On Love’s Hidden Life: Do We Believe In Love?

prefatory: These articles per chapter are not going to be full summaries, but instead a commentary of issues that were most intriguing to me as I read. I’d encourage you to read along if you want, and use these as a conversation partner (or hey, use me as a conversation partner — I love that!). So if there’s an SK scholar that happens upon these, feel free to correct me, but know I’m not looking so much for accuracy as I am exploration.

Works Of Love begins its discourses with a chapter entitled “On Love’s Hidden Life.” While SK is critiqued for his verbose style, he will provide guideposts for the reader. Through his use of italics and strong closing statements, we’re able to “Cliff Notes” our way to the thesis.

Here, he’s more overt:

The first point developed in this discourse was that we must believe in love — otherwise we simply will not notice that it exists; but now the discourse returns to the first point and says, repeating: Believe in love! (Pg 16)1

However, this belief, SK argues, has a hidden source. Using a beautiful image of a hidden spring at the bottom of a lake that feeds and supports it, there will always be a wellspring of love that is hidden away. He’ll continue to expound on this hiddenness later, but for now, we’re asked to be comfortable with the idea that what we must believe in will not always be revealed.

The note I left myself at the bottom of the page of this chapter was “Do we believe in love… do I?”

SK is well-known for his concept of the leap of faith: no positivist exploration of truth will ever get us to the subjective, the out-of-domain. We never live that way in toto, however: if I asked about who you are, your height, weight, and job description will not suffice. Instead, it’s all that you are. There, I think, we conduct regular leaps of faith with one another. What I cannot verify in your story and your experiences (the hidden spring of you life) I value. And even if I was right there with you, I cannot experience the same event the same way you did. Therefore, I have to entrust my relationship to you in an untraceable hidden source.

And, sure, I could try to verify everything you’ve done, spend ages exploring your history, but that would make me a tedious acquaintance.

SK will continue to argue, that hidden love is God, Godself. There may be where some of us will stop. Belief in each other is one thing as it’s more verifiable, but God is another thing. To believe can be a leap of faith too far.

Let’s try for a moment to work our way backwards, then. What if we’re piqued to look for love (and nb: I’m getting ahead of myself, but we want to think of this love as an eternal duty to love everyone. This isn’t romantic or filial love: but a deep, enduring, sometimes painful love), and we find it — are we comfortable presuming that it is something otherworldly? That it does not completely rest in our power to make happen? There, we might find a different opening to believe in God, even (which I’m fine with for the sake of these conversations) if not the Christian God.2

SK’s arguments, should we not be willing to at least accede that belief, will ring more hollow. This was a critique I had with Barth: tens of thousands of pages of theological density held upright by one or two fundamental arguments that had to be agreed to.

This week, I had a pastoral visit with one of my members who is contending with progressive dementia. He’s at the point now where he doesn’t recognize his friends, is shocked to hear he has a wife and kids, and takes him a great deal of time to remember the house he used to live in.

The question I drove back to the church with in light of this chapter was does he believe in love? Or: what of the child that has not developed the language to express an understanding of love? Can that child believe in love?

Said another way: does God love the man with dementia? Does God love the child?

I want to argue yes, because the love we witness here, beyond ourselves, is not predicated on our full knowledge. We might miss traces of it, but it doesn’t preclude it from existence. And, to be honest, I’m pretty happy to take that as given. To experience a God who is not love and will not love solely based on our ability to intellectually and semantically process that love is not a God worth worshipping.

As time has gone along, I’ve found that question for myself to be more resolutely “yes, I do believe.” Not because I can see the source, but because I’ve found the lake to be beautiful. If the lake exists, there must be a source. And while I can go searching for it, it doesn’t change the beauty of the lake.

1. I’m using the Hong and Hong translation throughout these notes. ↩︎
2. This is something I’ll likely take up in a later section. I think SK desire to adhere to Christianity misses an opportunity to see that the love he desires people to live might be found in other traditions… “like is known by like; only someone who abides in love can know love…” is more of an opening than he will ever give credit for, but I want to. ↩︎