A God of perfect love

(See here for previous post.) Suppose we grant that Allen’s description of the “experience of perfect love” – a loving apprehension of the givenness of beings which don’t exist for our sake or to be of use to us, but which have their own integrity and goodness – correspondes to a real, if fleeting, part of human experience. Why should this experience be taken to be particularly revelatory of the nature of reality in general? Why privilege this experience over those of pain, futility, hatred, boredom or any of the myriad other states that make up our experience?

Allen says that a portrayal of the universe such that the experience of perfect love is central is necessary “for one experience among many to be given overriding importance, as the one experience that allows all others to be ordered around it. Given an appropriate view of reality, we see how it is that the experience is the correct one for people to have as their goal and standard. To give it a setting, then, allows us to understand how that experience may be a bearer of truth” (p. 40).

This may sound like he’s begging the question. After all, why construct a picture of the world specificially to provide pride of place to one kind of experience? Following Iris Murdoch, he says that one reason to trust the experience of perfect love as a truth-bearing experience is that it enables us to take a more realisitc perspective on things. When I realize that I am just one particular thing in the universe rather than that around which everything else revolves, when I see other things and people as having their own integrity and goodness quite apart from any use they might be to me, I attain a truer understanding of the world. “The experience of perfect love is a bearer of truth precisely because we are but one reality among many others” (p. 40).

But his purpose, at least at this point, is not to compel us to accept this account of reality, but rather to show how an interpretation of reality that takes perfect love as its animating principle can be a “plausible and attractive one, and this view can be used as one standard in the evaluation of other theological interpretations” (p. 57-8).

Although he doesn’t elaborate at this point, part of what I take him to be saying is that our interpretation of reality is “underdetermined” by the “data” of human experience. That is to say, our experience doesn’t “force” any one interpretation on us, but allows for a multiplicity of views about the ultimate nature of reality. So how we determine which view will guide our lives depends, at least in part, on factors like “attractiveness.” He maintains that Christian teachings shed a certain light on our experience and can show us why love matters. “If love matters, this doctrine matters, since it expresses love on a cosmic scale; love does matter, as we have seen, because to perceive from a moral position is to perceive more realistically” (p. 45).

Allen goes on to explain how the doctrines of creation ex nihilo and the Trinity portray a God of perfect love. “Prior” to creation (if we can talk that way) God, while alone, lacked nothing. He exists in perfect, self-sufficient blessedness. Creation, then, is an act motivated entirely by God’s love. God freely ushered into being a universe of creatures and delights in their existence. Rather than an abstract piece of speculative metaphysics, the doctrine of creation shows us what it means for God to be a God of love. What this picture of reality allows us to do, Allen thinks, is to test competing views to see if they can make adequate sense of our experience.

One thing I like about Allen’s approach is that he’s “postmodern” enough to realize that he’s not going to offer an argument that will compel any sufficiently rational person to accept the truth of Christianity. And he also realizes that the hegemony of the Enlightenment account of truth and rationality is waning. But that doesn’t mean that Christians should retreat into their own little cultural-linguistic enclave where there is no point of contact between the Christian account of reality and general human experience. No amount of post-modern hand-waving is going to prevent people from asking the question But is it true?