The Specifics of Love
I am teaching for the first time in the seminary, a mini-course on theological approaches to secularism. At the same time that this was happening, I also had occasion to, after discussing about it, rewatch Toy Story 3.
These two occurances are more related that you might think.
What helped connect the two for me was stumbling across Rodney Howsare’s journal article in Communio, entitled “Why Begin With Love: Eros, Agape & the Problem of Secularism”. The article was a very helpful excursis on the first half of Benedict XVI’s first encyclical Deus Caritas Est. To me, it unlocked what I thought was a powerful interpretive key for a lot of Joseph Ratzinger’s / Benedict XVI’s massive corpus of work.
For Ratzinger, the problem with love - in itself one of the universal human experiences - and its contemporary branding is that it has been evacuated of content. And it has been evacuated of content because of a specific problem found in post-Enlightenment and postmodern forms of secularism (and as Howsare makes clear, something that both “liberals” and “conservatives” have bought into). This is the tendency to assume that transcendence and immanence have no point of contact with each other. According to Howsare, this was a problem for Ratzinger, one that not only affected our apprehension of human and divine love (that is, the human attraction of eros and the self-giving love of agape), but because of it, also affected our apprehension of faith and reason.
To step back a bit, Howsare drew our attention to the common conception of erotic love as purely human and agapic love as purely divine, a conception that, as I found out in my class, many Christians hold to. Howsare took pains to point out how this sharp distinction of these two loves, far from being Christian, was actually borne of the sharp distinction of the secular from the transcendent. Instead, Howsare explained, Ratzinger’s apprehension of these two loves was coupled by the Christian conviction that Man was made in the image of God. As such, the erotic is always already charged with the agapic, and analogously, agape is also intertwined with eros. What this means is that, from the beginning, the two were always interlaced within each other, and to separate one from the other does not render a purer version of each. Instead, it leads to a diminishing corruption of both.
Because of this interlacing, Ratzinger argued (via Howsare), eros is already inclined towards where agape wants eros to go, to be purified of its tendency towards self-interest and step out of itself in an act of self-sacrifice. The way this self-sacrifice manifests itself in human love, Howsare suggests, comes in the sacrificing of eros’ tendency to be indiscriminate. Put another way, in Howsare’s words:
Here we have something close to an argument —although by no means a scientific proof—that the image of God found in Christianity, a God who is one and a God who is love, is the one that best corresponds to human experience. Love is not indiscriminate. Love makes demands. Love specifies! (442)
I was grateful for reading this before watching Toy Story 3 for, as it became clear, the driver for the movie was not simply about the poignancy of leaving one’s toys behind as one grows up. Beneath that drama, at least to me, were two competing versions of love, represented respectively by Woody on the one hand, and the villain Lotso, on the other.
What became clear to me as the movie went on was that Woody was a hero, not only because of his self-sacrifice for his friends, but because he also represented that kind of discriminating love Howsare identified in “Why Begin with Love”. Woody’s love was a love for a specific person, that of Andy, one that endured even as he faced the toys’ drama of donation.
By contrast, Lotso was not just the villain for being a tyrant, lording it over the other toys. What drove his lording was a giving up on the love of a specific person. This becomes evident even when you are led to believe, even for a moment, that Lotso was the welcoming grandfatherly figure of Sunnyside kindergarten. In his explanation of what made Sunnyside great, Lotso mentioned that it was great, not only because the toys were always played, but that they were always played by a revolving door of children who naturally pass on from year to year. Unlike for Woody, where happiness lies in the specified love of Ratzinger, Lotso’s version of happiness comes in the form of a love that rests on nobody in particular.
Towards the end of the article, Howsare wrote the pithy statement that “True love loves the other in all of its otherness; it is a distorted love that wishes to extinguish the otherness of the other” (447), that is, the specificity of the other. I am incredibly grateful for Howsare’s article for making this point especially clear.
If you enjoyed reading this and would like to see more, check out Matthew Tan’s other works.
