“Unselfish love that is poured out on a selfish object does not bring perfect happiness: not because love requires a return or a reward for loving, but because it rests in the happiness of the beloved. And if the one loved receives love selfishly, the lover is not satisfied… [his love] has not awakened [the beloved’s] capacity for unselfish love.”
“Love shares the good with another not by dividing it with him, but identifying itself with him so that his good becomes my own.” - Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island
In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a woman comes before the elder complaining that she lacks faith. The elder advises that while nothing can be proven here, one can be convinced, “By the experience of active love. Try to love your neighbors actively and tirelessly. The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul. And if you reach complete selflessness in the love of your neighbor, then undoubtedly you will believe, and no doubt will even be able to enter your soul. This has been tested. It is certain.” To which the woman responds that she does indeed love humanity, to the point where she has dreamed of leaving everything, including her sickly daughter Lise, behind to become a sister of mercy and bind up the wounds and sores of the suffering. She fears that ingratitude will cause her “active love for humanity” to wilt, an experience which the Elder Zosima corroborates by telling of a doctor he knew who claimed that, “the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular that is, individually, as separate persons.”
“Active love for humanity” such as the woman claims to have, is a contradiction in terms. To be active, love must be particular; it must be active upon a concrete, individual person. As Merton said, love rests in the happiness of the beloved. (I would have perhaps written “good of the beloved”, if only to avoid confusion. Happiness has been misconstrued as that which is pleasurable – and so could include sinful activities – rather than as the true joy found in the ultimate good, life with God.) Regardless of the terminology used, it is only in seeking the other’s good or happiness that the lover really goes about the activity of loving. It is only through sharing life together, “identifying [oneself] with [the beloved] so that his good becomes my own” that we really love actively, something that cannot be done in distraction. This is perhaps reflected in the curious Gospel phrase, “Jesus looked at them and loved them.” In His humanity, Jesus could not be in relation at all times with all people and so could not “love them” in any way that would make sense, so it is only upon apprehending them that Jesus begins to love. When God is said to “so love the world” He is loving all individuals separately rather than abstractly and seeking to draw each into a relationship of reciprocated love, because that is the beloved’s greatest good. Abstract love, in contrast, is passive. It does not seek the good of the beloved because it has no relation with it. In fact it is a form of self-love, because all its benefits rest in the lover rather than the beloved. The lover of humanity puffs himself up with fine feelings about himself, but affects no good in the perceived objects of his love. As I’ve written before on this blog, love for humanity can lead to hatred for individuals perceived to be against the common good, from the conviction that it is better for one man to die for the sake of the nation to killing Jews for the sake of Aryan racial purity. Love for humanity constitutes a kind of tenderness and sentimentality detached from its moorings, and as Flannery O’Connor wrote, “When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and the fumes of the gas chamber.” (A Memoir of Mary Ann) The commandment to love our neighbors is one which has both our neighbor’s good and our own as its end. Abstract love hopelessly collapses into itself; it is only through sharing in the good with others that we participate in the love of God.
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