Love

Note: Last Updated 7/29/2024.

C. S. Lewis:

     You might decide simply to have as good a time as possible. The universe is a universe of nonsense, but since you are here, grab what you can. Unfortunately, however, there is, on these terms, so very little left to grab — only the coarsest sensual pleasures. You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behaviour of your genes. You can’t go on getting any very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. You may still, in the lowest sense, have a “good time”; but just in so far as it becomes very good, just in so far as it ever threatens to push you on from cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy, so far you will be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony between your own emotions and the universe in which you really live.

(C. S. Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic Age;” In: C. S. Lewis, Present Concerns, ed. Walter Hooper, [San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1987], p. 76.)

Timothy Keller:

     You see, different views of God have different implications. If there’s no God—if we are here by blind chance, strictly as a result of natural selection—then what you and I call love is just a chemical condition of the brain. Evolutionary biologists say there’s nothing in us that isn’t there because it helped our ancestors pass on the genetic code more successfully. If you feel love, it’s only because that combination of chemicals enables you to survive and gets your body parts in the places they need to be in order to pass on the genetic code. That’s all love is—chemistry. On the other hand, if God exists but is unipersonal, there was a time when God was not love. Before God created the world, when there was only one divine person, there was no lover, because love can exist only in a relationship. If a unipersonal God had created the world and its inhabitants, such a God would not in his essence be love. Power and greatness possibly, but not love. But if from all eternity, without end and without beginning, ultimate reality is a community of persons knowing and loving one another, then ultimate reality is about love relationships.

(Timothy Keller, King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus, [New York: Dutton, 2011], p. 9.)

Simone Weil:

The love we feel for the splendor of the heavens, the plains, the sea, and the mountains, for the silence of nature which is borne in upon us by thousands of tiny sounds, for the breath of the winds or the warmth of the sun, this love of which every human being has at least an inkling, is an incomplete, painful love, because it is felt for things incapable of responding, that is to say for matter. Men want to turn this same love toward a being who is like themselves and capable of answering to their love, of saying yes, of surrendering. When the feeling for beauty happens to be associated with the sight of some human being, the transference of love is made possible, at any rate in an illusory manner. But it is all the beauty of the world, it is universal beauty, for which we yearn.

     This kind of transference is what all love literature expresses, from the most ancient and well-worn metaphors and comparisons to the subtle analyses of Proust.

     The longing to love the beauty of the world in a human being is essentially the longing for the Incarnation. It is mistaken if it thinks it is anything else. The Incarnation alone can satisfy it.

(Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd, [New York: Harper & Row, 1973], p. 171.)

Denis O. Lamoureux:

…the belief that truth is only found through scientific investigation. This view of knowledge is known as positivism reductionism. It asserts that all phenomena, including religious experience, can be reduced by science into nothing but simple physical laws. Ironically, atheists fail to recognize that there is no scientific test or experiment to prove this claim. They put their faith in the methods of science in a way similar to religious people who embrace belief in God. …the reductionist method concludes that love is nothing but a manifestation of biochemical activity in the brain. Accordingly, the notion of love is ultimately a delusion imposed on human relationships for the survival of the species. But does anyone who is in love believe that? Is a good marriage merely a herd response? No. Love is something more than just chemicals in our head. It is a spiritual reality ordained by the God of love that is beyond scientific detection, and it is known only through the “instrument” of the human heart

(Denis O. Lamoureux, I love Jesus & I Accept Evolution, [Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2009], pp. 36, 37.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria