Love

Human beings also appear to have a “sense” of perfect and unconditional love. Not only do we have the power to love (i.e., the power to be naturally connected to another human being in profound empathy, emotion, care, self-gift, concern, and acceptance), we have a “sense” of what this profound interpersonal connection would be like if it were perfect. This sense of perfect love has the positive effect of inciting us to pursue ever more perfect forms of love. However, it has the drawback of inciting us to expect ever more perfect love from other human beings. This generally leads to frustrated expectations of others and consequently to a decline of relationships that can never grow fast enough to match this expectation of perfect and unconditional love.

This phenomenon gradually manifests itself. For example, as the first signs of imperfection, conditionedness, and finitude begin to emerge in one’s beloved, one may show slight irritation, but have hopes that the ideal will soon be recaptured (as if it were ever captured to begin with). But as the fallibility of the beloved begins to be more acutely manifest (the other is not perfectly humble, gentle, kind, forgiving, self-giving, and concerned with me in all my interests) the irritation becomes frustration, which, in turn, becomes dashed expectation: “I can’t believe I thought she was really the One.” Of course, she wasn’t the One, because she is not perfect and unconditioned. Nevertheless, the dashed expectation becomes either quiet hurt or overt demands, both aimed at extracting a higher level of performance from the beloved. When she does not comply, thoughts of terminating the relationship may arise.

The root problem was not with the authenticity of this couple’s love for one another. It did not arise out of a lack of concern, care, and responsiveness, or a lack of desire to be self-giving, responsible, self-disciplined, and true. Rather, it arose out of a false expectation that they could be perfect and unconditional love, truth, goodness, fairness, meaning, and home for one another.

Why do we fall prey to what seems to be such an obvious error? Because our desire for love and to love is unconditional, but our actuality is conditioned. Our desire is for the perfect, but our actuality is imperfect. We, as human beings, therefore, cannot satisfy one another’s desire for the unconditional and the perfect. If we do not have a real unconditional and perfect being to satisfy this desire, we start looking around us to find a surrogate. Other human beings at first seem like a very good surrogate, because they display qualities of self-transcendence. Hence, we confuse one another for the perfect and unconditioned, and undermine the very relationships which hold out opportunities for growth, depth, joy, common cause, and mutual bondedness.

What is the origin of this desire for unconditional love? Just as the unrestricted desire to know must include a notional awareness of complete intelligibility to give rise to an awareness of and dissatisfaction with every manifestation of incomplete intelligibility, so also the desire for unconditional love must include a notional awareness of unconditional love to give rise to the awareness of and dissatisfaction with every manifestation of conditioned and imperfect love. This notional awareness of unconditional love seems to be beyond any specifically known or concretely experienced love, for it seems to cause dissatisfaction with every conditioned love we have known or experienced. Thus, our dissatisfaction would seem to arise out of an ideal of unconditional love which has neither been experienced nor actualized. How can we have an awareness of love that we have neither known nor experienced? How can we even extrapolate to it if we do not know where we are going? The inability to give a logical answer to these questions has led some philosophers to associate the desire for unconditional love with “the notion of unconditional love within us,” which would seem to have its origin in unconditional love itself.

Lonergan believes that when we fulfill our desire for unconditional love by authentically loving God, we simultaneously fulfill our capacity for self-transcendence, which includes our desire for perfect truth, goodness, and beauty:

I have conceived being in love with God as an ultimate fulfillment of man’s capacity for self-transcendence; and this view of religion is sustained when God is conceived as the supreme fulfillment of the transcendental notions, as supreme intelligence, truth, reality, righteousness, goodness.^[10]

Once again, the human awareness of and desire for the perfect and unconditional manifests a dimension which is not reducible to algorithmically finite (physical) structures; and so it seems that we have yet another trans-physical (spiritual), self-transcendent power.