The Goodness of Home: Human and Divine Love and the Making of the Self 0190674504, 9780190674502

Citation preview

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The Goodness of Home

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ACADEMY SERIES SERIES EDITOR Aaron W. Hughes, University at Buffalo A Publication Series of The American Academy of Religion and Oxford University Press GOD AND THE VICTIM Traumatic Intrusions on Grace and Freedom Jennifer Erin Beste THE CREATIVE SUFFERING OF THE TRIUNE GOD An Evolutionary Theology Gloria L. Schaab A THEOLOGY OF CRITICISM Balthasar, Postmodernism, and the Catholic Imagination Michael P. Murphy INCARNATION ANYWAY Arguments for Supralapsarian Christology Edwin Chr. Van Driel DISABILITY AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY Embodied Limits and Constructive Possibilities Deborah Beth Creamer MEETING GOD ON THE CROSS Christ, the Cross, and the Feminist Critique Arnfríður Guðmundsdóttir MUSLIMS, SCHOLARS, SOLDIERS The Origin and Elaboration of the Ibādī Imāmate Traditions Adam R. Gaiser RACE AND RELIGION IN AMERICAN BUDDHISM White Supremacy and Immigrant Adaptation Joseph Cheah JOURNEY BACK TO GOD Origen on the Problem of Evil Mark S. M. Scott BEYOND THE WALLS Abraham Joshua Heschel and Edith Stein on the Significance of Empathy for Jewish-​ Christian Dialogue Joseph Redfield Palmisano, SJ

TYPES OF PENTECOSTAL THEOLOGY Method, System, Spirit Christopher A. Stephenson OTHER DREAMS OF FREEDOM Religion, Sex, and Human Trafficking Yvonne C. Zimmerman LIBERALISM VERSUS POSTLIBERALISM The Great Divide in Twentieth-​Century Theology John Allan Knight IMAGE, IDENTITY, AND THE FORMING OF THE AUGUSTINIAN SOUL Matthew Drever RIGHTEOUS RHETORIC Sex, Speech, and the Politics of Concerned Women for America Leslie Durrough Smith ENFOLDING SILENCE The Transformation of Japanese American Religion and Art under Oppression Brett J. Esaki LONGING AND LETTING GO Christian and Hindu Practices of Passionate Non-​Attachment Holly Hillgardner MEANING IN OUR BODIES Sensory Experience as Constructive Theological Imagination Heike Peckruhn THE GOODNESS OF HOME Human and Divine Love and the Making of the Self Natalia Marandiuc

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The Goodness of Home Human and Divine Love and the Making of the Self

z NATALIA MARANDIUC

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1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Marandiuc, Natalia, 1968– author. Title: The goodness of home : human and divine love and the making of the self / Natalia Marandiuc. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2018. | Series: AAR academy series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017019912 (print) | LCCN 2017050191 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190674519 (updf) | ISBN 9780190674526 (epub) | ISBN 9780190699024 (oso) | ISBN 9780190674502 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Self—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Home—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Love—Religious aspects—Christianity. Classification: LCC BT713 (ebook) | LCC BT713 .M36 2018 (print) | DDC 248.4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019912 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

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For Anna Sophia

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Contents

Acknowledgments  1. Why Home? A Preamble about the Argument’s Theological Significance  2. Human Double Embeddedness: Frameworks of Meaning and Significant Relationships  2.1. Horizons of Meaning  22 2.1.1. Frameworks: Surrounding Us Like the Atmosphere  22 2.1.2. A Three-​Legged Stool  31 2.1.3. Radical Novelty  35 2.1.4. A “Do Not Discard” Label  41 2.2. Authenticity: A Contemporary Siren  46 2.3. Recognition: Subjectivity-​Constituting Gift  52 2.4. The Need for and Goodness of Human Attachments  68

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3. Theological Implications from Attachment Theory  3.1. Attachment Premises  75 3.2. Uniqueness of Attachment Figures  80 3.3. The Attachment System: A Chiseling Tool for the Human Self  82 3.4. Attachment Styles  86 3.5. Attachment and the Self: An Indelible Link  89

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4. Human Difference and Particular Subjectivity  4.1. The Self as Becoming  99 4.2. Universality and Particularity: A Double Layer of Human Subjectivity  105

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4.3. Haecceity: A Medieval Approach to Human Difference  113 4.4. The Bilocated Self  117 4.5. Particular Subjectivities as Fruits of Love  125

5. Human and Divine Love Cocreating the Self  5.1. Need and Desire  129 5.2. Neighbors and Lovers, and the Holy Spirit  142 5.3. Duty: A Kantian Interlude  159 5.4. John Duns Scotus on Human and Divine Love  170 5.5. A Letter with a Forwarding Address  175 6. The Goodness of Home: Attachment as Anthropological and Pneumatological Middle Space 

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Bibliography 

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Index 

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Acknowledgments

My gratitude extends to numerous people on both sides of the Atlantic whose love, presence, encouragement, and counsel contributed to creating this book. Some read the manuscript or portions thereof and offered invaluable advice, some cared for my well-​being through the various writing and editing stages, and some did both. I thank my colleagues from Yale University for the excellent conversations that refined my argument as I  developed it; our collaborative and formative exchanges contributed much to the shaping of this project. Most significantly, I appreciate the long-​term dialogue with Miroslav Volf, my Doktorvater, who supported the book from its inchoate beginning to its mature completion, read several versions of the manuscript, and gave me exceptionally erudite feedback along the way. I  also owe special thanks to others who read an earlier incarnation of the text: to Kathryn Tanner, whose sharp theological mind helped me clarify parts of the constructive proposal of the book, to John Hare, whose expertise on both Kierkegaard and Kant provided a fantastic springboard for my thought, and to David Kelsey, whose intellectual breadth helped me bring together the argument. I thank Christopher Beeley, Shannon Craigo-​Snell, Margaret Farley, Emilie Townes, and Denys Turner, with whom I had numerous fruitful talks that gave the book direct and indirect impetus. The creative formative years spent alongside Awet Andemicael, Jill Colwell, Scott Dolff, TJ Dumansky, Brad East, Marcus Elder, Layne Jacobs, Junius Johnson, Steven Jungkeit, Maurice Lee, Sam Martinez, Ryan McAnnaly-​Linz, Ross McCullough, Luke Moorhead, Kathryn Reklis, Erinn Staley, Linn Tonstad, and Ed Waggoner are the foundation upon which the ideas of this book were built. I offer thanks, too, to my colleagues from Perkins School of Theology, especially Evelyn Parker, Bill Lawrence, Billy Abraham, Karen Baker-​ Fletcher, Ted Campbell, Carlos Cardoza-​Orlandi, Ruben Habito, Robert

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Hunt, Jim Lee, Tamara Lewis, Gary MacDonald, Bruce Marshall, Beka Miles, Heidi Miller, Connie Nelson, and Joerg Rieger, whose support and dialogue were crucial during the final stages of working on this book. I particularly appreciate the chance to present the book’s main argument in a Perkins Faculty Symposium, which engendered discussions that gave it its final contour. Sarah Coakley from the University of Cambridge also read a chapter and gave me wonderful feedback that contributed to the coherence of the book as a whole. I am particularly indebted to my research assistant, Geoffrey Moore, whose keen copyediting eye has made the book easier and more pleasant to read, and to Aaron Hughes of the American Academy of Religion and Cynthia Read of Oxford University Press, whose editorial excellence has enabled the book to be born. I am grateful to my students from Perkins School of Theology and Yale Divinity School for their engaging conversations and heartwarming intellectual acuity. The book came to fruition amid our teaching and learning experiences. Several friends and relatives have been faithful companions through this journey. My parents, Floarea and Cornel Marandiuc, my sister, Vanda Marandiuc, and my grandmother, Iuliana Don, have continually supported my efforts and have offered words of wisdom and affection from Romania. My spouse, Joseph Casella, has been a most loving, sacrificially caring, and eagerly present partner, who read the whole manuscript a few times and gave me impactful counsel. The book is dedicated to our much-​loved daughter, Anna Sophia, who was born when the book was almost finished and who deepened my capacity for love beyond all prior imagination.

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Why Home? A Preamble about the Argument’s Theological Significance

When I  would visit my grandmother in her village in Romania as a little girl, the moment I stepped off the bus, villagers would ask me, “Tu a cui eşti?” (Whose are you? [lit.] To whom do you belong?) Yet home and belonging are hard to find for more and more people, as is the corresponding sense of self that grows out of attachments. This book speaks theologically about the goodness of home, understood as relations of love and attachment that cocreate human subjectivity. The argument brings together the notions of home, love, and the self and sets them against the backdrop of a problem that pervades a significant portion of contemporary society: the thinning sense of belonging and correlative alienation brought about by amplified mobility, increased transience, and technological developments that reduce human presence and face-​to-​face intimacy. On the whole, the contemporary conditions of globalization induce massive amounts of movement. Countless persons on the move experience change in their proximate contexts as their location changes or their interlocutors, neighbors, or companions move. Mobility often results in attachments that are, at best, fleeting and, more often than not, lost altogether. Home and belonging increasingly elude people. In addition to the cosmopolitan disembeddedness that pervades affluent Western populations, the contemporary phenomenon of forced human migration adds another dimension to the rupture of the structures of belonging. The world has arguably become filled with migrants largely due to deep structural economic and political injustices and harms as well as war; the attachments of such persons have been, to various degrees, wounded.

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In fact, so large are the flows of people who leave their homelands that migration theorists call our current era “the age of migration.”1 While migration in itself is not something new in human history—​since human beings have, in fact, always moved either to search for a new life or to flee from poverty or political persecution—​what is different today is the globalization and acceleration of migration. According to the United Nations, more than three percent of the entire world population in 2013 was made up of migrants.2 Only a small fraction of these people have left their homes without being chased away by fear; many, if not most, of those who left their homes behind are forced migrants. These are the people who have been compelled to flee their homes due to terrors and dangers such as ethnic cleansing, extreme poverty, violence, and natural disasters—​in short, due to fear of death. The need or longing for home is rarely diminished for migrants; on the contrary, its loss ruptures and tears a deep part of their sense of self. Daniel Groody calls migration a “traumatic undertaking.”3 Only in the hope of overcoming enormous stresses and dangers do people choose the painful experience of separation from home. “Such a separation leaves an indelible mark on the heart of the immigrant.”4 Groody notes that families rarely emigrate together, and I would add that it is even less common for migrants to depart together with friends, mentors, or other people for whom they care. “For many immigrants, crossing the border of death means leaving behind much of what ultimately gives meaning, value, and cohesion to their lives.”5 Warsan Shire, a Kenyan-​born Somali poet, writes, no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well  . . . 

1. Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (New York: Guilford Press, 2009). 2. United Nations, International Migration 2013, http://​www.un.org/​en/​development/​desa/​ population/​migration/​publications/​wallchart/​docs/​wallchart2013.pdf. 3. Daniel G. Groody, Border of Death, Valley of Life: An Immigrant Journey of Heart and Spirit (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 16. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 19.

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the boy you went to school with  . . .  is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t let you stay.  . . .  no one leaves home unless home chases you fire under feet  . . .  you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land  . . .  no one chooses refugee camps or strip searches where your body is left aching or prison, because prison is safer than a city of fire  . . .  i want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark home is the barrel of the gun and no one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore unless home told you to quicken your legs leave your clothes behind crawl through the desert wade through the oceans drown save be hunger beg forget pride your survival is more important6 6.  Warsan Shire, “Home,” https://​www.umcnic.org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2015/​06/​Home-​ Poem-​by-​Warsan-​Shire.pdf.

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Roberto Goizueta argues that the human self is birthed in community and that the migrant’s memories of home often sit side by side with the memories of the loss of home and the consequent sense of homelessness as one “bear[s]‌that community, those men and women, in the deepest recesses of [one’s] soul.”7 Goizueta then shows that seeking a connection to others and attempting to recover a sense of home is seeking “a connection to [one’s] very self.”8 In addition to international migration, economic and job precariousness together with the absence of safety nets, particularly in the United States, engender further mobility. Hedging against physical homelessness, which looms large when jobs are gone, people move and end up with relational homelessness. Economic-​based mobility driven by globalization benefits transnational corporations for whom human lives serve as mere resources, while human beings become commodified. The pervasive presence of global neoliberal markets of goods, services, and especially financial instruments affects human lives even more systemically;9 but these human lives themselves are not as readily detachable and movable as such instruments. Nonetheless, persons participate in this neoliberal economic dance in ways that are decoupled from their wills, and they undergo costly and wounding interpersonal ruptures. The contemporary cultural production of an ideology of never-​ending possession of “more,” intrinsic to the logic of capitalist expansion, in tandem with societal power dynamics that ensnare particular lives in macrosystems, with multiple dimensions ranging from the political, to the legal, the economic, and the social sphere, creates a diminished existential space for community, rest, nonrushed time, and other features of belonging and enduring attachment. These represent only a few facets of a broad contemporary problem which I call “relational impoverishment” and which I engage theologically. I use tools of theological reflection to enter into the story and mystery of the triune God’s relation to human beings as revealed in the incarnation,

7.  Roberto S. Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesús:  Toward a Hispanic/​ Latino Theology of Accompaniment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), 2. 8. Ibid. 9. See Kathryn Tanner’s compelling argument in her Gifford Lectures, “Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism,” University of Edinburgh, May 2–​12, 2016, http://​www.ed.ac.uk/​ arts-​humanities-​soc-​sci/​news-​events/​lectures/​gifford-​lectures/​gifford-​lectures-​2015-​2016/​ professor-​tanner-​christianity-​and-​capitalism/​christianity-​new-​spirit-​capitalism-​introduction.

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and I show the consequent interplay of divine and human relational love-​ streams that cocreate the self and enable its belonging. I argue, therefore, for the goodness of a home understood relationally, rather than spatially,10 as I claim that human love attachments are irreducibly needed for the actualization of the human self, and I argue that love is a source of subjectivity. Relational impoverishment goes against the grain of what home means, as it hinders the development and performance of the self as such. The book’s argument is broadly situated in the conversational context of theological anthropology, with considerations about the self’s dynamic nature and how it is impacted by divine grace when grace is conceived as God’s pneumatological presence in the experience of human love.11 I conceptualize home relationally particularly in light of the shifting meanings of locality that globalization engenders. Current work in neuroscientific research and attachment psychology indicate that secure human attachments directly support the proper and healthy functioning of the human body and its systems, as well as one’s cognitive, volitional, and affective capacities.12 In short, human attachments produce human selves. While such sciences attempt to explicate naturalistically the complex interdependence between human attachments and the making of the self as well as the self’s freedom, I  argue along theological lines that the love that overflows from God’s plenitude constitutes the necessary condition for the very possibility of human attachments and, further, that this love is planted constitutively in each human person as a seed whose growth needs to be nurtured. The greatest commandment in the gospels is to love God as well as human beings—​our neighbors.13 Numerous theologies have been proposed around

10. While my argument focuses on the relational dimension of what we call “home,” I do not intend to diminish the significance of a home’s spatial reality, however complex it may be in the age of globalization, even while discussing home in spatial terms is beyond the scope of this book. 11. I do not argue that God’s presence is exclusive to human loves; however, I assume divine grace to be equivalent to God’s presence, since God gives creation the gift of God’s very self, both in the incarnation and in the Holy Spirit. This book’s accent is on grace as the divine pneumatological presence in human loves. 12. See Jude Cassidy and Phillip R. Shaver, eds., Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research, and Clinical Applications (New York: The Guilford Press, 2008); Peter Fonagy, György Gergely, Elliot L. Jurist, and Mary Target, Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self (New York: Other Press, 2004); Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who we are (New York: The Guilford Press, 2012). 13. Cf. Mark 12:28–​31, Matthew 22:35–​40, Luke 10:25–​28.

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how to negotiate these two together. I propose that correlative to the “ought” implied in this commandment, there is a need. We are creatures of both need and desire: while the commandment targets the right orientation of our desires, they are matched by a powerful need to experience love. We are the kind of creatures whose being and well-​being is rooted in love, both human and divine. I argue, therefore, that since we are creatures of both need and desire, love precedes the formation of the human self, is needed for one’s own actualization, and is also essential for mending subjectivity when it has been harmed. I  draw from multiple sources to construct my argument, starting with the texts of Charles Taylor, whose retrieval of a modern understanding of the self in tandem with a rich description of the self’s relational embeddedness is both comprehensive and compelling. I augment this portrait of the relational self with a theological interpretation of contemporary attachment research. Thereafter, I draw most extensively from the theological work of Søren Kierkegaard, whose thought on love, human difference, and deep equality is surprisingly in sync with our contemporary context. Although Kierkegaard’s thought precedes the research of attachment theorists, his texts, especially Works of Love14 read together with Sickness Unto Death,15 make a case that evokes striking parallels with the claims of attachment theory. I choose Kierkegaard as an interlocutor also because his understanding of the self as a process of becoming and a progression that moves forward, albeit nonlinearly, as subjectivity is shaped, reshaped, and perfected, is a portrayal that fits well with the contemporary predicament of mobility and its consequent relational impoverishment. While feminist theologians16 have argued for ubiquitous relationality, such claims are often couched in rather universal, panhuman terms.17 My

14. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 15. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 16. See Catherine Keller’s classic From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and the Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986) alongside her recent Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 2002), and Mary Grey, Redeeming the Dream: Feminism, Redemption, and Christian Tradition (London: SPCK, 1989) and Prophecy and Mysticism: The Heart of the Postmodern Church (Edinburgh: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2000). 17. At the same time, Catherine Keller argues for the inescapable particularity through which we relate to the whole of reality. This accent on particularity is especially congruous with my project, as I develop it in c­ hapter 4.

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project not only grows from these limits but also extends the conversation past them, as I argue that particular love attachments are sine qua non for the establishment and sustenance, as well as the flourishing, of human subjectivity. Attachment theories, I suggest, are in fact enriched by a theological argument that the confluence of human and divine streams of love establishes the possibility of the bonds of belonging that the human self needs in order both to emerge in the first place and to be repaired when broken. The assumption is that a human being is not yet a self simply by being alive; one becomes a self only under certain conditions. The irreducible condition I describe is the experience of love. Certainly, not all attachments are good or conducive to human flourishing. In fact, attachment is an ambiguous good in its existential concreteness, as many close relationships, in fact, harm the self or prevent its emergence. Nonetheless, rightly contoured human attachments are a necessary good; conversely, a lack of belonging is a difficult predicament that hinders the self from operating with a robust agency or, in extreme cases, from operating at all. The theological significance of this argument for the goodness of home has much to do with its import for a theological anthropology that looks carefully at the sources of the making of the human self: relational impoverishment is an existential penury that results in an atrophied, debilitated, or even nonexistent self. One difficulty in making the case theologically, however, lies in a tradition that conceives of home as not located anywhere within creation, let alone in human attachments, both because of creation’s finiteness and because of its fall. Instead, home awaits us in a transtemporal heaven. Attachment to transient things, therefore, has been viewed as a problematic state of affairs. In De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine notoriously depicts our “home country” away from “this mortal life in which we are exiles,” and he claims that we ought only to use this world and human beings, and not to enjoy them, as they are not ends in themselves but only means toward our true end, which is beyond human attachments; enjoyment and proper attachment are to be reserved for eternal and infallible things.18 Augustine’s concern is twofold: on the one hand, he finds it dangerous that human beings would cleave to creaturely things and to other people,

18. Augustine, Teaching Christianity (De Doctrina Christiana), trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1996), 106–​11.

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all of whom are passing away, rather than cleave to the stability of what is immutable and eternal. That would be the holy trinity of God alone, who is the highest and ultimate good and, therefore, our own highest and ultimate end. God is not only beyond any possibility of transience, but also the only real terminus of our creaturely needfulness. According to Augustine, God is the final goal of our creaturely journey, the one in whom alone we can rest, because, having arrived at our eternal destination, we will be fully happy and fully blessed. There is nothing further to seek, to desire, or to pursue. Simply put, God is our home. On the other hand, Augustine wants to fight the concomitant danger of discarding creation altogether and rejecting fellow human beings under the delusion that we could actually reach our telos in God without the help of creaturely realities. We are not teleported, so to speak, into union with God; rather, we are traveling across the lands and seas of this world, using carriages and ships that we share with travel companions as we cross the spaces of our earthly exile en route to our heavenly homeland. These vehicles and our companions are meant to help us reach our homeland, but they themselves are certainly not our home—​at least, they are not meant to be that for Augustine. If we were to forget that and make ourselves comfortable within these vehicles, enjoying them as if they were our destination, being “perversely captivated by such agreeable experiences,” we would lose our focus on our celestial home “where alone we could find real happiness.”19 In the Augustinian imaginary, we are neither to succumb to the illusion that our means of travel are our home country, nor to forgo using them to get there. That said, our travel to our home with God is not a spatial one, but rather one of love. God is neither material nor finite; therefore, our voyage is one whereby we are purified so as to be able to perceive the divine light and to cling to it. We are returning home to our creator not by locomotion across physical lands—​the homeland metaphor notwithstanding—​but on a road “traveled by our affections.”20 It is a road of love with transformative effects on who we are. Having set this framework, Augustine presents a vision for understanding what the right order of love needs to be in order for us to reach our only true home: God. In this context, he makes his famous distinction, which

19. Ibid., 107–​8. 20. Ibid., 113.

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plays a central role in his argument contra any worldly home, between frui love and uti love. To love in the mode of frui is to enjoy that which is loved in the sense of loving it for its own sake, cleaving to it or attaching oneself to it with one’s entire heart and life. “Enjoyment, after all, consists in clinging to something lovingly for its own sake.”21 In other words, it cannot be a stepping stone to or an intermediary object for the sake of something else. Therefore, when we pursue something with frui love, looking to enjoy it, it means for Augustine that we are seeking it as the end of our desires. When we obtain it, we desire nothing further and seek nothing else. We were created precisely for this telos and this telos alone: to enjoy the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Clearly, the trinity in Augustine’s rhetoric is not to be loved for the sake of something else. Contrastingly, uti love is instrumental love. It amounts to loving things from the created universe in order to help us reach our telos of enjoying the trinity. We are to use the various objects in our path in order to reach our home, but we are never to enjoy them as final things or objects of ultimate attachment. While it is true that on our journey to God we need the medium of worldly things, it is equally true that we need to transcend them and by no means get attached to what is not our home. Creation is good, but it merely serves as a vehicle to the uncreated. It is not the infinite good in God that we were made to enjoy; and because of its finitude, creation cannot bear the weight of being a true home for us. God made the world in order for humanity to use it as a means of return to God. The “great question,” then, is what is the status of human beings, given that they, too, are part of the world: “ought [they] to regard themselves as things to be enjoyed, or used, or both”?22 In other words, the issue is whether we ought to love other people for their own sake or for the sake of something else. If we were to love them for their own sake, we would enjoy them or relate to them in frui fashion, whereas if we loved them for the sake of something else, we would use them, as uti denotes. At face value, Augustine’s answer is straightforward: we are not to love human persons for their own sake, because we would thereby make them the terminus of our desires and transform them into idols. We are only to love God for God’s own sake; no human being, including our own selves, can

21. Ibid., 107. 22. Ibid., 114.

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give us the enduring happiness and blessedness that God can. Therefore, if we were to enjoy fellow human beings rather than use them (in the technical sense in which Augustine differentiates these two forms of love), we would not love them the way we ought to. We would also commit ourselves to the misery of insatiatable desires, as human attachments do not have the resources to quench our longings. To love properly, we must love the triune God above all else and love our fellow human beings for the sake of God. This Augustinian understanding of love and its corresponding image of a home in heaven, transcending the world and its history as well as human embodied attachments, have engendered a long and complex theological legacy. Until fairly recently, one would encounter at least some ambiguity about, if not outright denial of, a strong notion of an earthly home in theological thought. Much less would the argument be made for received human love as constitutive of the human self. In recent decades, however, Augustine’s thought on loving human beings for the sake of another has been severely criticized; treating one’s neighbor instrumentally and using another person as a mere means to the end of enjoying God has struck an ethical nerve in post-​and neo-​Kantian imaginations. Kant warns us of the trouble of instrumentalizing human life and argues that all human beings ought to be treated as ends in themselves:  “rational beings are called persons because their nature marks them out as an end in itself, that is as something that may not be used merely as means.”23 In an influential article, Oliver O’Donovan acknowledges the legacy of this very troublesome reading of De Doctrina Christiana, according to which Augustine seems to be in a head-​to-​head conflict with Kant:  a common interpretation of Augustine’s proposal points to understanding neighbor-​love as an instrumental pursuit through which one seeks the love of God and, consequently, uses the neighbor exploitatively.24 O’Donovan then goes on to show that, although Augustine initially confers uti love on the neighbor, he cannot purge the term of its instrumental connotations and, therefore, restates his answer to the “great question” by allowing a certain kind of frui love for the neighbor: we can enjoy one another here 23.  Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 37 (4:428). 24. Oliver O’Donovan, “Usus and Fruitio in Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana I,” The Journal of Theological Studies 33, no. 2 (October 1982): 361–​97.

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on earth, but only in God. That is because the neighbor is, after all, not merely an earthy creature, but also one who belongs to the very destiny of divine enjoyment that is our ultimate end. O’Donovan concludes that Augustine simply made a mistake in his initial suggestion that human beings are to be used and not enjoyed, since the instrumentality suggested by the term “use” is fortified even more by his pilgrimage motif in relation to a post-​earthly home. The impetus for O’Donovan’s assertions comes from the earlier work of Anders Nygren, who strongly criticized Augustine’s frui/​uti distinction.25 Nygren blames Augustine for being influenced by Plato and appropriating Plato’s vision, according to which, however beautiful the things of this world are, they must be nothing more for us than a ladder we use to climb to heaven. Nygren credits Augustine for achieving the double purpose of assigning all love to its ultimate goal in the triune God and avoiding the exclusion of creation from the sphere of rightly ordered love. However, while the concept of uti makes room for creaturely love without sin, it also makes love relative. On the surface, it might seem that only creaturely love is being made relative by Augustine’s distinction. Indeed, the relativity of human love for temporal things is given a noncompeting status with the love of God, so that, while we are pilgrims in the world, we do not find it as an alien land; rather, we can lodge and rest in it for a while. The accent is on for a while. Our earthly career is decidedly one of pilgrimage, as the earth does not contain our home. Yet, on Nygren’s reading, Augustine inadvertently makes frui love relative as well. Although Augustine intended the concept of frui to guarantee an absolute love of God, it gives instead an interim status to this sort of love, relegating it to earthly life alone. In the eternal life, when we have reached our ultimate good and our home, we would have no more need to reach out in love for anything further. Our desire is quenched, and the ultimate good that corresponded to this supposedly absolute love has been reached. Therefore, such seemingly absolute love, in fact, results in the cessation of love in eternity. Nonetheless, a more charitable understanding of this Augustinian distinction would allow a rich framework for human mutual love to be mapped onto it. Such richness would be based precisely on loving the neighbor in reference to God. If we take Augustine to presuppose that 25. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (New York: Harper & Row, 1953), 503–​12.

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personhood, or in the terms of this project, the self, is generated by being a creature of God, then to fail to love the neighbor (in reference to God) would mean to fail to love her as a proper person or self. To give a human being an unqualified frui love, then, would be to abuse her by treating her as a nonperson. Rather than reading uti in an instrumental sense, it is possible to interpret it as making oneself useful to the beloved by referring her to her ultimate good. Paradoxically, this movement also propels the lover into greater proximity to her own final good so that the lover and the beloved may enjoy it together.26 This imagery is promising, even though the Augustinian legacy is far from unproblematic. Relating the concept of home to the concepts of love and attachment as well as to that of the self is bringing the right triad of categories into focus. I argue in this book that, indeed, home consists of love relationships that constitute the human self, a self that is, in fact, “selved” and actualized through the experience of love. Yet a thicker description and a stronger emphasis are needed for human love, as love “homes” the self through the experience it provides for the self to emerge, grow, and flourish. That being said, the channels of human love may also be seen as sacramental spaces that home not only the human lover and beloved, but also God in the Holy Spirit, who elevates the experience of human love into participation in the triune life of God. The latter part of my book focuses on a multilevel argument for how these notions come together as a coherent whole, especially in conversation with Søren Kierkegaard, who arguably builds on an implicit Augustinian framework and presents the human self as an ongoing “via toward God.”27 For Kierkegaard, as well as for Augustine, the pathway toward God is congruent with the development of an authentic human self, and vice-​versa; in Kierkegaard’s case, these simultaneous journeys ostensibly take place through the experience of human as well as divine love, which co-​participate in the making of the self. While Augustine’s influence on Kierkegaard’s writing may be somewhat indirect, it is nonetheless unequivocal and undeniable. Lee C. Barrett has shown the ample roots of Kierkegaard’s work in Augustine’s thought and rhetoric:  Augustinian thoughts and, in fact, Augustine’s theological 26. Helmut David Baer, “The Fruit of Charity: Using the Neighbor in De Doctrina Christiana,” The Journal of Theological Ethics 24, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 47–​64. 27.  Lee C. Barrett, Eros and Self-​Emptying:  The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), 9.

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framework as a whole constitute “the air that Kierkegaard breathed.”28 Both Augustine and Kierkegaard use the tropes of journey (and relatedly, home) as well as desire to organize their respective imaginaries about Christianity in general and love and the self in particular. Both of them also invoke these themes in a way that overcomes problematic binary oppositions with which theologians tend to wrestle. In particular, both Augustine and Kierkegaard show that the human self is by nature oriented toward God and that the striving for union with God is the only journey that truly leads to actualization and fulfillment. At the same time, they also affirm that God’s own self-​giving love for human beings arrives in human life as an entirely gratuitous, adventitious gift. Divine agape interweaves with human eros in such a way that the reception in trust of divine love and the work and activity of human love are never mutually exclusive or binary categories. Both theologians envision humanity to have been created by God such that God’s self-​giving love is the source as well as the telos of human eros, and human beings are called to work and cultivate this eros, as they can only reach happiness and fulfillment if they do, even while God’s self-​giving love remains the all-​enveloping flow of goodness that makes human striving possible.29 Receptive trust and striving love are not mutually exclusive options but different facets of the self, each active through the instrumentality of grace. My argument assumes that God relates to humanity and to the world as an ultimate giver whose love is the source of all that is. God loves, and therefore God gives. God initiates our existence by giving us our natural makeup and gives us the additional gift of grace to perfect our nature and sanctify our natural loves. Nature and grace do not, however, form a binary set of categories; rather, they interweave: whereas natural love actively seeks its own actualization and fulfillment, it approaches its telos only with the help of grace, while grace itself constitutes a magnet that attracts the striving of natural eros. I understand grace to be more than something that God does in and for human life: it is the gift of God’s own self in the Holy Spirit, elevating human existence so as to unite human loving with the love of God. Correlatively, our lives are permeated by a longing not only to love God and our fellow human beings, but also to experience the reception of love, both in human and divine forms.

28. Ibid., 3. This is, in fact, Barrett’s main argument. 29. Ibid., 4.

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Augustine and Kierkegaard organize their theological imaginations around the fundamental human orientation toward God in response to God’s own relation of love to humanity. Barrett rightly concludes that the fundamental theme that runs through both Augustine’s and Kierkegaard’s writings is a human-​divine relationship characterized by humanity’s “desiring, longing, loving, and yearning for ultimate fulfillment” found in union with God.30 He does not dwell on how both authors imply the equally powerful disposition to experience the receiving of love, on which my proposal focuses. Yet he describes in detail how for both Augustine and Kierkegaard, earthly existence is thoroughly permeated by a yearning for what we intuit to be the sheer joy and unsurpassable delight of God’s love. While both thinkers famously diagnosed and decried the human malaise that hinders and redirects our journey to God, our longing for God and the goodness it entails—​ the making of the self—​is more fundamental than the obstacles that befall us. In fact, the ills of the human condition produced by evil and sin determine the extent to which our yearning is attenuated such that our steps forward are often tentative and fraught with uncertainty; yet even the conceptualization of such trouble is only possible under the assumption of a deeper desiring of God and of God’s own love for us, which is never entirely extinguished.31 In my argument, the human longing for God as well as the human reception of God’s infinite love is productive of the self through the merging of the divine-​human relationship with earthly love attachments. Earthly loves are not optional add-​ons in the process of the emergence of the human self, but rather ineliminable dimensions of it. Barrett agrees that in Kierkegaard’s thought the idea of love forming the self32 is central, and he argues that Kierkegaard embraces the Augustinian distinction between uti and frui love, with God being the only proper receiver of frui love since God alone can be loved for God’s own sake.33 Barrett also admits that for Kierkegaard the two dimensions of Jesus’s commandment to love God and to love one’s neighbor are closely interlinked, and that human beings practically express their love for God in the way they love people. Barrett then signals that Kierkegaard diagnoses the same problem with which Augustine wrestled: human beings need to 30. Ibid., 65. 31. Ibid. 32. Literally, Kierkegaard refers to love forming the heart. Cf. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 12; referenced in Barrett, Eros and Self-​Emptying, 97. 33. Barrett, Eros and Self-​Emptying, 89.

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undergo therapy for their initially misdirected desire, as we tend to attach our longings to earthly objects alone, but, because of their finitude, such objects are inadequate ends of our love.34 We can relate with unbounded devotion and yearning only to what is infinite and absolute. While this is true in the Kierkegaardian universe, it requires unpacking. Indeed, Kierkegaard is clear that “it is impossible to relate oneself with eternal faithfulness to what in itself is not the eternal.”35 Human beings in themselves are certainly not eternal. But they are never independent creatures either, even in their sinful state. Human beings simply do not exist in themselves, but rather only in relation to God—​at the very least through their creaturely nature, but also through the gift of grace—​ and in relation to humanity and the created world, which itself only exists in relation to God. Furthermore, the very existence of the world and of humanity is the result of God’s fecund love. To love God rightly, then, is not only a duty in the mode of frui love but also a longing for what God loves. That includes our earthly lovers, friends, adoptees, relations of kinship, and others to whom we are attached—​as well as strangers. Imagining that God the Holy Spirit unites with our human loves and pulls them into the eternal stream of God’s love adds a transcendental dimension to such human loving without diminishing it. Kierkegaard surely builds on the Augustinian paradigm of uti and frui love yet makes greater room for the insertion of human loves in the flow of God’s own love for human beings and in the process of the formation of the self. My argument takes this paradigm one step further and shows that human loves are necessary in the making of the self. Barrett also notes that in recent years Charles Taylor has most significantly retrieved the importance of Augustinian themes in Kierkegaard’s work.36 Indeed, Taylor looks at the sources of the modern concept of the self and credits Augustine with one of the earliest expositions of subjectivity and inwardness. Barrett agrees with Taylor that Augustine was nothing less than the wellspring of the subjective turn in Western thought. Augustine’s impetus for introspection was the inchoate beginning of a trend that culminated in Kierkegaard’s postromantic stance toward the self’s constitution via its relation to itself, which also involves relating

34. Ibid., 97. 35. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 313; emphasis mine. 36. Barrett, Eros and Self-​Emptying, 9–​13.

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this relationship to God.37 Augustine himself departed from his inherited Platonic framework, according to which, since God is the ground of human life, this ground can be recollected from the depths of one’s soul because it is already present there.38 Augustine ends up rejecting the thought that such a divine ground would constitute what later modernity would call the self. Augustine locates subjectivity in the struggle of the self’s relating to itself as well as to God, anticipating precisely Kierkegaard’s more complex depiction of what creates the self—​a set of relationships. Taylor retrieves this parallelism between Augustine and Kierkegaard in his own tracing of the genealogy of the self in modern thought. Barrett rightly refers to Taylor’s brief yet potent retrieval, and I  too employ Taylor’s logic in the next chapter to set a broad stage for dialogue with Kierkegaard on the themes of home, love, and the self. Unlike Augustine, I propose a vision for a richly textured earthly home, albeit indwelled by the Spirit. Augustine himself privileges attachment love as a domain of existence that rises above the rest of creaturely experience and empowers us to face the universe with fortitude. In addition to his enormous attachment to his mother, Monica, he also writes, “[W]‌hat consoles us in this human society, so full of errors and hardships, except unfeigned faith and the mutual love of good and true friends?”39 He suggests in his Confessions that special human loves, particularly friendship, are bonds effected by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is poured into the hearts of those who form the friendship, or love bond, which enables them to “cleave to one another” through this divine gift.40 My argument in this book extends this image to suggest that the human self is worked out through participation in human love attachments, that they are what we might most properly call “home,” and that they are the “temple” of divine indwelling, which solidifies as well as elevates them.41

37.  I  discuss this Kierkegaardian constitution of the self in ­chapter  4. Cf. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 13–​14. 38. Plato, “Meno,” in The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 354–​84 (70a–100c). 39.  Augustine, Concerning the City of God against Pagans (De Civitate Dei), trans. Henry Bettenson (Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1972), 862 (19.8). 40. Augustine, Confessions (Confessiones), trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 56 (IV 4.4.7). 41. Cf. 1 Peter 2:4–​5: “Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual

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In addition to the theological legacy of placing home outside the natural world, a further difficulty in dealing with this topic is found in the tradition of grounding the need for human communion with other human selves in the doctrine of the church. Ecclesiology is, however, an insufficient framework for the nexus of categories I develop in this argument. The very nature of attachments is such that they are relationships of closeness and intimacy, formed and cultivated with relatively few people, and expansive in depth rather than in number. Consider Jesus’s repeated, passionate pleading to hear three times that Peter loves him.42 In Kierkegaard’s words, “So deeply is this need rooted in human nature, and so essentially does it belong to being human,” that even Jesus, in spite of the communion of love shared in the divine trinity as the eternal son, craved to be loved humanly while he lived a human life.43 Moreover, while he loved the entire human race, Jesus craved not simply to be loved by the whole of humanity in an abstract, generic way, or even by a group of people akin to a church community. He felt a profound need to be loved by a concrete individual person: Peter. Jesus longed for a particular, enfleshed relationship with another person who could uniquely love him. Since Jesus experienced the incarnation of every human characteristic, this included a particular self-​ identity and particular love relationships. For Kierkegaard, this only indicates that the need to be thoroughly loved by a few concrete human beings is a most basic human need. Jesus asks Peter, “[D]‌o you love me more than these?” and in spite of hearing the repeated answer, “[Y]es, Lord, you know I love you,” he keeps asking three times.44 Jesus pleads for human love with unmitigated longing. Divine omniscience aside, the human Jesus yearns to be loved and to hear expressions of love, to deepen the attachment to his friend. My book builds an argument for the goodness of precisely such attachment loves, which I call relational homes. They may take multiple forms, from erotic loves of all kinds (as this book’s argument fully includes LGBTQ+ loves) to friendships, to kinships, to mentorships, and to complex multi-layered forms of attachment. Attachments are necessary components in the making and flourishing of the human self.

house” (New Revised Standard Version; all subsequent Bible quotes in this book follow the NRSV)—​or arguably, a home having been elevated to a temple. 42. John 21:15–​17. 43. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 155. 44. John 21:15–​17, quoted in Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 155.

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In ­chapter 2, “Human Double Embeddedness: Frameworks of Meaning and Significant Relationships,” I propose a double embeddedness in which human beings find themselves. This double embeddedness consists of inescapable frameworks of meaning, on the one hand, and relationships of significance, on the other. In dialogue with Charles Taylor, I show how these two elements are constitutive features of human subjectivity and how they relate to and cocondition each other in the sense that subjectivity needs a horizon of meaning in order to operate; this horizon of meaning is accrued in relationships of attachment and significance, which themselves thrive under the canopy of common meaning. I therefore describe what a horizon of meaning is and why it is inescapable for human life. After discussing one such framework in its specificity, namely the culture of authenticity, I delve more deeply into one of its paradoxical dimensions: recognition. I show how human recognition from significant others is an ineliminable trait for an authentic self, the implication of which is that relationships of significance constitute relational homes that “house” the human self as it grows and flourishes and is repaired when broken. In ­chapter 3, “Theological Implications from Attachment Theory,” I dwell on a number of key findings and proposals from attachment theorists that I read theologically and put in dialogue with theological anthropologies that focus on the connectedness of the self. Attachment theory is one of the most amply researched and pragmatically employed frameworks in contemporary neuropsychology. Its premise is that human subjectivity is the product of human attachments, insofar as attachment figures provide an environment of perceived safety within which and out of which the self can pursue nonattachment activities; should attachment needs remain unmet, human actions would be inhibited. Self-​actualization depends upon secure attachments that home the self. In fact, the term “home” is a key technical concept for attachment theory: secure attachments are a secure home for the self. In ­chapter 4, “Human Difference and Particular Subjectivity,” I discuss the kind of self to which I  am referring throughout the book. In dialogue with Kierkegaard, I  construct a portrayal of subjectivity that entails a journey of becoming rather than a given facticity; while a gift from God in inchoate form, the self is nonetheless worked out in time, history, and especially relationships of love and belonging. I conceptualize the self under the rubric of a double layer of universality and particularity and discuss how these layers relate to each other. Regarding particularity, I explore the medieval notion of haecceity as it is developed by John Duns Scotus and explain how it contributes to contemporary

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understandings of human difference and singularity. I look at how the particular self with a universally describable baseline is also bilocated in time and eternity, or history and a transhistorical reality extending from God’s own reality. Finally, I refer to this kind of subjectivity as the fruit of love attachments. Chapter 5, “Human and Divine Love Cocreating the Self,” zeroes in more extensively on love in relation to the self as I develop the argument that human and divine love dance together to cocreate the self. In further conversation with Kierkegaard, I propose that love precedes the self’s emergence and that divine love is mediated through people who relate to each other in an embodied attachment mode. I retrieve Plato’s thought in the Symposium that love itself is a passionate union between need and desire and that, underneath the gospel commandment to love the neighbor as oneself (which rightly channels human desire), there is an equally powerful anthropological need for love. I then show that this union of need and desire is not a merely anthropological situation, but it is also a pneumatological reality. I contend that Kierkegaard’s bilayered theological anthropology corresponds to his theology of love, whereby universal love for all human beings is a base layer out of which particular attachment loves grow and cocreate human subjectivity through a mediation of the Holy Spirit’s own presence within relationships. I further distinguish between neighbor love and attachments by discussing the Kierkegaardian neighbor love as a mode of duty whose logic is a Kantian appropriation. The way in which human and divine loves dovetail is a further legacy inherited from Scotus, and Kierkegaard uses this framework to portray the love for God as a letter sent with a forwarding address to another human being. In ­chapter 6, “The Goodness of Home: Attachment as Anthropological and Pneumatological Middle Space,” I bring these strands of thought together and propose that a relational home is both anthropological and pneumatological because the Holy Spirit inhabits the attachment space between human beings as a third middle term. I suggest that this divine presence is what holds the relational space in place, preventing its implosion or dissolution and that it is, therefore, a space of stable belonging. Hence, it is a fitting connotation for the metaphor of home. I suggest that Jesus’s incarnate life is the most crucial pattern for the meeting of need and desire, as Jesus is both needful of human love and a most generous giver of it while also the most perfect union of human and divine loves working in tandem. I propose that the self is cocreated and sustained by

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love relationships that mediate and participate in the streams of divine love that originate in God, reach human lives, and empower human beings to become channels of these streams of love toward others. Human love for God is also forwarded by God to other people, with whom we form relational homes. The goodness of a relational home consists in its power to shape the making of the human self.

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Human Double Embeddedness Frameworks of Meaning and Significant Relationships

While the overall thrust of this book seeks to pursue a theological evaluation of the concept of home understood as a relational attachment from the perspective of both human nature, hence situating the argument within the domain of theological anthropology, and grace, which I conceive pneumatologically, this chapter focuses specifically on the self’s creaturely nature. I lay the foundation for a richly textured portrait of the human self who, in fact, becomes a self through relations of love—​both human love and divine love manifested pneumatologically—​and who is “homed” in this relational intertwinement. Later chapters include proposals for how to envision this relational home through the logic of grace. This chapter deals with some critical dimensions of that which constitutes the self as a creature whose natural being and well-​being depend on multiple forms of earthly belonging. Borrowing from Charles Taylor’s work, I argue in this chapter for a kind of double embeddedness in which human beings find themselves: we are immersed in a framework, or horizon, of meaning, and we form relationships of attachment with significant others.1 Both of these types of embeddedness become constitutive features of our subjectivity. They also cocondition each other. By constitutive features of our subjectivity, I mean the dimensions of existence without which we would not and could not have a 1. The phrase “significant others”—​ubiquitous in today’s pop culture—​was originally coined by George Herbert Mead in Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), and theorized by subsequent thinkers. Charles Taylor uses it in the same sense as I do, referring to various kinds of relations of love.

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properly functioning human self. The kind of coconditioning to which I am referring is a type of double causality that is at work: our relationships of love attachment would be impossible without a framework of meaning within which they are formed and maintained, or even broken, and, at the same time, they help shape the horizon of meaning within which our life unfolds. Each grounds the other in some sense, and each is insufficient on its own for the human self to form and to flourish. As I develop my argument, I first unpack Taylor’s concept of frameworks, horizons, or paradigms of meaning, describe what they are and why they are inescapable, and show their theological valences and their significance for understanding the self and its home. Next, I single out a specific framework that is deeply rooted in some key assumptions of modernity and postmodernity and that I refer to as the culture of authenticity.2 I choose this framework because it is both a pervasive phenomenon in the contemporary Western world and a good foundation for an argument for the need for human attachments. While the culture of authenticity seems to be one of the most powerful contemporary forms of autonomous individualism and an orientation of life that resists constitutive attachments within human subjectivity, under careful scrutiny, the opposite turns out to be true: authenticity of the self in fact requires attachments. I then sharpen my focus on one feature of the culture of authenticity—​recognition—​which, while not exclusively present in this kind of a framework, helps create the argument for the constitutive presence of significant others within one’s subjectivity. Finally, I  tie these threads together into the key argument of the chapter, which is a claim about the need for and goodness of human love attachments. I show how the relationship between universally present frameworks of meaning and the particular recognition of concrete subjectivities parallels the relationship between universal neighbor love and particular attachment loves.

2.1.  Horizons of Meaning 2.1.1.  Frameworks: Surrounding Us Like the Atmosphere Drawing the contours of the human self in modern terms, Charles Taylor argues that there is an inextricable connection between the idea of selfhood

2. Cf. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 31, 32.

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and a corresponding vision of the good that transcends moral categories of action such as right and wrong. To be sure, he admits, to be a self is inherently coupled with existing in a moral space,3 and modernity is, in fact, replete with a kind of moral thought, whether philosophical or theological, that addresses the content of duty or right action; but modernity often leaves no conceptual space for the “nature of the good life [or] the notion of the good as the object of our love or allegiance.”4 In other words, when goodness surfaces in such a discourse, it is referring to good moral choices for action and not directly to what counts for a good life to start with. This more narrow description of the human person as a moral agent lacks an essential element, namely, the circumambience of our existence beyond what is “right to do,” pointing to “what it is good to be” in the sense of what kind of life is good to have and what kind of vision of the good is worth loving and appropriating.5 This circumambient vision may be called a framework or horizon of meaning within which human subjectivity operates and without which we cannot coherently understand human selfhood. To translate Taylor’s claim theologically (although he does not do so), part of what it means to be human is to be and to live within the kind of divine blessing that calls creation—​and the human beings within it—​ good.6 Yet the shape of such goodness is not a universal, one-​size-​fits-​all paradigm. A  key feature of modernity, postmodernity, and the contemporary ethos more generally is the very nonuniversality of paradigms of life and accompanying visions of the good, even as the presence of such an assumed good is—​however implicitly—​always there. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus’s injunction is to “be perfect . . . as your heavenly father is perfect.”7 Arguably, such perfection is a vision for good. Yet we cannot be good in exactly the same way in which God is good; God’s goodness is infinite, as well as flawless, while ours is derivative and finite, marked by sin, and yet aided toward newness of life by the triune God in the Holy Spirit. In fact, irrespective of human sinfulness, creaturely goodness is rooted

3. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 112. 4. Ibid., 3. 5. Ibid., 79; emphasis mine. 6. See for example Genesis 1:31: “God saw everything that [God] had made, and indeed, it was very good” . 7. Matthew 5:48.

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in and springs forth from God’s ultimate goodness. It is also perfectible beyond its own human nature by divine grace, enabling human beings to grow toward union with God. Yet Jesus’s words do call for some kind of analogy between divine and human goodness. While many arguments have been put forth regarding how such an analogy might operate,8 my suggestion here is twofold. First, human goodness is derivative from and intrinsically participative in God, the ultimate good, and it consists of love. To be perfected in goodness, then, is to be perfected in love. Human participation in God’s goodness is, in fact, a partaking in the love of God and a mediating of it within human love attachments. I expand this concept in dialogue with Søren Kierkegaard in later chapters. Second, the gospel injunction “to be good” reaches beyond right acts, and even right motives, to a vision for what it is good to be, and what shape kindness and benevolence would have to take in order for life to be called good. The divine pronouncement of creaturely goodness in Genesis is distinct from, although not unrelated to, Jesus’s call in the gospel of Matthew, which addresses a wounded creation on its way toward healing and restoration with God’s assistance.9 The original goodness of creation is implied by Jesus’s words in Matthew, since it is not obliterated either by sin or the new life that heals it.10 The Genesis pronouncement that creation is good remains actual and is not superseded. Yet human finitude and historicity entail multifarious ideals of the good: it is not hard to observe that we are the kind of creatures whose subjectivity is shaped by the particular vision of goodness we embrace. Part of my broader aim is to argue that an inherent component of any compelling vision of the good needed for human well-​being is the experience of belonging, or being attached through love—​in other words, having an anchor in a relationally conceptualized home. Such a relational home

8. One example is the social vision grounded in trinitarian love proposed by Miroslav Volf in “‘The Trinity Is Our Social Program’: The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Shape of Social Engagement,” Modern Theology 14, no. 3 (1998): 403–​23. 9. I show later that this divine assistance is pneumatological in nature and that the goodness of human love attachments consists in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit within the attachment space between human beings. Here I focus on creaturely goodness as such. 10.  Immanuel Kant most helpfully discusses the indestructible predisposition to good as a marker of human life that is more fundamental than the universal propensity (a weaker word than predisposition) to evil. See Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. Allen Wood and George DiGiovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 50–​55 (6:26–​6:32).

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does not occur in a vacuum, but rather it is situated within a paradigm of meaning that, at its core, includes a given ideal of the good. While Taylor claims that such a paradigm of meaning is a framework that gives a constitutive character to the human self, I work with the understanding that meaning-​making paradigms that enable the making of the self are tenable only when they include an account of how to love. I refer to frameworks, horizons of meaning, or paradigms of life interchangeably throughout this chapter. Taylor thinks that underneath ideas of justice and respect for human dignity and well-​being typically included in a paradigm of life, especially when it comes to other human beings, lies one’s sense of what makes life worth living.11 In other words, our moral questions make sense only within a framework that includes a vision of the good for which it is worth living. The shape of that good and benevolence varies, but its presence does not. For example, “there seems to be a natural, inborn compunction to inflict death or injury on another, an inclination to come to the help of the injured or endangered.”12 While cultural and educational contexts may influence who qualifies as the ‘other’ at the receiving end of the proclivity to protect life, the reaction itself is already present. Such a reaction is grounded in something that resembles instincts, or intuitions, which are inborn and run extremely deep. On the other hand, such a reaction suggests real claims regarding the constitution of human beings. These kinds of claims, I argue, are theological. Put differently, there is a “spiritual nature and predicament”13 that renders certain reactions appropriate, and they make sense to us, even while correlatively pointing to what this presupposes about human life qua human. Taylor employs the term ‘spiritual’—​despite its multivalence and his own admission of the resultant vague connotations—​in order to refer to implicit norms by which we tend to make moral discriminations of right or wrong, or better or worse; however, we are not defined by the choices that we make in this respect or by the inclinations that accompany them. Instead, these background norms are independent of our reactions and logically precede them in the sense that they offer standards according to which we may judge our moral options. Frameworks, in other words, encircle the norms for how to

11. Taylor, Sources, 4. 12. Ibid., 5. 13. Ibid., 8.

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live under the vision of the good, to which this ‘how’ is subservient. They provide a rationale for making substantive claims regarding what kind of creatures we are. Paraphrasing Robert Adams,14 one could argue that there is a non-​or premoral understanding of the good—​God’s goodness as kindness and beneficence transcends and grounds the notion of the good understood in terms of right and wrong—​that is the condition for the possibility of even speaking coherently about the moral categories of right and wrong. In contrast, Taylor goes a somewhat different route and enlarges the moral sphere itself so as to include a “hypergood.”15 This kind of hypergood has to do with privileging one way of life over another and deeming it admirable and worthy of awe or respect. Some ends associated with this admirable way of life are not simply higher or more enticing than others, but, rather, they count as standards by which the very notion of a spectrum of higher (or lower, more or less desirable) actions, choices, and options makes sense.16 Taylor’s concept of the hypergood is compelling yet, in itself, insufficient. Ultimately, what frames any moral categories, choice options, willed acts (or their motivations) is a deeper orientation toward (or away from) love. We become selves insofar as we become creatures of love. As I show later, this coming-​to-​be of the self starts with the experience of being loved, yet to become a self is also to become an increasingly capacious lover, participating in human ways through human love attachments in the eternally lively streams of divine love. For Taylor, a framework is the background against which we make our judgments, exercise our intuitions, and take moral positions. It is the background against which responses of this sort make sense to us in light of our presuppositions about our human situation and the world in which we live.17 It is akin to a horizon that envelops our assumptions about what makes the universe ordered, at least to some degree, and enables our meaning-​making mechanisms.18 Arguably, one can hardly be a self

14. Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 243–​ 8, and “A Modified Divine Command Theory of Ethical Wrongness,” in Religion and Morality: A Collection of Essays (Garden City, NY: Double Day, 1973), 330–​41. 15. Taylor, Sources, 73. 16. Ibid., 20. 17. Ibid., 8–​9. 18. Ibid., 17.

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without the ability to make meaning. Marilyn McCord Adams contends that one’s sense of value of life and of one’s personhood are degraded and defeated when one’s meaning-​making structures collapse.19 My claim is that meaning is rooted in love. As I  talk about later in this chapter, the quest for meaning and the possibility of its loss are paramount features in the broad modern and postmodern context, a condition that renders the quest for placing ourselves under a believable framework, or horizon of meaning, extraordinarily important. In part, this is “because a framework is that in virtue of which we make sense of our lives spiritually. Not to have a framework is to fall into a life which is spiritually senseless. The quest is thus always a quest for sense.”20 Taylor aptly diagnoses the modern (and, in my judgment, postmodern) context, but a further analysis is needed: there is a deep correlation between the quest for a framework of meaning (and the fear of its loss) on the one hand, and the quest for love, belonging, and attachment—​in a word, home—​(and the fear of its loss or elusiveness) on the other. Taylor suggests that our subjectivity is framed by an enveloping horizon within which we can take stands for or against things, locate the domain of kindness, and determine what is of value and what is trivial. He envisions a framework to be the orienting space in which our sense of being a human self is anchored. Again, this logic is clearly analogous to the image of home.21 The space analogy is helpful insofar as it entails the idea that to be oriented in one direction or another is logically posterior to living within a territory wherein such directionality exists in the first place. Another way to make sense of frameworks is to consider two kinds, or levels, of valuations; I call these “strong valuations” and “soft(er) valuations” for short. The strong valuations would be the ones that make up the framework, or horizon, within which our self is placed and within which our agency seeks direction; the soft(er) valuations are the directions we take. The strong valuations are like inescapable questions to which the soft(er)

19. Marilyn McCord Adams has defined “horrors” to be those evils that give the participant a prima facie reason to doubt that her life would have any positive meaning on the whole after having been included in them. “Participation in horrors furnishes reason to doubt whether the participant’s life can be worth living, because it engulfs the positive value of his/​her life and penetrates into his/​her meaning-​making structures seemingly to defeat and degrade his/​her value as a person.” Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors:  The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 32–​33. 20. Taylor, Sources, 18. 21. Ibid., 27–​30.

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valuations are the putative answers. We do not invent both the questions and the answers, or, in other words, we do not “invent distinctions out of whole cloth.”22 To do otherwise would render our choices meaningless. Frameworks, then, include our “contestable answers to inescapable questions.”23 I return to this argument in subsection 2.1.4. For now, suffice it to say that according to Taylor this is what frameworks do to our sense of self: they instantiate a spiritually and morally orienting space of questions that exist prior to our choices, answers, and cultural givens and in which the self’s agency is exercised by virtue of giving answers, making choices, and enacting options.24 Frameworks are therefore agency-​enabling spaces in which human selves live, act, and find significance. Building on Taylor’s argument, I argue that frameworks are not simply spaces of meaning, but also spaces of love. Whom and how we love are answers we give existentially to the enveloping, primordial call to love. Furthermore, the experience of being loved frames the self-​in-​the-​making and the self’s response to the call to love. The very notion of the human self only becomes coherent against the backdrop of formative and sustaining embeddedness in a community of love and significance. A framework is not simply a space like an empty house with one inhabitant. A human person becomes a self only in a situation of embeddedness among other selves with whom it forms what Taylor terms “webs of interlocution,”25 but what I would call webs of attachment. According to Taylor’s categories, one’s subjectivity is formed and maintained within such webs in exchange with other speakers in what Taylor identifies as communities of immersion and dialogical definitions of meaning,26 but which I would name, in the language of Martin Luther King Jr., the beloved community.27 The beloved community is a community of

22. Ibid., 30. 23. Ibid., 41. 24. Ibid., 31. 25. Ibid., 36, 39. 26. Ibid., 36. 27. Martin Luther King Jr., “Facing the Challenge of a New Age,” in A Testimony of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: HarperCollins, 1986), 140, among other sources. Although King thought of “the beloved community” in the context of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and, more specifically, wrote the speech referenced here as an address before the First Annual Institute on Non-​Violence and Social Change (Alabama, December 1956), proposing that the end of any racial struggle,

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equality, dignity, and justice for all those partaking in it regardless of their differences, and a community that provides the environment for “building up” the self, as Kierkegaard richly shows.28 I engage Kierkegaard later and develop in more depth how love “builds up” the self, creating it from the seed of an inchoate divine gift that grows through human love partaking in the divine love-​flows. For now, I would like to establish the immediate relation between the frameworks of meaning within which the human self is defined as a self and the community of other human beings with whom one shares, at least in part, this paradigm-​space. Returning to the idea that frameworks inform our orientation not only in a moral space of right and wrong, but also in relation to a vision of the good that transcends such categories and gives them their own meaning, it is worth noting Taylor’s claim that human agency relates directly to our position toward the respective good. Such a vision of the good consists in determining the kind of life that is worth living—​in other words, what makes for a benevolent, fulfilling, rich, beautiful, honorable, or meaningful existence. In order to know the proximity to a given vision or ideal my life possesses in relative terms, or whether it is, in the first place, oriented toward or away from the vision or ideal in a more absolute sense, I need to have such an ideal or vision as a reference point. This is what a framework provides.29 It may be a vision of the good of the ordinary life that modernity has amply embraced,30 or a vision of the good of the contemplative life away from ordinary existence, as many medieval monastic communities pursued, or any other “higher-​order goods of this kind [or] ‘hypergoods,’ i.e. goods which are not only incomparably more important than others but provide the standpoint from which these must be weighted, judged, decided about.”31 The point is that one exercises one’s agency and fortifies one’s self as one directs one’s life to or away from this vision of the good, boycotts, and resistance is redemption and reconciliation, the idea of the beloved community is arguably retrievable more broadly (without diminishing its extraordinary significance for the ongoing racial injustices in the United States). The beloved community is one of dignity, justice, and abundance for all participants, and it is the kind of environment (even if a desideratum) in which all manner of subjectivities may thrive and be at home. 28. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 212, 215, 216, 217, 219, 221, 224. 29. Taylor, Sources, 41–​44. 30. Taylor refers extensively to the affirmation of ordinary life and its goodness in, for example, Sources, 13–​16, or especially in A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 370–​74. 31. Taylor, Sources, 63.

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and, in the course of existence as a whole, grows closer or farther away from it.32 More interestingly, embracing a particular vision of the good is productive with respect to our subjectivity in that it is contagious. We become carriers of the good to which we aspire. Goodness attracts us to itself and empowers us to embody it. Kierkegaard’s notion of the “highest good,” which for him is God’s own self, entails a powerful transformation in the entire existence of the person who relates to this ultimate good.33 For Kierkegaard, choosing the highest good amounts to taking responsibility for oneself and as such becoming a self. The Kierkegaardian production of the self through relating to God—​the absolute good—​is by no means a human-​divine relation in isolation or abstraction from other people. We love each other in loving God, and we enjoy God’s own presence of love within the space of earthly loves. The good is a shared good. According to Taylor, one’s vision of the good is indeed always a shared one, formed in dialogical interchanges with others and, in my view, in experiences of love and attachment, while both the framework itself and our relationships with the most meaningful interlocutors—​or relationships of attachment—​are constitutive ingredients of our selfhood. Although frameworks surround us like the atmosphere, defining them is not monovalent. Taylor’s thought-​world entails this much, though I further extend this logic of meaning-​making to the experience of the beloved community that envelops the self-​in-​the-​making. One way to think of frameworks’ omnipresence is akin to an immersion in a sea of assumptions that form the background for our moral reactions and love responses. Logically prior to conceptualizing right and wrong, superior and inferior, love and indifference, a vision of the good and an inescapable call to love grasp and envelop us. Put differently, frameworks are contexts in which our life-​reactions, moral categories, and love-​experiences have meaning.34 Such contexts are communal, linguistic, and richly textured, as well as concrete ways of life that are only partially captured by our articulation.35 However, their prearticulate status notwithstanding, frameworks are most powerful via articulation because verbal narratives and descriptions have

32. Ibid., 41–​46. 33.  Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 389. 34. Taylor, Sources, 78. 35. Ibid., 34–​39, 76–​77.

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a generative power in us, bringing us closer to that vision of the good that the respective framework entails.36 Yet another way to think of frameworks is to posit that they are constitutive elements of our sense of self that provide us with an orientation that is essential to our subjectivity. Hence, a framework, albeit not a universal, uniform given, is not an optional extra, an ulterior addition to the human self.37 Frameworks are constitutive insofar as the vision of the good they entail makes us do and be the respective good; loving this good empowers us to absorb it into our own existence.38 “[Our] acceptance of any hypergood is connected in a complex way with our being moved by it.”39 More importantly, in my extension of Taylor’s thought, frameworks include broad experiences of a beloved community whose love is contagious, enabling one’s love-​response, which is the very way the self is formed. While we accept a framework of meaning through myriads of dialogical exchanges with others and through the experience of love, the vision of the good that such a horizon holds for us has magnetic properties: it attracts us to partake in this good. Insofar as this good is ultimately love, while proximity to love makes us loving and to love is to be a self, horizons of meaning do, indeed, shape our selves.

2.1.2.  A Three-​Legged Stool I have argued thus far that a framework of meaning is a capacious, lushly textured space, including moral and transmoral dimensions, within which the human self is formed and actualized. I have also referred to “hypergoods” that organize this space, orient us, and help us rank what we love and value in our framework of meaning. These hypergoods are not identical across all frameworks of meaning; to be sure, significant differences obtain across frameworks. How, then, can we ever agree on what such frameworks of meaning denote? In Taylor’s imaginary, a horizon of meaning can be conceptualized as always containing an intersection of several distinct axes. One axis is our sense of respect for and obligations to others, to which I  would add respect for one’s own self. Second, a framework of meaning entails a complex set of elements that constitute what we

36. Ibid., 92. 37. Ibid., 78. 38. Ibid., 93. 39. Ibid., 73.

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understand by dignity. Finally, and most poignantly, that which we believe accounts for a good, full life lies at the core of our meaning-​making paradigm.40 Taylor suggests that these three axes (or some equivalent thereof) exist not only in every framework of meaning but also in every culture. However, the similarity between frameworks ends here. How these axes are conceived in the first place in terms of the content of respect, dignity, and good life, as well as how they relate to each other and which axis is more significant than the others—​all this differs considerably. Perhaps most intuitively familiar for the modern imagination, the notions of respect and obligation readily entail respect for rights, particularly the notion of not infringing upon the subjective rights of others. Even in relations of love and deep attachment, we imagine we ought to at least respect the other as other, not only because this is our duty but also because it is her genuine right. Much of the contemporary Western legal sphere also operates with this presupposition of respect for others’ rights. Respect, however, has a complex and diverse genealogy. Prior to modernity, natural law theory was invoked to pursue a right course of action and to stay away from a wrong one; the natural law thus conceived was something one had to obey simply because one was subject to it—​ the individual human person did not make it, nor did it depend on her whether such a law was in effect or not. Natural law was precisely that: natural and, therefore, ubiquitously present. Modern subjective rights are, instead, dependent on the agent who effects them. The self legislates them. Conceptualized as autonomous creatures, human persons actively cooperate in constituting and sustaining the existence of any such rights.41 To illustrate this difference more concretely, according to natural law, killing the innocent is wrong because the law prohibits it, and it prohibits it on account of an understanding that rational human beings function by observable universal principles, including some that make social life possible, such as the preservation of life.42 Subjective rights, however, which also typically include an accent on the natural right to life, only seem to amount to the same thing. The crucial difference lies in the much-​heralded subjective turn: the human self is called to put such rights into effect subjectively, to concur with their establishment and enforcement both in the

40. Ibid., 15. 41. Ibid., 11. 42. Taylor, A Secular Age, 126.

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social arena and in any form of interpersonal relating—​including love. Consequently, a human being possesses a substantially increased degree of freedom. In the extreme, one can theoretically waive subjective rights, such as the right to life itself, thus defeating the immunity conferred by such rights, which is why John Locke—​the pivotal thinker who substantiated this change—​found it necessary to obviate that possibility by suggesting that the rights to life, liberty, and property are inalienable.43 Yet neither increased freedom nor subjective autonomy, I argue, are freedom or autonomy from intersubjective love attachments, which are requisite for life to have meaning. My contention is that the self is created through love attachments and that the self’s freedom is freedom to be able to love, thereby cocreating the beloved’s own selfhood. Yet such relationships and the respect needed for them can and do take a multitude of forms. As one of the axes that make up the horizon within which a human person is situated, respect can mean different things in different paradigms of life and thought. Nonmodern frameworks often link respect for human life at the level of “to be,” whereas modernity places the emphasis on what one will “do.” In my argument, this imperative is primarily to love. The second axis that defines a paradigm of meaning might be described as our sense of dignity. I am not referring here to the dignity that comes conjointly with the active respect of human rights but more to an attitudinal kind of respect that human beings command by virtue of how others perceive their comportment and subjectivity as a whole. In this sense, dignity belongs to the texture of our gestures, speaking, working, walking, playing, and so on, insofar as these occur in a public space and, according to Taylor, incur the potential respect or disdain of others, and correlative pride or shame, giving one (or not) a sense of self-​worth44 and, more broadly in my argument, a sense of self. I would add that we attach the meaning of dignity to some practices, and the opposite meaning to others, primarily by virtue of dialogical interactions with others who inhabit the virtual space of our framework of meaning with us and, more particularly, through the multisensorial dialogues of our attachment loves. Our internal apparatus for meaning-​making is dialogically constituted, and the sense we give to dignity comes as a result of interactions with others, especially with those others who are linked to us more enduringly through love. The

43. Taylor, Sources, 11–​12; cf. John Locke, Two Treaties of Government, Second Treatise, §6. 44. Taylor, Sources, 15–​16.

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exterior practices of life that involve those who know and are known by us most deeply constitute the spaces where we learn what characterizes dignity and how to embody it. Therefore, these relational practices constitute a locus of experience that exists logically prior to the interior sense of one’s self, or what Taylor calls one’s self-​worth. The third axis that completes the intersection of hypergoods in a framework of meaning might be referred to as a vision for what constitutes a full, well-​lived life. Some such vision permeates any framework in which life unfolds, but the content of it varies significantly. For example, a whole range of premodern paradigms stands like unquestioned canopies over the human persons under them, defining the obligations or duties that those people have and functioning as their norms. The more one adheres to those standards, the fuller, or better, one’s life becomes. The self as an agent who is able, in principle, to comply with such norms—​even if that ability is conceived as one given by the divine grace that enhances nature—​is taken for granted. The less one respects one’s obligations, the more empty, or inferior, one’s existence would appear. The standard itself, though, remains uninterrogated, be it a demand for a given kind of piety in a faith tradition, courage in a warlike culture, the maintenance of one’s role and stature within a hierarchically viewed order of the universe, or anything else. As a guilty culprit, however, modernity again brings radical change. What accounts for a good, full life in the mind of the modern self differs from her predecessors or from the mode of existence prevalent in contemporary cultures disjunctive from Western modernity. Modernity has ascribed an importance to the concept of “the meaning of life” (hence my discussion of it in this context) that would have been incomprehensible to the non-​or premodern imagination. Postmodernity has deepened even more the centrality of meaning. The equivocal or imprecise connotations of the idea of “the meaning of life” notwithstanding, most people in the contemporary West have an intuitive sense of what is implied when one worries about whether life has any meaning or what the meaning of one’s own life might be. There is no given horizon within which one is automatically placed; rather, one has to find one’s own framework that is, or becomes, meaningful. A good, full life enjoys meaning.45 That said, a good life is one in which the self receives and gives love. I demonstrate later that the quest for meaning is a dialogical enterprise in which

45. Ibid., 16–​17.

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relationships of deep love attachment play a constitutive role that also creates the human self through participation in human as well as divine flows of intertwined love. Taylor’s claim is fruitful:  frameworks not only constitute necessary meaning-​making constructions within which the self is made and actualized, but they also always include some stable axes along which meaning moves. The content of respect for others and one’s own life, of dignity, and of flourishing existence, differs substantially across frameworks, but these axes are not lacking; the answers that define them vary substantially, but the broad questions they imply are, in some form, always there.

2.1.3.  Radical Novelty Why is it significant to talk about frameworks of meaning in conjunction with “homing” the self as it develops through participation in human and divine love? To begin with, the self is a creature of meaning to the extent that when one’s meaning-​making structures erode or diminish, one’s sense of value as a person is degraded and defeated.46 The self subsists as a self insofar as she can engage in constructing meaning for her life. I argue that meaning is generated in and through experiences of attachment and love received that cocreate the self and enable it to be not only the beloved, but also the lover—​in other words, to be fundamentally oriented in a loving direction and thereby enter God’s own streams of love. The significance of invoking frameworks of meaning, then, concerns their role in shaping the self. Yet they are not a given—​at least not in modern and postmodern contexts. Taylor argues that the broadly understood moral and cultural universe of modernity, although internally differentiated and temporally evolving, diverges steeply from the heritage received from preceding ages. I  have already hinted at this in a preceding subsection, but I  unpack it more clearly here. There is something radically novel about the modern age: a horizon for meaning can no longer be taken for granted. I contend that this is even more radically true in postmodernity, particularly in the context of today’s increasing globalization. An avalanche of alternative horizons of meaning assaults the contemporary self-​in-​the-​making.

46. McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors, 32–​33; see also n. 19.

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It has not always been so, and it is still not so in many cultural frameworks outside the perimeter of Western (post)modernity. Taylor shows that in honor-​based frameworks, such as those held by many non-​Western cultures today as well as in the past, someone may worry whether life is being lived in accordance with the norms that establish the basis upon which honor is conferred, for instance bravery in the battlefield or benevolence in leading one’s tribe, household, or kingdom. But those norms remain in principle unquestioned. Or, more relevant to this argument, in a culture suffused with the values of a particular faith tradition, one may experience anxiety with respect to living out of step with these values. Yet, again, those values are taken as normative without being called into question as a whole. Luther, for example, with his life under the imprint of a monastic culture in which one was pressed to seek salvific union with God and escape damnation, grew extremely anxious over his inability to keep up with the requirements that he perceived as placed over him by the ecclesial system to which he belonged. While in each one of these cases one may question one’s own standing under the requirements that constitute one’s given paradigm, the paradigm itself is taken for granted as a norm. It functions as a framework that remains unquestioned and operates as a measure by which one defines one’s life in terms of fullness or emptiness. It is a horizon of meaning, order, and orientation for life that remains firmly in place despite whether one lives closer to or farther away from its demands.47 This givenness is precisely what modernity wiped out, according to Taylor, yet it is postmodernity, of course, that has torn up root and branch any given horizon of meaning or the possibility of its givenness. Whereas in cultural contexts outside modernity and postmodernity the framework of meaning serves as a fixed horizon within which the human person freely dances with the certainty of unquestioned attachment and belonging, as well as the stability of meaning this horizon affords, modernity, in Nietzsche’s apt words, has produced a “sponge to wipe away the whole horizon.”48 The existence of frameworks has become problematic in several ways. Not only is there no singular framework for persons even within one culture, but the very idea of a framework of life as an unquestioned fact is problematic. One is often in the situation to choose or create one’s 47. Taylor, Sources, 16–​17. 48.  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New  York:  Random House, 1974), 181, quoted in Taylor, Sources 17.

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own paradigm of meaning and, in so doing, to act as a stable subject; the stability available in prior times by the horizon of a given paradigm has simply vanished, and the individual self is left to serve as the sole locus of stability—​or to be crushed by its absence. In part, I am arguing that love attachments enlarge this very locus of stability and make the self more capacious—​and endow the self with augmented powers to construct meaning. More deeply, I argue that love creates the self as human love attaches itself to the creative divine love-​flows that percolate through creation in the Holy Spirit and elevate creatures into union with God. Ultimately, this union is always a union of love. The human self, therefore, is most fundamentally fashioned through participation in relations of love; this participation is the very gateway through which the Holy Spirit enters creation. As if in a cafeteria, contemporary people can and do pick and choose from different paradigms of meaning the bits and pieces that suit them, and they pick and choose according to criteria that are themselves chosen subjectively.49 While Taylor grants this situation, as I  show later, not all pieces can be chosen: some things must remain as “given” if the idea of meaning is to be preserved at all. Meaning, in fact, springs from the stable flows of given love, which shape what I call home. This claim is theologically significant because God is always the one who gives, and God’s giving is best experienced as God’s loving. God always loves. God’s orientation in relation to creation is one of outflow, streaming divine love toward creation while enabling creatures to love what God loves: not only God, but also God’s creation. The human person is a self when it is homed within the divine love-​flows mediated in concrete, substantive human love attachments. When we choose our horizon of meaning, we choose it in dialogical interplay with significant others, and our dialogically laden attachments to them become constitutive of who we are. To be a self, then, is to be attached and to belong to others through such attachments. Such belonging may be an ever-​present human need—​however, whereas belonging and attachment are presupposed givens in nonmodern contexts, modernity and postmodernity induce the need to build and maintain both attachments and meaning. Because a framework of meaning serves as the construct by which human beings make sense of their lives, even though the givenness of the framework is no longer presumptive, Taylor notes that not to have

49. Taylor, Sources, 16–​18.

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one is the equivalent of falling into a life that is profoundly meaningless. For the modern and postmodern person, then, life is a quest to find a compelling framework; on the flip side, the search may fail, either due to personal insufficiencies or to the lurking possibility that, in the end, there may not be such a framework at all. However, the quest in which the person engages is essential for her well-​being because it is a quest for the very sense of life.50 Regardless of whether one fears losing one’s framework of meaning or does not think that it can be found yet feels compelled to continue on, the issue of the meaning of life is central to contemporary Western existence. Taylor concludes, And those whose spiritual agenda is mainly defined in this way are in a fundamentally different existential predicament from that which dominated most previous cultures and still defines the lives of other people today. That alternative is a predicament in which an unchallengeable framework makes imperious demands which we fear being unable to meet. We face the prospect of irretrievable condemnation or exile, of being marked down in obloquy forever, or being sent to damnation irrevocably, or being relegated to a lower order through countless future lives. The pressure is potentially immense and inescapable, and we crack under it. The form of the danger here is utterly different from that which threatens the modern seeker, which is something close to the opposite: the world loses altogether its spiritual contour, nothing is worth doing, the fear is of a terrifying emptiness, a kind of vertigo, or even a fracturing of our world and body-​space . . . . The existential predicament in which one fears condemnation is quite different from the one where one fears, above all, meaninglessness.51 To return to the example of Luther—​who describes his anguish and despair vividly and, by finally embracing salvation by faith, finds liberation from the life-​quenching fear of inescapable damnation that would cast him away from the love of God—​no matter how one construes the crisis the great reformer faced, it was not, in any form, a crisis of meaning. “For someone

50. Ibid., 17–​18. 51. Ibid., 18; final emphasis mine.

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in Luther’s age the issue of the basic moral frame orienting one’s action could only be put in universal terms. Nothing else made sense. [Luther’s crisis was] turning around the acute sense of condemnation and irremediable exile, rather than around a modern sense of meaninglessness, or lack of purpose, or emptiness.”52 In fact, the meaning of life was not at all questionable for him, or for anyone else in his age. He sought a breakthrough toward what he took to be a universally given norm of a life well lived, which he assumed to be pleasing to God through righteousness. While he eventually saw that righteousness is alien to humanity and is given by divine grace, he never questioned its universal validity or its necessity for rightly relating to God. Luther was not troubled by challenges regarding the expression of his own moral horizon, the need to discover it in his own terms, or the orientation of his life in accordance with such a framework once he appropriated it as his individual paradigm of meaning. It was not even a point of reference in the intellectual or practical universe of thought that characterized his time. The very question would have likely made no sense to Luther. In contrast, it dominates the contemporary West and defines it.53 The radical novelty of this paradigm commends the exigent value of talk about the love that homes and forms the self, empowering the self as Kierkegaard says “to love forth”54 and thereby construct meaning. While the horizon of meaning is no longer a universal given, it is buildable through the experience of love, which anchors the self and creates the self’s home. Taylor thinks that the modern world gives birth to a second radical novelty: an emphatic affirmation of ordinary life and its goodness. Earlier paradigms, for example those rooted in Aristotelian ethics, often conceptualized human life as the mere baseline support for superior forms, such as the good life of either contemplation or civic action, which were, of course, mainly available to the aristocracy. Life as such was not an end in itself.55 But the early stages of modernity, especially in their embodiment

52. Ibid., 28. 53. Ibid., 18. 54.  Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 217, and Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 61. Relatedly, Kierkegaard frequently refers to love’s power to “build up” the other person in Works of Love, 212, 215, 216, 217, 219, 221, 224. 55. Perhaps the most compelling modern account of life viewed as an end in itself is given by Immanuel Kant in, among other places, his Groundwork, 37–​38 (4:428–​429).

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in the Christian Reformation in the aftermath of Luther’s theological breakthrough, changed the meaning of ordinary life, establishing mundaneness as the locus of the good life in a manner that has persisted until today. Mundane life has become “the very center of the good life,” where one lives out one’s calling. Clearly, seeking one’s calling or vocation within the sphere of ordinary life is accessible not only to the elite, but to all people.56 How daily life is lived in relations of love and how concrete human love attachments relate the self to one’s own self, to others, and to God matters, in a fundamentally distinct way from nonmodernity. “The notion that the life of production and reproduction, of work and the family, is the main locus of the good life flies in the face of what were originally the dominant distinctions of our civilization,”57 according to which the lower forms of life were viewed in marked contrast from higher activities, be they political leadership, war heroism, contemplation, or extraordinary asceticism. Modernity has moved the contrast somewhere else. Its new locus is in the different ways in which one can lead the ordinary life of work and close relationships—​from kinship and friendship to romance and all manner of partnerships and attachments. “[T]‌he key point is that the higher is to be found not outside but as a manner of living ordinary life.”58 To be sure, the manner of living that is deemed superior has varied, from the Reformed theological framework to the instrumental rationality of utilitarianism or the expressivist bent of Marxism, to name just a few.59 Yet, common to all of these is the elevation of the ordinary life as that which can be lived well, with respect, dignity, and fullness. I am referring here to the three axes discussed earlier that constitute a paradigm of meaning. The quest for meaning in which the modern and postmodern person engages occurs within the geography of the mundane. One is bound to find one’s own compelling framework of life as part and parcel of an existence in which ordinary life is afforded central importance. And, in fact, it is precisely in this sphere that strong human attachments are formed and maintained, whether they take the form of family bonds, romantic love, deep friendship, committed mentoring, or any other type of attachment. To return to

56. Taylor, Sources, 13–​14. 57. Ibid., 23. 58. Ibid., 23; original emphasis. 59. Ibid., 21–​22.

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my central thesis: these comprise the very contexts in which one’s self is shaped, flourishes, and builds a home of meaning and belonging, regardless of physical geography.

2.1.4.  A “Do Not Discard” Label In spite of all the foregoing arguments, a skeptic may be tempted to discard the whole idea of frameworks of meaning and suggest either that they are optional in principle, or that the empirical evidence of people living without explicitly formulated paradigms demonstrates that such horizons of meaning are not inherent to human life, let alone the good life. That would, however, be a troubling conclusion. Even though it may be left to the task of scholars to determine the contours of a given framework, I concur with Taylor that human beings do, indeed, live lives “entirely structured by supremely important qualitative distinctions, in relation to which they literally live and die.”60 These distinctions may, and often do, remain inarticulate for those who live according to them, yet that does not render them nonexistent. One does not need to articulate an abstract theoretical understanding of attachment theory or love semantics in order to attach oneself to others in rich love. Taylor rightly argues for the strong assertion that life without frameworks of meaning is not possible; undamaged human subjectivity requires them. Why? The human self operates only within such a framework, which grounds the self’s development and sustenance and, in my argument, coconditions the loves that most directly build up one’s subjectivity. “Who” one is depends, at least in part, on where one stands with respect to a host of meaning-​making determinations—​be they moral, political, faith-​ driven, or of another kind—​that create a horizon against which a person deems something good or bad, valuable or worthless, desirable or disposable. A deeper sense of goodness grounds such judgments. To lose such a framework is tantamount to being adrift “at sea, as it were,”61 to lose one’s sense of orientation with respect to who one is. There is a correlation, therefore, between one’s sense of self and one’s framework of meaning: to know who I am is to be oriented in the framework’s space. This space of meaning is the base to which attachment loves that shape and home the self can be securely anchored. The self is doubly embedded in a universe of meaning more broadly and in the concretion of love experiences more 60. Ibid., 21. 61. Ibid., 27.

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particularly, creating a doubly layered description of subjectivity: out of the baseline of a framework of meaning grows the possibility of a love-​shaped self. While the horizon of meaning is shared broadly by many, the depth of love attachments is formed particularly with only a few. There is, however, a continuous relationship between these two layers. The intimate space of love is a deepening, perfecting, and enriching of the broader paradigm of shared meaning, and it is nested in it. Unlike other times or places, modernity (and postmodernity even more radically) calls for a particularizing of this universality of meaning. “Underlying our modern talk of identity is the notion that questions of moral orientation cannot all be solved in simply universal terms.”62 The frameworks that orient us are not only particular, but they are also the result of each person’s discovery, without which life is empty and meaningless. Only after a framework has been appropriated subjectively does it provide an orientation for who one is. “And this orientation, once attained, defines where you answer from, hence your identity.”63 In this sense, frameworks are indispensable. Should a person be without such a framework at all, she would practically be outside the space in which human communication occurs because she would have no place out of which to speak and “wouldn’t have a stand in the space where the rest of us are. We would see this as pathological.”64 Taylor does not consider how we appropriate a framework of meaning aside from implying a metachoice that we make for this hypergood. Yet inhabiting a paradigm of meaning is far from an abstract choice of the mind; rather, it is a historically and relationally situated, embodied, and contextual embrace of a way of life, along with its attendant meaning, which is always performed in dialogical engagement with a community, even when one finds oneself subverting its assumptions. But could not one define one’s subjectivity merely on grounds of preference, desire, or inclination? Sure enough, that would render frameworks simply “things we invent, not answers to questions which inescapably pre-​ exist for us, independent of our answer or inability to answer.”65 Yet they cannot be our own invention, because they function as spaces in which we find our life orientation, and such spaces logically precede one’s ability

62. Ibid., 28. 63. Ibid., 29. 64. Ibid., 31. 65. Ibid., 30.

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to find one’s existential bearings. In fact, such spaces are independent of one’s success at this task. However, the task itself is inescapable. For this reason, Taylor claims two things about the frameworks within which human life unfolds: on the one hand, they are universally present, “inescapable horizons,”66 so much so that to escape them is practically impossible without losing one’s mind; on the other hand, they are not universally identical, but inherently particular. Yet, again, could not a person define her subjectivity as a quest for discovering her own genuine originality in an ascent toward self-​actualization? Drawing from Søren Kierkegaard, I argue in this book that while the self is, indeed, singular and the result of an ongoing process of becoming, the self is actualized and nourished through relations of love. Taylor rightly claims that this is only possible against a horizon of signification that is also a shared space of interlocution. A  framework always entails communion with other human selves. Even in its most emphatic varieties, the modern idea of the autonomous self emerges from particular frameworks where the respective discourse is, in fact, one of a self in relationship with partners in meaning-​making who exist in the same community of judgment, a shared way of life, and a shared appropriation of this kind of vision of the good. To be sure, one may nonetheless insist that to define one’s own self is to draw those traits of significance that differentiate oneself from others, and rightly so. Part of my argument is that the self is unique—​hence accenting difference is both pertinent and necessary.67 However, not all differences are meaningful. For example, the number of strawberries I ate this morning, or the length of my toenails, may be unique to me, but these traits lack significance under some recognizable meaning-​making paradigm. A framework hangs together, then, in part because one shares it with others, and in part because one does not choose it in the same way in which one makes other choices so as to affirm one’s authentic originality. The horizon of meaning determines which things are more loving—​ and, therefore, worthwhile, desirable, moral, or good in some way—​and which things are less so, and only when this occurs can our own choices and modes of life be defined against such goods. These are the incomparably higher goods to which I was referring earlier, or the embracing

66. Taylor, Authenticity, 31. 67. Ibid., 35–​36.

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vision of the good against which our existence unfolds. If these higher goods were not norms for our choices, nothing would be significant. If choice qua choice were to serve as the ultimate arbiter of meaning and the making of the self, the number of strawberries I  chose to eat this morning would be as significant as choosing to donate a kidney to save a life. A person’s quest for meaning and for anchors for the self becomes possible just when this kind of formation occurs through choices made within the horizon of important a priori questions or an a priori orientation toward what to love. These questions frame the important categories for which to find answers and within which to live and form love attachments. With respect to an individual’s sense of self, the length of her toenails may rightly be deemed a great deal less significant than a commitment to care for her elderly parents, even though both choices truly describe who the self is or what choices the self makes. There is a higher order of evaluation in the background—​a vision of what makes life worth living that privileges filial love over toenail dimensions. In other words, one’s sense of self only becomes coherent against the background of implicit questions that precede it, whether posed cognitively or lived in embodied love commitments or both, and such a background horizon is not discardable. To understand the quest for self-​actualization in opposition to demands coming from beyond the individual (whether we located them in culture, society, metaphysical claims, or faith traditions, all of which imply that individuals belong together to some community of meaning) is self-​defeating. Self-​actualization and seeking one’s own meaning in life risk trivialization unless they occur under conditions that place the individual person in communion with others and under a shared horizon of meaning—​even as the individual self is unique.68 The three axes that hold meaning in place, asking questions about the content of respect, dignity, and the good, precede one’s individual spectrum of potential answers. Otherwise put, I can define my [self ] only against the background of things that matter. But to bracket out history, nature, society, the demands of solidarity, everything but what I find in myself, would be to eliminate all candidates for what matters. Only if I exist in a world in which history, or the demands of nature, or the needs of

68. Ibid., 35–​40.

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my fellow human beings, or the duties of citizenship, or the call of God, or something else of this order matters crucially, can I define an identity for myself that is not trivial. Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands.69 Or, authenticity supposes a horizon of meaning that cannot be discarded in principle because it is the kind of thing without which life itself would have no meaning, even though there are multiple possibilities determining the shape this horizon will take. To summarize, a framework or horizon of meaning consists of a sense that certain actions and embodied ways of living are incomparably more loving and, therefore, superior to others, however more easily attainable these others may be. Taylor clarifies that by “incomparable” he means not simply a class of ends that are higher than ordinary ends yet on the same scale. Rather, such ends both command our respect and admiration in ways that ordinary ends do not and represent norms by which we judge our other choices, inclinations, desires, and ordinary ends.70 They tell us whether and to what degree we love. These ends function as norms for the rest of the goods that exercise an attraction upon us. Either explicitly or implicitly, these norms constitute the background against which we make judgments, have reactions (moral and otherwise), and exercise our intuitions regarding how we love and with respect to all three axes that make up our framework. In this sense, a framework includes a particular vision of the good and of love that marks our lives and participates in determining them. These background norms—​which give human beings and communities an apparatus for measuring their sense of respect for and obligation toward others, their beliefs about what gives a person recognizable dignity, and their understanding of what makes up a full life—​are neither uniform nor universal, even though the frameworks as such are universally present. However, we are universally conditioned for this kind of particularity. As I will show, a complex interplay between universality and particularity also resides at the core of our call to and experience of love.

69. Ibid., 40–​41. 70. Taylor, Sources, 19–​20.

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2.2. Authenticity: A Contemporary Siren One particular framework to which I  now turn my attention is the pervasive contemporary phenomenon of valuing and desiring authenticity. Charles Lindholm theorizes authentic selfhood as expressive of one’s own preferences based on subjective desires and rejections.71 Someone is authentic to the extent that her life expresses her true self. The desideratum of authenticity is so ubiquitous that it is “taken for granted as an absolute value in contemporary life.”72 The culture of authenticity has wooed large numbers of people and has become nothing less than a “mass phenomenon.”73 Taylor describes it as the act of rendering life meaningful in direct proportion to a person’s engagement in a quest for originality and self-​fulfillment. One particularly fitting reason to address this kind of a framework in the broad context of an argument about human love attachments and their role as constitutive ingredients of the self is that, on the face of it, the ideal of authenticity would seem to contradict the claim that relational attachments are necessary elements of one’s selfhood and identity. If the human self is construed as consisting of a road toward self-​fulfillment, which, in turn, is couched in terms of uniqueness and distance from external scripts, it would seem that being embedded in relational attachments is not congruent with it. In the face of the evidence—​ theoretical and empirical alike—​that the call to authenticity brings, can the argument stand? According to the ideal of authenticity, one is compelled to discover and chisel out one’s unique self from the inner resources that dwell within oneself. It may seem that this context creates the conditions for a rather extreme form of individualist self-​grounding and self-​sufficiency. If so, these circumstances would entail that, whatever the benefits and joys of various forms of love, the logic of authenticity denies that they be an inherent component in one’s subjectivity, as they have been relegated to a merely ancillary status. However, I argue that, even in the case of the most ardent formulation of authenticity, the human self results from being embedded in significant attachments, partaking in the love-​flows generated through them, flows that ultimately host divine love and presence. I focus on this divine indwelling of human attachments in subsequent chapters, though 71. Charles Lindholm, Culture and Authenticity (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2008), 66. 72. Ibid., 1–​2. 73. Taylor, A Secular Age, 473–​75.

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I argue here that the far end of the theoretical spectrum, where champions of individualism anchor their position by invoking authenticity as a goal, paradoxically requires the concept of attachment in order for that very goal to be intelligible. Thus, if an extreme form of autonomous individuality such as that which the culture of authenticity seems to imply can be shown to be unsustainable in such terms, and if, moreover, that concept is self-​contradictory, then the argument for the necessity of intimate human affiliations and love attachments in the fashioning of the self can be further substantiated. Among other reasons, I  chose Charles Taylor as an interlocutor for this chapter because he both chronicles the pervasiveness of the framework of authenticity in contemporary accounts of human subjectivity and makes a case that human attachments, operating in broadly social as well as narrowly intimate spheres, are nonetheless necessary among the sources that constitute the human self. But first, how has the framework of authenticity invaded the contemporary stage? According to Taylor, it is a late child, born of the earlier stages of modernity and its forms of individualism, including Descartes’s disengaged rationality, Locke’s political autonomous subject, and, especially, Romanticism’s idea that nature and moral sources are located within, although this latter thought transcends the Romantic period.74 The appeal of authenticity developed progressively in the last half of the twentieth century, incorporating previous types of autonomous subjectivity yet shifting toward a new variety of “ ‘expressive’ individualism.”75 The Romantic ideal did contain an emphatic expressivism in the sense that each person was meant to express her own humanity and not conform to a model imposed heteronomously by society, tradition, religion, or any other structure. In fact, this type of expressivism has been a closely held desideratum of countless artists and intellectuals over the last two centuries. However, only after the Second World War did the ethic of authenticity become a force shaping the whole of modern society and an assumed source of meaning for large groups of people. One contributing factor has certainly been the postwar explosion of mass consumerism together with affluence, a new organization of space privileging privacy, and the means to fill such a highly individuated space with goods that foreground one’s own

74. Taylor, Authenticity, 25–​26; A Secular Age, 539–​40; Sources, 368–​70. 75. Taylor, A Secular Age, 473.

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preferences and tastes—​hence the increasing emphasis on choice.76 To be authentic is to exercise the option of choosing from a “seemingly limitless field of pleasurable options.”77 But, as I have already argued, choice itself is a meaningful category only against the backdrop of stronger considerations that render some goods superior to others; thus, against the backdrop of a deeper vision of the good. The ethos of authenticity creates a particular mode of understanding the human self, distinct from both classical modern constructions of individualism and nonmodern concepts of subjectivity. I have already shown some ways in which modernity and postmodernity constitute a radical novelty in comparison to earlier or other frameworks, but the ideal of authenticity brings into focus another distinction: Taylor coins the terms “buffered self” and “porous self” to contrast “a very different existential condition”78 that separates modern people from their predecessors. The porous self of the nonmodern universe entails a constitutionally fuzzy boundary between the human person and the surrounding world and its forces—​natural as well as supernatural. The nonmodern world is an enchanted space, replete with extrahuman agencies, spiritual entities, and God’s own presence. Such agencies are not experienced as merely interacting with human beings from the outside, but are perceived as constitutive to the nonmodern person.79 Similarly, the nonmodern person is embedded in the social group to which she belongs to such an extent that the individual agency of one single person is simply inconceivable.80 “By definition for the porous self, the source of its most powerful and important emotions are outside the ‘mind’; or better put, the very notion that there is a clear boundary, allowing us to define an inner base area, grounded in which we can disengage from the rest, has no sense.”81 Social rituals involve fixed roles and a hierarchical social order, while individual human beings could not even imagine their identities outside the social matrix in which they were embedded and that they collectively constituted as much as it constituted them. The background horizon of meaning against which

76. Ibid., 473–​78. 77. Ibid., 479. 78. Ibid., 38. 79. Ibid., 38–​40. 80. Ibid., 148. 81. Ibid., 38.

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a person would recognize that which is important is established in significant ways by the respective person’s societal position, along with its accompanying roles, activities, and relations.82 The contours of human subjectivity are penetrable, with cosmic and societal elements contributing to the constitution of the self who is inherently attached to these, as well as to proximate human beings with equally porous identities. What I call attachment in contemporary terms is not questioned; it is unnamed and assumed like the air we breathe. The buffered identity of modernity contrasts poignantly with this worldview. The self is bounded by a firm contour from within which one can master one’s world. One can disengage from anything that exists outside one’s own boundaries, whether spiritual or natural, divine or human. One can say, “My ultimate purposes are those which arise within me, the crucial meaning of things are those defined in my responses to them.”83 The buffered self has made the “famous” anthropological turn and shed the vulnerabilities of the porous self by drawing from its inner power its strength to reason, act, and order its world.84 By its very constitution, it is detached from any sense of an enchanted universe, although it is at the center of a mechanistic universe and a society constituted by individuals endowed with self-​referential agency.85 Attachment seems a mere contractual obligation among individuals whose agency operates from within this buffered, thickly contoured, inner subjectivity. The age of authenticity takes this accent on the buffered self to a higher level by adding the call to subjective expressivism. Rooted in Romanticism’s resistance to universal reason and social conformity, the ideal of authenticity moves sharply toward establishing the importance of human particularity. Each person must discover and nourish her unique instantiation of humanity. Authenticity stands in steep antagonism to earlier positions that located moral distinctions between right and wrong in relation to consequences, especially concerning divine reward and punishment, and, hence, an external standard, even as this standard had to be further appropriated by the individual person as a logically posterior act. The heritage out of which authenticity later emerges had already replaced this external

82. Taylor, Authenticity, 46–​47. 83. Taylor, A Secular Age, 38. 84. Ibid., 300–​301. 85. Ibid., 145–​55.

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norm with a shift toward human interiority: the voice of morality is situated within. However, authenticity brings a further dislocation: the moral dimension is no longer a matter of right and wrong but a matter of being in touch with the inner depths of oneself.86 Nonetheless, morality as such does not exit the stage. It consists of the very call to attain an authentic, uniquely expressed identity and to not fail at that task. Taylor notes that, before the nineteenth century, nobody imagined that the differences between individual human beings might have such moral significance. However, this supposition warrants a closer, questioning look. In the thirteenth century, John Duns Scotus87 had already worked out what came to be known as the concept of haecceity, or individual essence, a concept that entails a moral as well as theological-​anthropological framework. In Scotus’s view, a particular, individual essence is a perfection of a universal essence; according to Aristotelian categories, in the same way that a species is a perfection of a genus, the individual is a perfection of the species to which she belongs. Hence, a particular human being is a perfection of humanity. Humanity, of course, can only exist embodied in each individual self; Scotus’s Aristotelian roots could not allow him to proceed otherwise. For him, the particular individual embodies a higher entity than humanity taken as a universal category, albeit without contravening this universal, yet at the same time an individual human being cannot be reduced to the universal. Each human person actualizes herself into a particular essence by virtue of a unique love relationship with God that forms the basis of unique relationships with other humans. The kind of actualization that takes place includes moral dimensions that are picked up in Søren Kierkegaard’s thought in the nineteenth century. While such a view differs in important ways from the contemporary notion of authenticity, it serves, however, as an early precursor to it. The accent on individual particularity in the work of both Scotus and Kierkegaard is, in fact, intrinsically connected with a substantial view of anthropologically constitutive loves. Surprisingly similarly, today’s emphasis on authenticity is also inherently dependent on a view of human relations of attachment that render them constitutive for the human self. I  make this link obvious in section 2.3, where I focus on the notion of recognition.

86. Taylor, Authenticity, 26. 87. See especially ­chapter 4.

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Taylor thinks that earlier views entailed one version or another of the idea that in order for a human person to achieve full being, she must be in touch with God, or the good, and our inner voice would be important only as a means to an end, that is, to distinguish right from wrong in order to act rightly, that is, in conformity with the divine standard or the respective vision of the good. Authenticity, instead, places full moral force on simply being in touch with one’s inner voice, whatever this voice calls for. “[Each] of us has an original way of being human. Each person has his or her own ‘measure’ . . . . This idea has entered very deep into modern consciousness.”88 It is not only that there are differences between human beings, but also that this uniqueness has moral significance. “There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s. But this gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I  am not, I  miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me.”89 The moral weight falls on being in a particular kind of contact with one’s own inner nature, which is the source of one’s self-​actualization and self-​fulfillment. The anthropological weight is that one’s self is at stake here because there is a real possibility of, in fact, not being in touch with or listening to this interior voice or treating it as merely instrumental. Yet it cannot be merely instrumental, because one’s inner voice has something unique to say, holding the key to one’s own manner of being human. Consequently, I must listen to my inner voice because this is the only way to actualize a potentiality that is truly my own—​the only one that is, in fact, available to me. Outward conformity is not an option within the framework of authenticity precisely because it stifles the very source of one’s own original mode of being and one’s own original selfhood. Authenticity, therefore, does away with any socially derived sense of subjectivity. By its very nature, subjectivity cannot be constructed by social positioning but rather can only be “inwardly generated.”90 That being said, this inward generation is impossible to achieve monologically.91 Here is where, I argue, relationships of close attachment and

88. Taylor, Authenticity, 28. 89. Ibid., 28–​29. 90. Ibid., 47. 91. Ibid., 47.

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love can be seen as necessary to human subjectivity. It takes dialogue and exchange for the human self to be born and sustained. I shall turn to the dialogically constituted, love-​driven sources of subjectivity in the following sections.

2.3.  Recognition: Subjectivity-​Constituting Gift I have tried to show that under the ideal of authenticity, the human self is produced, so to speak, from within one’s own interiority. This interiority, however, is not isolated. It participates in, and—​I argue—​is attached to, other selves. Catherine Keller has argued in her early work that the self is fundamentally interrelated, eternally connected to others—​in fact, to “all other beings in the universe”92—​and that the self is a “radical inclusion” of both many other entities that become constitutionally part of one’s subjectivity and one’s past “necklace of experiences,” which make up one’s life narrative as a whole.93 In her depiction, a self is not a fixed entity but a continuous weaving into a new whole of the many beings who “selve” us and with whom we are to form a web that connects reality. Human selves never exist in relation to one another as “discrete beings . . . cleanly divided by the surrounding world.”94 One selves oneself by relating and connecting while avoiding both separation from others and solubility into other controlling selves.95 At the same time, we are finite creatures who cannot relate to the whole web of reality at once. We partake in it through the gateway of the particular as “we move through particular relations between particular things to glimpse the unseen interrelatedness of all things—​ and always back again to the particular.”96 The particular is, indeed, the compelling category in this conversation. The self is a particular reality, actualized via particular connections and love attachments and shaped by particular horizons of meaning. These particular others to whom the self-​in-​the-​making is connected provide what Taylor calls “recognition.” I  argue in this section that the

92. Keller, From a Broken Web, 155. 93. Ibid., 227–​28. 94. Ibid., 1. 95. Ibid., 228, 251. 96. Ibid., 158.

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emergence of the “authentic” self does not happen in isolation, but rather it needs outward recognition from others and it is worked out in dialogue with them. Taylor rightly claims that both the dialogical exchange itself and the further internalization of its effects shape the subjectivity of the participants; this exchange often involves struggle alongside the resonance of agreement or the attunement of the affect. One’s self is being chiseled out and actualized through a temporally extended process involving myriads of such exchanges. Because recognition determines the shape (or, tragically, the misshape) of human subjectivity to such an important extent, relationships—​both social networks and, especially, love relationships—​ do not merely serve as a means toward the end of one’s self-​fulfillment, thereby becoming discardable or replaceable. They are defining, coconstitutive elements of the human self.97 Human subjectivity hardly results from an autogenetic interior well even when authenticity is the goal. Instead, it is crucially dependent on one’s dialogical relation with others and on their recognition.98 But what is recognition? For my purposes here, recognition is an externally generated, inwardly validating, dialogically proceeding exchange with particular others to whom, in some way, we assign significance, or to whom we become attached by love. Recognition is a particular kind of dialogue that validates who, what, and how the other person is; hence, it presupposes a ‘given’ to be recognized yet, paradoxically, also contributes to the making of the ‘given.’ This ‘given’ is the inchoate self, which is not simply externally bestowed. Neither is it generated monologically but evolves and develops precisely in such exchanges of recognition. While Taylor discusses recognition in relation to human identity, I contend that the self as such is forged and actualized through recognition. Taylor refers to identity in simple terms: it is “our understanding of who [we] are, or [our] fundamental defining characteristics as a human being,”99 “where we’re coming from. As such it is the background against which our tastes and desires and opinions and aspirations make sense.”100 Consequently,

97. Taylor, Authenticity, 43, 52–​53. 98. Ibid., 48. 99. Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25. 100. Ibid., 33–​34.

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identity and recognition are inevitably linked together, because internally generated interiority is impossible in isolation. The self, however, is not reduced to “our understanding.” The self is a composite of relations that constitute the self’s home; the self is received as an inchoate gift, actualized through love that is received and called to live with the end of loving others as well as oneself. Reflecting on Kierkegaard, Emmanuel Levinas defines subjectivity as tied to the “self’s responsibility for the Other.” The self’s existence is simply inconceivable outside of this responsibility from which the self cannot ultimately hide.101 In my view, such a responsibility has a particular context and orientation, and that is to love the other in her own particularity. Our ability to love far exceeds our power to know. Yet the self’s actualization can properly be seen through the same lens of recognition that Taylor invokes. This recognition need not be one of abstract reasoning and intellectual understanding. In Kierkegaard’s talk about the existence of the self, there is a stark contrast between the objectivity of abstract thought and the seeming certainty of knowledge, on the one hand, and the passionate subjectivity of knowing the truth, on the other. Any knowing that matters relates to existence and to subjectivity because the knower is a subjective self.102 Nonetheless, Levinas reads Kierkegaard to mean that this is precisely where recognition matters most:  as subjectivity is forged and the self strives for actualization—​which entails a salto mortale of faith in God—​the self is perpetually renewed. Consequently, the self is “always in need of renewed recognition.”103 I show in c­ hapter 3 how Kierkegaard fits my argument that this recognition builds up the self, sheltering human subjectivity within the streams of love that both allow for recognition to occur and constitute a temple for God’s subjectivity-​making love. Taylor’s account of the function of recognition in the making of the self is compelling, with the caveat that this is a subjective, embodied, affect-​laden, multisensorial kind of recognition. Recognition implies dialogue, interplay, and multiple forms of relating. “[W]‌e have to take into account a crucial feature of the human condition that has been rendered almost invisible by the overwhelmingly

101.  Emmanuel Levinas, “Existence and Ethics,” in Kierkegaard:  A  Critical Reader, ed. Jonathan Reé and Jane Chamberlain (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 32. 102. Kierkegaard, Postscript, 183–​251. 103. Levinas, “Existence and Ethics,” 30.

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monological bent of mainstream modern philosophy. This crucial feature of human life is its dialogical character.”104 Taylor underlines that we only emerge as formed human selves with operative agency and capacity for defining our subjectivity through learning and using a rich repertoire of languages. He admits that these languages are not reducible to words but rather include the lush textures of symbols, gestures, rituals, art, service, and, not least, love. These languages are modes of exchange with other people, and we can only learn the means of self-​expression in these dialogical exchanges. “People do not acquire the languages needed for self-​definition on their own. Rather, we are introduced to them through interaction with others who matter to us—​what George Herbert Mead called ‘significant others’ ”105 long before the phrase became a popular trope. The genesis and sustenance of the self are projects that we cannot accomplish on our own, even as we work them out in our interiority. Recognition, then, provides a basis for the production of a well-​contoured self, even as this self is ultimately not a fait accompli but a perpetual striving.106 Recognition is externally generated and involves other persons, but it eventually becomes internalized in often-​indelible, albeit transformative ways. The dialogical interplay of recognition is a negotiation that entails resonances and conjunctions and dissonances and disjunctions with, as well as listening and responding to, others; in so doing, each party internalizes the process as well as the other, the recognizer. If recognition bears such significance for one’s well-​contoured subjectivity, the correlary is also true: its absence, or malformation, impedes—​ or maims—​one’s sense of self. “[A]‌person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. [It] can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted or reduced mode of being.”107 It is not only the recognition of others, but also their potential misrecognition or nonrecognition, that radically impacts human subjectivity.

104. Taylor, “Recognition,” 32. 105. Ibid. 106. M. Jamie Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 17–​21. 107. Taylor, “Recognition,” 25.

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Since the self is developed dialogically yet processed internally, a pejorative recognition is often internalized as a negative imprint of one’s own self. This derogatory recognition outlasts the exchange itself and continues to live in one’s internal self-​understanding “so that even when some of the objective obstacles to [one’s] advancement fall away, [one] may be incapable of taking advantage of new opportunities.”108 Structural misrecognition is especially pernicious. People of color, undocumented migrants and refugees, women and children, people of varied sexualities and queer genders, subjects of colonization, victims of abuse and cruelty—​in short, those who have encountered sundry forms of malrecognition109 from dominant others—​often adopt that malrecognition as part of their self-​understanding, internalizing it such that it becomes a powerful, oppressive source operating internally as much as externally. Furthermore, distorted images of oppressed people bleed through the whole social fabric and are reinforced through myriads of patterns of reproduced misrecognition expressed in multifarious linguistic and embodied practices. “Within these perspectives, misrecognition shows not just a lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-​hatred. Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need.”110 The supremacies that malform the social space, from white supremacy and heteronormative patriarchy to the oligarchy of the economic elite, are structural harms and systemic sins that destroy even the conditions or the possibility of flourishing and well-being for those whose existence is caged by such social injustices. To be sure, much more than recognition is needed for the social transformation and justice that would undo these structural harms and empower subjectivities to thrive on their own terms. Yet recognition remains of central significance. Taylor is careful to affirm that the importance of outer recognition as an ingredient in human selfhood is not a new phenomenon in the world, appearing in the age of modernity in general or authenticity in particular. In fact, one form or another of substantial dependence of one’s self on other human beings has always been present. Social recognition has always been built into human subjectivity. However, prior to or outside of 108. Ibid. 109. While Taylor speaks about misrecognition rather than malrecognition in Authenticity, 43–​53, the latter term has a stronger connotation that I find appropriate for the structural harm I describe, which goes beyond interpersonal acts and relationships. 110. Ibid., 26.

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modernity, recognition has been derived from social categories that have been assumed and unquestioned. What is new, specifically with the contemporary paradigm of authenticity, is that “inwardly derived, personal, original [subjectivity] doesn’t enjoy this recognition a priori. It has to win it through exchange, and it can fail. What has come about with [our] age is not the need for recognition, but the conditions in which this can fail.”111 The novelty, then, is that the modern and postmodern person acknowledges and reflects upon this need for recognition; while not much premodern literature concerns selfhood or recognition, it is not because these do not exist in nonmodern contexts, but because they are being taken for granted. Socially recognized subjectivity is simply “too unproblematic to be thematized” before or outside modernity or postmodernity.112 The problem occurs today, instead, when the ideal of authentic self-​ actualization seems on the surface to obviate the need for recognition—​ and even its premises. I argue, however, that the most decisive among such premises, durable love and attachment to a few other human beings, actually render recognition meaningful. A key reason why recognition often fails in the contemporary West is the broad relational poverty encountered here. While the concept of recognition as such is not ignored in contemporary intellectual discourse, the specific implications for the need and goodness of love attachments have not been developed outside strictly psychological research, and not in direct conjunction with recognition. The last section of this chapter will develop more concretely how attachment is, in fact, implicated by recognition. Because recognition can fail even when it is part and parcel of the stability of the human self, the cost of its failing is enormous: a crippled, amputated, or diminished subjectivity and a consequently mal-​or underformed agency. Since recognition cannot be taken for granted in the age of authenticity, its very aim—​a self-​actualized, well-​formed human selfhood with a robust agency—​is easily jeopardized. Thus far, I have talked about recognition both in broad social terms and in terms of significant relations of attachment loves without differentiating these spheres in order to show the strength and pervasiveness of the practice of recognition in the construction of the self. Yet these two particular loci in which recognition functions as a necessary category, the social plane and the intimate sphere, are worth differentiating. Socially, accepting that human identity is shaped and maintained in the open space of dialogue 111. Ibid., 48; emphasis mine. 112. Ibid., 48.

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has led to a movement Taylor calls “the politics of equal recognition.”113 Such politics can mean two distinct desiderata congruent with two critical changes in social structures and consciousness. One such broad change is that from a prevailing nonmodern idea of honor which entails hierarchy, to modernity’s concept of universal dignity afforded to all people, extended into postmodernity. I discussed the distinction between these paradigms earlier. The political intuition corresponding to the modern assumption of universality has often been (in principle, at least) based on the presumption of an “equalization of rights and entitlements.”114 Premodern social hierarchies structured the positioning of different people in different societal strata, which also constituted the basis of conferring honor. The idea of honor implied an inherent inequality, socially recognized though unproblematic at the time: in order for some to have it, it could not be the case that all would have it; otherwise, it would lose its meaning. For example, it would make no sense to speak of the honor of kingship if all people could be monarchs any more than, in a contemporary equivalent, it would make sense to speak of the honor of receiving a Pulitzer prize should all receive it by default. When the premise of honor assumes universality, the concept of honor loses its meaning; therefore, in the case of modern democracies, the old idea of honor is replaced by the inherent dignity of all human beings, at least in principle. The premise assumes universal egalitarianism, which calls for the requisite social and political recognition of all human selves. The second change, which has developed more recently, concerns the increasingly large-​scale understanding of individualized subjectivity, especially evidenced in Taylor’s terms by the framework and ideal of authenticity. The corresponding political intuition is to acknowledge difference. While the politics of equal dignity establishes a universally identical set of rights and duties, the politics of recognition goes a step further and demands the acknowledgment of unique identities and differences that describe a given individual or group. It calls for the universal recognition of that which is not universal but unique, particular, and distinctive. “The idea is that it is precisely this distinctiveness that has been ignored, glossed over, assimilated to a dominant or majority identity. And this assimilation is the cardinal sin against the ideal of authenticity.”115 113. Taylor, “Recognition,” 36. 114. Ibid., 37. 115.  Ibid., 38; cf. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1982).

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The political desideratum of equal recognition of difference and particularity, then, is not merely a good idea for the smooth functioning of a liberal democracy. As stated before, the withholding of recognition inflicts real damage on those who do not receive it. Projecting an inferior image on another self and thus denying her equal, albeit unique, recognition and invalidating her particular identity, such as being a woman, a transgender person, an African-​American, a Sikh, a Venezuelan, or whatever else, renders her socially invisible, distorting as well as oppressing her. Social invisibility is inversely proportional to the self’s potential to be shaped and actualized. The stakes are high, both for positive and negative reasons, given that human subjectivity when “unshaped by a predefined social script” is shaped, instead, “in open dialogue”116 into something authentically particular. Positively, particular selves are dependent on social recognition; negatively, serious harm results from its absence or denial. In theological terms, this depiction of the human self may be constructed through universally reaching love. The greatest commandment of Jesus, which includes loving one’s neighbor as oneself and which implies that all human beings are one’s potential neighbors, translates politically into universal recognition of all human neighbors. Recognition is arguably one dimension of universal love understood in political and social terms. I show later how universal neighbor love and particular attachment love are two strata in continuity with each other and how they are not only what homes the self but also what homes divine love within the space of human love attachments. Indeed, the second locus where recognition plays a radical role is that of intimate relations with people who are, or become, attached and therefore particularly significant to us. These may be relationships not only of passionate eros but also of kinship, adoption, friendship, mentorship, and other forms of attachment. The paradox of recognition described earlier is fully manifest here: the more developed an original, unique, authentic self, the more such a self has been shaped by the recognition given by others whose lives are closely bound with ours. [A]‌n original [subjectivity] needs and is vulnerable to the recognition given or withheld by significant others. It is not surprising that in the culture of authenticity, relationships are seen as the key loci of self-​discovery and self-​confirmation. Love relationships are not

116. Taylor, Authenticity, 49.

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important just because of the general emphasis in modern culture on the fulfillments of ordinary life. They are also crucial because they are crucibles of inwardly generated identity.117 I have already shown that while the culture of authenticity calls for life to be a project of self-​generation and self-​actualization, in fact, the very task of doing so is impossible by self-​generated means alone. Social recognition plays an important role; however, robust particular selves only materialize out of robust relationships of love and closeness, where recognition matters most vitally. The recognition that such people offer (or withhold), while it cannot be exacted but only received as a gift, is, nonetheless, a paramount subjectivity-​constituting gift. We flourish with it, and we are severely impaired without it. Taylor asks what the conditions are for the possibility of realizing the ideal of authenticity in the first place and what this ideal calls for.118 As I  have already shown, the main feature of human life that provides the answer is its inescapably dialogical character. It is never the case that one engages one’s imagination in a vacuum from scratch; there is always an interlocutor, even if implicitly so. And those interlocutors who most potently participate in identity-​shaping dialogues with us are the ones with whom we share close, intimate relationships of love, kinship, friendship, or mentorship. Undoubtedly, these spheres may overlap, but their significance consists in the attachments they create. Whereas the concept of authenticity seems to imply an extreme form of self-​expressivity, and hence not immediately evoking the image of a dialogue partner, this expressivity itself is the result of acquiring complexly textured languages of expression. These languages are both verbal and nonverbal, embodied and gesture-​rich, at times art-​inclined, and always love-​laced. “We are inducted into these in exchange with others. No one acquires the languages needed for self-​definition on their own.”119 Moreover, Taylor adds, our interlocutors are not random others who can be replaced at any moment by some other random others. The genesis of human languages of expression arises from exchanges with “significant

117. Ibid.; emphasis mine. 118. Ibid., 32. 119. Ibid., 33.

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others”;120 thus it is with these others whose love has attached our subjectivity to theirs that we form lines of resonance that connect the vibration of our interiority to that of another and help form another self. I assert that it is precisely these attachments to significant others that constitute what we may call the home of the human self. From the earliest stages of infancy, the external recognition of attachment figures becomes internalized, and the manifold exchanges with these attachment figures contribute to the development and stability of both one’s subjectivity and the expressive powers that solidify it. Certainly, our dialogical character operates on the social plane, but its most deeply cutting significance for our subjectivity resides here. Taylor believes that it would be nearly impossible to prevent our subjectivity from forming through people we love since some of the goods we value most become accessible to us only “through [intimately close] common enjoyment.”121 This would be especially true for the hypergoods I discussed earlier. Taylor reasons that since such goods are only attainable in relation to the person one loves, such a person becomes part of one’s own self-​formation. Even in the case of a solitary artist or a hermitic monk, while it seems that they seek freedom from attachment and embeddedness, there is an implied dialogical partner. The artist’s work implies an audience—​even if only a future audience to be created by her art. The monk presumably engages God, and, I would add, the means of engagement are shaped by myriads of expressive shades of language that had been learned in (dialogical) recognition by other human beings. Taylor concludes that short of “a heroic effort to break out of ordinary existence human subjectivity cannot not be dialogical.”122 I suggest, however, that such a severing is impossible: learning the languages, rituals, and practices one uses (even when later in life one chooses, or is confined to, some form of isolation) occurs in close relationships of care from the beginning of our lives—​even if only minimal care, without which an infant would not survive. We enter patterns of gestures and linguistic expression that precede us, surround us, and engage us in the finite circle of relational closeness that constitutes ordinary life. Of these

120. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, quoted in Taylor, Authenticity, 33, and in “Recognition,” 32; emphasis mine. 121. Taylor, “Recognition,” 33. 122. Ibid., 34.

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modes of expression, we mirror some, oppose others, improvise on some, and in general relate somehow to most of them—​and especially to the people in our intimate sphere of life who embody them. The way we are loved builds who we become. In Kierkegaard’s words, “love builds up.”123 Even disagreements and disjunctions with our intimate circles still preserve them as referents from which we depart. In fact, ruptures with such relations of closeness often emanate from the dialogical poison of mis-​ and malrecognition that suffocates our subjectivity and resulting capacity for agency. The validation we receive from our significant others as we work out our identity in the world solidifies our sense of self. The withholding of recognition, whether intentional or inadvertent, cripples our subjectivity, which needs dialogue as a plant needs water. And yet, are not these recognition-​producing relationships, in some sense, merely instrumental for the self? However important and conducive to one’s well-​being, are not social recognition and love relations simply means to a higher end, that of the formation and growth of a well-​ formed, authentic self? Taylor asks a similar question:  considering the ideal of authenticity as existential telos, even with recognition assumed, is not a “disaffiliated way of being”124 the necessary consequence, while our associations are relegated to mere instrumentality? On both the social and the intimate planes, Taylor argues that the answer is no. On the social plane, the contrary may appear true. It could seem, in Taylor’s assessment, that the recognition of difference among people is simply a matter of procedural, hence instrumental, justice, whereby we treat everybody equally without a strong allegiance to a particular form of societal organization or body politic. Yet one problem with this is that any societal milieu that operates with a sufficiently strong notion of the common good would praise those who support it and condemn those who aim at alternative goods. A politics of neutrality may seem appealing in light of this, if such an option were, in fact, realistic to start with; but Taylor unearths a deeper problem. Recognizing that different ways of being have equal value raises the question, What grounds such equality? Mere difference—​be it in the realm of choosing different ways of life or in the realm of categories such

123. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 212. 124. Taylor, Authenticity, 50.

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as race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and so forth—​is not self-​grounding with respect to equal value. To come together on a mutual recognition of difference—​that is, of the equal value of different identities—​requires that we share more than the belief in this principle; we have to share also some standards of value on which the identities concerned check out as equal. There must be some substantive agreement on value, or else the formal principle will be empty and a sham . . . . Recognizing difference, like self-​choosing, requires a horizon of significance, in this case a shared one.125 Equal social recognition, albeit crucial for the well-​being of a human self, is simply insufficient as a conceptual category to be meaningful in itself. More needs to be said to ground it and render it real. In order to recognize the other as such, one needs to share with this particular other a horizon of meaning under which both place an understanding of equality, in whatever respect it might be applied. Both individuals need to participate in a community of meaning, for otherwise what one individual recognizes will be incoherent to her interlocutor. She may, in fact, recognize something else than the other is, and the purpose of recognition itself is short-​ circuited. It would no longer be recognition. Proper recognition requires embeddedness in, or affiliation with, a framework within which recognition is coherent. Taylor is careful to add that this kind of logic does not imply that recognition is predicated upon belonging to the exact same political, cultural, ethical, or other sort of circle. That would, in fact, place limits on recognition. We would not be able to recognize foreigners if political or nation-​state belonging were a prerequisite for recognition, with dreadful consequences for the already-​pained lives of migrants. Nonetheless, discovering and growing “commonalities of value”126 is an important way in which the degree of recognition may increase. It remains to be argued, of course, to what extent such commonality need not necessarily overlap entirely, on the one hand, and require some degree of cultivation for recognition to have its effect, on the other hand. This naturally raises the

125. Ibid., 52. 126. Ibid., 52.

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question, what constitutes a sufficiently common framework? While answering this question exhaustively lies beyond the scope of my project, my succinct proposal is that there is no universal solution but only particular answers to particular situations where recognition is involved, and that answers are to be sought dialogically under the injunction of the second half of the greatest commandment: to love all neighbors universally, but in their concrete particularity. This topic brings me to two theoretical points that shape my argument more clearly. First, recognition depends on a horizon of signification under which both parties need to be placed to some degree. They need to belong to an adequately similar paradigm and to be attracted to a sufficiently similar, or at least compatible, vision of the good. A Venn diagram is one way to visualize this: the image is one of partially overlapping circles with a common area, yet with a portion of each circle that remains uncovered by the other circles.127 The common area represents the parties’ commonly shared meanings and may be large or small, but some form of understanding of what constitutes respect, dignity, and a good, full life would, at the very least, need to reside within the perimeter of the common area in order for recognition of distinctions to be coherent. The common area of the circles of meaning might be small initially, yet dialogue, which provides recognition of the other, serves as both a means and an end here: it enlarges the common ground, and it solidifies the other’s self. Another way to conceptualize this idea is reminiscent of Hans Georg Gadamer’s thought on the fusion of horizons. He takes human beings to derive meaning by virtue of their immersion in a given semantic horizon consisting of a particular time, space, and historical reality. In our attempts to understand other semantic frameworks, historical epochs, or spaces of another’s imagination, we cannot simply immerse ourselves in alternative horizons or project within our imagination an entirely different horizon than the one we experience. We cannot leave our own horizon of meaning, enter a different consciousness, and thereby assume what is an alien understanding. Nonetheless, a person who studies history engages in a kind of projection of an alien understanding from a historical horizon into her own. Yet by projecting a historical horizon, she, in fact, fuses her

127. A. W. F. Edwards, Cogwheels of the Mind: The Story of Venn Diagrams (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004).

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own horizon with it.128 A similar fusion of horizons may be posited across different paradigms of meaning in order to bring about some sense of belonging to a similar framework of meaning, which is a condition for the possibility of recognition. Second, recognition does not come wholesale; it comes in degrees. The degree of given (and received) recognition depends on both the closeness of the relationship between the two parties, and therefore the degree of attachment, and the degree of the overlapping or fusion of the horizons of meaning that envelop the respective interlocutors. Both of these factors engender recognition, which, in turn, fertilizes the ground for the human self. Taylor also asks the question I  entertained in these past paragraphs about the intimate sphere of relationships: are the significant people in our lives merely instrumental to us, or do they play a stronger role such that we would not quite be who we are without them and these people without us, even beyond the early formative years of life? The answer is more immediately evident in this sphere: close relationships cannot be merely instrumental if they are subjectivity forming. Even though the closest relationships can, tragically, break, whether between lovers or spouses, parents and children, siblings, other forms of kinship, mentor and mentee, or plain old friends, such relationships, nonetheless, remain integral to the human sense of self often long after their ruptures, if not the whole of one’s existence.129 Why is this so? We internalize our exchanges with such people and their recognition, which continues to work inside us far beyond its external occurrence. Now, certainly, our sense of self changes and evolves throughout our lifetime, but, Taylor argues, we form our subjectivity with a clear sense of continuity between our past, present, and hope for the future rather than seeing our lives as a chain of discrete, discontinuous moments. I am not shaping a 2018 sense of self that has nothing to do with 1998, or with my desires, hopes, and dreams for the years ahead. I carve out who I am today as a human being with a history that is real and unfolding and whose subjectivity will, in fact, only be complete once I will have lived a whole life. “My identity defining relations can’t be seen, in principle and in advance,

128. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Bowden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 269–​73. 129. Taylor, Authenticity, 52.

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as dispensable and destined for supersession.”130 That is because one’s self is a narrative that keeps unfolding through involvement with people who matter to oneself and whose responsiveness constitutes one’s sense of self. This unfolding is not simply a matter of “genesis,”131 such as during the early years of one’s life. It is not the case that we learn languages of self-​expressivity in such early conversations and in the relations that carry them only to depart from both dialogue and closeness and to venture on our own to use them solitarily. To be sure, solitude is part of the human experience. In fact, much of contemporary life involves a sort of opinion-​ formation and choice-​making that is grounded in one’s own internal deliberations. However, solitariness is not the space in which we work out the bigger things—​the things that have to do with our sense of self. “We define this always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the identities our significant others want to recognize in us. And even when we outgrow some of the latter—​our parents, for instance—​and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.”132 By their very nature, relationships of love and significance cannot be temporary, or serial, or replaceable. If they were seen in such a way, they could not be subjectivity-​shaping but rather simply modes of enjoyment.133 Taylor acknowledges the temptation to retain the monological ideal operative after the formative beginning of human life, but he rightly argues that this is an untenable idea. The objection to dialogical subjectivity runs something like this: while it is true that we may never entirely disentangle ourselves from the influence of early caregivers, parents, and so on, we ought to aim at a self-​definition that is not dependent on them but gives us understanding of their influence and, consequently, control over our own destiny. Relationships may well fulfill us, but they do not define our sense of self—​the skeptic would add.134

130. Ibid., 53. 131. Taylor, “Recognition,” 32. 132.  Taylor, Authenticity, 33; cf. M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Michael Holquist and Katerina Clark, Michail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1984); and James Wertsch, Voices of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 133. Taylor, Authenticity, 52–​53. 134. Taylor, “Recognition,” 33.

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I concur with Taylor that this instrumentalist view of relationships does not hold. Paul Ricoeur’s anthropology, which is largely based on a narrative analysis of the human self, helps make the argument. In the same vein as Taylor, Ricoeur thinks that the human self and its identity is a story that spans over one’s whole life, which always intersects with a few other proximate lives and includes them to various degrees. Because the narrative of my life crosses the narrative of some other lives, my own subjectivity is coconstituted by them thanks to our shared narratival journey.135 Furthermore, we are creatures of need as well as creatures of response. The need is essentially for another and can be best expressed by Levinas’s question, “Where are you?” The response, “Here I am,” is a declaration that this other is someone I can count on, and, as Levinas also puts it, this other self is being accountable. It is a “statement of self-​constancy.”136 Even when in extremis one’s life narrative breaks down, self-​constancy is a way of being in the world whereby one can count on another human being and hold that person accountable.137 The constancy in question, however, is accrued in time by the repetition of such answers that confer a relational sedimentation of the identity of the self for both participants in the exchange.138 I  derive from this that the closer the relationships and the deeper the loves that unite them, the more complex, prolonged, and frequent are the intersections of life narratives that cocreate the respective unique selves. To summarize, human self-​definition neither ceases with adolescence nor changes its mode of enactment from dialogical to monological. We remain dialogical creatures and creatures of love throughout our lives, addressees and addressers whose selves are formed in the recognition given and received through the dance of interlocution, both in our social proximities and especially with those few who make up the close, intimate sphere of love in our lives. This sphere of love homes the human self.

135. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 113–​39. 136. Ibid., 165–​68. See also Emanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1974), 180. 137.  Anthony Rudd, Self, Value, and Narrative:  A  Kierkegaardian Approach (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012), 223. 138. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 165–​68.

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2.4.  The Need for and Goodness of Human Attachments Thus far during the course of this chapter, I have unpacked several claims regarding what shapes and constitutes the human self. I referred to horizons of meaning, or frameworks of life, and showed their inescapable nature as well as their multiple possibilities of instantiation. I  subsequently singled out one such framework, the culture of authenticity, and reflected on its characteristics and contemporary appeal. I then engaged in an argument for the need for recognition in the formation and lifelong sustenance of human subjectivity, which, even when understood as profoundly inwardly generated, requires dialogue. How do these issues relate to Taylor’s work at the level of theological anthropology? Or to put the question in David Kelsey’s terms, what picture do these claims paint about what, who, and how human beings are insofar as they are God’s creatures?139 Kelsey distinguishes between these three questions of what, who, and how to allow for multiple layers of anthropological reflection while at the same time pursuing this interrogation in conjunction with two more triads:  that God, who is triune in God’s own inner reality, relates to us in three complexly interconnected yet distinct ways—​to create us and therefore to give us our nature, to draw us to an eschatological consummation and thereby to elevate our nature toward closeness to God, and to reconcile us with God and with one another when we have become alienated. Kelsey resists a dyadic contrast between either nature and grace or law and gospel and finds such binaries too reductive. Instead, he constructs a picture of a triple helix whereby the triune God relates to human beings in a distinct way to consummate the relationship eschatologically and to be reconciled with humanity; and both of these divine-​human relations center on the story of the incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth through whom God enacts both of these narratives. Furthermore, this pair of plot lines winds helix-​ like around the narrative of God relating to us creatively, since this latter story is presupposed yet does not absorb the other two. Kelsey argues that this triadic theological structure is more stable than a two-​pole picture,

139. The three-​dimensionality of what, who, and how human beings are has been developed by David Kelsey in Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009).

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which inevitably pulls theological proposals centripetally toward one pole, subordinating the other to it.140 Kelsey then asks what, who, and how human beings are with respect to each one of these interrelated yet distinct narratives, and he situates the question of the human self under the “who” and “how” interrogations while describing “what” we are as “actual living bodies” with characteristic features and sharing a specifically human DNA.141 The picture I am developing assumes this “what” and further suggests that we are unquestionably immersed in particular frameworks of meaning, even while the fact of the immersion is universal. My argument, however, does not engage in a full triadic imaginary. It presupposes the triple narrative as a background while specifically delving into the dual strata of creatureliness of nature, on the one hand, and grace, or the human participation in union with God, on the other. The presupposition is that both of these dimensions are modes of divine as well as human love. Specifically, human creatureliness as such entails the need for and gift of love in order to develop, and this is precisely the gateway through which divine grace enters creation in the form of divine love indwelling human relationships. This chapter has dealt with the human self at the level of creation alone, abstracting from God’s adventitious gift of God’s own self to creation as grace. In c­ hapter 5, I deal with envisioning humans as graced creatures. I introduced in the first chapter the broad framework of this book as one of nature and grace, but more specifically, the consideration is how we can think of human creatureliness and its elevation by grace translated in the language of human and divine love. The argument will progress to show how creaturely love is indwelled by and participates in divine love, thus elevating the human self and its nature toward union with God. With respect to nature qua nature, I propose that we are creatures whose lives presuppose a double embeddedness. Specifically, the logic of recognition operates in the social as well as the intimate sphere, and each of these presupposes a different mode of embeddedness. First, we are immersed in paradigms of the kind I described in section 2.1 of this chapter, which involve a particular vision of the good that orients us in its own moral landscape and way of life. Such a good attracts us to itself, empowering us to embody it in our own existence. We make sense of it by participating in

140. Ibid., 468–​77. 141. Ibid., 250–​70.

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language-​rich contexts that we appropriate through dialogue with others. Although not universally uniform, this horizon of meaning is ineluctable in the constitution of the human self and surrounds us like the air of the atmosphere. We are embedded in it. Social recognition only happens in a broader community that shares, at least to some degree, a horizon of meaning that functions as a stable enough background against which a dialogical recognition is coherent to those involved in it. The lack of a common space of interlocution that such a horizon provides would obviate recognition and, in turn, the growth of our subjectivity. Second, and most significantly, we are embedded in relationships of attachment love. Intimate recognition requires that we are attached to the recognizer with whom we form a more in-​depth bond than what we share with the larger social circle that populates an entire paradigm. The latter is a necessary yet insufficient condition for the possibility of developing one’s subjectivity. Relationships of attachment provide a second necessary layer of embeddedness that does not contradict the first but goes deeper. One way to define attachment is as a durable affiliation formed between two human beings involving familiarity with each other developed over time, mutual trust, and support—​especially confirmed in sorrow—​and, at least to some degree, entailing a form of affection (differing, of course, in kind from mentorship to filial bonds to romance and so on). If the human self can only be forged in dialogical exchanges, then all the complex layers of one’s subjectivity and inner depths need to be involved in dialogical recognition in order to gain solidity and integration in one’s sense of self. However, the openness that more deeply personal exchanges necessitate requires the very features that I describe when defining attachments. Correlatively, attachments grow in and through vulnerable openness that proves over time to be a space of empathetic validation and, therefore, recognition. Recognition alone, without invoking love attachments, is an insufficient category of explanation regarding the dialogical formation and development of the self. To recognize another person authentically in her intricate particularity implies a mode of knowing that presumes a high degree of comprehensiveness. How else could misrecognition not be a likely occurrence? To know as well as to be known is a temporally extended process; a momentary snapshot would be insufficient for infusing one’s imaginative space with the rich texture of another person’s subjectivity so as to enable a right recognition. Furthermore, knowing and being known are conducive to bonds of the very kind that attachment instantiates.

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However, the openness I am describing here involves risk. Once intimate spaces are open to be known, the interlocutor may be hostile or harmful. Instead of validating and recognizing rightly, one can exercise one’s power to violate and depreciate what is offered in openness. Likewise, the interlocutor may be neglectful. A person can withhold any response whatsoever, ignoring the offer for dialogical intimacy. While long-​term hostility results in a mutilated subjectivity, long-​term neglect leads to a stunted self. Both are forms of failed recognition with negative consequences for the formation of subjectivity. So, while dialogical openness is needed for recognition and, in turn, for a well-​developed self, it does not guarantee that the other will respond rightly. Instead of attachment, the consequence can be anxiety and avoidance. Psychological research shows that secure attachments are not only essential for the formation and well-​being of human selves, but that they also entail low levels of such anxiety and avoidance precisely because attachment figures validate their partners when the latter open up in dialogue. Chapter 3, dealing with attachment theory, details this thought further. What, then, is right recognition, and what kind of attachment practices and love disposition does it presuppose? Broadly speaking, such practices need to be rooted in an orientation of one’s will and disposition toward the other in beneficence. Put differently, it is a will to love that acts to love. Such willing and acting are not yet either closeness or attachment, as one can show beneficence to strangers, but right attachments cannot be devoid of it. Attachments entail close and long-​lived human relationships of love that involve familiarity, trust, support in distress or sorrow, and affection. Important practices that create and sustain attachments, then, would be reliability, empathy, and kindness. Reliable engagements deepen familiarity and trust, empathetic responses in sorrow or distress engender a sense of support, and kindness nurtures one’s affect. Such practices of beneficence are embodied and, therefore, involve far more than reasoned verbal exchanges and require actions as well as emotions. The ensuing chapter will delve more systematically into parsing out the nature of emotions linked to actions and to mental representations within relationships of attachment. To summarize my proposal here, the human self is conditioned by love in its dialogical constitution and nourishment, which entails beneficent practices of recognition that operate within good modes of attachment, devoid of both hostility and neglect. As I have uncovered some of the theological-​anthropological presuppositions implicit in Taylor’s claims, I have aimed to show that relationships

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of attachment are both necessary and good constitutive dimensions of the human self. We need to be, and we flourish when we are, embedded in such attachments in addition to our embeddedness in frameworks of meaning. Relational attachments both help create the self and make it more capacious—​in fact they home the self—​which then includes these attachments indelibly. Subjectivity is consolidated by such relational anchors; they stabilize one’s selfhood through the bonds in which the self engages and which become part and parcel of the self’s identity. Good attachments are relational homes that confer a stable base from which to venture out and exist in the world and to which the self may come back to rest and go out again. Just as physical homes are places of rest (when functioning well), so relational homes are spaces of rejuvenation and consolidation for the self in her particular identity. Borrowing from David Kelsey’s categories, I asked at the beginning of this section what, who, and how we are as God’s creatures, while postponing for later chapters the same interrogation with respect to the effect of grace on human creatures. To answer what human beings are as creatures, I point to our universal immersion within broad yet particular paradigms of life in which we find significance. Regarding who we are, I assert that we are subjectivities embedded in relational attachments. And with respect to how we are to be, I answer that we are selves called to responsible attachments that bring about right recognitions. That being said, the broad picture I have painted in this chapter is of a double embeddedness: I conceptualized the self as fundamentally partaking in constitutive frameworks of meaning and in subjectivity-​defining relations of significance. How does this relate to my claim that the self is structurally forged in and through love? In this sequence of my argument, I refer to human creaturely love, even while this love is itself a gift of God. Even abstracted from the further gift of divine grace, the fundamental human call voiced in the story of the incarnation of Jesus is to love the neighbor as the self. Certainly, the neighbor is anyone. At the same time, attachments are not formed with just anyone, let alone everyone. Through the rest of the book I show the complex dynamic between universal love for one’s neighbor and particular special loves. The parallel that has emerged thus far is one of direct correspondence between the universality of the frameworks of meaning and the universality of neighbor love. As Jesus issues the call to love all neighbors, so is it necessary to establish a common (at least to some degree) framework of meaning with all human interlocutors. There is also a direct correspondence between the

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recognition the self requires in order to develop and self-​actualize and the love attachments that enable it. Put differently, the relationship between paradigms of meaning and the practices of recognition is analogous to the relationship between universal neighbor love and particular attachment loves. Chapter 3 elucidates more concretely what attachment entails and how attachments constitute the self’s home.

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Theological Implications from Attachment Theory

Attachment theory, together with its neuroscience background, is one of the most extensively researched and practically deployed conceptual frameworks in contemporary psychology, with rich, albeit underexplored, valences for theology. While the theory’s infancy involved a concerted effort to understand attachment in the developmental stages of human life, notably in children, the current scope of attachment research is expansive and includes multiple varieties of adult attachment. Attachment theorists hold that the “adult mind [has a] strong propensity for forming close relationships with other embodied minds.”1 Moreover, the ability and need to form attachments constitute an “inborn regulatory system”2 that contributes extensively to a human being’s development of personality and self-​ actualization, social comportment, and, generally speaking, one’s sense of self. In fact, attachment research shows that the good operation of a person’s attachment system is a necessary condition for her optimal engagement in nonattachment pursuits. A good attachment background is an indelible requisite for the stability of one’s affect and one’s mind. When one perceives dangers or threats (whether they are real or imaginary is immaterial in this context), or when one experiences distress or sorrow, one’s attachment system activates so as to seek the proximity and protection of attachment figures—​people with whom attachment bonds have been forged. If they are protectively available, the resultant state of the 1. Mario Mikulincer and Philip R. Shaver, Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change (New York: Guilford Publications, 2007), 4. 2. Ibid., 28.

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seeker is one of relief and security, as well as positive mental representations for the respective people and one’s own self.3 A lack of attachment figures available and able to provide aid results not only in a negative view of the potential givers whose protection is sought, but also a negative, often destructive, representation of one’s own self. Secure attachments are more than a desirable feature of good relationships; they are an essential foundation for one’s subjectivity and self-​actualization, which, according to psychological research, is virtually impossible without such attachments.4 The implications for theological anthropology are complex. In theological translation, attachment theory frames an understanding of the human person as constitutively existing in interconnective communion with other human selves, with God indwelling the relational space of attachment and fortifying it through grace. However, this attachment communion is not pan-​human, operating across the entire species, but rather an interconnectivity that functions in small settings of delicate yet resilient attunement. We are the kind of creatures who are hardwired and have the need to be embedded in attachment relationships in order to develop and thrive as human beings. In the course of this chapter, I theorize the nature and necessity of durable attachments.

3.1.  Attachment Premises While attachment theory is an intellectual offspring of psychoanalytic thought, its very first proponent, John Bowlby, suggested that attachment is part of a hardwired behavioral system.5 The attachment system is innate in the brain and has a formative as well as a sustaining role in the proper function of motivations, emotions, and memory. For example, when the attachment system motivates a child to seek the proximity of a caregiver, it is not only as a tool for survival but also one of self-​actualization at the most basic level: the young mind, by virtue of this relationship of attachment, uses the functions of the adult mind to organize its own processes. The

3.  While the relationship between what we call the mind and the physical brain and its functions—​or whether the two are the same—​is a complex debate among contemporary philosophers, I do not focus on this aspect and will use the two terms relatively interchangeably in this chapter. 4. Mikulincer and Shaver, Attachment in Adulthood, 9–​28. 5. John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, vol. I (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 177–​84, 198–​209, quoted in Mikulincer and Shaver, Attachment in Adulthood, 10.

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self is forged from early on through this “borrowing” of another’s mind to shape one’s own. This kind of rapport remains operative through one’s entire life, even if or when attachment figures change. There is a kind of traffic between the two subjectivities involved: one is giving, while the other receives. In healthy adult attachments, the roles of giver and receiver switch with a relatively balanced frequency. This two-​way emotional traffic is especially significant in a relationship of attachment, as it involves caring responses when signals of distress are expressed. Such responses reduce the affect’s negative states and amplify its positive tendencies. Moreover, repeated experiences of this kind are encoded into memory and become both expectations for the future and internalized patterns of attachment.6 The mind organizes itself by virtue of relating in a mode of attachment to another mind and by virtue of experiencing this other person’s sensitive, caring responses to situations of anxiety. Soothing external behaviors in which the attachment figure engages the other person produces internal schemata of the mind that regulate one’s affect, memory, social comportment, and narrative self-​reflection, all of which are building blocks for the making of the self. The human person forms attachments throughout her life, starting with early infancy. Almost all infants become attached to their caregivers, or even to their siblings. Twin attachment is a well-​known example. Attachments are established with only a few other selves. This is one of the most significant distinctions of attachment relationships:  they neither become essentialized into a kind of abstract relationality nor portray a community of people, let  alone all human neighbors. While the idea of a web of belonging that ultimately embraces all life is a compelling truth, that kind of relationality does not describe attachment. Attachment relationships are, by their very nature, selective, preferential, and based on concrete social interactions that channel caring empathy.7 To use the concepts employed in the previous discussion of recognition, attachment relationships are based on beneficence toward the other. In the language of Søren Kierkegaard, they “build up” the self.8 Attachment researchers have widely hypothesized and subsequently concluded that large networks

6. Daniel S. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), 67. 7. Ibid. 8. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 212.

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of people insufficiently uphold human well-​being in the absence of close attachments, which are never numerous. In fact, a single such relationship can, in some cases, be sufficient.9 An attachment figure, then, serves a crucial role that larger communities cannot fulfill: such a relationship yields real changes in the human brain processes of the self that affect behaviors from infancy through the whole of one’s life.10 In attachment neuro-​research, the attachment system is a complex set of anatomical, physiological, cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes in which a human being engages both when the attachment need is acute and (differently) when it is being met. In c­ hapter 1, I alluded to the backdrop of the great commandment of the gospel11 and suggested that it consists of pairing need with desire. While we are creatures of creativity and resource, endowed with powerful desires to give, we are also creatures of profound need. Our attachment system reacts sensitively to our need for recognition, for care in distress and sorrow, and for attunement with another’s affect. Consequently, it includes several always-​present features. First, the human attachment system reacts at the most basic biological level to protect us from danger and threats by seeking and maintaining proximity to one or a few empathetic and caring persons, or attachment figures. The logic of evolutionary psychology suggests that the genes that encode the tendency toward seeking closeness and care, as well as other attachment practices, were selected and passed on because infants who experience the caring proximity of attachment figures would be more likely to reach adulthood and reproduce. Researchers have identified a number of hormonal activities and other physiological processes that account for attachment inclinations, respond to distress, and play a clinically observable role in attachment relationships. For example, neuropeptides (hormones associated with neurons) such as oxytocin—​which has been linked with both parent-​child and romantic or sexual relational bonding and which generate states of bliss and well-​being—​are consistently low in persons who were orphaned, neglected, or mistreated in childhood. On the other hand, stress hormones such as cortisol are high or unstable in people of all ages who have been separated from attachment figures or are 9.  Mary J. Levitt, “Attachment and Close Relationships:  A  Life-​ Span Perspective,” in Intersections with Attachment, ed. Jacob L. Gewirtz and William M. Kurtines (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991), 183–​200. 10. Siegel, The Developing Mind, 68. 11. Mark 12:28–​31; Matthew 22:35–​40; Luke 10:25–​28.

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even in a situation to consider such separation. The attachment system is measurably linked with hard biological data and is active during the entire lifespan. Clinical as well as theoretical psychological research has shown that human autonomy is, paradoxically enough, predicated upon strong dependence. Autonomy is directly proportional with dependence on attachment figures and the receipt of care from them, particularly during times of pain, threat, or even loneliness and discouragement. In fact, autonomy is only realized by internalizing good interactions with attachment figures and thus developing the ability to self-​soothe derivatively, maintaining the attachment in internal mechanisms when the attachment partner is not physically available. To summarize, according to attachment theory, human beings’ biological system is measurably linked to their inherent orientation toward relationships and their predisposition to seek “contact comfort” in affectionate, supportive, caring relationships, while the loss or interruption of such attachments is a natural source of psychosomatic dysfunction.12 Second, the attachment system is activated by either threats that endanger a person in some real way or by clues that suggest the possibility of danger. Isolation, darkness, or loud noises can suggest imminent danger, especially when their source is unknown, as can the imagined threat of being separated from or altogether losing an attachment partner. Such fears are the daily bread of migrants, who are often separated from attachment figures. While adults have a higher activation threshold for the attachment system than children, it is only because of the prior internalization of attachment relationships, sometimes deep within the subconscious. This internalization of past attachment care results in an expansion of symbolic thought and patterns of affect, as well as one’s imagination, all of which invoke complex memories of attachment figures whose comfort has effects long into the future. One can then delay with a greater measure of ease the receipt of care until such a person is available.13 Third, the attachment system’s primary strategy is, indeed, to seek the proximity of a protective attachment figure. The need is so powerful that a healthy mental self-​representation of the human self inherently includes introjections of security-​inducing attachment partners; self-​soothing is only possible when such attachment relationships have been incorporated

12. Mikulincer and Shaver, Attachment in Adulthood, 11–​12. 13. Ibid., 12–​13.

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in one’s mind (consciously or subconsciously), where they become sources of symbolic proximity, either in reflective mediation or nonverbal memory, at least until physical proximity is an option. However, in situations of a greater perceived danger, symbolic attachment strategies are insufficient, and the physical presence of a caring other is the only adequate resource. At any rate, the possibility of relying on comfort contact, whether real or temporarily symbolic, is a necessary ingredient in the constitution of a fully functioning human self.14 Fourth, the goal of the attachment system is to provide a “felt security,” a psychological state that terminates the attachment system’s activation and enables the human person to devote her energies to other goals besides self-​protection. The cycle of the attachment system is to detect experiences of distress, seek comfort from attachment figures, experience stress reduction and renewed security, and engage in other pursuits. However, engagement in these alternative goals is conditioned in the first place by the presence of attachment relationships in one’s life. Knowing that these relationship partners are available provides an internal script that regulates emotions and behaviors, allowing for equanimity and tranquility. Conceptually speaking, these phenomena allow for the compatibility of autonomy and dependence. Not only is there no tension between these two principles, but attachments are the condition for the very possibility of autonomy.15 They provide what has come to be known as a “secure base”16—​one of the most significant attachment theory concepts—​from which one has the freedom and confidence to explore the world, knowing that there is a home base to return to any moment. Fifth, the attachment system operates with a strong cognitive basis. The brain processes information about both the surrounding environment—​ thereby assessing the presence of potential threats—​and its own inner affective states in order to detect distress. The brain then seeks the attachment figure’s protection and evaluates her response to the signals the attachment seeker sends. The brain also adjusts a person’s behaviors to react in a manner attuned to the attachment partner’s responses or lack thereof. After repeated experiences with attachment relationships, the mind organizes itself into representations of both the others and the self

14. Ibid., 13–​14. 15. Ibid., 14. 16. Ibid., 8.

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that become “working models of others” and “of self,” respectively. These working models are patterns in the mind that organize one’s memory; the narratival representation of one’s self, one’s sense of efficacy, and one’s value is predicated upon these kinds of responses from attachment figures in situations of need.17 Sixth, the attachment system can literally supersede other behavioral systems: when activated, it prevents their operation. When people perceive a threat, they experience fear and seek out protection by their loved ones rather than engage in exploratory, creative, or productive pursuits. Only when the need for protection is met can the person access other mental resources so as to work, give, care, and, in general, dedicate energy toward nonattachment activities. In times of danger, the attachment system simply takes over one’s whole self; when the attachment need is met, however, fear subsides and the same system functions in the background to ensure the safety and tranquility that enables the self to thrive. The attachment system is in dynamic interplay with other cognitive-​behavioral systems by inhibiting them when distress visits and fostering their flourishing when comfort is received.18 In the presence of those to whom we are attached, we become, in Kierkegaard’s words, “boldly confident.”19 Foreshadowing attachment research, Kierkegaard reads 1 John 4:18 as saying that “[w]‌herever love is present, it spreads bold confidence. We like to be near someone who loves, because [she] casts out fear.”20 The presence of a caring attachment figure deactivates fear and activates emboldened selfhood.

3.2.  Uniqueness of Attachment Figures Attachment theorists make a clear conceptual distinction between attachment figures and other kinds of people to whom we relate. Attachment relationships are not just any kind of close relationship: they reach deeper because they are formed with people to whom we turn to receive comfort when we experience suffering. Attachment figures become objects of proximity-​seeking, as their closeness gives relief in times of stress.

17. Ibid., 15–​16. 18. Ibid., 16–​17. 19. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 281. 20. Ibid., 280.

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Attachment researchers call such a type of relationship a “safe haven” and a “home base” because it is reliable precisely in creating part of what I  term a relational home:  it provides the stability, the empathy, and the care that one seeks. In theological terms, it provides the human love-​flows that, when indwelled by the Holy Spirit and augmented by divine grace, become the home out of which the self grows and flourishes and to which the self returns with joy. Because attachment creates a safe environment in which persons can flourish, attachment relationships form a type of “secure base” that, indeed, allows people to explore, so to speak, as other behavioral systems are activated and other goals are pursued. The safety of attachment resides in the reliability of such a secure base. For this reason, it is only natural that people react with separation distress when real or potential parting with attachment figures occurs or when these partners are lost through migration, abandonment, or death.21 Attachment figures are not replaceable as other relationships might at times be. Once the attachment has been established, it is that specific person who can provide the secure base, and separations or ruptures are causes for protest or grief, depending on the nature of the separation. While other people may provide companionship or enjoyable engagement, the attachment system requires the particular figure it has incorporated and none other. Research shows that even caring and solicitous individuals ultimately fail to substitute for an attachment partner.22 Indeed, no one can replace my grandmother and my attachment to her or the narrative of our history together in her village in Romania. Nor could anyone replace my attachment to my daughter. There is a distinction between attachment and affiliation, even though they may be dimensions of the same relationship between two given people. In an attachment interaction, one seeks comfort from the other as a result of experiencing some form of pain or distress. In an affiliation interaction, neither of the two people feels threatened or suffers; they are engaged in the pursuit of common interests with enjoyment. Strong adult relationships possess both of these aspects, and the two people take turns in serving as attachment figures for one another while also affiliating in nonattachment modes in which the two partners are equals. With 21. Mikulincer and Shaver, Attachment in Adulthood, 17. 22.  Robert Weiss, “The Attachment Bond in Childhood and Adulthood,” in Attachment across the Life Cycle, ed. Colin Murray Parkes, Joan Stevenson-​Hinde, and Peter Marris (London: Routledge, 1991), 66.

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the exception of parent-​child rapports (when the child is not yet an adult), most other close relationships, such as those among friends, siblings, other relatives, romantic partners, or spouses, involve role switching in which one is temporarily the comfort giver while the other receives.23 Because attachment bonds are irreplaceable, attachment relationships are the strongest ones that exist.24 While people develop other emotional bonds, such as those based on common interests or biological ties or long-​term familiarity or significant respect, attachment bonds are more basic for human well-​being. When secure, they provide a foundation upon which other kinds of relationships and human activities can be built, while the attachment system recedes into the background. When insecure, the attachment system is activated, inhibiting other modes of relating or types of actions as well as free thoughts or emotions to occur. Furthermore, a person may suffer pain when other kinds of bonds are severed, but typically not with the intensity and duration that follow the breaking of an attachment bond. A parent’s distress following the loss of a child is likely to be extreme. While there are qualitative differences within an attachment relationship between giving and receiving a supportive presence—​ the longing to give care and provision and the longing to receive the same being two distinct emotional sets—​researchers have found that the bonding of infants with their parents and the bonding of romantic or marital partners are simply variants of a single core process. The formation of attachment bonds between lovers takes, on average, as long to develop fully as it does in the case of human infants, which is one to two years.25

3.3.  The Attachment System: A Chiseling Tool for the Human Self Although nearly all human beings have experienced attachment, not all have known what psychologists term secure attachment.26 While highly pernicious, abusive attachments are not nonattachments. Attachment security results from the manner in which the attachment partner responds and not from how well one’s own cognitive or emotional processes operate on

23. Mikulincer and Shaver, Attachment in Adulthood, 19. 24. Ibid., 19. 25. Ibid., 20–​21. 26. Ibid., 21.

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their own. In fact, as I have already shown, one’s management of one’s affect is, to a large degree, conditioned by the extent to which one has experienced the home base of attachment security. When the attachment partner is recurrently available and receptive to one’s bids for proximity, responding empathetically, one experiences not only felt security but also a larger sense that the world is a safe place to be explored with curiosity and confidence. Furthermore, one’s own internal world of self-​definition, self-​reflection, and self-​actualization is shaped with similar inquisitiveness and self-​assurance. The “safe haven” of the attachment relationship provides an anchor so that the self does not drift too far away at sea, with no place to rest, but finds the stability of support in distress. In the previous chapter, I described a similar experience in the context of the modern predicament of the self: one needs to choose one’s particular horizon of meaning yet faces the danger of failing to find it and, instead, of finding oneself at a loss, again adrift at sea. Neither a universal horizon of meaning nor secure attachment relationships are a given, and their elusiveness makes them objects of longing. When the need for each is met, the self is homed at least to some degree. This kind of safety marks a healthy attachment system, which frees a person from investing all energy, consciously or not, in attachment strategies. Repeated experiences of attachment figures as reliable sources of empathy create a “secure-​base script”27 that organizes one’s play of cognition and emotions. This internal script consists of an if-​then proposition, which reads roughly as follows: “[i]‌f I encounter an obstacle and/​or become distressed, [then] I can approach a significant other for help; he or she is likely to be available and supportive; I will experience relief and comfort as a result of proximity to this person; I can then return to other activities.”28 This script is a symbolic, linguistic reflection of a logically prior “hard-​wired program at the heart of the attachment system.”29 The attachment system’s primary strategy is to activate itself in times of need with the goal of attaining a state of felt security, after which it deactivates itself and frees the person to seek other ends. Therefore, the deactivation and correlative enabling of other pursuits is contingent upon attaining the relational anchorage that only reliable attachment can provide.

27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 21–​22. 29. Ibid., 21.

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If attachment figures are neither available and receptive nor able, willing, or skilled in offering the relief of a secure base, then the attachment system is thwarted, as is the person’s consequent freedom to explore both the inner and the outer world, to actualize her potential, and to become a full self. The distress that initially activated the attachment system increases with the additional stress that attaining a secure base is a doubtful enterprise. The world is increasingly perceived as an unsafe place, trust in others becomes questionable, and one is vulnerable to the unreliability of attachment figures as well as to insufficient internal resources to manage emotions and situations. “These worries about self and others, and the resulting sense of vulnerability, can place the attachment system in a continually activated state, keep a person’s mind preoccupied with threats and the need for protection, and interfere with the functioning of other behavioral systems.”30 In other words, the attachment system is activated least often when it can count on being activated with adequate response. Its primary strategy is proximity-​seeking with the expectation that the attachment partner will respond to the need and offer presence and empathy. When the attachment system’s primary strategy fails in the long term, it tends to adopt secondary strategies, either in the form of its hyperactivation or its untimely deactivation, somewhat akin to a fight-​or-​flight model. Hyperactivation is a fight-​like response to attachment needs that go unmet. When the attachment figure alternates between being responsive and nonresponsive, the attached partner operates under the assumption that persistent, amplified requests for proximity will eventually yield a fruitful response because sometimes they do. As the attachment figure appears insufficiently, unreliably, or merely partially responsive, the dependent person is incentivized not to give up easily but to energetically demand her love and care. Such sharp requests start to feel natural as well as the only way to achieve the goal of a supportive response, which remains elusive, while the initial distress grows in stridency.31 Conversely, premature deactivation of the attachment system strategies is akin to a flight reaction. When attachment figures disapprove or punish expressions of need and vulnerability, the attached partner is stimulated to repress such expressions and to block or downplay pursuits of proximity. Since the inherent need for felt security is never achieved this

30. Ibid., 22. 31. Ibid.

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way, the attached partner compulsively deactivates her attachment system in order to avoid the additional distress of her partner’s unavailability or reprimand.32 When occurring repetitively, both secondary strategies, hyperactivation and premature deactivation of the attachment system, generate the accruing of a sediment of negative mental representations of one’s own self as well as the subjectivity of others. The self is diminished and one’s freedom to actualize oneself is hindered. Similarly, these compensatory strategies accumulate mental patterns for relating to others, reproducing the same deficiencies and altering one’s spectrum of capacities and one’s expressiveness of emotions. Human long-​term associative memory creates “cognitive scripts”33 on the basis of knowledge stored in such representations. These scripts are then reenacted in future life episodes and relationships. These patterns function as attachment working models; they allow a person to predict future interactions with attachment partners and adjust proximity-​seeking expressions without mentally negotiating each interaction from scratch. Attachment theory claims that the consolidation of one’s customarily accessible attachment working models during childhood and adolescence is the most important, most enduring, and most resilient effect on one’s personality and self-​understanding, although powerful adult attachments can and sometimes do heal problematic attachment patterns as well as the wounded subjectivities created thereby. The predominant attachment working model becomes a prototype that functions automatically and subconsciously throughout one’s life. Adult attachment patterns certainly influence early models of attachment. Yet, discrete mental and affective representations of specific interactions with caregivers begin the process and then solidify into “core personality characteristics [that] are [then] applied to new social situations and relationships, and shape the attachment system functioning in adulthood.”34 It takes robust, tenacious, and complex adult attachments to heal and transform solidified attachment patterns that formed early on in a fight-​or-​flight dynamic. That said, attachment relationships are relationships of love—​in whatever variety—​and love shapes the self, both in the making and in the

32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 23. 34. Ibid., 25.

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remaking of subjectivity when healing provides the pathway to eventual self-​actualization.

3.4. Attachment Styles In the preceding subsections, I have attempted to demonstrate that a person’s experience with attachment figures and their perceived availability when distress occurs create a given attachment model. It ignites either a primary (and good) or secondary (and problematic) attachment strategy. The cumulative effect of engaging in a specific attachment strategy solidifies in an attachment style. Different attachment styles map onto the different attachment strategies that a person develops as a response to the emotional-​behavioral reactions of attachment figures to her needs. Broadly put, attachment styles may be secure, experienced by people whose attachment working models grow from successful pursuits of loving proximity of significant others, and insecure, experienced by people whose working models grow from impoverished attachment bases.35 According to attachment theorists, four primary attachment styles occur in people of all ages, from infants to adults to elderly persons: secure, insecure avoidant (or dismissing), insecure anxious (or preoccupied), and insecure disorganized (or disoriented), a combination of fearful-​anxious and avoidant impulses.36 Attachment theorist Mary Ainsworth initially proposed this classification to describe the types of responses infants showed in a sequence created in a laboratory setting that she famously termed a “strange situation”:  infants were temporarily separated and subsequently reunited with their mothers.37 Understanding the nuances of this experiment and its relation to the four attachment styles critically informs my argument 35. Ibid., 25–​28. 36. Ibid., 27; and Siegel, The Developing Mind, 74. 37. Mikulincer and Shaver, Attachment in Adulthood, 25. While this experiment was initially performed with infants and their mothers in London in the mid-​1970s, it has been replicated in many cultures up to the present day, and its findings hold. Additionally, the infant-​mother dyad is not the only one that is premised on this logic; any other parental figure, regardless of gender, activates the same patterns. Nonbiological parental figures complexify (although do not contradict) the picture; the findings of this research hold in those cases as well. Single parents, same-​sex or queer couples, or any other parent figure leads to the same clinical observations. In the original experiment, the mother simply was the more common primary caregiver of an infant in the British cultural context when the experiment was conducted. See Mary D. Salter Ainsworth, Mary C. Blehar, Everett Waters, and Sally N. Wall, Patterns of

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here because it sets the stage for the nearly identical reactions exhibited by adults, who fit the fourfold attachment styles according to the exact same logic. Indeed, “attachment needs are vital from the cradle to the grave.”38 Secure babies exhibited attachment working models showing that their attempts to attain security by seeking proximity were easily successful. In the “strange situation” context, they exhibited distress when the mother left the lab room but would recover quickly upon her return, showing affection and joy and recommencing the exploration of their environment with interest. Studies showed that the respective mothers had been routinely available and responsive to their infants prior to the strange situation experiment.39 Avoidant-​dismissive babies appeared to have working models focused on the deactivation of the attachment system. They would tend not to show distress when the mother left the room and would also tend to avoid her when she returned. In research that extended outside the lab event, mothers of these infants were discovered to have been emotionally rigid in their daily interactions with their babies, reacting with anger and rejection to proximity-​seeking efforts.40 Anxious-​preoccupied children exhibited working models in which their attachment system would be hyperactivated. The “strange situation” experiment would lead to deep distress during the separation from the mother and conflicted or equivocal responses at the reunion with her, one moment clinging to her, the next moment angrily rejecting her. Home studies showed such mothers to have been inconsistent in their responses to their children’s proximity-​seeking bids. In fact, mothers of both avoidant and anxious infants create the conditions for the adoption of secondary strategies by preventing the attainment of security for their offspring. Avoidant infants simply deactivate their attachment system altogether as a response to parental neglect, while anxious ones hyperactivate their attachment system in reaction to selective parental responsiveness.41

Attachment: Assessed in the Strange Situation and at Home (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1978). 38. Joan Woodward, “Attachment Theory and Ageing,” in Attachment and Human Survival, ed. Marci Green and Marc Scholes (London: Karnak, 2004), 53. 39. Mikulincer and Shaver, Attachment in Adulthood, 25–​26. 40. Ibid., 26. 41. Ibid.

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Disorganized-​disoriented children suffer from a breakdown of all three strategies—​ primary, deactivating, and hyperactivating—​ alternating among them and reacting in seemingly random fashion, including behaviors and gestures that, on the surface, appear to have little in common with the immediate situation. These reactions correspond to similarly disorganized and unpredictable behaviors on the part of the attachment figure, who often suffers from unresolved attachment traumas or losses and is therefore unable to adopt coherent, reliable attachment responses.42 The typology of adult attachment styles is identical with that of infants, with the addition that an adult is, at least in part, able to reflect on her attachment-​related strategies and behaviors. The prototypical adult attachment relationship is that between lovers engaged in a romantic or spousal relationship. The lover with a secure attachment style finds it easy to depend on the beloved and to be depended upon, values close attachment, speaks objectively about negative attachment experiences as much as positive ones, does not routinely experience abandonment anxiety, and does not worry about emotional closeness—​which she desires.43 This style grows out of a secure childhood attachment, as such a person often verbalizes memories from childhood in a coherent, clear, and organized way, depicting her parents as available and responsive. The avoidant or dismissive person, instead, tends to downplay the importance of attachment and cannot desire intimate closeness without envisioning difficulties associated with it. She would likely recall few incidents of emotional interactions with parents and, in the few instances in which she does so, she would likely give a fairly incoherent account of them by generalizing either without providing supportive concrete memories or by recounting episodes that contradict the respective generalization. The recollections themselves are often brief and pauciloquent.44 The preoccupied or anxious adult is very eager to engage in close attachment yet fears that her partner would not sustain the relationship for too long or would not desire sufficient closeness. Such a person recalls complicated, negative memories of parental attachment accompanied by intense emotions ranging from anger or fear to sensitivity or simple

42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 26–​27; and Siegel, The Developing Mind, 74. 44. Mikulincer and Shaver, Attachment in Adulthood, 27; and Siegel, The Developing Mind, 74.

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passivity. Additionally, the mode of expression would often entail long and not entirely coherent articulations.45 Adults with a disorganized or disoriented attachment style often combine traits from all other ones, especially the two insecure ones; thus, such persons are both avoidant and preoccupied yet without an organizing principle to make these two coherent. Attachment strategies break down because of internal contradictions, recollections of early attachment memories typically involving lapses in reasoning and sharp changes in the style of discourse.46 Attachment researchers have concluded that two dimensions of insecurity underlie all attachment styles:  anxiety (or fear of too little attachment) and avoidance (or fear of too much attachment). People experience an enduring sense of attachment security only when both anxiety and avoidance run low. They trust that their loved ones will be available and responsive, they feel drawn to closeness and interdependence, and they manage distress and threats in helpful, constructive ways, thanks, to a large degree, to earlier attachment figures. When either anxiety or avoidance runs high, the respective attachment style obtains; when both are high, the resulting mode of attachment is disoriented, both anxious and avoidant in unpredictable patterns. This being said, human beings do not fit the four attachment styles in discrete groups; these styles are fuzzy regions. Drawn on a two-​dimensional space graph marked by the two axes of anxiety and avoidance, people’s attachment styles would be distributed across the whole space.47 Most of us have a predominant style but import features from other styles as well.

3.5.  Attachment and the Self: An Indelible Link Why are attachment styles important, beyond mere taxonomical information? Moreover, why are they significant for theological anthropology? The key reason they matter is that they play an essential role in the constitution of the human self and in the whole narrative of a person’s life. They are the single-​most important provider of emotional and cognitive peace in times of distress, even when the attachment figure is not immediately

45. Mikulincer and Shaver, Attachment in Adulthood, 27; and Siegel, The Developing Mind, 74. 46. Siegel, The Developing Mind, 74. 47. Mikulincer and Shaver, Attachment in Adulthood, 27–​28.

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available since her representation in the mind of the dependent partner serves as a temporary stopgap until reunion. Attachments also help to organize current and past experiences in one’s mind, as good and secure attachments enable quality memory formation. Above all, attachments are a central factor in the neuronal growth of the developing brain and in the optimal neuronal connections throughout one’s life. The domains of the mind that function as our “conceptual anchor points,”48 such as memory, emotion, representations, and the narrative capacity are either enabled or thwarted by our attachment relationships. These affect-​laden relationships with people who matter to us “serve to create the central foundation from which the mind develops”49 and the narrative sense of self unfolds. The neuronal synaptic connections in the brain do not simply develop as a result of genetic programming, even as that plays a large role. Genetic potential is always actualized in social settings and experiences, especially ones that involve the affect as we relate to significant others. Simply said, “human connections create neuronal connections.”50 Attachment needs and behaviors, however, do not cease, or even diminish in their significance for one’s well-​being, throughout the entire lifespan, even as the needs may be less visible when they are being met or have been met for a long time. While researchers do not know with precision to what extent the brain is “plastic” and able to be chiseled, they do not doubt that it is. Relationships that involve close affective connections, especially attachment relationships, contribute to the formation, pruning, and maintenance of neuronal synaptic connections in the brain.51 Such neural pathways are responsible for the basic brain functions that enter the dynamic interplay of subjectivity formation, from behavior to feelings to cognition. The region in the brain most identifiable with attachment is the very same one responsible for autonoetic consciousness, the kind of consciousness that helps with the self-​recollection or re-​enactment of events to which one has been present. This cortical region also hosts the centers that coordinate empathic attunement, emotional regulation, bodily states, and the assessment of the value and meaning of particular mental representations. Not coincidentally, all these cognitive processes have proven to be influenced positively

48. Siegel, The Developing Mind, 68. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 85. 51. Ibid., 85–​86.

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by secure attachments and negatively by insecure attachments of every form.52 Considering the role of attachments in the bio-​psychological formation and organization of the brain as well as its processes of cognition and emotional texturing, these relationships are constitutive to the developing and sustaining of one’s subjectivity and self-​actualization. In secure relationships, the attachment figure, or the person in the relational dyad that functions as such in that moment, has a cultivated sensitivity to emotional signals from the other and responds to them with emotional alignment. The two individuals’ states are then brought into what attachment theorists call “mental state resonance,” which results in each person influencing the other and co-​regulating the other’s “affect attunement” as well as mental organization.53 Certainly, achieving this resonance is not a normative aim at all times. Secure attachments involve a circular dance of engagement in and disengagement from such attunement, and this dance preserves that very nature of attachment closeness that allows attachment to serve as a safe base to come back to and go away from, only to return again. However, the attunement of states is a necessary component of attachment between partners, and it forms a nonreducible dimension of the safe home base from which one securely ventures out in nonattachment pursuits. Attunement creates the conditions for the possibility of both nonverbal connectivity and collaborative communication that is contingent on the respective states of the participants’ affects. This contingent communication that emerges out of resonances between the emotional states of two people is the principal way in which the brain activity of one influences the brain activity of the other, shaping a secure attachment style and coshaping the processes whereby one is forging her sense of self.54 Many kinds of emotionally close relationships among adults involve an attachment component, either a symmetrical one, such as in romance or in friendship, or an asymmetrical one, such as in mentor-​mentee or therapist-​patient relationships. In symmetrical attachments, the sensitivity to emotional signals and engagement in resonances is a mutual task, whereas in asymmetrical attachments the burden of attunement is the primary responsibility of the participant in the dyad with the most power. In either case, resonance

52. Ibid., 84–​85, 96–​97. 53. Ibid., 70–​71. 54. Ibid., 70.

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entails a presence of mind and emotions that influences the other person’s mind and thereby the accretion of sediments that shape one’s narrative sense of self.55 Various branches of psychological theory utilize the notion of “mentalization,” which refers to the reflective function of the mind that enables the capacity to envision mental states both in the self and in others.56 The ability to mentalize is important for attachment theory because it is acquired in early attachment relationships and is continuously shaped and maintained during one’s whole life through attachments. Mentalization itself is a paramount determinant of one’s mental self-​organization and affect regulation, both of which are decisive components in one’s self-​ understanding and construction of subjectivity. Consequently, the claim can be made on this basis alone that attachment relationships themselves are constitutive ingredients in the formation of one’s sense of self. To state the point conclusively, there is broad agreement among attachment researchers that the human self exists only in the context of other selves and that the development of the self is vigorously related to the aggregation of experiences that place the self in close relationships. Attachment relationships are the most salient in this regard due to their comprehensive role in the regulation of the affect and mental representations. It is worth noting that these processes are mediated and aided by memory, which is itself dual. In addition to autobiographical, explicit, and at least partially conscious memory, there is a second component to memory that functions implicitly, nonreflectively, and perceptually. This memory is a kind of body memory that stores how actions are performed and what kind of bodily functions are involved, often involuntarily, and automatizes these into a “procedural knowledge” that is accessible through performance rather than mental representation. While this memory shapes a large portion of human life, it manifests itself only in the acts, gestures, and bodily reactions in which it is embedded. Attachment relationships are, to a large extent, styled as secure or insecure as a result of constructing working models of behavior and expectations that tap into this body memory that precedes its mental representation.57 Interestingly, however, any variant of

55. Ibid., 88–​89. 56.  Peter Fonagy, György Gergely, Elliot Jurist, and Mary Target, Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self (New York: Other Press, 2004), 23. 57. Ibid., 40–​41.

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an insecure attachment style can be transformed into a healthy and secure one by bringing to cognition those linkages that are made automatically and subreflectively at the level of behavior and repatterning the emotional attunement so as to enter into mutual resonance with the attachment partner. The newly acquired states of mind become both engrained in neural pathways and constitutive of core identity traits of the human self.58 In this chapter, I have attempted to demonstrate that there is a complex intertwining between human selfhood, on the one hand, and attachment relationships, on the other. The link between them is simply unerasable. While attachment relating is not the only mode of relationality that contributes to the construction of human selfhood, these kinds of relationships are the most basic, enduring, and painful when ruptured. When secure, attachment frees a person to pursue other relationships and activities. When insecure, it often invades a large portion of one’s interiority, inhibiting or hindering most other processes and pursuits and affecting negatively the lives and subjectivities of others who relate to that person. At the level of our created nature, then, attachments constitute nothing less than relational homes that anchor the human self and give it stability as well as the possibility of being hospitable to other selves. While this is the case in naturalistic anthropological categories, it has theological import: God’s own love is being homed there, transforming the self through grace, above the level of nature. To put flesh on what have otherwise been abstract concepts, the attachment loss suffered by the large number of today’s migrants clearly has far-​ reaching consequences not only for their well-​being but also more basically for their sense of self. In addition to enduring painful attachment ruptures to begin with, they are often bereft of their loved ones in the very moments they find themselves most in need of the safety of their presence, often in the face of the dangers and uncertainties of alien, frequently inhospitable spaces. In light of these painful realities, the claims of attachment research add a deeper dimension to a contemporary understanding of the greatest commandment to love (all) human neighbors and, more concretely, to be open to walk the arduous road toward close attachment with strangers and foreigners. The gospel’s greatest commandment of love needs to be read together with Hebrew Bible’s reminders that attachment-​robbed

58. Siegel, The Developing Mind, 114–​16.

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foreigners are to be loved as one’s own self as much as the widows and the orphans—​categories that describe many migrants as well.59 While the language of this chapter has centered on attachment rather than love, given the focus of attachment researchers, the theological presupposition of attachment relationships is, indeed, love. Human attachments are fueled by love, manifested especially as meeting a most fundamental, visceral human need for safety through embodied, empathetic presence, yet with much larger consequences for the constitution of human subjectivity. Love is the central source of the self. In c­ hapter 4, I discuss what I mean by the self and, therefore, what is created in and through attachment love.

59.  See, for example, Leviticus 19:34:  “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt:  I  am the Lord your God”; and Deuteronomy 10:17–​19:  “For the Lord your God is . . . not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

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What is the self? What is being shaped, transformed, and actualized through love attachments? To what extent is the self a coherent entity, let alone an entity at all? In his “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman famously reckoned, “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”1 The material out of which we are made is not private property or an exclusively assigned set of building blocks. We share the smallest particles with other selves. Are we then an endless flow with no boundary? Whitman adds, “You shall listen to all sides and filter them through yourself,”2 alluding to at least some space or place whence a person receives elements that potentially come to be part of herself and decides what to let in and what to be impermeable to. Read through Catherine Keller’s lens, Whitman, far from seeing the self as a “sturdy construction”3 with a given essence, envisions a self-​in-​the-​making: Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations, The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.4

1. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” sec. 1, in Leaves of Grass: Authoritative Texts, Prefaces, Whitman on His Art, Criticism, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York: Norton, 1973), 28. 2. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” sec. 2, 30. 3.  Catherine Keller, Cloud of the Impossible:  Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 208. 4. Whitman, “Autumn Rivulets: Kosmos,” in Leaves of Grass, 392–​93.

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We are, indeed, building ourselves up as one would construct a house. Yet the image of building a house is not one of finality but rather one of becoming, capturing both attachment theory’s developmental approach and the narratival view of subjectivity I  engaged earlier. The house, the home, is a space for the self who exists together with complex elements that enter into the home’s composition and that are themselves in part composed in and through the participant self. Catherine Keller invokes this poem as part of a subtle argument that “to become your own house (oikos, eco-​) is to make yourself at home in the earth—​despite every force of normalization that would exclude or evict you.”5 The picture is one of being a home and also being at home, with exclusion looming and threatening homelessness. This threat is powerful; part of my argument in this chapter is to demonstrate how the self can be conceptualized so as to celebrate uniqueness and difference precisely without alterity-​fueled exclusion. Keller describes the self as a unique event, a process, which is better understood as a verb rather than as a noun. The self is the place that gathers one’s unique composition of experiences without hoarding them. The self receives them and puts them back out in the universe. Keller’s depiction includes both a self that is exogenously composed and a self—​the very same self—​that further “selves” the world and one’s own future moments. The self is “both radically spontaneous and deeply continuous.”6 Whitman intuits a similarly unbounded self. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)  . . .  Who wishes to walk with me?7 This capacious self need not resolve her contradiction, but requires company in order to be. We do not build ourselves up autonomously. Kierkegaard’s repeated assurance rings unabated: love builds the self up.8 Kierkegaard understands the self to be a synthesis whose contradictions

5. Keller, Cloud of the Impossible, 208. 6. Keller, From a Broken Web¸194–​95. 7. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” sec. 51, 88. 8. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 212, 215–​17, 219, 221, 224, among others.

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are not tamed but rather harnessed in passionate tension through a process of becoming and a forward-​moving progression by which subjectivity is forged, even if nonlinearly. Kierkegaard’s vision of the self sheds light on the frequent contemporary condition of disembeddedness and mobility people face, as well as their consequent relational poverty, which this book addresses in its core proposal:  home is a metaphor for human relations of belonging and love, indwelled by God’s love and cocreating the human self. Kierkegaard’s assumptions anticipate the premises of attachment theory surprisingly well, as well as a growing body of research in the contemporary natural and social sciences that asserts that human beings are, in a strong sense, fashioned by how they relate to others and to their proximities, an assertion repeatedly confirmed by everyday experience. Among theologians, Kathryn Tanner has argued9 that a defining characteristic of human persons is their plasticity with respect to outside influences. We are creatures open to transformation. We are chiseled out through stimuli that interact with us, whereas on our own we tend to lack clear definition or even appear unbounded. We are highly shapeable by exogenous factors, and our person’s contour is actively formed and patterned by our context. Of particular theological significance in Tanner’s argument is that we are especially transformable by the highest power that comes in contact with us, Christ. Attachment to Christ transforms our lives so as to image Christ’s life. Human flesh becomes God’s own in the hypostatic union of incarnation, and human lives further become Christ’s own through attachment to him. In Tanner’s understanding, our own existence and creaturely powers are not fully operational outside the shaping received from Christ, which is equivalent with her claim that our lives are maximally functional and, in fact, properly existing only in the state of grace. Our attachment to Christ is the channel through which God gives us God’s own gifts, which are more expansive than the first gift of having been created and having been given earthly lives. While Tanner does not devote her immediate attention to the notion of the self or the self’s actualization and sustenance, her account of the transformation of human life through the means of attachment to Christ, whereby one attains the true state for which one was created, parallels,

9. Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–​3, 39–​57.

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at least in part, my suggestion that the human self emerges through the transformative processes of love attachments. As I later show, these human attachments, when properly lived, ultimately unfold in the power of Christ and pattern the incarnation. Good love attachments mediate God’s love for us and participate in it with the result of enabling the human self to be properly constituted and maximally operative. I propose that the self is an inchoate gift that God gives to living human bodies10 that we must actualize in time in and through love. We are not born with a formed subjectivity; a self, properly speaking, emerges in (and out of) a process of becoming. Each human being is a self-​in-​the-​making in a unique way. This uniqueness applies both to a distinct way in which each of us relates to God11 and to a distinct individuality12 resulting from distinct human relations—​especially relationships of attachment—​with formative power. I argue in the course of this chapter that, far from a static, let  alone essentialist picture, the self is a relation that unfolds in a process of subjective becoming. I then demonstrate that Kierkegaard works with a theological anthropology according to which human life is characterized by a double layer of identity:  on top of a universal baseline that marks all humans, there are markers of particularity and difference that extend and perfect the universal. This line of thought has early roots in John Duns Scotus’s theological anthropology, which I  explicate in relation to Kierkegaard’s. I then discuss how Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology further presupposes a bilocation of the human person in both the finite, historical-​temporal realm and the infinite, eternal one. Temporality and eternity are heterogeneous, yet because they intersect in each human person, human subjectivity is itself constituted by this very kind of heterogeneity. The self, then, is a relation “relating itself to itself”13 within the fertile tension of the relation between the temporal and the eternal and

10.  I  refer here to a framework developed by David Kelsey in Eccentric Existence, 242–​80, according to which human creatureliness consists in having been born in a living body, classified as human by virtue of its DNA, that is an actual (not merely potential) gift to which God relates in freedom and intimacy. This body is constantly changing and developing, containing a finite set of real powers, always inherently mysterious, and remaining good in spite of sin. 11. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 230. 12. Ibid., 271. 13. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 14.

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the relation to the one who established it—​God—​even while this nexus of relations is negotiated in human acts of love. I conclude this chapter with some remarks on how human subjectivities are, indeed, fruits of love.

4.1.  The Self as Becoming Kierkegaard’s rhetoric matches his message. In Works of Love, he addresses his reader as a “single individual,” inviting her to read this text slowly at a tempo that allows for deliberation even though he claims that what he is describing is essentially indescribable and inexhaustible in its richness.14 It is a paradox: I am addressed as an “I” who is asked to reflect; yet it is precisely reflection that eludes me. Why so? This address is meant to be existentially gripping and personally transformative; hence, the mind is not to be engaged as an end in itself but rather with another telos. Reflection alone does not accomplish the goal Kierkegaard seeks. The process of transformation Kierkegaard pursues is the actualization and becoming of a human self, including the reader. Intriguingly, the human self in Kierkegaard’s poetics is like lettuce. This metaphor enables him to envision the relation between subjectivity and the outer elements that shape it. Lettuce is a plant that forms a heart, Kierkegaard says. Its leaves cover its heart, or its core, holding it together, while the heart gives the whole plant a stable base from which to grow more leaves. Likewise, the human self does not possess actuality from the beginning of one’s life, but subjectivity is constituted in time through outer components. “Love forms the heart.”15 It is not the case that the human self gives rise to love; the love that comes from others gives rise to the self. The self, however, is not a passive entity at the mercy of others either. Kierkegaard is concerned with the becoming of the self as a singular particularity, in contradistinction from portrayals of broader historical processes to which the individual is subjected with little power. Kierkegaard’s individual has power and agency and unfolds in time into a unique construction that keeps evolving. Three stages of life encompass this journey of the self-​ in-​ the-​ making: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. These stages are not

14. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 3, 107. 15. Ibid., 12.

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chronologically extended, at least not necessarily, but can nonetheless be logically sequential. In other words, these are not necessarily periods of life that people undergo but rather paradigms of existence in the vein theorized by Charles Taylor. Each stage existentially answers interrogations into what constitutes a life well lived.16 While many individuals may not traverse a certain stage, especially the religious one with its culminating effects in one’s process of self-​actualization, sequencing these stages of life is possible, however, because a fully actualized self will have traversed them all. The aesthetic stage concerns primarily self-​gratification. The aesthete enjoys art, literature, music, or anything else that is appealing on the spot. Even the Bible and biblical images, such as Christ portrayed as a hero, can be appreciated aesthetically. However, the aesthetic stage entails little beyond existential indifference: the aesthete is far from a developed self, even though she makes certain choices and engages in affective transactions with others. But simply tickling the affect is not love. The aesthete has not given her life to a definitive commitment and does not act according to universal ethical principles—​however understood. The ethical sphere of existence breaks through the aesthete’s indifference somewhat. The person who lives in the ethical stage does not simply follow her aesthetic impulses but acts according to moral principles of right and wrong, and therefore is able to live her life coherently as well as responsibly. Whether one senses that the claims of duty are to God, or to one’s people, or to humankind in general, the ethical sphere involves making moral choices according to a publicly shared morality. Kierkegaard does not mean by universal moral principles the kind of absolute morality that I described earlier as characterizing a nonmodern framework of meaning. He accepts the presuppositions of modernity as the epoch in which he is situated, including the idea that there is a shared moral vocabulary within the paradigm of meaning that one chooses. One can choose (and ought to, according to him) the Christian paradigm, but certainly not all people do. The ethical sphere is a midway point between the randomness of the aesthetic mode of existence and the breakthrough of the religious life. The insufficiency of the ethical becomes acutely evident when one is confronted with extreme decisions of unconditional commitment, such

16.  Merold Westphal, Becoming a Self:  A  Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996), 22.

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as Abraham’s preparedness to sacrifice Isaac. From the standpoint of most societies, Abraham is, ethically speaking, a murderer. But from the standpoint of the Christian tradition, he embodies the paradigm of faith. Indifference has no place beyond the border between the ethical and religious spheres. The religious life transcends the ethical and suspends its goals for a higher telos—​the God-​relationship. The shared rules of the community are left behind for the sake of the individual’s relationship with the absolute. The religious stage is the pinnacle of one’s development as a self. In the initial manifestations of the religious life, what Kierkegaard calls “religiousness A,” the individual may feel a sense of guilt before God, particularly as she sees that she cannot, in fact, live a pure, ethical life. Religiousness A is one of immanence, rooted in earthly attempts to live responsibly and apply universal moral principles to everyday existence. Conversely, “religiousness B” is transcendent in nature. It consists of the famous Kierkegaardian leap of faith: Abraham has stepped beyond the province of ethics and is performing his highest, albeit paradoxical, duty.17 In my reading, these stages of development in Kierkegaard’s thought map onto his key description of the distinction and interplay between the universal and the particular. Section 4.2 will be dedicated to the import of universality and particularity for human subjectivity, yet it is significant to note here that the formation of a particular, unique self who takes the leap of faith is the highest stage of human actualization for Kierkegaard. He furiously resists Hegel’s claims that universality is the peak of existence,18 and he reverses the Hegelian genealogy of becoming with an emphatic accent on individual subjectivity. Whereas for Hegel the starting point for subjectivity is the “Spirit” as a universal, unthematized idea oozing infinite possibility and content in itself—​a Spirit that in a second stage gets immersed in material life and becomes full of particular activities in history and that in a third and final stage steps out into the consciousness

17.  Kierkegaard develops these concepts, both explicitly and implicitly, across the majority of his works via several pseudonymous voices. See especially Johannes Climacus in Postscript; Victor Eremita’s editorial pen in Either/​Or, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Hilarius Bookbinder’s editorial compilation in Stages on Life’s Way, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). See also Merold Westphal’s commentary, Becoming a Self. 18. G. W. F. Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Robert S. Hartman (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-​Hall, 1997), 43, 94.

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of its own freedom and, consequently, out of particularity into sublimated universality19—​for Kierkegaard, the process is radically reversed. Kierkegaard abhors the claim that the concept of becoming is primarily a feature of a sweeping Spirit and applies the concept, instead, to the human person in her utter uniqueness. Each existence matters, and human beings need to fulfill their own subjectivity in a singular, albeit love-​ constructed, way. Kierkegaard’s most self-​ actualized individual would be one with a vivid individuality who grows over time, may not be well integrated, but is in the process of becoming a fuller self amid tensions, passions, uncertainties, and, especially, loves. The full flowering of all life’s unfolding lies as far from a basic universality as one can be, and it blooms into inimitable particularity. Kierkegaard is a radical supporter of what today we call human difference. His three stages of existence unfold in reverse order from Hegel’s, as they proceed from a particular sphere of unexamined life that evolves into universal ethical judgments and finally culminates with a consciousness of particularity from which there is no regress. The aesthete enjoys an existence steeped in particularity, wandering desultorily from one event or person to the next and focusing intensely on one thing at a time yet not attaching herself to either but rather staying existentially uninvolved like a detached observer. This stage dissolves as observations accrue and one passes at least some judgment on what one observes, sensing that we all have the inner ability to make moral choices that better organize our lives. Kierkegaard’s intuition is correct that the inchoate self is endowed with an implicit desire to be actualized and to live to the fullest. In this schema, then, the self-​in-​the-​ making is attracted by the ethical. Universal ethical principles become the organizing material of life. The ethical sphere enables people to search for and find meaning for their lives rather than to be driven by accidental impulses and selfish desires.20 But the ethical stage further dissolves into a new particularity when one discovers the insufficiency of universal reason for one’s own life—​including universality understood in the more modest sense described above. The catalyst for this progression arises from the confrontation with the undeniable reality of one’s own sheer

19. Aside from the complex argument in the entirety of The Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Hegel more succinctly unfolds this kind of logic to which Kierkegaard reacts viscerally in Reason in History, 78–​95. 20. Herbert L. Dreyfus, “Kierkegaard on the Self,” in Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard, ed. Edward F. Mooney (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 19–​20.

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uniqueness and individual vocation. Actualizing one’s own unique self is clearly unachievable on the strength of publicly shared maxims alone. A person becomes a self only when she gives herself unconditionally to a calling in a passionate, subjective, singular commitment. “By responding to the call of such an unconditional commitment and thereby getting an identity, a person becomes what Kierkegaard, following the Bible, calls ‘a new creation.’ ”21 That being said, the self cannot be constituted, let alone become whole, by just any commitment. Notably, one cannot become a self by committing oneself to what is evil.22 Whether one conceptualizes evil in the Augustinian privation-​of-​good tradition or whether one gives it a more substantive character, it is fair to say that evil is destructive of the self, hence incompatible with self-​formation. Moreover, beyond the particular commitments that give the self its distinctive singularity, the self needs to ground itself in a deeper commitment to the good and anchor the other manifold vocations in it, including commitments in the form of love attachments. Authentic selfhood is the result of rightly relating to the self, which can only occur through attachments to other people and which, in turn, can only happen as a result of properly relating to the good. Kierkegaard identifies this good as the Christian God who, although wholly other than humanity and utterly transcendent to creation, becomes incarnate in time, history, and finitude,23 therefore not only channeling divine love toward the earth but also validating the multifarious forms of human loves. I  will show how, for Kierkegaard, the “new creation” is constituted through human and divine love and how it is grounded in the incarnation—​the most climactic union of human love with God’s love. In this highest stage of life, the religious, we respond to God’s love with our own love of God in the form of an ultimate commitment. Yet God, the ultimate giver, always turns our love toward our human neighbor. In the religious stage, we make choices that have unique import for our own life story, including, most crucially for Kierkegaard, the passionately inward leap of faith. It is a moment of simultaneously giving oneself over to trust in God’s fashioning grace and acting to take responsibility of one’s

21. Ibid., 16. 22. Rudd, Self, Value, and Narrative, 45. 23. Ibid., 45–​46.

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existence24 on the strength of the divine grace toward which one is leaping. This last religious stage is thoroughly one of existential particularity as we actualize our life in a unique fashion, without denying the features of universality out of which mature particular existence emerges. The particular of the religious sphere is necessary for one’s full life, but paradoxically so. From the side of the ethical, one cannot distinguish between the selfish particularity of the aesthete and the unconditional particular commitment of the faithful. Abraham, again, exemplifies this dilemma. As a particular, singular individual, Abraham stands higher than the universal ethical (and undoubtedly sensible) law. But as a person of faith, he is called to relate to the absolute, God, from his particular existence, and not via universal categories of morality or reason. From the side of the religious sphere, there is no confusion:  “the single individual is higher than the universal, [in] that the single individual . . . determines his relation to the universal [ethical ideals] through his relation to the absolute . . . to God.”25 Put differently, “faith is a paradox capable of making a murder into a holy act . . . because faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off.”26 The particular of the religiousness B, post fidei, is not a fragment of the universal or an inferior category, as it is for Hegel.27 On the contrary, the particular is a perfection, an outgrowth of the universal, going beyond it, yet without contradicting it. This leaves conceptual room to envision a self-​in-​the-​making and to think of the human being as having degrees of selfhood; one may therefore acquire a self without yet having grown into a fully authentic self in faith.28 Taylor’s idea of an authenticity that requires the recognition of relationships of attachment—​thus of love—​maps well onto Kierkegaard’s concept of the authentic self of the religious stage—​as Kierkegaard’s authentic subjectivity is always constituted through relations of love as well. In the following subsection, I delve more deeply into the proposition that universality and particularity are both dimensions of the self, which is especially pertinent to understanding how love for the 24. Kierkegaard, Postscript, 389–​90. 25.  Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling:  Dialectical Lyric by Johannes de Silentio, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 97–​98. 26. Ibid., 82. 27. Hegel, Reason in History, 86. 28. John J. Davenport, “Selfhood and ‘Spirit,’” in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. John Lippitt and George Pattison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 230–​31.

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universal neighbor relates to particular loves for particular neighbors and how this rapport contributes to the formation and performance of the self.

4.2.  Universality and Particularity: A Double Layer of Human Subjectivity Kierkegaard grounds his theological anthropology in his doctrine of God or, more precisely, in his understanding of the coherence between God’s being and God’s action in the world:  if God is love, then God teaches human beings how to love.29 Divine love for creation is marked by equality and similar regard for all human beings, even though we human beings are marked by particularity and dissimilarity. We are creatures of difference. The differences among us are multiple and are powerful in terms of their effects for our lives as well as our social structures. Kierkegaard was strikingly prescient about realities that were theorized only much later. He conceptualizes our differences as another layer on top of an irreducible equal universality, on account of which our loves resemble God’s own. Neither the particular nor the universal is optional or reducible in our subjectivity. Kierkegaard emphasizes the category of the universal because of our propensity to err on the side of particularity in such a way that, when we sense differences, particular loves devoid of universality distance us from one another and from the source of sustainable love, which is God. Kierkegaard’s theology is a picture of love that bears significance for a corresponding theological anthropology, according to which human beings are doubly marked in their identity. They are characterized by a basic universal humanness, shared by all and coextensive with the human DNA. Yet, of course, nobody will ever encounter a live human person at this level of generic, “pure humanity.”30 This is simply not how embodied, lived human existence takes place. Kierkegaard recognizes that human beings are also characterized by innumerable distinctions, dissimilarities, and modalities of being whereby we are irreducibly and ineffably unlike anyone else. This is how we come across to anyone, including ourselves.

29. While it is beyond the scope of this work to fully unpack this issue here, it is of great significance for Kierkegaard’s broad theological framework to assume that God wants to teach creation, and more specifically, that love (since God is love) by its nature teaches creatures to love. This is an a priori ontological background to Kierkegaard’s project, which I too appropriate in my assumptions. 30. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 73.

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Contemporary thought on race, gender, sexuality, ability, and other identity markers dovetails well here. Our lives are replete with features that make each one of us complicatedly and irreducibly particular.31 As I previously demonstrated, there is serious harm in the nonrecognition of the particularity of human subjectivity.32 In addition to the universal and the particular, another dyad characterizes the Kierkegaardian self: the infinite eternal and the finite temporal. A detailed discussion of this dyad and the synthesis the self achieves between these two poles follows later in this chapter,33 but for now, suffice it to say that what makes us similar is the mark eternity places on every human being, as both our source and our destiny are related to the divine absolute; dissimilarity, conversely, is the mark of temporality in our existence. We cannot avoid dissimilarity or having a unique self any more than we can avoid being alive. We bear both the marks of eternity and of temporality, which map onto our similarity and difference, and both these dyadic markers contribute to a synthesis that makes the human being a particular, remarkably singular self. These two sets of markers of human subjectivity each do a different kind of work for Kierkegaard’s thought on human love. The dissimilarities that characterize the entire spectrum of human life differentiate us from each other in innumerable dimensions. “There is dissimilarity everywhere in temporality,” since the very nature of time-​infused history is “the different, the multifarious.”34 “In being king, beggar, rich man, poor man, male, female, etc., we are not like each other—​therein we are indeed different.”35 It is because of such differences that we develop desires and preferences for some people and not others, Kierkegaard warns.36 And this is the most fertile ground for inequality and exclusion and thus for relational homelessness. While particularity is woven into the fabric of our existence and gives us not only our unique subjectivity but also our unique beauty, it is also the

31. Ibid., 70. 32. See section 2.3. 33. See section 4.4, which focuses on the bilocation of the human self in the time-​history sphere as well as the transhistorical, eternal realm. 34. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 81. 35. Ibid., 89. 36. Ibid., 69–​72.

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dangerous terrain in which the seeds of rejection grow. We are especially tempted to associate ourselves with people most like us. The problem with that, in Kierkegaard’s estimation, is that those kinds of relationships are not attachments based on love but rather on selfishness. The other is like me; hence she is another kind of “I” and not a genuine other to be embraced as other.37 In Kierkegaard’s list of worries, difference is the root of inequality. He rightly notes that the manifold differences by which human beings live are often differences that carry with them an inequitable distribution of advantages, power, wealth, honor, and so on. References to differences in social class and material wealth are especially prominent in his examples; alluding to Jesus’s parable of the wedding banquet,38 Kierkegaard envisions a ball where the host invites a ragtag crowd of poor people and beggars to share in the best food and drink. In Jesus’s story, the initial invitees are the friends and the relatives of the host, who refuse to come, after which the host invites the poor and the lame, the street dwellers and the beggars, who do come. In Kierkegaard’s exegetical twist, the nobodies are invited from the start. When a friend hears this host’s story, he is initially upset that he was not invited, but when he hears who made the list, his anger subsides: he would have not come anyway. He has a hard time picturing it as a true banquet of equal partaking and sees it instead as an eccentrically lavish soup kitchen: the poor are not equal to either the host or the friend. In Kierkegaard’s mind, difference (socioeconomic, in this case) works against one’s ability to regard one’s neighbor as an equal. “The one who feeds the poor—​but still has not been victorious over his mind in such a way that he calls this meal a banquet—​sees the poor and the lowly only as the poor and the lowly.”39 Kierkegaard is concerned that dissimilarities of social location work against the possibility of entering relationships of equality. Indeed, relational equality is elusive when difference means hierarchy, which entails rejection and exclusion. Yet difference and particularity cannot be eliminated from human existence. Neither can universality, although left on its own, it would expel human life out of embodied historical existence altogether. The universal and the particular must be considered together. 37.  See Nicomachean Ethics, in Complete Works of Aristotle, vol II, trans. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:1825–​39 (8.1.1154b1–​8.14.1164a1). 38. Matthew 22:1–​14, or the parallel parable of the banquet (without the wedding implication, at least explicitly) in Luke 14:12–​24. 39. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 83.

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Certainly, Kierkegaard is correct that difference can carry the logic of hierarchy perniciously. Judith Butler has rightly questioned the understanding of sexual difference as something materially unalterable, and showed how it stands at the root systemic inequality, which can be dismantled only in conjunction with discarding claims of such difference as well, at least when specific gender differences are understood to be permanently inscribed on our bodies. Differences in gender and sexuality (the differences that she theorizes) are performative only; while we humans are gendered subjects, our gendered marking is only the result of each one of us performing a role repetitively, while at any given moment we have the option of altering the performance, subverting the script, and creating new possibilities of being gendered.40 Butler’s key concern is that gender and sexual difference are ineluctably bound up with systems that perpetuate relations of inequality and therefore inequity. But we can and ought to resist the scripts that trap us in hierarchies. There is a discernible parallel between Butler’s emphasis on the performativity that produces our gender identity and an understanding of the self as a process of becoming that Kierkegaard richly describes. The Kierkegaardian becoming is arguably a performance productive of the self just as the Butlerian performance is productive of the self’s gender. As gender is fluid and shapeable for Butler, so is our subjectivity malleable and uniquely moldable for Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s solution to the problems that arise from taking both the universal and the particular on their own and ascribing them to the human self—​and in my view to consequent relationships of love and attachment—​ is to assume a double layer of identity that marks the human self. We are a synthesis in which these two layers coexist without conflict and without subsuming one into the other. While we are certainly marked by a stratum of universality that makes us recognizable as humans and thus similar to one another, we are also marked by unique features without which our subjectivity would not be conceivable. Rightly understood, the relationship between the universal and the particular within the human self is one of continuity, not one of contrast.

40. Regarding gender differentiation and the trouble therein, see most notably Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). A more in-​depth conversation and claims about inequality engrafted even in systems of thought that allow for fixed biological-​sexual differences rather than simply gender differentiation appear in Judith Butler’s subsequent book, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).

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For Kierkegaard, every human being is our universal neighbor. What gives content to his claims about universality is that we ought to relate to all others equally, as neighbors. “The neighbor is every person,” Kierkegaard says, yet neither on the basis of the host of dissimilarities that differentiate her from us nor on the basis of the potential similarities two people share in contradistinction from the rest of humanity. One is a neighbor on the basis of a universal similarity that permeates the species and on the basis of God’s equally reaching love, which is “equality with you before God, [which] unconditionally every person has.”41 Yet again, the particular is clearly inescapable in our lives. If the universal is a baseline that renders us both human and neighbor to each other, the particular perfects and extends this principle. Far from violating what makes us individually particular, Kierkegaard thinks that “Christianity has not taken away [our] dissimilarity any more than Christ himself would take or would ask God to take the disciples out of the world.”42 On the contrary, “just as little as the Christian . . . can live without his body, so little can he live without the dissimilarity of earthly life that belongs to every human being in particular by birth, by position, by circumstances, by education, etc.—​none of us is pure humanity . . . . This must continue as long as temporality continues.”43 In other words, embodied human life is impossible without particular distinctions, resulting in particular subjectivities and unique selves. Kierkegaard thinks that we are prone to be partial toward people for whom we have a preference or an inclination and that this constitutes a powerful temptation for our desires. While such desires are often born out of affinities we share, these similarities are, in fact, at odds with other particular identities and, thus, not the ground for neighbor love, which is universal, irrespective of likes or dislikes. This is why he insists that the quality of the neighbor must permeate all human relating and human identity as a universal foundation on top of which particular loves and subjectivities can grow well. Chapter 5 focuses precisely on the impact Kierkegaard’s assumptions about a bilayered human identity has on love relationships.

41. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 60. 42. Ibid., 70. 43. Ibid.

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It is important to underscore that Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology operates with this dual stratification of identity without the two layers being opposed, because his claims about universal neighbor love and particular, preferential loves do seem to go in opposite directions at times. Yet keeping in mind a nonoppositional relation between the components of our identity helps with the coherence of his claims about human relationships, especially how special relationships of deep attachment do not contradict the duty to love all people but are, instead, sanctified by the universal thread of neighbor love. In fact, this sanctification enables human relationships of attachment to be the secure homes that attachment theorists suggest they can and must be. Hence, here lies the very significance of discussing a bilayered approach to human subjectivity. I have already mentioned that for Kierkegaard the human self is a composite of what he calls temporal and eternal elements. Since the dissimilarities that mark each individual are features of temporality, Kierkegaard suggests that death takes them away. He thinks that the more we cling to our particularity, the more death needs to tear this bond away forcefully and release us into eternity’s unhindered resemblance to all other humans.44 This may, however, be questionable. Particularity need not be conceptualized as an exclusive characteristic of finite history and time. Human beings are creatures of particularity in all modes of their existence, including eschatological existence. According to Revelation 2:17, God gives each person in the life to come a white stone with a new name inscribed on it, which is an individual, particular name only known to the receiver, though we do not know it yet. Often times in Scripture (and in the ancient world more broadly), a name is thought to impart something of its meaning to the character of its bearer as, for example, when Jesus names Simon “Peter” (literally, “rock”) and tells him “on this rock I  will build my church.”45 On the one hand, we can take this to mean that God calls each human being to have a particular identity developed in time. On the other hand, it appears to support the thought that such particularity is not limited to temporality  and historicity, even as some features of particularity are

44. Ibid., 88. 45. Matthew 16:18.

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indeed bound up with time and history. Yet this need not be the fate of particularity itself.46 Kierkegaard is committed, however, to vibrant claims for human particularity during our historical, experienced lifetime. “We are not like each other,” he notes.47 The domains of dissimilarity are themselves exceedingly numerous, from sex and gender variations to vocation, economic location, variety of abilities, social domicile, inclinations, preferences, geography, race, as well as many more. We are not neighbors because of our unique situatedness, however. In Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology, it is not particularity that makes me the neighbor of my fellow human being but rather our common humanity. In addition to particularity, we are also “unconditionally like each other,”48 and on account of this similarity we are each other’s neighbor. The Samaritan in the gospel story was the neighbor of the robbed and assaulted person on the road to Jericho not so much on account of his Samaritanness but on account of his humanity, his ethnic identity notwithstanding, which is both real and makes him distinct in the story. Universal likeness and irreducible uniqueness are both features of the self, but these two descriptors of identity are not on the same plane. While our universal humanity functions as a sort of foundational first layer or ground level in the construction of the self, particularity extends the self by adding another level. To be sure, the universal is a constitutive gift of our sense of self, but particularity perfects the universal without thereby introducing tension, opposition, or conflict. In Kierkegaard’s imaginary, this relation can be illustrated by paper sheets impressed with a common watermark.49 Each sheet carries on it a different inscription, story, or drawing. The watermark makes them all the same kind of sheets, but the writing on them makes them unique. It is the writing that gives them each a peculiar character. This peculiarity is also the most visible characteristic. The story, drawing, or scribble is immediately discernible

46. I am indebted for this thought to conversations with John E. Hare, who develops this imagery in God and Morality: A Philosophical History (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009), 111–​14. 47. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 89. 48. Ibid. 49. This is perhaps one of the most suggestive images that Kierkegaard constructs in order to represent how he envisions the nonconflictual relationship between universality and particularity in human existence.

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to the eye; less visible is the watermark in the fabric of the paper. We must hold this paper in the light and look carefully to discern it. Yet, the watermark is ingrained in the paper, fused with it. Kierkegaard pictures human beings to be somewhat like these sheets of paper, permeated by a common watermark yet having a unique story inscribed in their existence. Like many sheets of paper each of which having something different written on it, we are different from one another. At the same time, these diverse inscriptions do not occlude the common watermark—​our common humanness—​that is discernible on each sheet of paper if one holds it up in the light. This watermark of common identity is like a baseline on which particularity is built. It is, however, less visible than the dissimilarities that immediately catch the eye. The common watermark is the neighbor, the human being who calls out our sense of care and responsibility, as in the Samaritan story—​which for Kierkegaard is decoupled from Samaritan citizenship—​however much such an identity would be most easily discernible. The Samaritan was the neighbor of the wounded traveler on account of his own humanity, in spite of his Samaritanness and in spite of the prejudices associated with it at the time. We can see the common humanity in our neighbor only when we look underneath and through the more clearly visible particularities of time and history and see the common humanity of the other person in light of eternity. Yet, eternity’s light comes through only via the dissimilarities of our existence50 because this is what our eyes meet. We can never bypass the beauty of human particular difference. Dissimilarity is temporality’s method of confusing that [which] marks every human being differently, but the neighbor is eternity’s mark—​on every human being. Take many sheets of paper, write something different on each one; then no one will be like another. But then again take each single sheet; do not let yourself be confused by diverse inscriptions, hold it up to the light, and you will see a common watermark on all of them. In the same way the neighbor is the common watermark, but you see it only by means of eternity’s light when it shines through the dissimilarity.51

50. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 89. 51. Ibid.

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4.3.  Haecceity: A Medieval Approach to Human Difference I suggest that Kierkegaard is indebted for the views described in the previous section to John Duns Scotus, the medieval mastermind of the notion of particularity or, in medieval terms, haecceity.52 To be sure, Kierkegaard does not import Scotus’s metaphysical system, which gave rise to Scotus’s understanding of particularity. That said, the notion of haecceity itself is a rich concept worthy of retrieval today, especially by contemporary feminist, womanist, and queer theologians when discussing human difference, and it need not depend on the metaphysical structure from which it originated with Scotus; Kierkegaard’s own use of the logic of haecceity decoupled from medieval scholastic metaphysics is a case in point. Scotus thought that there must be a metaphysical basis for the mind’s ability to make sense of both what is common among individuals of the same species and what he called the unique essence of existing individuals, or one’s irreducibly particular, nonrepeatable, individuating difference from all others.53 He conjectured that haecceity is beyond and more than a mere accidental feature that describes somebody (or something, for that matter), say, for example, my sister’s blue eyes, her gender, her Romanian ethnicity, her profession as an aviator, her residency in Bucharest, or her unique birthmark. Any such feature would be consequential to her being human in the first place, according to Scotus; moreover, any such descriptor would be a kind of feature that in itself is repeatable in the existence of others. At the same time, haecceity is beyond and more than the sum total of various features one has, however many of them are invoked and

52. Among others, John E. Hare upholds the heritage of Scotus in Kierkegaard’s thought. See also Richard McDonough, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (New  York:  Peter Lang Publishing, 2006), 90; and especially Lev Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969), 240, 268–​72, 277–​82, 295–​300, who both claim that Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology has its early roots in the work of Scotus. 53. This idea is derived from the Latin haecceitas, though Scotus has not used the term itself, either in his Ordinatio or in his Lectura. While Richard Cross (in his article “Medieval Theories of Haecceity,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 2014, article first published July 31, 2003, revised May 12, 2014, http://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​ sum2014/​entries/​medieval-​haecceity) suggests that it is, in fact, a term invented by Scotus and that, according to William A. Frank and Allan B. Wolter in Duns Scotus, Metaphysician (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1995), 197, Scotus used “elsewhere,” it was Scotus’s followers who popularized the term itself.

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however seemingly unique they may appear. Haecceity is a determinate “thisness.”54 My sister is unmistakably this person, this self. As David Kelsey puts it in a broader dialogue that includes a discussion of Scotus, when we ascribe properties to a person in order to identify or recognize her as her, these descriptors are in fact abstractions that might as well denote other people; there may be others who might be referred to as blue-​eyed Romanian aviators with a birthmark, residing in Bucharest. Furthermore, “no matter how complex and dense” I construe the network of distinctions that describe my sister, “the singularity of [a]‌person’s identity slips through the network of ascribed properties.”55 Consequently, there is a singular particularity that makes a person recognizable as her, or who she is, even as what constitutes this uniqueness remains elusive. Scotus builds his case for the plausibility of haecceity by first arguing for the existence of a “common nature”56 shared across all humanity. His argument proceeds from the experience of human knowing. He thinks that there must be a correspondence between the human mind’s gift to abstract universal categories of description from empirical observations and interpersonal encounters, on the one hand, and a reality that logically precedes such intellectual representation, on the other. Beyond the mind’s ability to generalize from observing particular traits of individuals and thus deducing the potentially infinite repeatability of various traits across the species, there must be a universal common nature that transcends the mind of the observer. Scotus thinks that only by embracing the idea of a universal common nature, such as humanness, can we place on solid enough logical ground the possibility of coherent human knowing. There must be an extramental reality that precedes the mind’s knowing of it. This is the common nature, which, although it is common by virtue of being repeatable in any number of individuals, can exist only in particular individuals that are each more than it. This particular difference is haecceity. Human nature thus always lives in and through the unique haecceity of each individual. In Scotus’s view,

54.  Haecceity (haecceitas in Latin) is derived from the Latin haec (this). See Duns Scotus, Lectura II, d. 3, p. 1, q. 2, in Early Oxford Lecture on Individuation, ed. Allan B. Wolter, (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 2005), 20–​27. 55. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 386. 56. Scotus discusses common nature in several texts, though a key one is Ordinatio II, d. 3, p. 1, q. 5–​6, especially q. 5, retrieved by William A. Frank and Allan B. Wolter in Duns Scotus, Metaphysician, 184–​86.

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common nature is a logically prior category from this individual differentiation even though it is thoroughly void without it. “[O]‌n this matter of individuation, nature is prior naturally to [haecceity].”57 Yet “it is the ultimate reality of the being” in question,58 and there is no contradiction or conflict between an individual’s humanity as common nature and her haecceity as a human being. Common nature and haecceity overlap in each individual human life. We are therefore bilayered creatures. Yet, these two layers are not merely juxtaposed to each other like geological strata; they are in continuity with each other. Moreover, haecceity expands and perfects common nature to a higher level, not allowing it to be further divided; each individual is, of course, an indivisible unity, unlike a species, for example. However, each individual is bilocated in the spheres of the universal and the particular: universal common nature can only exist in the individual and not independent of her. Furthermore, there is more to haecceity than the negative traits of not being like anything else and not being divisible into further entities. It is a thoroughly positive, immediate presence,59 no matter how elusive its discursive possibilities may be. While there is nothing in human nature that necessitates that I or my sister exist with unique particularity, neither could there be anything in each of our haecceities that is discontinuous from the universality of what Scotus calls human common nature. There is harmony between the universal and the particular in each life, Scotus claims. While shared universality is logically prior to haecceity and “it does not pertain to it to be this [very instantiation], neither is it repugnant to its essential nature to be other than just this.”60 For Scotus, haecceity stands in a relation of continuity with whatever common nature may be intellectually construed and ontologically substantiated in every human individual existence.61 The concept of haecceity achieves two things for Scotus: first, it helps him make the claim that each individual human being is absolutely unique and nonreplicable, even by God; second, it enables him to posit that there

57. Ibid., 185. 58. Ibid., 187. 59. Scotus, Lectura II, d. 3, p. 1, q. 2, in Early Oxford Lecture on Individuation, 20–​27. 60. Scotus, Ordinatio II, d. 3, p. 1, q. 5,in Duns Scotus, Metaphysician, 185–​87. See also Lectura II, d. 3, p. 1, q. 1, in Early Oxford Lecture on Individuation, 17. 61. Ibid.

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are deep differences between each person and her neighbor. This latter claim, as I will show, has theological implications for how Scotus understands neighbor love as part and parcel of our love of God, which in effect is part and parcel of our subjectivity. This opens the door for arguing that love of and for other people is constitutive of our selves and our well-​being, and, specifically, it is most profoundly constitutive when it comes to particular people with whom we engage closely. Because each haecceity is different from another, it is identical only with itself, entirely unique. At the same time, haecceity is a universal feature of existence in the sense that each person has this unique particularity. But haecceity does not tell us what an individual person’s particularity actually is. Since an individual’s particularity has no shareable features with other haecceities, it is radically primitive. Therefore, we cannot conceptualize it except when we reflectively mediate its real immediacy by thinking of it in relation to something abstract and thus akin to universally applicable terms.62 Simply put, Scotus believes that while we can understand features of our common nature by intellectual cognition, we lack that ability when it comes to haecceity. In other words, my intellectual powers cannot comprehend the individual essence of another person (or my own, for that matter) in any discursive fashion. We can, however, intuit it63 and can therefore be aware of it, both in its presence and in memory thereafter, and, more importantly, we can love it. In Scotus’s estimation, we can love more than we can understand, and thus we can love the individual haecceity of another person even though what we love transcends what we understand.64

62. Scotus, Early Oxford Lecture on Individuation, xii. 63. Scotus distinguishes between abstract or intellectual cognition and intuitive cognition, the latter of which is somewhat like an intellectual vision, analogous to the human sight except within the mind, and which enables a sort of vision of the individual essence of something or someone. See Ordinatio II, d. 2, p. 3 q.2 in Philosophy in the Middle Ages: The Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Traditions, 3rd edition, ed. Arthus Hyman, James J. Walsh, and Thomas Williams (Indianapolis, IN: Hacket Publishing, 2010), 581, and Robert Pasnau, “Cognition,” in The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus, ed. Thomas Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 296–​300. 64.  While we cannot know cognitively the individual essence of either human beings or God according to Scotus, we can love both humans and God, and we are able to love God above else even without the aid of grace. The implication is that we can love more than we can know. See Scotus, Ordination III, suppl., d. 28, in Duns Scotus on Divine Love: Texts and Commentary on Goodness and Freedom, God and Humans, ed. A. Vos, H. Veldhuis, E. Dekker, N. W. den Bok, and A. J. Beck (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 45.

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In Scotus’s view, this is how, in fact, we are able to love the individual essence of God, even though we do not understand it. As I show in ­chapter 5, for Scotus this also means loving particular human beings on account of assuming that loving God means loving too, what or whom God loves. Scotus depicts human nature as tending toward its own perfection,65 which means an inclination toward one’s own happiness. Yet, this happiness is not generic but rather what Scotus refers to as “happiness in particular.”66 While he does not mean that this happiness pertains to one person as opposed to another, he nonetheless views it as including the perfection of the individual will.67 The particular telos Scotus has in mind is that the human person enters a union of will with the triune God, thus partaking in the love that flows within the divine trinity. We are therefore to become “co-lovers” with God. This is the final perfection of each human individual haecceity. We are love-​oriented creatures whose uniqueness is not just a given but is also perfectible in love. Kierkegaard retrieves the idea of haecceity without naming it as such. The particularity he proposes to be in continuity with universality is arguably a modern paradigm that appropriates Scotus’s thought. However, while for Scotus the idea of a common human nature rests on a scholastic metaphysical construct, Kierkegaard does not import those assumptions, and neither do I. But the logic of distinguishing between a universal human marker and a particular self is useful for parsing out contemporary concerns that attempt to bridge difference and equality. In my own project, this distinction accounts for a theological anthropology that makes room for both the universal call to love all human life and the special relations that most shape the making of our selves and the constructing of a relational home.

4.4.  The Bilocated Self Kierkegaard proposes an articulation of the self as simultaneously dependent and actively cocreated. The self depends on God’s own creative activity.

65. This would, in fact, be the case with any nature, of any kind, in the Aristotelian understanding that a nature carries within itself its own tendency toward its perfection and telos. 66. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio IV, suppl., dt. 49, q. 9, a. 1–​2, in Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, ed. Allan B. Wolter (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 156–​59. 67. Ibid.

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The self also depends on a set of relations that operate within human interiority as well as between the self and what is external to one’s subjectivity: God and other people. These relationships must be calibrated and properly ordered. As the self engages in this activity, the self coproduces itself out of ingredients both given by God and experienced via temporality and earthly relationships with other human beings. Human persons are therefore cocreators of the self with a freedom that is qualified by dependencies. It is inconceivable for the self to exist in the absence of relationships from which the self derives its identity and which enable its becoming.68 I undertake to explicate below what kinds of multiple relationalities are operative here and how the cocreative endeavor is fueled by the experience of human love. Kierkegaard’s anthropology is most directly tailored to address the concept of the “self” in his pseudonymous The Sickness unto Death, where he proposes a construction of subjectivity for the purpose of “upbuilding and awakening,”69 in contrast with the seemingly morbid title. Indeed, his argument aims to portray the self as a project that needs to be actualized in spite of a structural despair that threatens the enterprise. If and when properly actualized, the self is rightly relating to itself, to the neighbor, and to God, which M. Jaime Ferreira describes as Kierkegaard’s “normative account of what it is to be a self, the state of health, as it were,”70 and to overcome the otherwise pervasive despair that permeates existence. This actualization, however, is not one that involves a static stage of “having arrived” at a final point; it is constantly negotiated and constitutes one’s perpetual becoming. While there are stages, there is no identifiable threshold above which one’s self has stopped evolving, particularly as this becoming is created in continuously active relationships. This kind of right relating is one of love, and, I suggest, a love that operates most fully in relationships of attachment, which mediate most comprehensively both one’s relation to one’s own self and one’s relation to God. Put succinctly, the task of actualizing one’s self is an activity of engaging in three nestled layers of relating. Kierkegaard gives a condensed picture of subjectivity involving these three layers that requires unpacking: “the

68. C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), 270–​71. 69. From book’s subtitle. 70. M. Jamie Ferreira, Kierkegaard (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009), 153.

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self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but the relation’s relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of . . . the temporal and the eternal . . . . A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self . . . . If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self.”71 Far from a fixed entity or a constellation of properties, the self in this account is a relational activity. The self is an ongoing project to be achieved via active engagement in a triple structure of relations. The first and core relation is a synthesis between two sets of ingredients that together form a dialectical polarity found in every human being: on the one hand, each human life is embodied, finite, and steeped in temporality, facticity, and necessity; on the other hand, we are infinite creatures endowed with an eternal soul (or unbounded mind) and characterized by freedom and endless possibility. Achieving a synthesis between these two poles is not yet what counts as a self for Kierkegaard, but it is the basis for the other relations in this triple structure that in its entirety forms the self. While the ingredients are universally present in each of us, how we achieve the synthesis is a particular endeavor, unique to each individual life. Achieving the proper synthesis in the unique terms of our own life forms the kernel out of which subjectivity grows for yet another reason: in my reading, for Kierkegaard, the mode of achieving a good synthesis between temporal and eternal, finite and infinite, necessity and freedom, and body and soul, is through unique human love attachments.72 The second relation, which builds on the first, is constituted by the fact that the synthesis described above “relates . . . to itself,” producing “the positive third, and this is the self.”73 The self results from how one chooses to relate to the primary synthesis. Judith Butler observes that Kierkegaard seems to develop two definitions of the self here. The self is both a reflexive relation, as Kierkegaard names it “a relation that relates itself to itself,” hence taking itself to be its own object, and the activity entailed in this

71. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 13. 72.  Kierkegaard talks about love as the link between temporality and eternity in Works of Love, 6–​10. 31, 88, 132–​34, 246, 249, 251–​52, 280, 319, rather than specifically through Anti-​ Climacus’s authorship of Sickness unto Death; however, the idea that unsanctified erotic love translates into mere self-​love, which occupies a good portion of the argument in Works of Love, is also reflected in Sickness unto Death, cf. 45. 73. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 13.

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reflexivity, or, as Kierkegaard calls it, “the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.”74 In an ironically Hegelian fashion, the latter alternative transcends the former for Kierkegaard, as the self never turns out to be the mere static relation implied by the former statement but rather the dynamic activity in which the dyads of the physical and the psychical, of finite temporality and the infinite of the eternal, and of necessity and freedom are worked out in a continuous process determinative of how the self is becoming.75 David Kelsey equates this “how” with the path of choosing how to be oriented in the world in a concrete, particular way, or, put more succinctly, choosing one’s “existential how.”76 As I argued before in relation to Scotus, this “how” is always a unique subjectivity, which the medieval imagination called haecceity. It is unrepeatable and always present, even though it transcends articulation. Furthermore, it is a relation conscious of itself and of its own relating to the body-​soul dyad as well as conscious of the fragility of the relation between the polarities of temporal, finite necessity and eternal, infinite freedom. A misrelation is always possible, either between the polarities or in how one relates to the polarities, which inevitably serves as a source of despair. The conscious self is then not only living the dissonance but is aware of it. Whether the original relation between the two poles is miscalibrated or whether one’s conscience is not attuned to the original misrelation, Kierkegaard thinks that the existential fragility of the self comes from multiple angles of potential imbalance in the whole relational structure. Thus, the self needs a more stable home base. The third relation, which enfolds the previous two like an envelope that holds the rest together, provides precisely such a stability. The third relation is between the self (which results from the anterior two relations) and the power that has established the entirety of the structure in the first place: God. “[A]‌self must either have established itself or have been established by another.”77 Kierkegaard adopts the hypothesis that it is indeed “another” who constructs the whole relational conglomerate that makes up the self, and he identifies it as God in a note in the final draft of his manuscript: “God constituted [the person] as a relation, but when this relation relates itself to itself, God releases it from [God’s] hand . . . . In this

74. Ibid. 75. Judith Butler, Senses of the Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 115–​19. 76. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 109. 77. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 13.

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way the human being is a self, and the misrelation is possible.”78 But when the already doubly relational self relates rightly in this third relation to God, despair may be overcome, even though its possibility is never far off. The structural features of the self involve constant relational negotiations at all three levels, and despair is therefore part and parcel of the package of creation’s finitude. Nonetheless, the normative ideal, “[t]he formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.”79 The key to the equilibrium of the self is its relation to God in a transparent way, which for Kierkegaard means that one is self-​conscious of the relation80 and “enters faith.”81 The God-​relationship of the faithful anchors the anterior two relations of the self to its synthesis of the polarities and within the synthesis itself. According to Edward F. Mooney, the Kierkegaardian self is “a complex relational field” comparable to a musical ensemble composed of “alto/​alto, tenor/​tenor, and bass/​bass parts sharply juxtaposed,”82 or different musical instruments each playing notes at the extreme spectrum of its register. These seemingly opposing elements create a synthesis by relating to each other when they sing or play a piece together in the same way embodied, finite temporality and necessity relate to the soul’s infinite eternity and freedom. The self as a musical ensemble is then a “fluid unity” that relates actively and positively to itself, integrating the contrasting instruments and voices into a coherent whole. The grounding power of the ensemble, or the ultimate field and context in which its music is created, is the radical freedom and infinite possibility that characterize divinity. Listening to great music masterfully performed gives us the sense that wondrous newness unfolds in front of us, captivating us with its life, power, and unique beauty, no matter how many times that piece was performed before. At the same time, such music’s exuberant, singular newness “find[s]‌itself . . . as it must be . . . ground[ing] itself transparently, freely, in its destined

78. Ibid., 144. 79. Ibid., 14. 80. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 361. 81. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 97. 82. Edward F. Mooney, Selves in Discord and Resolve: Kierkegaard’s Moral-​Religious Psychology from Either/​Or to Sickness unto Death (New York: Routledge, 1996), 91.

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future.”83 Analogously, the divine power that grounds the self enables it to become a mature, expansive subjectivity freely through the self’s active and unique relational engagement. Yet the self’s relational ensemble and its own freely chosen relation to itself remain simultaneously a derivative existential unit: it originates in the grounding power of God. It might seem that such references to a relation that chooses to relate to itself in one “existential how” or another is an odd-​sounding abstraction. The reality is that only concrete, embodied human beings enter relations, decide how to actualize themselves, and become unique subjectivities. However, as Kelsey points out, the core mind-​body relation in the Kierkegaardian three-​tier structure fills the abstraction with the right kind of content: “a living, organic, conscious self-​directing body, a psychosomatic whole in which body and soul are synthesized in very complex ways.”84 John Davenport thinks that this complexity is like a “multi-​storied house” in which people choose the floor on which to make their residence.85 The house metaphor is apt, but a house is not yet a home. What makes it a home in my interpretation is that all three Kierkegaardian levels are not merely interior relations but relations negotiated with other people in the context of love attachments. All three structural relations within the self—​the relation between the body and the mind, the relation of this synthesis to itself, and this entire structure’s relation to God, the power that constituted it—​are mediated in the concrete experience of human loves.86 At the very least, Kierkegaard offers a platform for claiming that “selfhood is a thoroughly social phenomenon,”87 since no human being can engage in the process of becoming a self on her own. Contact with others is not neutral but shapes our subjectivity; we start with early relationships of care in infancy and continue through formative relational experiences that accumulate through time, including the models of selfhood embedded in the language we use and the social institutions we inhabit, whether or not we appropriate those models positively or find ourselves dissenting from them. We are still in conversation with the given patterns of subjectivity that we experience. Such models are themselves embodied in the concrete

83. Ibid., 3. 84. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 110. 85. Davenport, “Selfhood and ‘Spirit,’ ” 237. 86. Ferreira, Kierkegaard, 153. 87. Evans, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self, 272.

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relationships in which we participate. While all relational encounters have a shaping effect on one’s self to some degree, the intensity of one’s love attachment is directly proportional to the depth of the transformation induced by it. The Kierkegaardian triple structure of the self is a dynamic becoming negotiated most powerfully in the most intimate attachments. Indeed, the first core relation that holds the bilocation of the human person in equilibrium between finite temporality and infinite eternity has love as its bond.88 While it may seem at first glance that this portrait of subjectivity is turned only inwardly given that the ingredients that make up the self’s polarity are interior features, the self, in fact, negotiates this polarity outwardly in relations of love with other people. We are created to be intrinsically oriented toward other human persons with whom the self is cocreated in love partnerships. Therefore, although the synthesis between the fourfold polarities of the self is interior, the link between each of the poles of the two dyads is love. Love given to and received from another human being by being attached to her is what harmonizes the finite, necessity-​ridden temporality of the body with the infinite, eternity-​ touched freedom of the soul. The heterogeneity of time and eternity found within the uniqueness of each human self is bridged by outward attachments of love. The climax of the union between time and eternity, history and infinity, and necessity and freedom is located in the paradigmatic God-​human: Jesus. Our own love-​experienced equilibrium and exit from despair is grounded in the paradigm of the incarnation. “Christ . . . did, after all, come to the world to become the prototype, to draw human beings to himself so that they might be like him.”89 We are to relate to our source and origin imitatively, in the pattern of Christ, who as a human being cultivated human love attachments and who also brought the infinite power of divinity into the tissue of embodied human existence. The second relation in the tripartite structure, which renders the first one self-​conscious, involves choice. Fundamentally, it is a will to love. As Davenport puts it, “ ‘self’ is the identity that is formed by willed caring, taking an interest.”90 Similar to the practice of recognition discussed in section 2.3, the will to love and to act beneficently for another lies at the center of self-​formation. At the same time, this will to love is itself formed through the experience

88. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 6. 89. Ibid., 264. 90. Davenport, “Selfhood and ‘Spirit,’ ” 237.

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of received love. Kierkegaard’s maxim that “love builds up” applies most directly to the fortification of the human will to love. This orientation of the will is also grounded in the incarnation, which is arguably the most exquisite evidence of the divine will to love creatures. Finally, as the entire relational structure is grounded in and relates to God, this structure is itself a love relationship. However, it is not only a divine-​human love arc. I discuss in ­chapter 5 how love for God is like a letter sent with a forwarding address to another human being. It does not stop with God, but rather, God forwards it to the neighbor. Therefore, this unique self-​in-​the-​making, who is created through grounding the whole structural edifice in God, is in fact cocreated by relations of human love. And our love for God, which God resends to our loved ones, is most visible in the incarnation. As Jesus related to finite creatures with the infinite passion of his love, so are we called to act analogously in our unique life context, aided by the power released into creation through the incarnation. The incarnation brought eternity to time in order to elevate us time-​bound creatures to eternity. Yet, we become eternal only in time; our relational home is divinely indwelled, but its location is earthly. To be sure, this earth is an eschatologically oriented earth, and our homes are loves enhanced by grace; yet the incarnation of eternity in time is permanent. Jesus’s death was followed by his resurrection and ascension, thereby taking embodied temporality into the internal life of the triune God for all eternity. The self enters the eternal domain through the gateway of love; one can defraud oneself of love, but the cost is an eternal loss in the sense that eternity itself is forfeited.91 There is no compensation for this loss, Kierkegaard suggests, either in the temporal or in the eternal. Suppose, for example, that somebody might be deceived in love as one might be deceived in life. Difficult as that might be, it is still a situation related to love—​in fact, inside the experience of love that shapes the self. The real trouble emerges when one deceives herself by locking herself out of love altogether. It follows, then, that in incurring this loss, one cannot become a full, mature self, because the self is heterogeneously constituted with eternity as an integral part alongside earthly time. A human being cannot become a self without love. Love propels the potential subjectivity into its unique, particular actualization and into eternal life. The consequence of this account is that not receiving this kind of person-​forming love incurs the danger of possessing at best precarious or impoverished resources for 91. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 5–​6.

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becoming a self, as well as impoverished mediatory paths to eternity. This condition further lays a claim on the human call to love; beyond any ethical command, this call matches love’s resources with a fundamental need for subjectivity both in its formation and in its final destiny.

4.5.  Particular Subjectivities as Fruits of Love How do we recognize a formed self? Can we? Kierkegaard depicts his “knight of faith” as a person who calibrates his or her interior structure properly, loves even on the strength of the absurd, and “belongs altogether to the world.”92 Such a person would, in fact, not stand out in absolutely any way. [I]‌f one didn’t know him it would be impossible to set him apart from the rest of the crowd . . . . In the afternoon he takes a walk in the woods. He delights in everything he sees, in the thronging humanity . . . you would think he was a shopkeeper having his fling, such is his way of taking pleasure . . . . He takes his ease at an open window and looks down on the square where he lives, at everything that goes on—​a [mouse] slipping under a board over the gutter, the children at play—​with a composure befitting a sixteen-​year-​old girl . . . . Carefree as a devil-​may-​care good-​for-​nothing, he hasn’t a worry in the world, and yet he purchases every moment that he lives, “redeeming the seasonable time” at the dearest price . . . and yet this man has made and is at every moment making the movement of infinity . . . he expresses the sublime in the pedestrian absolutely.93 As the above example shows, we cannot tell this person of faith apart from the aesthete. However, what we can recognize is the presence of love in such a person. Kierkegaard takes to heart the words of Jesus: love is recognizable by its fruits, in the same way a tree is to be known by the fruit it produces. He thinks that the kind of love Christianity advocates is necessarily eternal, derived from God’s eternity, and its recognizability depends on whether it carries this “fruit” of an atemporal character alongside the elements that are steeped in time and history.

92. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 68. 93. Ibid., 68–​70.

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But the trick is that the eternal element is invisible even though it validates what is temporal. In this particular yet crucial way, Christian love is entirely unlike a plant that blossoms only to perish. Regardless of the duration of such blossoming, which might in fact span across one’s lifetime, what gives love its true character is that, although it is lived in time, it is anchored in eternity and does not perish.94 Yet how can we recognize love if its true mark is invisible? In the same way as “like is known only by like,”95 the person who loves recognizes the love in another and vice versa, bypassing reason. Kierkegaard infers that there is a resonance of loves that enables this recognition. Like Scotus, he implies that we can love more than we can know with our minds, and that the lover’s love can be intuited by the beloved on the strength of love itself. Since to love another person is, in fact, offering her help to love God and, conversely, to be loved by another is to receive help to love God,96 then the most terrible human loss is to opt out of love. Why? Since human love serves as a pathway to God, and since love functions as the link between temporality and eternity, to close off love is to close off an option to partake in eternal life. Kierkegaard thinks that the beloved has a claim on the lover’s expression of love—​in other words, the visible expression of affect and of actions; even the inward emotion is not in one’s own possession but belongs to the beloved. The lover owes it to her beloved like a debt. At the same time, there is no specific expression of any kind that denotes love. There is no given signifier that can stand for true love. Works or words of love in themselves do not demonstrate love, but how they are performed does. Yet even the “how” is epistemically elusive; “there is nothing, no ‘thus and so,’ that can unconditionally be said to demonstrate unconditionally the presence of love or to demonstrate unconditionally its absence.”97 The desideratum ought to be that one’s love could be recognizable, not that one would be excessively worried that it would not be recognized or unduly anxious about what love’s specific signifiers would look like. Kierkegaard warns that, while love is recognizable by its fruits, one ought not to insist on seeing fruits at all costs. And although it would be a mistake to err on the side

94. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 8. 95. Ibid., 16. 96. Ibid., 107. 97. Ibid., 14.

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of cynicism and deny the existence of love, it would also be a mistake to demand visible signs of love from the lover. Instead, responsive love would see potentially impoverished fruits of love as more than what they are. “If mistrust can actually see something as less than it is, then love also can see something as greater than it is.”98 The other’s expression of love can expand as a result. Kierkegaard suggests that it is far superior to believe in love itself even when the fruits of love are unmistakably present in a person; sure enough, this love makes itself known and recognized in the words, gestures, and acts of the other person. Nonetheless, these words, gestures, and acts originate in a hidden spring of eternity that is inscrutable; trusting in the hidden reality of love, then, is “more blessed” than relying on signifiers alone. Ultimately, only the invisible love in me recognizes the invisible love in another; the “unconditionally convincing mark of love” is only “love itself, the love that becomes known and recognized by the love in another. Like is known only by like.”99 The principle implied here is that only a human being who already has love in her life is able to recognize the love another person has for her. But, as I  show in ­chapter  5, each human being has a seed of love in inchoate form implanted in her by God. The ability to receive love, then, is a universal gift of creation, eagerly awaiting its expansion through relations of love. While the human being is not yet a self simply by being alive, the love that selves and homes us matches the need and longing with which we were created. In the next chapter, I turn to showing how this need is met by converging streams of human and divine love.

98. Ibid., 16. 99. Ibid.

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In further dialogue with Kierkegaard, Scotus, Kant, and others, I argue in this chapter that the love attachments that cocreate the human self are sacramental sites of God’s pneumatological presence and participate in the larger love story of God with creation. While earlier sections of this book include arguments for the natural constitution of the self, here I  center my proposal on God’s gift of grace to us understood in terms of God’s own presence within human loves. Yet I do not argue for conceptualizing nature and grace in strictly binary categories. Rather, while nature strives toward its ultimate telos, union with God, it also rests in the reception of grace, which enables the striving in the first place. I  embrace Kierkegaard’s assumption that receptive trust and active love are two equally real sides of the self. In fact, beyond looking at grace simply as an activity of God on the stage of creation or within the human self, I argue for grace conceptualized as God’s pneumatological dwelling within human loves. God as Holy Spirit actually takes up residence within love relations, engendering the possibility of love in the first place and actively propelling human beings toward communion with one another as well as union with God by enabling human loves to partake in human ways in the never-​ending stream of divine love. I will proceed by showing that when love channels rightly calibrated resourcefulness to a well-​estimated need this love unites human desire with human need in wise attunement. The attunement between needfulness and the love that meets it is most comprehensively enabled in relations of close attachment. I expand the previous depiction of the human

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self as a bilayered creation with particularity continuing and perfecting the universal by proposing a corresponding theology of love in which the universal prerogative to love all human neighbors is perfected in particular loves of close attachment and enduring belonging. In the course of doing so, I also contribute to the longstanding debate regarding the relationship between universal neighbor love and special relations by suggesting that close attachments do not at all contradict Jesus’s commandment to love all people; rather, the two are in a relation of continuity with one another such that preferential special loves make the emergence of the human self possible in the first place, and, once formed, the self can love neighbors with freedom and agency. In making this argument, I engage Kierkegaard and then complexify his claims by showing his indebtedness to Kant in terms of conceptualizing universal neighbor love as an unequivocal moral duty. I argue that the duty to love, far from imposing an unwelcome rigidity to human relating, functions as a higher principle and more profound enabler of love. I then extend the conversation to the medieval thought-​world of Scotus in order to show that the injunction to love God in the greatest commandment necessarily includes loving those whom God wholly loves: human beings. I also infer a correlation between Scotus’s logic and attachment research, together with Scotus’s claims about haecceity, and show how this nexus points in the direction of the thesis that close, particular bonds are productive of human subjectivity. Finally, I re-​engage Kierkegaard and his indebtedness to Luther to show that our love for God, while rightly oriented toward God, is like a letter sent with a forwarding address: God resends our love of God to our fellow human beings, especially those with whom we form close attachments. Consequently, human love relationships are love-​flows that include God as a middle term. Put differently, we participate in God’s own love-​flow toward us. From different angles, I  show how human loves are intertwined with God’s love for us, which elevates human love relationships as sacramental sites of grace. In sum, this richly textured description of love is an argument for what makes the human self as well as what constitutes the self’s home as an edifice of love.

5.1.  Need and Desire In the Symposium, Plato explains in the voice of a woman, Diotima, that love is the passionate union between resource and need. Consequently, it

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is both always needy and full of energy, desire, and, in fact, masterful abilities to meet this need. But it is the need that drives it forward.1 In the Christian gospels, Jesus’s greatest commandment is to love not only God but also our human neighbors.2 The interplay between these two dimensions of Jesus’s injunction may be negotiated in multiple ways. Poignantly significant is the correspondence between the commandment’s imperative, which orients human desire, and a most ardent human need: the powerful need to experience love. Both need and desire are hardwired in our makeup, as we are love-​oriented creatures. Our being and well-​being are conditioned by both divine and human love. Minimally, one might be compelled to claim that love between humans contributes to human well-​being and that relationships of attachment and significance add to our flourishing. While I assume this is true and intuitively recognizable by my readers, this book defends the stronger thesis that human love actually constitutes the self. Put negatively, human subjectivities cannot be formed without the experience of human love. Put positively, relationships of love are necessary components in the constitution and performance of the self. These relationships anchor the self as well as constitute embodied conductors of reception and transmission of the love of and from God. As I have already argued, while attachment theorists call love attachments “home bases,” I refer to them as relational homes that anchor the self not only on account of the natural, safety-​inducing experiences they provide, but also because they can be the earthly home of God’s grace, which is the same as God’s own presence, elevating human love into the love life of God. Relational homes shape, sustain, and enable the thriving of the self. I do not refer here to romantic love alone but to all sorts of loves that in their complexity draw us close to one another: from kinship (whether adoptive or biological) to friendship, mentorship, various erotic loves,3 and any other forms of attachment. Echoing Diotima’s story of resourcefulness that meets neediness in the Symposium, in Kierkegaard’s imaginary to love is to estimate adequately and thereby supply fittingly

1.  Plato, Symposium, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 551–​63 (199c–​211d). 2. Matthew 22:37–​39; Mark 12:31–​32; Luke 10:27. 3. This book’s argument fully embraces human eros in its multiple varieties and manifestations, affirming and celebrating any LGBTQ+ relations of love and attachment and thoroughly resisting heterosexual normativity.

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another person’s need. One’s desire to love is calibrated to the specificity and singularity of another person’s particularity. Kierkegaard is correct that to love is to give, and I suggest that this is true beyond resources meeting need in a manner that seeks the beneficence of the other regardless of the kind of attachment in question. Often the categories are fluid: the friend is also the lover, and so forth. While Kierkegaard continues to be a key interlocutor in my argument, he himself does not develop the conclusion that particular relationships of attachment are necessary for becoming a self, at least not explicitly or at face value. However, his texts include elements of thought that gesture in that direction and that help me construct this argument as an extension of more straightforward Kierkegaardian claims. Love grounds all created existence for Kierkegaard, and it is the force field in which human life subsists at all times. The self cannot exist without love’s “enigmatic power,” which explains why we crave to give as well as to receive it.4 Kierkegaard reads the New Testament’s claim that we “are being rooted and grounded in love”5 to mean that human subjectivity is defined and made distinctively unique by love.6 Chapter 4 foreshadowed the more explicit engagement of this set of claims here. Kierkegaard is clear that love as such is needed for constituting the self, and that, while this love is divine love, it is, in fact, existentially experienced in human relations. Moreover, such mediation occurs in relationships that are concrete and unique, not generic, and he acknowledges them in tandem with what I showed in c­ hapter 4 to be the singularity of human subjectivity. Equally so, our relationships are singular and therefore not substitutable; bereavement shows this with striking acuity. There is a parallel between the distinctiveness and difference of the self and the distinctiveness and uniqueness of the love relationships by which the self is sustained. Kierkegaard shows that the truly loving person loves not only in accordance with her own distinctiveness but also in attunement to the distinctiveness of the other’s self.7 It will be my further task to demonstrate how such relationships are love attachments with a

4.  Rick Anthony Furtak, Wisdom in Love:  Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 97. 5. Ephesians 3:17. 6. Furtak, Wisdom in Love, 98–​99. 7. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 269.

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divine element and how they are needed in human subjectivity, cocreating the self and the self’s performance in the world. Kierkegaard begins the second series of his Works of Love with a discourse centered on the thought that the real work of love consists in building up another human being. He declares that “[l]‌ove is the source of everything”8 and that it builds people up.9 In fact, “to build up is exclusively characteristic of love.”10 But what does it mean to build up? For Kierkegaard, this kind of building up refers to the process of becoming the kind of singular, particular sort of self I argued for in ­chapter 4. Moreover, it refers to the other person’s journey of becoming. The receiver of love is the one who is being built up, developing and growing into a fuller subjectivity by the very experience of being loved, even as the giver also becomes a more capacious person by and through loving. Yet to love, I contend, is to give and, in fact, to give in a way that knows the receiver’s need in its particularity and meets it with eagerness and delight. As I showed in ­chapter 4, the singular subjectivity that is built up is not a fixed state to be reached as if one were to reach some terminus of growth, but a person nonetheless becomes a particular self who continues to develop and is being enabled to love increasingly more by receiving love. A formed self is a capacious giver of love. I am not suggesting that there is an identifiable threshold below which one is not yet a self and above which the self is formed.11 Rather, the self is a core center from which human freedom operates. This freedom is not simply the freedom of choice but rather a freedom of self-​determination with directionality and formed habits of virtue performed with intentionality, as well as with care for others and for the proximity that constitutes one’s social context. Ultimately, it is a freedom to love.12 Yet, becoming a mature giver of love takes time. It is a progression that unfolds nonlinearly and often unpredictably as subjectivity is slowly fashioned, refashioned, and restored when broken. It is, therefore, moldable but also woundable as well as redeemable. Love builds this becoming-​prone self, and as such, love is one of the sources from which 8. Ibid., 215. 9. Ibid., 212, 215, 216, 217, 219, 221, 224. 10. Ibid., 212. 11. See also Evans, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self, 267–​68, who distinguishes between a minimal self and a mature, responsible self that has a substantial character. 12. Margaret Farley, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2006), 128–​29.

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the self emerges. The self that comes to be in this process is unique, and the needs of this self are, therefore, highly particular. This particularity of the self’s needs requires that they be rightly estimated and sufficiently met if love is to be rightly given. Such a rightly given love further requires the type of deep knowing that takes time and common experience to acquire. Therefore, given these conditions, the self is most solidly built from relations of attachment and significance. These relations are the only loves that allow the deeper knowing of the other so as to estimate and meet her need adequately. I have argued in c­hapter  3 that current debates in the neuroscience research of attachment psychology show that secure human attachments are direct sources of the proper functioning of the human body and its systems, as well as one’s cognitive, volitional, and affective capacities. In short, this research shows that human attachments produce human agency. While such sciences attempt to explain naturalistically the complex interdependence between human attachments, agency, and the agent’s freedom, theologically speaking, the condition of the possibility of human attachments is love that overflows from God’s plenitude and is planted constitutively in each human person as a seed that needs to grow. This growth occurs through concrete human loves expressed most strongly in relations of attachment, which best channel a well-​calibrated love-​flow in which resources recognize and meet needs in synchronicity. Attachment loves teach our bodies and our minds the kind of deep empathy that enables us to engage with the world, our environment, and other relations as fortified agents; these attachment loves are the delicate, finely tuned, yet powerful settings in which we become human. Love, therefore, is a unique mode of benefiting another person. Kierkegaard calls it “a quality by which and in which you are for others,”13 unlike wisdom, for example, which he relegates to a class that he terms a “being-​for-​itself quality.” In his estimation, love is quintessentially that by which one is always for another, whereas wisdom is that by which one is sensible for oneself, however much others may derivatively benefit from it as well. This Kierkegaardian distinction, however, need not be taken too far. Wisdom can and ought to be in relation to others and to one’s own environment, too. David Kelsey has argued that human beings “are called to a life-​long project of actualizing [themselves] as wise persons”14 in relation not only to their own lives but also in relation to their quotidian proximities 13. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 223. 14. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 324.

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and for the purpose of their flourishing. Arguably this includes proximate relationships, particularly relationships of significance. Kelsey rightly affirms that the call to be wise for the well-​being of the quotidian has to do with its particularities as they are, hence with the unique and particular relationships in which we engage, not with an ideal, abstract, or generic relationality. Indeed, my own suggestion is that the right kind of love is wise love. Wisdom calibrates the channeling of resourcefulness to a rightly estimated need and to the attunement of the lover to the beloved.15 While love builds up, the works of love that do so need to be wise so as to benefit the other in her own particularity, not the giver’s imagination. In Kierkegaard’s terms, love confers goods to the other person, self-​benefits notwithstanding, which are always present as well. The direction, however, is outward, not inward—​or not merely inward. The key good that is given to the other is the shaping of her subjectivity. Luther thought that God’s own love does not simply find and respond to what is lovable and pleasing but creates the lovability in the beloved—​ in the human person.16 However, God also creates the person in the first place. Human beings made their appearance in the world because of God’s creative love. In Luther’s account, therefore, divine love gives a double set of goods: it creates both the human self and the lovability of the self. Kierkegaard appropriates such a framework but inserts human love within the stream of divine love as a cocreative power. The self is created in relations of human love, which co-participate in God’s creative power. However, while the self is formed through the delicately complex attunement of human loves, the self’s lovability is a proleptic gift of God. Kierkegaard insists that human love on its own cannot ignite love in another person. Nor can it create the self from scratch. Human love participates, however, as a mediator and conveyor of divine creative love and as such becomes a cocreator derivatively. God’s own love plants love, as well as the self, as a seed in the human person. A human lover (or friend or another attachment figure) can draw this original kernel of love forth because it was divinely planted from the start. While the lover builds the other’s self upon a foundation of love that is already present, even if inchoately and invisibly at the start, the seed of love cannot be placed in another human subjectivity by human works of love. Still, it does take human love 15. Or the friend to the friend, caregiver to receiver, mentor to mentee, etc. 16.  Martin Luther, “Heidelberg Disputation,” in Luther’s Works, ed. Harold J. Grimm, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1957), 31:39–​70.

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to cocreate the self, but, according to Kierkegaard, the lover must presuppose that a kernel of love is already present in the beloved. The beloved is fundamentally lovable on account of this divine spark of love, regardless of her having or lacking a sense of self. When human love meets the presupposed love in the beloved, it draws out the good in her and builds her up.17 The lover, then, becomes a channel of the good that is drawn out from the beloved. In Kierkegaard’s view, this “good” is a response of love and of agency, which grows within and is drawn out from a person by another human being. [T]‌he one who loves presupposes that love is in the other person’s heart, and by this very presupposition he builds up love in him—​ from the ground up, provided, of course, that in love he indeed presupposes its presence in the ground.18 The seed of love must be assumed to be present in the other in order to be retrieved. The other can be “built up” only from this foundation that is present a priori. Put differently, this basis assures the possibility of human love coconstituting another’s self. “Ultimately no human being is capable of laying the ground of love in the other person.”19 God lays this ground. “It is God, the Creator, who must implant love in each human being, [God] who [Godself ] is Love.” We would delude ourselves if we imagined that we could replace this divine work with human work and provide the ground of love from which the “building up” can emerge. Such a “building up would then be inconceivable.”20 We must first receive love in order to respond in love, and we must experience this exchange of love, starting with its reception, in order to become a self. The exchange is possible only with the presupposition that the foundation of love is already present, but it must be retrieved and thus enabled to expand and grow. A  lover is, therefore, a midwife, bringing forth the self-​in-​the-​making. Kierkegaard puts it precisely this way:  the lover “loves forth.”21 Like Socrates’s self-​understood role as a midwife, a

17. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 217. 18. Ibid., 216. 19. Ibid., 219. 20. Ibid., 216. 21. Ibid., 217.

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role by which he engaged his interlocutors so as to bring forth a certain kind of knowing from the hidden recesses of their minds,22 Kierkegaard suggests that one cocreates the self by bringing forth the other’s hidden love, which responds to and resonates with the lover’s own love. I started this section by suggesting that we are creatures of need and desire, as Plato’s Symposium proposes. Plato does not think, of course, that there is a seed of love implanted by God, residing within the self. However, this image of love as the child of need and desire, or poverty and plenitude, is a rich and helpful one here: it is the divine kernel of love within us that activates both our fundamental need to be loved, and thus calls forth our subjectivity into becoming, and our equally fundamental desire to love, which, when rightly channeled, is directed to God as well as humans. Lee C.  Barrett suggests that Kierkegaard frames his entire thinking around a sharp awareness of humanity’s desire, longing, and yearning for the ultimate delight and joy found in God. Barrett shows that, similar to Augustine, Kierkegaard works with the assumption of a restless human heart oriented toward God as its highest good and final resting place. This presupposition enables Kierkegaard to further appropriate from Augustine the trope of journey as a central metaphor for “becoming” for the Christian life and the shaping of the human self.23 Indeed, Kierkegaard’s theology has a teleological structure; the human person journeys toward God because one’s love for God and one’s desire for union with God are unquenchable creaturely givens, which parallels Augustine’s assertion that the human voyage toward God is one of love and desire. Reading Kierkegaard constructively, I suggest that the related themes of desire and love for God, on the one hand, and the journey of the self’s becoming, on the other, unite as a common bond in the experience of human love. Our love for God and the forging of the human self are simultaneous processes imbricated with our partaking in relations of human love and attachment. Working with Platonic motifs, Kierkegaard refers to our attraction to God not only by using the language of desire but also in terms of a profound need.24 God’s attractiveness for us is the result of our having been

22.  Plato, Phaedo, Meno, and Phaedrus, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 41–​98, 354–​84, 476–​525 (57b–​118a, 70a–​100c, 227a–​279c). 23. Barrett, Eros and Self-​Emptying, 22. 24. Ibid., 101.

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created with a need for the experience of love. The seed of love residing in each human person needs to be cultivated in order for the self to develop. Barrett claims that Kierkegaard locates human fulfillment of the self in loving what is enduring and eternal—​in other words, loving God. And certainly, Kierkegaard does say that to need God is a human being’s highest perfection, thereby conceptualizing human longing for God as directly related to the actualization of the human self.25 Yet yearning for God does not occur in isolation; human loves mediate and participate in the love relationship between the human self and God, as well as in the emergence and fulfillment of the self as such. The maieutic role of human love in the formation of the self and in the growing of the self’s elastic, expansible capacity for love is a highly potent role. At the same time, Kierkegaard’s portrayal of God as the middle and core element in the midst of human love relationships indicates a double mediation. While human loves mediate the love of God, God Godself is the middle term within rightly lived human loves. Barrett concurs that Kierkegaard brings closely together the two dimensions of the gospels’ love commandment: to love God and to love human beings. In fact, for Kierkegaard, to love the human neighbor is a manifestation of loving God. While God is the only proper telos of human love, when we love God, we also love God’s self-​giving love, which is God’s very nature. Furthermore, by loving God’s love, we come to participate in it and love together with God those whom God loves: our human neighbors.26 Barrett calls Kierkegaard’s Works of Love a “spiritual pedagogy” that aims to direct the reader to the source of all love in God and to transform the reader’s needs and desires so as to be enticed by God’s attractiveness to participate in God’s love.27 While that is undeniably so, Works of Love also serves as a pedagogy for human eros, aiming to evoke in the reader both the disposition and the practice of rightly loving another human person. In Kierkegaard’s imaginary, the right kind of human love is to be permeated by and united with God’s love, yet it nonetheless retains its human passion and beauty. Human love, however, becomes solidified and able to endure the vicissitudes of temporality and circumstantial change only as 25. Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, trans. Howard D. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 303. 26. This Kierkegaardian move has an early root in the theology of John Duns Scotus; see section 5.4. 27. Barrett, Eros and Self-​Emptying, 90–​91.

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divine love percolates through it and transforms it. In other words, grace, understood as God’s presence of love, transforms natural love. This does not take anything away from human love qua human; instead, it elevates it to be the very kind of gift that God intended it to be for human creatures, who function at their highest potential when their lives are doubly anchored in the temporal realities of the world and the eternal love of God. The transcendental anchor has primacy, yet without obliterating creaturely finitudes. My argument for the making of the self through partaking in human and divine love affirms Kierkegaard’s theological denial of any rigid binary of nature and grace. The need and desire that characterize natural loves also orient them to strive toward the kind of ultimate fulfillment that can only be found in God, even as it is mediated through the experience of human loving, while God’s own love remains an adventitious gift for us above and beyond our nature although it catalyzes nature’s efforts. Barrett articulates this nonoppositional relation by showing that in Kierkegaard’s thought, human eros and divine agape are never mutually exclusive any more than they are in Augustine’s work. It might seem, however, that Christian life is a contested space between opposing dynamics: God is both the telos of human desire and the source of unexpected grace, such that the condition of the pilgrim resembles both living out the task of struggling for godliness, thus exerting one’s own agency, and enjoying the divine gift, thus relying on the efficacy of God’s providential giving. However, these are countervailing options only when considered as hard metaphysical alternatives; Barrett regards them as different passions in Kierkegaard’s imagination. When Kierkegaard wants to generate the reader’s excitement for the gift of God’s love, he emphasizes godliness, which for him amounts to the mature subjectivity of religiousness B, as a fruit of relying on God. When he seeks instead to elicit the reader’s effort to strive to be more loving, he underscores the result of knowing and loving God with the help of God’s own assistance.28 As affective dispositions, these attitudes can be held together without contradiction since the self’s existential state may rely deeply on God’s assistance while at the same time striving passionately toward God,29 just as in human love one can rest in the assurance of the beloved’s affection while simultaneously striving to be a giving lover.

28. Ibid., 99. 29. Ibid., 23–​24.

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I agree that responsible effort and trusting rest are compatible states of the affect, yet in Kierkegaard’s work they are also interweaving ways in which the God-​relationship operates in human existence. Kierkegaard follows in Augustine’s footsteps, asserting that human beings have been created with an innate desire for cultivating their eros for the self-​giving love of God and can reach happiness and fulfillment only insofar as they do this;30 grace nourishes the process as much as it is its telos. These Augustinian roots of Kierkegaard’s thought make room for works of love performed in the context of both human responsibility and trusting reliance on grace without contradiction. Love is not a superadded gift, supervenient on the gift of nature; rather, our desire to love God and our fellow human beings, as well as our need to be loved, are intrinsic to our makeup even as they require cultivation and striving and are aided by divine grace. The striving called for in the commandment to love God and our neighbor fits with our creaturely nature, which is gifted with a seed of love planted by God in each individual person. Consequently, our effort to engage in the work of loving can be effective both on account of our creatureliness and of God’s further gift of grace by God’s own joining with our effort.31 Life is a journey to God emulating Christ’s career on earth as well as God’s embracing acceptance of humanity, calling forth our trust in God’s providential care.32 This is because the human journey toward God occurs on the strength of God to start with; God’s grace is paradoxically both the motor of passionate human striving toward God and the source of one’s ability to rely on God and relinquish one’s own human powers. Such faith in God’s power is not antithetical to the works of love, since love and faith are distinct only conceptually. In practice, they are two virtues that show different dimensions of a single attraction to God.33 Barrett rightly identifies Kierkegaard’s Augustinian heritage as channeled through both Luther and Aquinas, as Kierkegaard conceives of God both as a provider who calls on human beings to receive God’s gifts in trust, and as the telos of human life who beckons us to work toward it. Divine self-​giving love and human striving are unified because what we are actually aiming at is God’s exuding love, which pulls us toward itself as well as puts a fire under our feet to

30. Ibid., 4. 31. Ibid., 92–​93. 32. Ibid., 21. 33. Ibid., 23.

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push us toward union with God. The entire human-​divine relationship is a love story, with the infinitely giving love of God being of such sheer attraction to humanity that we are hardwired to find actualization, meaning, or happiness only when we fulfill our desire for God with ardent passion.34 Barrett shares my reading of Kierkegaard’s themes as centering on a vision of human life that consists most basically in desiring and longing for God,35 although my constructive thought development makes greater room for yearning human love attachments, which help the self develop and which participate in the love-​ stream that God generates toward humanity, igniting the human longing for God. To be sure, God remains wholly other and transcendent; yet this does not create a theological need for Kierkegaard to conceive a disjunction between either God’s otherness and the human yearning for God36 or between loving God and loving people. What we long for is God’s infinitely giving love and God’s holiness, which enables us to be capacious human lovers and fills us with awe, and which also underlines God’s utter difference from us. We are neither holy nor infinitely giving, and our existence fundamentally derives from God’s creative love for us. Yet we long for God’s sheer love with such an intensity that only the language of erotic passion can do some degree of justice to it, hence Kierkegaard’s tendency to use erotic tropes for the human-​divine relationship. Barrett identifies in Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology a key thread of spiritual hunger for union with God and a correlative conscience of something that is merely intuited in the context of temporal, historical existence: the overwhelming joy and delight of God for which human beings long, yearn, and strive with a desire that we cannot ultimately entirely suppress, try as we might. I add to this picture the need for human love attachments, which home the burgeoning self together with the beloved. Human existence has a teleological attraction to God and to at least some human beings, inscribed in its fabric. Kierkegaard does not simply describe it but tries to induce this attractiveness in the reader through rhetorical creativity. He therefore writes like someone who has genuine love for the reader and concern for her reaction to the text, wanting to orient her toward the magnetism of God via rightly lived human attachments. His purpose is to woo the reader both to the power of God’s love and to the

34. Ibid., 25. 35. Ibid., 65. 36. Ibid., 88.

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goodness of human love by stirring her imagination about what it would be like to fall in love with love itself. Kierkegaard thinks that Jesus’s love commandment resonates with us when we see the powerful attractiveness of the life of love, which is who God is and what God imparts to us. Therefore, he attempts to direct the reader straight to the source of love, God, in order for the reader to experience directly the divine bounty of love in her own life and to unite her earthly loves with it while fortifying earthly attachments as well.37 Like Augustine, Kierkegaard produces performances rather than mere texts addressed to the mind and seeks to transform the reader’s comportment and affect.38 To achieve this, Kierkegaard avoids communicating his thoughts directly and writes instead in such a way that the reader may take responsibility for constructing her own meaning out of a multitude of possibilities and for reacting with her own passions, thus training her existential muscles on these texts for the deeper purpose of taking responsibility for the construction of her subjectivity while being open to the reception of grace.39 His texts are therapeutic tools given to the reader with the hope that by experiencing the love of God toward which the texts urge the reader to turn, she will be formed as a robust self, capacious and free to give love to others.40 Jesus’s love commandment is not an executive order to be fulfilled either out of fear of punishment or for an external reward. It is instead a commandment that functions as a guide for creating the self and bringing it to mature freedom. The seed of love implanted in human interiority by the creative love of God requires cultivation. Kierkegaard does not just theorize this process but acts to cultivate love in the life of the reader by stirring her passions and igniting her desire to engage in a life of love. He shows that by “lov[ing] forth”41 the other, we cultivate the inner seed of love in another human being, creating not only an attachment to the other but cocreating her subjectivity. Recall that attachment theorists refer to a strikingly similar process of bringing forth the self when they describe mentalization as a state

37. Ibid., 92–​94. 38. Ibid., 16. 39. Ibid., 19. 40. Ibid., 97. 41. Kierkegaard, Works of love, 217.

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of resonance between two human persons. Human affect-​laden minds become attuned to one another and see the other’s state, to which the partner responds. This interplay between these two states of recognition of and response to the other’s state enables an equalizing of the two states like water-​filled communicant vessels. Similarly, in Kierkegaard’s thought, one recognizes the kernel of divinely planted love in the other, who, when experiencing the human motion of love toward her, recognizes it and can enter into resonance with it. While this state of resonance only describes the mechanisms of secure attachments, it conveys a picture that can function as a norm of goodness as much as a telos that orders those kinds of relations that are most conducive to the birth and fortification of the self.42 Undoubtedly, as was evident in the chapter on attachment theory, not all attachments are either secure or good. But it is also evident that attachment anxiety as well as attachment avoidance results from the lack of good attachment experiences. To translate this in theological terms: when the divinely planted seed of love has not been properly cultivated via wise human love mediations, or when it has been harmed via toxic attachments, the making of the self becomes, at best, an obstacle course.

5.2.  Neighbors and Lovers, and the Holy Spirit In ­ chapter  4, I  argued for a Kierkegaardian theological anthropology according to which the human self is viewed as a bilayered creation: the particular is in continuity with and a perfection of the universal. I want to propose here that there is a correspondence between Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology and his theology of love. There is a correspondence between, on the one hand, the relation of universal features of being human to particularity as a distinctive perfection of each human being’s actualized subjectivity and, on the other hand, the relation of neighbor love understood as universally due to all human persons to particular special loves that involve close attachments or preferential bonds, thereby engendering an experience of belonging. This parallelism, together with the argument that stems from it regarding the constitutive role of special relationships in the creation and flourishing of the self, is a constructive proposal that Kierkegaard himself does

42. Regarding the just-​love relationship as a norm as well as a telos, see Margaret Farley, “New Patterns of Relationship: Beginnings of a Moral Revolution,” Theological Studies 36, no. 4 (1975): 627–​46; and especially her book Just Love (see n. 12 above).

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not make. In fact, Kierkegaard has often been read as the enemy of any special relationships, from friendship and kinship to romance and any variety of eros. Indeed, his claims about universal neighbor love and particular, close, or preferential loves do, at times, seem to go in opposite directions. A venerable cohort of his interpreters (though not all) take him to mean that preferential loves are inherently selfish and hence not congruent with Christianity, which only has room for unselfish neighbor love. I have already shown that in Kierkegaard’s understanding the neighbor is any fellow human being. Neighbor love, therefore, targets anyone, which of course allows for such love to be construed as the antidote to selfishness. However, as I emphasized in the antecedent chapter, Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology operates with a dual stratification of subjectivity without any opposition between the two layers, and this attribute functions as a stepping stone in my argument to a parallel nonoppositional relation between universal love toward all people and the particular loves toward significant others with whom we form attachments. Keeping in mind such a nonconflictual relation between the elements of our identity strengthens the coherence of Kierkegaard’s claims about human relationships, especially how special relationships of deep attachment do not contradict the duty to love all people but are instead sanctified by the universal thread of dutiful neighbor love that depicts God’s universal love for all human beings. I will show how it is this very thread that enables human relationships of attachment to be the secure homes that attachment theorists suggest that they can and must be. Hence, far from standing as the enemy of special relations, belonging, bonding, eros, and attachment, in my reading Kierkegaard is a most helpful interlocutor for a robust construction of a theology of love as deep relational attachment. When Kierkegaard refers to neighbor love, every person is included; hence, the circle is maximally large. This supercircumscription is compatible with more recent feminist and womanist arguments that conceptualize the whole of humanity in a web of connectivity and relationality.43 43. Feminist theologians have developed such compelling accounts; I situate my own proposal as a continuation and expansion of the relationality-​centered feminist theological anthropologies put forth especially by Catherine Keller, with whom I interact in other chapters, as well as Elizabeth Johnson and Mary Grey (see c­ hapter 1, n. 16), while also acknowledging variegated other locations of such thought, from the African ubuntu conception of the human being, which entails an inherent communion with others, to the more theologically explicit claims of communion in the Eastern Orthodox tradition as evinced by John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Creswood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997).

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Kierkegaard is not a feminist avant la lettre, nor does he make such a claim in these terms, but his emphasis on the “ought” of neighbor love when the neighbor is indeed every human being qua human does, at the very least, allow for a linkage of consistency between his thought and contemporary feminist concerns with universal connectivity, even if the parallel does not extend all the way into full-​scale relational anthropologies. While Kierkegaard does say that “Christianity has thrust erotic love and friendship from the throne” and replaced it with the love of neighbor and that “the praise of erotic love and friendship belongs to paganism,” he also claims with passionate rhetoric that “erotic love and earthly love are the joy of life” and adds that “erotic love is undeniably life’s most beautiful happiness and friendship the greatest temporal good.”44 While these claims seem to contradict one another (as, for example, Sharon Krishek sees it45), my suggestion is that there is no conflict; rather, the nonpreferential and preferential loves are in a certain relation of continuity. This continuity corresponds to the bilayered theological anthropology implied by Kierkegaard and inherited, as I demonstrated in the last chapter, from Scotus. The distinction I propose as an interpretive lens is that erotic love, friendship, and all other attachments are not simply in a different category from neighbor love. Attachment loves perfect neighbor love as the particular perfects the universal in the identity of the self. One key way in which Kierkegaard distinguishes between the love of neighbor and preferential loves, such as the love for a friend or erotic love, is to describe neighbor love as concerned with what is universally human; its focus is “away from the dissimilarities” that exist among people.46 Kierkegaard recognizes, though, that the dissimilarities that are inherent in creation are not reducible; they are part and parcel of the realm of temporality and history, as ­chapter 4 details. Special loves instead embrace human difference and particularity and are an added dimension, albeit a profound one, to neighbor love. They are not simply another sort of love; they are a perfection of neighbor love and an expansion of it without taking away or contradicting any of the features of the former.

44. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 267. 45. Sharon Krishek, Kierkegaard on Faith and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 113–​29. 46. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 68–​73.

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Yet, is not neighbor love enough? I submit that the answer is no, and that while universal neighbor love is an undeniable good that is included in and qualifies preferential and particular loves, human fulfillment and actualization is reached through the latter kind of love, which allows for depth, intimacy, and closeness and, most importantly, which is a love based upon the singularity and uniqueness of the partners and not just their human DNA, which is the sufficient condition for neighbor love. Kierkegaard has been accused by many interpreters, however, of being nothing less than a destroyer of the legitimacy of intimate love and friendship.47 I disagree, and fortunately, I am in good company on this point. Among the critics, Theodor Adorno objects that Kierkegaard’s account of love approaches callousness insofar as the differences between persons are of no significance for the Christian sort of love Kierkegaard advocates.48 While Kierkegaard does indeed sometimes refer to neighbor love as the specifically Christian kind of love, he does not, in my reading, simply discard attachment love as non-​Christian. He only does that when attachment love is not part of the bilayered structure of love in which neighbor love is also present. Lorraine Smith Pangle agrees with Adorno, as she reads Kierkegaard to mean that friendship is to be discarded as unchristian.49 In a similar vein but stronger terms, Knud Ejler Logstrup charges Kierkegaard with having created a “system of safeguards” designed to prevent people from engaging in close relationships and therefore reducing human connections to something both generic and distant.50 Mark Vernon is even more emphatic and claims that Kierkegaard rejects friendship altogether and proclaims neighbor love to be entirely different from it. In fact, making a pun on Kierkegaard’s name, which can be translated as “graveyard,” Vernon alleges that Kierkegaard has “buried” friendship.51 Sandra

47. John Lippitt has compiled a useful summary of positions that fall along the lines of these two interpretations of Kierkegaard in “Cracking the Mirror: On Kierkegaard’s Concerns about Friendship,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 61, no. 3 (2007): 131–​50. 48. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” in Søren Kierkegaard: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, vol. II, ed. Daniel W. Conway (London:  Routledge, 2002), 9–​10. 49. Lorraine Smith Pangle, Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3. 50. Knud Ejler Løgstrup, The Ethical Demand, ed. Hans Fink and Alasdair MacIntyre, trans. Theodor I. Jensen and Gary Puckering (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 232. 51. Mark Vernon, The Philosophy of Friendship (London: Palgrave, 2005), 77–​78.

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Lynch furthers this thought by suggesting that Kierkegaard sets the love for one’s neighbor in opposition to the love for a friend or a romantic partner, as such special loves are nothing more than varieties of self-​love and idolatry.52 More recently, Sharon Krishek53 has proposed an analogy between the structure of love in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love and the structure of faith in his Fear and Trembling. The self’s journey to faith involves a double movement, first of resignation from historical and material mundaneness by a leap into the infinite and then of regaining the joy of finitude by a second leap of faith back into the everyday. Kierkegaard personifies these two as a “knight of infinite resignation” and a “knight of faith” respectively. According to Krishek, this double movement ought to be that of love, too, but she thinks there is a missing link in Kierkegaard’s texts and charges him with failing to construct the parallel. The knight of resignation’s renunciation of his princess is indeed parallel to the self-​denial involved in the love of one’s neighbor, while the knight of faith’s receiving her back ought to be a celebration of the embodied inclinations and desires we experience in romantic love. Yet, Krishek does not take Kierkegaard to imply the second half of the parallel, and she thinks that he makes much too sharp of a contrast between the preferential love for a friend or a romantic partner and the nonpreferential love of neighbor. She ultimately finds him inconsistent, as she thinks that, although he has a clear appreciation of preferential love, in his logic preference is always selfish, which leaves no room for an account of nonselfish romance or friendship. In the next pages, I show that a more nuanced relationship is, in fact, discernible in Kierkegaard’s thought between loving the neighbor, loving the friend or intimate partner, and loving the self, with divine love interweaved through and grounding all earthly loves. Kierkegaard admits that while self-​love is implicated in any kind of other-​love, this is not to be repudiated. On the contrary, a proper kind of self-​love is the condition of the possibility of loving another human being, and vice-​versa, close and binding relations enable self-​love as much as (and because) they enable the formation of the self. The problem lies, I argue, with an improper kind of self-​love.

52.  Sandra Lynch, Philosophy and Friendship (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 35. 53. Krishek, Kierkegaard on Faith and Love, 139–​65.

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John Lippitt has rightly critiqued the string of interpretations that place Kierkegaard in a posture of enmity toward close relationships of preference, such as friendship or relationships driven by eros.54 He draws on M.  Jamie Ferreira’s commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love in that she, too, resists the charge that Kierkegaard condemns intimately bonding loves and shows instead that Kierkegaard’s worry regarding friendship and erotic love concerns the dangers of relating to the lover and the friend as if they were “another self.”55 Kierkegaard appropriates a view of friendship and intimate love that derives from the ancient idea that a friend is an extension of the self, such as in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,56 and therefore loving her would be, in a sense, loving one’s very self. Ferreira notes that Kierkegaard’s understanding of the friend as the second self is further based on the assumption that close relationships of friendship are based on similitude.57 If the likeness between people is what instantiates closeness and fuels the ineffable mechanisms of attraction, inclination, and preference, and if love is to be understood as fundamentally driven by such desires, then it is true that those who are unlike us would be excluded. Lippitt then proposes a different basis for friendship,58 which he calls “drawing”59 and which does not depend on similitude, thus negating, at least in principle, the possibility of exclusion when people are dissimilar. I agree that dissimilarity is coherent with the magnetism of drawing, which need not be based on sameness but rather may be based on any number of positive traits of the other, however inarticulable they might be. The other’s own singularity, or haecceity60 as Scotus would have it, suffices. But this account does not resolve everything. Most importantly, it does not offer a rationale for how close relations of love help construct the human self, how love of preference relates to neighbor love or love of

54. Lippitt, “Cracking the Mirror,” 3. 55. Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving, 45. 56. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 2:1825–​39 (8.1.1154b1–​8.14.1164a1). 57. Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving, 44–​45. 58. This would certainly hold for any kind of close relationships of attachment. 59. Lippitt, “Cracking the Mirror,” 15–​20. 60. See ­chapter 4’s discussion of Duns Scotus’s notion of haecceity and its import for both Kierkegaard and for contemporary conversations about human difference and the uniqueness of subjectivity.

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the self in positive terms, and how this has anything to do with the love of God. It seems to me that a better way to employ Kierkegaard’s text is to propose that friendships, passionate loves, or any other forms of human intimacy are bilayered relationships as much as we are bilayered subjectivities. The inclination, desire, attraction, and the entire magnetism of preference are, by all means, one of the layers. The other layer ought to be the neighbor-​love relation. The latter layer ought, then, to be in place between all human beings, but all relationships need not (and, in fact, are not) reduced to this base layer of relating. We do grow close to some particular people, but certainly not to all with whom we interact, and even less so with the whole global community of human beings. Our finitude gets in the way. We form attachments with a mere subset of people. Nevertheless, all people are our neighbors in this understanding. In this sense, this view can make good use of the relational assumptions of feminist theological anthropologies such as Catherine Keller’s, according to which a web-​like connectivity lies at the core of all human life.61 In Kierkegaardian terms, it would be universal neighbor connectivity. In Keller’s terms, we engage the totality of all life-​connectedness through particular relations that allow us “to glimpse [into] the unseen relatedness of all things—​and always back again into the particular.”62 While she, too, accents the inescapability of particular relations, for her they are means of partaking in the universal interconnectedness of the whole human community and cosmos. For Kierkegaard, the key idea is that particular relations are well-​lived when the universality of neighbor love is within them. The universality, then, is the means toward the meeting of need and desire that only close attachments can supply. Such people ought not cease to be the universal neighbor, but they are more than that. Kierkegaard’s “ought” regarding universal neighbor love is, however, not what people encounter most often in their daily experiences. The more common experience is one of preferential proximity and similitude-​based associations without neighbor love permeating those associations. Love relations across human differences are far less frequent, particularly when differences are great. Chances are slim that a Wall Street hedge-​fund executive’s best friend is the janitor at the Burger King across the street or that

61. This is the core of Keller’s argument in From a Broken Web. 62. Ibid., 158.

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a white Southern Republican residing in an affluent suburb will find deep affinities with an undocumented Mexican migrant working on the fields where the suburbanite’s food is grown. What is quasi-​universally present is love rooted in sameness, not universal neighbor love that would transcend dissimilarities no matter their magnitude. Kierkegaard acknowledges this fact, but this is precisely what he resists calling good. He rather decries it with vehement passion and suggests a reversal: to make neighbor love universal and not to let preferential loves be devoid of it. Paradoxically, the kind of attachment love for which we yearn needs at its core the nonpreferential “no-​matter-​what” element of neighbor love. I take Kierkegaard’s objection to preferential, special loves to be that they are problematic when the attraction involved in them would constitute the one and only layer, which would then appear to be in a relation of opposition to the nonpreferential love for the neighbor. The neighbor-​ relational logic needs to be part of passionate preferential relationships. My beloved and I are not, then, to be merely engaged in a dyad of passionate mutuality but to have a third element between us: “the middle term ‘neighbor.’ ”63 Kierkegaard also affirms through much of his Works of Love that the middle term between human beings is God. The universality of God’s love for all of us and the universality of neighbor love to which we are called parallel each other and allow him to construct what I read as a bilayered image of human love, with the universal thread in the middle of all rightly lived particular loves of preference and closeness. Furthermore, the equivalence between neighbor-​kind-​of-​love as a middle term and God as middle term shows the sanctifying function of such a middle term within preferential loves. Kierkegaard does not call for the elimination of passionate loves but sets the neighbor love element as a foundation of every particular love.64 He explicitly accepts the reality of human desires that give rise to passionate relationships that differ from universal neighbor love. His solution is not to excise them from his vision for love but to place them in the correct relation with the nonpreferential mode of love that ought to permeate preferential loves. He wants to ensure both relational equality with and responsibility toward others with whom we are not in passionate engagement. “Christianity does not want to make changes in externals; neither

63. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 142. 64. Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving, 92.

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does it want to abolish drives or inclination—​it only wants to make infinity’s change in the inner being.”65 This requires a transformation. In Kierkegaard’s sense, such a change means becoming steeped in the eternal, which is equivalent with universal neighbor love becoming part and parcel of close attachments as an equalizer of the partners. Relationships are to be permeated by the transcendent. Between the two passionate lovers stands more than the flame of their own passion for each other: it is the imperishable equality of the neighbor relation that shows God’s love and shines through as well as sanctifies preferential loves. “[I]‌n loving the beloved we are first to love the neighbor . . . . Your [spouse] must first and foremost be to you the neighbor; that she is your wife is then a more precise specification of your particular relationship to each other. But what is the eternal foundation must also be the foundation of every expression of the particular.”66 Kierkegaard’s reference to the “eternal” is consistent with his move to make both God and neighbor love equivalent with the middle term that sanctifies human relationships. Relationships are thus indwelled by the transcendent. Conversely, God lives within human relationships as the Holy Spirit with a synergistic power of transformation. I return to the specificity of this claim in the following pages. Relationships of close attachment, then, are a “further . . . expression” of the nonpreferential relationality of universal neighbor love. Neighbor love needs to permeate them, but neighbor love alone is not a sufficient specification of (and condition for) how we, human beings who need the experience of loving and being loved, come to be mature, thriving selves. I suggest that the circle of neighbors is simply too large,67 and if this circle were all someone had, one would not have a home base from which one could engage the rest of the world. In fact, if the world at large is one’s home, one is homeless. Neighbor love alone is too diffuse and thin to anchor a human self sufficiently. If all people are neighbors equally, the radius of this circle is too big to see anyone’s face closely.68 Moreover, what it means 65. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 139. 66. Ibid., 141. 67. For similar reasons, ecclesiology is not the ideal theological locus to address this issue either. The church is too large of a setting, conceptually speaking (irrespective of concrete church sizes); attachments are made with just a few people. As described by attachment researchers, the subtle and complex processes of mentalization that cocreate the self are interpersonal rather than in relation to a group as a whole. 68. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA:  Duquesne University Press, 1969), 194–​219. See also “Ethics as First

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to be a neighbor to start with is itself not about any unique, singularly embodied face but about all such faces irrespective of their singularity. Neither are special loves sufficient on their own terms; neighbor love needs to become the ground out of which they grow to ensure equality between the lovers as well as to sanctify them, thus making them the sacramental sites they can be by having God as their middle term. Kierkegaard can be constructively read so as to imagine human love as rerouted through God, which gives human relationships an ultimate context alongside the proximate context of concrete close attachments as well as grounding it.69 The insertion of God’s own self in the relationship makes the path to sanctification possible, as the neighbor love patterned after God’s love is the sanctifying element inside the intimacy of close relations of belonging. The relation between neighbor love and special loves is thus one of continuity and expansion. Neighbor love is a ground that holds firm the root of preferential loves, which give us meaning and delight. Intimate relationships, friendships, kinships, and the like, if they are to be what they can indeed be—​necessary ingredients in the becoming and flourishing of a human self—​are extensions that grow from this fertile soil. The trouble that Kierkegaard signals regarding erotic love or friendship when not rooted in neighbor love is that it would single out one person from the whole of humanity as a recipient of preference and passionate devotion,70 risking both inequality and an implosion of the relationship, which is the very opposite of cocreating the human self. Inequality would result from our proclivity to favor those who are like us rather than those who are different; it is neighbor love that resembles, at the human level, the divine love equally given to each person. Because the other’s similarity to ourselves attracts us, the “other” in a human relationship is not quite seen as “another” any longer, which is why, I suggest, the relationship would implode. It would, in fact, annihilate the other’s self were a preference based on similitude alone to serve as the source of such a love. The other would not be loved as other in accord with her need and Philosophy,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Malden, MA:  Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 76–​87. 69.  David Kelsey, in Eccentric Existence, 4–​5, 160–​75, 190–​214, 442–​57, 478–​500, 607–​46 develops extensively the distinction between the proximate context of human existence as our embodied, historical life unfolds in particular environments, communities, and relationships and the ultimate context that grounds the former one and that is defined by the economic trinity. 70. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 49.

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uniqueness but rather in accord with the giver’s own. For that reason, it would, indeed, be the very antithesis of cocreating the other’s self. Neither would self-​love be real, because it would involve the destruction or harm of the other; if one takes seriously the greatest commandment to love the other as oneself, which Kierkegaard makes foundational, then to harm another is a sign that one’s self-​love is in fact injurious to the self. Love must rather build the self. However, Kierkegaard is neither suggesting that we ought to give up preferential loves nor that we are in fact able to do so. “[Y]‌ou are not to cease loving the beloved . . . far from it. If in order to love the neighbor you would have to begin by giving up those for whom you have preference, the word ‘neighbor’ would be the greatest deception ever conceived.”71 To renounce preferential loves would even amount to a contradiction, Kierkegaard adds, because if the neighbor includes equally all potential people, how could the beloved be excluded? That itself would invite the logic of preference, which is the problem Kierkegaard fights in the first place. And he fights it because of the danger of masking a problematic kind of self-​love: the kind of ill self-​love that prevents one from loving another human being as much as oneself when the other is different. Particular loves are part and parcel of human existence in an ineliminable way. However, neighbor love as a mode of loving needs to permeate through them. The commandment “you shall love the neighbor as yourself” is meant to teach one how to love oneself,72 and “it also will teach erotic love and friendship genuine love: in loving yourself preserve love for the neighbor; in erotic love and friendship, preserve love for the neighbor.”73 As Kierkegaard is nuanced when he argues that Christianity has dethroned special loves such as erotic relationships and friendships and has privileged instead neighbor love according to a logic of equality, his intent is actually not to rule out preferential loves. His concern is that the logic of preference itself, when left to its own devices, rules out the possibility both of equal regard and of caring for the other’s need when different from one’s own, that, in turn, fuels selfishness, more precisely the antithesis of love.

71. Ibid., 61. 72. While the commandment is often taken to mean that it teaches people how to love the neighbor, Kierkegaard and I, too, think that the Kantian interpretation is compelling; according to Kant, the self is also a neighbor and therefore must not be treated (and loved) less than any other neighbor. 73. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 62.

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Because love must care for the other as much as for oneself, special loves must stem from and be permeated by the logic of neighbor love in order to be sustainable. Special loves that carry a particular and strong attachment ought not to contrast with the love of the neighbor but incorporate its logic as a purifying element that cleanses it of either selfishness or self-​disregard. Neighbor love is indeed different from loving one’s child, parent, friend, or intimate partner. But the dissimilarity lies not in the mode of a conflictual either-​or, Kierkegaardian appearances notwithstanding. The dissimilarity is one of ranking. Neighbor love is more fundamental than the love of intimate attachment and preference and conditions it, but in itself neighbor love does not suffice for human beings to enjoy well-​being. Intimate love does that, provided that it is shaped by divinely indwelled neighbor love. “ ‘[Y]‌our friend, your beloved, your child, or whoever is an object of your love has a claim upon the expression of [your love]’ and not to express it would be ‘withholding from someone what you owe him.’ ”74 This kind of claim a person has on another’s love, I suggest, is a need. I proposed at the beginning of this chapter that we are creatures of desire as well as need and that the need is always unique and particular, given the uniqueness of our subjectivities, while love is the adequate estimation and supply of this need. There is a unique way in which each person can therefore be loved in correlation with how each emerges as a unique subjectivity. For this reason, neighbor love, which is to be distributed to all human beings and hence to any person, while accounting for the multifarious differences that characterize our identities, is not the sufficient resource for meeting such a need. In order to know the nature of the need, one must come close and see it well. I also referred to this close seeing under the rubric of recognition in dialogue with Charles Taylor. Only when recognition occurs can one’s love resource, or desire, be channeled and calibrated to the receiver’s need. Such closeness is certainly the very nature of special relations, be they friendships, kinships, erotic intimacies, or other forms of attachments.

74.  Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 12, quoted by Ferreira in Love’s Grateful Striving, 92; emphasis mine.

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When functioning rightly, particular loves through which we form attachments are the only ones that both meet this need and channel the giving desire. They form the proximate contexts75 in which we are seen and known as well as see and know the other for who, what, and how each one of us is,76 enabling each to grow and be fortified in our unique subjectivity in virtue of being externally validated and recognized77 in our uniqueness. This Kierkegaardian claim allows me to suggest further that there is an irreducibility to the particular relationships that most shape us. We are, in fact, inescapably engaged in such relationships given the very nature of our particularity as people. Our relationships, then, are not interchangeable any more than we can be substituted for one another. There is a unique space created by my mother’s unique identity, way of being in the world, habits of gesture and language, laughter, touch, tears, modes of tenderness, and an innumerable host of other things that make her recognizable as her, many of which exceed linguistic expression and all of which intersect lovingly in an ineffable yet distinct totality with my own particularity—​different as it is from my sister’s, for example—​to form a unique relationship of love that is not replaceable by any other. Neither my subjectivity nor my mother’s would be the same without this relationship. At an intuitive level, it seems plausible, of course, to make the claim that the relationships that make the greatest impact on our identity are those that are the closest and the deepest. My argument goes beyond that to claim that we need such close and deep relationships in order to become able human beings, mature selves with agency and freedom of self-​determination in the world, and that these relationships form a basis out of which we can pursue other projects in our existence. It is not only the case that we would not be the same without our unique profound attachments; we would not be stable, actualized, entirely developed human selves without having such attachments. The key reason is that attachment loves mediate most pervasively the divine love from which our subjectivity ultimately draws.

75. I am assuming here David Kelsey’s distinction in Eccentric Existence, 4–​5, 160–​75, 190–​ 214, 442–​57, 478–​500, 607–​46 between the ultimate and proximate contexts, respectively, within which human life unfolds. 76. As before, I am using the triple categories of identity of what, who, and how with the understanding developed by David Kelsey throughout Eccentric Existence. 77.  I  have explored in depth the role of recognition as one source of the human self in ­chapter 2.

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As suggested, Kierkegaard helps in constructing this argument in part by assuming a theological anthropology that operates with two layers of identity, which I see as a corollary to the proposition that human relationships occur at two levels as well:  universal neighbor love and particular preferential love. While the former is an ethical as well as a sacramental side to each human relationship and must not be absent from special relationships of closeness and attachment, these special relationships are not formed across the whole of humanity universally (as neighbor love is). They are formed with relatively few people and are therefore expansive in depth rather than in number. Put differently, they are enlarged by the depth of how much we see and are seen in our particularity and experiences that enable our unique lives to dovetail. In their highest form, they are also enabled by the core seed of neighbor love, which assures the equality of the parties as well as the stability of the relationship, which, in Kierkegaard’s understanding of neighbor love, means that the love relationship is anchored transcendentally.78 While Kierkegaard states that Christianity does not change erotic or friendship relationships directly, he thinks that these relationships are nonetheless changed derivatively because of the core kernel of neighbor love that must inhabit them. “It is . . . this change that Christianly changes erotic love and friendship.”79 Put differently, while Christianity neither augments nor diminishes the scope or content of particular attachments, it does change love at its core—​by stabilizing its core with an anchor hooked in eternity, and because of that, everything else related to love has in fact changed. The stability that the kernel of neighbor love engenders then spreads through particular love attachments like the sap that flows from the root into the rest of a plant. Contrary to the common critique, Kierkegaard does not therefore discard tender romance, passionate erotic love, or the peculiar loyalties of friendship; he does, however, suggest that Christianity makes a specific difference in positing the need for a “fundamental universal love”80 that can manifest itself in a large number of ways. Concrete, particular loves of

78. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 58, 216–​18. 79. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 143; emphasis mine. 80. Ibid.

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any kind need this universal element as a foundation beneath the growth of inclinations, desires, feelings, and all other sorts of magnetism. Interestingly, Kierkegaard calls this “the spirit’s love.”81 While Kierkegaard himself does not refer here explicitly to the Holy Spirit in a trinitarian sense,82 envisioning a pneumatological dimension as part of his notion of universal neighbor love makes it theologically compelling without contradicting his thought. Building on Kierkegaard’s framework, I suggest that the Holy Spirit is present within human love for the neighbor and that it functions as a foundation for particular loves of passion, preference, or attraction of any kind. Kierkegaard is adamant that Christianity allows for such loves to “remain in full force”83 and to flourish maximally; however, they are to be transformed by the change of interiority through which, in my constructive reading, the Holy Spirit anchors them with a stability and permanence that is characteristic of transcendence alone. Yet, precisely because such stability is only located transcendently, we need a transcendental dimension of our love attachments. Attachments would not hold on their own, with their roots suspended midair, without having been planted in the firm ground of transcendence, which is the Spirit’s own location. The universal love that serves as a base layer and out of which particular loves that create attachments grow, then, has a pneumatological grounding. “Christianity  .  .  .  knows only one kind of love, the spirit’s love, but this can lie at the base of and be present in every other expression of love.”84 I show later how this kind of pneumatological portrayal is, in fact, best seen as a trinitarian image, particularly in light of the incarnation. As I explained above, I read Kierkegaard’s anthropology as a bilayered state of affairs with a base stratum of basic humanness on top of which lies a second layer of particularity, seamlessly continuous with the first yet which makes each one of us recognizable as a unique human person. Similarly, in Christian love, the Spirit’s love is present in universal neighbor love and forms the base layer out of which the layer of particular loves grow without contradicting, violating, or negating the former layer. The

81. Ibid., 146. 82. Kierkegaard’s most immediate reference is to the spirit of German idealism, especially in the heritage of Hegel. 83. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 144. 84. Ibid., 146.

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former layer, in fact, sustains the latter with the only kind of consistency on which special relations of closeness can be based and thrive because they are sustained by the triune God’s own love in the Holy Spirit. God is therefore wholly present within human love attachments. In the same way in which humanness characterizes every human being without being visible (because what we see are particular human beings with unique features and dissimilarities), so is neighbor love the kind of invisible reality that supports concrete love relationships from underneath. One cannot point to it, yet when one has it, it is “in” every other kind of love and transforms that love as a whole. Love becomes bilayered and doubly located in the realm of the here and now and in eternity; the latter gives consistency to the former: [Y]‌ou never see and no human being has ever seen Christian love,85 in the same way no one has ever seen humanity. Yet “humanity” is the essential specification, and yet Christian love is the essential love . . . . To repeat, Christianity has not changed anything in what people have previously learned about loving the beloveds, the friend, etc., and has not added a little or subtracted something, but it has changed everything, has changed love as a whole.86 While Kierkegaard seems to claim that Christianity has not added a new ingredient to special loves, I take his proposal to mean that Christianity does not modify the double logic of need and desire integral to special loves. Kierkegaard does, however, resituate special loves in a necessary relation to neighbor love, which must be universally present in his account. In fact, all loves must include this secret ingredient if they are to be rightly lived. Neither the logic of preference alone nor the deep closeness of attachment would ensure the requisite equality that preserves the wholeness of both partners as well as their love. Yet this secret ingredient is not the whole story: it is our particular relationships, not a generic neighbor love, that create the kind of attachments that chisel out our subjectivity most strongly—​albeit with this ingredient as a necessary, fertilized soil out of which particular loves can grow. 85.  Kierkegaard often uses the phrase “Christian love” interchangeably with “neighbor love,” referring to the universal love out of which special relations of closeness and attachment grow. 86. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 147.

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One might accuse Kierkegaard of interiority reductionism: the kind of transformation required seems to concern an inner relation to the eternal with little purchase on the concrete practices, let alone relationships, in which we engage as embodied creatures traversing quotidian environments. However, that need not be the way to read Kierkegaard’s theology or to construct one’s own proposal in dialogue with his work. Recall from the previous chapter that, in Kierkegaardian terms, while the self depends on a nexus of a triple set of internal relations that operate within the self, they are in fact negotiated externally—​between the self and God and, especially, other people. These relationships must be calibrated and properly ordered in order for the human self to emerge properly. As the self engages in this activity, subjectivity grows out of the ingredients given by God and experienced via temporality and earthly relationships with other human beings. Human persons are cocreators of the self with a freedom that is qualified by attachments. In this account, the self is not a static given but rather something to be achieved via active relational engagement; to recall briefly from ­chapter 4, it looks something like this: the first internal relation is a synthesis between finite temporality and infinite eternity, or body and soul, and is the kernel from which subjectivity grows. Yet the mode of achieving the right synthesis between these two interior poles is external, experienced through relations of love. More specifically, this synthesis is worked out by rightly calibrating neighbor love, which functions as a pneumatologically contoured element within close love attachments. Although the temporal-​ eternal synthesis is interior, the bond between the temporally finite and the eternally infinite dimensions of the self is love given to and received from another human being.87 Thus, love functions as the bond for the core relation that holds the bilocation of the human person in equilibrium between the temporal, historical space and the spiritual, eternal realm. Simply put, the necessity of temporality and the freedom of eternity meet in the single human subject and are linked by love. While it seems at first glance that this portrait of subjectivity is turned only inwardly, it is in fact oriented toward a neighboring human person with whom, in a love partnership, the selves are reciprocally cocreated. Furthermore, God as Holy Spirit is present in the love that attaches human beings to one another. The human experience of the

87. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 13.

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eternal as well as of God’s love is mediated in this account in and through temporal, terrestrial, embodied loves that are divinely indwelled. As such, this account is not a story of a merely interior becoming of the self. It is also the story of an exterior process involving a pneumatological bridging presence occupying the space between persons. It is therefore an interstitial divine middle term, exterior to the self yet interior to the relationship, living between human beings who are united by love. Because it is situated in between human beings, this process is a space of embodiment and hence historicity and particularity. Thus the pneumatological presence of God in human love does not effect only an interior transformation; it effects a transformation of the entirety of the relationship together with its enfleshed practices: “it has changed everything, has changed love as a whole.”88 This whole is lived in praxis between people and therefore fuels the emergence and performance of human agency and freedom.

5.3.  Duty: A Kantian Interlude There is another dimension to this conversation about universal love in relation to the particular attachments that create a home for the self while cocreating the self in and through belonging to this home: in contradistinction from preference or inclination, Kierkegaard places the entire conversation about neighbor love under the concept of duty. Simply put, to love the neighbor, who is any human being, is an absolute duty. Of course, such a proposal can engender reader resistance considering the apparent tension between the free character of neighbor love and the mandatoriness that duty implies. Kierkegaard nonetheless translates the greatest commandment from the gospels to love the neighbor as oneself into the language of duty in order to emphasize its universality and, as discussed above, discard both selfishness and exclusion. While certainly not everyone is a lover or a friend, everyone is a neighbor and can become an attachment partner, but attachment ought not be the only mode in that the gospel commandment is carried out. Kierkegaard worries that attachment alone would thwart Jesus’s commandment because on their own inclinations would not be conducive to fulfilling the commandment. Duty stands as a higher principle and a more deeply reaching enabler of love

88. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 147.

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than inclination, whether it is present or not, and duty anchors the inclination when it is, in fact, present. To love the neighbor, then, is a moral task and a universal duty because everyone is the neighbor; hence preference has no place in this endeavor. In fact, preference is diametrically opposed to this duty because preference singles out the beloved or the friend, whereas duty does not single out anyone.89 There cannot be any duty associated with singling someone out. Kierkegaard categorizes erotic love and friendship as circumstances of good luck: “it is a stroke of good fortune, the best of good fortune, to fall in love, to find this one and only beloved. It is . . . almost as great, to find this one and only friend.”90 But one cannot be tasked with finding either one or the other. The task is to love well once the lover or friend has been found. That itself is a duty but one that is given contingently if and when good fortune allows friendship or romance to develop. The search for either lover or friend is not anyone’s duty. It is instead the duty of everyone to love her neighbor, which means concretely to love all people universally. Kierkegaard thinks that this is the most fundamental task of one’s life and the origin of all other duties and subsequent activities. I find this framing of duty compelling because of how it can apply to contemporary Western life: one cannot be coerced to make a friend, fall in love, conceive or adopt a child, mentor or be mentored by someone, and so on. But one’s duty toward others, at least in a common-​ground sense, is tenable and so is the strength of duty once significant relations have been chosen or given. I believe Kierkegaard’s concept of duty is a heritage from Kant. Like Kierkegaard, Kant upholds a contrast between inclination and duty.91 While Kant does not use the language of love, he does employ the category of universality regarding duty toward others and one’s own self, as Kierkegaard himself does. Kant’s categorical imperative, as expressed in each of the several formulations from the Groundwork and implied in the rest of his work on practical moral reason,92 assumes that the unconditional

89. Ibid., 50. 90. Ibid., 51. 91. Kant, Groundwork,13–​25 (4:400–​413). 92. With Kant, of course, any epistemically accessible reason is a moral reason having to do with the will-​derived and freedom-​laden sources of action, that, translated into the categories of Christianity, are precisely the sort of actions stemming out of the great commandment of universal love. Therefore, for Kant, the moral currency is that of universal duty.

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command of duty applies not only to all people as subjects who will and act morally but also to all people (including one’s own self) as recipients of moral acts. He therefore implies, as Kierkegaard does later under the influence of this Kantian legacy, that all human beings are creatures of need—​in need of receiving morally good acts performed by others. Being creatures of need is an additional premise for Kant, above the assumption that we are creatures of duty. Kant assumes the reality of a needful humanity with universal duty to be the right means toward meeting this universal human need, and he articulates this universal duty in terms of the categorical imperative: “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”93 for everyone to follow if one found oneself in identical circumstances. Furthermore, we are capable not just of following such maxims but of literally appropriating them, making them our own; the human will, then, is a legislator of such universal moral laws, that, because of their universality, are everyone’s duty.94 I delved briefly into a similar logic when I showed earlier how the subjective rights of modernity are put in effect by each person who in a sense colegislates them within the jurisdiction of her own life. To be sure, private rights are the corollary of duty. We ought to treat all human beings, others as well as ourselves, not only as means toward other ends but also as ends in themselves—​as termini to our moral duty.95 I showed earlier how Augustine resists granting such ultimate regard to human beings since they are creatures; yet according to some interpreters, he struggles with his own resistance given that human beings’ final destiny is eternal union with God. Kant himself does not imply that human beings are ends in themselves in opposition to being related to God but in opposition to being used for the benefit of other humans. The operative Kantian assumption here is that all human beings are united by common laws of morality while simultaneously inhabiting an imaginary “kingdom” where the ends of all people are to be taken as broadly unified.96 While each individual does not have a bird’s-​eye view over all ends of all people, the concept of the kingdom rests on the presupposition

93. Kant, Groundwork, 31 (4:421). 94. Ibid., 40 (4:432). 95. Ibid., 37 (4:428). 96. Ibid., 40–​41, 46 (4:433, 4:439).

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that the divine “king” does have such a view, and it effects an eventual union of each person’s happiness with each person’s moral duty. This “kingdom of ends”97 is thus permeated by a universality of duty in terms of regard for both self and others in conjunction with assuming need as a human reality to be met by duty. While this regard is not exactly love in Kierkegaardian terms, Kierkegaard’s concept of neighbor love includes nonetheless a similar logic of universal equality and duty, while Kant’s ideas about moral duties can arguably be translated into the commandments to love that Jesus gave.98 Both Kant and Kierkegaard, then, ultimately link the gospels’ greatest commandment to love with duty. Kierkegaard imports this tradition from Kant because of the work it does in securing particular loves to a stability that preferences and inclinations in themselves cannot supply. To make this more self-​evident, I  will look more deeply into the kind of Kantian logic that Kierkegaard appropriates. Kant is adamant that subjective inclinations stand opposed to universal duty. He admits that duty does not solely determine our dispositions and actions. Instead, human beings are creatures of need who experience inclinations that can and often do run contrary to the duty to respect all people. He claims that our will “stands . . . as at crossroads”99 between an a priori universal duty toward the moral good, objectively perceived by our reason, and a posteriori incentives that lure our subjective inclinations. These inclinations cannot be deemed morally good since they lack universality and therefore contradict the categorical imperative. Subjective feelings are liable to temptations to what only seems good, but, in fact, they cannot be trusted guides according to Kant because they tend to favor personal advantage—​or selfishness, as Kierkegaard would think of it—​rather than treating all others with equal regard and as ends in themselves.

97. Ibid., 41 (4:433). 98. See John E. Hare’s interpretation of Kant as a translator of Christian doctrines into the philosophical categories of reason in The Moral Gap:  Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1996); see also my own two essays, “Human Will, Divine Grace, and Virtue: Jonathan Edwards Tangoes with Immanuel Kant,” in Jonathan Edwards and Scotland, ed. Kelly Van Andel, Adriaan C. Neele, and Kenneth P. Minkema (Edinburgh:  Dunedin Academic Press, 2011), 129–​46; and “Kant’s View of the Church:  An Intellectual Missionary, yet an Impoverished Ecclesiology,” Archaeus 10 (2006): 109–​30. 99. Kant, Groundwork, 13 (4:400).

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For Kant, the human will is conflicted between knowing the universal good that speaks to our duty and gravitating toward subjective ends that contradict the universal good and call upon our needs. Like Kierkegaard, Kant derives the thought from Plato’s Symposium that we are creatures of resource as well as need. That said, for Kant, need is maximally met by an appeal to duty. Kant assumes that we do indeed know the good and that our will is actively pulled in opposite directions by two determinants—​ objective reason and subjective inclination—​that both compete, albeit unequally, to effect a choice. One of the two is always winning in the sense that the other becomes subordinate to it yet without disappearing from the structure of the human self.100 Kant goes on to say that, even though our subjective feelings sometimes go in the same direction as the pull of duty, it is easier for us to detect whether we choose the good when our inclinations do not coincide with it. If both duty and raw emotion call me to testify as a witness to my neighbor’s subjection to severe domestic violence, it would be hard to tell whether I would do so should my outraged feelings be more muted. Hence, they cannot be trusted in the Kantian scheme. Subjective preferences either plainly prevent duty’s employment when they oppose the call of duty or, at the very least, confuse one’s discernment as to whether or not one acts out of duty when they correspond with duty. Moral requirements to which duty is bound are always universal in the Kantian universe because the highest good to which we can aspire is to have a good will out of which morally good acts can emerge. But a good will always makes decisions on the basis of the universal moral law, not one’s own preferences or even happiness. Subjective desires that aim at increasing one’s pleasure or advantage might be contrary to the moral law by virtue of their very subjectivity: they are not translatable into universal maxims applicable to all people. The other is liable to suffer loss when subjective desires trump her well-​being. For example. making false promises would be ruled out by the categorial imperative, because false promises could not be universalized without undermining the institution of promise-​keeping on which they rely. And if that is the case, then one cannot make false promises any more, as they depend on the institution of promise-​making in the first place. Hence, a subjective inclination toward an advantage cannot carry moral weight because it would oppose morality’s laws if they were to be grounded in it. And insofar as human 100. Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, trans. Allen Wood and George DiGiovanni (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 55–​61 (6:32–​6:39).

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relationships would be impossible without a moral universe, they would be equally harmed. Universal moral duty, instead, is what must permeate human acts in order for them to count as good; they are the fruit of a morally good will,101 which places duty over advantage. However laudable an action may be, if it is based only on motives of personal happiness, self-​ preservation, or even empathy for others, it is not rooted in a good will and has no genuine moral worth for Kant. Duty is foregone when motives do not align themselves with its universal command. Only when duty is the sole motivator of the will—​untainted by self-​interest of any kind—​is the will able to follow its universal call toward the good, irrespective of preferences and circumstances. Yet, preferences might align themselves with duty. This alignment is the sanctification of subjectivity and of subjective inclinations. When preferences incline with ease in the direction of duty toward others, one’s will is being sanctified. This would be Kierkegaard’s ideal in Kantian terms. Kierkegaard’s own emphasis on neighbor love is based on duty, in contradistinction to preferential love that issues from inclination. But it would be a mistake to take Kierkegaard to mean that the duty to love the neighbor universally comes at the cost of either suppressing tender emotions or blending close and particular relationships in a universal, undifferentiated mass of sameness. Kant’s position has been vulnerable to somewhat similar critiques:  one can object that his emphasis on duty over emotional care for the beloved or the friend is, in fact, not superior, and moral worth does not require that one’s actions be motivated by duty alone, devoid of love or friendship. However, Kant’s own argument is not about suppressing inclinations; as creatures of need, we are never devoid of subjective preferences, desires, needs, emotions, and various self-​interests. He is, however, arguing for the determining principle in the mix of what makes up the structure of the self and of decision-​making: duty is the superior principle to which a myriad of forms of self-​love ought to be subordinated. They ought not be excised—​ that would contradict what it means to be human. Yet, they ought not be the locomotive that pulls the train of duty in their own direction. I think Kierkegaard’s logic is indebted to Kant’s in the sense that neighbor love ought to be the determining principle in any relationship and not be trumped in relationships where inclinations run high and the

101. It is beyond the scope of my project to delve more deeply here into what creates a morally good will in the Kantian sense, which is ultimately the result of a revolution made possible by divine assistance through grace.

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temptation to follow inclination above duty is the strongest, such as erotic love or friendship. The danger is that such inclinations, when they run on their own steam, are in fact destructive of love itself because they revert to some modality of selfish self-​love, not a love for another human being, given that we have the tendency to be inclined to what is similar to us in others and not to others as different. Moreover, subjective inclinations correspond to a poor love of one’s own self—​which for Kierkegaard, as for Kant, carries the same import as the love of the other and coconditions it. A self must love the other as herself, and she can only love the other when she loves herself properly. And, I suggest, one can only love oneself properly when one has been loved well by another, respecting the difference and equality of the relation. No human self is properly shaped without having been rightly loved. The sanctification of subjective inclinations is mediated by the experience of receiving the right kind of love, which Kierkegaard (and implicitly Kant) theorizes as duty-​permeated love. Thus, the sanctification of the self, which is in fact the making of the self, is mediated by human love. Put differently, human love, as I showed earlier, mediates divine love in the Holy Spirit. So, Kierkegaard does not abolish preferential loves but objects to special loves devoid of the Spirit.102 He wants to ensure that neighbor love is included in all loves. What he resists is the potentially ungrounded character of preferential loves when they are not rooted in and transformed by neighbor love where the Spirit is present. “ ‘You shall love your neighbor.’ Just as this commandment will teach everyone how to love oneself, so it will teach erotic love and friendship genuine love: in loving yourself, preserve love for the neighbor; in erotic love and friendship, preserve love for the neighbor.”103 So the love for the neighbor needs to be woven into our special loves because those whom we love in such intimately special ways are our neighbors as well. [L]‌ove the beloved faithfully and tenderly, but let love for the neighbor be the sanctifying element in your union’s covenant with God. Love your friend honestly and devotedly, but let love for the neighbor be what you learn from each other in your friendship’s confidential relationship with God! Death, you see, abolishes all dissimilarities,

102. As above, I read Kierkegaard constructively and refer to the Holy Spirit here. 103. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 61–​62.

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but preference is always related to dissimilarities; yet the way to life and to the eternal goes through death and through the abolition of dissimilarities, therefore only love for the neighbor truly leads to life.104 I showed in section 4.2 that dissimilarities need not be understood as Kierkegaard presents them, vanishing upon death. At the same time, while in one sense dissimilarities from me are preserved in my neighbor, as neighbor love is not dependent on what is like me, in another sense dissimilarities vanish in neighbor relationships because the neighbor is every human person, unconditionally. The sense in which neighborliness needs to be part of every relationship is not one of eradicating attractions, inclinations, preferences, passionate affection, or the like. The point is that love is not merely these things, which are subject to a change. “Christianity allows all this to remain in force and have its significance externally, but at the same time through its doctrine about love . . . it wants to have infinity’s change take place internally.”105 What Kierkegaard is after here is an inward, qualitative transformation that gives the right quality to close attachments. Human interiority connects with infinity, or with God, who pours love into it both by God’s own love for the human person and by enabling the human person to love. There is thus a “change of infinity” that takes place “which is the hidden being of inwardness, which is inwardly directed toward the God-​ relationship.”106 This change is what transforms all particular loves by engrafting them onto the stable root of the relationship with God, which itself issues in the love for the neighbor. Kierkegaard also calls this transformation the “change of eternity.”107 There is a paradox here: Kierkegaard suggests a change into unchangeability, which he associates with eternity. As I  argued above, this “eternity” element is a pneumatological divine presence. The Holy Spirit is, however, not only within us but, more significantly, also between the two people engaged in a loving, attachment-​prone relationship where neighborly love resides at the core of the union. The Spirit is in the space between the people, which brings a qualitative change

104. Ibid., 62. 105. Ibid., 144. 106. Ibid., 139. 107. Ibid., 32.

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to their attachment—​it is being anchored in the stability of unchangeable eternity. An example might illuminate what Kierkegaard means by this change of eternity. Kierkegaard observes that any kind of temporal love can be recognized by its ability to stand the test of time. Only after the test of time does it gain a certain validity and prove itself to have a substantial existence. But even reaching this state does not prove that the relationship will continue to stand the test of time in the future, as the future can bring its own unpredictable changes that impact one’s love and potentially diminish, harm, or extinguish it. Barrett notes that Kierkegaard is pushing against the false promises of earthly romance and friendship, which cannot deliver security and permanence because such relationships are liable to changes in the other person and therefore prone to destruction and decay.108 The same is not true with the kind of love that has metamorphosed into an eternity-​ grounded one and has thereby acquired what Kierkegaard calls enduring continuance.109 Such love undercuts entirely any change in the partner, is not prone to follow the vicissitudes of temporality, and is not grounded in the attractiveness of the other person. Instead, it reflects God’s eternal nature and identity precisely because it participates in God’s own love from which it takes its character. This is why it unites temporality with eternity, transforming the features of the former so as to resemble eternity’s perfection and reliability. Such transformed love is not dependent on the other’s perceived lovability, let alone the ups and downs of the other’s temperament, choices, or affection, but rather mimics God’s giving nature since it is united with God. The other’s existential zigzags, as well as one’s own, do not disappear—​we are not yanked out of our historic condition; rather, this transformed love envelops them all since God’s own love envelops our human eros and fortifies it. Barrett rightly assesses Kierkegaard’s strategy, which goes beyond constructing a theological argument and aims to entice the reader to the attractiveness of God and God’s love. Appealing to the reader’s imagination and affect, Kierkegaard attempts to maximize her discontent with the vagaries of mere earthly desires for attachment and to cultivate her enchantment with God, which is expressed through resilient neighbor love.110 While Barrett thinks that Kierkegaard puts

108. Barrett, Eros and Self-​Emptying, 95. 109. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 32. 110. Barrett, Eros and Self-​Emptying, 95.

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romance and friendship on the same spectrum as the neighbor love for which Jesus calls since all loves seek happiness—​only with the difference that Christian neighbor love is more deeply satisfying than natural loves since it is the only enduring sort of love111—​my argument suggests a subtly different reading. Neighbor love is not another kind of love but an added dimension to natural loves, which are to be permeated by the qualities of neighbor love as their transformative power. This kind of love is that which I noted above as inhabited by the Holy Spirit. Kierkegaard likens it to sterling silver. By its very nature, sterling silver endures in time; and once somebody knows that an object is indeed made of sterling silver, that person also knows that the object will stand the test of time. There is no need to wait a few decades to see how sterling silver behaves. The matter is settled. It will last because it is in its nature to last. Even if somebody wanted to test sterling silver, the test would only confirm what is already known in advance by anyone who has familiarity with its nature—​that it will pass the test.112 Love inhabited by the Holy Spirit is love in the mode of duty and therefore bears properties analogous to sterling silver. It does not need to be tested to see whether it makes it across the years. Duty is not contingent on the beloved’s states, no matter how they are altered. Love of this sort brings into temporality the stability of eternity. It is contingent only on its anchor: God as Holy Spirit. Hence, change is not a feature of its constitution. This Kierkegaardian argument might be perceived as a straitjacket in the context of abuse, neglect, or any form of relational disintegration—​from banal to extreme. Yet Kierkegaard himself broke his engagement to his fiancée and never rekindled it. This kind of love is not a prescription for forced togetherness but a vision for what preserves love when it is secure. Testing is always connected with mere possibility. The kind of love that requires perpetual testing is not a secure love that operates as duty. “Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured.”113 The constant testing of a love that has not made this transition to duty would only create a feverish craving to attain an elusive certainty, without the condition for the possibility of such attainment being in place to start. A noneternally secured love is bound to be permeated by fear and anxiety because there is

111. Ibid., 96. 112. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 32. 113. Ibid.

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always a possibility that it will change. Attachment theorists’ depictions of anxious and avoidant attachments prove this, too. Kierkegaard thinks that insecure love can change either within itself, such as when it morphs into hate or jealousy, or from itself, such as when it simply changes or disappears over time. Like a river that starts its flow as a fresh and fast spring yet dissipates further down its course into sluggish, muddied waters, love that is not eternally secured can lose its original freshness, delight, and passion further down the years, becoming dissipated in indifference and lukewarm habits. Its waters need to be perpetually refreshed. Love as duty is a conduit for regenerative streams of water that issue from God’s own love and take up human love, purifying it from its inclination to reject what is dissimilar. The concept of duty that Kierkegaard inherits from Kant, therefore, does the theological work of linking human and divine love streams together, although it does not say how—​an issue to which I return shortly. Kierkegaard is especially critical of love having descended into a cluster of habits and thinks that habit is like a predator that sucks the blood out of love without the lover ever noticing. Habit is pernicious because it depends on a logic of dullness: one can become so accustomed to the thunderous sound of powerful explosions that her ears pick up on a small chuckle in a room more immediately than yet another extraordinarily loud explosion. Likewise, one can become so used to the voice of the beloved that one cannot hear her anymore; her voice is like white noise, no matter how loud it is, while a small distraction is readily recognized. Habit is therefore dangerous because it prevents the ears from hearing and the eyes from seeing the other for what she is, and, as I argued earlier through the logic of recognition, this nonrecognition cuts at the core of the possibility of truly loving her. Now, it may seem that the unchangeability of habit is somewhat similar to the unchangeability of eternity, but this is not the case. The eternal is “something that neither can nor ought to be changed,”114 whereas habit is something nefarious we need to change. The change of eternity is not only needed but also compatible with temporal changes and differences, as well as fresh recognition of the beloved through them,115 because these are not on the same plane. The change of eternity corresponds to universal neighbor love, while frequent temporal changes correspond to and are in fact frequently encountered in attachments loves.

114. Ibid., 37. 115. See the discussion of recognition in ­chapter 2.

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Yet attachment loves can be homed with a transcendentally secure anchor while still fully functioning in the everyday.

5.4.  John Duns Scotus on Human and Divine Love An early root of Kierkegaard’s thought on universal neighbor love as it relates to attachment to particular people and to the love of God is the theological work of John Duns Scotus, who I engaged earlier on the issue of particularity and universality in the bilayered structures of the self. Scotus links human love of the neighbor with human love of God to the extent that, in his view, these loves are in fact one single disposition. He argues for such a linking by invoking God’s nature as a “common good,” available to all, as opposed to some kind of a private object of endearment. God “does not want to be the private or proper good of any person exclusively. Nor should someone, on the basis of a correct argument, appropriate this common good to [her]self.”116 God is universally present to all, without exception or preference. Scotus then goes on to argue that our ability to love God the right way in the first place is a gift from God. It does not originate in human creative powers qua human. While Scotus holds that we do have a natural ability to love God above all else by virtue of being God’s creatures even aside from an additional supernatural gift of grace from God,117 God in God’s goodness endows us with an extra power. This supplemental gift of grace is charity, given to us to perfect further our natural inclination to love God. The perfection to which Scotus refers is to love God with a desire that others would love God as well. This is a supernatural desire fueled by grace—​the source of our power for charity. Since God is good in Godself, God desires to be loved by humans as their own highest good; this divine desire and human beings’ highest good are congruent with each other. God manifests God’s love for human beings precisely by desiring that they love God. God loves Godself with an infinite love within the trinity. When we love God, then, we participate as creatures in the intra-​trinitarian

116. Scotus, Ordination III, suppl., d. 28, in Duns Scotus on Divine Love, 45. 117. In this respect, Scotus is notably at odds with Aquinas, his frequent polemical interlocutor. Aquinas, among others, argued for infused charity as necessary for the human ability to tend to supernatural ends, especially the loftiest of them, i.e., to love God appropriately as the highest end.

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love-​flow, and this is for our maximal, ultimate good. God therefore desires that human persons become co-lovers with God, partaking in a human yet intimate way in the divine love. Consequently, to love God can only mean to love all that God is, and that includes all that God loves. Because God loves human beings, to love God then means to love people, including other people’s own love of God.118 One can see how this account of human and divine love can be taken as a backdrop for Kierkegaard’s thought on neighbor love, which is universal love due to all humans because they are all loved by God. We, therefore, ought to love what God loves to properly love God. But how do special and particular relations fit in? Recall Scotus’s thought on haecceity, the unique essence of each human being, discussed in c­ hapter  4. Putting Scotus’s texts on love together with his doctrine of haecceity results in a picture of each human person as wanted and loved by God not simply as a generic human being but uniquely. Since God has bestowed upon every single person a singularity, a haecceity, that is intrinsically hers, God loves precisely that uniqueness in each individual. “[H]‌aecceity is our personal gift from God.”119 Unlike Kierkegaard and my own proposal, Scotus does not describe this singularity as one that is achieved in a process of becoming but rather one that is a divine gift. However, his notion of haecceity is useful in understanding subjectivity as unfolding and becoming in time and via relationships. Even as I engage in highly formative relationships that in a strong sense cocreate my self, it is nonetheless the case that it is “I” who engages in a unique way. In Kierkegaardian terms, there is a kernel of divine love, uniquely given as a divine gift to each person, out of which earthly relations of love can and do grow. This kernel of love, from which attachments receive transcendental nourishment as they grow and shape the self, is akin to Scotus’s notion of haecceity because that which is described in both cases is God’s individual gift to each person. Therefore, aside from its original connotations of a fixed givenness, the notion of haecceity is a concept worth retrieving today. A contemporary haecceity could arguably be one of a particular and unique human journey of subjectivity, a unique way of loving, or simply a unique life story. The medieval ontological substratum need not be preserved. 118.  In line with John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio III, suppl., d.  28, in Duns Scotus on Divine Love, 45–​47. 119. Duns Scotus, Will and Morality, xxi.

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I showed earlier that Scotus understands our happiness as something particular that the human will desires in particular rather than general or universal terms and this consists of one’s own individual willing to be a co-lover with the triune God. Given our haecceity, each person’s way of being a co-lover with God is always unique to her.120 Furthermore, if one’s love for God includes loving what God loves, that is, not only fellow human beings taken as universal human neighbors but also unique persons with singular perfections, then my love for another person cannot stop at a generic level. The way I love one person must therefore be different from how I love another. Now, this ought not preclude a basic call to love any human being universally, but it does make room for an extension of such general love into particular love relationships. My love for my sister ought not contravene the pattern of common love for any neighbor, but neither ought it to stop at that generic level. Her unique difference calls for more. My love for her must take into account not just the humanity in her but also the particular person she is. And as the overall thrust of this chapter attempts to show, such a particular love, which best instantiates the intersection of need with the desire to meet that need, is the kind of love that shapes attachments and cocreates the self as well as the self’s agency. To love in accordance with subjective, unique need is only feasible in intimate attachments. As everywhere else in this book, I am not referring to erotic relationships exclusively but also to relations in which various modes of attachment are formed, which can include different kinds of friendships, mentorships, biological and adopted kinships, and complex combinations across such categories. Scotus offers some building blocks on which theological thought on constitutive particular loves may rest, and it seems to me that these building blocks are reflected implicitly in Kierkegaard’s texts. Scotus’s specific way of linking human and divine loves is helpful in making the case that human particular loves cocreate subjectivity. Kierkegaard’s thought includes similar assumptions in his claims that when we love another person, we help her love God. It is, however, not a merely universal love between me and this other person, nor the kind of love each one of us has for God. We love in a unique way. Consequently, we form unique relationships. Human relationships are unique, since the unique universes of the partners can only cocreate a singular manifestation of love. A beautiful story written by Antoine de Saint-​Exupéry provides 120. John Hare has worked out this inference in God and Morality: A Philosophical History (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 113.

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a vivid illustration.121 In the story, a small boy develops a unique love relationship with a personified rose. Before the relationship starts, the rose is a generic one among thousands of others, yet after they attach to each other, each of their identities alters irrevocably. Their haecceities becomes evident. They each become a unique self who incorporates in rich textures the relation that has developed in time and has grown through experiences of meeting unique needs. As the boy meets the rose’s need, the rose becomes his rose, thereby creating a particular story of subjectivity, while his desire to “build her up”—​to borrow Kierkegaardian construction-​of-​ self language—​is itself shaped by her need. At the same time, recall Kierkegaard’s affirmation that there is a universal element that gives solidity to each particular relationship in its own particularity. This universal element is the neighbor love of the greatest commandment of Jesus, which relates “to the different kinds of love [by virtue of being] in all of them.”122 It is contained as a hidden, albeit security-​conferring, element in any love relationship. It is therefore invisible:  “you cannot point to [it]” any more than one could point to some distinguishable feature that would be identifiable as “humanity.”123 “But you never see and no human being has ever seen Christian love, in the same sense as so one has ever seen humanity.”124 All we see are particular human beings who differ from one another and whose various qualities meet our senses, understanding, and desire for affection. Likewise, we do not see neighbor love with the naked eye. There are no identifiable concrete words, gestures, or gifts (in the broadest sense of this term) that would identify neighbor love as neighbor love. It is hidden within the particularity of concrete relationships just as humanity as universal descriptor is hidden under the surface of concrete, embodied, unique human beings. For Kierkegaard, special loves grow out of this invisible root in the same way in which the particular is an extension of the universal and in the same way in which Scotus shows both a similar relation between haecceity and universality and a similar extension of universal love into particular loves. Kierkegaard’s theology of love and his theological anthropology are also correlative to each other, and the function of this combination is to

121. See Antoine de Saint-​Exupéry, Le Petit Prince (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1943), 76–​88. 122. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 146. 123. Ibid. 124. Ibid., 147.

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ensure the stability of human loves together with the equality of dissimilar partners. The invisible, secret ingredient of universal neighbor love to which I referred above, while descriptive of our neighbor-​connective humanness, is also, in Kierkegaard’s thought, the way in which human love partakes in God’s own love because God loves all humans universally. “Christianity knows only one kind of love, the spirit’s love, [which] can lie at the base of and be present in every other expression of love.”125 I have already argued that the neighbor love that permeates every other human love in Kierkegaard’s view may be taken to be of pneumatological import: it is “the spirit’s love.” As Kierkegaard argues for a certain kind of divine presence both in the constitution of the human self and in the constitution of human love, I contend that this kind of presence is pneumatological. Like water gushing from a divine spring, human love has its source in divine love and contains it as a secret yet real constituent. While Scotus talks about haecceity in terms of a divine individual gift of uniqueness given to each person as universality is only expressed in particular instantiations, Kierkegaard, too, affirms that the secret element of universality is only visible in particular, concrete, enfleshed lives and loves. Our love stories and love attachments do not stand in a vacuum. They partake in a larger story of love between God and creation that precedes all particular human loves and infuses them with the pneumatological consistency that gives them stability. This has correlations with Scotus’s thought on God as a common good that is universally given and available to creation though instantiated in uniquely shaped streams of love toward unique persons. Particular human loves partake in the larger story of God’s love for creation and are inserted in the broader stream of divine love that God poured in creation. “In this way the heart must be bound,”126 Kierkegaard says. While there is a sense in which any preferential love derives from one’s freedom rather than from compulsion or servitude, which Kierkegaard resists, human freedom in fact derives from a bondedness to God and from a participation in the larger divine love story with humans. The divine source of love that dwells within the human self even in its inchoate state, enabling human loving, is also outside the self within human loves and outside these loves, embracing them and including

125. Ibid., 146; see also 143. 126. Ibid., 148.

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them in the larger stream of God’s love story with humanity. “[T]‌he heart bound infinitely to God has a prior history and therefore understands that erotic love and friendship are only an interlude, a contribution to this, the one and only history of love . . . a very little segment within that eternal history.”127 This pneumatological dimension of our love is not simply descriptive of our existence but productive: it has an educative function. But this is neither abstract teaching nor the teaching of some kind of objective material; rather, it is teaching in the sense of the Bildung of the self to emerge and mature. It is enabling the self to love. “We should learn from God what love is. [God] is indeed the one who first loved us—​and thus is our first teacher, who by loving us taught us love so that we could love [God].”128 Yet this love for God does not remain stationary with God. It is redirected to other human beings. The teaching therefore reaches into the embodied practices of concrete, particular loves who are thereby united pneumatologically with God’s own love. Section 5.5 explicates how.

5.5.  A Letter with a Forwarding Address Jesus’s double commandment to love God and to love human beings corresponds with human needs of formation of subjectivity and performance of the self. I showed in ­chapter 4 how in Kierkegaard’s account the structures of the becoming a self are nestled in what he calls the God-​relationship; here I take the argument further to show that the human love for God, when rightly directed toward God, undergoes a redirection to other human beings. The larger love story between God and that which is not God is neither simply a God-​to-​humanity love move nor just a humanity-​to-​divinity love arc. Rather, God is always a giver of love. While we are called to love God, God resends our love for God to God’s own loved ones: God’s people. Like a letter sent with a forwarding address, our love for God reaches its destination, another human person, via God. It does not stop at Station God, as it were. It terminates in the neighbor. To be sure, God “asks for everything,” Kierkegaard says, but this everything is not for God to absorb in Godself. The moment “you bring it to [God] you immediately receive, if I may put it this way, a notice designating where it should be delivered further,

127. Ibid., 149–​50. 128. Ibid., Supplement, 418.

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because God does not ask for anything for [God]self.”129 There is not exactly an I-​Thou rapport130 between God and the human person, since God does not fall on the spectrum of existence as we know it in human experience. The gap between God and humans is exceptional. God’s love is the love of an ultimate giver; ours is not, because we are creatures of need. But we are also creatures of desire. We desire to love. Consequently, even when we love God, God transforms it into a gift to us and redirects the love-​flow from Godself to human beings. “God’s being merciful [will be] therefore continually pointing away from [God]self.”131 On this front, Kierkegaard is indebted to Luther. As I alluded to earlier in this chapter, Luther talks about a God whose love is always an outward flow that creates the very subject of God’s love, the human person. It does not depend in any way upon the lovability of that which it loves but creatively brings both the subject and its lovability into being—​by creating it, elevating it above its own creaturely location into participation in divine love, and redeeming it by repairing its brokenness. By contrast, human beings, according to Luther, love what they find pleasing. God, instead, bestows the pleasing character upon people; the love of creation culminates in “the love of the cross  .  .  .  where it may confer good upon the bad and the needy person.”132 God therefore makes the beloved attractive through loving her, no matter what her state is. The key trope is that of a love-​flow that unidirectionally goes from God to human beings with the productive power of creating goodness in the beloved. Similarly, Luther thinks that we ought to allow the flow to continue from ourselves to the neighbor. We are channels through which the love-​flow that originates in God and reaches us transformatively can extend to the neighbor.133 Kierkegaard imports this logic in his own construction of how human and divine love streams flow together. He, too, starts from the premise that God is most basically the lover who gives. For that reason, while attentive to the gospel imperative that human beings love God above all else,

129. Ibid., 161; emphasis mine. 130. Cf. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner’s, 1970). 131. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 160. 132. Luther, “Heidelberg Disputation,” 31:57. 133.  Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” in Luther’s Works, ed. Harold J. Grimm (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1957), 31:371.

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Kierkegaard takes that to mean that God’s reception of human love is yet another mode in which God loves and gives of Godself to us. Kierkegaard suggests that this works concretely by starting with directing one’s love toward the unseen God. But, to borrow from mystical allegories, love cannot land in the darkness of the unseen.134 It nonetheless ascends toward the invisible God only insofar as it finds concrete, particular landing places in the lives of embodied, visible human beings in our proximity with whom our lives are closely intertwined. Loving the “unseen” at the cost of the exclusion of concrete, embodied, terrestrial relationships is illusory. The “unseen” may be taken to be the invisible God or humanity as whole, amounting to an abstraction; in either case, such an enterprise of love would not live up to its name but be a deception. Kierkegaard makes it clear that the more one loves the unseen, the more one will in fact love the people one sees, but never the other way around. It is not the case that the more one rejects her immediate human companions whom she sees, the more she loves the God whom she does not see; that would be a farce.135 The delusion consists in imagining that one can love God directly. Kierkegaard warns that it is impossible: the gap is too wide. “God is too exalted to be able to receive a person’s love directly.”136 Therefore, we can only love God indirectly by loving other people and, specifically, by loving the people we see. Arguably, the ones we “see” in the greatest depth and expansiveness are the ones with whom we are in relations of closeness and significance. Our love of God is therefore most aptly mediated through the strongest love attachments that form our relational homes. Love always manifests itself as a “redoubling,” according to Kierkegaard.137 Love for God simply does not exist in abstraction from loving human beings, but rather, true love for God inevitably outpours itself in love extended to other human persons. The two expressions of love are not in competition with each other any more than the love of one’s neighbor would be in competition with loving oneself. For Kierkegaard, the redoubling of love is the core logic of Jesus’s commandment: as loving

134. See Denys Turner, The Darkness of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 186–​88. 135. Kierkegaard builds on 1 John 4:20: “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” 136. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 160. 137. Ibid., 21, 182, 280–​82.

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oneself needs to redouble in the love for other people, so the love of God must redouble in human loves. This intrinsic doubleness inscribed in the gospel commandment confirms its Christological origin:  love expresses itself in the world in the same way God comes into the world, as the union between divinity and humanity.138 Kierkegaard’s thought on this mediation would be well represented visually, even though imperfectly, by a triangle. Consider two persons occupying the two bottom corners and God occupying the top corner. Imagine the love for God from the person on the bottom-​left corner like an arrow directed at God. Then picture God forwarding this love to the person on the bottom-​ right side of the triangle like an arrow heading from the top of the triangle down to the person in the right corner. The two people represented here at the bottom corners of the triangle are therefore united by a love that includes God as a middle point. To be sure, Kierkegaard asserts, a “person should begin with loving the unseen, God, because [this is how one] will learn what it is to love.”139 That said, this movement of ascent by the human heart would be fanatical if not redoubled by a horizontal love extension toward “the people we love in particular,”140 whom Kierkegaard distinguishes from universal humanity at large. In the triangle I am describing, the premise is that God is always the lover who gives. God does not absorb our love for God’s own use but returns it to us by forwarding it to another human person. The love-​flow between me and another human therefore has God as a middle point through which it passes rather than reaching the other person only directly. While in the analogy of the triangle the bottom line directly unites the two humans involved in this union of love, that is only a partial representation. The full picture is the whole triangle, with God as an upper-​middle point that mediates in this particular sense the human love relation. In fact, a more complete picture would be to collapse the triangle and include the human and divine loves in one integrated stream while still allowing for the distinctness of the two kinds of love. This representation is coherent

138.  Carl S. Hughes, Kierkegaard and the Staging of Desire:  Rhetoric and Performance in a Theology of Eros (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 176–​78. 139. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 160. 140. Ibid., 159; emphasis mine.

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with Kierkegaard’s discussion of God as exactly the “middle term” that sanctifies human love141 and that I invoke more fully in ­chapter 6. If God receives and further directs human love, then God is indeed inside the relational arc thus formed between human creatures. In fact, God holds the relation together by directing the love-​flow and uniting it to God’s own love. Human love relationships, then, structurally include God’s own self. Therefore, love attachments, I propose, cocreate the self on account of how God indwells the relational space. I suggest that this indwelling is a pneumatological presence in the interstitial space among humans as an increase of the power that rests in creation qua creation. This increase of power is the gift of divine grace bestowed on us by God’s generous love in addition to the gift of our own constitutive nature. I claimed earlier that the scope of my argument is one that encompasses, broadly speaking, the paradigm of nature and grace translated into the language of love. As it is discernible by now, I equate the gift of God’s grace with the gift of Godself to creation in the Holy Spirit. As God the Holy Spirit is present within human loves, relationships are sacramental sites of divine grace and, in this sense, mediate our participation in God’s own life of love. Natural human loves are elevated supernaturally into the triune divine love by God’s own pneumatological participation in them. Significantly, Kierkegaard develops the idea of love for God as a letter sent with a forwarding address in the context of speaking about concrete relationships with people who are close to us in our daily lives, not by invoking relationality in general terms. Immediately preceding his discussion of the forwarding feature of God’s love, Kierkegaard inserts some of the most passionately longing texts in his entire corpus, claiming that “human nature [has] this innate need for companionship.”142 Neither extended solitariness nor a “teeming crowd” is conducive to flourishing; the former is “pain and misery,” and the latter makes “a person grow weary.”143 Only close, concrete companionship is the response to this need and desire. I suggested in this chapter both that our love for God is indirect, mediated by human loves, and that God is internal to human loves as their transforming middle term. How does this work? I think another Kierkegaardian image supplies a vivid answer. Picture a lake whose waters are replenished

141. Ibid., 67, 107–​9, 260, 301, 339, 450, among others. 142. Ibid., 154. 143. Ibid.

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by a hidden, secret spring at its bottom and a stream that issues from the lake and carries the waters forward.144 I think Kierkegaard uses this image to convey the idea that God’s love is always in motion, as the water of this lake is in motion given the spring that keeps supplying new water and the stream that moves it forward. But, the water in the lake is not just moving; it is moving, through the stream, in a given direction. Likewise, God’s love is moving to another human being and is moving my love for God toward that which God loves: other particular human selves. When we love God, we enter God’s stream of love, which already tends toward another human being. Therefore, God is structurally part of human loving, while human love relationships are modes of participation in God’s own love. Grace is not simply an elevator of nature but the loving divine power that empowers earthly loves to be homes. There is always another person, another self, to whom God’s own love is in motion; the other person in her uniqueness explains the directionality of God’s love and constructs the relational home formed thereby. As I love my grandmother, a peasant in rural Romania, I partake in God’s love-​flow toward her even across geographical separation. While all human beings are addressees of such divine streams of love, we enter only a finite number of such streams concretely given our temporality and bodily finitude. Yet, the expansiveness is in the finitude, in the depth that the particularity of each human subjectivity entails. Put differently, the expansiveness is in that person’s increased depth of agency, actualization, and freedom.

144. Ibid., 10.

8 11

6

The Goodness of Home Attachment as Anthropological and Pneumatological Middle Space

In ­c hapter 5, I described human beings as creatures of need as well as desire and argued that our need for love is met when we receive love calibrated to our individual subjectivity and particularity, which needs to be recognized in its particular nuance. Our desire to love, which grows from the inner seed of love placed in us by God, is rightly oriented when it proceeds toward God, who forwards it to the needful friend, beloved, or adopted stranger in the unique way that meets that person’s singular subjectivity. The right kind of love, which builds up the self, includes God, then, as its middle term between the human persons engaged in the love arc and places them within the divine love stream for creatures such that they become partakers of that same divine love. Thus, this union of wisely attuned human love, which attaches the lovers not only to each other but also to God’s love for them, meets both human need and human desire. Most climactically, the incarnation patterns this model for our own works of love and love attachments. In Jesus, need and desire meet in the most perfect way as divine and human love form the most perfect union, although I am not hereby claiming that the hypostatic union is a union of mere love. As human, Jesus was a creature of need like all of us. Jesus asks Peter longingly whether Peter loves him and is not satisfied until he hears the answer three times.1 But Jesus also embodied the resourceful desire to love, massively expressed in his works of love given to meet 1. Other interpretations frame the repetition in terms of Peter’s need. What I propose here is, however, one possible interpretation that can be truth bearing.

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the concrete, particular needs of unique people in his proximate environment. Furthermore, Jesus’s human love enters most perfectly the stream of divine love as Jesus himself was a union of what is fully human and what is fully divine. Jesus, therefore, is the climax of love’s possibilities both in terms of God’s expression of love for what is not God and in terms of a maximally flourishing human self, a self in whose model we are to be shaped as creatures of love. That said, we do not repeat or replicate the incarnation. While we live in the effects of its power, we do not enter a hypostatic union with God. Instead, our earthly loves enter the embracing flow of God’s love pneumatologically as God the Holy Spirit indwells the relational space between those attached by human loves. In this concluding chapter, I draw the previous arguments together to show that this middle space of attachment between lovers is both anthropological and pneumatological and constitutes the self’s home. The origin of human love is external to the human self: its genealogy is in the love of the triune God, embodied in the incarnation where need and desire meet most strongly, and is given to human beings in an inchoate form that needs cultivation. This cultivation is made possible by God’s gift of grace to us above and beyond the gift of embodied life. In addition to giving us our bilayered nature—​the gift of ourselves—​God, the ultimate giver, gives us the gift of Godself in the Holy Spirit. When a love relationship integrates the power of the partners with the power of the Holy Spirit’s own love that indwells it, the relationship has both natural and transcendent resources to fight, overcome, and remove defects and imperfections that threaten the well-​being of the partners.2 Like Kierkegaard’s image of a lake whose waters are continuously renewed by the fresh water of an invisible spring at the bottom, human loves have access to the rejuvenating power of the Holy Spirit. Such a love attachment, then, has built-​in mechanisms for the cleansing, healing, purification, and growth of the selves involved and is thus a relational home and a place of flourishing for its “tenants”—​whether attached by virtue of erotic passions, friendship, kinship, mentorship, or some other bond. When such an attachment occurs, we form a union with the other person that serves as a space of sanctification as much as one of subjectivity formation.

2. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 166.

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Kathryn Tanner describes the formation and sanctification of human life according to the pattern of Christ by suggesting that we are primarily attached to Christ and that this attachment is itself productive of identity through the shaping power of the Holy Spirit.3 As we engage in this process of conforming to Christ, we participate in the triune life of God. Yet this understanding of attachment can be extended by considering human mediations. The Spirit’s presence within the attachment space of human loves brings with it an enlargement of this space. Human loves become “roomy” enough to contain the transforming powers of the Spirit cocreating the self when they actually embody and participate in the flow of God’s love. In my reading of Kierkegaard’s terms, between two people who form the right kind of a human bond, there is always a middle term: God as Holy Spirit. This assertion allows one to conceptualize such a relationship as involving an interstitial space that is divinely indwelled. Barrett argues that Kierkegaard’s understanding of human love for God will naturally manifest itself in love for fellow human beings precisely because when we love God we in fact love God’s overflowing, giving love, which is who God truly is. While Barrett does not show the connection between this Kierkegaardian logic and the thought of Duns Scotus, I discussed earlier how Scotus’s claim that we become co-lovers with God is an influential heritage for Kierkegaard. Barrett’s analysis does, however, portray a similar move in Kierkegaard’s work and shows how loving God entails loving God’s love for creatures and thus participating in it. Correlatively, God participates in our human loves; without this divine middle term, our loves would not be genuine.4 I described this middle space of attachment as a relational space of emotional, affective, and cognitive resonance between partners that helps with one’s representation of the world and with one’s own development of self. The goodness of the love described here, then, is the goodness of attachments that draw from creaturely nature as well as divine grace and actualize our human becoming, or put differently, empower our becoming human. Jean Vanier argues that becoming human is a process that centers on “a way of the heart”5 that is an existential stance that focuses on personal

3. Tanner, Christ the Key, 58. 4. Barrett, Eros and Self-​Emptying, 91. 5. Jean Vanier, Becoming Human (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 88.

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relationships. After extensive experiences in small, tightly knit communities of friendship with people with intellectual disabilities, Vanier concludes that subjectivity forms and flourishes in modes of relating that de-​center the mind and connect with others affectively, centering on the body, on emotions, on presence, and on ludic engagements. Becoming human is an unfolding of one’s subjectivity via communion with others in small settings that are capacious in depth rather than breadth. In this kind of venue trust can grow, which, in turn, empowers the very communion that creates the trust in the first place. Vanier is also interested in de-​ emphasizing the intellect on account of its potential impediment to love; he notes that the power of reason is a force that distances and that, while admirable in its own right, creates separation and potential competition, whereas weaknesses and vulnerabilities together with experiences of affection engender closeness and communion, which meets a deeper need in the formation of subjectivity and performance of the self. Rita Nakashima Brock similarly argues for the central role of the “heart” for becoming human, as the heart is the repository of the self, the “innermost region” that also “binds us to others . . . and empowers us to act.”6 The heart is equally the location of affective desires as well as needs: “[w]‌hen the outer world of the self is not loving, supportive, and reliable enough, the inner self must become rigid to protect its need to create a coherent world.”7 But that requires that there is a sufficiently formed self in the first place, which she carefully notes is the complex result of close relationships of care, playfulness, and empathy. In different terms and categories, my argument suggests similar elements for the formation of the self. The heart, and the self in my language, is vulnerable to the vicissitudes relationships entail. The inner core of the person is her source of strength as much as it is her source of vulnerability: “the heart strength lies in its fragility.”8 Brock is right to observe that this kind of an argument is particularly needed in the contemporary West, which is “dominated by the crushing of the heart, by heart dis-​ease.”9

6. Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (New York: Crossroad, 1988), xiv. 7. Ibid., 36. 8. Ibid., 17. 9. Ibid., 35.

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My project as a whole stems from this impoverishment of heart, which describes much of the globalized world today, especially in its Western instantiations. A poverty of heart and a poverty of relations have much to do with the struggles of the contemporary self to maintain itself in the face of the avalanche of demands and the cancerous growth of work intensity, competition, information, tasks, and extreme mobility. The lack of heart for the plight of migrants is not an isolated phenomenon in the West but part of a larger malaise of the age. Yet while relations of love and attachment nourish the self and enable us to become human, they can also be the source of great harm, especially under the pressures of globalization and the societal conditions just described, where the demands remain pressing whether the self’s needs will be met or not. That being said, Brock is right to suggest that, harm notwithstanding, “the depth of our need for relationships” is insuperable. “Those who damage us do not have the power to heal us, for they themselves are not healed.”10 But the healing is nonetheless possible in close relationality that opens up and restores the channels that harm blocked. In my own account, the reality of this possibility lies in envisioning attachment love as integrated into the perpetually replenishing streams of divine love and imagining the formation of the self, as well as its healing, as the cocreation of divine and human loves synergistically at play. The complex dance between geographical distance and interpersonal connectedness that contemporary globalization and migratory dislocation create calls for even greater urgency in finding theologically compelling metaphors for a sense of relational home that can anchor the human self in this situation of rapidly shifting meanings of locality. My theological construct of home is the confluence of human and divine loves. Human love is not self-​standing. While it springs from the innermost core of a person, human love originates mysteriously even deeper in God’s own love for human beings. Let me return to the trope of the reservoir whose waters are supplied by a spring and are also flowing outward from it. In Kierkegaard’s imagination, in the same way that the lake is formed and maintained by the steady flow of fresh water from the hidden spring at its bottom, human love is nourished by and participates in the transtemporal, unquenchable stream of divine love that proceeds toward others. This divine love is the hidden stream, epistemically inaccessible

10. Ibid., 16.

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to direct human scrutiny. Kierkegaard thinks it ought not be disturbed by reflective inquiry, which can only “ ‘grieve the spirit’ and hinder growth.”11 Reason is de-​centered to make room for the heart. The horizon of meaning that, according to Charles Taylor, inescapably surrounds the self is not one of reflective rationality, at least not primarily, but rather it is a communally created, practice-​driven, intuitively lived paradigm of significance that envelops one’s life. It is not a reflective capacity that most significantly creates the self and enables it to operate in the world. Instead, it is the experience of love that most immediately and ineluctably channels the formative and sustaining streams of divine love. Several ideas are interwoven here. The organizing thought is the image of God as the middle term between two humans who relate to each other in love because their respective love orientations for each other stream out of the divine love for each of them. In that sense, my love for my beloved is not self-​standing, and neither is hers. Between the two of us is the mutually intertwined expanse of our respective inwardness, which becomes a sacramental site since it houses the love of God, which is always who God actually is. As the spring at the bottom of the lake replenishes the lake’s water, so God’s love for us is productive of our own love for another human person. The gospel of John asserts that “the Word became flesh and [tabernacled] among us . . . full of grace and truth.”12 The Johannine claim draws from the Hebrew Bible’s depictions of the divine presence in the tabernacle erected by Israel in the desert. As God was present in a physical manifestation in the tabernacle, and later in the temple, the incarnation is the utmost manifestation of God’s presence among human beings. In like fashion—​and most certainly as a result—​God’s presence dwells among those human beings whose love relationship attaches them to one another. They are, however, attached to God as well, as the divine source of love hidden in each of them is also common between them. Scotus is right to speak of God as a common good and not a private one; God’s incarnate presence among human beings is a common good available to all by the enacting power of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit tabernacles in the spaces contoured by human loves. We are therefore sacramental sites with God’s own 11. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 9–​10. 12.  John 1:14; while the NRSV translation reads “lived among us,” the literal meaning is indeed “made a dwelling” or “tabernacled [ἐσκήνωσεν] among us,” as the Greek verb is an immediate cognate of the noun tabernacle (σκῆνος).

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presence as love in us. The middle term, God as Holy Spirit, the mutual source of love between lovers, makes a dwelling in the attachment space contouring its home-​like character. The indwelling of the Spirit within the interhuman attachment space unites not only those persons partaking in the attachment but also their mutual love for one another with the love of God. We cannot love God without loving humans, and we cannot love humans without loving God. These two kinds of love are not the same, but the particular configuration in which they are related makes it possible to propose that human attachments are inextricable from both one’s subjectivity and one’s love for God. I will borrow again from Kierkegaard, who claims the following three relational equations: “to love God is to love oneself truly; to help another person love God is to love another person; to be helped by another person to love God is to be loved.”13 In other words, self-​love, the giving of human love, and the receiving of human love are all equivalent to loving God. Kierkegaard is not suggesting by these equations that one ought to engage in infinite devotion either to one’s own self or to another human person as if that kind of love that would have a human being as its terminus would in itself exactly translate into the same thing as loving God. In fact, such overextended human loves would be destructive, because to give of oneself ultimately to a finite end would run the risk of extinguishing the self or, at best, harming it. Neither are human beings, qua human, steeped in finitude and transience as they are, sufficiently dependable on their own to be recipients of absolute love. To demand absolute love from another would be even more pernicious; it would not be a love that contributes to the cocreation of one’s subjectivity but rather to its harm: colonizing another person and absorbing her particularity into one’s own, in addition to harming the other, would give rise to a dictator dependent on such exterminating absorbencies, not a self with a robust agency able to give. On the other hand, withdrawing from the other in fear would only confirm the unreliability of human loves operating on their own power. Likewise, self-​love as an end in itself would not only be selfish but also dwarf the self insofar as it would preempt the cocreative streams with others from nourishing it. Underfed, such a self would be underdeveloped. To put it synthetically, human loves, while both an inescapable need and the right channel of our desire, are not sustainable on their own steam without

13. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 107.

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partaking in the love stream that originates in God and passes through God to reach everyone else. God as the middle term between human loves is what ensures that the human self neither absorbs the other nor is lost in the other—​nor does the self withdraw from the other out of fear of such a loss. Our relationship to God is primordial, and remains so, in order for human loves to be maximally giving. In the Kierkegaardian universe, we cannot determine what love is unless we start with God as the reference point. We “must start from God and must find God in [the] love to the neighbor. From this foundation, Christianity now takes possession of every expression of love.”14 The God-​ relationship functions as what Taylor would call a hypergood, which is the condition for the possibility of all other relationships. I discussed in ­chapter  2 how hypergoods as normative canopies orient our existence, constituting a way of life as a horizon within which particularities of everydayness occur and gain meaning. Love for God is such a hypergood, and it is above and determinant of human loves because one can relate in an absolute way only to the absolute—​to God.15 While constitutive of the self, human attachment loves are not absolutes or hypergoods. God’s love stream in which they are situated when they are at their best is that kind of an absolute. Yet this is not a cold, abstract absolute, like a reified idea. This absolute is a loving God whose truth is meaningful only subjectively, in the passion of the self’s inwardness, yet manifest outwardly in the self’s embodied loves. This absolute—​God—​gives and loves with infinite ardor. We, however, are not absolute. While we are, indeed, a mix of the eternal and the temporal, the latter means that we live fully immersed in the finite conditions of history and among the finite objects of the universe, including other human selves. From our place of finitude, we can only love God in a mediated way. For this reason, our love of God and our human loves are necessarily intertwined. Kierkegaard implies a double mediation in our love relationship with God: both our own love for God and our reception of God’s love for us—​which conditions our love for God and for other humans and consequently the possibility of the emergence of the self—are mediated through human loves. At the same time, God is the middle term in human attachments. One side of the mediation of our love relationship with God is captured in the second two elements of the three-​part equation above: that we help 14. Ibid., 140. 15. I owe this phrasing in relation to Kierkegaard to conversations with John E. Hare.

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each other love God. “[To] be loved by another person . . . is to be helped to love God.”16 On the other side of the mediation, our love for God is forwarded to human beings. Even though love for God is the pinnacle of any possible human loving, it is an aim that gets redirected to people—​in fact, to particular people whose lives are closely linked with ours, because we see them most expansively and can engage in their recognition most strongly. Regarding the first mediation, while we can relate to the absolute only in absolute ways, the relationship is mediated by the finitude of temporal life. We cannot love God directly. We are helped along the way by human loves. Regarding the second mediation, our love for God does not stop with God: as the last chapter demonstrated, human love for God is like a letter sent to the divine destination yet redirected to a forwarding address. “God is continually pointing away from [Godself ] . . . as God is too exalted to receive a person’s love directly . . . [hence if ] you want to show that your life is intended to serve God, then let it serve people.”17 What does the first mediation mean more concretely? How can I help someone else love God, and how can another person help me love God? Kierkegaard implies an Augustinian distinction between worldly and spiritual goods.18 One ought not to relate to worldly goods in such a way as to possess them because God can take them away at any time. They are not secure with us, and if one thinks one possesses them, one cannot have them because such finite goods, including human loves, can slip away. Instead, spiritual goods, such as faith, ought to be possessed; one can only “have” them if one possesses them. This logic applies to love attachments as well. We cannot possess other human beings. They can be taken away from us, or they can walk away any time. We can possess neither other people nor their love. But we can possess our love for others because, at an even deeper level, we can possess the divine source of love in us, and that is not extinguishable or diminishable since God gave Godself to us in that very way. The implication here is that in any human relationship that is truly good, we are not simply relating to one another as lover and beloved; we are also at the same time relating to God. When we love another human

16. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 107. 17. Ibid., 160–​61. 18. Ibid., 26.

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being rightly, our love includes the divine element that woos the other person, thereby helping her to love God. In Kierkegaard’s logic, this also stands true in our relationship to our own selves, which is why he also invokes the love of the self as constitutive of the mediation of our love for God. Loving ourselves rightly is conducive to loving God. This is significant, particularly because it responds to legitimate worries about the possibility of human self-​denial when loving. Kierkegaard is not suggesting a kind of crushing or annihilating of the self that would allow the beloved to swallow up the lover’s identity or that would encourage one to surrender one’s self in a motion of self-​dissolving into the other’s world. As much as any other human being is the neighbor who must and needs to be loved, one’s own self must also be loved like the neighbor. In Kantian categories, the self is a neighbor too. And loving the neighbor helps her love God. In the categories of David Kelsey’s theological anthropology, God’s love as an ultimate context is made possible and is mediated in the temporal realm by the proximate context of human loves.19 We cannot properly love other humans as we love God because that sort of absolute devotion is both selfish self-​love and self-​destructive:  the self collapses in the world of the other, with one partner becoming the colonizer and the other the colonized. But neither can we properly love other humans apart from loving God. The dangers are similar, as the relationship is liable to be devoid of the kind of space of in-​between-​ness where God indwells it and sustains it durably. As the middle term in a human attachment relationship, God prevents each person from becoming vulnerable to annihilation by the other—​either by suffocating in the other’s colonizing embrace or by giving of oneself with such infinite surrender that there is nothing left of one’s own self except to serve the other. Kierkegaard warns against such servitude: “[e]‌very person is God’s bond servant; therefore [she] dare not belong to anyone in love unless in the same love [she] belongs to God and dare not possess anyone in love unless the other and [she herself ] belong to God in this love.”20 No one ought either to solicit or to offer a sacrifice that enslaves one’s self to another human being. The temptation to do so is real, however, especially when love is understood as fundamentally constitutive of the human self, as Kierkegaard infers it. 19. I am making again use of David Kelsey’s categories of ultimate and proximate contexts that envelop human existence as he develops them in Eccentric Existence, 4–​5, 160–​75, 190–​ 214, 442–​57, 478–​500, 607–​46. 20. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 108.

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Without the divine middle term, the interlover space would implode and the partners would collapse into one another, resulting in human power differentials reasserting themselves and, again, one colonizing the other. God the Holy Spirit as middle term assures the proper distance between lovers while also preventing the disintegration of the attachment. The Spirit’s presence in between them obviates both a centripetal crushing of the relationship and a centrifugal splintering of the love attachment. The attachment space of love is good; therefore, only insofar as it is humanly as well as divinely populated with the ultimate and proximate contexts is it rightly aligned. The God-​relationship is the mark by which the love for people is recognized as genuine. As soon as a love-​relationship does not lead me to God, and as soon as I in the love-​relationship do not lead the other to God, then the love, even if it were the highest bliss and delight of affection, even if it were the supreme good of the lovers’ earthly life, is still not true love  .  .  .  . The merely human view of love can never go beyond mutuality: the lover is the beloved, and the beloved is the lover. Christianity teaches that such a love has not yet found its true object—​God. The love-​relationship requires threeness:  the lover, the beloved, the love—​but the love is God. Therefore, to love another person is to help that person to love God, and to be loved is to be helped.21 A well-​built relational home is not only anthropological but also pneumatological. The metaphor of home, however, entails a certain level of dependence and boundedness that goes against the grain of contemporary sensitivities with respect to boundaries. A home is, after all, not a place of universal inclusion. Yet embodiment is finite and particular and calls for a certain kind of boundedness that is comfortable for the body given its material condition. I have already shown in previous chapters that attachments are preferential and involve a relatively small number of people since attachments are expansive in depth rather than multitude. But the paradox at play here is that the boundaries of attachments enable freedom. The depth of human belonging—thus, dependence—is directly proportional to the strength of human agency—hence, independence. The

21. Ibid., 120–​21.

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dependence inherent to love is the very condition for the freedom to act as well as for the independence to give of oneself to others with a fortified agency of a formed self. I am not suggesting that acts and works of love are exclusively dependent on a position of strength. Attachment figures are people with their own need for attachment. Kierkegaard gives the examples of a crippled person confined to bed and of those whose misery is so comprehensive, who have been so tragically devastated, that even a meager expression of sympathy is difficult for him to convey. Contemporary trauma studies show that trauma survivors can experience a shattering of the self to such a degree that their ability to love is severely harmed, as much of their entire psychosomatic whole is no longer an integrated system.22 Under the assumption that human beings are creatures of need and resourceful desire, these people evidence their need more than their resourcefulness. But the kernel of love that God gives everyone, even when massively undercultivated or shaken, does not disappear. Even if the self is not yet necessarily constituted (or has been severely broken), the kernel of love out of which the self can grow or heal is always there. While the size of the need may dwarf the size of the resources available to give, “should we now be so merciless as to add this new cruelty to all their misery to deny them the capacity to be merciful”?23 When the need differential is great between two people, one loves and gives in the mode of mercy. In a sense, attachment love is always a form of mercy because it involves a relation of inequality in the moment of attunement:  one gives, and the other receives. One is operating by extending her resourceful desire, the other is functioning as a needful addressee. The roles may and do change places, but this structural feature remains discernible. When I “build up” my friend, I  love by serving as a conduit of God’s own love toward her, forwarding into her structures of the self the love that God planted in me, which meets the seed of love in her and which rides on the strength of the Holy Spirit’s presence between us, contributing to actualizing her subjectivity. When I am the addressee, the roles reverse, and I am helped to love God by being pulled into the stream of divine love via the mediation of this friend’s love. The more the particularity of need is met by the particularity 22.  Bessel A. van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane, and Lars Weisaeth, eds., Traumatic Stress:  The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society (New  York:  The Guilford Press, 1996), 3–​46. 23. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 325.

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of the other’s orientation of desire toward it, the closer the attachment, the more perfect the mediation of divine love in human loving, and the more the relationship is a home. Again, one of the highest riches is, paradoxically, to be needy in love—​ not merely in need of loving, but in need of being loved. This neediness does not enslave the self to the beloved. The need to receive love is, in fact, a mode of independence because the need of love is not a need to possess or be possessed—​that would be the kind of dependence that curtails freedom, imprisoning one or both partners in vicious cycles of power plays that destroy subjectivity and do not create the self. Kierkegaard draws a fine line between being needy in love and that to which love relates: when love relates merely to the object of love—​another human being—​it creates an unsustainable dependence. Human love needs to relate to something else in order to be sustainable and to preserve the lover’s freedom: it needs to include God as a pneumatological middle term holding the arc of the love between humans. The independence of the self needs love as one of its ingredients, but this love must not be fully dependent on something temporal, finite, and corruptible, which any human being would be.24 This love must instead be dependent on the incorruptibility and immutability of the triune God, which is human love’s own internal source. Human love is a reservoir replenished and maintained by the fresh flow of divine love to which it relates in this kind of dependence—​a dependence that enables creaturely independence. In Kierkegaard’s world, the flip side of freedom is more than dependence: it is despair, which amounts to a nonparticipation of human attachments in the divine love streams. If the lover relates with infinite passion to a finite particular, which characterizes any terrestrial beloved, despair is bound to emerge. Only the eternal can properly absorb infinite passion, hold it, and secure it against all perils of change. Any kind of love that has not undergone what I earlier called the “the change of eternity” and placed its grounding in the infinite spring emerging from its transhistorical domain would be in a state of despair. Or, more precisely, such a person would be in despair. It is not the case that an unhappy turn of a love relationship, friendship, or other attachment is the real source of despair. Love troubles may make it manifest, but they themselves are not facets of despair. According to Kierkegaard, despair is not the lack of happiness

24. Ibid., 38–​39.

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in love; it is the lack of the eternal ingredient or, in the language of my proposal, the lack of the pneumatological dimension of love attachments. When a person’s love is not nourished with the streams of eternity, she exists in a state of despair. “[D]‌espair is not something that can happen to a person, an event such as good fortune or misfortune. Despair is a misrelation in a person’s inner being—​no fate or event can penetrate so far and so deep; it can only make manifest that the misrelation—​was there.”25 Favorable life events can easily hide this state of despair from one’s own introspection, and while misfortune would make it more obvious, if one thinks that the misfortunes alone are what causes despair, that is to confuse the categories. “Despair is not, therefore, the loss of the beloved—​ that is unhappiness, pain, suffering—​but despair is lack of the eternal.”26 Since the self is always a relation, or more precisely a set of interrelated relations, despair is healed only when the relational structure of the self flows rightly, streaming from its source. The self escapes despair when it rests consciously in the divine power that established its entire relational structure. The self then becomes conscious of God as the ultimate giver of this selfhood, which is always occurring uniquely in each individual existence, cocreating a unique individual.27 While our universal relational prototype is Christ and the source for all actualized subjectivities is ultimately divine, the resulting self is a “distinctive individuality”28 rooted in a singular relation to God as well as unique relationships to irreplaceable human attachment figures. Kierkegaard is not blind to the devastation or even disintegration of the self that is brought about by loss, absence, or unrequited love. He is well aware that comfort is nearly impossible to find when that is the case and that the command to love comes packaged with the experience of sorrow for the human condition. His antidote to despair parallels the Kantian revolution of the heart, which is only possible by God’s own act within human interiority that enables it to fulfill God’s command. Kant suggests that since God commands that we have the duty to fulfill the moral law, it follows that God must also provide the means for

25. Ibid., 40. 26. Ibid., 41. 27. Arnold B. Come, Kierkegaard as Theologian: Recovering My Self (Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 1997), 58–​61. 28. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 272.

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us to be able to do so by making us capable of doing it and, since this proves insufficient, by further offering us divine assistance.29 Kierkegaard makes a similar move: “when eternity says, ‘You shall love,’ it is responsible for making sure that this can be done.”30 For Kierkegaard, the recurring commandment to love with a love that is anchored in eternity is a humanly impossible task; yet in Kierkegaard’s understanding, the command to love carries with it the provision of the possibility of its fulfillment. Kierkegaard admits that it seems like mockery to tell a despairing person to love when she would desire nothing more; this is precisely what is impossible and the very source of her despair. At the same time, Kierkegaard turns the impossibility on its head: this is the very proof that the command is of divine origin and that there is help to meet the need with the resource that supplies its fulfillment. This is why true love that builds up is never merely an earthly affair of nature, devoid of the power of grace or decoupled from the Holy Spirit. [T]‌his shall of eternity is the saving . . . element. Sit with someone who deeply mourns. If you have the ability to give to passion the expression of despair as not even the sorrowing one can do, it may soothe for a moment, but it is still false. If you have the sagacity and experience to provide a temporary prospect where the sorrowing one sees none, it can be refreshingly tempting for a moment, but it is still false . . . . I do not have the right to become insensitive to life’s pain, because I shall sorrow . . . but neither do you have the right to love despairingly, because you shall love . . . and you shall preserve yourself and by and in preserving yourself preserve love . . . . [O] nly this shall eternally and happily saves from despair. Eternally and happily—​yes, because only that person is saved from despair who is eternally saved from despair. The love that has undergone eternity’s change by becoming duty is not exempt from misfortune, but it is saved from despair, in fortune and misfortune equally saved from despair.31

29. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 66 (6:45). 30. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 41. 31. Ibid., 41–​43.

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In ­chapter  1, I  alluded to 1 Peter 2:4–​532 to suggest that the nonearthly dimension of our love attachments that make up our relational home warrants calling that relational home a temple of divine indwelling. The Petrine image depicts human beings as the living stones who become building blocks in a “spiritual house” (oikos pneumatikos), or perhaps a “house of the Spirit”—​a home-​like construction in which the bodies of the tenants are in fact the creators of the space itself. This home is made by that which holds the inhabitants together:  their love for one another serves as trusses and joists, since the walls are their very lives. It is, then, a relational home, with the added dimension of being a home for the Spirit, who holds the participants together as living stones, animated by grace. As the Holy Spirit gives life to the stones, grace elevates natural loves to partake in the love life of God through the divine middle term. The cornerstone of this edifice is Christ, since the home both rests on his power and takes its design from him, while its purpose is human transformation into a “holy priesthood.” The ancient Hebrew priests to whom the text refers mediated God’s presence to the people; as the participants in this home of the Spirit are priests, they also mediate God’s love (since God’s presence is always love) to fellow human beings with whom they form attachments. This relational home is one of mutual benefit, as it operates within an economy of mutual resonance between partners. The attunement that attachment theorists describe might be translated into a theological vision of resonance that enables the transfer of spiritual goods such as love, which can be possessed, from one person to the other through the attunement of their respective love frequencies to their unique particularities. The love of God is communicated as a spiritual good through this channel of resonance. Human love streams are being pulled into the encompassing streams of divine love, which human attachments mediate when they become channels of God’s love toward other people. The goodness of a home understood in this way consists in its power to shape the making of the human self and enable its agency and freedom. I argued that this model for human loves is lived in the Spirit yet patterned after the incarnation. At the end of Paradise Regained, John Milton portrays a victorious but tired, thirsty, and hungry Jesus after having had a lengthy altercation with Satan in the desert. When Satan finally departs,

32.  “Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood.” 1 Peter 2:4–​5.

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Jesus receives “celestial food” served by angels “from the Tree of Life and from the Fount of Life.”33 Nourished by this feast of divine love, Jesus is sent back to earth to do his work of saving humankind. Jesus indeed returns and goes straight to the house of his mother. In Milton’s story, Jesus’s mature career in the world starts with his attachment to his earthly home: not just a physical house but, more importantly, the relationship with his mother.34 Human loves are, indeed, the earthly homes for which the heart longs and in which, according to ancient Hebrew poetic prophecy, God personally rests.35 This interstitial space between those who love is not empty: God is wholly present, resting in the arc between the two people. This divinely indwelled space, which, far from pulling the lovers away from each other, links them together in the strongest way possible, is our attachment home, contoured anthropologically as well as pneumatologically. God is present in it as Spirit, and we are present in it as love-​oriented creatures whose identities are marked in a strong sense by the love that is forwarded from God to other human beings. It is a space of double belonging—​both to our earthly loves and to the love of God, which together cocreate the human self.

33. John Milton, Paradise Regained (Stilwell, KS: Digireads, 2006), 70. 34. I am grateful to Rita Nakashima Brock for a conversation that led me to this insight. 35. For example Isaiah 66:1: “The earth is my footstool; what is the house you would build for me, and what is my resting place?” or Isaiah 60:13: “my sanctuary . . . where my feet rest” (emphasis mine).

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207

Index

abandonment, 81, 88 Abraham, 101, 104 abuse, 12, 56, 168 actualization, 5, 6, 13, 50, 54, 97, 99, 101, 118, 124, 137, 140, 145, 180 Adams, Marilyn McCord, 27 Adams, Robert, 26 adoptees, 15 adoption, 59 aesthetic, 99, 100 affect, 53, 71, 74, 76, 77, 78, 83, 90–92, 100, 126, 139, 141, 167 affection, 10, 18, 70, 71, 87, 138, 166, 167, 173, 184, 191 agape, 13, 138 agency, 7, 27, 28, 29, 48, 49, 55, 57, 62, 99, 129, 133, 135, 138, 154, 159, 172, 180, 187, 191, 192, 196 Ainsworth, Mary, 86 anxiety, 36, 71, 76, 88, 89, 142, 168 Aristotle, 147 attachment anxious, 86–89, 169 avoidant, 86–89, 169 constitutive, 22 dismissive, 87, 88 disorganized, 86, 88, 89 disoriented, 86, 88, 89 figures, 18, 61, 74–81, 83, 84, 86, 89, 192, 194

insecure, 91 insecure anxious, 86 insecure avoidant, 86 insecure disorganized, 86 particular, 19, 22, 59, 73, 155, 159 preoccupied, 86–89 relational, 21, 46, 72, 143 relations of, 50, 57, 133 relationships of, 18, 21, 30, 70, 71, 98, 104, 110, 118, 130, 131, 143, 147n58 secure, 18, 71, 75, 90, 91, 142 space, 19, 24, 183, 187, 191 strategy, 86 style, 86–89, 91, 93 system, 74, 75, 77–85, 87 theory, 6, 18, 41, 71, 74, 75, 77–79, 81, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91–93, 96, 97, 142 working model, 85–87 attachment love, 16, 17, 19, 22, 33, 41, 57, 59, 70, 73, 94, 133, 144, 145, 149, 154, 170, 185, 188, 192 attraction, 45, 136, 139, 140, 147–149, 156, 166 attunement, 53, 75, 77, 90, 91, 93, 128, 131, 134, 192, 196 Augustine, 7–16, 136, 138, 139, 141, 161 authenticity, 22, 45–51, 53, 56, 60, 104 age of, 49, 57 culture of, 18, 22, 46, 47, 59, 60, 68

208

208

Index

authenticity (Cont.) framework of, 47, 51 ideal of, 46, 48, 49, 62, 58, 60, 62 autonomy, 33, 78, 79 Barrett, Lee C., 12–16, 136–140, 167, 183 beauty, 106, 112, 121, 137 becoming, 6, 18, 30, 43, 96–102, 108, 118, 120, 123, 132, 136, 151, 159, 171, 175, 183 belonging, 1, 4, 5, 7, 18, 19, 21, 24, 27, 36, 37, 41, 65, 76, 97, 129, 142, 143, 151, 191, 197 beloved, 12, 33, 35, 88, 126, 134, 135, 138, 140, 149, 150, 152, 153, 157, 160, 164, 168, 169, 176, 181, 189–191, 193, 194 beloved community, 28–31 beneficence, 26, 71, 76, 131 benevolence, 24, 15, 36 bilayered relationships, 148 binary, 13, 128, 138 body, 3, 5, 38, 92, 98n10, 109, 119, 120, 122, 123, 133, 158, 184, 191 bonds, 7, 16, 40, 70, 72, 74, 82, 129, 142 boundaries, 49, 191 Bowlby, John, 75 brain, 75, 75n3, 77, 79, 90, 91 Brock, Rita Nakashima, 184, 185, 197n34 Butler, Judith, 108, 108n40, 119 caregiver, 66, 75, 76, 85, 86, 134n15 categorical imperative, 160–62 change of infinity, 166 charity, 170, 170n117 choice, 23, 25, 26, 28, 42–45, 48, 66, 100, 102, 103, 123, 132, 163, 167 Christ, 97, 98, 100, 109, 123, 139, 183, 194, 196 church, 17, 110, 150n67. See also ecclesiology

closeness, 17, 60–62, 65, 66, 68, 71, 77, 80, 88, 89, 91, 145, 147, 149, 153, 155, 157, 177, 184 co-lover, 117, 171, 172, 183 comfort, 78–83, 194 common good, 62, 170, 174, 186 communion, 17, 43, 44, 75, 143n43, 184 companionship, 81, 179 context proximate, 1, 151, 154, 190, 191 ultimate, 151, 154n75, 190, 190n19, 191 creation, 5n11, 7–9, 11, 23, 24, 37, 69, 103, 105, 105n29, 121, 127–29, 142, 144, 174, 176, 179 creaturely goodness, 23, 24, 24n9 Cross, Richard, 113n53 debt, 126 dependence, 56, 78, 79, 191–93 Descartes, René, 193 desire, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 19, 42, 77, 102, 128–31, 136, 138–41, 148, 153, 154, 157, 170, 172, 173, 176, 179, 181, 182, 187, 192, 193 despair, 38, 118, 120, 121, 123, 193–95 dignity, 25, 29, 29n27, 32–35, 40, 44, 45, 58, 64 disposition, 14, 71, 137, 170 dissimilarity, 105–07, 109–12, 144, 147, 149, 153, 157, 165, 166 distress, 71, 74, 76, 77, 79–87, 89 divine presence, 19, 166, 174, 186 DNA, 69, 98n10, 105, 145 duty, 15, 19, 23, 32, 100, 101, 110, 129, 143, 159–65, 168, 169, 194, 195 ecclesiology, 17, 150n67. See also church embeddedness, 21, 28, 61, 63, 69, 70, 72 double, 18, 21, 69, 72 relational, 6

209

Index embodied, 10, 19, 42, 44, 45, 50, 54, 56, 60, 61, 74, 94, 105, 107, 109, 119, 121–24, 130, 146, 151, 151n69, 158, 159, 173, 175, 177, 181, 182, 188 emotion, 48, 71, 75, 79, 82–85, 88, 90, 92, 126, 163, 164, 184 empathy, 71, 76, 81, 83, 84, 133, 164, 184 end in itself, 10, 39, 39n55, 99, 187 ends in themselves, 7, 10, 161, 162 equality, 6, 29, 62, 63, 105, 107, 109, 117, 149–52, 155, 157, 162, 165, 174 eros, 13, 59, 130n3, 139–39, 143, 147, 167 erotic, 17, 119n72, 130, 140, 144, 147, 151–53, 155, 160, 165, 172, 175, 182 eschatological consummation, 68 eternity, 11, 19, 98, 106, 112, 119, 72, 121, 123–27, 155, 167, 158, 166–69 ethical, 10, 63, 99–102, 104, 125, 155 evil, 14, 24n10, 103 exclusion, 96, 106, 107, 147, 159, 177 exile, 8, 38, 39 existence, 13–16, 21, 23, 29–32, 34–36, 38, 40, 44, 54, 56, 61, 65, 69, 97, 100–02, 104–97, 110–13, 115, 123, 127, 131, 139, 140, 152, 154, 167, 175, 176, 186, 194 existential how, 120, 122 expressivism, 47, 49 faith, 16, 34, 36, 38, 41, 44, 54, 101, 103, 104, 118, 121, 125, 139, 146, 189 Farley, Margaret, 142n42 fear, 2, 27, 38, 80, 88, 89, 141, 168, 187, 188 feminist, 6, 113, 143, 144, 148 Ferreira, M. Jamie, 118, 147 finitude, 9, 15, 24, 103, 121, 146, 148, 180, 187–89 flourishing, 7, 17, 35, 80, 130, 134, 142, 151, 179, 182 framework of meaning, 18, 21, 22, 27, 29, 31–38, 41, 42, 65, 69, 72, 100

209

freedom, 5, 33, 61, 79, 84, 85, 98, 102, 118–21, 123, 129, 132, 133, 141, 154, 158, 159, 160n92, 174, 191–93, 196 friendship, 16, 40, 59, 60, 91, 130, 143–47, 151, 152, 155, 160, 164, 165, 167, 168, 175, 182, 184, 193 fulfillment, 13, 14, 46, 51, 53, 137–39, 145, 195 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 64 gender, 63, 86, 86n37, 106, 108, 108n40, 111, 113 gift, 13, 15, 16, 18, 29, 52, 54, 60, 69, 72, 97, 98, 111, 114, 127, 128, 134, 138, 139, 171, 171, 174, 176, 179, 182 globalization, 1, 2, 4, 5, 5n10, 35, 185 God triune, 10, 11, 23, 68, 117, 124, 172, 182, 193 union with, 8, 13, 14, 24, 36, 37, 128, 136, 140, 161, 182 God-relationship, 101, 121, 139, 166, 175, 188, 191 God’s goodness, 23, 24, 26, 170 good life, 23, 32, 34, 39–41 gospel, 19, 23, 24, 68, 111, 159, 176, 178, 186 grace, 5, 13, 15, 21, 24, 34, 39, 68, 69, 72, 75, 81, 93, 97, 103, 104, 124, 128–30, 138, 139, 141, 170, 179, 180, 182, 183, 186, 195, 196 greatest commandment, 5, 59, 64, 93, 129, 130, 152, 159, 162, 173 grief, 81 Groody, Daniel G., 2 habit, 132, 154, 169 haecceity, 18, 50, 113–17, 120, 129, 147n60, 171–74 happiness, 8, 10, 13, 117, 139, 140, 144, 162–64, 168, 172, 193 Hare, John E., 111n46, 113n52, 168n15

210

210

Index

harm, 7, 56n109, 59, 106, 152, 167, 185, 187 heaven, 7, 10, 11 Hegel, G. W. F., 101, 102n19, 104, 156n82 heteronormative patriarchy, 56 historicity, 24, 110, 159 history, 18, 19, 44, 64, 65, 81, 101, 103, 106, 110–12, 123, 125, 144, 175, 188 holiness, 140 Holy Spirit, 12, 13, 15, 16, 19, 23, 14n9, 37, 81, 128, 142, 150, 156–58, 165, 166, 168, 179, 182, 183, 186, 187, 191, 195, 196. See also Spirit home base, 79, 81, 83, 91, 120, 130, 150 goodness of, 1, 7, 19, 181 relational, 17–21, 24, 72, 81, 93, 106, 117, 124, 130, 177, 180, 182, 185, 191, 196 secure, 18, 110, 143 homelessness, 4, 96, 106 horizon of meaning, 18, 21–23, 25, 27, 31, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41–45, 48, 52, 63–64, 68, 70, 83, 186 house, 17n41, 18, 28, 95, 96, 122, 186, 196, 196n32, 197, 197n35 human difference, 6, 18, 19, 95, 102, 113, 144, 147n60 hypergood, 26, 29, 31, 34, 42, 61, 188 hypostatic union, 97, 181, 182

individualism, 22, 47, 48 inequality, 58, 106–08, 151, 192 infinite, 123, 124, 146, 158, 170, 187, 188, 190, 193 injustices, 1, 29n27, 56 interiority, 50, 52, 54, 55, 61, 93, 118, 141, 156, 158, 166, 194 intimacy, 1, 17, 71, 98n10, 145, 148, 151 inwardness, 15, 166, 186, 188

identity, 7, 42, 45, 46, 49, 50, 53, 54, 57–60, 62, 65, 67, 72, 93, 98, 103, 105, 106, 108–12, 114, 118, 123, 143, 144, 154, 155, 167, 183, 190 incarnation, 4, 5n1, 17, 68, 72, 97, 98, 103, 123, 124, 156, 181, 182, 186, 196 inclination, 25, 52, 109, 117, 148, 150, 159, 160, 163–65, 169, 170 independence, 191–93 indifference, 30, 100, 101, 169

law, 68, 104, 161, 162, 194 LBGTQ+, 17, 130n3 letter sent with a forwarding address, 19, 124, 129, 175, 179 Levinas, Emmanuel, 54, 67 Lippitt, John, 45n47, 147 living stones, 16n41, 196 Locke, John, 33 longing, 2, 13–15, 17, 82, 83, 127, 136, 137, 140 lovability, 134, 167, 176

Jesus, 17, 19, 59, 68, 72, 110, 123–25, 162, 168, 173, 181, 182, 196, 197 Johnson, Elizabeth A., 143n34 joy, 14, 81, 87, 136, 140, 144, 146 justice, 25, 29, 29n27, 56, 62, 94n59 Kant, Immanuel, 10, 24n10, 39, 128, 129, 152n72, 160–65, 169, 194 Keller, Catherine, 6n17, 52, 96, 143n43 Kelsey, David, 68, 69, 98n10, 114, 120, 122, 133, 134, 151n69, 154n76 kernel of love, 134–36, 171, 192 Kierkegaard, Søren, 6, 12–19, 24, 29, 30, 39, 43, 50, 54, 76, 80, 96, 98–113, 117–29, 131–52, 155–69, 171, 173–80, 182, 183, 186–90, 192–95 kindness, 24, 26, 27, 71 King Jr., Martin Luther, 28, 28n27 kinship, 15, 40, 59, 60, 65, 130, 143, 182 Krishek, Sharon, 144, 146

21

Index love active, 128 attachment, 5, 7, 14, 16, 19, 22, 24, 24n9, 26, 33, 37, 40, 42, 44, 46, 47, 52, 57, 59, 70, 73, 95, 98, 103, 119, 122, 123, 128, 130, 131, 140, 155–58, 174, 177, 179, 181, 189, 194, 196 divine, 12, 13, 19–21, 26, 29, 35, 37, 46, 59, 69, 103, 105, 127, 128, 131, 134, 138, 146, 151, 154, 165, 169–72, 174, 176, 178, 179, 181, 182, 185, 186, 192, 193, 196, 197 experience of, 7, 12, 31, 39, 45, 124, 137, 186 -flow, 29, 37, 46, 81, 129, 133, 171, 176, 178–80 frui, 9–12, 14, 15 uti, 9–12, 15, 15 God’s, 14, 15, 97, 98, 103, 129, 137, 138, 140, 149–51, 159, 167, 170, 174–76, 179–83, 186, 188, 190, 196 for God, 14, 19, 20, 124, 129, 136, 172, 175, 177–80, 183, 187–90 human, 5, 10–13, 15–17, 19–22, 24, 26, 29, 37, 40, 46, 59, 69, 81, 103, 106, 118, 119, 122–24, 126, 128–30, 133–38, 140–42, 149, 151, 156, 157, 159, 165, 169, 170, 174, 175, 177–83, 185–90, 193, 196, 197 natural, 13, 138, 168, 179, 196 of God, 10, 11, 13, 24, 38, 103, 116, 129, 137–41, 148, 170, 171, 177, 178, 186–88, 196, 197 particular, 105, 109, 129, 143, 145, 149, 152, 154–57, 162, 166, 172, 173, 175 preferential, 110, 129, 143–46, 149–52, 155, 164, 165, 174 reception of, 13, 14, 177, 188 relations of, 1, 21, 21n1, 32, 37, 40, 43, 104, 123, 127, 130n3, 147, 158, 171, 185

211

relationship, 12, 17, 53, 59, 109, 129, 131, 137, 142, 155, 157, 172, 173, 179, 180, 182, 186, 188, 193 rightly ordered, 11 self-giving, 13, 137, 139 -stream, 5, 140 streams of, 7, 20, 35, 54, 174, 180 universal, 19, 59, 72, 143, 155–57, 159, 160, 171–73 unrequited, 194 lover, 12, 15, 26, 35, 65, 82, 88, 126, 127, 131, 134–36, 138, 140, 142, 147, 150, 151, 159, 160, 169, 171, 176, 178, 181, 182, 187, 189–91, 193, 197 Luther, Martin, 36, 38–40, 129, 134, 139, 176 maieutic, 137 malrecognition, 56, 56n109, 62 mature, 104, 122, 124, 132, 138, 141, 150, 154, 175, 197 meaning, 2, 18, 27n19, 27–30, 33–42, 44, 45, 47, 49, 58, 63, 64, 90, 102, 110, 140, 141, 151, 188 meaninglessness, 38, 39 meaning-making, 25–27, 27n19, 30, 32, 33, 35, 41, 43 mediation, 19, 79, 131, 137, 178, 188–90, 192, 193 memory, 75, 76, 79, 80, 85, 90, 92, 116 mentalization, 92, 141, 150n67 mentorship, 59, 60, 70, 130, 182 middle space, 19, 181–83 middle term, 19, 129, 137, 149–51, 159, 179, 181, 183, 186–88, 190, 191, 193, 196 midwife, 135 migrant, 1, 2, 4, 56, 63, 78, 93, 94, 149, 185 migration, 1, 2, 4, 81 Milton, John, 196, 197

21

212

Index

mind, 48, 74–76, 75n3, 79, 80, 84, 90, 92, 93, 99, 107, 114, 116n63, 119, 122, 141, 184 misrecognition, 55, 56, 70 mobility, 1, 4, 6, 97, 185 modernity, 16, 22, 23, 29, 32–37, 39, 40, 42, 47–49, 56, 57, 100, 161 Mooney, Edward F., 121 moral categories, 23, 26, 30 morality, 50, 100, 104, 161 mother, 16, 86n37, 87, 197 mundaneness, 40, 146 mutuality, 149, 191 narrative, 52, 66–69, 76, 81, 89, 90, 92 natural law, 32 nature, 5, 10, 13, 15, 17, 21, 24, 34, 44, 47, 51, 68, 69, 93, 114–17, 128, 138, 139, 179, 180, 182, 183, 195 necessity, 39, 47, 75, 119–21, 123, 158 need, 2, 6, 17, 19, 37, 56, 57, 67–70, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 83, 84, 93, 94, 102, 125, 127–43, 136–40, 148, 150–57, 161–64, 172, 173, 176, 179, 181, 182, 184, 185, 187, 192, 193, 195 neighbor love, 19, 22, 59, 72, 73, 109, 110, 116, 129, 142–45, 147–53, 155–59, 162, 164–71, 173, 174 neoliberal, 4 neuropsychology, 18 neuroscience, 74, 133 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 36 nonpreferential, 144, 146, 149, 150 nonrecognition, 55, 106, 169 Nygren, Anders, 11 O’Donovan, Oliver, 10, 11 oligarchy, 56 ordinary life, 29, 29n30, 39, 40, 60, 61

pain, 78, 81, 82, 179, 194, 195 paradigm of meaning, 22, 25, 33, 37, 39, 40, 42, 65, 73, 100 particular relationships, 131, 134, 154, 157, 164 particular, the, 52, 101, 104–06, 108, 109, 115, 142, 144, 148, 150, 173 particularity, 6n17, 18, 45, 49, 50, 54, 59, 64, 70, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104–07, 110–17, 129, 131–34, 142, 144, 154–56, 159, 170, 173, 180, 181, 187, 192 partner, 60, 61, 78, 81–85, 88, 90, 93, 142, 146, 153, 159, 167, 190 passion, 124, 137, 140, 149, 150, 156, 169, 188, 193, 195 pedagogy, 137 performance, 5, 92, 105, 108, 130, 132, 141, 159, 175, 184 pilgrim, 11, 138 plasticity, 97 Plato, 11, 19, 129, 136, 163 pneumatological, 5, 5n11, 19, 24n9, 128, 156, 159, 166, 174, 175, 179, 181, 182, 191, 193, 194 postmodernity, 22, 23, 34–37, 42, 48, 57, 58 poverty, 2, 57, 97, 136, 185 power, 4, 20, 31, 39, 49, 54, 71, 91, 97, 100, 107, 120, 121–23, 131, 134, 139, 140, 150, 168, 170, 176, 179, 180, 182–87, 191, 193–96 proximity, 12, 29, 31, 74, 75, 77–80, 83–87, 132, 148, 177 psychology, 5, 18, 74 evolutionary, 77 queer, 56, 86n37, 113 race, 63, 106, 111 reason, 49, 102, 104, 126, 160, 160n92, 162, 162n98, 163, 184, 186 recognition, 18, 22, 50, 52–73, 76, 77, 104, 123, 126, 142, 153, 169 redoubling, 177

213

Index relational impoverishment, 4–7 relational structure, 120, 124, 194 relationality, 6, 76, 93, 134, 143, 150, 179, 185 reliability, 71, 81, 167 religious, the, 99–101, 103, 104 religiousness A, 101 religiousness B, 101, 104, 138 resonance, 53, 61, 91, 93, 126, 142, 183, 196 resource, 77, 79, 129, 153, 163, 195 resourcefulness, 128, 130, 132, 192 respect, 26, 26, 31, 33, 35, 40, 44, 45, 56, 63, 64, 82, 162 responsibility, 30, 54, 91, 103, 112, 139, 141, 149 rest, 4, 8, 11, 72, 83, 138, 139, 197n35 Ricoeur, Paul, 67 romance, 40, 70, 91, 143, 146, 155, 160, 167, 168 Romanticism, 47, 49 sacramental, 12, 128, 129, 151, 155, 179, 186 safety, 4, 18, 80, 81, 83, 93, 94, 130 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 172 Samaritan, 111, 112 sanctification, 110, 151, 164, 165, 182, 183 Scotus, John Duns, 18, 19, 50, 98, 113–17, 120, 126, 128, 129, 137n26, 144, 147, 147n60, 170–74, 183, 186 security, 75, 78, 79, 82–84, 87, 89, 167, 173 seed of love, 127, 134–37, 139, 141, 142, 181, 192 self-actualization, 18, 43, 44, 51, 57, 60, 74, 75, 83, 86, 91, 100 self-expressivity, 60, 166 self authentic, 18, 53, 59, 62, 104 autonomous, 43 buffered, 48, 49

213

-in-the-making, 28, 30, 35, 52, 95, 98, 99, 102, 124, 135 making of the, 5, 12, 14, 15, 25, 44, 54, 76, 138, 142, 165 particular, 19, 117, 132 porous, 48, 49 relational, 6, 121 sense of, 1, 2, 28, 31, 33, 41, 44, 55, 62, 65, 66, 70, 74, 90–93, 111, 135 unique, 46, 101, 103, 106, 173 selfhood, 22, 23, 30, 33, 46, 51, 56, 57, 80, 93, 103, 104, 122, 194 selfishness, 107, 143, 152, 153, 159, 162 self-love, 119n72, 146, 152, 164, 165, 187, 190 sexuality, 63, 106, 108 Shire, Warsan, 2 significant others, 18, 21, 21n1, 22, 37, 55, 59, 61, 62, 66, 86, 90, 143 significant relations, 57, 160 similarity, 106, 109, 111, 151 sin, 11, 14, 23, 24, 56, 58, 98n10 singularity, 19, 103, 114, 131, 145, 147, 151, 171 Socrates, 135 soft(er) valuations, 27 solitariness, 66, 179 sorrow, 70, 71, 74, 77, 194, 195 soul, 4, 16, 119, 120, 122, 123, 158 special relations, 117, 129, 143, 153, 157, 157n85 Spirit, 16, 101, 102, 156, 165, 183, 186, 187, 191, 197. See also Holy Spirit strangers, 15, 71, 93, 94n59 stress, 77, 79, 80, 84 striving, 13, 55, 128, 138, 139 strong valuations, 27 subjective rights, 32, 33, 161 subjective turn, 15, 32

214

214

Index

subjectivity, 1, 7, 18, 19, 22, 23, 41, 47, 49, 52–56, 59, 61, 68, 94, 98, 101, 105, 106, 110, 129, 131, 132, 134, 180 Tanner, Kathryn, 97, 183 Taylor, Charles, 6, 15, 16, 18, 22, 25–30, 32–39, 41–43, 45–48, 50–56, 58, 60–63, 65–67, 100, 153, 186, 188 temporal, 11, 98, 106, 110, 119, 120, 124, 126, 138, 140, 144, 158, 159, 167, 169, 188–90, 193 temporality, 98, 106, 109, 110, 118–21, 126, 137, 144, 158, 167, 168, 180 theological anthropology, 5, 7, 19, 21, 68, 75, 89, 98, 105, 110, 111, 117, 140, 142–44, 155, 173, 190 theology of love, 19, 129, 142, 143, 173 threat, 78, 80, 96 time, 4, 18, 19, 64, 67, 70, 96, 98, 99, 102, 103, 106, 110–12, 122–26, 132, 133, 167–69, 171, 173 transcendent, 101, 103, 140, 150, 182 transience, 1, 8, 187 trauma, 192 trinity, 8, 9, 17, 117, 151n69, 170 trust, 13, 70, 71, 84, 89, 103, 128, 139, 184 ultimate good, 8, 11, 12, 24, 30, 171 uniqueness, 46, 51, 80, 96, 98, 102, 103, 111, 114, 117, 123, 131, 145, 147n60, 152–54, 171, 174, 180

universal neighbor, 22, 59, 73, 105, 109, 110, 129, 143, 145, 148–50, 155, 156, 169, 170, 174 universal, the, 50, 98, 101, 104–06, 108–11, 115, 129, 142, 144, 173 universality, 18, 42, 45, 58, 72, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 109, 111n49, 115, 117, 148, 149, 159–62, 170, 173, 174 validation, 62, 70 Vanier, Jean, 183, 184 vision of the good, 23–36, 29–31, 43–45, 48, 51, 64, 69 Volf, Miroslav, 24n8 watermark, 111, 112 way of life, 26, 42, 43, 69, 188 web of belonging, 76 well-being, 6, 21, 24, 25, 38, 62, 63, 71, 77, 82, 90, 93, 116, 130, 134, 153, 163, 182 white supremacy, 56 Whitman, Walt, 95, 96 will, 71, 117, 123, 124, 160n92, 161–64, 172 wisdom, 133, 134 womanist, 113, 153 yearning, 14, 15, 136, 137, 140 Zizioulas, John, 143n43