Love and the Incarnation

by Piotr J. Małysz

To Love or Not to Love

That love stands at the center of the Christian imagination is a statement of the obvious. It is impossible to speak of God without rather soon turning to love that gives all our God-talk its center and texture. Likewise, it is impossible to speak of humanity without summoning love to show us what it is that endows our being with ultimate meaning, or what, when present by its conspicuous absence, makes us into clanging cymbals. The Bible addresses itself to both of these: the overabundant love of God and the rather halting and often wanting human love.

To a love-starved world this surely is thrilling and affirming news, exactly what all of us want to hear. There are many things in the Bible we may not enjoy hearing, things that make us scratch our heads, squirm, or clutch at all kinds of rationalizations and justifications. But love? Who’s going to argue with love?! After all, isn’t love all that we need? We hear this all around. The world, after all, is also full of love talk of its own. “All you need is love. Love lifts us up where we belong.” The singer Cher may want us to “believe in life after love”—but we of course hope that even “life after love” brings love of its own with it, perhaps a better kind of love, more loving. Love is our lifeblood; it flows in our veins. We are creatures of love, or so it seems: in need of love, ready to take what we can get, and not infrequently radiating with love, or at least love’s affirmations. No quibble here; bring it on!

Yet, when the Christian witness actually does justice to the love which gives it its rationale, there soon emerges a crucial difference on which everything hinges. On its account, Christian love-talk cannot but part ways with the worldly idea of love, even as the latter pales off and, alarmed, itself sounds a retreat from a premature alliance. The Bible is adamant: love is more than an abstraction. For the “love that moves the sun and the other stars,” in Dante’s memorable turn of phrase,[i] does not confine itself to the sun and the other stars, from which it then benevolently and inoffensively presides and rains over all reality. And this is where the rubber hits the road and things become not so easy any more. Why? Because our culture, ever so subtly, renders love self-involved. We are in fact in love . . . with love. We are in love with loving, which makes love like a feel-good drug, self-serving, something that sees me through bad days. All you need is love—and you’ll feel better right away. However, the Bible insists love happens very much on the ground. And this, too, turns out to be one of those things we do not really enjoy hearing. How so?

While it is easy to love humanity in the abstract, it is much more difficult to love specific men and women. Love feels safer, not to mention untarnished and secure in its identity, when it remains abstract. As Zygmunt Bauman observes, “Loneliness [to be sure] spawns insecurity—but relationship seems to do nothing else. In a relationship, you may feel as insecure as without it, or worse. Only the names you give your anxiety change.”[ii] Love feels safer when it remains abstract, preserved in its pristine Gestalt: untouched, unchallenged, un-stretched, untested, unsullied, un-rejected. Always on the move. Utterly for itself, for, in raising its head up high, it manages to keep its nose clean.

Now, it is an altogether different story when love must deal with men and women whose eyes, if we were to look into them, would convey anguish and an overwhelming plea for help, or whose eyes might perhaps express hate, delusion, enmity, or just plain unfamiliar otherness. People, actual people, whether friendly or hostile, destitute or conceited, can be difficult to love. It is likewise, let’s be honest, easier to love the unborn, with their uncomplicated life stories, than those irredeemably broken by life, who, vulnerable though they are, come with a baggage of mistakes and unsavory habits. “Love hurts.” Well, we have been told as much. Sigmund Freud comes in handy with a ready justification: After all, don’t I cheapen my love, trivialize it, and water it down in offering it indiscriminately? God forbid that I should do that! In the name of love itself, says Freud, and for the sake of love, I cannot love all, and I certainly cannot love those who don’t deserve my love, who are not worthy of it, my love.[iii]

Love in the Depths

Confident though we might feel in this impregnable logic of our protestations (we are, after all, saving love itself!), the First Epistle of John leaves no room for doubt that it is all dreadfully wrongheaded and even deadly. Christians are not meant to be followers of Freud. But what, then, is love, the love that is the spiritus movens of our being? As we examine John’s words, we will notice, first of all, that he points us away from ourselves—to God. But even here, and especially here, we need to be precise. And John couldn’t be more emphatic: God’s love, His above all, is no abstraction. It is painfully, painfully concrete. “God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him” (1 John 4:9, NRSV).

What is at stake in this revelation, we should note, is that it is no mere illustration. It is, rather, the very form and presence of God’s love, its entry into the world; so much so that to look for it behind its doings, to abstract it from its work, as if its work were something less than what it is in itself, is to miss it entirely and run into a void. God Himself is where He chooses to have dealings with us—either there or nowhere. For God has dealings with us by means of His very triune Self. It is in God’s work that we are to look for the God of love.

For this reason, when John warns his epistle’s recipients to test the spirits, he has in mind the opposition between the life-giving concreteness of God’s love and its deadly, abstract representation: “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. And this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming; and now it is already in the world” (1 John 4:2-3). What John is saying here is that God’s love is true love because it meets us in the depths—it meets us where we are, in our flesh, and it meets us just as we are, God’s enemies, body and soul, those who have made His world, His creation the loveless and love-starved place it is. As the apostle Paul has also famously put it, love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” It unfolds itself on the ground; yet, as it were, “it never runs aground [οὐδέποτε πίπτει]” (1 Corinthians 13:7-8, trans. altered). In other words, God’s love is true love because it goes out of itself and, in this going out, it affirms itself. It does not suffer diminishment let alone lose itself. It is what it is.

If such indeed is God’s love, then two issues demand our attention. On the one hand, the world and the nature of our salvation in it, and, on the other, the identity of God who so loves. If we don’t confess that Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, has come in the flesh, if we deny His flesh, we in effect declare the world to be beyond redemption, beyond God’s reach, the playground of the antichrist. Then, we must rather confess with the poet:

… the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy—nor love—nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.[iv]

If we don’t confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, then our only hope is to get the hell out of here, leave it all when the time finally comes, and fly away to the god of love up in the sky . . . Only not love, for what is love when it is only an abstraction that we must make our way to, shorn of our own flesh—a spectral love of a god who, despite all his love, only demands our love but, in the end, has no love to give? Some hope! In short, to deny that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is, in the end, not only to deliver the world over to the devil. It is also to strip God of His love, His very being—for “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16).

Two Loves

Implicit in John’s insistent “God is love,” together with the way John fleshes this assertion out, is a critique of the notion that true love is a reified and rarefied love, self-contained and standing at a remove from all that which could obscure it or even compromise it. A love that demands, first of all, to be an object of our striving, which in its light becomes true love, too. John’s critique extends even to the idea that our own love comes into its own only as it reaches towards a love that already is commensurate with and true to itself because it stands abstracted from all that which is not it. This notion goes back at least as far as Plato. In the Symposium, Socrates is an eloquent spokesman for it.

The proper way to go about or be guided through the ways of love is to start with beautiful things in this world and always make the beauty . . . the reason for your ascent. You should use the things of this world as rungs in a ladder. You start by loving one attractive body and step up to two; form there you move on to physical beauty in general, from there to the beauty of people’s activities, from there to the beatify of intellectual endeavours, and from there you ascend to that final intellectual endeavour, which is no more and no less than the study of thatbeauty, so that you finally recognize true beauty.[v]

Christianity, unfortunately, has not been immune to this kind of understanding of divine love—of the God who in God’s Self is love. One hardly needs to go out of the way to find examples. There is Augustine who, reflecting on the debilitating grief that gripped his soul in the wake of his friend’s death, resolves to be on his guard when it comes to human friendship. “The reason why that grief had penetrated me so easily and deeply was that I had poured out my soul on the sand by loving a person sure to die as if he would never die.”[vi] Meister Eckhart may be a bit of an outlier, though not by much, in his claim that “[when] the Son in his divinity wished to become man, and became man, and suffered his passion that affected God’s immovable detachment as little as if the Son had never become man.”[vii] For Eckhart, it is the Christian’s task to attain a “complete detachment,” like God’s, and in consequence to be “so carried into eternity that no transient thing can move him, so that he experiences nothing of whatever is bodily, and he calls the world dead, because nothing earthly has any savor for him.”[viii] Even when faced with 1 Corinthians 13, Eckhart declares: “I praise detachment above all love. First, because the best thing about love is that it compels me to love God, yet detachment compels God to love me.”[ix] In Eckhart, we encounter a Christian rendition and crystallization of the schema of human love purging itself of all worldly attachments and in this way approximating divinity, so that by its purity it might infallibly attract God itself and find rest in the divine love. Though there is a radical aspect to Eckhart’s language, the underlying idea is surprisingly mainstream.

It is this very idea, or rather its wrongheadedness and deadliness, that underlies Martin Luther’s polemic against works of the law in the Heidelberg Disputation. What is rarely understood is why Luther concludes the disputation with a thesis on two loves, divine and human. “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it.”[x] Yet, in light of its final thesis, the disputation is about much more than pride underlying our best works and rendering them insidiously sinful. It is, likewise, about more than the impatience of the theologian of glory with God’s mundane works and his or her desire to bypass the “unattractive” works of God for the sake of relishing God’s unadulterated divinity. The disputation is not only about an ethic of humility or about epistemological access to things truly divine.

Luther’s claim is much stronger; it is at bottom theological and metaphysical. The person who trusts in his or her own works cannot but deny the God of love. For to trust in one’s own works is to believe, whether implicitly or explicitly, that God’s love must be enticed out of the Godhead, that it can only embrace one when attracted by the works one offers, unimpeachable and uncommonly otherworldly in their quality. Thus the person who seeks to draw God toward him- or herself by means of works cannot but deny God in the concreteness of God’s own good work. He or she seeks divine love of a different sort than the love of the God who is love. Such a person misses God not in part but altogether—for the denial implicit in the posture of the theologian of glory has to do with the very being, the very heart of God Himself. In the Incarnation, we would do well to keep this in mind, God doesn’t simply act contrary to our expectations. God is Who He is.

The Mystery of the World

If we follow Luther’s critique, we should thank God that God is not love in a human way—a love that must be attracted, enticed, prodded, goaded and cajoled into a pale embrace out of its splendid, untouched solitude. “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins,” says John (4:10). It was about this very love that the Ethiopian eunuch was reading, as he rode in his chariot along the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. He found himself moved by the strange words of the prophet Isaiah: “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth” (Acts 8:32-33; Isaiah 53:7-8).  What we see in this passage is the messiah’s—Jesus’s—love displayed for a world that had little love for him; more than that, a world hell-bent on denying him justice and positively lynching him. Yet, Jesus does not respond to hate with hate, even though he would have been perfectly justified to do so. “He does not open his mouth.”

Two aspects of Jesus’ very concrete love come to the fore in this prophetic image. They correspond to Christ’s humanity and to His godhead, respectively. First, even in the midst of injustice and the depth of suffering, Jesus knows that the love of the Father is with Him, with Him even in the depths. Where fellow humans have no love for Him, no concrete love that comes to His defense, Jesus knows that the love of the Father is right by His side, that He is not beyond its reach, and that it will come to vindicate Him in the flesh. The only love that, in the end, matters. Jesus knows this in the depth of His humanity, which reverses the self-love of Adam.

Second, in bearing the lovelessness of his accusers and even the abstract love of his cowardly disciples, Jesus in fact stands in their place. They don’t know it, but it is in Him, in the person of the Son of God, that God says “No!” to our lack of love for our fellows, to all our lazy abstractions and self-justification. It is Him, His own Son, that the Father delivers into the hands of men, into our hands. God says His “No!” in Jesus, His faithful Jesus—so that He might say a “Yes!” even to His accusers, to all those whose love comes short, to all of us, unfaithful though we are. A divine “Yes!” “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:24). Such is the depth of God’s love: in Jesus, God supplies what we lack, a true love even in face of hate, and faithfulness amidst trial and temptation, and, in the same Jesus, God takes away what we overflow with, a paltry, half-hearted, and self-absorbed love. Jesus hears God’s “No!” so that we would hear a “Yes!”

And as we come to hear God’s “Yes!”, in Jesus God, in fact, says to us that the truth of who we are lies not in our lovelessness. It lies solely in His love. We can certainly make ourselves loveless, even hateful, and justify it with abandon, even in the name of saving love itself from being cheapened, we can crucify God’s own Son; but, try as we might, we cannot make God loveless or make His love for us any less real than what it has been. Not ever. His love is the truth of who we are. We can contradict it—but we cannot wish it out of existence. We can unleash the spirit of the antichrist, as if the world were beneath God or abandoned by Him, but we cannot wish out of existence the fact that Christ has come in the flesh to bear God’s “No!” to our lovelessness, He has come in the flesh to love where we don’t and see no reason to, and He has done all this to demonstrate the love of God even for His enemies.

The Ethiopian eunuch is transfigured by the message. The world is now a different kind of place than it once appeared. There is salvation in it and for it. For it stands under God’s resounding “Yes!” The call goes out to each and every one of us, “to know and to believe the love that God has for us” (1 John 4:16), that is, to see the truth of who we are not in our erratic loves but in and through the love of God. Jesus Christ is the true vine—faithful to God and neighbor-loving. We are his branches. He calls to us all: “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me” (John 15:4).

To be sure, in and of ourselves, we are incapable of an exuberant, lively, wild, and wholly passionate love. At our best, we may find ourselves in love with love that fumbles and falls the moment it is confronted with the face of another. At our best, we must judge some unworthy of our love, for we don’t have much love to spare. And it may seem to us that, in doing so, we are saving love. But it is a much more powerful love that has already saved us—a wild and undeterred kind of love, a love that will not capitulate and retreat in the face of lovelessness, but stamp it out, just so it may give itself to the loveless.

Loving Your Self

So, it is in God’s concrete love that we must ultimately find ours, renewed and reoriented from the ground up. It is with this insight in mind that St. Bernard insists,[xi] rather counter-intuitively and yet with deep and precise insight, that the highest degree of love is not love of God for God’s sake. This is still to love in a human way and, in reality, to love an abstraction. For, in doing so, we conveniently leave behind the world God so loved and pursued as rather unworthy of our own pursuit, as beneath our own love. We think of our love as precious, as worthy at the very least of the stars moved by love divine. For Bernard, however, the highest degree of love, which he doubts whether it is possible on this side of the grave, is actually to love oneself for God’s sake. Loving oneself for God’s sake is loving oneself in the concreteness of God’s love which has claimed me for itself. It is to love myself as given to myself entirely from God’s hand—to love myself as justified by God in my very being. The possibilities are earth-shattering. “To love in this way is to become like God,” Bernard claims. For to love oneself in this way—entirely for God’s sake—is to testify to God’s love with one’s whole being and to do so on the ground, as it were, and in the flesh. Thus, to love myself for God’s sake is also to love my neighbor as myself, for he or she, too, has been embraced by the love of God-in-Christ.

This is now our moment to find ourselves transfigured by God’s love, to live from its power: “Beloved,” says John, “if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” and to do so without fear, for “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:11, 18). And the Lord Himself adds: “My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples” (John 15:8). Disciples in a love-starved world, a world that is filled with all kinds of love talk and love posturing, but desperately, desperately needs God’s love, in the flesh, on the ground, even in our faces, and hands, and feet.

Notes

[i] Dante Alighieri, The Paradiso, Canto XXXIII.146; The Divine Comedy, trans. J. Ciardi (New York: New American Library, 2003), 894.

[ii] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003), 15.

[iii] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Norton, 2010), 91-92.

[iv] Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach (1867) (emphasis added).

[v] Plato, Symposium, trans. R. Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 55 [211].

[vi] Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. H. Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 60 [IV.viii (13)].

[vii] Meister Eckhart, On Detachment; The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, trans. E. Colledge and B. McGinn (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1981), 289.

[viii] Ibid., 288.

[ix] Ibid., 286.

[x] Martin Luther, Heidelberg Disputation (1518); Luther’s Works, vol. 31 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1957), 41, 57.

[xi] Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God; Selected Works, trans. G. R. Evans (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1987), 195-197, 204.