"The greatest of these," wrote the Apostle Paul, "is love" (1 Cor. 13:13). Many centuries later, in a culture quite foreign to the Apostle to the Gentiles, the singer John Lennon earnestly insisted, "All we need is love."

Different men, different intents, different contexts. Even different types of "love." You hardly need to subscribe to People magazine or to frequent the cinema to know that love is the singularly insistent subject of movies, songs, novels, television dramas, sitcoms, and talk shows—the nearly monolithic entity known as "pop culture." We are obsessed with love. Or "love." With or without quotation marks, it’s obvious that this thing called love occupies the minds, hearts, emotions, lives, and wallets of homo sapiens.

Yet two questions are rarely asked, considered, contemplated: Why love? And, what is love? These aren’t just good questions for philosophical discussions—these are important, powerful questions that all Catholics and atheists should consider.

What Is This Thing Called Love?

One man who spent much time and thought considering the why and how of love was St. John Paul II. "Man cannot live without love," he wrote in Redemptor Hominis, his first encyclical. "He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it" (10).

That is a statement both St. Paul and John Lennon could agree with, for it states something that is evident to the thoughtful person, whether Christian or otherwise: I need love. I want to love. I am made for love.

But what is love? Many profound works have considered this question at great length and with intense detail. They have plumbed the depths of the various types of love—familial, sexual, and agape. I’ll start with the basic brushstrokes of a definition of love between humans.

The Thomist Josef Pieper, in his essential book On Love, wrote that this love is personal, active, and evaluating. It gauges what is beautiful, right, and—especially—good, and affirms that it is such. "Love," Pieper states, in articulating a philosophical understanding, "is therefore a mode of willing. … To confirm and affirm something already accomplished—that is precisely what is meant by ‘to love’" (On Love II).

How Wonderful That You Exist!

But what is willed by loving? When we say to another: "It is good that you exist, that you are!"—what do we mean? The question is not nearly as abstract or obtuse as it might sound, for it does serious damage to the flippant claim that man is able to "make a meaning," for love is not about making something ex nihilo, but the recognition and affirmation of what already is. Or, put another way, in seeing the good of another, we choose to embrace and treasure that good.

So Pieper makes an essential distinction: "For what the lover gazing upon his beloved says and means is not: How good that you are so (so clever, useful, capable, skillful), but: It’s good that you are; how wonderful that you exist!" (On Love II). This seemingly simple point has profound ramifications, for it is an affirmation of what is. It involves the recognition that something outside of myself is objectively good and worthy of my love. Because reality is knowable and has objective meaning—not shifting, subjective "meaning"—love is possible and can be known. This, of course, raises the question: Where does the objective meaning of love ultimately originate from if not from myself? It is a question sometimes ignored by skeptics, but worth asking of both those who deny God’s existence and those who reject the existence of objective truth: "If your love for your spouse or family is subjective and of a ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ sort, what meaningful, lasting value does it really have?"

The true lover, Pieper argues, intuitively understands, even if not with precise logic, that an affirmation of the beloved’s goodness "would be pointless, were not some other force akin to creation involved—and, moreover, a force not merely preceding his own love but one that is still at work and that he himself, the loving person, participates in and helps along by loving" (On Love II).

Human love, therefore, is an imitation, a reflection, of the divine love that created all that is, including each of us. In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, in Deus Caritas Est, "there is a certain relationship between love and the Divine: love promises infinity, eternity—a reality far greater and totally other than our everyday existence" (5). Even Sartre, who is not known for being happy about much of anything, remarked in Being and Nothingness, "This is the basis for the joy of love . . .; we feel that our existence is justified" (3.I).

Grateful to No One in Particular

It is here that Pieper makes a significant connection, proffering (as even Sartre’s remark suggests) that all love must contain some element of gratitude. "But gratitude is a reply," he argues, "it is knowing that one has been referred to something prior, in this case to a larger frame of universal reference that supersedes the realm of immediate empirical knowledge" (On Love II).

This is noteworthy because there are atheists and skeptics who insist that it is perfectly logical, even laudable, to be grateful. Recently, The Philosopher’s Magazine ran a piece titled, "Thank Who Very Much?", written by Ronald Aronson, Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Wayne State University. It opened with a rather honest and blunt assessment of the situation faced by atheists and agnostics:

"Living without God today means facing life and death as no generation before us has done. It entails giving meaning to our lives not only in the absence of a supreme being, but now without the forces and trends that gave hope to the past several generations of secularists. . . . By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the modern faith that human life is heading in a positive direction has been undone, giving way to the earlier religious faith it replaced, or to no faith at all."

So, what to do? Aronson maintains a stiff upper lip, exhorting his fellow unbelievers to "shape a satisfying way of living in relation to what we can know and what we cannot know" and so forth. Noting that Christianity and Judaism tend to be filled with gratitude since they believe in a personal God, he offers a rather startling suggestion, worth considering at length:

"But there is an alternative to thanking God on the one hand and seeing the universe as a 'cosmic lottery' or as absurd on the other. An alternative to being grateful to a deity or to ignoring such feelings altogether.
 
Think of the sun’s warmth. After all, the sun is one of those forces that make possible the natural world, plant life, indeed our very existence. It may not mean anything to us personally, but the warmth on our face means, tells us, and gives us a great deal. All of life on Earth has evolved in relation to this source of heat and light, we human beings included. We are because of, and in our own millennial adaptation to, the sun and other fundamental forces.
 
My moment of gratitude was far more than a moment’s pleasure. It is a way of acknowledging one of our most intimate if impersonal relationships, with the cosmic and natural forces that make us possible."

Why Does It All Exist?

We can be grateful, I suppose, for Aronson’s suggestion but still find it unconvincing. His notion of an "intimate if impersonal relationship" is, at best, paradoxical, and at worst, illogical. It is an attempt to assign meaning to something (creation) whose value has already been denied (since the world and our lives are the accidental offspring of molecular chaos). If I understand his proposition correctly, man should extend personal, relational reaction in response to a reality that is not only impersonal, but possessing no personal basis or value. And then we are stop there, without contemplating, "Where did all of this come from? Why does it even exist?"

Aronson recognizes this problem and appeals not only to "our gratitude to larger and impersonal forces," but to man’s dependence "on the cosmos, the sun, nature, past generations of people, and human society." Which still does not explain why the cosmos, the sun, and nature exist, or why they exist so as to sustain human life. Strip away the sincere intentions and we are still left with a simple fact: It’s not enough. The vast majority of people down through time have never found it enough to extend an intimate and personal note of gratitude to impersonal, biological forces that do not care about us or love us. Responding in gratitude to the sun, the fallow earth, the dewy meadow, the complexity of DNA is either sentimental neo-paganism or points to man’s natural knowledge that Someone must be responsible for those lovely—and love-revealing—realities. Skeptics should be led to ask themselves: "Are you grateful to be alive? If so, does it make sense to be grateful to immaterial forces and objects that don’t care at all about your existence?"

The novelist and essayist Walker Percy, a former atheist who believed in his youth that science would provide the answers to all questions and problems, impatiently dismissed the "grateful, but to no one" position in his rollicking self-interview, "Questions They Never Asked Me":

"This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make of it and have to answer, 'Scientific humanism.' That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight; i.e., God. In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything else."

Aronson, like many skeptics, puts on a brave face, but ultimately settles for too little. His philosophical approach is merely a more sophisticated version of the crude belief: Create your own meaning. Yes, he essentially says, I readily admit that the universe is diverse and full of unbelievable phenomena, but at the end of the day I conclude it still has no meaning other than that which I give it. Ironically, it is the skeptic who takes an illogical leap of faith. Fortunately—or rather, providentially—faith does not have to be the enemy of reason, as long as it is faith in the right Person.

Love Is of God

The most convincing explanation for human love is divine love. As Benedict explains so well in Deus Caritas Est, Christianity carefully distinguishes between divine love and human love, but also recognizes that the latter results from the former. On one hand, man cannot know and grasp the theological virtue of love by his natural powers. Yet by his nature man is drawn toward God even through human love—especially through human love. And it is the Christian story—the Christ story—that makes sense of man’s hunger to love and to be loved. The great surprise is that God’s love is most fully revealed in the death of the God-man, Jesus Christ, on a cross, which was the culmination of the great scandal of the Incarnation and was validated by the great mystery of the Resurrection.

"In the mystery of the Cross love is at work," wrote Pope John Paul II in Dominum et Vivificantem, "that love which brings man back again to share in the life that is in God himself" (41). This love allows man to participate in the life of the Triune God, who is love (1 John 4:16). The perfect love in and of the Trinity is the source of love and the home of love. The Son’s redemptive work of love unites us to himself, the Holy Spirit perfects our will in love and makes us more like the Son, and both guide man toward the loving heavenly Father. Such is the path of divine life and love, the joy of divinization. "God himself," the Catechism summarizes, "is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange" (CCC 221).

"Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new," wrote Augustine in his Confessions. As a young man he had sought love in many places, things, and people. Why? Because he knew that he was made to love and be loved. Everyone, in the deepest recesses of their hearts, has the same knowledge, no matter how scarred and distorted it might be. Some have even made love their god, failing to see that we cannot love love, nor can we worship love. Lennon sang, "All we need is love." More accurately, all we need is the One Who is Love. Now that is a lyric worth singing for a lifetime and beyond.
 
 
Originally published in This Rock Magazine. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Wikimedia)

In his dark 1977 novel Lancelot, novelist Walker Percy brings us into the walls of a mental institution to hear a man named Lancelot tell his life story, a tale of empty commercialism, salacious self-destruction, and one murderous act of vengeance. Now confined by the four walls of an asylum, he confides in his old friend, a priest and psychiatrist, about the “quest” that led him there and the truth of the world outside:

“In times like these when everyone is wonderful, what is needed is a quest for evil. You should be interested! Such a quest serves God’s cause! How? Because the Good proves nothing. When everyone is wonderful, nobody bothers with God…but suppose you could show me one ‘sin,’ one pure act of malevolence. A different cup of tea! That would bring matters to a screeching halt…‘evil’ is surely the clue to this age, the only quest appropriate to the age. For everything and everyone’s either wonderful or sick and nothing is evil.”

Like Chekov’s “Ward No. 6”, Percy’s story is meant to invert our normal understandings of the patient and the doctor, the madman and the well-adjusted citizen. Lancelot—despite evoking the reader’s just suspicion—hits a nerve with his diagnosis of modern America, especially in his central question: is there such a thing as an evil act, pure and simple? One that evades sociological or biological reduction? In short: does sin exist?

I thought about Lancelot as I started watching Guillermo del Toro ("Pan’s Labyrinth", "The Devil’s Backbone") and Carlton Cuse’s new vampire series "The Strain". (Interestingly enough, a character is seen reading Percy’s Lancelot in Cuse’s hit series "Lost".) The series is a new spin on vampirism at least insofar as it brings a sci-fi thriller element, complete with a panicky CDC, high-profile quarantines, and revolting autopsies. The first episode plays most like "The Andromeda Strain" than "Dracula"...
 

 
...that is, until we actually meet the creature behind all the mayhem. Soon it becomes abundantly clear that this “strain” is a tad worse than a viral outbreak, as victims begin losing their genitals, shooting elongated killer tongues out of their mouth, and feasting on the blood of their family members. Clearly, this is not Ebola—it’s something supernatural, a kind of force…something truly evil.

The lead character, the drowsy epidemiologist Ephraim Goodweather, eventually agrees to hear out an elderly Armenian man who insists that he knows what this is all about and how to stop it:

“This scourge we are now witnessing has existed for millennia. It is a corruption of both flesh and spirit. It ravages what is human in its victim and instills the raging thirst. That is his goal: to destroy humanity…I suppose you might call him patient zero. He spreads his virus through the parasites in his blood, driven by his horrible will...The Master excels at manipulation and disinformation, which is why they created a scapegoat…Take away the cape, the fangs, the accent. He’s a predator, a leech, a blemish.”

Abraham then describes seeing this “devil,” this “disease” with “an intelligence,” with his own eyes in one of the extermination camps during World War II. Late at night, Abraham watches the “strigoi”—which has that supernatural-yet-natural look and feel of del Toro’s creations—sneak into their cabin to feast. The next morning, Abraham tells his brother Jacob, who dismissed it as a nightmare. “Stop looking for monsters,” Jacob snaps. “We’re already surrounded by them.”

In this key scene, the gross-out, occasionally ridiculous tenor of The Strain transcends itself, and we can begin to read “the strain” as a metaphor for human evil—for sin.

First, there is the biological nature of the strain. It’s a purely negative force—a leeching privation of the good—that passes from person to person like an infection. Father Robert Barron, in his review of "World War Z<", explains the connection:

“Original sin is passed on from generation to generation, ‘propagatione et non imitatione’ (by propagation and not by imitation)…sin is not so much a bad habit that we pick up by watching other people behave, rather, it is like a disease that we inherit or a contagion that we catch…addressed only through the intervention of some medicine or antidote that comes from the outside.”

Also, there is the origin of the strain. It’s fitting that a mysterious Jewish character (Abraham, of all names) is the one to explain this origin, as Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus read like an epidemiological traceback of sin. (The mention of a “scapegoat” is striking too, given the role the scapegoat played in ancient Jewish rites of atonement.) Moreover, Abraham’s description of “the Master”—a manipulator and deceiver driven by an inflated will to infect and destroy humanity—rings a bell or two.

Lastly, there is the effect of the strain on its hosts. Again, Father Barron’s review of "World War Z" is fitting:

“If sin were just a bad habit, then it wouldn’t reach very deeply into the structure of the self; but were it more like a contagion, it would insinuate itself into all the interrelated systems that make up the person…sin causes a falling-apart of the self, a disintegration of mind, will, emotions, and the body, so that the sinner consistently operates at cross-purposes to himself.”

Likewise, the strain causes a corruption of both “flesh and spirit” in its hosts: their internal organs shrivel up; their eyes become cold and lizard-like; their rational mind vanishes; their will is squelched, driving them only to use and discard their next victim; and most strikingly, they are driven to hurt the ones they love first.

This corruption of love is an especially horrifying—and apparently central—element of the story, one that perhaps calls sin to mind the most. The first recited words of the first episode touch on the subject:

“Hunger is the most important thing we know, the first lesson we learn. But hunger can be easily quieted down, easily satiated. There is another force, a different type of hunger, an unquenchable thirst that cannot be extinguished. Its very existence is what defines us, what makes us human. That force is love.”

If love is what makes us most human, than the corruption of love by the strain is what makes us most inhuman. To the Master’s scheming assistant, Thomas Eichorst, it’s the other way around—love corrupts, and the strain liberates. “What I find fascinating is how love is considered a gift, a blessing,” he says as he tortures one of his victims, “with no acceptance to the fact that it also binds, chokes, and strangles.”

With all of this in mind, it’s no surprise to learn that Carlton Cuse and Guillermo del Toro are both Catholic. In fact, the explicit Catholic references in the show are numerous: holy water, a rosary, a Roman collar, a Mary candle, and the sign of the Cross are all seen or mentioned, most often as a kind of weaponry vis-à-vis the strain.

In an interview with Busted Halo, Cuse confesses that his Catholic faith is “very important” to him, describing the interaction of faith and storytelling in this way:

“I think religion becomes most meaningful in people’s lives when it’s told in the form of stories where people can connect…in a lot of ways the Bible is a great story, and you find the meaning underneath that, but I think its relevance is not just because of the embedded meaning, it’s also because the stories are so good.”

Del Toro also discussed his own religious background in the Wall Street Journal:

“My basic substance is Catholic…It was very much intertwined with the way I wrote the book. It is an incredibly powerful way of mythologizing about good and evil…One of my favorite books, and one of the most mysterious books in the Bible, is the Book of Job. I thought it would be great for the character of [Ephraim Goodweather] to be sort of the chosen one, but to be taken apart by destiny, point by point, until he finds the voice of God in ways that are very subtle.”

Of course, the attitude toward sin reflected in "The Strain" has its critics. On one reading held by many atheists today, malevolent acts are a holdover from millennia of animal ancestry; these are not “evil” so much as “defective” behaviors that, countered with reason, science, and education, will sizzle and shrivel under the hot light of progress like del Toro’s vampires. Like Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, they proclaim that there can be no redemption from sin, because there was never any sin to begin with.

But has history borne this out? In the mid-nineteenth century, Dostoevsky was already countering this dream of an Enlightenment “utopia” with his “Underground Man” who, as William Barrett explains:

“…Might die of boredom, or out of the violent need to escape this boredom start sticking pins in his neighbor – for no reason at all, just to assert his freedom. If science could comprehend all phenomena so that eventually in a thoroughly rational society human beings became as predictable as cogs in a machine, then man, driven by this need to know and assert his freedom, would rise up and smash the machine.”

Dostoevsky, it turns out, was something of a prophet. Just when we hoped to see the dawn of universal brotherhood, we saw instead a torrent of bloodshed and mass murder unparalleled in recorded history. In the horror of World War II, the raging waters of the irrational rose up once again; and through the evolutionary ethos of Nazism, Abraham met the Master face to face. Man, one Roman playwright wrote, is man’s wolf—and nowhere is this more evident than in the twentieth century.

Today, our digital age only magnifies the increasingly random horrors at home and abroad. Love, peace, “coexist!”—these are the catchphrases we hear (and say) over and over. But is there anything in such short supply? As anthropologist René Girard puts it in his new book: “Why is there so much violence in our midst? No question is more debated today. And none produces more disappointing answers.”

The “human strain” is self-evident down through the centuries. But the question remains: is it sin? The term seems to presuppose an objective moral order grounded by God. But as Lancelot saw it, the quest for sin has precious little to do with these things. Instead, it’s about observing the world as it is, openly and without prejudice, to see whether pure, irreducible evil—whatever you want to call it—is a fiction. Unfortunately, we don’t have to travel very far in this quest. We don’t even have to take a single step.

Many will be tempted to write off "The Strain" as a mindless entertainment. But I think it does something more: it paints a picture of the evil that really and truly infects the world, the kind that—once exposed within—impels its host to don sackcloth and ashes, and whisper with that underground dweller, to no one in particular: “I am a sick man…I am a wicked man…”
 

 
 
(Image credit: Movie Pilot)