Benedict's "Deus Caritas Est"

[Kismet]

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28/01/2006
Making sense of love
by Peter Hampson


As Benedict XVI this week publishes Deus Caritas Est, the first encyclical of his papacy, a leading psychologist suggests how his discipline can help theology unravel the complexities of love

WHAT CAN WE say about love, a word so often used, so overlaid with meaning? This week Pope Benedict XVI published the first encyclical of his papacy and chose to focus on love. Just two days before the document was released, the Pope told a major conference in Rome of the difficulties of addressing love. “Today the word ‘love’ is so tarnished, so spoiled and so abused, that one is almost afraid to pronounce it with one’s lips,” he said. “And yet, it is a primordial word, an expression of the primordial reality.”

Given that love is so fundamental to human experience, psychologists have been as interested as theologians in this aspect of our existence. Today, the psychology of love has gone beyond simplistic accounts of our need for affiliation with others, or the satisfaction of drives. Is the time now ripe for fruitful dialogue between theology and psychology? Or is there still a communication gap?

Theology not only tells us what love is, or rather who is love, it also discusses its meaning, purpose, demands and awesome beauty. For the Christian theologian the phrase “God is love” connotes a Creator who loved the universe into being, whose visible compassion in Christ redeems the world, and whose Spirit lovingly sustains and sanctifies all of creation. The chasm between this and, say, the psychology of sexual attraction, or the development of self-worth, or even the ability to exude unconditional regard, seems at first to be staggeringly wide.

Yet Scripture and Christian theology tell not only of God’s love, but speak too of the possibility for people who are suitably graced by God, to love God, each other, and themselves in return. We can become Christ-like and share in the Trinitarian life of love. Theology, in other words, makes claims about human nature and so opens itself for dialogue with secular understandings.

There are good reasons why psychology can act as theology’s handmaid when thinking about love, but equally good reasons to be cautious in calling for its help. For a start, there is a bewildering variety of ways in which psychology tackles the topic of love, including psychodynamic, psycho-biological, socio-cognitive and discursive approaches to name but a few. It is not always obvious which claims to heed.

Secondly, psychology offers explanations that are provisional. According to received wisdom in the 1950s, it looked as though loving affection from one significant person, ideally a child’s (biological) mother, was essential for its future psycho-social adjustment. Later on it seemed that stable relationships mattered more than the identity of the care giver. More recently still the pendulum has swung back somewhat and mothers matter again. Like any science, psychology bases its claims on the best available data at the time, and with new data these claims can and do change.

Thirdly, psychological accounts are frequently partial. It may well be that participants in laboratory experiments judge more symmetrical faces to be healthier and more attractive than asymmetrical ones, but this does not mean that facial symmetry is the sole determinant of attraction, let alone love.

Fourthly, many psychological accounts are reductive; they break down complex phenomena, such as love, into simpler components and study these. The balance of chemicals in the brains of those who are passionately in love may well change; those in romantic love frequently think of their love as a story or journey. But this does not make their love only a neurochemical response, or merely a socially constructed narrative. To state otherwise is to transmute valid scientific explanations of aspects of love, into invalid scientistic ones of its totality. Psychologism replaces psychology. Nor do all psychological theories provide explanations; some seek broader understanding but often at the cost of experimental rigour and precision.

The Pope’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, draws on the epistle of John, and examines the different kinds of love. In doing so, it covers similar territory to that mapped out in The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis. I first read Lewis’ book as an adolescent and can still remember my resigned disappointment on learning that eros was clearly not the highest love. Reading it again as I wrote this article, I was struck by Lewis’ attempt to cover comprehensively the scope of love, and how prescient many of the passages of his book still are.

The title, though, is something of an undersell, as Lewis spends time initially discussing a fifth love: the longings and sometimes cravings for sub-human things, from the taste of water when thirsty to the gratuitous perfume of a rose. He uses these to illustrate neatly the difference between what he calls the “Need Loves” and the “Gift Loves”. At the very beginning of the book, Lewis explains how these two types of love, while seemingly in conflict, are really in creative tension. The book as a whole then explores some of these tensions, charting love’s ascent from the biological to the Divine.

While psychology would find little controversial in Lewis’ account of the appetitive nature of many Need Loves, I suspect that an evolutionary psychologist might question whether Gift Loves are as gratuitous as Lewis implies, searching instead for some survival value in even the most innocent pleasure. Similarly, I found his suggestion that friendship brings little evolutionary benefit a little odd, as if solitary selves chose whether or not to engage in friendship, rather than friendship being an expected and natural outcome for persons in relation. This was all the more surprising especially when it was clear that Lewis grasped that the death of a friend clearly affects what would now be called the “relational self”.

Yet, on the whole, when he discusses the human aspects of love, Lewis’ account rings reasonably true. With some adjustment it could be made to fit with many of the findings of modern psychology. Psychology, though, is obviously ill equipped to evaluate theology’s assertion that love’s many varieties have a common, divine source. Also, and depending on its type, psychology might have varying degrees of difficulty in accommodating claims that love is in some sense “self-transcendent”.

These difficulties apart, it is charity and its accompanying emotion, compassion, which I think pose the biggest challenge here for psychology, particularly in its dialogues with theology.

We may quickly set to one side as distracting, the suggestion from certain sociobiologists that pure altruism, and unalloyed charity do not, indeed cannot, exist. Unlike “kinship altruism” or “reciprocal altruism”, selfless love, they say, brings no reproductive benefits, and so any genes “controlling” it would never have been naturally selected. This is not the key issue. Philosophy and psychology unassisted by theology are well equipped to show this claim to be overstated. The philosopher Mary Midgley, for one, has done so with great verve.

More critical to my mind is the explanatory gap between theological and psychological accounts of compassionate charity. Again, secularity can make considerable sense of compassion’s human qualities; the philosopher Martha Nussbaum does so admirably in Upheavals of Thought, for example. But, suppose we risk a further theological step, by following Oliver Davies’ lead in A Theology of Compassion. For Davies, the out-pouring of self in compassionate acts reflects not only the basic kenotic content of compassionate consciousness, its “dispossessive intentionality”, but shows what it is to be made in the image of the Triune God. Moreover, the truly compassionate person not only resembles Christ, he or she actually takes on the mind of Christ and begins really to share in the Trinitarian life.

Psychology can hide behind postmodernism at this juncture if it wishes. It can treat theology merely as a self-shaping, Christian “narrative” or story, a story which affects the way the self is configured, perhaps, but whose truth value can be politely ignored or dismissed. It can deal with the mechanics of belief and exclude its meaning.

Or – and this is the challenge – it could take the claims of theology seriously. In so doing, psychology would need to let theology set the agenda, and to allow theology to position psychology’s naturalist narratives. Psychologists who did this might then wish to follow their theological colleagues further, and ask what difference if any this Christian understanding makes. Davies has no doubt; it reveals “a self who, in contrast to the ‘grey’ self of many postmodern texts is exuberantly self-possessing in its own existence, foundationally reciprocal and inhabiting a space which is co-gifted by and inhabited by the other … it discovers too … that it is already in relation with the ecstatic personhood of Christ … the compassion of God.

“The gift of compassion, extended to others, leads to the life of God, and renders it visible.”

Any psychology prepared to entertain the validity of such ontological claims is thereby invited to explore their mental, emotional and behavioural correlates. If it chooses to do this, it will need to distinguish clearly such explicit religious revelations of Christian being from possibly more superficial or even specious claims about spiritual experience.But is it yet ready, willing or able to do so? Can psychology go beyond secular love?

Peter Hampson is Professor of Psychology and currently Acting Head of the School of Psychology at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He has also recently completed a degree in theology.

[Desert Walker]

[quote]Any psychology prepared to entertain the validity of such ontological claims is thereby invited to explore their mental, emotional and behavioural correlates. If it chooses to do this, it will need to distinguish clearly such explicit religious revelations of Christian being from possibly more superficial or even specious claims about spiritual experience.But is it yet ready, willing or able to do so? Can psychology go beyond secular love? [/quote]

Why is this a concern for this professor? The only useful theoretical psychologies would be the ones that are totally subject to the ontological assertions of Christian theology. My question for him would be why worry about the ones that aren't?

Edited January 30, 2006 by Desert Walker

[Desert Walker]

This article is just a very complicated assertion of simple commands Jesus gave to us in the Gospel.

Examples:

"Love one another as I have loved you."

"Treat others the way you would like to be treated."