A Provocative Article About Human Love
The WSJ ran an article last weekend reviewing three books (All About Love by Appignanesi, Extravagant Expectations by Hollander, and Love: A History by May) on the topic of post-Christian worldviews of human love, observing that humans have deified the very idea of love itself. A few paragraphs out of the article are thought-provoking:
"When God died -- that is, when Western intellectuals and artists of the 18th and 19th centuries began finding themselves unable to believe in the Christianity of their forebears or its deity -- the idea took hold that in selfless love for another person one could find the same absolute intensity of feeling, capacity for moral regeneration and conviction of one's own immortality that had been previously associated with the love of God. Simon May . . . describes this as the 'divination of human love' where, in the Western imagination, 'love came to play God' as our 'ultimate source of meaning and happiness, and of power over suffering and disappointment.'"
But the truth uncovered by these authors -- for various reasons (some academic and some not -- for example, in the "some not" category, one author noted that the #1 quality sought out in personal ads is a "fun orientation") -- is that human love is all too often centered in self-interest. As the article continues:
"Despite the [divine] story line promoted by the Romantics and their heirs, human love is not selfless, unconditional or eternal. In short, it in no way resembles the limitlessly generous divine love of conventional Christian belief. The most ardent of human lovers fall out of love fast when they discover something distasteful about their beloved. Love -- in contrast to admiration or a sense of duty -- is rare, selective and fickle."
The conclusions in the above paragraph, incidentally, were reached by one (Mr. May) admittedly "eccentric and decidedly hostile" to the Bible. Which makes me only wonder -- what is the author left with then? The reviewer notes that "Mr. May turns out to be another Romantic, and that may be the point. As creatures of a secular age, we may be stuck with Romanticism, criticize it though we may. The only alternative for the godless, as Mr. May says, is despair."
"When God died -- that is, when Western intellectuals and artists of the 18th and 19th centuries began finding themselves unable to believe in the Christianity of their forebears or its deity -- the idea took hold that in selfless love for another person one could find the same absolute intensity of feeling, capacity for moral regeneration and conviction of one's own immortality that had been previously associated with the love of God. Simon May . . . describes this as the 'divination of human love' where, in the Western imagination, 'love came to play God' as our 'ultimate source of meaning and happiness, and of power over suffering and disappointment.'"
But the truth uncovered by these authors -- for various reasons (some academic and some not -- for example, in the "some not" category, one author noted that the #1 quality sought out in personal ads is a "fun orientation") -- is that human love is all too often centered in self-interest. As the article continues:
"Despite the [divine] story line promoted by the Romantics and their heirs, human love is not selfless, unconditional or eternal. In short, it in no way resembles the limitlessly generous divine love of conventional Christian belief. The most ardent of human lovers fall out of love fast when they discover something distasteful about their beloved. Love -- in contrast to admiration or a sense of duty -- is rare, selective and fickle."
The conclusions in the above paragraph, incidentally, were reached by one (Mr. May) admittedly "eccentric and decidedly hostile" to the Bible. Which makes me only wonder -- what is the author left with then? The reviewer notes that "Mr. May turns out to be another Romantic, and that may be the point. As creatures of a secular age, we may be stuck with Romanticism, criticize it though we may. The only alternative for the godless, as Mr. May says, is despair."