I Want You to Be: On the God of Love

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Love—Where from, and Where To

I have often asked myself, but found no answer, / where gentleness and goodness come from / I still don’t know today, and now must go, wrote Gottfried Benn.¹ The authenticity and sadness of this verse is what captivates. Something profounder and more universal shines through the poet’s humble sincerity—a testimony about the times we live in. The constant flow into the sea of human knowledge simultaneously conceals and reveals that notknowingness, the chasm of helplessness when we are confronted by the question of the ultimate where from that defies all attempts to name it.

In the first half of the twentieth century, against the background of all the horrors of war and genocide, the age-old question, Whence cometh evil?, was posed afresh with new urgency. It is quite possible that nowadays we have become so accustomed to evil, violence, and cynicism that we ask ourselves with surprise another question: Where do tenderness and goodness come from? What are they doing here in our cruel world? Do tenderness and goodness—like evil and violence—emerge from somewhere in the conditions of our world (do evil and good depend chiefly on how we organize society?) or from some still unexplored corners of our unconscious or complex processes in our brains? There are plenty of scientific studies about the psychoneurobiological processes that accompany all our emotions, and about the centers in the brain that are activated when we receive or show tenderness, and when we do good or people are good to us. I do not doubt that everything we feel and think first passes through countless portals of our natural world and is affected and influenced by our organism and our environment, and by the culture we are born into, including the language in which we think. After all, our bodies and our minds, our brains, and everything that happens in them are part of the world or nature, that intricate corridor through which the river of life flows. But where is the truly ultimate source?

Can we simply reject the ancient intuition that goodness and tenderness, the light and warmth of life that we almost hesitate by now to give the overworked name of love, enter our world—and hence our minds and behavior—not simply as a mere product of ourselves and our world, but as a gift, as a radically new quality, which rightly fills us again and again with amazement and gratitude? Isn’t the world itself a gift? Aren’t we a gift to ourselves? And isn’t this gift renewed over and over again and revived from that therefrom from which love springs? But if we go seeking that source beyond our world—outside—will we not miss the opportunity to encounter it where we overlook it because it is so close, namely, inside?

Where do tenderness and kindness have their source? Do I know, perhaps? I have to admit that I don’t. All the answers that occur to me feel like a heavy curtain covering the open window of this question. There are some questions that are too good to spoil with answers, that should remain an open window. Such openness need not lead to resignation but to contemplation.

Those who are aware that the author is a theologian are by now possibly waiting impatiently for me to say at last that the answer to the question about the ultimate is God, of course. But the conviction has gradually matured within me that God approaches us more as a question than an answer. Maybe the one whom we mean by the word God is more present to us when we hesitate to say the word too hastily. Maybe he feels better with us in the open space of the question than in the constrictingly narrow gully of our answers, our definitive statements, our definitions and our notions. Let us treat his Holy Name with the greatest restraint and care.

Maybe the moments in history when polite or indifferent silence about God reigns in the world of academe are a precious opportunity for the theologian to make amends for the pious garrulousness of the previous epoch and return to what the holy teacher of the faith Thomas Aquinas emphasized at the beginning of his philosophical and theological investigations: God is not evident. Of ourselves we do not know what or who God is. Let us not fear vertigo when looking into the depths of the Unknown. Let us not fear the humble admission, I don’t know. After all, this is not the end but always a new beginning on the endless journey.

Besides, for faith (and also hope and love), for all these three forms of patience with God, with his hiddenness,² we don’t know is not an insurmountable barrier.

For many people around me the biblical statements about love (God is love; love the Lord your God with all your heart; God so loved the world; love your enemies) sound like phrases in an unfamiliar, incomprehensible, or long-forgotten language. Those people often consider themselves unbelievers (or at most people who believe differently than those who subscribe to Christianity or Judaism). In the world of the Bible, theology, and Christian faith, they are strangers. So it is not surprising that religious statements of that kind sound like music from distant worlds, or like the ruins of cities once inhabited by the generations of their ancestors.

And what about us? Let us not duck the question about how and to what extent those sentences are understood by us who declare our courage to continue to regard ourselves as Christians in this world. Those sentences are close to our hearts because we have heard them many times, but how do they tally with our experience, our everyday world?

This brings to mind the story of the young Jewish boy who enrolled in a rabbinical school against the wishes of his rich merchant father. When he came home for vacation his father welcomed him sarcastically: Well, my son, what have you managed to learn in the space of a whole year? The boy replied, I learned that the Lord our God is the only God. Outraged, the father grabbed one of his assistants by the shoulder: Isaac, do you know that the Lord is the only God? Of course, the simpleton replied. But his son exclaimed with passion, I know he heard it. But did he learn it?

In this book I want to give an account of what I have tried to learn, what I strive to understand more profoundly about those few seemingly simple biblical sentences about love. But I admit at the outset that regarding those statements about God’s love, about love of God, and about love of one’s enemies—which are by no means as plain as some might think—not to mention their translation into the language of our everyday experience, I am far from saying my last word. This book, like all my earlier ones, is also simply an interim report of my journey, and seeks to be an inspiration and encouragement for your journey, for your own courage to seek, rather than a set of reliable maps.

You’ve already written books about faith and hope. When will you write one about love? The young man who asked this question during a discussion I was having with some of my readers must have been surprised to find that it evidently caught me off guard. I don’t think I’m quite ready for that, I mumbled. But at that moment I knew that his question presented me with a challenge that I wouldn’t be able to resist forever.

When my friends were curious to know what my new book would be about, and I told them I would be writing about love, the uneasy astonishment of their reaction did not surprise me.

Many years ago, when I happened to be present at a wedding in the cathedral in Budapest, I asked my guide, who, unlike me, understood Hungarian, whether the word that the priest had repeated about thirty times already in the course of a short address meant love. When he nodded, I vowed that if ever I became a priest I would treat the word like gold dust. In religious bookshops I have always instinctively avoided books that had the word love in the title, fearing that the opening chapters would be redolent with the cheap sickly perfume of pious sentimentality that never fails to turn my stomach. Secular literature is saturated with the topic of love—from erotic poetry to psychological counseling handbooks about interpersonal relations. What can philosophical theology, the hermeneutics of faith, add to all that today?

Love is shown more in deeds than in words, wrote my favorite saint, St. Ignatius of Loyola. But reflection, if it is honest, is of itself a deed, and may inspire deeds that are not superficial. So on what should one focus one’s reflections at the present time in order to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between love and religion and between love and Christian faith?

No doubt some representatives of analytical philosophy would instantly dismiss the sentence God is love as inadmissible in their linguistic games. After all, the statement can be neither borne out nor refuted. The word love, like the word God, is a typically polysemantic expression; it would be hard to find two other words that mean such different things to different people.

I would like to try in this book to contribute to reflections on love by concentrating on two typically Christian aspects, which are lacking in the secular concept of love and about which many pious handbooks speak in superficially banal terms. I am referring to love of God and love of enemies. I am convinced that this dual aspect—which is profoundly connected with man’s relationships to himself and the world—is far more urgently needed in our day than might appear at first glance.

Love means self-transcendence. And what is more radical than to abandon self-absorption—which is especially pronounced nowadays—in favor of an absolute mystery (i.e., God) and the disturbing and threatening alien environment of the world, which turns its hostile face to us (i.e., the enemy)?

In my earlier reflections, I reached the conclusion that faith (in the original biblical sense) is not a matter of adopting specific opinions and certainties but the courage to enter the domain of mystery: Abraham set out, not knowing where he was going.³ It strikes me that the same applies to love (both love of God and love of one’s enemy): it is a risky endeavor whose outcome is never certain, a path on which we travel without knowing for sure where it will lead.

If I maintain this about love of one’s enemy (that absurdsounding command of Jesus) it is certainly understandable. But the same equally applies to our love of God. Will it eventually turn out to have been simply an illusory projection of our dreams of heaven?

The expression love of God sounds just as absurd to many of those around us as the words love of one’s enemy. And after thirty-five years of pastoral ministry I venture to maintain that the sentence, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength (Deut. 6:5), is also disconcerting for quite a number of believers. What does he specifically want of us?

My books are not intended for those who are absolutely sure that they fully understand what is meant by the commandment to love God. They certainly already have their reward. I address myself to those who seek the meaning of those words, whether they consider themselves believers (of whatever denomination, because I am sure that in all churches and religious groupings there are those who regard their faith not as a possession but as a method, an ongoing journey), almost-believers or erstwhile believers (who in the course of their lives have lost their former religious certainties for one reason or another), doubters and agnostics, or nonbelievers (because in the multifarious world of nonbelievers there are always those who don’t consider their unbelief a comfy bed at their life’s destination but are people on a journey). I address the people I meet around me every day who are simul fideles et infideles, believers and unbelievers at one and the same time. In other words, they are by no means religiously tone-deaf: on their path of faith they know moments of God’s silence and their inner aridity; sometimes they lose their way and then find it again; they have unanswered questions and also experience moments of revolt. I address people who are obliged to call out again and again, like the man in the Gospel, I believe; help my unbelief !⁴

Theologians are professional doubters. Even when they are fully anchored in God by sincere and ardent faith, it is their duty to be part of the band of seekers by exploring questions in the light of their own way of living, understanding, and expressing their faith. A faith that is constantly unsettled by doubts and has to struggle with unbelief also within itself is no halfhearted faith.

In several of my books I deal with the dialogue between belief and unbelief, which I suggest is not a quarrel between two warring parties but is something that takes place within many people. At the same time I try to demonstrate that belief (of a certain kind) and unbelief (of a certain kind) are two different interpretations, two views from different angles of the same mountain veiled in a cloud of mystery and silence. Time and again I have interpreted the unbelief of our epoch as a collective dark night of the soul, as the Good Friday moment of the eclipse of God, which nonbelievers may interpret as the death of God and believers as the necessary passage to the Easter morning.

In this book I am taking another step along this road. I show that the disappearance of God need not be simply a dark night. The commandment of love can lead to a mystical experience in which God disappears and the ego disappears, because love transcends the boundary between subject and object, and by locating God in a world that was strictly divided in the spirit of modern philosophy into subjective and objective spheres, the God of the Bible was fatally replaced by the banal god of modernity. That god fully deserved his rejection by atheists!⁵ A god that is merely objective or merely subjective, one that is only external or internal in relation to the world and people, is not worthy of belief or love.

Linking the commandment to love God and the commandment to love one another—the core of Jesus’s gospel—is a way of rediscovering the God who disappeared, and specifically, in our relationship to our neighbor. God happens where we love people, our neighbors. Jesus refuses to exclude anyone a priori from the category of neighbor, not even enemies. When asked who we should consider our neighbor, he inverts the question and tells us: Make everyone your neighbor. In the same way that linking the command to love God with the command to love one another overcomes the temptation to turn God into an object, an abstract idol, so also the command to love our enemies overcomes the similar temptation to turn humanity into an abstract idol. When we are asked who God is and who are our neighbors, we must not have a ready-made answer. We must go on seeking that answer all the time and experience how, in the process of searching, the horizon of possible answers continuously broadens. To break down the barrier between God and human beings is also to break down the barriers between people, and to refuse to accept as inalterable any division of people into us and them.

I am convinced that the next word after the death of God, the return, which, according to the Gospels, started that Easter morning and will be accomplished at the end of time, is the discovery of love—love in the radical sense in which it is used in the Gospel: love as an unconditional and all-embracing force of unification with God and with all people, including our enemies. Jesus speaks about a love that fulfills people’s age-old yearning for perfection, to be like God: be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:43–48).

But this is quite a different understanding of love than the romantic notion of love as an emotion, which, even among Christians, has dragged the word into the shallows of sentimentality. Love as it is understood in the Gospels has very little in common with romantic emotional turbulence. It is the courage to die to one’s selfishness, to forget oneself because of others, and to step out of oneself.

Let us say it yet again. Love is essentially transcendence, crossing the borders that surround our existence: this world, the world of things. (In the words of Martin Buber, it is a question of shifting from the world of it to the world of Thou.)⁶ That is why love is fundamentally a religious and theological theme and that theme cannot be left solely to the mercy of literature, psychology, and the natural sciences. At the same time it should not ignore how the theme of love can be enriched from other perspectives.

But this book also has a subplot. As in my previous books it is an attempt to link spiritual and theological-philosophical topics with a tentative diagnosis of our times. I don’t want to speak about love as a private feeling. In his analysis of history, Teilhard de Chardin wrote in the face of the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century that love is the only force which can make things one without destroying them.⁷

As I observe the West nowadays, and particularly Europe, which, although it is moving in the direction of political, economic, and administrative unity, desperately lacks a credible and fundamental unifying spiritual vision, I try hard to consider more deeply and further develop my idée fixe that the future of Europe depends on finding a dynamic compatibility between two European traditions: the Christian and the secular humanist. Moreover, in this book I mention the confrontation and contention between three currents in Europe today: Christianity, secular humanism, and neo-paganism. And since I have learned from Teilhard de Chardin not to be afraid of visions that might seem utopian to some (because every vision is fundamentally utopian, although this does not in any way detract from their power and significance), I dare to