V Любовь не значит "мне нравится"

Эта любовь потому и столь радикальна, что не ждет взаимности, сродства. Она распространяется на тех, кто заслуживает любви, и тех, кто ее не заслуживает. Бог повелевает солнцу вставать над злыми и добрыми, и проливает дождь над праведными и неправедными. Предположить, что христианский императив требует от нас любить каждого, есть жалкое лицемерие в этическом плане, и невозможность в плане психологическом. Люди часто говорят, совершенно разумно и точно по смыслу, что «невозможно любить из послушания», и что требовать этого – значит только поощрять лицемерие, «поскольку не всех людей вообще можно любить».10 Оба возражения верны. Но они были бы верны в отношении агапе лишь в том случае, если бы мы сентиментализировали любовь, рассматривали ее как вопрос чувствования или эмоций. «Люблю» и «мне нравится» (loving and liking) не одно и то же.

Кант учил, что любовь не может быть истребована и рассмотрел этот вопрос довольно подробно.11 По-своему и на свойственном ему языке он выражал согласие с тем, что романтическая любовь (и, в этом же отношении, любовь дружеская) не могут быть предписаны. Но агапе – может быть. Он сделал тот вывод, что в основной заповеди Христа, в его второй части, «лишь практическая любовь имеется в виду в этой сущности всех законов». В христианской любви или христианской этике нет ничего сентиментального.»
10 Cf. E. B. Redlich, The Forgiveness of Sins (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1937), pp. 294-295.

11 Critique of Practical Reason, tr. by T. K. Abbott (Longmans, Green & Co., Inc., 1923), p. 176.

Admittedly, there can be no command, no obligation, no duty, to love if love is affection, as it most assuredly is in friendship love (philia). Genuine emotion—what psychologists call "affect" to mark it off from conation or will—cannot be turned on and off like water from a faucet, simply by an act of will or willing obedience to a command. But the works of will, of love, can!

Kindness, generosity, mercy, patience, concern, righteous indignation, high resolve—these things are "virtues" or dispositions of the will, attitudes or leanings, and therefore they are, psychologically speaking, perfectly possible requirements of covenant and command. (A typical listing by Paul of virtues, of fruits of the Spirit, as in Gal. 5:22, amply manifests their conative rather than affective character.)

The Greeks thought of love as need, demanding and desiring. Socrates' story in the Symposium is typical: Eros was born out of Penia (poverty). Among the Greeks, God could not easily be called love, since to them God was perfect, needing nothing. In the Biblical-Jewish view, love is a phenomenon of strength. It goes out instead of taking in. They had no trouble believing in a God who wants and offers covenants; who would mount a cross for man's sake. He is love and he gives himself and he is inexhaustible; love is inexhaustible.

The radical obligation of the Christian ethic is to love not only the stranger-neighbor and the acquaintance-neighbor but even the enemy-neighbor, just as we love the friend-neighbor. Every neighbor is not friendly nor a friend. To suppose they are is to be sentimental and uncritical, i.e., antiagapeic. Christian love does not ask us to lose or abandon our sense of good and evil, or even of superior and inferior; it simply insists that however we rate them, and whether we like them or not, they are our neighbors and are to be loved.

There are some neighbors who, being what they are now, simply could not be one's friend. Most of us—all except the hypocrites and the hopeless sentimentalizers—know any number of people whom we seriously do not like, often for sufficient cause, often for no particular reason. (Agape demands, however, that when philia is lacking, we must lean over backward to love those we don't like! "One cannot command that one feel love for a person but only that one deal lovingly with him".¹⁵⁴)

But Christian love, which is not at all reciprocal, not mutual, is not concerned so much for a "close relationship" as for a dialogic encounter (to use Buber's phrase). It does not presuppose any return of concern, even though it hopes for it. It is, in short, not a bargaining principle or a market orientation, as Erich Fromm would say.¹⁵⁵ It is, to recall what was said in the preceding chapter, an ethic in which justice—impartial, inclusive justice—and love are one and the same thing. As we know, justice is as personal as love, and love is as social as justice.

When the editor-compiler of Matthew's Sermon on the Mount ended his section on the universality and all-inclusiveness of love by saying "be perfect as your heavenly Father is", he could not have meant perfect in any maximal sense, of completeness. That is impossible for men. Given the section it summarizes, it can only mean one thing: be all-inclusive in your agape as God is in his. And when agape is understood to be will, the otherwise absurd commandment becomes of practicable seriousness.

This nonaffectional love is the Christian requirement as between man and God just as it is between man and man. Some, especially mystics and highly religious people, have a feeling (sometimes almost erotically intense) for God, for his very presence. Yet the nonreligious man who "knows" God only by faith commitment and willing obedience to his love command is as agapeic toward God as those who have religious experience. One Anglican writer says of love, "It is a matter of choice, choosing to submit to the will of God".¹⁵⁶ Another says that "man is enabled to love God in the sense that by an act of will he prefers God above everything else".¹⁵⁷ Decision, will, is the key in both the man-to-God and man-to-man dimensions. Human relations can, of course, be both agapeic and philic. All that agape stipulates is that we shall will another's good. Yet it is not without its significance that Christians find it much easier to have friendship for others when they start, at least, with love. Given the will, philia finds a way, discovers a reason to follow love. But when and if this happens, the feeling side is secondary—one of love's dividends.

Where were there ever more unlovable men than those who stood around the cross of Jesus, yet he said, "Forgive them"? Paul gave this its cosmic statement: "While we were yet sinners Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8). Non-reciprocity and nondesert apply even to affection-love: Reuel Howe explains why "my child, your child, needs love most when he is most unlovable".¹⁵⁸ Good medical care prescribes "t.l.c." (tender loving care) every hour on the hour, whether doctors and nurses like the patient or not.

This is psychologically shrewd. We cannot love others, nor can we be honest with them, if we are not able to love or be honest with ourselves. This is as true as it is to say that we cannot give love if we cannot accept it. Augustine asserted that "you love yourself suitably when you love God more than yourself".¹⁶¹ In this formula we can substitute neighbor for God. Luther said that we "are Christs to one another," and, "The Christian man . . . lives in Christ through faith and in his neighbor through love".¹⁶² In this love he gains himself.

Perhaps in some imaginative mystique it is possible to experience what Father Martin D'Arcy has called "ecstatic" love (a transport of love, heedless of self, off one's own center, utterly kenotic).¹⁶³ But self-realization, Christianly achieved by seeking the neighbor's good, seems to be a coinherence which outlaws any attempt by mutual exclusion to set the self over against the neighbor.
A long parade of eminent theologians and philosophers have insisted upon this: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Abelard, Luther, Aquinas, Butler, Jonathan Edwards. But the question remains, how are we to "love ourselves in the right way"? How are we to transform self-centered self-love into self-love for the sake of others? Agreeing that self-love is a given fact about people, are we to regard it, as some do, as wholly evil, preventing any good; or is it only a danger—on one of its sides the driving force behind creativity and fruitful struggle, on the other mere ego-centricity? In short, can the sin of self-regard be redeemed, can it be raised from selfishness to self-concern in the right way?

Bernard of Clairvaux, in a mystical and monkish essay, once outlined a "ladder" by which we may climb: It goes from (1) love of self for self's sake, to (2) love of God, yet still for self's sake, to (3) love of God for God's sake, to (4) love of self, once more, but this time for God's sake and not one's own.¹⁶⁴ In the same way, surely, we can see how it is possible, by a parallel, to ascend the ladder of neighbor-love: from (1) love of ourself for our own sake, to (2) love of our neighbor for our own sake, to (3) love of neighbor for the neighbor's sake, to (4) love of ourself again, but now for the right reason, i.e., for the neighbor's sake.

The meaning of this is, in a real way, that the Christian takes Aristotle's ideal of self-realization (self-nurture) seriously, but for the sake of his neighbors whom he will thereby be more fully able to serve, to whose welfare he may more solidly contribute. Better a trained man than a dolt, better for everybody.

But the problem of tragedy still haunts us, even if we (reader and author) are still together after the last flight of subtlety. The essence of tragedy is the conflict of one good or right with another. Tragedy, of necessity, brings creative casuistry into play. Melodrama, after all, is Sunday-school ethics, child's play—the conflict of good and evil. When we are asked to choose between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, it is not too great a test of our ethical decision-making powers. But what of the situations in which the Lesser Evil and the Greater Good issue is posed? And to bring this to bear upon the problem of self-love, what do we do when self-love and neighbor-love cross each other?

Therefore the ship's captain or the plane's pilot or the wagon train's or safari's master and scout—these are to keep themselves alive, even at the expense of some passengers, if need be, when disaster threatens all. This is tragedy—of the kind that is enacted constantly in peace and war. Who could seriously disagree with the situa-tionist's opinion that the President of the United States, in the event of a bomb attack, should disregard all cries of fear, pain, and helplessness around him, and scuttle callously" for the safety of his shelter, where his special knowledge could be brought to bear for millions of others?

The two commandments in the love Summary are really only one, and the three objects of love (God, neighbor, and self) unite its work; they do not divide it. All love is amor sui, self-love, i.e., all love seeks its own good. For Christians, self-love may be either right or wrong love, depending upon the good sought and the situation. If we love ourselves for our own sakes, that is wrong. If we love ourselves for God's sake and the neighbor's, then self-love is right. For to love God and the neighbor is to love one's self in the right way; to love one's neighbor is to respond to God's love in the right way; to love one's self in the right way is to love God and one's neighbors.
Calculation Is Not Cruel
All of this is thoughtful love, careful as well as care-full. It is a matter of intelligence, not sentiment. Nothing is as complex and difficult as ethics, even Christian love ethics, once we have cut loose from law's oversimplifying pre-tailored rules, once we become situational. It was the mature acceptance of this which lay behind Undershaft's reply, when his son Stephen, the unemployed man-about-town, said with considerable unction and self-righteousness, and unbounded superficiality, "I know the difference between right and wrong".

Said his father more annoyed than amused, "You don't say so! What! no capacity for business, no knowledge of law, no sympathy with art, no pretension to philosophy; only a simple knowledge of the secret that has puzzled all the philosophers, baffled all the lawyers, muddled all the men of business, and ruined most of the artists: the secret of right and wrong. Why man, you're a genius, a master of masters, a god! At twenty-four, too!"¹⁶⁵ Stephen is a prototype of ethical legalism.

Moral choices need intelligence as much as they need concern, sound information as well as good disposition.

To be "good" we have to get rid of innocence. The Victorian advice, "Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever," is false. The sweet maid has to be clever to be good. We do not have to follow Socrates' identification of virtue and knowledge in order to insist upon the importance of facts, of context. The yogi alone is up in the air; he needs the commissar; aspiration needs practicality.

Even the radical principle of enemy-love has to be qualified in the calculations of the situation; it is right to deal lovingly with the enemy unless to do so hurts too many friends. The enemy-neighbor has no stronger claims than a friend-neighbor, after all. In the old heart tugger, "Which should you save if you can carry only one from a burning building, the baby or Da Vinci's Mona Lisa?" you take the baby if you are a personalist. There are copies and photos of the painting. But if the choice is between your own father and a medical genius who has discovered a cure for a common fatal disease, you carry out the genius if you understand agape. This is the agapeic calculus. Sir David Ross tried to find a middle course between Kant's legalism and Mill's utility.¹⁶⁶ It was not a successful effort. Our situation ethics frankly joins forces with Mill; no rivalry here. We choose what is most "useful" for the most people.

In Italy during World War II a priest in the underground resistance bombed a Nazi freight train. The occupying authorities began killing twenty hostages a day, until the saboteur surrendered." When asked if he refused to give himself up because he intended to do more heroic deeds, the priest said, "No. There is no other priest Mailable and our people's souls need my absolution for their eternal salvation". After three days a Communist, a leilow resistance fighter, betrayed the priest to stop the carnage. One may accept the priest's assumptions about salvation or not (the Communist evidently did not), but no situationist could quarrel with his method of ethical analysis and decision.

Only those who sentimentalize and subjectivize love look upon calculation and "figuring the angles" as cold or cruel or inimical or a betrayal of "love's warmth". Tolstoy, who wanted love to be futureless (no consideration of consequences) and indifferent to arithmetic (no counting and weighing of one against another), seeing only the one who is there, was the soul of sentimentality. He would tell a doctor rushing to answer an emergency call for those hurt in an overturned bus to stop if, on the way, he saw a motorist smash into a wall. Quite to the contrary, love might even disguise itself, distort its face, pretend to be other than it is. In a TV play, The Bitter Choice, a nurse in a military hospital deliberately makes wounded soldiers hate her enough to motivate them to get them on their feet again and out of her care on the way to full recovery! Love can simulate, it can calculate. Otherwise, it is like the bride who wanted to ignore all recipes and simply let her love for her husband guide her when baking him a cake.

Some years ago a newsmagazine took up the perennial issue whether panhandlers should be turned away.¹⁶⁷ One minister wrote in that "of course they should be" sometimes, and in any case clergy ought not to give them money—never let the skillful panhandler outsmart them. Another minister wrote in to protest, calling his brother in the cloth "cold and suave" with "cold-as-ice efficiency", and arguing that clergy should meet immediate calls for help even if they are "taken" by the panhandler. But agape is on the first man's side, assuming that he is not indifferent. This is why the Didache, that earliest of Christian ethical treatises, said, "Let thine alms sweat in thy palm until thou knowest to whom thou art to give". For love ethics, this is the bifocal vision of the serpent and the dove (Matt. 10:16).

Make no mistake about it; love can not only make people angry, it can be angry too. Love makes judgments; it does not say, "Forget it" but, "Forgive it". It may not hate the sinner but it hates the sin, to use an old but fundamentally true bromide. This is why Augustine said, right after his reduction of Christian ethics to a loving will: "Love can be angry, charity can be angry, with a kind of anger in which there is no gall, like the dove's and not the raven's".¹⁶⁸

Again, to love is not necessarily to please. Agape is not gratification. It has often been remarked that the golden rule should read, "Do unto others as they would have you do unto them"—that its classic form, "as you would have them do unto you" is self-centered, cutting its cloth according to what you want rather than what the neighbor wants. But to accept this revision would be too close to "disinterested" love; it would be neutral love, which is too close to indifference. For agape is concerned for the neighbor, ultimately, for God's sake; certainly not for the self's, but not even for the neighbor's own sake only. Christian love, for example, cannot give heroin to an addict just because he wants it. Or, at least, if the heroin is given, it will be given as part of a cure. And the same with all pleas—sex, alms, food, anything. All parents know this.

With the development of computers all sorts of analytical ethical possibilities open up. Legalism could find little of interest in it but situation ethics does. Once we laughed at Raimon Lull's medieval Ars major, an arithmetic, surefire device for getting answers to theological questions. It is said that followers of his in the "Lullian Science" contrived a barrel device to revolve after fixing clock pointers, so that a whirl of the barrel, like the spin of a roulette wheel, would pop out the answer. In fact, it was a primitive computer.

It is possible that by learning how to assign numerical values to the factors at stake in problems of conscience, love's calculations can gain accuracy in an ethical ars major. The temper of situation ethics is in keeping with the attempt to quantify qualities. It is this kind of distributive analysis which modern game theory has matured.¹⁶⁹ And already game theory is being applied to ethics, as well as to economics, in our consideration of defense problems.¹⁷⁰ As Lady Bracknell says in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, "The truth is never pure, and rarely simple".

A macabre tale is told of the god Moloch. He came down to earth to the premier of one of the new nations in Africa, with an offer: "I will provide you with a modern highway network if you will sacrifice 45,000 people to me every year." The premier, aghast, cried, "No! Not a single, solitary soul!" "Phooie", retorted Moloch, "that is what I get in the U.S.A. annually". Actuaries know in advance how many men will be killed for every fifty miles of new roads built or every ten floors of new buildings. By reducing the speed limit on our highways to fifteen miles an hour we could save more than four fifths of the lives that are lost in accidents. We don't do it, though. Why?

It is sentimental, simplistic, and romantically backward to "feel" that love cannot or ought not calculate; that it is either demeaned or diluted by having a memory, making future references, counting people, trying to figure the angles, finding its mix of alternatives and trying to win the game of optimum choice. Very much to the contrary, love grows up, is matured and actualized, when it permits a reasonable fire to warm its work but seeks more and more light, less and less heat. The heat it can leave to romance.

Love's business is not to play favorites or find friends or to "fall" for some one-and-only. It plays the field, universalizes its concern, has a social interest, is no respecter of persons. If we could ever claim (as Nygren did) that disinterested love is anything real at all, then it cannot mean that in such an ethic the lover is quite forgotten and only the loved remembered, i.e., that love is kenotic or self-emptying. Disinterested love can only mean impartial love, inclusive love, indiscriminate love, love for Tom, Dick, and Harry.

This is possible, such a disinterested love, because—as we say—love wills the neighbor's good whether we like him or not.