Phenomenology of love

Draw together elements from Lonergan, Ratzinger, Plascencia, von Balthasar.
Love is unlimited and unrestricted by its essence (Lonergan, von Balthasar)
The word 'all' is frequently on the lips of Jesus.
Love does not recognize the language of obligation (von Balthasar)
Love seeks a response, though it does not depend on the response (Lonergan, Ratzinger, Plascencia)
"How wonderful that you are!" Love reaches the singularity; it is a combination therefore of agape and eros. It is eros that reaches the singular, that delights in this person. (Ratzinger, Plascencia)

Persons and love

"A Gesu' interessano le persone." (Rossi de Gasperis, Sentieri di vita 2.2:114) Persons: in the final analysis, those who are able to love. That love is of course made possible by the intellectual nature, which means their ability to know and to freely decide and act. Love presuppose freedom: without freedom there is no love. And somehow, freedom is linked also to knowledge. Not in a necessarily linear way, but yes, linked. (Nihil amatum nisi cognitum, and the exception, minor and major, to this principle.) 

Discovering one is in love

"The man or woman in love discovers that he or she is in love when all spontaneous and deliberate tendencies and actions regard the beloved"
“discovers”
i.e., one becomes aware / knows what is happening
so the effects lead to the discovery
the effects: spontaneous and deliberate tendencies and actions
what is discovered?
That which makes these (tendencies and actions) possible: the conjugate form, the habit
The habit itself is a new spontaneity
Which gives rise to deliberate tendencies and actions

This is significant for the dynamic between gift and response.
One responds, one moves into the state of being in love, or perhaps one is gifted into that state, and then one discovers...
Already in Insight.

Remember that there need not be a temporal gap between grace as operative and as cooperative.

Love, agape + eros

All spontaneous and deliberate tendencies…
Lonergan is speaking here of a man or woman in love
And uses this to illustrate our love for God
This kind of love is more than agape? What I mean is that it somehow involves everything, the whole person: all spontaneous and deliberate tendencies and actions
I would imagine, also the feelings
So this is not the love where there is no particular feeling
Or else, we have to go with Benedict XVI who insists that (God’s) love is agape + eros – eros which delights in the existence of this particular, singular person: How wonderful that you are!
Is this ultimately the model of all love?
Are we, am I, called to love each brother and sister thus, with a love that reaches the particularity of the person?
The answer is yes.

"all spontaneous and deliberate tendencies"

“[A] man or woman knows that he or she is in love by making the discovery that all spontaneous and deliberate tendencies and actions regard the beloved.” [Lonergan, Insight CWL 3:720-21.]
(Just noticed the 'discovery' here...)
A habit of charity is a new spontaneity, a new set of laws.
But: deliberate tendencies?

Perhaps we need studies of the experience of love.
There is already a being in love that arises from falling in love – even before the response, which no doubt leads to a new stage in loving. But it may not be the beginning of being in love.
This being in love is not yet mutual, but “all spontaneous and deliberate tendencies and actions regard the beloved.”
What then if the Latin tag (Nihil amatum nisi cognitum) were violated?
In the human case, even if it is love at first sight, the sight precedes.
In God’s case: he is not bound by the tag.
So: we find ourselves in love (with God)?
We discover first, and only then perhaps we can decide?
What do we discover? That all spontaneous and deliberate tendencies regard the Beloved?

Read Aquinas on the habit of charity.
It is one of the grounds from which Lonergan’s thinking arises.
I am trying to understand how the habit of charity can be mutual, can be friendship.
What is mutuality?
What is friendship?

Before and afer the infusion of a mutual love (!) there are acts of consent.
But what about: no acts of charity before the infusion of the virtue? (READ!)
Surely there is natural love, besides meritorious love of God?
But, from experience, I would say that seen as process, there would be actual operative and cooperative graces, and therefore consent, before and after the infusion of sanctifying grace.
Even after, a failure to correspond can lead to the death of sanctifying grace.

To be loved is - to change?

I ask myself: are there instances where to be loved is to be changed?
Not always, perhaps: a declaration of love can be sometimes rebuffed, rejected, not accepted.
But there are instances when we have felt loved, when we have been loved into loving. The gift has become a response. And this, before any proper act of consent.
Subsequently there will be place for such acts.
This, more especially when the gift is conscious but not known. When there is an exception to the Latin tag, Nihil amatum nisi cognitum.

Hefling in conversation with Doran

Just finished reading Charles Hefling's response to Doran's use of the four-point hypothesis as the starting point of his new systematic theology. Electrifying - not only because Hefling is a masterly writer and scholar, but because of the way his text met questions which had arisen for me.

I try to note down these at random:

1. What is the implication of the fact that, of the 4 divine relations, only 3 are real, and one not?
2. Is the gift of God's love really distinct from the state of being in love with God, in Method in Theology? What of the fact that Lonergan uses them randomly and interchangeably? Did Lonergan want to distinguish them?
3. What to make of the fact that, even when he acknowledged the amalgamation in the Workshop of 1974, he did not sound apologetic - that instead, he pointed out to the need to overcome faculty psychology?

One point that I did not come across in Hefling's text is my dis-ease with the way Doran associates the state of being in love with God with the response to God's love. But on almost every other point, Hefling meets my spontaneous - therefore not studied - approbation.

Hefling in conversation with Doran: is this not really dialectic, in some sense at least? 

The state, the consent, and the religions

Why am I spending so much time on Doran's thesis?
Or: in what way is it relevant to my paper on the Natural and the Supernatural in the Religions: Lonergan's Evolution?

Perhaps it can form a separate paper, with an identity of its own.
Certainly it is relevant to the questions I have had since 1988, about the gift of God's love, and the state of being in love with God: the suspicion that, in a very real sense, God loves us into loving him.

Habitual grace as operative - as a technical way of speaking about God plucking out the heart of stone and putting in the heart of flesh - seemed fascinating and full of promise in this direction. As Lonergan says somewhere, the heart of stone does not want to be replaced!

Also, the reversal of the priority of knowing over loving - or the major exception to Nihil amatum nisi cognitum - this also seemed promising. God stealing a march over our knowing. God loving us into loving him, "before we know what's happening" - and before even the moment of our freedom, our free response.

But, we might ask: is this kind of love - in which we are loved into loving someone - is this truly love? Is not freedom a constitutive part of loving?

On the other hand: is it not true that we are, even in our ordinary human experience, sometimes loved into loving? Not always, it is true. Sometimes people love us, and we are absolutely unmoved. But there are some cases when the love of someone overwhelms us, and we find ourselves loved into loving, and that loving is something we find ourselves in, rather than a product of our choosing. Certainly after this we can still choose to accept and confirm or to reject.

Encouraging remark of Doran's:

Before I close this paper, may I suggest that we must turn to human love to find the analogy by which we are able to reach some further understanding, albeit imperfect, of the reality of grace as we have presented it here. The positive dimensions of the analogy would be at least twofold. First, the reception of the love of another person for us changes us in such a way as to enable us to perform operations and experience states which previously were not within our capacity. I have made some initial forays into expressing this in chapter 8 of Theology and the Dialectics of History. Second (and this I still have to work out even in incipient fashion), the love of another person for us is somehow constitutive of us (without, of course, involving the indwelling of that other person in the same manner as the divine indwelling), and not in the manner of a formal cause, but in the manner of inviting us into a relation to the one who loves us, who would thus be one term of the relationship. [Essay 1:34.]

So how is all this relevant to my paper?

The virtue of charity as involving a response to God's love

The infused virtue of charity is a secondary immanent formal effect of sanctifying grace.
Distinct from it are the acts that habitual grace gives rise to: here are the acts of consent, movements of free will.
The former is operative grace.
As principle of the latter, grace becomes cooperative.
So it would seem that it is not possible to call the infused virtue of charity a "response to God's love", or to identify it with the "state of being in love with God."

On the other hand, it is precisely the same habitual grace that is operative as well as cooperative. It is one and the same grace, but different in its effects. In its formal effects, it is operative. As leading to effects in the field of effective causality, it is cooperative.
So perhaps we can say that the virtue of charity, precisely as principle of acts of choice, is cooperative.

So in this way we might be able to make sense of the fact that the virtue of charity is described in terms of friendship with God, mutual love, in which not only God loves us, but we also love God. 

Thomas' virtue ethics

Thomas' virtue ethics: just a glimpse from Ashley's notes, but quite wonderful.

Morality begins in love, works through desire, and is completed in joy.

Interestingly, Thomas gives a central place to the passions and affections in his account of the moral life. Passions empower moral growth and transformation. Becoming good is a matter of learning to love the right things in the right way.

Thomas' ethic is an ethic not of duty, or of law, but of virtue. His primary concern is not just good decisions, but good persons. Virtues are moral skills that make both actions and persons good. They are transforming activities [are virtues activities? are they not rather habits?] that sculpt us into people capable of finding bliss in God.

But Thomas also holds that virtues make us good, but not good enough. What make us 'good enough' are the gifts of the Spirit. The moral life begins with a gift and ends with a gift: it begins with the gift of God's love poured into our hearts, and ends with God's love completing our virtue with a goodness that we could never achieve by ourselves, but only receive.

I found interesting Thomas' distinction between affective (concupiscible) emotions and spirited (irascible) emotions. The affective emotions are love, desire, joy. These are  basic. The spirited emotions are hatred, aversion, sadness. They enable us to be resolute in our pursuit of the good when we face difficulty or are getting discouraged.

If the vibrant language is Ashley's, I think we have a very good article here...

Love of God

Hughes quoted Pascal last night: "If you are searching for God, you have already found him."

I thought it would be truer to say: "If you are searching for God, he has already found you." For you would not be searching for him if he had not first drawn you to himself.

So Lonergan's spiritual direction story of the young man who went to his director complaining that he did not love God. You ought to, said the director. I want to, said the young man. Then you do, said the director.

Even the desire comes from God. Operative actual grace. God has first loved us. The Lion is God.

Love that unites and that divides

One of the lovely things said by Jeremy Wilkins was about how Christ's love both united him and divided him from people. It obviously united him to them, which is not too difficult to understand. But how did it divide him? Because, said Jeremy, his love was so pure that he was pained by the smallness of those around him. But it was a sorrow 'untainted by malice.' What a lovely expression. I remember it being said of Cimatti, Salesian Apostle of Japan, that he too was pained by the imperfections of his confreres. Bernanos, it seems, said the same thing of Mary: what isolation she must have suffered because of the purity of her love.

Nietzsche, Freud and Tony De Mello

Keith passed an interesting remark while commenting on the Masters of Suspicion: it is well known that Freud had learned a lot from Nietzsche. It seems Freud said he had to stop reading Nietzsche, who seemed to be saying everything that Freud himself wanted to say, otherwise he would have nothing original left to say.

I thought of the novel I have been trying to read on Nietzsche and Freud: the impression I was getting was that Tony De Mello himself had taken a lot from Nietzsche. In the book, for example, Nietzsche says: No one really loves anyone else. All love is disguised self-interest. I remember Tony saying something like that. Might not be completely and absolutely true, but it does make one think, reflect, ask oneself about one's motives: why do I love this person? what am I getting out of it?