The Shape of Love

One of the curious things about love is how resistant it is to definition. I mean absolute definition, not merely contextual explanation. What is love, really? Is it a relationship? Yes. Is it an emotion? In fact, it is several of the most powerful ones. Is it a choice? A sacrifice? A passion? A bond? All of these are true, and none can quite be called "final." In fact, virtually no aspect of human endeavor makes much sense outside the idea of love: family, law, poetry, music, stories, sex, psychology, economics. None of these escape its influence, and most of them provide their own ideas of what it means.

I have an idea of why this may be. In formal logic, there are three laws that form the basis of all others: the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction, and the law of excluded middle. They are called "foundational" because they themselves cannot be logically proven, as any proof would be dependent upon them. They can only be inferred as self-evident by looking at the world around us and how we are able to successfully reason within it. I think perhaps that what these laws are to logic, love is to human nature: the irreducible bedrock on which all of its higher functions depend. One cannot fully explain love, because it is only by means of love that our nature is explicable.

This also goes a long way to explain why we have so much difficulty with the nature of love, and why we are constantly violating it if it is so basic. That might sound strange—but the three laws of logic are basic too, and people violate them in their thinking every day. We tend to get so wrapped up in thinking about specifics, what we might think of as "higher-level" considerations, that we can often neglect the basics. Logical contradiction usually arises from complexities between multiple competing concerns. In the same way, unloving behavior usually gets rationalized by one specific "rule" of loving behavior providing an excuse.

I should probably give an example, so I'll use one from the gospels. In Jesus' day, there was a religious rule called Corban, where a person could set aside money to be given to the church after they died. Since they were usually allowed to go on living off its proceeds in the meantime, it was common for people to declare sums of money as Corban in order to get out of helping their family with financial trouble. The money still remained theirs to use in the meantime, but since it was dedicated to the temple, it allowed them to dismiss competing claims on it from a position of moral high-ground.

Jesus pointed out that this was a violation of the fourth commandment to honor your mother and your father. That's interesting to me, because the fourth commandment doesn't say anything specifically about providing financial aid to your parents. Rather, Jesus seems to be speaking to the underlying intent. It's very easy to use derivative rules to make excuses for big, inconvenient precepts like love, justice, and mercy. The Pharisees made an artform of it, but we're no slouches ourselves today. It's very easy to get caught up in these traps because deeper precepts like these speak to purpose, not process—which means the process can't be fully defined for us by the rules. It's up to us to actively look for ways to practice them—or to avoid them.

But of course, we frequently have trouble making ourselves think that hard. People want step-by-step directions to follow. They want a manual that spells out exactly what "good action" looks like in their daily life—and there's always somebody happy to provide one. But what is good in one circumstance may provide an excuse from goodness in another. The law is the best example of mankind's attempt to explicitly codify "good behavior," but all it really does is draw borders to exclude evil behavior. It restrains the heartless, but it does not elevate the heart.

Nearly all of us intuitively recognize radical love in action: the mother who runs into a burning building to save her child, the man who jumps onto the train tracks to pull a stranger to safety, the missionary who devotes their life to caring for the sick and poor. But we don't usually refer to them as "love" in our conversation. We use words like "heroism" and phrases like "over and above." The idea seems to be that it represents a level above the everyday love that is a part of our own lives—but does it really? Our practice of the golden rule does not have to be dramatic or make headlines to be sincere and powerful, but I think it does have to be active and creative. There is nothing particularly loving about going along to get along. The rules merely outline the silhouette of love; it is commitment to what lies beneath that transforms lives.

Have a blessed, wonderful day!
Dr. Alex Loyd