Loving the Unlovable

A friend wrote some interesting things to me privately about my first entry (see November 22), pointing out the facts that we humans love all kinds of things and people that would be hard to affirm.

   I don't think you can love something intrinsically evil or rotten or bad. You can love someone who as a human being is intrinsically good but who has been corrupted. The form that love takes is pity. Those idiots who loved Hitler loved a man they fantasized was good. But that was a delusion.

  The movie (and book) Dead Man Walking explores this crazy possibility: without sentimentality, the possibility of loving a man who was capable of horrific evil, and what that means for the parents of families. It was not only pity at the end. After Sean Penn's character confessed, faced the truth of what he had done, things got real. There was real grief after his execution, even juxtaposed to the unspeakable grief of the parents whose children he had helped violate and murder. This is either supernatural or sentimental. It is impossible on a purely human level. It makes no human sense. 

    The idea is that unless one finds it intelligible that someone might love them lucidly and purely, they won't find their existence worth affirming - deep down, subconsciously. Loving someone confirms, makes it intelligible to themselves, that their existence is good, meaningful. Children denied love will have a hard time finding themselves loveable. How can a Hitler, how can such a murderer and rapist, find himself lovable except by deluding himself?

    My friend tells me that even Hitler had a girlfriend. I don’t deny Eva Braun probably "loved" Hitler in some sense, and within the bubble of the Nazi world, it was intelligible to see Hitler as loveable. But she has to see him through rose-colored glasses and from a perspective within an ideology that made evil good, good evil – probably because she was screwed up herself. Human love is messy and unpredictable – because imperfect and often a result of fantasy or sentimentality – especially when it comes to sex.

     I am just saying it contradicts the very idea of love to love what is evil because it is evil, and lucidly grasp the evil as evil. I think at bottom love –  the very idea of it, the geometrical form of love as opposed to our imperfect reflections of it –  is a form of believing or judging that what or who is loved is good. Good just means that someone or something an intelligible object of love - or would be if you really understood them or it. There are conceptual relations between loving, goodness, and being. But there are so many forms of love – pity, compassion, friendship, eros, patriotism, vocation, amor mundi, grief, etc. And love is always filtered through fucked up human beings, so it is rarely pure. Like sunlight filtered through a polluted atmosphere. It is hard to see the thing itself. But in certain people, it does shine through.

    I think love is a key – to meaning, to understanding reality, to understanding morality. I think apart from the mythology – which may or may not also weirdly be history. Christianity gets that right. In fact, I learned from the New Testament. 

    In a way, the reason that love does not have more power to give us joy and affirm life is precisely because even Hitler had a lover of sorts. We don't trust human love to reveal that it is wonderful that we exist; to reveal our soul. That's why a lot of folks need God. Perhaps in some sense everyone does. Not as a power-authority figure; not as an all-powerful being that gives commands; but as Christ understood God, as the Creator whose love never fails. God's love never fails – a conceptual point about God's love, not an empirical one; it’s like saying a circle is always round or a square always has four sides.

     I recall watching Cadfael, a BBC medieval mystery series based on the Cadfael novels of Elis Peters. Cadfael was a crusader for 20 years who became a monk and solved mysteries. In one episode a former crusader, a great warrior admired by all, friend and foe alike, came down with leprosy. Incognito he follows his niece around as she is abused by her guardians - who get what's coming to them. In the end, Cadfael urges him to reveal himself to her rather than continue to let her think him dead. Then the old crusader shows Cadfael his hideous face – a face no human can bear. Cadfael, in a moment of love, tells him that God sees not with the eyes of men. He sees the heart and will find it beautiful. A good illustration of why men need God to feel that their existence is good. Human love is limited and fallible. It can reveal us, partly; but like our imperfectly drawn circles, it points to an Idea from another dimension.