Love enlightened

The Promises and Ambiguities of Love

In this article I wish to reflect upon the potential of a critical theological approach to love. Although in recent centuries love has at times been appealed to as an antidote to rational thinking, my argument wishes to employ critical thinking in order to develop a more responsible theology of love.

1. I shall first review some crucial dimensions of human love.
2. Secondly I shall interpret four significant early Christian approaches to love.
3. In a third part I shall discuss the philosophical approaches to love in two contemporary thinkers.
4. I conclude with a brief analysis of the relationship between love, God, and self.

1 Defining Love

If one consults any of the standard encyclopaedias on love one will find – in spite of differences in detail – a degree of consensus : love is a summary concept for a number of human relationships ; relationships that affirm some subject or object, acknowledge its value, and are motivated further to explore the subject or object of their attention.

Moreover, these relationships are often accompanied by specific emotions and inspired by a desire to seek some sort of union with the other. Love is always transitive, i.e. we cannot merely say that ‘we love,’ we must always say whom or what we love. Not only grammatically, love needs the other. Love relationships between subjects, that concern us here, can be further distinguished in terms of their respective intensity and exclusivity. The love between two partners brings together the personal, the erotic, and possibly even the sexual attraction and energy of two persons and thus changes both partners’ ways of being as well as their experiences and understandings of the extension of their bodies. Interestingly enough we can meaningfully state that we love subjects who are not even or no longer physically present : we can say that we love our dead grandparents, Mother Theresa, Napoleon, or God. As Søren Kierkegaard reminded us, we even can love the dead.

« The work of love in recollecting one who is dead is a work of the most unselfish love ” (Kierkegaard 1995 : 349)

Thus, we can feel part of larger bodies of love, not only of the transforming experience of an intimate and sexual relationship of a loving couple, but we can also be part of a family, a circle of friends, a people, or a religious body, such as the ‘body of Christ’ and the ‘community of saints.’

Already at this point we must conclude that the experience of love has implications for the understanding of our bodies.

However, no experience of love – however intense and sweet – removes the powerful experience of difference. The human desire for union with the other person or with God originates in the awareness of difference and otherness. Difference provides love with much energy. Human desire for the other arises out of the experience of difference or radical otherness. No experience of love can ever remove from us our individuality and our personal journey towards death, but it can make that journey through life, toward our individual and personal deaths, different. Love has the potential to transform our lives.

This potential is often experienced as ambiguous. When people confess in magazines of the rainbow press that love has destroyed their lives, that love lies at the bottom of their personal misery, that love has given them more pain than death ever could, etc., they point to the experience of unfulfilled, rejected, or frustrated love, to the pain of having opened oneself to another person who then might have taken advantage of it. Love, we must conclude, is a risky business. [1] One has no guarantee that one’s desire for the other, the investment of feelings and body, one’s care for the other, and the risk of one’s own self in this new and mysterious relationship with the other will ever result in a new united ‘body’ of blissful experience.

Love cannot be made. Sex can be made, but not love. Love is and remains a mystery. As the English language expresses it, I can fall in love. I can be drawn into the transformative and revolutionary experience of love. I can be taken into a new experience of both another person and even my own self. I can be invited to become part of a new body transcending my own body. No amount of preparation or intellectual consideration can fully prepare me for the actual experience of encountering the otherness of the other and the otherness of my own self. Love is not a principle, but praxis.

The critical and self-critical reflection upon this praxis, however, may help us to better appreciate the promises and ambiguities of love both in history and the present. It might also help us develop our sensitivity toward detecting instances of pseudo-love, distortions of love, or unrealistic expectations of love and related disappointments. It might make us more aware of the close connection between love and power. It may confront us with the shadow of love. Critical reflections on love call for an enlightened discourse.

For example, suspicions of projection have been voiced in psychoanalysis with reference to assumed love relationships whose incapacity to allow personal transformation has been interpreted as a sign of the lack of genuine love. [2] Sociologists have described how especially in current Western culture love relationships are often overburdened with particularly unrealistic expectations. They have alerted us to the need for discussing the tendency of reducing love to a couple’s insular pursuit of happiness in or even against a threatening environment. The couple’s inability to appreciate the interconnectedness of all forms of love may eventually lead to an implosion of their own love relationship. [3]

The theological treatment of love also needs to be analyzed with some measure of suspicion and critique. Why has there been a strong tendency to propagate ‘pure’ Christian love over against the blending of love with eroticism (‘impure love’) ? Is it not appropriate to appreciate the erotic dimension of all forms of love ? Stressing this erotic nature of human love facilitates the rediscovery of the important aspect of desire operating in all forms of love. Moreover, some Christian thinkers have promoted the theory that real love is somehow detached from the human body, i.e. purely spiritual.

Against such voices it would seem important to emphasize that human love is always embodied, gendered, and historically conditioned. Human love can escape the human conditions of time, space, and language only at the price of death. However, the question is how, this side of death, love may be understood as an experience of radical otherness precisely because of its disclosive, transcendent, and transformative potential.

I cannot here examine all the different aspects and forms of love , [4] but I would like to draw the reader’s attention to five dimensions necessary for any discussion of the complex phenomenon of love :

1.1 Love has a history

No practice of love and no consideration of love occur in a cultural vacuum. Rather, all experiences of and reflections upon love are embedded in space, time, and language. Any longing to retrieve the one and only authentic understanding of love would be as naïve as the search for the one and only valid interpretation of a complex literary text. Even though a great many cultures and religions have developed discourses, praises, defenses, and practices of love, love is not thereby necessarily a trans-cultural phenomenon. Rather, every form or expression of love is rooted in a specific culture, even when it occurs as a radically transformative force within it.

1.2 Love has a location

Every experience of love occurs in a specific cultural, social, political, religious, aesthetic, and linguistic context.

1.3 Love requires an embodied self

All loving relations into which we are capable of entering as humans are made possible, but are also limited, by our physical existence. Human love does not happen outside the human body. Moreover, love requires respect for the bodily limits and limitations of the other as well as the self. To think about love forces us to reflect upon our bodies and their nature as well as upon their possible extensions promoted by love.

Through acts of loving solidarity we can participate even in larger ‘bodies,’ such as the body of Christ. The Christian discourse of love has always referred to the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ as the highest manifestation of love on earth, thus defending the significance of the human body for divine love. However, belief in the Incarnation has not always protected Christianity from belittling the body. [5]

Nevertheless, contemporary attempts at reconstructing the human body do not make this retrieval of the body’s significance any easier. We are confronted today both with a public commodification of the (young) body and a repression of the (fragile and old) body. The body is threatened in many ways. Not only does one significant strand of the Christian tradition consider the body as the bearer of sin and corruption and therefore recommends a strict moral control of all bodily utterances, fluids, and extensions.

Additionally, considerable trends within post-Christian secular culture arrive at ultimately negative attitudes toward the actual body. Fasting, painful sporting activities, beauty operations, all sorts of medicines and remedies are recommended in order to reach a higher level of control over the body. A new and perfect body is longed for – a kind of secular object of salvation. The hope for the perfect body seems to have replaced the hope for the perfect soul in many quarters of Western society. This fight against the present and imperfect body and for the new and perfect body can, of course, never end. The secular cult of the body has seemingly reached eschatological proportions. [6]

1.4 Human love is gendered

When we talk of the human body, we must note that there is no such thing as the human body as such. Rather every human body is a gendered body, a female or a male body. But even the insight into the fact that the body is gendered has a long and a rather perplexing history (cf. Laqueur 1992)

1.5 Love is erotic

Eroticism (or the erotic) can mean a number of things in today’s parlance. It may refer to the spiritual and psychological sides of the experience of love over against a mere sensually and physically experienced sexuality. It may refer to the overall role that love and sexuality play in a particular culture. Or it simply may refer to sexual love. [7]

The word itself goes back to the Greek éros, the god of love, and has a rich and varied history. Part of the original Greek perception of Éros was his uniting force that brings together previously separated beings. Éros appears as a mediator between the gods and humans and is in charge of maintaining the relationality of the whole. Éros loves wisdom and the beautiful (Plato 1999 : 40) Yet éros is also madness. Hence, éros needs to be tamed in order to unfold its cognitive power. It is, however, important to recall that in Greek culture éros was used particularly with reference to men and their specific physical and intellectual pursuits. Hence, the erotic realm includes sexual desire, cognitive desire, and the longing for union with the other.

It has entered the Christian tradition in two forms. Either the erotic realm is judged as contradictory to the transcendent spirit of religion, and therefore should be excluded from divinely inspired relations, or the erotic realm is considered vital for the relationship between the believer and God and thus becomes an important object for theological reflection.

The first and negative assessment of the erotic identifies éros with contingent physical realities that are obstacles to the spiritual pursuits of human beings. In the theology of Anders Nygren, for instance, éros is the competitor against agapè ; éros and agapè are not compatible. Éros is self-centered and human, while agapè is self-less and divine (Nygren 1982 : 30-35) In spite of his critique of later Augustinianism, Nygren shares Augustine’s distinction between worldly love, characterized by self-love (éros), and heavenly love, characterized by selfless love (agapè) . [8]

A different and positive reception of éros can be found in the mystical tradition. Christian (as well as Jewish and Islamic) mysticism explores and defends the unity of love, and the erotic dimension is understood as part of this unity. The mystics do not understand the bodily passion of love in terms of a heteronomous or anti-divine attitude ; rather genuine love for God takes hold of the entire human self. Mystical love for God and its positive evaluation of the body by no means exclude an ascetic and chaste lifestyle. Many men and women have adopted a monastic or eremitic lifestyle in order to be more fully devoted to the love of God and the love of neighbor. Thus, asceticism can be appreciated as a training of the body, not as an exclusion of it. [9] The mystical discourse of love thus shows that the erotic and the sacred need not be understood in terms of radical opposition. Rather they are experienced as closely connected.

2 Early Christian Theologies of Love

Love is neither a Christian invention nor a Christian possession. Rather the Christian development of love is firmly rooted in the Jewish religious tradition. According to both Christian and Jewish praxis, love of God, love of neighbor, love of self, and love of God’s creation are closely related. The different forms of love must, of course, be distinguished, but never separated. Ultimately, the divine love command concerns the development of right relationships between persons and communities and the various others : God as the radically other, the human other, God’s mysterious creation project, and the otherness within my own self.

While the Hebrew language has a number of linguistic expressions for the different experiences and challenges of love (e.g. intimate relationship, desire, loyalty, solidarity, charity, commitment, concern, attention, appreciation, friendship, sympathy), the English language combines a great variety of experiences under the overlapping terms love and charity. [10] The advantage of this linguistic reduction consists in the implicit emphasis on the unity of all forms and expressions of love. Its disadvantage lies in the loss of differentiation between its many forms and expressions.

In any case, there is not the Christian love. Rather Christian love has always been a pluriform phenomenon. There have always been tensions and shifts in emphasis between different Christian experiences and conceptualizations of love. I would like to illustrate this point by referring to three New Testament approaches to the subject. [11]

2.1 Luke

The synoptic gospels all report on Jesus’ restatement of the Shema Israel from Deuteronomy 6 : 4-5 (« Hear, O Israel : The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. ”) as well as Jesus’ combination of the Shema with the commandment to love the neighbor as oneself. While, theologically speaking, it is not important to know whether Jesus was the first to have combined both love commands, it is crucial to appreciate the significance of this double love command for the proclamation of God’s reign in the synoptic gospels. [12] Love is the central focus of the human-divine and the human-human relationship. However, for Jesus this focus calls for concrete action rather than for lengthy theological or legal deliberation.

This fact is most clearly expressed in Luke’s gospel where the story of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10 :25-37) is told immediately after the citation of the double love command. By redefining the meaning of ‘neighbor,’ the Lucan Jesus establishes a principle of moral obligation. [13] The praxis of love, which Jesus proclaims and shapes through his actions, reaches out to all sorts of people : his friends, the needy, women, children, the poor, the suffering, the sick, sinners, the foreigner, and the enemy. This praxis reflects God’s goodness toward all human beings and gathers all people around God’s creative and reconciling presence.

But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you… Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High ; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful (Lk 6 :27-28, 35b-36)

The constructive and charitable relationship to all people that characterizes this understanding of love is an important theological event. Its centrality in the synoptic gospels provokes the Christian to widen the horizon of love so as to include the enemy, the foreigner, and the sinner. [14]

Parallel to this widening of the horizon, the gospels reveal a relativization of traditional family bonds. Jesus is reported to have redefined the question of identity in his community in terms of belonging to God and active participation in God’s reign : “ My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it. ” (Lk 8 :21) Jesus does not question the potential usefulness of the traditional pillars of Jewish religious life and identity, i.e. family, Temple, Torah, and the land, but he relativizes their significance for the emergence of God’s reign by subordinating these pillars of tradition to the transformative praxis of love. God’s reign will come through the praxis of love, not through the mere preservation of the legality and integrity of religious tradition.

All New Testament discourses on love witness to the divine origin of love, but they draw different conclusions from this insight. To acknowledge God as the author of love and to reflect upon God’s nature as love does not necessarily lead to the same kind of theological conviction or indeed to the same kind of praxis of love in church and world.

2.2 John

The Johannine community stresses the close connection between love of God and love of the other, though in its writings the others always refer to members of this particular Christian community.

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. … We love because he first loved us. Those who say, “ I love God, ” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars ; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this : those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also (1 Jn 4 :16b, 19-21)

The Johannine understanding of Christian love includes two further dimensions : (1) the love of God is related to oneness or harmony within the Christian community and (2) to Jesus’ own example of self-sacrifice for his friends.

With regard to the first, it is striking to see how much this gospel focuses on the issue of abiding in the love of God (Jn 15 :9-10) It is obvious that in this context love characterizes the network of relationships between God, the Son and the community against the very real threat of hatred, i.e. of that which might destroy the inner-Christian bond, both from inside and out.

With regard to the second dimension, the author considers it important to show that love has to do with self-sacrifice on behalf of the others within the same community (1 Jn 3 :16-17)

The Johannine approach to love revolves around an intensification of divine love that aims to strengthen the community from within (cf. Jn 13 : 34-35) There is no question that love is central to Christian discipleship, though the scope of love in John’s community differs from other New Testament writings. The Johannine discourse on love centers on the Christian community’s own life including the call to pay attention to those brothers and sisters who require help and assistance. The equality of the members of the Christian community may thus be stressed (cf. Theißen 2003 : 108f.)

However, the shift from a love that is actively concerned about all human others toward a love that is concerned with the inner circle of a Christian church cannot be overlooked. In this community love functions first of all in terms of internal loyalty over against a societal context experienced as threatening. [15] Moreover, love and oneness are linked in such a manner that suggests that love is not so much the way to handle difference, conflict, and otherness as it is a way of avoiding all three. Here, John clearly differs from Luke, but also from Paul.

2.3 Paul

While for John love is a means to unite those who belong to the Johannine church, Paul approaches love as a way of handling conflict, difference, and otherness within the Christian community. To the disunited community at Corinth Paul offers what he calls an unusual, indeed extraordinary way of approaching one another in everyday life.

Paul does not moralize, sentimentalize, nor psychologize when he presents this way of love. Love is neither an idea nor an abstraction (cf. Schrage 1999 : 294f.) Instead he recommends a concrete praxis.

Love is patient ; love is kind ; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way ; it is not irritable or resentful ; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends (1 Cor 13 :4-8a)

Moreover, for Paul, love is the central dimension of Christian discipleship and existence (cf. Gal. 5 :6) Love draws the Christian disciple into the truth. It thus includes an eschatological dynamic (1 Cor 13 :12-13) But it also includes a personal dynamics, for love invites Christian disciples into union with Christ (Rom 8 :35-39) Not even death can separate the Christian from the love of Christ. That means that this love not only is unlimited, rather it possesses the quality of eternity, i.e. of God’s own realm. God’s presence, love, and respect for his creation will never end. This in turn means that the love relation that God offers to the human being in Christ respects both God’s divinity and also the humanity of the human being without dissolving the one into the other. God’s love then respects the difference between the human being and God and thus invites all through the praxis of love into a process of disclosing the mysteries of both – of God’s divinity and the humanity of the human being.

Yet for Paul, this understanding of love is not confined to the limits of the human subject. Rather every genuine love comes from God and extends to the entire community that God has called into existence through Christ (cf. Rom 5 :5) [16]

This limited discussion of three New Testament approaches to love has highlighted the early diversity and plurality of the emerging Christian theology of love. Obviously, each approach reflects rather different social, religious, and moral conditions. Hence, any choice among different New Testament perspectives on love will automatically influence the discussion of love’s potential to transcend the social confines of particular Christian communities.

2.4 Augustine

The complex biblical heritage of love has been received and continued in different ways. The major figure at the intersection between biblical concepts and theological developments of love was Augustine who, more than any other thinker, has influenced the development of the theology of love in the Christian tradition of the West. The approaches to love in the mystical tradition, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Romanticism, and contemporary philosophy have all been influenced by Augustine.

According to Augustine, there exists only one true and lasting form of love : the love of God. Therefore whenever we humans really love, we love God. Hence, the meeting with another human person does not have any co-constitutive character for me as an emerging spiritual subject. Rather, if I love the other person, I love God in her, and the other person loves God in me. Hence, ultimately, only God can be loved. He is the summum bonum, the highest good, which we all desire. For Augustine, love is the way out of our sinful human predicament. Original sin is the framework in which he considers love (cf. Arendt 1929) The dilemma of Augustine’s understanding of love is that the neighbor is not loved for his or her own sake, but for God’s sake. Every relationship thus becomes an occasion for a direct relationship with God. Loving the neighbor is a function of our love for God. It is difficult to see how such an understanding of love, clearly influenced by the Johannine theology of love, can ever lead toward the establishment of a community characterized by mutual love (cf. Arendt 1929 : 82-86)

For Augustine, proper love is always amor Dei, never amor sui. Proper desire is always directed towards God as the summum bonum. This desire is possible only because the Holy Spirit ignited love in us, he himself being love. All we can do is to love God, who is love, for God’s sake. In De Doctrina Christiana Augustine explains : “ Whoever … justly loves his neighbor should so act toward him that he also loves God with his whole heart, with his whole soul, and with his whole mind. ” [17]

Augustine sees in any human desire to find oneself an even deeper desire to find God. Any desire to love one’s neighbor is the desire to love God in him. Love is the way to God – full stop. The interaction between embodiment, love, and the emerging subject does not arise in an Augustinian agenda. The emerging subject is of no ultimate concern to Augustine, in spite of the hundreds of pages in his Confessions on precisely that, the journey of his own self towards understanding how to reach beatitudo, everlasting happiness.

Augustine has clearly sided with the Johannine understanding of love, conceptualized in a Neo-Platonist tradition. Love is God’s creative power in which we humans must grow to participate as fully as possible. The ultimate vocation of the Christian then is to grow in his or her relationship to God. The self must learn how to abandon itself for the sake of participating more and more in God’s love.

Hence, Augustine’s understanding of love calls for a kenotic view of the self and not for an embodied agent empowered by God’s love to become a responsive lover of God, the other, God’s creation, and his or her own self. Reading Augustine and his many followers reminds us of the admonishment of the gospel of John to remain in the love of God. God’s love is the bond that unites the church. Human love only counts when it is as closely as possible a reflection of God’s love. In view of Augustine’s location of love as opposed to original sin, love is that grace that takes us out of this fallen world into God’s realm.

But what about specifically human love ? Is there human love and does God want and affirm it ? Has it any lasting reality in itself ? Can we humans love at all or does only God love in and through us ? Ought we to distinguish more clearly between God’s love and human love without separating the one from the other ?

3 Contemporary Philosophical Approaches to Love

While theologians have not developed a broader theology of love for some time, [18] more recently a number of philosophers and philosophers of religion have treated love. Here I wish to discuss Vincent Brümmer’s and Jean-Luc Marion’s approaches to love. [19]

3.1 Vincent Brümmer

In The Model of Love, Vincent Brümmer examines the potential of love in terms of how it could serve Christian discourse as a key model for a relational understanding of faith in God. [20] Brümmer stresses the limits of any such model by raising the critical question : “ how is the relation between God and ourselves alike, and how unlike, human relations ? ” (15)

Thus, Brümmer is aware that no root metaphor or model can ever fully describe God’s relationality. Brümmer discloses the ambiguous nature of ‘ love ’ in the history of Western thought and questions exegetical searches for “ the true biblical concept of love ” (30) Moreover, he points out that most of the comprehensive concepts of love from within the Christian tradition “ have been attitudinal rather than relational. Love has generally been taken to be an attitude of one person toward another, rather than as a relation between persons. ” (33)

Brümmer wishes to correct this view by examining the potential of a relational view of love. Although love clearly involves feelings or emotions and different forms of desire, such as sexual desire, it transcends all of them in terms of “ a purposive commitment to adopt a complex pattern of actions and attitudes in relation to the beloved ” (153) Love involves long-term commitments, i.e. policies that necessarily issue in actions, which are public. Moreover, “ although we cannot be held responsible for our feelings, we can be held responsible for keeping our commitments ” (154) What distinguishes love from most other attitudes, however, is the desire for reciprocation. “ Love wants to be returned, requited, and in this way fulfilled in a relationship of mutual love. Of course this does not exclude the possibility of unrequited love. ” (155) Love desires community, though it does not logically depend on the fulfillment of its desires. Moreover, love is more than beneficence. Love entails beneficence, but unlike beneficence it also seeks a relationship.

Thus unlike many approaches to love in the Christian tradition Brümmer understands love not as an attitude which might issue in a relationship, but as “ a relationship which involves the partners adopting a complex set of attitudes toward each other. ” (156) Therefore he analyzes different models of relationship, including manipulative relations, agreements of rights and duties, and mutual fellowship.

For Augustine, and indeed for Anders Nygren, love is issued in the form of an asymmetrical relationship between God and human beings. Here, human beings are not independent agents of love. They “ cannot freely decide to love God or each other, since their love is the exclusive effect which the divine agapè has on them… God causes us to love him and each other. This seems to turn God into a Heavenly Conquistador. ” (159, original italics)

Brümmer concludes that views such as this “ take love to be a highly impersonal concept and the relationship of love to be a very impersonal manipulative one. ” (160) Therefore, he stresses the importance of rethinking the entire network of divine-human relationships in terms of a love that centers on mutual fellowship. Such a view of love has significant implications for our understanding of both divine and human agency, [21] for our assessment of love as a source of knowledge, for our understanding of sin as broken relationship, and for our appraisal of the ways in which such a broken relationship might be restored.

Brümmer also emphasizes the need to order our different love relationships. This is important if one is to avoid false reductions of the horizon of love. On the one hand, one particular love relationship does not exclude love for others. On the other hand, no two love relationships are ever identical since in love “ the beloved is valued as an irreplaceable individual. ” (209) No desire for union in love can annihilate the actual individuality of the lovers.

Brümmer’s approach to love offers important conceptual clarifications. For him there is no dichotomy between éros and agapè. He recognizes the significance of desire for love, while he examines the implications of love for our understanding of human subjectivity and also of divine agency. However, the significance of body and gender does not receive appropriate attention. Moreover, one needs to ask if Christian love could not also be understood as an attitude of generosity in situations where mutuality is lacking or not (yet) possible or where mutuality is realized in non-symmetrical ways, e.g. in the parent-child relationship. [22]

3.2 Jean-Luc Marion

Marion has treated love in two major works, Prolégomènes à la charité (1986), [23] and Le phénomène érotique (2003) [24] Here I shall chiefly discuss the latter work in order to assess in what way it might be able to contribute to a critical theology of love.

Marion wishes to overcome an inadequate metaphysical understanding of love by pursuing a phenomenological approach to love. He understands the human being in the first place not as a thinking animal, but as a loving animal. “ In brief, we have to substitute metaphysical meditations by erotic meditations ” (19..

His point of departure is the human flesh, which can be affected endlessly by the things of this world. For Marion, then, the crucial question is not to reach an ontological security, but rather to answer a different question, namely, “ am I loved ? ” (38) The erotic possibility allows me to discover myself as a given – a given phenomenon – and as such the erotic reduction can get under way.

First of all, to be loved or hated is an experience coming to me from elsewhere. Hence, any form of self-production of the ego is disclosed as an impossibility. To be loved and to be able to love constitute a world opposed to the world of self-sufficient thinking (50 : “ L’amant s’oppose donc au cogitant. ”) The erotic reduction radically alters our understanding of space, time, and identity. Selfhood is given only through becoming flesh. Only this “ prise de chair ” assigns me to an irreducible here and now. (67) Hence the crucial question is no longer “ to be or not to be, ” but solely “ am I loved – after all ? ” [25]

This approach to love affirms both the necessity of distance for any act of love as well as the impossibility of an unconditional self-love. [26] Moreover, in order to fight the assault of uncertainty, vanity, threat, hatred, rejection, etc., I would need to be able to answer the question “ am I loved – after all ? ” (109) However, as yet, the erotic reduction has not gone far enough. It still appears only as an indication of a lack. For this reason, the recognition that I can love first is so important for my becoming I myself. “ My acts as a lover indisputably belong to me, unmixed, undivided. ” (124) Whenever the loving person decides to love without assurances of being loved in return and decides to love first by risking everything, then she not only transgresses reciprocity, but, most of all, contradicts the form of sufficient reasoning in any kind of economy. Love creates its own way of reasoning. Strictly speaking, the one whom we love, we do not know – or only in so far as we love that person.

Marion examines in great detail the concrete circumstances of encountering both the other and oneself as loving persons at that moment of encounter. He speaks of “ un phénomène croisé ” in order to maintain the respective individuality of the two potential lovers and their respective intuition. But this crossed phenomenon carries a common signification. (167)

Marion then analyzes the crucial importance of desire for love. “ The loving person individualizes herself first of all through the desire, or better, through the desire that is her own and belongs to nobody else. ” (172) Next, the loving person individualizes herself through the desired eternity. All genuine love desires eternity, or it is not genuine.

Finally, the loving person individualizes herself through her passivity. This passivity includes three aspects : the lover’s pledge, the lover’s initiative or move, and the taking of risks.

According to Marion, this triple passivity arises clearly from the phenomenon of the flesh (la chair) “ I do not have flesh, rather I am my flesh and it coincides absolutely with me. ” (178) It is interesting to note that Marion sees the flesh, and not the body, as the primary phenomenon that allows love to be experienced. The reason for this is his focus on love as an erotic encounter between two people that is unmediated by other aspects of existence. The primary phenomenon of love, according to Marion, is the love of a couple made possible through the encounter of two people in their naked flesh. The flesh can be sensed, but not made visible to the gaze. In Marion’s understanding, that visibility to the gaze of the other would change the flesh into a body. (185)

Therefore he speaks of the erotization of the flesh, and not of the body. In this process, the other gives to me what I do not possess, namely my own flesh, and I give to him what he does not own, namely his own flesh. Thus, I enjoy not my own pleasure, but the other’s. (201) This flesh turns into a body when we suddenly become aware that we are naked and begin to look at each other. Moreover, Marion insists that ultimately I do not have a body, except in terms of an inappropriate analogy with the bodies of the world. In this sense, “ every flesh is born and dies as flesh, while every body remains a body. ” (217) Later on I shall have to return to Marion’s problematic understanding of body and flesh.

The erotization of the bodies also affects the language between the lovers. This erotic language is performative and thus reminds Marion of mystical theology and its aim of provoking the excess of the union of the lover and the beloved, yet always maintaining the ultimate distance between both lovers. (233)

Following an examination of a number of possible threats to love, e.g. lies, jealousy, hatred, etc., Marion proceeds to reflect on fidelity as the necessary condition for love. Without fidelity, the erotic phenomenon will turn again into a simple momentary thing, disappearing as soon as it has appeared, “ une intermittence phénoménale. ” (286) Fidelity demands nothing less than eternity. We cannot really be said to love provisionally, he concludes. This in turn implies that all authentic love will be carried on by me eternally. I am stigmatized by the love that has left traces in me. Thus, I am irrevocably marked by my loves – even though I may have failed to honor them. All true love is eternal. Therefore, the erotic phenomenon as such is not subjected to death because love does not belong to the horizon of being. Rather, the loving person always already anticipates eternity. She does not desire it. Rather, she presupposes it.

The arrival of the third, i.e. the child, is not to be understood here in terms of social continuity or biological laws. Rather in the child the pledge of love becomes flesh – notwithstanding the actual faithfulness of the lovers. [27] Moreover, in the crossing of their flesh, the lovers become one single flesh, but this is not really theirs, rather this single flesh is the flesh of another person, of a third.

In this context Marion underlines the eschatological character of love. Love is, as we have seen, eternal. The lovers complete their pledge of love in their final ‘adieu’ to each other, i.e. in their passage to God whom they know to be their ultimate witness. Finally, in the light of the love that comes to me I can discover even myself in terms of being a lover, I can finally even love myself, the most difficult love of all.

Only in the concluding pages of his work, Marion widens the perspective from the loving couple to other forms of love, such as friendship and God’s own love for human beings. While Marion denies any opposition between erotic love and friendship, he approaches friendship through his analysis of erotic love and accords it the status of genuine love, yet a love that does not demand either exclusivity or the erotization of the flesh of friends. It is, we might say, a shorter form of love, though not a more limited form of love.

With regard to God’s love Marion says that God loves infinitely better than we. God’s highest transcendence does not concern his power, his wisdom, or even his infinity, but his love. “ God surpasses us as the best lover. ” (342) Like Brümmer, Marion rejects any dichotomy between éros and agapè.

He too has analyzed the significance of desire for love. And he has certainly stressed the implications of love for our understanding of human subjectivity. For Marion love is not only a model for an appropriate relationship between human beings and God. Rather, love is the occasion of truth itself. In love and according to the logic of the erotic phenomenon the human person becomes aware of her own self as a loved and a loving self. This loved and loving self, however, is enfleshed rather than embodied. Moreover, love always originates elsewhere ; it comes from outside ; it hits me in my passivity. Hence, Marion’s primary question : “ Am I loved – from outside ? ” An alternative to this peculiar question could be “ How can I love ? ” Or in Christian terms : How can I love my neighbor whom I am commanded to love ?

Marion, it seems, has overburdened his approach to the passivity of love with his phenomenological-theological disclosures and, at the same time, underestimated the potential of a fuller theological exploration of the different forms of Christian love.

While Marion does not discuss the dimensions of gender in all human love, he does, as we have seen, pay a lot of attention to the difference between flesh and body. [28] The union of the flesh gives rise to a third party. But is there also a loving community of the body, e.g. the body of Christ ? Does not one of the problems of Marion’s approach to love lie precisely in this dichotomy between flesh and body ? Marion’s attempt to reach an unmediated love as event of pure givenness seems to be disturbed by the human body.

Moreover, is the erotic phenomenon really adequately described when it is limited to the procreative erotic love between a couple ? Does this form of love exhaust the depth of the erotic phenomenon ? Furthermore, is Marion’s overall analysis of love as necessarily unmediated and unreflective really adequate ? Why this dichotomy between loving and thinking ?

Marion’s rejection of a hermeneutics of loving is not convincing. Moreover it appears to be dangerous in view of the ambiguous history of love. Rather than searching for the purity of love, it seems desirable to search for a critical understanding of the different forms of love. However, such a task requires hermeneutical thought beyond the kind of Eucharistic hermeneutic proposed by Marion elsewhere. [29] Does Marion’s overall philosophical agenda of highlighting the superabundance and gratuity of the gift of God’s love weaken his appreciation of the potential of human love ? [30] Does his prioritizing of flesh over body lead to new forms of unembodied love ?

As we have seen, Brümmer has called for an ordering of love in order to avoid both the reduction of love to exclusivity and the false identification of different loves. Hence, a community of mutual love can emerge in response to different initiatives, and is not limited to the paradigm of the erotic love of a (heterosexual) couple. [31]

This brief analysis of two recent philosophical approaches to love has underlined the need for a continued examination both of different forms of love and of the role of the body in a critical theology of love.

4 Love, God, and Self

Feminist theologians have argued that the radical stress on overcoming or sacrificing the self in Christian love (kenosis) has added to the continuing oppression of women in church and society. Every unqualified call for the surrender of selfhood endangers the process of becoming a person able to relate in love to God, to other people, to the world, and to one’s own emerging, fragile, and always embodied self. [32] It is not only selfishness and possessiveness that are obstacles to the development of Christian love, but also the very lack of self. Hence, any adequate treatment of Christian love requires an in-depth discussion of the concepts of human self and of personhood. [33] Moreover, such discussions need to be organized in a multi-disciplinary way in order to avail them of all possible insights gained in other areas of human thinking.

In this context, the relationship between freedom and Christian love requires further attention.

• What are the necessary conditions for participating in mutual relationships ?

• How are the integrity and dignity of the human being affected by loving relationships ?

• How and when does a person become able to love ? How can one develop a context for Christian formation in love ? [34]

There can be no doubt that the theological attention to love must include a study of the social context of Christian love. Representatives of political, liberation, and ecological theologies and philosophies have criticized the Christian tendency to treat love mainly in terms of one-to-one relationships. Rather than reducing love to a mere object of belief or devotion, or to a private sentiment, love ought to be seen as inspiring and guiding Christian faith, hope, and action within the eschatological horizon of God’s coming reign. Hence, important criteria for the authenticity of Christian love must include the pursuit of justice and equality for all human beings ; [35] the solidarity of all human beings within, yet also beyond borders of gender, nation, and religion ; and the affirmation of God’s creative and redemptive project and of the integrity of creation through appropriate action and contemplation.

Hence human love must flow from an emerging self that is truly willing to love and at the same time to be transformed by this love. A self-less love is not a Christian option for human beings, neither is a purely selfish love. Let us not confuse God’s creative and redemptive love, in which all human love is grounded, with human love relationships. Rather, let us consider a change in terms of framework : should not love become a new framework for discourse on the human self, rather than selfhood the framework for a discourse on love ? As we have seen, both Brümmer and Marion have offered concrete proposals for such a change of framework.

Moreover, it would seem urgent to retrieve Paul and Luke’s approaches to love in order to balance the usual overdose of Johannine love. For Paul, as we recall, love was a way of respecting otherness in patience and kindness, a means of negotiating unity through respect for the other. For Luke, love was addressed radically to every human person notwithstanding her or his social, ritual, religious, ethnic, or family standing. Every human person is my neighbor, as Kierkegaard forcefully reminded us (Kierkegaard 1995 : 55) Every human being can become part of my extended body through love. Should not love therefore become a new framework for the discourse on the human body and its extensions, rather than the body forming the framework for a discourse on love ? In this regard, neither Brümmer nor Marion offers much help.

Brümmer does not discuss embodiment at all, and for Marion the body is not of primary significance for human love. Rather for him the flesh of the human being provides the starting point for a phenomenological analysis of love that privileges the encounter between two human beings in their respective flesh, rather than between two human bodies.

All love entails the potential of transcendence, even of radical transcendence. Every genuine experience of love, either on a personal and intimate scale or on a wider social scale, has the potential to open the self through and for the otherness of the other/others and the otherness of the self. This potential is the entry point of religious experience. Here, the Johannine expression that God is love reveals a great insight into the ultimate promise of love : every experience of otherness bears within it the possibility of being confronted with God’s radical otherness. All love comes from God, though as we have seen, not all love is of God.

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