I love you ideologically

I have a buddy I’ll call “Tristan.” He’s married, and I’ll call his wife, “Isolde.” They were watching the sun set one evening awhile ago. It was one of those super late sunsets where the rays shot up to hit the bottoms of the clouds for hundreds of miles, illuminating them with a peach-umber tone that hadn’t existed on any color palette in all of human history. The light was substantial; and it suffused the canopy of the trees differently, too - the leaves were less illumined by the enflamed light than they were encased by it. 

The first, faint snap of fall was just beginning to overpower the hot, carbonized air of summer. Sweater weather was just about upon them. Heaven’s light had broken through. It revealed and transfigured them; for a moment they were who they were. 

He said he’d have to have been a stone golem not to feel it. Tristan turned to Isolde and slid his arm around her waist. “I will the good for you,” he said.

She accepted his embrace and placed her hand on his chest. “Love is of its nature reciprocal: she who knows how to receive knows also how to give.”

He brushed a strand of hair from her face and pulled her closer. “You are an entity of a sort to which the only proper and adequate way to relate is love.”

She smiled and pushed him away, but she took his hand. “If desire is predominant, it can deform love between a man and a woman and rob them both of it,” she teased.

He stepped back, palms up in a you-can-totally-trust-me gesture. “Treating a person as a means to an end, and moreover which in this case is pleasure, the maximization of of pleasure, will always stand in the way of love,” he protested.

She stepped to him, taking his hands again. “Love consists of this,” she said, “Commitment which limits one’s freedom - it is a giving of the self, and to give oneself means just that: to limit one’s freedom on behalf of another.”

“I agree,” he said, encircling her with both of his arms. “Friendship, as has been said, consists in a full commitment of the will to another person with a view to that person’s good.”

“Freedom exists for the sake of love,” she said. And then they kissed. Ideologically.

---

Yeah, that didn’t exactly “happen.” It’s an episode I imagine that purely ideological people would consider an ideal, so to speak. Say, senior-year theology students clutching the remains of a faith that four years of theology have thus far failed to beat out of them. (No offense to St. Pope John Paul II, whose work, “Love and Responsibility” is the source of this dialogue. I love you, Papa, but that book was about as useful in my marriage as a Chilton auto repair manual…)

I touched on this in the last post - this tension between ideology and what I called “practical wisdom,” which is probably an abominably bad phrase for what I mean. “Practical wisdom” is more like Stoicism, in my mind, which I thought (and more or less still do), is a good way to apply Judeo-Christian wisdom, especially as found in Proverbs. For awhile last year, I was reading one Proverb per day, along with one chapter of Ryan Holiday’s “The Daily Stoic.” It was, it seemed, a surprisingly good way to impose some order on a still wild and barely civilized soul. Judeo-Christian wisdom was the fuel, Stoicism was the bulldozer.

Now, fully enmeshed by Orthodoxy and its mind, soul, and character-changing milieu, I’m beginning to think that I should put some distance between me and pagan philosophy. My Orthodox fathers and brothers would certainly say so. I get the reasons why - anything less than wisdom from the Source is probably mixed with a lot of not-wisdom, so to speak. Just a dash of arsenic in the tea.

Nonetheless, I’m attracted to it because while most of us can agree with what IS wise, and that we should embrace it, practically applying it has always been a shortcoming, at least for me. 

My friend Peter left a comment on the last post: “Isn’t practical wisdom an ideology, too?” And then that sent me down a rabbit trail for the whole weekend. (Thanks, Peter). It was a carnival of sophistry, which was probably inevitable given my remote association with philosophy and growing antipathy to ideology. So, here’s what I know:

There came a point where it felt like I was wearing a massive pack of tools, maps, treasures, books, gadgets, and even some people. (I believe one of them was St. Thomas Aquinas). It wasn’t junk. Not at all. It was just…stuff. Collectibles. Things. Remember my long slog of a two-part post called “The Slog?” That hike up the mountain was exactly like the ideological hike on my way to wisdom (definitely still hiking, by the way…) I was overburdened, overweight, and just trying to put one foot in front of the other. I felt pretty well equipped, though. I just made walking extremely difficult. 

It finally got to the point where I, well, didn’t so much as put the pack down as fall over. I unstrapped myself and stood up. I apologized to God for what might very well be a horrific mistake, and said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t bear this [burden of of ideology] anymore.”

The experience after, so far, has been a lightness of being that frees me up to truly seek wisdom and, ultimately, He Himself Who Is Wisdom.

Here’s the big, fat asterisk, though: I am in no way arguing for some kind of relativism or subjectivism. I don’t believe that truth is “in our hearts” intrinsically. On our own, without seeking actual, objective, outside-of-ourselves truth, we’re doomed to building new ideologies of libertinism. Prisons, in other words. 

This is, I hope, near the point that my friend Andrew made in a text to me after last week’s post: it’s less about following an ideology and more about “having ideals to strive for.” This is a critical mistake I’ve made all my life, which I think is also common to many well-meaning and sincere students of theology and philosophy. The problem is that the acquisition of ideas is often mistaken for internalizing and acting on them. It was even “scientifically” proven in one of those personality tests employers gave to me. I’m a “Trailblazer” according to something called “Clifton Strengths.” A characteristic of that personality type is “collecting huge quantities of information.” The more I read, the wiser and better prepared I was, right?

Definitely not. 

I think I have this antipathy toward ideology because even the best, most well-ordered set of principles, studied for years, or taught by the wisest sages that exist this side of the Veil, can’t seem to prepare us for the messiness of life (and let’s not forget about those supernatural intelligences out there who eat our philosophies for lunch - all while feeding us poisonous new ideologies). 

We, in our fallen, awkward, groping ways, try our best and mostly fail to harmonize our neat and tidy beliefs with the realities of the battlefield. But here’s the thing I think I’ve figured out. As in really, truly, holy-cow-this-is-real figured out: “I love you” is all there is all the ideology I can hold at one time. 

Is it naive? Probably. Perilous? Certainly. Does it leave you with a lot of questions about what you should do in situations X, Y and Z? Yep. 

Doesn’t matter. If you love, you’ll figure it out.