Costly Love

Surrendering to the Risk of Relationship

Human love is relational; human love cannot be meaningfully conceived outside of and apart from a field of individuals who affect and are affected by one another. “When we are deeply connected to others, it is not clear who is affecting whom, and the causal direction does not really matter.” Does such a claim apply to God as well as to persons? It does if, as Stephen Webb writes, “God is more of a person than we are.” 

Harry Frankfurt writes that “love is, most centrally, a disinterested concern for the existence of what is loved, and for what is good for it.” Any being who desires the maximal good of others, but without experiencing, sharing in, or responding to that enhanced good of another person, might act in ways that benefit others—but it is doubtful we can consider that being to be under the influence or the effects of love. An AI could be programmed to attend to the maximal benefit of those persons in its purview, but the machine intelligence could hardly be said to love. The moral freedom to choose and the capacity to respond emotionally are requisite. It is not an inconsiderable point that those who recognize or perform morally appropriate responses without feeling them are diagnosed as sociopaths.

Paul Bloom makes the case in Against Empathy that our psyches would be healthier and our social policies more effective if we had “less empathy, more kindness,” by which he means less feeling what others feel, or experiencing what they experience, and more conscious, deliberative response to what others feel and experience. (“There is a neural difference,” fMRI studies demonstrate.) That Bloomian tilt toward the socially beneficial rather than the loving, the benevolent rather than the empathic, may be roughly paralleled by those who want to strip biblical agape of any genuinely emotional or empathic content. Ludwig Wittgenstein insisted that the one thing love is not in Paul’s catalogue to the Corinthians (“love is patient, love is kind, . . .”) is a feeling. And Terry Eagleton agreed that “charity is a social practice, not a state of mind.” 

Unfortunately for Wittgenstein and Eagleton, Paul expressly denied what they claim: “If I give away all my possessions [to the poor] . . . but do not have love, I gain nothing” (1 Cor. 13:3, NRSV). It would be hard for Paul to be clearer: the morally commendable “social practice” of charity, devoid of the motivational, affective dimension, may be a wonderful thing for the recipients of that social practice but it is not love. (Clearly, the feeling without the action is not love either!) In the genuine practice of love, we cannot insulate ourselves from vicarious participation in and susceptibility to the emotional experience of others. Love cannot be love without pain, without vulnerability. As the word’s etymology suggests, a compassion devoid of any shared suffering needs a name other than compassion (“to suffer with”), and while non-empathic responses might be helpful, they are a far cry from solidarity, relationship, or love. “More kindness, less empathy” might foretell great social policy, but it is not a basis for a personal relationship—with God or our neighbor. As Henri Nouwen writes, when “we try to enter into a dislocated world,” our connection will not “be perceived as authentic unless it comes from a heart wounded by the suffering about which we speak.”

The reciprocity of love means both individuals and their futures are interconnected and therefore changed. Paul Fiddes notes: “To love is to be in a relationship where what the loved one does alters one’s own experience.” This change is inevitably in the direction of both joy and pain prompted by the other. More recently, Nicholas Wolterstorff writes out of personal experience that “Love in our world is suffering love. Some do not suffer much, though, for they do not love much. Suffering is for the loving.” That is the universal condition of the loving—human or divine. Any definition that would delimit suffering love to “our world” reflects a theology that denies love as the primary mode of God’s being. The essence of love’s cost is not solely or even primarily in the pain it inevitably entails—but in the vulnerability to which such love exposes the lover. For example, a child may live a life that provides unremitting satisfaction to the parent, yet the parent is nonetheless vulnerable. The parent’s de facto self-identification with the welfare of that child is a de facto sacrifice of their impermeability to that child’s potential for suffering.

This vulnerability, this entanglement, is the indispensable dimension of love that is relational. Exposing oneself to the uncertainties associated with another person’s future is the height of risk. Not because one cannot foresee—but because one cannot determine—the emergent reality that any relationship summons into being and continually recreates. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote, “A throw of the dice will never abolish the risk.” In David Hart’s reading of this principle, “what is hazarded has already been surrendered, entirely, no matter how the dice may fall.” Once we place ourselves in loving relation, we have already paid love’s full price, even if we don’t know yet what that price is. This is why all genuine love is infinite love: to love is to entangle our destiny with another, to open oneself to an unpredictable and ungovernable emergent reality. If we take John at his word that God loves in the same way that Jesus did, in the same way that we are called to love, then we cannot do otherwise than perpetually renew our wonder in the God we worship. 

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New. To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, first subscribe and then click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Art by Francesco de Mura

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