If I Have Not Love, I Get No Candy
My wife tells me that I am the most unromantic person she has ever met. I have to agree with her. You see, I have made it a household rule that we don’t celebrate Sweetest Day. Sweetest Day, in case you aren’t aware of it, is an Ohio-based holiday that has become a mandated boon for the flower and candy companies. Only a few states outside of Ohio celebrate it, and so I leverage this fact into personal avoidance.
I am not so lucky with Valentines Day. That one is pretty much a national holiday, so my unromantic self gives in. Valentines Day is the day we celebrate romantic love. I know we praise that emotion because it “makes the world go around.” It is as timeless as moonlight and as necessary to life as the heart used as its symbol. We can’t explain love. In fact, as Donald Miller quips, “The best explanation for love is a chubby little guy with wings and a bow and arrow.” We can’t define it, but we know it exists.
Which would strike most of our ancestors as uniquely odd; for you see, they would have never heard of it. If you explained it to them, they would have chuckled and perhaps thought you a bit unbalance or a very bad story-teller. For you see, the last thing you could have called our ancestors was “romantics.” Maybe that’s because movies hadn’t been invented yet, but it probably goes a bit deeper than that. The cultural structures were the antithesis of that necessary for romantic love to exist.
In tribal societies and in ancient cultures, friendship and [sex] were rigidly separated. Women and men united to produce children and to maintain the family, but friendship was sought in groups with members of the same sex, in part because of the superstitious fear of something so powerful and demanding as heterosexual intimacy.(Andrew M. Greeley, Sexual Intimacy. Pg. 69)
Accordingly, love for them was not the emotional linkage of sexuality, poetry, (commercialism), and friendship/relationships that we have made it today. They would have argued that such linkages were not even possible or desirable. What they called love we would more term bonding or attachment.
[Love] is the value of group attachment and group bonding. It may or may not be coupled with feelings or affection. Such group attachment and group bonding are one type of social glue that keeps groups together…Thus, to love someone is to be attached or bonded to the person. (John J. Pilch and Bruce J. Malina, Biblical Social Values and Their Meaning. Pg. 110)
This was true, even for Paul’s most famous passage of 1 Corinthians 13. Though often used at weddings, its meaning in context was the antithesis of romantic love. If anyone was not a romantic, it was the apostle Paul. His was a hard-headed approach to church relations and mutual bonding. He cared little if light headed, ecstatic feelings were involved. In fact, the mixture of the erotic and emotional would have worked against the type of bonding that Paul felt was necessary for his communities to hold together. His churches had little in common except for the Lord Jesus Christ. They came from slave classes and aristocrats, government leaders and beggars, Jews and Gentiles. He needed to knit his people into a cohesive unit in order to for them to withstand the pressures of the pagan culture and the imperial cult. This could only happen if he found a means to overcome the divisions that become so rife when the social classes are as mixed as they were in the early Christian communities.
The Corinthian church was under tremendous pressure from within. They had divisions, the elevation of spiritual gifts, incest, questions on food offered to idols, segregation at the Lord’s Supper, and the need for funds for the Jerusalem church. Paul had to forge together these people into a unity. The only tool he had available was the bonding nature of love.
Krister Stendahl, in his groundbreaking book, Paul Among the Jews and Gentiles, makes this same observation about the place of 1 Corinthians 13. I take some excerpts from the Chapter entitled “Love Rather Than Integrity.”
Christianity is an experiment in living together—and with a certain flexibility to take differences into account without being divided.
Love, then, is not the “super-virtue.” Love, to Paul, is constant concern for the church, for one’s brothers and sisters.
He..points out precisely that it is love which keeps even things like faith and hope from deteriorating into little lapel buttons which we flaunt to proclaim our own cleverness, our own commitment, or our own capacity to believe and trust. In reality, love means actually to be what one is together with one’s brothers and sisters to the benefit of the building up of the church.
Therefore, the entire chapter of 1 Corinthians 13 does not proclaim directly the romantic love between a man and a woman. Instead it was to proclaim the mutual concern of both for the entire group. It was an ethic that considered the weaker brother over oneself and pushed all toward being more fully conformed to the image of Christ.
Yet, I could argue (and may in some future post someday), the Apostle Paul did sound the death-knell for the ancient views of love with this letter, though not as directly as some supposed. The Churches that forged together under the Christian name were not bloodless associations of disinterested people. As Thomas Cahill notes throughout his book, Desire of the Everlasting Hills, the early Christians were unique to the experience of Pagan culture. They “lived buoyantly.” (pg. 244) They were a “close-knit” (pg. 240) group and full of feeling and emotion.
If there is much commotion, solidarity, and camaraderie, there are also may kisses from afar, many last embraces, and many tears of farewell…These people, generous with their time, talents, and resources to the point of improvidence, actually liked one another.
Among many other things, these were groupings of men and women binding together with an affection heretofore unknown in the ancient world between the sexes. As brothers and sisters in Christ, they could associate and share mutual respect and worth. In such an environment, the view of women as sex objects could no longer tolerated within the Christian fellowship. Paul truly used love to bind together his small, unique, communities of faith. It was a glue that was to last for millennia.
I would say more, but I’m taking my wife out to dinner for Valentines Day. Hey, I said I was not a romantic; I didn’t say I was an idiot!
(With thanks to the Internet Monk.)