“As God has renounced himself out of love, so we, out of
love, should renounce God; for if we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice
love to God, and in spite of the predicate of love, we have the God – the evil
being – of religious fanaticism.”
-- Ludwig Feuerbach from The Essence of Christianity
This is the beginning of the emptying of the concept of
love. Feuerbach had a huge impact on Marx, but also on secular humanism and on
certain strains of theology and religion.
I can understand why Feuerbach and others might think
this in necessary and a good thing, but I feel that it is short sighted. Doing
this can make ecumenical work easier and it would seem to work well at trying
to unite humanity. However, it makes both God and love simple and superficial.
Whether you sacrifice God and keep only love, or empty God of everything but
love, you are making the thing that sits at the center of your existence, your
world, simple and superficial. This is binary thinking that insists that when
two things are not totally compatible, one must be given up, allowing for the
other to take up the space previously occupied by the two. This is simplistic
thinking and leads to simplistic ideas, and on this level to simplistic ideals.
'The evil being of religious fanaticism' is of course a
problem. But it comes from the simplification of God as well. A fanaticism that
hates is the exact opposite of a God that is only love or love without a God:
it is a simplification and superficiality in the other direction. It is a God
that does not like complexity and any sort of incompatibility and reacts by
hating whatever introduces complexity and incompatibility. The reality of God
and of love lie in the complexity of them, in the multiplicity, juxtapositions
and even contradictions of the ways that those ideas are thought, expressed and
felt together in tradition, art, theology, history, etc.
The self-renunciation referred to here is almost without
a doubt the crucifixion. Reducing the Judeo-Christian God to that one event is
a gross simplification. Reducing that event to one meaning makes it even worse.
The story, the history, the theology and the tradition behind the crucifixion
and the Judeo-Christian as a whole God is far more complex and deep than that,
with layers of meaning and interpretation. These allow for new experience and
interpretation of both the idea of God and of love.
Just as the existence of faith necessitates at least the
possibility, and usually the occasional existence, of doubt, the existence of
something as powerful as love or God, something that occupies the center of
your world, requires complexity and depth to be real; it requires complexity to
mean anything when it finds itself in the real world. The complex histories,
traditions, theology and struggles of the major world religions are a testament
to this. Religion (or anything really) needs to be dynamic to be relevant in
the world, which itself is very complex and dynamic.
Stripping God of everything but love makes God a
simpleton, a caricature of what God has to be to be real and relate to the real
world. Placing love at the center of a world without a tradition of thought,
stories or art to help define it is one step away from leaving that center
empty. Neither are practical, but both are currently very popular. I can't help
but think that has more than a little to do with the futility and animosity
that fills our public discourse.
A (more modern) philosophical aside:
It is interesting for me to compare what this
simplification does to God and love to what Heidegger says technology does to
truth.
"The threat to man does not come in the first
instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The
actual threat has already afflicted man in his essence. The rule of enframing
[a strict and seemingly permanent ordering of things] threatens man with the
possibility that it could be denied him to enter into a more original revealing
and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth."
-- Martin Heidegger from The Question Concerning
Technology.
This can be applied to the idea of simplification of God
and love like this:
The threat of religion does not come from a God that is
not left behind in favor of pure love and the fanaticism that may come from
that. The real threat has already taken hold because man looks to religion for
a simple, universal and eternal answer to the question of the meaning of life.
This insistence that the meaning of life, or just the rule that we must live
life by, must be simple and at the same time applicable at all times and in all
places, keeps us from encountering reality and our own experiences as they are
and learning from them and acting from a closer relation to and more intimate
understanding of them. That the rule is simple and universal keeps us from
reality, which is ever changing, in a twofold sense: first, it keeps us from
seeing the world directly without the simple and universal filter shaping it
and the filter, being eternal and universal as well as simple, cannot
accommodate or adapt to those changes; second, it keeps us from responding to
the world as it is and limits what we can imagine as possible responses based
on the simplicity of the rule that cannot accommodate the complexity and every
changing nature of the world. In other words, we cannot experience what we
encounter, nor can we react to it, in a close and original way because the
simple and universal filter gets in the way.
