What do you know about love?

Disclaimer: Sometimes I like to stretch or even redefine terms for which we not only already have our hand-me-down definitions, but about which we've probably already formed opinions. It's not that I don't know what most educated people have been taught about these words; sometimes I just disagree. When you learn about how words get their meanings and how those are put down for posterity in a dictionary—how the sausage is made, so to speak—this won't seem quite as absurd a project as it might otherwise seem. If, for instance, we had to replace the modern understanding of the cosmos with the ancient Canaanite cosmology in order to believe with any doubtlessly-committed sincerity, then belief in the eternal and changeless truths to which they point us would be impossible. All definitions and concepts are ultimately provisional and break down under the demands of eternal changelessness and certainty. Even then, these are especially provisional; they're only working definitions so if my readers are accustomed to a naïve vision of Webster's versions etched in stone, I'll just politely request that they briefly suspend disbelief in the imperfect vision I will give here and ask forgiveness for the feelings of anxiety they may experience when challenged by someone who certainly has none of the prerequisite authority or credentials to do such things as redefine important words. All I request is a bit of charity and leeway to borrow some words and I'll give the words back when I'm done, promise! Some of the terms that we'll have to grapple with in this post are: spiritual maturity, Christian philosophy, and perhaps even faith (about which I take the traditional view that has been largely lost).

Knowledge is not only affected by spiritual maturity (as growing taller permits us to see higher things), but spiritual maturity is also an entirely unique category of knowledge. I believe that Christian philosophy is spiritually mature thought—which is, in turn, more than a matter of being well-adjusted because being well-adjusted is mere submission to the entropic designs on our world. Spiritual maturity, on the contrary, is painful, sorrowful, and yet has us rejoicing more and more.

I started this post with a thought: What specific things from the Bible do I believe and why? I didn't answer because I knew that, should I have answered, I would have begun to wonder about the epistemic justification for each and every belief I landed on. Instead of that, I moved laterally to another question unrelated to the Bible but entirely related to spiritual life and maturity: Why do we love?

I've given some time and energy recently to exploring the reasons why we ask questions and what's beneath them. On the one hand, it seems like we will keep on asking our questions until we've reached an answer that fits nicely into the network of all of our other beliefs. Such a theory would itself fit snugly into the coherentist theory of justification. As I often say, it's nonsensical to claim to believe something without knowing what it is; and we can know what something is at least in part by seeing it in context.** **Words like "love" (all words?) are only ever given to shared experiences. So is that the route to go in search of an answer to why we love?

I could start by exploring some certain scientifically proven and falsifiable explanations for love. But eventually I would set off again, seeking to justify all of those beliefs as well. It would go on infinitely like this, embedding each nodal belief within greater and greater contextual webs of experiences and other ideas related to love by greater and greater degrees of separation. And if I were to take this route, I'd never leave a single web (natural science) in order to explore another context for love.

There's another way. It would be impossible to describe description itself, or to question questioning itself, and so on, because that is an individual experience which implicates the subject himself or herself. This is a matter of mystery in Gabriel Marcel's sense of the term—and this won't go on infinitely with tangential relations to other terms we use for related experiences, broadening the contextual definition of love until it encompasses everything that ever was; rather, it, like other mysteries, only deepens and becomes more enriched as we pursue it.

To answer the question, though, we will have to say that we love because...no, that's it: We love. We love, we think, we question, we philosophize, and the list goes on.

Is this an idiosyncratic philosophy in want of reciprocated attention or adherence from other philosophers—a roughly-hewn likeness of its creator in need of further chisel-work to clear away the dross before it's worth considering a good way of thinking "the truth"? And if I believe it does express the correct way of thinking, does it therefore somehow supplant Christianity—like I've dismantled one framework and replaced it with another?

No to all of the above. It would be nothing less than forgetting that all I'm referring to by "Christian philosophy" is "clear-thinking" tout court. Is clear-thinking itself a self-referential idol for inwardness? Does clear-thinking threaten to supplant Christianity? No, it doesn't—not any more than good architectural design stands to replace buildings. To put it more succinctly, Christian philosophy doesn't compete with anything in Christianity because it's of an entirely different category than salvific faith or its objects.

Christian philosophy does console me, however. Community is always a source of some consolation, and to love wisdom is to participate in a shared endeavor across every time and place in Christian history. Philosophy is unique in that you see it progress not for humanity writ large but within every individual person across their lifetime; and that progress is love for wisdom—not necessarily progress in wise behavior, but certainly love for wisdom. I'm reassured by certain reflections from likeminded thinkers within Christian philosophical traditions precisely because they reassure me that I can touch bottom in reality without solipsism. They love, too.

I was intentional in saying that I'm reassured by "likeminded thinkers" rather than pointing to a "philosophical system," too. Even crystal-clear thought is not the compass or the blueprint itself; if it were, then it would be Escher-like and in an infinite feedback loop. It would be circular, in other words, to claim that man should use a philosophical system of man's own creation to discover the first things about what lies behind those concepts that man assigns to our shared experiences which cannot describe themselves such as description itself, thought itself, questioning itself, and love.