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Love is the basic passion of man. Every emotion of the human heart is reducible to it. Without love we would never become better, for love is the impetus to perfection, the fulfillment of what we have not. Love, in the broad sense of the term, is found wherever there is existence. It has the same dimensions as being. Whatever has an inclination, whether it be fire to burn upwards, flowers to bloom, animals to beget, or man to wed, has love. Chemical elements love one another through the law of affinity of one element for another, as two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen make water. Plants love the earth, the sun, the moisture, through the Divinely implanted laws of vegetation; animals love through the Divinely infused instincts which guide them to the end for which they were created. But when it comes to man, there is no determined instinct, but reason and freedom by which he can freely choose that which will complement and perfect his nature. What instinct is to the animal, that the free will is to man. Choice is without reason in beasts, but it is rational in man.
Animal love is tied down to what can be tasted, seen, touched and heard, but man's love is as universal as goodness, beauty, and truth. Man can know and love not only a good meal, but Goodness. He may not always love what is best for him but this never destroys his power to love Love, Which is God.
Love is an inclination or a tendency to seek what seems good. The lover seeks union with the good which is loved in order to be perfected by it. The mystery of all love is that it actually precedes every act of choice; one chooses because he loves, he does not love because he chooses. The youth loves the maiden not because he chooses her from among maidens, but rather he elects and selects her as unique because he loves her. As St. Thomas puts it: "All other passions and appetites presuppose love as their first root." All other passions, even those which seem the enemy of love, are related to it, such as fear and hate. Fear rises from a danger of losing what is loved, whether it be wealth, possessions, or friends. Hatred springs from an antipathy against those who would do violence to our loves. Hatefulness, bitterness, envy and fretfulness are all perverted kinds of love.
Love is very different from knowledge. When the mind is confronted with something above its level--for example, an abstract principle of metaphysics or mathematics--it breaks it down into examples so that it can understand it. The reason why many teachers fail in their profession is because the! do not know how to bring down to a lower and concrete level the subject which they teach. Maybe they do not know the subject, for the test of knowing anything is the ability to give an example for it. Theses with footnotes, into which are thrown the knowledge that is not understood, are easier to write than a popularization of that same subject for a beginner. Some are thought to be learned when they are only confusing. The Word Incarnate spoke in terms of parables illustrating eternal verities, such as judgment of the good and bad, under the analogy of the separation of sheep and goats. If we understand anything, we can make it clear. If we do not understand it, we can never explain it.
But love acts just the opposite to knowledge. Love goes out to meet the demands of what is loved. The intellect pulls higher things down to its level; the will, which is the seat of love, lifts itself up to the level of the good which it loves. If one loves music, one meets the demands of music by submitting to its laws; if one wishes to win the love of a poet, one must cultivate some appreciation of poetry. Because love goes up to meet the beloved, it follows that the nobler the love, the nobler the character. We live on the plane of our loves.
If, then, anyone wishes to judge his character, all he has to do is to answer the question: "What do I love most?" As Our Lord put it: "Where your treasure-house is, there your heart is too." (Matt. 6:21) Our favorite topic of conversation is the telltale of Our deepest love. It would be wrong to judge people solely by the snatches of conversation one overhears on the streets and in dining rooms, for these would make it appear that for many men business is their greatest love, while for women, it is fashion or style. Actually, however, there are two basic loves which everyone has without exception: love of self and love of others. The first is the basis of self-preservation; the second is the root of friendship and community. Love exists not in isolation or suspension, it craves involvement with others because love is essentially a relation. Love of self becomes the love of others, either for the sake of association or for the continuation of humankind.
These two loves of self and neighbor ought to go together, but they often pull in opposite directions. On the one hand, we cannot cling to ourselves and love ourselves apart from all others, because he who is absolutely alone is loveless. On the other hand, we cannot cling entirely to others, for though they offer occasion of love, they also set limits to our love. They do this either because they are not absolutely lovable, or because they are really not worth clinging to at all. Loving self alone has many disadvantages: it forces us to dwell in quarters that are too cramped and squalid for comfort; it confronts self with a self that in some moments is not only unlovable, but even intolerable; and it makes us want to get away from ourselves because we find we are not very deep. Probing into the depths of our ego to find peace is too often like plunging into a pool without water. After a while, our self-centeredness ends in self disruption, as we discover we have no center at all. No one can love himself properly unless he knows why he is living.
Love is useless when alone, as it is in sleep or death. It is really possessed only by giving it to others. Love is a sign of our creatureliness, the strongest proof that we are not gods and have not all we need within ourselves. If we were God, we would have no need of loving anything else, for love would find its perfection within itself, as in God. We must love others because we are imperfect; it is the mark of our indigence, a reminder that we came from nothingness, and that of and by ourselves love is incomplete and sterile. Yet in giving to others, we are often disappointed; some want to use us, others to possess us. The involvement does not come up to our expectations; the one whom we thought was a good angel turns out to be a fallen one. Some contacts with others are like boomerangs; they throw us back on ourselves poorer than when we left, and therefore embittered. Torn between the independence of their own ego and dependence on other egos, tossed between worship of self and worship of others, many hearts develop a restlessness and a fatigue which keep the rich busy running to psychoanalysts to have their anxiety explained away, and the poor having recourse to the cheaper charlatans of alcoholism and sleeping tablets. It is interesting how a materialistic civilization describes the rich as suffering from an "anxiety neurosis," and the poor as being plain "nuts" or "crackpots." If no true solution of the tension between love of self and love of others is found, legitimate self-love degenerates into egotism, pride, skepticism, and arrogance, while love of others degenerates into lust, cruelty, and hatred of the spiritual. Cynics are disappointed egotists, and revolutionists of violence are disgruntled altruists. Perverted self-love, when it became political, created Individualism, or Historical Liberalism; perverted love of others, when it became political, created Totalitarianism.
There is a solution to this problem of tension between love of the ego and love of the non-ego, or the independence of the ego and its dependence on other egos, but it is not to be found either in the ego or the non-ego. The basic error of mankind has been to assume that only two are needed for love: you and me, or society and me, or humanity and me. Really it takes three: self, other selves, and God; you, and me, and God. Love of self without love of God is selfishness; love of neighbor without love of God embraces only those who are pleasing to us, not those who are hateful. One cannot tie two sticks together without something outside the sticks; one cannot bind the nations of the world together except by the recognition of a Law and a Person outside the nations themselves. Duality in love is extinction through the exhaustion of self-giving. Love is triune or it dies. It requires three virtues, faith, hope, and charity, which intertwine, purify, and regenerate each other. To believe in God is to throw ourselves into His arms; to hope in Him is to rest in His heart in patience amidst trials and tribulations; to love Him is to be with Him through a participation of His Divine Nature through grace. If love did not have faith and trust, it would die; if love did not have hope, its sufferings would be torture, and love might seem loveless. Love of self, love of neighbor, and love of God go together and when separated fall apart.
Love of self without love of God is egotism, for if there is no Perfect Love from Whom we came and for Whom we are destined, then the ego becomes the center. But when self is loved in God, the whole concept of what is self-perfection changes. If the ego is an absolute, its perfection consists in having whatever will make it happy, and at all costs; this is the essence of egotism, or selfishness. If union with Perfect Love is the goal of personality, then its perfection consists not in having but in being had, not in owning but in being owned, or better still, not in having but in being.
Union with Perfect Happiness or God is not something extrinsic to us, like a gold medal to a student, but is, rather, intrinsic to our nature, as blooming is to a flower. Without it we are unsatisfied and incomplete. The self actually is always craving for this Divine Love. Its insatiable urges toward happiness, its anticipated ecstasy of pleasures, its constant desire to love without satiety, its reaching for something beyond its grasp, the sadness it feels in attaining any happiness less than the infinite--all these constitute the mating call of God to the soul. As trees in the forest bend through other trees to absorb the light, so every self is striving for the Love which is God. If this Love seems contrary to some people's desires, it is only because it is contrary to their developed egotism but not to their nature. God has not given to self everything it needs for happiness; He kept back one thing which is needed, Himself. On this point, there is a similarity between the temporal unhappiness on earth and the eternal unhappiness in hell: the soul in each instance lacks something.
There is not a golfer in America who has not heard the story, which is theologically sound, about the golfer who went to hell and asked to play golf. The Devil showed him a 36-hole course with a beautiful clubhouse, long fairways, perfectly placed hazards, rolling hills, and velvety greens. Next the Devil gave him a set of clubs so well balanced that the golfer felt he had been swinging them all his life. Out to the first tee they stepped ready for a game. The golfer said: "What a course! Give me the ball." The Devil answered: "Sorry, Comrade (they call one another 'Comrade,' not 'Brother' in Hell), we have no balls. That's the hell of it." And it is just that which makes hell: the lack of Perfect Life, Perfect Truth, and Perfect Love, which is God, Who is essential for our happiness.
God keeps something back on earth, not as a punishment, but as a solicitation. The poet George Herbert has told us that God poured out wealth, beauty, and pleasure on man, but kept back Himself:
For if I should (said He)
Bestow this jewel also on creatures,
He would adore My gifts instead of Me,
And rest in nature, not the God of nature,
So both should losers be.
Yet let him keep the rest
But keep them with repining restlessness;
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to My Breast.
It takes some effort to grow in this love, for as the art of painting is cultivated by painting, and speaking is learned by speaking, and study is learned by studying, so love is learned by loving. It takes considerable asceticism to banish all unloving thoughts and to make us eventually loving. The will to love makes us lovers.
There are four stages the soul passes through in its love of God: (a) the soul which starts with loving self for its own sake soon realizes its own insufficiency, seeing that loving self without God is like loving the ray of sunlight without the sun. Perhaps the soul at this point also sees that even the self would be quite unlovable unless love-energy or lovableness had been put into it by God. (b) God is loved not for His own sake, but for the sake of the self. At this stage, there are prayers of petition because God is loved because of the favors He gives. This was the love of Peter when he asked of the Lord: "What do we get out of it?" (c) God is loved for His sake, not ours. The soul cares more for the Beloved than for what the Beloved gives; in the romantic order it corresponds to that moment when the beloved no longer loves the suitor because he sends roses, but because he is lovable. It is like the love of a mother for a child who seeks no favor in return. (d) The final stage is one of those rare moments when the love of self is completely abandoned and emptied and surrendered for the sake of God. This would correspond to a moment in a mother's life when she ceases to think of her own life in order to save her child from death. In this kind of Divine Love, the self is not destroyed but transfigured. This is the "love that leaves all other love a pain."
As a person uses the scalpel on his soul and analyzes his psyche, he discovers more and more how unlovable he is. The flights from self, the plunges into the irresponsibility of artificial unconsciousness, prove that man cannot bear himself. Without God Pascal rightly described the self as despicable, or the "moi haissable." Fundamentally, it is because God loves us that we ought to love ourselves. If He sees something worthwhile in us and died to save us, then we have a motive for loving self rightly. As a person feels ennobled when a beautiful and gracious friend loves him, then what shall be the ecstasy of a soul at that moment when it awakes to the shattering truth: God loves me!
It is easy to love those who love us, and Our Divine Lord told us that there was no reward in this. But what about the number of people in the world whom we regard as unlovable? One of the strongest social arguments for God is this: there must be a God, otherwise so many people would be unloved The love of God makes it possible to love those who are "hard to love." Why should we love those who hate us malign us, who trample on our feet to get to the first seats in a theater? There is only one reason: for God's sake. We may not like them, for liking is emotional, but we can love them, for love is in the will and is subject to command "But I tell you, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who persecute and insult you." (Matt. 5:44) Because we love God, we can love anyone for His sake, as a lover will cultivate a love of lobster for the sake of the beloved. When therefore some particularly repulsive individual comes our way, and we are inclined to reject his presence even for a brief span of time, we ought to think of God appearing to us at that moment saying: "Listen, I put up with him for forty years; can't you put up with him for ten minutes?"
The love of God also reminds us that we ought not to judge the neighbor by his appearance. If he had all the graces and opportunities we have had, how much more he might love God. The Pharisee in the front of the Temple who kept the law and gave the amount deductible from income tax to the poor was uncommended by God, while the publican who poured out his soul to God, begging pardon, went back to his own house justified. It was this thought that made Philip Neri say, as he saw a condemned man go to the gallows: "There goes Philip except for the grace of God." After a while all these people, who before seemed so unattractive, are actually seen as much better than we; spiritually we get to a point where we feel their sin as our own, and take on their debts in penance, as the Savior took on ours, because we love them in God.
Love of neighbor, in like manner, when suffused by the love of God, never uses the neighbor for one's own pleasure. Nothing has so much contributed to the debasement of human relationships as the idea that friends are won by flattery. True love helps the neighbor to fulfill his vocation in God and thus it coincides with his own. As St. Paul told the Romans: "We who are bold in our confidence ought to bear with the scruples of those who are timorous; not to insist on having our own way. Each of us ought to give way to his neighbor, where it serves a good purpose by building up his faith." (Romans 15:1-2) In human relationships we limit the horizon of our affection to those whom we love. Few are the Samaritans who love those who hate them. Nothing can extend this horizon as much as recognizing not those alone whom we love, but those whom God loves, and that is everybody. Thus the soul becomes like God, the "creator" of the one we love. In Him we make them lovable. Not only does a love of God prolong God's Creation, it even continues His Redemption, at least to the extent that we would re-create or redeem those whom we love.
Imagine a large circle and in the center of it rays of light that spread out to the circumference. The light in the center is God; each of us is a ray. The closer the rays are to the center, the closer the rays are to one another. The closer we live to God, the closer we are bound to our neighbor; the farther we are from God, the farther we are from one another. The more each ray departs from its center, the weaker it becomes; and the closer it gets to the center, the stronger it becomes.
The secret of happiness is for each man to live as close to God as he can, and he will thereby live closer to his neighbor. This is the solution to the riddle of Love. In Him self love becomes perfected; in Him also we love our neighbor as ourselves and for the same reason. If, therefore, I hate anyone, I hate someone God made; if I love myself to the exclusion of God, I find that I hate myself for not being all I ought to be.
Love at first seems a contradiction: How can one love self without being selfish? How can one love others without losing self? The answer is: By loving both self and neighbor in God. It is His Love that makes us love both self and neighbor rightly. God has first loved us while as yet we were sinners. Love of self avoids egotism by love of self-perfection, which is achieved by loving God. Love of others avoids totalitarianism, or the losing of self by absorption in the mass, through the loving of others in the spiritual brotherhood of "Our Father."
The poor frustrated souls who are locked up inside their own minds keep their little egotistic heads too busy and their selfish hands and feet too idle. If they would begin loving their neighbor for God's sake, they would soon find themselves loving their own moral perfection, which consists not in seeing their self-will but in living according to God's will. This double law of love of self and neighbor in God is the secret of life, for Our Savior, after giving the law of love of God and neighbor, said: "Do this, and thou shalt find life." (Luke 10:28)
God never intended that the "I" and the "Thou" should be separated. God is no obstacle to the full enjoyment of self, nor is He a competitor to the love of neighbor. But when love becomes triune, God is installed in the center of the "I" and the "Thou," thus preventing the "I" from being an egotist and the "Thou" from becoming a tool or instrument of pleasure. Such love is God in pilgrimage. But if we would seek the reason why it takes three to make love, we must look into the heart of God Himself.
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