One Love, Many Shapes

The difference I keep feeling

I keep feeling a difference, and I don't trust the feeling yet. Here it is, only lightly cleaned.

Embodying godly love versus embodying my own sense of subjective love. I feel like there's a difference here. Part of me feels like there's only one true way to love others, and it's the way God loves us. But then us, as humans, I feel we can define our own ways in which I, the subject, can love specifically. I feel I can express love of His creation through bodybuilding, for example. Or some people find love by finding a partner that matches whatever sort of reality they are implementing — financial success, or having a family, finding a stable partner and being able to have an efficient family for systemic ends. So many shapes and forms of love. But God's love seems very specific, and also can be possessed by humans.

Is there one love, with a shape I could fail to match? If there is, how can this body, this work, this household, still love in a way that is its own? And if God's love can be possessed, is that a thing I generate, a thing I am given, or a thing that exists only while it is passed on? In Whose Love Is It? the choice between his love and mine did not survive. The fruit grows on the branch. That essay left the particular mostly alone. Bodybuilding is not enemy-love. A household is not a basin. If those are loves, where do they stand next to the love John defines by the sending of the Son?

A love with a measure

The part of me that says there is only one way to love is not inventing the pressure. John will not leave the word as a mood.

"Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins." (1 John 4:7–10)

"God is love" is the sentence people carry off alone. John ties it to a sending, and to an order: "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19). "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son" (John 3:16). A few verses on, "people loved darkness instead of light" (John 3:19). "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). If I wait until the other person matches me, I have left the pattern.

Then Jesus makes the pattern a command, and the newness of the command is the measure.

"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." (John 13:34–35)

Israel already had love of neighbor. What is new is "as I have loved you," said on the night of the foot-washing. "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends" (John 15:13). I wrote about the basin in The God Who Kneels, and I will not tell it again. The shape is what I need here. Equality with God was not "something to be used to his own advantage." He took "the very nature of a servant," and became "obedient to death — even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:6–8). The love moves down. It spends what it has. It does not first ask whether the other person completes the lover.

It does not sort the field first. "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous... Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:44–45, 48). In that paragraph, perfection is the sun. "If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them" (Luke 6:32). I don't read this as a ban on loving my own people. A circle of mutual benefit is real, and it is also what people manage without God. The addition is the love that does not wait to be returned: kindness "to the ungrateful and wicked" (Luke 6:35).

The two great commandments keep a self inside that picture, and I don't want to lose the self on the way to sounding spiritual.

"The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these." (Mark 12:29–31)

"As yourself" assumes a self-love and hands it outward. Heart, soul, mind, and strength are the whole participant, not a religious compartment. Ordered love of one's own life sits inside the command. A self that stays the destination does not. There is room for a body, a craft, and a house, and no room for any of them in God's place. Paul describes the same shape as behavior: patient, kind, not self-seeking, keeping no record of wrongs (1 Corinthians 13:4–8). Read beside John, it looks like a person, and then like a standard I do not meet. That gap is not a stick for anyone else.

Poured in

The other half of the intuition is that this specific love "can be possessed by humans." I still flinch at possessed. In the earlier essay I thought the better words were receive, remain, and pass on. His love is made complete in us when we love one another, not when we store it (1 John 4:12). I have not dropped that. I also have not dropped the feeling that the love really does end up in us. Paul is blunt about the route.

"And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us." (Romans 5:5)

Poured out, into our hearts, through the Spirit who is given. I did not squeeze it up out of resolve. If humans can possess this love, the possession is a reception. And the "in me" is not a metaphor I can step around. A love that never arrives in a particular chest is not a love anyone can embody. Godly love, if I am to have it, has to become a way a body and a history actually move.

Paul will not let me turn the arrival into an achievement. "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control" (Galatians 5:22–23). Fruit is not a wage. I can cooperate with a tree or neglect it. I cannot manufacture an apple by wanting one. The trying is real. The source is not the trying. He also prays for a knowing past the definition: power to grasp "how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ," a love that "surpasses knowledge" (Ephesians 3:18–19). A shape with dimensions, and still no box I have measured. Specific enough to recognize. Too large to own as an idea.

Thomas Aquinas calls charity friendship with God, and says it "can be in us neither naturally, nor through acquisition by the natural powers, but by the infusion of the Holy Ghost" (Summa theologiae II-II, q. 23, a. 1; q. 24, a. 2). I train skills for a living. On this account charity is not one of them. It is given, and then it can use the skills. The sentence I want before a barbell or a marriage is the other one: "grace does not destroy nature but perfects it" (I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2). The loves I already have are not trash to clear, and they are not finished because I have named them.

Four words, and the fight over them

Greek has more than one word where English has "love," and I have heard the four of them used as if they settled the question. Agapē, the word the New Testament mostly reaches for. Philia, the love of the friend. Storgē, the affection of kinship. Erōs, the desiring love that wants union with what it finds beautiful. The sorting is not useless. It is not a map the apostles handed me.

Benedict XVI notes that the Greek Old Testament uses erōs twice, and the New Testament never. The writers prefer agapē. That preference is not a seal. Demas deserted Paul "because he loved this world," and the verb is agapaō (2 Timothy 4:10). John 21 moves between agapaō and phileō, and readers still disagree whether the change is a sermon. I will not build on a difference the text may not be making. What does appear is the refusal of kinship-love: astorgos, which sits in the NIV's "no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy" (Romans 1:31). Ordinary warmth is not pagan clutter.

C. S. Lewis, in The Four Loves, sorts affection, friendship, eros, and charity, and under them three elements. Need-love cries out of poverty. Gift-love wants to give. Appreciative love says a thing is very good even if the speaker gets nothing back. "Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God." He will not let me sneer at need. Our love for God "must always be very largely, and must often be entirely, a Need-love." And "Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God." Likeness is not approach.

He sets "God is love" against Denis de Rougemont: "love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god." Drop the balance, and God's love "may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God." Then Lewis's own line: "We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance which we owe only to God. Then they become gods: then they become demons." The danger arrives at their best, when a faithful passion sounds like God. Mere appetite does not. "A man may act upon such feelings but he cannot revere them any more than a man who scratches reveres the itch." "Our Gift-loves are really God-like," which is how like gets mistaken for same.

He does not say to throw them away. A garden is not insulted by needing a gardener. "The natural loves are summoned to become modes of Charity while also remaining the natural loves they were," "taken up into, made the tuned and obedient instrument of, Love Himself." Nothing is "too trivial or too animal" for that, a game or the act of Venus included. I hold it as a hope. The form stays. The failure keeps the old name. The form was not the error.

Anders Nygren, in Agape and Eros, drew the line much harder. In his account the two are opposing motifs. Agape is spontaneous and unmotivated, indifferent to the worth it meets, creative of value, God's way down. Eros is acquisitive, the soul's way up toward a beauty it lacks and wants to possess. He thought the attempt to fuse them — Augustine's caritas included — had lost the gospel by making God's love partly a desire. I feel the force of this in front of Romans 5:8. Christ did not die because we completed him. If "unmotivated" means that, Nygren saw something John saw.

The split has a cost. If eros is only the rival, desire, friendship, and the body get left at the door. Benedict will not take the antithesis that far. Christianity would become "a world apart, admirable perhaps, but decisively cut off from the complex fabric of human life." "Eros and agape — ascending love and descending love — can never be completely separated." Eros that never turns toward the other's happiness "loses its own nature." And "man cannot live by oblative, descending love alone. He cannot always give, he must also receive." A source has to keep drinking, and the spring is not my generosity.

Josef Pieper refuses the other reduction, love as helpfulness with no joy that the person exists. In About Love, loving is a way of saying, "It's good that you exist; it's good that you are in this world!" Human love imitates the love that wants the person to be there at all. God's "very good" is the original of that sentence (Genesis 1:31).

The test I trust is not which Greek word I reach for. It is whether the love keeps its direction when the other person is no longer useful to me.

Rightly ordered, not erased

Augustine had already refused the wall. In the City of God the sons of God love a beauty he will not call a fraud. "Beauty is indeed a good gift of God," loved wrongly when it is preferred to God. "When the miser prefers his gold to justice, it is through no fault of the gold." A creature "is loved rightly when it is loved ordinately; evilly, when inordinately." "It is a brief but true definition of virtue to say, it is the order of love" (XV.22). The gold is innocent. The muscle is innocent. The disorder is the ranking. In the Confessions the same law is a motion: "My weight is my love; thereby am I borne, whithersoever I am borne" (XIII.9). The question under every form of loving is what sits at the bottom of the day.

His other tool is colder. In On Christian Teaching, to enjoy a thing is "to rest with satisfaction in it for its own sake." To use it is to refer it toward what you desire. Only God, in that final sense, is to be enjoyed. "Use," said of a person, is an ugly verb, and it has done harm whenever it sounded like permission to treat someone as a tool. The aim is the opposite: love the person, and do not make the person the resting place. I hold the aim. I would rather keep his other name for it, the order of love.

Bernard of Clairvaux, in On Loving God, marks four degrees. Love of self for one's own sake. Love of God for one's own sake, for the rescue. Love of God for God's sake. Last, barely tasted here, love of self for God's sake: "one loves oneself only for God's sake." The self is not abolished. A body and a craft, loved for the maker's sake, would still be this man's limbs and this man's work.

Kierkegaard, in Works of Love, will not let preferential love keep the throne. It picks the beloved and the friend. Neighbor-love comes with a "you shall." The preferential kind can be self-love in a beautiful costume, the other I. In the Hongs' English, worldly wisdom thinks love is "a relationship between persons"; Christianity teaches "a person—God—a person, that is, that God is the middle term." Leave God out, and what remains may be "a mutual and enchanting illusion of love." He is right about the mirror. He does not abolish the beloved. I will not call a faithful marriage a pagan mistake, and I will not drop the severity.

Jonathan Edwards, in The Nature of True Virtue, pushes the circle past the couple. "True virtue most essentially consists in benevolence to Being in general." A love that runs only to a private circle, and can sit beside enmity toward the rest, he supposes "not to be of the nature of true virtue," though it "may in some respects be good." Too small to be the whole, not nothing. From that wider goodwill, loves of particular people do arise, "as objects are presented and occasions arise." Love of benevolence wills someone's good without waiting for them to be beautiful. Love of complacence delights in a beauty already there. God's benevolence, as Edwards reads it, is prior even to the existence of many of its objects. Delight is part of a sane life. It is a poor foundation for enemy-love.

The body I train

The chart breaks when I get under a bar. I train, and I train other people. The hours are ordinary: loads, joints, sleep, food. I have written about the gym before, as something I notice, not as a verdict on how a person eats. The question here is whether those hours can be a way of loving what God made.

"God saw all that he had made, and it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). The body is inside that sentence. "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well" (Psalm 139:14). I don't read that as a compliment to my current physique. The making is the wonder, including a body that is tired, injured, or aging. Contempt for the body is a refusal of the work.

Paul puts the body inside worship. "Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice... this is your true and proper worship" (Romans 12:1), in view of mercy, so the offering is an answer. "You are not your own... Therefore honor God with your bodies" (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). A temple is not a billboard I own. And the scale, so I don't turn a squat into a sacrament: "Physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things" (1 Timothy 4:8). A lesser weight. "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord" (Colossians 3:23).

Gerard Manley Hopkins, in "As Kingfishers Catch Fire," gives me what a program cannot.

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

A kingfisher catches fire by being a kingfisher. The turn I need is the later one: "Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his." I don't take the sonnet as permission to call every workout worship. A body under a load can be a creature doing what it is. It can also be a self performing for itself.

I can feel both in the same set. One kind of training will not despise the person in the body, and wants the person I coach actually stronger even when it does nothing for how I look. Another makes the mirror the face I serve. The bar is not at fault. Vanity is the weight shifting until the body is the resting place. Showing off is less likely to become a god than the clean devotion that has made the body its glory. Discipline can be love of a gift, and it can feel like virtue while it is self-worship.

Bernard's fourth degree is the hope I don't want to fake: this self, loved for God's sake, still a body. Need is in the room too. I need the work, and I need to be capable. The question inside a set is smaller than a theory. What has the weight, in this minute? In the Matrix I called that Orientation. Body is one of the Four Affections, part of the participant, not a costume. I will not pretend I can see that weight in someone else on the floor.

The partner who matches

The other shape deserves the same respect. Some people find what they call love by finding a partner who matches a reality they are already implementing. Money that holds. A stable home. A family that runs. I don't hear this as a cynic, and I don't want to write it as one. Shelter, bread, a child who is safe, a person who stays: these are the stuff of love in ordinary hours. Storgē makes a household livable. Philia is the ally who shares the work. Erōs wants this person and not a type. None of those is lust by another name.

In Giving or Taking I separated a love that gives itself from a lust that takes, or lets itself be taken. A partnership in which two people hand each other a life can be two gifts meeting. Providing can be a way of giving. I have no interest in a spirituality embarrassed by a paid bill.

It can also be a mirror. I choose the person who fits the picture I am already drawing, and I call the fit love. It may be love of the project, or of myself returned to me by someone who confirms it. In the reader the System is the structured field a subject inherits and helps modify. A household is one of those fields. People build relationships for systemic ends — stability, children, a life that runs — and I don't think the ends are dirty. The bend is when the person becomes a component. You can succeed at the life and fail the partner recruited to complete it.

Covenant is a different picture, and I offer it as a contrast in the text, not as a grade on anyone's marriage. Hosea is told to love his wife again "though she is loved by another man and is an adulteress," as the Lord loves a people who turn to other gods (Hosea 3:1). "I will betroth you to me forever... in love and compassion... in faithfulness" (Hosea 2:19–20). "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her" (Ephesians 5:25). The church is not a successful implementation of Jesus. The love gives itself up before it checks the match.

Wanting a fit is not a sin I am interested in inventing. A stable family is a splendour. The gospel's addition is the love that remains when the match fails. A private circle can be beautiful and still closed against the person who is not useful to it. Loving those who love us is something I want. It is not yet the whole of what was poured in. A mirror can wear the face of a gift. I can hand someone food, faithfulness, and a future, and still be taking myself back through them. I cannot see into another house. I can see the want in myself: a life that confirms me, called love.

One substance, many shapes

Here is the synthesis I want to test, and not recite.

Maybe the distinction is not the form. None of the people I have been reading asks the kingfisher to become a generic bird. Maybe God's love is the one substance, and our loves are the shapes it can flow through, or fail to. The question would be source and direction. Is this received and moving outward, or generated from my need and bending back to me? Romans 5:5 is the source. John 13:34 is the measure: as I have loved you. The same barbell, the same wedding, the same word can carry either current. In one hour the form is a shape the poured love has taken. In another it is my own gravity, borrowing a holy name.

"Subjective love" might be three things, and I don't want a slogan that collapses them. A legitimate personal expression: this body, this history, this craft, the branch's own fruit. A lesser love: real, created, and good, and not yet the love that lays a life down for the unlovely. Lesser is a ranking of weight, not an accusation of fraud. Or the place where God's love gets particular — this patience, this training, the decision to stay when the house is no longer efficient. I lean toward the third as the hope. I keep the first two because I have lived them. A good set can be gratitude and vanity in the same motion, and the motion does not split on command.

I have called the Moment God's tool to enact his will. That phrasing is a theological framing, not a measurement. If this love is poured in, the moment is where a shape either gives it on or bends it back. I don't have a love in general. I have the next hour, under whatever is actually governing. That can be God, or the mirror, or a household I have turned into a god because it was the best thing I knew how to build. The best thing is what Lewis thought could become a demon, and what grace would rather perfect than scrap.

A family trying to be faithful is not my project to unmask, and loving the work of the body does not make a person a pagan. Calling a feeling love does not make it the love John defines by the Son. The name is cheap. The shape is not. In The Many Rooms I asked how much of one love a heart can bear. How many shapes can that love take and still be itself?

What I still don't know

I don't know how to see the source from the outside, and sometimes not from the inside. Sincerity is not the test. The hour I feel most loving may be the hour a good thing has taken God's weight. Lewis thought the claim to divinity becomes plausible exactly when a love really does resemble God. I also don't know whether "one substance, many shapes" is true, or a way of keeping every love I like inside the gospel. The test is enemy-love, and the love that costs the project. If the synthesis dies when someone does not fit the life I am building, it was only a theory of my preferences. A trained body and a faithful house can be modes of charity. They are not the measure. He is.

I don't know how much of my "subjective love" is the branch's honest shape, and how much is the old self recruiting God as the name of what I already wanted. Bernard's second degree and his fourth can feel the same on a Monday. In Whose Love Is It? I refused the choice between his love and mine. I still refuse it. The meaner difficulty is that a love can be mine in its shape and his in its source, and I can counterfeit that sentence with a shape that was only ever mine.

• What has the weight in the loves I would most like to call good?
• Where is a real likeness to God being asked to serve as God?
• When I train, or when I imagine a life with someone, am I saying "it is good that you exist," or "it is good that you confirm me"?
• Who, in my actual week, is not a match for the reality I am implementing — and is my love finished with them?

If the love in me is poured, and the shape of it is mine, what would have to be true of the next person I do not find useful before I could trust that I had not only borrowed the name?