Is there any such thing as love?
This is the sort of foolish and naïve question that children might ask. ‘The wise’ never worry about such things. By ‘the wise,’ I mean the anthropologists, the biologists, the geneticists, and above all the philosophers, who by definition make their living by loving wisdom. For the biologist and geneticist, love is merely a programmed survival instinct. For the anthropologist, love is the invented oil that lubricates social interactions and gives shape to traditions, while the philosophers are all too eager to agree with either or both of those diagnoses.
There are several different things I could mean by ‘love,’ and I will give some distinctions next time. But for now, it is enough to say that I am referring to the kind of love ‘without conditions’ that the New Testament writers can’t seem to stop talking about. John says that “love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love…” (I John 4:7,8). Paul, after saying that love is greater than faith (I Cor. 13), goes onto to anticipate John’s writings: for him, as for John, the unmistakable evidence of the presence of God in one’s life is the presence of love (Gal. 5:22). And conversely, a life without love always indicates the absence of God (Gal 5:19-20).
So it is that love is central for New Testament Christianity. Therefore, if the wise are successful in their attempts to reduce love to biological or social mechanisms, Christianity (along with many other religions) would be the most pervasive, extravagant, and scandalous deception in Western history. To appropriate Paul, we should be pitied in the worst way, perhaps the way a parent might pity a child who discovers that Santa Claus never leaves presents at his house. That child deserves pity because he must come to terms with the fact that something he has believed strongly his whole conscious life, even in the face of adversity, turns out to be wrong.
But we should also look at the issue the other way around. If there is such a thing as love after all, ‘the wise’ have an accounting problem on their hands. How can they account for the fact that love ended up in the world? When asked whether there is love, it is tempting to give an immediate and sharp “YES!” After all, we all love our children, spouses, and parents with unconditional love, right? Don’t we show love to the neighbor across the street when we invite her for parties even though she continues to be un-neighborly? Don’t we manifest true love when we are nice to our co-worker even while he is rude to us? I want to resist an easy answer, because this question, it turns out, is complicated. The wisdom of the world has given us an important challenge.
