Column Title: Meaningful-Faith: Words, the Word, and a Life of Substance
Column Entry: “How to Die for the Wrong Kind of Love?”
By Mark Williams, Ph.D.
Professor of Rhetoric, California State University, Sacramento
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How to Die for the Wrong Kind of Love
You want to be loving, I suspect. Well, maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re just mean and you like being mean. But probably not. Most folks who hang around in this kind of online space would tell me that love is the most important part of living a Christian life. The claim is high-minded, and virtuous, and sometimes right.
But it is not always right. In dark times, where our view of the real things has become fuzzy, the claim that a Christian must be loving above all else can be quite misleading.
I might insist that eating healthy is very important, but if my definition of eating healthy includes consuming slightly more than two and one-half pounds of Baklava every day, one could easily guess where that would lead. Now, presently, we are at a place where my Baklava diet choices are not tragic, but merely comical. But that is only because everybody actually knows that eating forty-five ounces of Baklava every twenty-four hours is unhealthy.
But what if they didn’t know that? What if we passed into such a fog of nutritional truth-telling that, well, one day we started, you know, being deeply and thoroughly, like, confused about what it actually meant to eat in a healthy way? What if we really did lose the ability to know what healthy meant? What does a world of post-nutritional-truth look like?
If I, in my confusion and ignorance, Googled up “Baklava Diet” and somebody in a white coat with charts and cool animation was out there telling me about the advantages of eating two and a half pounds of Baklava every twenty-four hours or so…. But, then, there was also a guy with a YouTube channel telling me that the zero-sugar, all-centipede-and-powdered-cement diet was the very pinnacle of healthy eating…. But this lady on Instagram was saying that healthy eating meant loads of steamed cabbage, raw carrots, and smoked cod…. While over on X, I was getting a complete rundown of the advantages of the boiled pig’s feet and wholegrain aconite diet…. Suddenly, in such a dark place, my conviction that I should eat healthy—indeed: the very real requirement that I eat healthy, if I want to live—has to take a back seat to a substantively different project: I must, as quickly as possible, as thoroughly as possible, as soundly as possible, discover the actual meaning of healthy.
In the world of post-nutritional-truth, we would have to prioritize a conversation designed to recover the truth about nutrition; without that, the very word nutritional would remain meaningless, and we would all starve.
We have not quite yet, perhaps, entered the deepest part of the Dark Wood that we find in the opening canto Dante’s Inferno, where the whole understanding of love is lost in ignorance and confusion. We have not quite lost all the intellectual goods that allow us to explore the actual meaning of love. But we are well beyond the borderlands of that Dark Wood, and we are marching steadily deeper into what Dante called the pathless wilderness. Today, the word love is used by various factions to mean mutually exclusive things.
If I believe that gender is properly and essentially established by the physicality of a person’s body, I am not being loving, according to any number of people who are eager to explain to me what real Christianity is. If I believe that gender is a socially constructed subjective experience, independent of the body, I am not being loving, according to any number of other people who are eager to explain to me what real Christianity is.
If I believe that immigrants who have crossed the border of my country without the proper paperwork are still entitled to the full protections of the state, I don’t understand how to love properly, according to any number of Christians who are eager to explain to me how little I know about my faith. If I believe that immigrants who have entered the country in ways contrary to its laws should be removed, then I am not being loving, according to any number of other Christians who are eager to set me straight. It is unloving to limit abortions, some Christians say. It is unloving not to, other Christians say.
What does it mean to say love is my highest priority, if I live in a world where the word love is simply a name for the way I, personally, feel about stuff?
And just how closely does my own idea of love line up with one specific social or political faction? If the answer is very, very closely, what does that suggest about who is teaching me how to love? But if we say, “Well, Christians will have different views on these hot-button issues, of course. We just have to agree to disagree,” then is that supposed to be our definition of Christian love?
What does love mean? Does love mean letting the other person do whatever they want? Does it mean insisting the other person do what I want? Does love mean being polite? Avoiding conflict? Taking an uncompromising stand? Perhaps most importantly, how are we to figure out what love means? If love is the soul’s highest good, but we live in a world where nobody knows what love means, then we would need to find a way to recover the truth about love before we could love, wouldn’t we? And how, exactly, are we to go about that difficult task?
We may yet find our Virgil. Virgil was, of course, the embodied voice of reason and wisdom that came to rescue Dante from that Dark Wood, where the meaning of love had been lost in the pathless wilderness filled with wild beasts. But Virgil’s arrival did not solve Dante’s problem—at least not right way. Virgil came in order to lead Dante on a brutal, painful, treacherous pilgrimage, during which he had to relearn the very definition of love. He had to learn to recognize and reject lies (in the Inferno), and to recognize and choose truth (in the Purgatorio)—skills he had long forgotten.
So, yes: we may yet find our Virgil, our guide to lead us back to a place of understanding and wisdom. But even if we do, I don’t think we should expect a quick journey. We are already too far into the Dark Wood for that. And when we do return to wisdom and understanding, having left behind so much of what we thought we knew, we will then (and only then) be, like Dante at the end of his Purgatory, ready to celebrate love as our top priority again. Until then, it is probably best if we begin to think about how to prioritize truth, before our souls starve to death here in this Dark Wood.
In the Dark Wood, prioritizing truth may be the only loving thing to do.
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