Lumen Fidei: Truth Requires Love-in-Action

In paragraph 27 of Lumen Fidei, Pope Francis looks at the relationship between truth and love. The pope has compared faith in Christ to falling in love; and many of us might think that falling in love is no guarantee of truth. On the contrary, the one who has fallen in love cannot see clearly. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was right there:

For Wittgenstein, believing can be compared to the experience of falling in love: it is something subjective which cannot be proposed as a truth valid for everyone. Indeed, most people nowadays would not consider love as related in any way to truth. Love is seen as an experience associated with the world of fleeting emotions, no longer with truth.

Anyone who has seen a friend who is in love with entirely the wrong person, and who is determined with all of his might to ignore the defects that are obvious to everyone around him, will have some sympathy would Wittgenstein’s point of view.

But there’s more to love than “being in love”. There are feelings we call “love”; and then there the actions we take, which can be loving or hating. As Christians, we are called to love our enemies, but we are not called to have warm fuzzy feelings for them. Rather, we are called to seek their good rather than their ill, even though we have feelings of hatred.

But we’re speaking of feelings of love. So suppose I fall in love (feelings) and my love and I choose to marry (action), as indeed we did, over twenty-five years ago. What happens next? Any married couple can tell you: a sharp dose of reality. And the strength of your love for each other (action) is how you cope with that dose of reality. You must choose to continue to love your spouse, despite the things you didn’t see before. And the net result is, you come to know more of the truth about your spouse.

Being-in-love may lead to fantasy; but love-in-action leads to increased knowledge of the beloved, and hence increased knowledge of the truth. And this is true of our relationship with God as well. Pope Francis says,

Love cannot be reduced to an ephemeral emotion. True, it engages our affectivity, but in order to open it to the beloved and thus to blaze a trail leading away from self-centredness and towards another person, in order to build a lasting relationship; love aims at union with the beloved. Here we begin to see how love requires truth. Only to the extent that love is grounded in truth can it endure over time, can it transcend the passing moment and be sufficiently solid to sustain a shared journey. If love is not tied to truth, it falls prey to fickle emotions and cannot stand the test of time. True love, on the other hand, unifies all the elements of our person and becomes a new light pointing the way to a great and fulfilled life. Without truth, love is incapable of establishing a firm bond; it cannot liberate our isolated ego or redeem it from the fleeting moment in order to create life and bear fruit.

(My emphasis.)

The truth is seldom obvious on the face of it. It takes digging. And when it comes to other people, it takes a lot of digging, because we naturally hide ourselves, even from ourselves. Living with someone long term, and loving them for themselves, is the only way to truly come to know them deeply.

With God the dynamic is essentially the same, though the reasoning is different. Unlike you and me, it is God’s will to reveal Himself to all and sundry: to reveal Himself to each of us as fully as we can bear. But God is so unlike us that coming to know Him is hard, and without His help we could never do it. It is only by accepting His love, and learning to love Him in return, that we can make any progress.

This should be no surprise; it’s true in every field of endeavor. Which student learns to understand math better, the one who likes math, or the one who approaches it with fear and dread? Whoops, that’s feeling again. It’s the student who puts forth the love-in-action to really engage with subject.

If it is love, love-in-action, that leads us to truth, then a loveless truth is a problem. But that will have to be another post.