Reason and Revelation
Six Questions Toward Emmanuel (God is with us)
1) What is the most positive and creative power or capacity within me?
1) What is the most positive and creative power or capacity within me?
2) If love is the one power that seeks the
positive in itself, and we are made to find our purpose in life through love,
could God (perfect Being), who created us with this loving nature, be devoid of love?
3) Is my desire to love and to be loved
conditional or unconditional?
4) If my desire for love can only be ultimately
satisfied by unconditional Love, then could the Creator of this desire be
anything less than Unconditional Love?
5) If the Creator is Unconditional Love, would
He want to enter into a relationship with us of intense empathy, that
is, would He want to be Emmanuel (“God with us”)?
6) If it would be typical of the unconditionally loving God
to want to be fully with us, then is Jesus the One?
The ‘Jesus thing’ is about the unconditional
Love of God. It is about God wanting to be with us in a
perfect act of empathy; about God wanting to save us unconditionally
and to bring us to His own life of unconditional Love. A
Creator alone, indeed, even a Creator with infinite power, could be tantamount
to Aristotle’s God. Once he has fulfilled His purpose of ultimate, efficient,
and final causation, He is detached from the affairs of
rather base and uninteresting human beings. The God of Jesus Christ is about the desire to be
intimately involved in the affairs of human beings made in His
image and destined for His eternity – and that makes all the difference.
I give you, the
reader, these six questions and some points to guide your reflection, so that
you might be able to see more clearly the logic of love and its consequences
for an “unrestricted Creator outside of space-time asymmetry” (God).
1) What is the most
positive and creative power or capacity within me?
At first glance, one
might want to respond that this power is intellect, or artistic creativity, but
further reflection may show that the capacity to apprehend truth or knowledge,
or to create beauty, in and of itself, is not necessarily positive. Knowledge
and beauty can be misused, and therefore be negative, destructive, manipulative,
inauthentic, and thus undermine both the individual and common good. There is
but one human power that contains its own end of “positivity” within itself,
one power that is directed toward the positive of itself, and therefore one
power that directs intellect and artistic creativity to its proper, positive
end. As may by now be evident, that power is love above). Love’s
capacity for empathy, its ability to enter into a unity with others leading
to a natural “giving of self,” forms the fabric of the common good and the
human community, and so seeks as its end the good of both individuals and that
community.
Love by its very
nature unifies,
seeks the positive, orders things to their proper end, finds a harmony amidst
diversity, and gives of itself in order to initiate and actualize this unifying
purpose. This implies that love is naturally oriented toward perfect positivity
and perfect fulfillment.
Furthermore, love
would seem to be the one virtue that can be an end in itself. Other
virtues do not necessarily culminate in a unity with others whereby doing the
good for the other is just as easy if not easier than doing the good
for oneself. Thus, courage,
left to itself, might be mere bravado
or might lead to the persecution of the weak. Self-discipline, left to itself, might lead to a disdain for the weak or a sense of
self-sufficiency which is antithetical
to empathy. Even humility can be overbearing and disdainful if it is not
done out of love. Even though these virtues are necessary means for the
actualization of love (i.e., authentic love cannot exist without
courage, self-discipline, and humility), they cannot be ends in themselves,
for they can be the instruments of unlove
when they are not guided by the intrinsic goodness of love. Love seems to be
the only virtue that can be an end in itself and therefore can stand by
itself.
2) If love is the one
power that seeks the positive in itself, and we are made to find our purpose in
life through love, could God (perfect Being), who created us with this
loving nature, be devoid of love?
If the Creator were
devoid of love, why would that Creator create human beings not only with the
capacity for love, but to be fulfilled only when they are loving?
If the Creator is devoid of love, why make love the actualization of
all human powers and desires, and therefore of human nature? If the Creator
is not loving, then the creation of “beings meant for love” seems absurd.
However, if the Creator is love, then creating a loving creature (i.e., sharing
His loving nature) would seem to be both intrinsically and
extrinsically consistent with what (or perhaps better, “who”) He is.
Could the Creator be any less loving than the “loving nature” He has created?
Furthermore, if a Creator were perfect Being, wouldn’t that perfect Being also
be capable of the one power and virtue which can be an end in itself, that is,
Love?
3) Is my desire
to love and to be loved conditional or unconditional?
It may do well to
pause for a moment here and give some background about our desire for love which
has occupied the writings of many philosophers since the time of Plato.
We appear to have a
desire for perfect and unconditional Love. Not only do we have the power to
love (i.e., the power to be naturally connected to another human being in
profound empathy, care, self-gift, concern, and acceptance), we have a “sense”
of what this profound interpersonal connection would be like if it were
perfect. This sense of perfect love has the positive effect of inciting us to
pursue ever more perfect forms of love. However, it has the drawback of
inciting us to expect ever more perfect love from other human beings. This
generally leads to frustrated expectations of others and consequently to a
decline of relationships that can never grow fast enough to match this
expectation of perfect and unconditional Love.
The evidence of
this desire for perfect and unconditional Love manifests itself in our
frustrated expectations within relationships. Have you ever had this
experience – where you thought a relationship (or friendship) with another was
going quite well until little imperfections began to manifest themselves? In
situations like these, there might be slight irritation, but one has hopes that
the ideal will soon be recaptured. But as the fallibility of the beloved begins
to be more acutely manifest (the other is not perfectly humble, gentle, kind,
forgiving, self-giving, and concerned with me) the irritation becomes
frustration, which, in turn, becomes dashed expectation: “I can’t believe I
thought she was really the One.” Of course, she wasn’t the One, because she is
not perfect and unconditioned.
This gives rise to the
question, “Why do we all too frequently expect our beloveds to be
perfect and expect ourselves to be perfect to our beloveds if we did
not have a desire for perfect and unconditional Love in the first place?” The
reader must now apply this question to him or herself. If you did not have a
desire for perfect and unconditional Love, why would you be so dissatisfied
with imperfect and conditioned manifestations of love in others (even
from the time of childhood)? If you sense within yourself an incapacity to be
ultimately satisfied by any form of conditioned or finite love, then you will
have also affirmed within yourself the intrinsic desire for unconditional
Love, which leads to the next question.
4) If my desire for
love can only be ultimately satisfied by unconditional Love, then could
the Creator of this desire be anything less than Unconditional Love?
A simple response to
this question might run as follows: if we assume that the Creator does not
intend to frustrate this desire for unconditional Love within all of us, it
would seem that His creation of the desire would imply an intention to
fulfill it, which would, in turn, imply the very presence of this quality
within Him. This would mean that the Creator of the desire for unconditional
Love is (as the only possible fulfillment of that desire) Himself
Unconditional Love. The reader here is only affirming the inconsistency
of a “Creator incapable of unconditional Love” creating a being with
the desire for perfect and unconditional Love. This is sufficient for affirming
the presence of unconditional Love in the Creator.
A more complete
explanation might begin with the origin of the desire for perfect and unconditional
Love. The awareness of unconditional Love (which arouses the desire for
unconditional Love) seems to be beyond any specifically known or concretely
experienced love, for it seems to cause dissatisfaction with every conditioned
love we have known or experienced. How can we have an awareness of love
that we have neither known nor experienced? How can we even
extrapolate to it if we do not know where we are going? The inability of
philosophers to give a purely naturalistic answer to these questions has led
them to associate the “tacit awareness of unconditional Love” with the “felt
presence of Unconditional Love Itself.” Unconditional Love Itself would
therefore seem to be the cause of our awareness of It and also our
desire for It. Inasmuch as Unconditional Love Itself transcends all
conditioned (and human) manifestations of love, it might fairly be
associated with the Creator. The Creator would then be associated with our
human awareness of and desire for unconditional Love. Therefore, it seems that
the Creator would have to be at least capable of unconditional Love.[
5) If the Creator is
Unconditional Love, would He want to enter into a relationship with us of
intense empathy, that is, would He want to be Emmanuel (“God
with us”)?
If one did not
attribute unconditional Love to God, then the idea of God wanting to be with
us, or God being with us, would be preposterous. A God of stoic
indifference would not want to bother with creatures, let alone actually be
among them and enter into empathetic relationship with them. However, in the
logic of love, or rather, in the logic of unconditional Love, all this changes.
If we attribute the
various parts of the definition of agapē to an unconditionally loving Creator,
we might obtain the following result: God (as Unconditional Agapē) would
be unconditional empathy and care for others (even to
the point of self-sacrificial care). As such, God would expect neither
repayment for this care, nor any of the affective benefits of the other three
kinds of love. Hence, God would not need the affection of storge (family) in
order to love us, though He would have unconditional affection for us; He would
not need the mutual commitment and caring of philia (friends), though He would
be unconditionally committed to us in friendship; and He would not have need of
our romantic feelings, even though He would grace such feelings in the human
endeavor toward exclusive love. God would seek unconditionally to
protect, defend, maintain, and enhance the intrinsic dignity, worth,
lovability, unique goodness, transcendental mystery, and intrinsic eternity of
every one of us.
Recall that love
is empathizing with the other and entering into a unity with that
other whereby doing the good for the other is just as easy, if not easier,
than doing the good for oneself. This kind of love has the
non-egocentricity, humility, self-gift, deep affection, and care which would
make infinite power into infinite gentleness, and would incite an infinitely
powerful Being to enter into a restrictive condition to empathize more fully
with His beloveds. In this logic, “Emmanuel” would be typical of an
unconditionally loving God. This would characterize the way that
Unconditional Love would act – not being egocentrically conscious of the
infinite distance between Creator and creature, but rather being infinitely
desirous of bridging this gap in a perfect unity of perfect empathy and perfect
care. It would be just like the unconditionally loving God to be “God with us.”
The following
consideration might help to clarify this. If God is truly Unconditional Love,
then it would not be unreasonable to suspect that He would be unconditional
empathy; and if He were unconditional empathy, it would not be unreasonable to
suspect that He would want to enter into an empathetic relationship with us
“face-to-face” (“peer-to-peer”) where the Lover and beloved would have a
parallel access to the uniquely good and lovable personhood and mystery of the
other (through empathy). A truly unconditionally loving Being would want to
give complete empathetic access to His heart and interior life in a way which
was proportionate to the receiving apparatus of the weaker (creaturely) being.
It would seem reasonable (according to the reasonings of the heart), then, that
an unconditionally loving Creator would want to be Emmanuel in order to give us
complete empathetic access to that unconditional Love through voice, face,
touch, action, concrete relationship, and in every other way that love, care,
affection, home, and felt response can be concretely manifest and appropriated
by us. If God really is Unconditional Love, then we might be presumptuous
enough to expect that He might be Emmanuel; and if Emmanuel, then concretely
manifest in history.
6) If it would be
typical of the unconditionally loving God to want to be fully with us, then is
Jesus the One?
As reasonable and
responsible as the answers to the above questions might be, they can be
considerably strengthened through historical corroboration, that is, through
experienceable data which concretizes the reasoning given immediately above.
What kind of experienceable data could accomplish this corroboration? Data
which at once manifests (1) God in our midst (Emmanuel) and (2) God as
Unconditional Love. It so happens that a remarkably powerful experienceable
event did at once manifest and synthesize these two corroborating data, and
showed the above reasoning about the unconditional Love of God to be both
reasonable and experienceable, and to be mutually corroboratable through
concrete experience and the logic of love. This remarkable experienceable event
is Jesus Christ.
So can this incredibly
good news, this historical corroboration of our reasoning, this complete access
to the heart of God be brought into focus so that it can be seen clearly to be
at once the truth about God and our destiny? I believe it can, because the life
of Jesus and the Church He initiated is filled with clues that
synergistically connect the mind to the heart and the heart to the mind.
