body (like a wild steed) to be disciplined by a superior soul (the charioteer) is from Plato, not from Judaism and Christianity.
A very good recent study of love in all its many different varieties has been bequeathed to us by Dietrich von Hildebrand’s The Nature of Love. Von Hildebrand sees all the many varieties of human love—he distinguishes eight or nine different loves, each with its own proper name—as designed to fold into each other, all converging upwards into a rich, symphonic unity. This unity culminates in that greatest of all gifts, the caritas which is proper only and solely to the Persons of the Trinity for one another. The caritas that makes them one. This caritas is also the force which impels the Lord to overflow his identity, diffusing caritas throughout the human race, inspiriting the race, raising its sights and aspirations, transforming the world like yeast in dough, or the heat of white-hot ingots glowing in the night.
Von Hildebrand’s distinctions between agape and caritas are especially brilliant. His vision of the love of a man and woman bounded in matrimony is both very high and beautiful, and quite down to earth. Married love is not that of angels. It is that of sweating bodies, disheveled sheets, unruly hair, bad breath, scraggly beards, dirty diapers, and, outside the door, clamoring little ones hollering for their breakfast. Christian love is this worldly and realistic. Resistant to romantic illusions, feet-on-the-ground. Realism supreme. Reality is always better than illusion. And in regard to marriage, especially so.
But the love of man and wife is also very high and beautiful, precisely insofar as it may be penetrated by supernatural caritas. As Von Hildebrand writes: “It is caritas that empowers those who are animated by it to enter the kingdom of holy goodness, and it is caritas that brings about the dominion of the humble, reverent, and loving center in them over the center of pride and concupiscence.” Not a bad statement of the fulfillment of spousal love.
Michael Novak has recently retired from the George Frederick Jewett chair in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute and is a member of the editorial board of First Things.
Comments:
...if I weren't Roman Catholic myself, I'd probably laugh at this assertion. Seeing as, well, he presumably had no firsthand experience with sex. But seeing as I am, I'm going to pose the query more seriously: How is it, again, that he was a foremost expert?
It comes from the idea that God knows more about sex than we do. Human experience is never going to tell us that much. People who have one partner know certain things. People who have many know other things. People who abstain from sex know have another set of experiences. Nobody can live all those lives and tell us which is the right path based on experience.
John Paul has profound insight into God. He has the experience of many people that contribute to Catholic tradition. He also has access to what people tell him in confession and spiritual direction. He is far from ignorant.
What makes him a foremost expert is simply that what he has written has been affirmed by so many who have lived it. Be married people, by celibate people, be engaged couples, etc. Sure it is subjective but everything is. But his particular set of experiences are not the reason to reject him.
Romantic love may be the exception rather than the rule, yet there are enough examples both in history and in the present day, to place romantic love in the category of a myth that happens to be true.
God, please defend the innocent. And thank you, Lord, for my wife, who I *decide* to love. Let my eyes see her as she is, the precious creature You placed in my care, who You made to bring forth my children and to help me along the road to your kingdom.
†
How do you define romantic love?
You talk as if it’s temporal: (“if that’s what they’re now feeling”)
The romantic talks as if it’s eternal: (“For then the living member of the couple can go on loving infinitely, forever, above the ordinariness of mere earth.”)
You, or Rougemont, say that romance is “falling in love with love, not with a concrete person.”
It is good that the romantic is in love with love, for God is love. And though He is Three Persons, He is One, just as, though He is Spirit, He is a “concrete person,” Jesus Christ, who is the love of the Church, and in whom the Church has fallen.
You say romance is “above” biological love: “a factor having the power to make instinct turn away from its natural goal and to transform desire into limitless aspiration, into something, that is to say, which does not serve, and indeed operates against, biological ends.”
If this is romance, count me among the clergy, for every Catholic Priest “operates against biological ends.”
Passion does mean suffering, but it hasn’t to do with “the mastery of fate over a free and responsible person.” To love love is to love the object of love more, for if I love a person, it is because they are made in the Image and Likeness of God. The commandments are to love God, and then love your neighbor. Further, to love love is to court suffering but not to love suffering. The courtship is suffering, the marriage is love. Yet even after the marriage the courtship never ends, nor would we want it to. To desire is to suffer, it is the paradox of passion that suffering can be joyful. Further, it is not that the romantic lovers need one another’s absence, but in absence their romance comes alive in their desire for one another’s presence.
Thanks for the thoughts!
Since I was the one who asserted John Paul II's "primacy" as expert in human sexuality, I will also attempt to answer. I do agree with what Randy said, above.
John Paul certainly did have insight into God. He also had deep insight into the human person, made in the image of God. The insight was derived from his study of theology, but certainly also by his decades of very intimate spiritual direction of engaged and married couples--and, of course, hearing confessions as Randy pointed out. Karol Wojtyla had a long-term, intense interest in pastoral work related to marriage.
He also was able to ponder deeply the experiences of the couples he ministered to, to see what these experiences meant in the context of the gospel. An early published work (1960), while he was still a priest I think, called Love and Responsibility explained these insights. By the time he ascended to the papacy in 1978, he had prepared a manuscript for another lengthy treatise, ultimately known as Theology of the Body. Before it was rendered in full-length book form, the TOB was given as a long series of lectures, Wednesday audiences, done on and off from 1979 all the way to 1984.
Since we humans are made in God's image, and called to "love as God loves", our sexuality is a spiritual and relational reality, as well as biological and psychological. It cannot be understood in purely scientific terms, and it must be recognized that it is different in profound ways from that of the other animals. For this reason, any candidate for "foremost authority" must be someone other than a Freud or a B F Skinner, and certainly than a Hugh Hefner or a Dr Ruth! Such an authority must be able to incorporate deep knowledge of the human heart and soul, as well as knowledge in God's mysterious ways. Whatever else he was, John Paul was a man of deep prayer, and a mystic.
(By the way, this is also why those "experienced" with sex are often less qualified to understand and explain it. Ironically, in particular the more experienced in terms of multiple partners, etc, become through their increased experience less able to grasp the true essence of sex. This is probably why the more experienced in sex are more at risk to fail at marriage.)
The above tells of John Paul's preparation and qualifications. But the "proof" of his mastery must come from what he wrote and said. One reads Love and Responsibility and Theology of the Body and comes away in great awe of the profound truth, as well as the profound beauty, of what is being proposed. It blows me away. The view of sex which is proposed is the most positive I have ever seen, and all done in full consistency with the ethos of sexuality called for by the Catholic Church (no surprise that.) But there are some surprises, and delightful ones. For example, John Paul declares that the union of man and woman in the marriage act is the "primordial sacrament"--the first tangible sign on earth of God's love--present from the very beginnings of humanity.
These works are not easy reads. It helped me to read and listen to stuff by Christopher West, an expert on TOB and a very gifted communicator. His lectures on the subject are very good, and his Theology of the Body for Beginners is a good accessible overview of the subject, which can help prepare one to tackle the full original text of TOB.
It is especially curious to note that such defenses seem to be specifically Catholic, in the sense of a cultural tradition that some Catholics feel the need to defend. Medieval Christians such as Dante (see "DNB" above) might have managed to hold together romantic love and caritas together, in the sort of True Myth interpretation advocated by Mr. Koehl, but that synthesis is no longer available to us.
Romantic love is now wholly owned by the enemy. Christians will only get it back--if ever--after a purifying fire that purges our culture of every drop of this corruption. How long that would take (if it is even possible) only God knows.
To anyone who objects, I repeat:
ARE YOU SERIOUS?
Yet , can we ignore the scene when Adam first sets eyes on Eve - " here at last is the flesh of my flesh and the bone of my bones !"
Made in God's own perfect image and being able to discern same in his mate , Adam possibly experienced the best of what we would call romantic love ...
Detached from God , that love possibly became more like idolatrous idealisations - turning to recieve from creature the infinite love that God alone can give fallen man , in His mercy !
The overemphasis of the culture on lifestyles based on such idolatrous values also unsettling to cultures that have seen its detrimental effects in the West .
May many hearts turn to our Lord , The New Adam , to be able to quench the thirst ... for the heavenly joys that the saints speak of !
Could it be that if those who have lost the sense of Goldy image in themselves and the other use argument of romantic love for ungodly behaviors
First of all, read the sources before asserting that a scholarly judgment is "ignorant and grossly uninformed". (Starting, if you'd like, with the Lewis work referenced.)
Secondly, intellectual history 101: just because two different eras or cultures use the same word, it doesn't follow that the word has the same denotation in those eras/cultures.
Thirdly: your word for the day:
ANACHRONISM.
Look it up.
I think it is important for us to distinguish between the "romance" of modern understanding, which is quite accurately addressed herein as illusory and erroneous in many respects, and the true Romance of Charity. Indeed, Christianity is the most romantic (in the old sense) of all stories.
I think that Romance, if viewed rightly, is itself rooted in Caritas; but the modern "romance" which seeks to ground itself in a sort of intensified worldly eros (but remains, nevertheless, limited thereto) is Romance falsely so called.
It is absolutely not better to desire a desire than it is to desire the desired. The journey only has worth in proportion to the outcome. I want to obtain my beloved in the same way that I want to obtain heaven: I can have as much fun as I want on the way, but if I wind up losing them (or being damned), then what does it matter? It is the destination, not the journey; for the journey is only for the destination (whether that destination be geographical, moral, or whatever else).
I spend a lot of time around young people, and I find Rougemont's explanation of desire-for-desire thoroughly persuasive as I watch young men and women bounce from relationship to relationship. It eventually becomes obvious to me if not to them that they do not really desire a relationship with another person so much as they desire To Be In A Relationship. Fortunately, as Augustine showed in the Confessions, sometimes the restless shifting between various objects of love results in the realization that no earthly object can satisfy a longing for infinite Love. But that is a painful journey. Better to pursue rightly-ordered love at the outset.
In the end, maybe romantic love and christian love share the same basic delusion: that couples are going to like each other and be toghter for ever, for the sake of an ideal or the sake of a God. And reality shows us that is a lie.
Romantic love in the past may well have been a desire for desire itself; but modern "romance," if you can call it that, is a desire for the experience of consummation, not the experience of longing. It seems to me that cultivating romantic desire, to include a sense of loyalty to the beloved, is exactly what young people need rather than the source of their problems.
You darned fool. (Stronger is required here but the venue imposes limitations.) Haven't you ever been in love? Good golly.
Yes, you're supposed to reproduce and multiply and love is the way to do that, if you don't interfere with the process. Love creates. But it is love that creates. It's not not the command to reproduce and multiply that creates.
The lack of understanding or appreciation or any hint of understanding of love here is the most astonishing thing. Yes, some find it. Some don't. Some are tall. Some are short. Some are smart. Some are not. Some are well put together. Some are a mess.
So one should never be smart, or pretty, or in love?
Get off any mass transit stop in any major city at morning rush hour and walk a mile and look at all the pretty girls. And what's that for? And what's that for? And what's that for? I mean it in triple.
They aren't fire hydrants that we hook up with as it has it in your essay here. But you only get one of these girls, and you must obey the instructions from the manufacturer, God himself.
I'm in love, for 45 years. Look for it. Don't demean it. If you do, you're lost, in the sense of woodsy lost.
Jerry Crimmins
Chicago
Love is such a strong emotion and it provides some very powerful reactions to humans and human sexuality. I agree that people should be safe when they love others, both emotionally and physically, but I think that people should be able to love and express themselves with others however they choose as well.
To these I would add John Paul II's Theology of the Body. A masterwork which makes the same points in exquisite detail, from the perspective of probably the 20th Century's foremost expert in human sexuality.