The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (18 page)
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Authors: Anthony Esolen
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“Seest thou this woman? I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water for my feet: but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head.“Thou gavest me no kiss: but this woman since the time I came in hath not ceased to kiss my feet.“My head with oil thou didst not anoint: but this woman hath anointed my feet with ointment.“Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.” (Lk. 7:44–47)
A Book You’re Not Supposed to ReadThe Bible
“This is my commandment,” He says to his apostles on the eve of his arrest and death, “That ye love one another, as I have loved you,” meaning by love no mere sentiment, but the gift of self, for “greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (Jn. 15:12–13). Hirelings work for their own advantage, and will abandon the sheep when the wolves come, but “I am the good shepherd,” says Jesus, and “the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep” (Jn. 10:11–12). That should help us understand how revolutionary is the love he demands of his followers. When, after the resurrection, Jesus turns to Simon Peter, the man who had denied him three times, and asks, three times, “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me?” (Jn. 21:16), Peter knows he is being asked not about liking or compatibility of temperament, but about the most profound act of giving that a man can make, a love unto death. “Lord,” says Peter, “thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee.” Whereupon Jesus commands him, “Feed my sheep,” and foretells Peter’s crucifixion, the death he would endure for the sheep, to glorify God (21:17–19).
Consider what
love
means, for the pagan cultures of that day, and for our pagan culture now. The materialist poet Lucretius (99–55 BC) describes it as a hunger, usually for something vain; not simply the nude body of the beloved, but a delusive image of that body. Nor are lovers satisfied when they have done the deed, for
love
means, for the pagan cultures of that day, and for our pagan culture now. The materialist poet Lucretius (99–55 BC) describes it as a hunger, usually for something vain; not simply the nude body of the beloved, but a delusive image of that body. Nor are lovers satisfied when they have done the deed, for
... the same madness returns, and the fury too:They long to attain they don’t know what, and can’tFind any trick to master this disease. (
On the Nature of Things,
4.1108–10)
Cato the Elder, the stern moralist of the last days of the Roman republic, scoffed at a young man in love, advising him to go to the whorehouse instead. Knock one nail out with another, said Cato.
7
7
Plato is the great philosopher of love; but for him too love is essentially
eros
, a hunger for what one does not have. It is exuberant and rich, born of Plenty, but also needy and beggarly, born of Poverty (
Symposium,
203b–c). I’m not saying that Romans and Greeks did not love. They loved their children (those whom they did not expose at infancy). The usually self-important Cicero was crushed by the death of his beloved fourteen-year-old daughter Tullia.
8
If popular poetry and epitaphs and letters are evidence, they loved their spouses, too. Friendship was highly esteemed, a stronger part of a man’s emotional and civic life than it is now: we can hardly imagine a scene like the gathering of friends about the bed of Socrates on the day of his death, with a young man named Plato so moved by it that it became the pivotal moment in his life. But there was no identification of God with love. The idea that God
could love
would suggest that He needed something. Therefore there was only a dim notion that the love we are called to show—feelings here are beside the point—must apply to all men, everywhere. Jesus, as the King of the Jews, revolutionized what the very idea of loving must mean.
eros
, a hunger for what one does not have. It is exuberant and rich, born of Plenty, but also needy and beggarly, born of Poverty (
Symposium,
203b–c). I’m not saying that Romans and Greeks did not love. They loved their children (those whom they did not expose at infancy). The usually self-important Cicero was crushed by the death of his beloved fourteen-year-old daughter Tullia.
8
If popular poetry and epitaphs and letters are evidence, they loved their spouses, too. Friendship was highly esteemed, a stronger part of a man’s emotional and civic life than it is now: we can hardly imagine a scene like the gathering of friends about the bed of Socrates on the day of his death, with a young man named Plato so moved by it that it became the pivotal moment in his life. But there was no identification of God with love. The idea that God
could love
would suggest that He needed something. Therefore there was only a dim notion that the love we are called to show—feelings here are beside the point—must apply to all men, everywhere. Jesus, as the King of the Jews, revolutionized what the very idea of loving must mean.
How so? A Zeus might “love,” might be overcome with sexual desire; but Plato derides these stories as unworthy of a god (
Republic
3.390b–c). Then if God essentially loves, it cannot be like Zeus’ lust for Hera, or the craving that Lucretius suspects will ruin your life. Love is what God
does
: He creates, He gives bountifully, He is of infinite patience, He redeems, He empties Himself and puts Himself at his enemies’ service: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (Jn. 3:16). Then if we would love God we must love those whom God loves. We cannot retreat into the cell of a mystery cult, ignoring our grumbling neighbors. To be like God is, more than anything else, to love as God loves. So Jesus instructs his followers in that most realistic prayer of love for God and man: “Forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us”
Republic
3.390b–c). Then if God essentially loves, it cannot be like Zeus’ lust for Hera, or the craving that Lucretius suspects will ruin your life. Love is what God
does
: He creates, He gives bountifully, He is of infinite patience, He redeems, He empties Himself and puts Himself at his enemies’ service: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (Jn. 3:16). Then if we would love God we must love those whom God loves. We cannot retreat into the cell of a mystery cult, ignoring our grumbling neighbors. To be like God is, more than anything else, to love as God loves. So Jesus instructs his followers in that most realistic prayer of love for God and man: “Forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us”
Individual Dignity Comes from GodDeism, or the Principles of Natural Worship, are onely the faint remnants or dying flames of reveal’d Religion in the posterity of
Noah . . .
Our Modern Philosophers, nay and some of our Philosophising Divines have too much exalted the faculties of our Souls, when they have maintain’d that by their force, mankind has been able to find out that there is one Supream Agent or Intellectual Being which we call God.From
John Dryden
, Preface to “Religio Laici”Dryden turns instead, in humility, to divine Revelation and the teachings of the Church, handed down through the centuries (he would convert to Roman Catholicism three years later, in 1685). He may be wrong about the weakness of human reason, but he is surely right about Deism, which was no great intellectual discovery, but a pale and incoherent shadow of Christianity. Much the same sort of specter haunts the politically correct, who airily talk about “rights,” without troubling to note that their belief in the dignity of each human person—if they still do believe in that dignity—derives its life from Judaism and Christianity.
(Lk. 11:1). For the first time in the history of the world, God is proclaimed as love, to be loved, and to be loved also by loving others.
So important is the distinction that the writers of the New Testament cannot use the Greek word
eros
to describe this love. They use
agape
: and reveal a most fruitful field for western thought and art. If
eros
and
agape
are not the same, and if true love makes the soul most like the loving God, what place does
eros
assume in a good life? How can that desire be well-directed? It is the subject of Dante’s
La Vita Nuova,
Petrarch’s
Canzoniere,
the sonnet sequences of Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare, Titian’s
Sacred and Profane Love,
Caravaggio’s
Mary Magdalene,
Fielding’s
Tom Jones,
Graham Greene’s
The End of the Affair,
and Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited.
It’s impossible to imagine Western artistic and intellectual development
without
the problem of the right ordering of human loves.
eros
to describe this love. They use
agape
: and reveal a most fruitful field for western thought and art. If
eros
and
agape
are not the same, and if true love makes the soul most like the loving God, what place does
eros
assume in a good life? How can that desire be well-directed? It is the subject of Dante’s
La Vita Nuova,
Petrarch’s
Canzoniere,
the sonnet sequences of Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare, Titian’s
Sacred and Profane Love,
Caravaggio’s
Mary Magdalene,
Fielding’s
Tom Jones,
Graham Greene’s
The End of the Affair,
and Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited.
It’s impossible to imagine Western artistic and intellectual development
without
the problem of the right ordering of human loves.
There’s more. It is not just that
agape
is different from and nobler than
eros.
It embraces
eros
, perfects it, and still inverts what most people think love must be
.
Consider the act that, for Christians, consummates Jesus’ life of love: his willing death upon the ignominious cross. Saint Paul sings about it:
agape
is different from and nobler than
eros.
It embraces
eros
, perfects it, and still inverts what most people think love must be
.
Consider the act that, for Christians, consummates Jesus’ life of love: his willing death upon the ignominious cross. Saint Paul sings about it:
Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross. (Phil. 2:5–8)
Love, then, does not grasp, but flings away. If in man love is needy, what it most needs is to be absolutely poor, absolutely
for
the beloved. Then only do we begin to live abundantly. That is the meaning of the true Christian life: “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it” (Mk. 8:35).
for
the beloved. Then only do we begin to live abundantly. That is the meaning of the true Christian life: “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it” (Mk. 8:35).
The West will be infected by this high vision of love, which links utter divinity with utter humility. If only the infection were ten times as virulent! But even in the best of times it is a hard lesson to learn, and most times are not great. Still, consider to what it leads: look at the new heroes of the West. We have a Saint Francis of Assisi who becomes the father of an army of barefoot friars preaching and living among the poor. He does it not by empowering himself, but by flinging power and luxury and privilege away, literally stripping his clothes off in the piazza of Assisi, disowning his merchant father before the father can disown him. Or we have a Father Damien lying about his health so that he can wangle a one-way passage to the leper colony at Molokai, a place of physical and moral squalor, where he will bring the gospel, and spiritual hope, and medicine and food. There he will die of the very disease to which he had ministered.
Or consider even the heroes of our popular art. In
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,
the bravest man is the sharpshooting John Wayne, but not because he can kill at fifty paces. It is because, in his submission to the good of the woman he loves, he gives her up, without a word of reproach, to a lesser man who did not shoot the gunfighter, but who accepts the reputation for having shot him and parlays it into a career as a senator and a builder of his western state. At the opening of the movie, Wayne’s character is lying in a bare pine box, without so much as a pair of boots, and with no one to mourn his passing but a loyal Negro servant and one or two old friends. A Christ, taken down from the Cross.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,
the bravest man is the sharpshooting John Wayne, but not because he can kill at fifty paces. It is because, in his submission to the good of the woman he loves, he gives her up, without a word of reproach, to a lesser man who did not shoot the gunfighter, but who accepts the reputation for having shot him and parlays it into a career as a senator and a builder of his western state. At the opening of the movie, Wayne’s character is lying in a bare pine box, without so much as a pair of boots, and with no one to mourn his passing but a loyal Negro servant and one or two old friends. A Christ, taken down from the Cross.
We understand such love now, or we think we do. Whatever we believe, we must come to terms with that love, as little sense as it makes to all who prattle about power and the fulfillment of desire.
Do not suppose that this vision of love leaves the West dour and self-abnegating. The puritan we will always have among us; and if you want the essential killjoy of our day, he will be easy to find in the garb of a secular spy, afraid that someone somewhere might be singing a hymn. Jesus did not say, after all, that we must lose our lives. He said that we will gain life by that loss, gain true life by the giving: “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (Jn. 10:10). The message of the Scriptures blows the lid off the universe: we are not cramped by a blind Fate, not hemmed in by the determinism of matter, not forced to walk the endless toils of human sin and sorrow.
“Be of good cheer,” Jesus says at the Last Supper, “I have overcome the world” (Jn. 16:33). It is impossible to underestimate the force of this declaration, which is in accord with God’s saving acts throughout Jewish history. The prophets all testify to this high hope. It is not a world that seeks our destruction, but a world created and sustained and to be redeemed by God, who desires not slaves but sons (cf. Gal. 4:7), and who has made us “a little lower than the angels” (Ps. 8:5). That confidence in a fundamentally good world governed by a God of love means that we can stride forth in time, knowing that the end is not dissolution. It has given man hope, and that hope has allowed him both to wonder, and to achieve wonders.
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