We need to look afresh at the whole idea of falling in love.
The present cultural anarchy that has come to surround relationships has evolved from the 20th century’s preoccupation with falling in love. Initially just falling in love, but then falling in love and into bed to something vastly more complex.
If you wanted to be a bit blunt you might say that our culture has become addicted to an entertainment industry selling a mixture of deep (multiple) infatuation and a lot of sex. Hollywood platformed the self-soothing of romantic love. And as the boundaries of what was morally acceptable became more porous, it moved beyond straight people looking to get married to people of different orientations looking for a wider variety of things.
But we are hampered in our theological and spiritual response to this phenomenon by only having one word for love which, unlike the Greeks who had four, obscures what is happening rather than telling much truth about it.
The Americans often use a word “limerence” to describe the more unstable expressions of falling in love; it simply means romantic obsession, and it’s a helpful addition to our limited lexicon. Falling in love is after all also often seen as a period of temporary madness in which two people develop wholly unrealistic affections for each other that don’t survive time, circumstances and doses of reality. But like so much else there is both a pathological end of the scale and also a virtuous end.
In the most benign part of the scale, the period of falling in love can allow intense depths of affection, intimacy and emotional bonding to develop. They discover themselves increasingly emotionally and physically complemented and resourced; that their mutual love then deepens, heals, inspires, absolves and nurtures. At the pathological end, something rather different.
But the Church has not got much involved with the experience of falling in love, except for the point at which it ushers a couple into marriage and offers a theology of co-creativity with God, and a protection of the sanctity of a relationship which produces and nurtures children.
However, to those who fall in love and don’t want either marriage, children or sanctity, it doesn’t have much to say apart from offering warnings about the power of sex to destabilise the affections and damage the soul when used outside marriage.
Yet, as with almost all that slips into heresy and disorder, there is another end of the scale that it has fallen away from. In this case, Dante is the Church’s premier theologian of romantic love.
Dante Alighieri wrote the Divine Comedy in the early 1300s. Within the history of Christian mysticism there are two journeys that the contemplative pilgrim can take; the Via Negativa (or the Negation of Images) (Teresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, The Cloud of Unknowing). The other is the Via Affirmativa (the Affirmation of Images) – the recognition of the infinite in the finite, the eternal in the temporal, the celestial in the terrestrial. Of the two ways, the Affirmativa, more capable of communicating and celebrating the incarnation, was more central and formative of Catholic teaching in the Middle Ages.
Ignoring the temptation to start a commentary on the Comedia, it is the figure of Beatrice who matters to us here. Dante did something so unusual that it is almost unique in Christian spirituality. After Virgil, he has the girl he fell in love with, his beloved Beatrice, act as his guide towards heaven and the Beatific vision.
Historically he had met Beatrice only twice in real life, but fell profoundly in love with her from afar. The class difference made her inaccessible in real life. But in his work of imagination, the Divine Comedy, she becomes the guide and inspiration for his journey of encounter towards God; she leads him towards the Beatific vision.
The idea or possibility that romantic love could act as an instrument of revelation was astonishing. Most of Christendom has been so aware of the power of sex, that it has concentrated on constraining and channelling that.
Dante’s idea was taken up by CS Lewis’s friend and co-Inkling Charles Williams. He wrote about the experience of falling in love as a Christian. He suggested it was akin to a mystical experience, in which for a short while, the lover saw the beloved as God sees them; wholly lovely and adorable, without fault or blemish. The moment of falling in love was not one of madness but of vision. The vision would fade, but the responsibility of loving the beloved in a way that made that inner beauty more visible in time and space to others, was the work of marriage.
Falling in love becomes not a moment of temporary madness but a vision of potential transformation. The long, faithful, forgiving task of marital love would be the means for making what God sees in someone, the beauty of the soul, more visible to the rest of the world. In ethics as in so much else, vision and ideal are more powerful than censure and guilt, which is what Dante was telling his readers.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.