Happy Valentine's Day!

Although the commercial focus is on romantic love, Valentine’s Day is a good time to think about love in general, as a force and as a philosophy of life. People describe love in a million ways and tack on countless definitions to it that vary infinitely, and yet love remains the same and is understood in the same way by all, because love eludes the intellect and impresses itself instead into the heart and soul. All of the most fundamental things do so, because the intellect is the least fundamental form of existence. The intellect deals with existence after it has taken a physical form, when it has reached its most tangible state. The intellect deals with existence at its surface, and analyzes the ripples in the water rather than the original disturbance. Nothing that deals with the form of existence rather than the spirit can truly comprehend love.

But, like anything, love takes a form, and that is precisely where the confusion arises. Love makes ripples in the water, but the ripples look differently to the observer on the shore than they do to the observer on the cliff overhead. To one, perhaps, it appears violent, while to the other it appears peaceful. Is its essence in the ripples it makes, in the actions it drives us to, in the desires it ignites, or in that indefinable inner force, the initial disturbance? In truth, its essence is in all of these things, all at once; spirit of existence and form of existence are equally valid, and are bound up together. And forms of existence are infinitely complex; there are always a million things happening all at once. This is why love is so difficult to understand intellectually, because to attempt any kind of intellectual understanding we must break the problem into discrete parts and analyze them one by one. But if we do this with the form of love, we only confuse ourselves with a million irrelevant details all tangled up together. We may see someone vigorously push a person out of the path of a speeding car and think that love is violent, or we may see someone take the hand of a small child and think that love is gentle. Worst of all, we may see the same form in different contexts, one with love and one without, and won’t be able to make head or tail of it. The fact is, we cannot understand love from form alone. Analyzing a ripple in the water doesn’t tell us anything about what caused the ripple; it might have been caused by a falling rock or by someone wading into the water, and we would have no way of knowing from the ripple alone. To understand love, we must view it at a more fundamental stage, before it takes a form at all.

But how can we view something that has no form? The intellectual rejects such a course of action, because it cannot be subjected to any kind of method or logic. But comprehension of the fundamental, of the profound, demands a sacrifice of intellect, because intellect is, of all human powers, the least adequate. When we attempt to apply intellect to the profound, we arrive at uncertainty and nothingness, and the conclusion that there is no objective reality. Such a philosophy does not bear out in the world we live in; it does not keep the planets in motion, it does not make the plants grow, it cannot build an airplane or a computer. The limitation of intellect is that it can only operate on relative objects, on cause and effect, and on the physical manifestation of fact. But every application of human reason has its root in a fundamental fact, in something that is assumed to be true, and we see the confirmation of our assumptions in the final product. Intellectual understanding is retrograde: it is only achieved in the implementation of an assumption, in the success or failure of something we believe to be true. Spiritual understanding, rather, is the foreknowledge of the assumption and the recognition of a fact antecedent to its manifestation. But I digress.

Let us begin with the Apostle Paul’s famous passage on love, in which he explains love qualitatively—i.e., in terms of the virtues or character traits that are tied up with the attitude of love:

“Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7)

The point that Paul is trying to make in this chapter is that love is an attitude of existence, a state of being, before it is an action. Note that the previous chapter, 1 Corinthians 12, discusses spiritual gifts and offices—i.e., the ministries of the church. Paul is trying to explain to the Corinthian church that any action, however pious or virtuous, is meaningless if it does not stem from a place of genuine love. He does not try to explain love in terms of actions, as if it were a method or protocol to follow, but in terms of virtues that, while they don’t come naturally and must certainly be practiced, are impossible to fake. Consider the first three verses of 1 Corinthians 13:

“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.”

Even if the saint gives all he has to the poor and sacrifices his own body, it means nothing without love! The action without the spirit is meaningless. But if the spirit is present, the action is immensely valuable; Paul is not saying that the ministries of the church have no value, but that the spirit and the action must work together, in the proper order. As Christ Himself said: “Seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.”

Thus, if we understand first that love is a spirit, a certain attitude toward existence, we can begin to discover the attributes of that attitude in the effects it produces—in the ripples in the water. The fact is, we can never define love directly; definitions are limited to the material realm, and love is too vast, too infinite, and, above all, too spiritual, to be so defined. But without precisely defining it, we still understand it, because we feel the flame it ignites within us, we feel the spirit it stirs, and we feel the impetus toward virtue. That is a critical point: that love is an impetus to virtue. Love, genuine love, will never drive us to evil, because love itself is the force of Good. Too often, love is confused with desire because they share a similar passion, but one is divine while the other is animal. To discern between the two is the ambition of the saint.

Recently, I had a conversation with my brother about the difference between poetic philosophy, such as Kierkegaard, and analytical philosophy, such as Descartes. I lamented that Kierkegaard made some interesting points, but he used such flowery language it was often difficult to follow. “It sounds pretty,” I said, “but sometimes I wish he would just come out and say what he means.” My brother sagely replied that the whole point of poetic philosophy or even of poetry itself was to explain things that couldn’t be explained in any other way; a scientist can explain the objective reality of a spring day, but only a poet can take you there. Only a poet can describe the beauty of springtime, and only a poet can tell you what love is. This is exactly why Jesus used parables in all His teachings, because nothing spiritual can be understood directly, through any kind of methodical, scientific approach. It must be understood poetically, soulfully, just like springtime. It must, ultimately, be experienced.

The scholars and intellectuals, even amongst Christ’s own disciples, were frustrated and baffled by His teachings for the same reason I was frustrated with Kierkegaard: “I wish he would just come out and say it.” It is not that what He taught was illogical that made it inaccessible to intellectual method, but that human intelligence is limited to such a particular sphere of existence, to a physical, materialistic sphere of existence. What He taught was not outside this sphere of existence, but simply extended so far beyond it that human intelligence could only comprehend it in a very limited sense. He wanted us to understand faith, salvation, and the kingdom of Heaven in a deeper sense, so He presented it to the soul rather than the mind. Jesus never told us what the kingdom of Heaven is, only what it is like, because we cannot possibly understand what the kingdom of Heaven is intellectually. He did not say “the kingdom of Heaven is in these coordinates of time and space,” or “the kingdom of Heaven is a state of being,” or anything that would satisfy the scholar or scientist. Instead, He said: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field,” and “the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed,” or like treasure hidden in a field, or like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls.

In the same way, to describe anything fundamental or anything that extends beyond the realm of what we can physically quantify, we must approach it in a poetic, spiritual way. This has been done more with the idea of love, perhaps, than with anything else, and especially with romantic love, as the commercial interpretation of Valentine’s Day never fails to remind us. But I would like to highlight a different idea of love, a Christ-like love, which, rather than being a feeling or a set of actions, is an attitude of existence and a practice of sainthood. Fyodor Dostoevsky presented such a love in his novels, by taking his readers to the darkest corners of the human heart and kindling a kind of fanatic love in and toward the sufferer. Dostoevsky believed that life was a kind of purgatory, that humanity was continuously being redeemed through its suffering—not in the total, divine sense of redemption through the suffering of Christ, but in the local sense of man to man. Christ redeems us to God, but our daily suffering on earth redeems us to each other. Thus, Dostoevsky purported that love was a product of the redemptive power of suffering. In Crime and Punishment, Sonia forgave the murderer Raskolnikov because of the immensity of his suffering—his internal suffering, in the form of his personal revelation of guilt, and his external suffering, in the form of his public admission of guilt and acceptance of judicial punishment. Without, perhaps, the extreme suffering that Dostoevsky presented in his novels, we can still practice this kind of saintliness on the basis of shared humanity alone: in the form of a generous spirit to those around us, certainly, but, more importantly, in our response to evil. Perhaps the best, more or less contemporary example of this is Dr. Martin Luther King’s teaching of non-violent activism. He believed in the moral power of the soul for conquering evil and proved this philosophy in the wild success of the Civil Rights Movement. Anyone who has read his sermons or other writings must know how highly he esteemed Christ-like love as a weapon against immoral institutions. “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate,” he said, “adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Contrary to the secular idolization of force or even the church’s resistance to the social gospel, he believed that the practice of sainthood could have an immense reformative power, on a national and even a global scale.

Dostoevsky and Dr. King’s descriptions of love as a force of good in the world were the most influential to me, but there are countless other examples. If it seems that in this idea of love as an attitude of existence I am only describing morality, I would ask you to recall the Apostle Paul’s discussion of love in 1 Corinthians. Morality implies law, and, in a way, action. Love, rather, is the spiritual force that gives rise to morality. It is the state of being in which one is self-motivated toward virtue.