AS LOVE

Family Alphabet

The family remains a precious commodity, but it is falling apart. It is undeniable fact that one becomes human in the family, but in reality, couples break up, education is in shambles, people are increasingly fragile.

In just a few decades, traditional society has given way to complex society, with obvious gains in terms of well-being and obvious losses in terms of goodness. We have shed some sacral rigidity, but the secular age delivers us a shattered society. The affective codes, patiently woven over the millennia of classical and Christian civilisation, are in disarray, and it is not clear to whom to appeal in order to attempt a recomposition that looks to the future without forgetting the past.

The idea of a ‘family lexicon’ might have been fine until the mid-20th century, as described in Ginzburg's novel of the same name. But the current conjuncture advises us of the more modest purpose of presenting a ‘family alphabet’ to rediscover the grammar of the sexes, to spin the syntax of the affections, to articulate the discourse of love.

AS LOVE

Departure is a must. For reasons of alphabetical order, but above all for order of importance.

What a bad end is love! It would be the word that names God's ultimate identity and man's deepest desire. But its sentimental and erotic reduction has rendered it bloodless. ‘Love’ has lost the power to evoke the Name of God and to recall the truth of human affections. They have reduced it to a variation of the senses and instincts. It no longer directs to great ideals, nor can it motivate the sacrifices of life. It no longer plays on gift and fidelity, but on the quantity and randomness of experiences. And it does not aim for a stable commitment, but for increased well-being and enjoyment. It is dangerously sucked into the sphere of consumer goods, and tries to bend even the sphere of law to its purposes.

The accounts, however, do not add up. The projects of ‘free love’ realise deep slavery. But it is possible not to realise this immediately. Just a couple of examples.

1. Even Christian judgement might be led to think that the favour accorded to the world of the emotions and the sphere of eroticism plays into the hands of family affection, insofar as it integrates its specific concreteness. But apart from the fact that this is not integration, but substitution, there is actually more than one reason that should lead us to believe and proclaim that it is the gift of self and belonging to others that saves love, its joys, its ecstasies. More frankly, it is marriage that saves and realises love, not love that must be saved in marriage! As Ricoeur recognised back in ‘66, marriage is brilliant because it “saves the duration and intimacy of the sexual bond, making it human. In many cases, it achieves the opposite effect: it destroys its duration and intimacy. However, despite these dangers, marriage remains the best opportunity for tenderness.”

2. It also gives one pause for thought that precisely in this way, desecrated and secularised, love is nevertheless deified and made an object of worship. This very love, reduced to the adolescent form of falling in love, subtracted from all normative and ritual constraints, consigned to the spontaneity of emotion and excitement, is made the object of an invisible religion and absolute devotion. It is obvious that such a cult does not keep its promises: there is much concern among experts that the growth of the possibilities of enjoyment is accompanied by a proportional growth of ‘death drives’. The ancients already knew, well before Freud, that there is an obscure link between passionate love (eros) and the death instinct (thanatos), but it is indeed true what De Rougemont and Lewis said in their essays on love, that “when love is no longer God, it becomes a demon”, and similarly, “when love is elevated to god, it becomes a demon”! Christians just cannot stop proclaiming to all the heart and synthesis of the Christian message: not ‘love is God’, but ‘God is Love’ (1 Jn 4:8)!

Roberto Carelli SDB

(Source: Roberto Carelli - Family Alphabet)