Your Cheatin’ Heart

Actually, this post has nothing to do with Hank Williams (Sr. of course, while turning one song into a 20 year career with Monday Night Football is impressive in its way on Jr.’s part, Hank Sr.’s music still holds up today in contrast to Jr.s’ forgettable 1980s country-schlock). What follows is a longish, rambling treatment of why adultery is sinful that I wrote one night when unable to sleep. Actually it doesn’t have all that much to do with adultery either, it is rather a back-door entry into a discussion of relationships (marriage specifically, but really any relationship, erotic or not, should take and participate in suitable degree with this form for the Christian). Any obscurity in it is hopefully explained by how late in the night it was written, but I have no real interest in editing it here. Also there is a bit in there about marriage necessarily producing children and the inability for the adulterous relationship to do likewise. This should not be taken too literally - although there is perhaps some deficiency in a marriage that does not eventually desire children (see Europe) – but is emblematic of the necessity of the relationship to go beyond itself, be fruitful, and not become its own end. Again, this comes from a little notebook I keep and wasn’t originally intended for blogging – think Pascal’s Pensées, except less worthwhile. Also the Paolo and Francesca mentioned are from the first circle of Dante’s Hell and my thoughts here probably draw more than I realize on the notes from Dorothy L. Sayers’ translation of the Comedy and in turn from both my own and her reading of Charles Williams’ The Figure of Beatrice.
Why is adultery sinful: that is, what makes the adulterous relationship different from the marital? Lack of acceptance by the community. Adultery cares nothing for the community at large, does not seek its acceptance, but draws the sphere down to only two. “And the two shall become one flesh.” Without the community, the relationship is cut off from all others; Paolo and Francesca spinning alone for eternity. The relationship becomes an end in itself, neither regarding God or the community for its context or continuance it collapses into itself, into self-love, the mutual gratification of erotic love. It does not seek its own perfection; it seeks only its own gratification. By refusing to be itself publicly (eros expressed in and supported by the community in marriage) it may also cease to be itself privately, the somewhat tenuous bonds of eros failing, unsupported by familial love and refusing to seek perfection in agape. Christian marriage places itself in its correct orientation to God and fellow man. Adultery, precisely because it refuses to place itself in any greater context is unable to seek any end other than itself and thus can grow into solipsistic self-determination – when the other partner no longer meets my needs, I end it. Adultery is unable to forget itself because it has already declared itself to be all that matters. Thus paralyzed, it must continually reaffirm itself, take stock of itself against itself, and justify its own existence by its effects. As it only exists so far as the two individuals will for it to, and its paralyzing self-affirmation stagnates itself (such a relationship can have no children, no other objects of love, it begets nothing) the adulterous relationship must increasingly seek its validation in the effects on the individual rather than on the other. And the one shall become two. Marriage may be perfected, beget (and so forget itself as an end) and create a real union (two as one flesh) as the individual no longer seeks its telos in oneself or in the relationship (which necessarily resides in oneself) but empties oneself and looks not only to one’s own interest, but the interest of others and so shares in the mind of Christ, the Bridegroom.
Hopefully that was helpful as a preliminary foray into this subject, sketching out in broad strokes the trajectory I think we should follow. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the allusion to Philippians 2 in the last sentence, as the Scripture it points to is much more important, has much more to say on the subject than anything written here. Also, I would point you to an essay by C.S. Lewis called “We Have No ‘Right to Happiness’” that can be found, if nowhere else, among the essays collected in God in the Dock. While I only read it for the first time this morning and didn’t incorporate any of it into what has been written here, I found it to be good, useful thinking on this subject coming from a different angle.
– As a site note, I realize I have not been posting much lately. When the internet is not so readily available, it makes me more discriminating in the things I think merit posting. This may not necessarily increase the quality of my posts, but it certainly does decrease their quantity. I will try and make a note of new postings on facebook from here on out, unless they become somewhat regular again.

Neighbors Needed: Why abstract love doesn’t work

               “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.          

Good Article from NY Times on Narcicism and Activism

The article here

I've said pretty much all I have to say in the title, but for those just itching for more, here's a little lagniappe: I've been thinking something somewhat on the same lines for awhile, touching on it briefly here.  I've also some vague plans in the works for a post on why project (red), Toms, and the like while being wonderful corporately and doing much good are not really charities and potentially dangerous for the customer if they replace true Charity (big "C" because I mean it in the old sense as the Christian virtue of love).  The marriage of apparent charity with materialism, especially when this charity benefits some unseen (and so abstracted) person- not a neighbor in the traditional sense- can potentially collapse all attempts to do good into self-love, the good done to our neighbor across the world superseded by personal fulfillment granted by simultaneously thinking oneself to be generous and gratifying the desire for more stuff.  Saving the world while you destroy yourself.

Like I said, there is a rant coming, that was just a taste.  I'm sure I leave you both tantalized and anticipatory...