Ordering Freedom and the Four Loves
I. Ordering Freedom
The primary language of the Church has never been one of rights and freedoms. Now if modern man asks: “What kind of backward thinking would the Church have me believe? I want my rights and my freedoms!” then it seems he has been duped by modernity into thinking that rights and freedoms are ends in themselves. This is what philosophers like Sartre call ontological freedom, an absolute and total freedom from everything. A modern example of this would be those who mistakenly believe that the First Amendment’s freedom of religion really means freedom from religion. In their view, anything exterior to the person that imposes a duty or responsibility is an affront to their ontological freedom, even if that exteriority is their Creator. Historically speaking, it was this line of thought that lead to totalitarian regimes; for if a nation is made up of ontologically free citizens who are not guided by morality but by their own desires, then it must take a totalitarian regime to keep them in line.
Freedom is given to us by our Creator to be, like wealth, given away; for the more we have, the more we have to give away in love. The greater the freedom, the greater the capacity for love. More importantly, the more a person loves, the freer he is. But this is also true on a national level. It is one reason why we find that when men gather in brotherly love, like the men of the American Revolution or the men of Lepanto, the result is a greater corporate freedom. It would follow that if we understood the Mass in this capacity – as a place where the brethren gather as sons under the Father – civic freedom should find itself strengthened, not limited. While more will be said on this later, suffice it to say that freedom is a means, not an ends. Because God is our ultimate end, and because “God is love”, it follows that love is the end to which freedom is the means. Therefore, freedom itself must be ordered to love. Sartre is wrong to place freedom on so high a pedestal; for if freedom is higher than love, it makes sense that he would define hell as “other people”. Love implies relation; ontological freedom implies only negation (i.e. myself over all else).
If we consider freedom as an absolute ends, all freedom would mean freedom from. It is an absolute negation. If, however, freedom is a means, then freedom of implies freedom for or freedom to. The seeming negation is balanced by an implied affirmation. To pick up on our example above, freedom of religion means the freedom to choose whichever way one wishes to offer his worship to God. It should not surprise us that our Founding Fathers places the worship of God, whose nature is love and who is our final end, as the first duty implied by the Bill of Rights. We cannot fail to lose the truth that our freedom and rights are the means to the higher purposes of love, which entail duty and sacrifice. Let us therefore turn from the secular language of rights to the Church’s more ancient language of love.
But what is love?
II. Ordering the Four Loves
We could say that moderns like Sartre not only disordered but also oversimplified freedom by making it absolute. Modern philosophy has been characterized by a rejection of teleology, which is the notion that there are ultimate ends or goals or meaning. It does this chiefly by rejecting God, our ultimate end. Without God, teleology has been struck a mortal blow. In a world without God, there is only means, no ends; there is no love, only freedom; no meaning, only despair. In a world without God, rights and freedoms become hollow and flat. But if we return to God and love, making freedom ordered to love as an ends, freedom becomes hierarchic and filled with life. Freedom enables us to rise in love towards our Creator. In such a way, it is no longer disordered and oversimplified. But if freedom is made more complex due to being ordered (contrary to the existentialist atheists), how much more so is love itself? True, since God is absolutely simple because He is love, we might tend to think that love is not hierarchic, not ordered. Due to our limited human nature, however, love is both a complicated and simple thing. Whereas angels, who are pure intelligences, simply apprehend the truths of God, we men must use reason to the best of our ability to know truth.
Hence my decision to address the concept of the Four Loves.
Since ancient times, philosophers have done their best to reason about love by categorizing it into four: storge, eros, philia, and agape. The first three are further categorized as natural loves and the final is divine love. Before going forward, let the reader be aware that I am here embarking on a kind of thought experiment. Perhaps the above categories are inappropriate means to the ends I wish to reach. But categories help, and these categories are not only ancient, they have also been used by philosophers from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, through the medieval Aquinas, and down to a modern man like C.S. Lewis (who wrote a book called The Four Loves). If the best ideas stand the test of time, the concept of the Four Loves has proven to be very good idea. Thus given its historic precedent, it seems fitting to attempt the use of the Four Loves here.
Let us proceed to define the Four Loves:
1. Storge: The deep relations found in family and friends. Storgic love not only makes the family, but it also makes for deep and lasting friendship. It is the kind of love that comes easier for women than for men; indeed it is a love manifested best and taught by the mother to her children. Storgic love can make a virgin girl into a lovely woman, ready for motherhood and/or a work befitting the dignity of woman. In boys, the storgic love from a mother teaches him how to love a mother and reinforces the way he should treat a woman. The storgic love of women also gives boys a reason to enter into the love called philia (see below). Storgic love is not limited to women, it can be found in deep friendships between men – like the friendship of Frodo and Sam in the Lord of the Rings. In purely biological terms, storgic love is easier for women in part because a woman’s cerebellum has stronger connecting pathways giving them superior language skills and a deeper sense of intuition.
2: Eros: The intimacy shared between a man and a woman in marriage. Characterized by unitive and procreative aspects, marriage is the bond of complimentary sexes. Its purpose is life: it lasts for the entirety of each person’s life and it is open to new life.
3: Philia: The unity of brethren for the corporate or communal good. As a particularly masculine form of love, philia is the love taught by a father to his sons. This example of the father prepares the sons to enter into the life of the nation. Philia unites men of all races as brethren in order to create the nation wherein man is protected and thus able to freely worship God, find a spouse, and raise a family. If storgic love looks inward to form close and intimate relationships, the eyes of philia look outward to safeguard what goes on inside the nation, inside the church, and inside the home. Philia is not impersonal, but it is a love that places the lives of women and children ahead of any individual male in the group. Males joined by philia forego storgic relationships among themselves in order to enter into a higher form of love, just as a virgin who enters a convent forgoes the love of marriage for the higher love of God. Men in philia are willing to show the highest form of love: the physical laying down of their lives for those in need.
4. Agape: The nature of God, manifested for us in self-sacrifice for the good of the other. It is demonstrated by Christ, the Good Shepherd, who lays down his life for his sheep.
Given the above definitions, let us see how the natural loves are ordered and formed:
1. Each of the natural loves is ordered in themselves and towards each other. Order thus means they work toward some goal. Due to the Fall, however, the loves can easily become disordered. This leads to nepotism, incest, homosexuality, pacifism, etc. Some even more heinous sins, like abortion, can be traced back to one of these disordered loves. In the case of abortion, man’s rejection of philia through pacifism lead to woman’s rejection of storgic love of child. History also tells us that storgic love, the love of family and friends alone, kept men from entering into philia and thus for the greater part of man’s history following the Fall, there were no nations and no civilizations. This was the true Dark Age.
2. The natural loves are formed by agape. The formation of the natural loves by agape in essence purifies these loves from fallen man’s inclination to pervert them. God gave Adam an Original Mission (i.e. to be fruitful and have dominion over the Earth). Through the cross and entry into the Church, Christ pours agape into the heart of man, redeeming him and restoring to him that Original Mission. Through the formation of agape, the natural loves are able to be ordered towards the completion of the Original Mission – which will entail a final battle with the Evil One. Furthermore, given the agapic dimension, we can say that each of the natural loves has a religious icon to guide it. Storgic love is manifested by the Holy Family, Mary and Elizabeth, and Jesus and John. Eros, the love between a man and a woman, is best understood through the relationship of Jesus to his bride, the Church. Finally, philia is manifested by the Apostles with Christ under the Father. These images should be a help through which we allow agape to form our natural loves. For example, if we recapture and use this language and imagery of agape we will more readily see that homosexuality and pacifism pervert philia.
III. Our Modern Crisis
Different eras produce different crises. Totalitarian regimes, for example, tended to form loves by a perverted kind of philia rather than through agape. Likewise, mafia families do something similar by forming loves through a twisted sort of storgic-family love. In our current culture, however, all loves are eroticized. Woman abandons storge for pleasure; the homosexual tells the Church that God better allow room in agape for homosexuality; the man abandons philia through “conscientious objection”.
Thus far the Church has addressed the problem of an eroticized culture by an appeal to storgic love coupled with an agape-formed eros (e.g. the Theology of the Body). But in these times of crisis, the Church must not forget the icon of philia, an organized body of men seeking to do the will of the Father. The current priest scandal has resulted in large part due to the loss of philia within the priesthood. This loss has produced (1) priests disconnected from a lived apostolic fraternity, (2) effeminate priests, (3) one-man personality trips like Fr. Corapi and Fr. Phleger, (4) active homosexual priests, and (5) pedophile priests. Philia formed by agape is the best way to renew the priesthood and address the problems confronting our society. Not only will it bring the priests into order under the Father (represented by the bishop) – like planets ordered around the sun – but it will also be a sacramental sign to the men of our culture who so desperately need to understand sonship and fatherhood.
The primary language of the Church has never been one of rights and freedoms. Now if modern man asks: “What kind of backward thinking would the Church have me believe? I want my rights and my freedoms!” then it seems he has been duped by modernity into thinking that rights and freedoms are ends in themselves. This is what philosophers like Sartre call ontological freedom, an absolute and total freedom from everything. A modern example of this would be those who mistakenly believe that the First Amendment’s freedom of religion really means freedom from religion. In their view, anything exterior to the person that imposes a duty or responsibility is an affront to their ontological freedom, even if that exteriority is their Creator. Historically speaking, it was this line of thought that lead to totalitarian regimes; for if a nation is made up of ontologically free citizens who are not guided by morality but by their own desires, then it must take a totalitarian regime to keep them in line.
Freedom is given to us by our Creator to be, like wealth, given away; for the more we have, the more we have to give away in love. The greater the freedom, the greater the capacity for love. More importantly, the more a person loves, the freer he is. But this is also true on a national level. It is one reason why we find that when men gather in brotherly love, like the men of the American Revolution or the men of Lepanto, the result is a greater corporate freedom. It would follow that if we understood the Mass in this capacity – as a place where the brethren gather as sons under the Father – civic freedom should find itself strengthened, not limited. While more will be said on this later, suffice it to say that freedom is a means, not an ends. Because God is our ultimate end, and because “God is love”, it follows that love is the end to which freedom is the means. Therefore, freedom itself must be ordered to love. Sartre is wrong to place freedom on so high a pedestal; for if freedom is higher than love, it makes sense that he would define hell as “other people”. Love implies relation; ontological freedom implies only negation (i.e. myself over all else).
If we consider freedom as an absolute ends, all freedom would mean freedom from. It is an absolute negation. If, however, freedom is a means, then freedom of implies freedom for or freedom to. The seeming negation is balanced by an implied affirmation. To pick up on our example above, freedom of religion means the freedom to choose whichever way one wishes to offer his worship to God. It should not surprise us that our Founding Fathers places the worship of God, whose nature is love and who is our final end, as the first duty implied by the Bill of Rights. We cannot fail to lose the truth that our freedom and rights are the means to the higher purposes of love, which entail duty and sacrifice. Let us therefore turn from the secular language of rights to the Church’s more ancient language of love.
But what is love?
II. Ordering the Four Loves
We could say that moderns like Sartre not only disordered but also oversimplified freedom by making it absolute. Modern philosophy has been characterized by a rejection of teleology, which is the notion that there are ultimate ends or goals or meaning. It does this chiefly by rejecting God, our ultimate end. Without God, teleology has been struck a mortal blow. In a world without God, there is only means, no ends; there is no love, only freedom; no meaning, only despair. In a world without God, rights and freedoms become hollow and flat. But if we return to God and love, making freedom ordered to love as an ends, freedom becomes hierarchic and filled with life. Freedom enables us to rise in love towards our Creator. In such a way, it is no longer disordered and oversimplified. But if freedom is made more complex due to being ordered (contrary to the existentialist atheists), how much more so is love itself? True, since God is absolutely simple because He is love, we might tend to think that love is not hierarchic, not ordered. Due to our limited human nature, however, love is both a complicated and simple thing. Whereas angels, who are pure intelligences, simply apprehend the truths of God, we men must use reason to the best of our ability to know truth.
Hence my decision to address the concept of the Four Loves.
Since ancient times, philosophers have done their best to reason about love by categorizing it into four: storge, eros, philia, and agape. The first three are further categorized as natural loves and the final is divine love. Before going forward, let the reader be aware that I am here embarking on a kind of thought experiment. Perhaps the above categories are inappropriate means to the ends I wish to reach. But categories help, and these categories are not only ancient, they have also been used by philosophers from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, through the medieval Aquinas, and down to a modern man like C.S. Lewis (who wrote a book called The Four Loves). If the best ideas stand the test of time, the concept of the Four Loves has proven to be very good idea. Thus given its historic precedent, it seems fitting to attempt the use of the Four Loves here.
Let us proceed to define the Four Loves:
1. Storge: The deep relations found in family and friends. Storgic love not only makes the family, but it also makes for deep and lasting friendship. It is the kind of love that comes easier for women than for men; indeed it is a love manifested best and taught by the mother to her children. Storgic love can make a virgin girl into a lovely woman, ready for motherhood and/or a work befitting the dignity of woman. In boys, the storgic love from a mother teaches him how to love a mother and reinforces the way he should treat a woman. The storgic love of women also gives boys a reason to enter into the love called philia (see below). Storgic love is not limited to women, it can be found in deep friendships between men – like the friendship of Frodo and Sam in the Lord of the Rings. In purely biological terms, storgic love is easier for women in part because a woman’s cerebellum has stronger connecting pathways giving them superior language skills and a deeper sense of intuition.
2: Eros: The intimacy shared between a man and a woman in marriage. Characterized by unitive and procreative aspects, marriage is the bond of complimentary sexes. Its purpose is life: it lasts for the entirety of each person’s life and it is open to new life.
3: Philia: The unity of brethren for the corporate or communal good. As a particularly masculine form of love, philia is the love taught by a father to his sons. This example of the father prepares the sons to enter into the life of the nation. Philia unites men of all races as brethren in order to create the nation wherein man is protected and thus able to freely worship God, find a spouse, and raise a family. If storgic love looks inward to form close and intimate relationships, the eyes of philia look outward to safeguard what goes on inside the nation, inside the church, and inside the home. Philia is not impersonal, but it is a love that places the lives of women and children ahead of any individual male in the group. Males joined by philia forego storgic relationships among themselves in order to enter into a higher form of love, just as a virgin who enters a convent forgoes the love of marriage for the higher love of God. Men in philia are willing to show the highest form of love: the physical laying down of their lives for those in need.
4. Agape: The nature of God, manifested for us in self-sacrifice for the good of the other. It is demonstrated by Christ, the Good Shepherd, who lays down his life for his sheep.
Given the above definitions, let us see how the natural loves are ordered and formed:
1. Each of the natural loves is ordered in themselves and towards each other. Order thus means they work toward some goal. Due to the Fall, however, the loves can easily become disordered. This leads to nepotism, incest, homosexuality, pacifism, etc. Some even more heinous sins, like abortion, can be traced back to one of these disordered loves. In the case of abortion, man’s rejection of philia through pacifism lead to woman’s rejection of storgic love of child. History also tells us that storgic love, the love of family and friends alone, kept men from entering into philia and thus for the greater part of man’s history following the Fall, there were no nations and no civilizations. This was the true Dark Age.
2. The natural loves are formed by agape. The formation of the natural loves by agape in essence purifies these loves from fallen man’s inclination to pervert them. God gave Adam an Original Mission (i.e. to be fruitful and have dominion over the Earth). Through the cross and entry into the Church, Christ pours agape into the heart of man, redeeming him and restoring to him that Original Mission. Through the formation of agape, the natural loves are able to be ordered towards the completion of the Original Mission – which will entail a final battle with the Evil One. Furthermore, given the agapic dimension, we can say that each of the natural loves has a religious icon to guide it. Storgic love is manifested by the Holy Family, Mary and Elizabeth, and Jesus and John. Eros, the love between a man and a woman, is best understood through the relationship of Jesus to his bride, the Church. Finally, philia is manifested by the Apostles with Christ under the Father. These images should be a help through which we allow agape to form our natural loves. For example, if we recapture and use this language and imagery of agape we will more readily see that homosexuality and pacifism pervert philia.
III. Our Modern Crisis
Different eras produce different crises. Totalitarian regimes, for example, tended to form loves by a perverted kind of philia rather than through agape. Likewise, mafia families do something similar by forming loves through a twisted sort of storgic-family love. In our current culture, however, all loves are eroticized. Woman abandons storge for pleasure; the homosexual tells the Church that God better allow room in agape for homosexuality; the man abandons philia through “conscientious objection”.
Thus far the Church has addressed the problem of an eroticized culture by an appeal to storgic love coupled with an agape-formed eros (e.g. the Theology of the Body). But in these times of crisis, the Church must not forget the icon of philia, an organized body of men seeking to do the will of the Father. The current priest scandal has resulted in large part due to the loss of philia within the priesthood. This loss has produced (1) priests disconnected from a lived apostolic fraternity, (2) effeminate priests, (3) one-man personality trips like Fr. Corapi and Fr. Phleger, (4) active homosexual priests, and (5) pedophile priests. Philia formed by agape is the best way to renew the priesthood and address the problems confronting our society. Not only will it bring the priests into order under the Father (represented by the bishop) – like planets ordered around the sun – but it will also be a sacramental sign to the men of our culture who so desperately need to understand sonship and fatherhood.