At its highest, love is not a spontaneous feeling. There is nothing spontaneous about an egalitarian community of comrades—it requires hard work and full commitment. There is nothing spontaneous even about sexual love, which is only ever satisfied by the proof that it is, at bottom, a free and deliberate choice: even among non-religious people, sex either tends toward something like a marriage vow or becomes spiteful, cruel, not-love. This is why love can and should be paradoxically commanded: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you” (John 15:12). True love is a practice, a fundamental mode of dealing with another person.
True love is hard, then, tough—not sentimental. How does love look when we do not perform it as though obeying a divine command? Neil Gaiman perfectly described how spontaneous love ends up:
Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up a whole suit of armor, for years, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… You give them a piece of you. They don’t ask for it. They do something dumb one day, like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like “Maybe we should be just friends” … turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-insideyou-and-rips-you-apart pain…. I hate love.[1]
This is a correct description of love as a self-destructive human passion lacking the divine dimension. To attain true love, we have to reach beyond humanism: even loving directly all of humanity is not enough. Christ has to be here. (Recall what Gilbert Keith Chesterton said: “Christ did not love humanity, He never said He loved humanity; He loved men. Neither He nor anyone else can love humanity; it is like loving a gigantic centipede.”)[2] Why do we need Christ and his difficult command to love? Because we are fallen. (This stance was nicely summed up by Rúben Gallo who wrote: “Human beings, regardless of gender, race, social class, or nationality, are invariably selfish, cruel, and corrupt.”[3] Gallo’s statement is the truth of the liberal-humanist motto: “All humans, independently of their sex, race, religion and wealth, share the same rights to freedom and dignity.” This fallenness is why Raffaele Nogaro, bishop emeritus of Caserta, is right to claim that Christ’s words on the cross “Father, why have you abandoned me?” are “L’affermazione del fallimento di ogni vita cosciente e responsabile” [an affirmation of the failure of every conscious and responsible life].) Are we not utopian here?
Are we not preaching an impossible ideal by advocating for a love that can be commanded beyond everything that is human in us? Absolutely not: we should learn to discern the traces of superhuman, loving solidarity that still abound all around us, although we are conditioned to ignore them like the good old Pavlov’s dog. There is a notion which shows a way to make one’s life meaningful without falling into a trap of some higher power guaranteeing this meaning— including the “higher power” of enjoyment which liberal-captalist regimes mandate as the necessary guarantee of any act’s authenticity. I am speaking of vocation. In his Shattered, Hanif Kureishi notes that, much more than top specialist doctors, nurses are those who consider their job a vocation:
In every town, in every city in the world there are hospitals that are full of nurses doing a devoted job. From the conversations I’ve had with the nurses, with whom I spend most of my days, and some of my nights—not having known any before— they consider their work to be a vocation, a calling, a whole way of life. They dress and undress me, wash my body, genitals and arse, cleaning everything. They brush my hair, change my dressings, feed and engage me in conversations; insert suppositories, change my catheter and brush my teeth, shave and transfer me from bed to chair—this is their everyday work…. The nurses here are cheerful, they sing and make jokes, but they are not well paid. Wages are certainly lower in Italy than they are in the UK but they have been doing this for years and, as far as I can tell, want to carry on. One nurse told me he didn’t have a girlfriend because he was too exhausted from his work to sustain a romantic relationship.[4]
We are not talking here about some higher form of creativity (art, politics, science, etc.) which passionately occupies us, although this also opposes those jobs which we do only for money. We are talking about hard, unpleasant work which brings no satisfaction and little remuneration. We do it because we feel that we simply cannot not do it. In an authentic vocation, I don’t choose it but am chosen by it. It is love commanded.
This shows that the idea that human nature (if we risk this term, whatever it could mean) is basically egotist and utilitarian is as wrong as the idea that it is basically good and only corrupted in societies in which exploitation reigns. In fact, regular human beings violate both creeds or, as Freud puts it in “The Ego and the Id”: “If anyone were to put forward the paradoxical proposition that normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes but also far more moral than he knows, psycho-analysis, on whose findings the first half of the assertion rests, would have no objection to raise against the second half.”[5]
For all its apparent individualism, the idea that human beings are only ever self-interested is basically pantheistic, Buddhist: to do good to the world becomes identical with doing good to yourself, just as doing evil to the world becomes identical with doing evil to yourself, with acting against your own self-interest. Man and the world are really one thing. Christianity does not identify evil with the self and its interest but with the lack of love owed to God and neighbor. The core of what we refer to as “evil” is not egotism but envy and resentment, which make me act against my rational interests since the other’s displeasure matters to me more than my own pleasure. Genuine passionate hatred of another person is impossible if everyone is egoistic. It is retained by Christianity. Gilbert Keith Chesterton fully assumed the implications of this paradox, which is why he rejected the (then and now) fashionable claim about the “alleged spiritual identity of Buddhism and Christianity”:
Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces…. This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea. The worldsoul of the Theosophists asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it. But the divine centre of Christianity actually threw man out of it in order that he might love it…. All modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls.[6]
A tremendous violence thus dwells in the very heart of the Christian notion of the love for one’s neighbor: a violence which finds its most direct expression in a series of Christ’s disturbing statements—here are the main versions:
Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it. (Matt 10:34–39)
How are we to read these statements?
Christian doxa resorts to five strategies to deal with them.
The first two are outright ones: one gets rid of the problem by disputing the standard translation, suggesting either a modest correction (one corrects “those who do not hate their father,” etc., to “those who do not prefer me to their father”: so that we get nothing more than a certain hierarchy of love enjoined by a jealous god, i.e. “love your father, but love me more”) or else a radical change (such as claiming that “gaudium” is to be translated as “joy,” not “a sword,” so that Jesus “brings joy”); the other heroically accepts the message imposed by the literal reading and claims that Christ himself advocates violence to crush enemies.
What then follows are three more sophisticated strategies. The first one (arguably the most disgusting and politically dangerous one) claims that Christ’s message “I … bring … a sword” has to be read together with its apparent opposite, the “pacifist” warning that “All those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword” (Matt 26:52): such that the sword Christ is talking about when he announces that he “brings a sword” is the second sword in “those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword”— it is others who take up the first sword, i.e., attack Christians, and Christians have the full right to defend themselves by the second sword that Christ brings, if necessary. In short, only by taking up the sword in defense of those things that are harmed by the swords of others can those others be stopped.
This is also how such a strategy would deal with the passage from Luke 22:36 (“if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one”). It should be read: “buy a sword to finish off those who started it.” The problem with this reading is, of course, that it courts the danger of sanctioning the most brutal violence as a defense against those who attacked us, even giving such violence the clout of fulfilling the divine prophecy-injunction (“those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword”). Hitler claimed exactly the same—he used the sword only to destroy those who already took up the sword against Germany.
The fourth strategy is to read Christ’s words not as an injunction or threat, but as a simple prediction and warning to his followers: “I bring a sword” means “When you spread my message, you should be ready for the hatred of those who will ferociously oppose it and use the sword against it”—a prediction fully confirmed by many pogroms against Christians in the Roman Empire. It is in this sense that Christ is turning husband against wife, etc.: when a wife accepts Christianity before her husband, this can of course engender his animosity toward her.
The problem with this reading is that it fails to account for the much stronger injunction to (actively) hate your father, etc., not just to get ready to (passively) endure their hatred. When Christ enjoins his followers to hate their parents, etc., there is no qualification that they should do it only if their parents oppose their faith in Christ—the injunction clearly imposes a hatred that as it were makes the first move, beginning by itself, not just reacting to others’ hatred.
I think the solution here is that we should hate our parents insofar as they are parents, parts of a social hierarchy, not as persons:
Then Jesus’ mother and brothers came and stood outside. They sent someone in to summon Him, and a crowd was sitting around Him. “Look,” He was told, “Your mother and brothers are outside, asking for You.” But Jesus replied, “Who are My mother and My brothers?” Looking at those seated in a circle around Him, He said, “Here are My mother and My brothers! For whoever does the will of God is My brother and sister and mother.” (Mark 3:31–35)
Here, of course, we are not dealing with a simple brutal hatred demanded by a cruel and jealous God: family relations stand here metaphorically for the entire socio-symbolic network, for any particular ethnic “substance” that determines our place in the global Order of Things. The “hatred” enjoined by Christ is therefore not a kind of pseudo-dialectical opposite to love, but a direct expression of what St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 13, deployed as agape, the key intermediary term between faith and hope: it is love itself that enjoins us to “unplug” from our organic community into which we were born, or, as St. Paul put it, for a Christian, there are neither men nor women, neither Jews nor Greeks, etc. Once again we can see why this love must be commanded, how it opposes and reaches beyond what is human, and so cannot be expressed except as a hatred for precisely what is most natural and human about us: loving “Mom and Dad,” loving our home, loving our immediate and comforting environment. All this risks the disappointing dead-end of “spontaneous” love and must be rebuked if we are to risk a love that reaches beyond our enjoyment, if we are to take up our vocation, loving with the total, radical commitment of one obeying a divine command.
When Jesus had risen from the dead, his first words to the apostles were: “Peace be with you” (John 20:19). This peace must oppose that peace which he says “I do not come to bring” (Matthew 10:34) but which he disrupts with a “sword.” Perhaps we, fearing death from natural disasters, wars, and social catastrophes, are well positioned to understand this false “peace” that Jesus would destroy. The term “peace” has at least two very problematic uses today. First, military aggressions are as a rule declared to be interventions to secure peace—Russia wants peace in Ukraine, Israel wants peace in Gaza… Peace as a goal is not enough, it should not be used as a direct justification of brutal military acts. Second, it is also not enough to reduce “peace” to inner peace, certainty, and confidence. From the ancient times of the Bhagavad Gita and Zen, military doctrine advises soldiers that they must act with inner peace and distance from external reality: avoiding direct subjective engagement, not identifying with one’s own acts, is the key to success. This “peace” is becoming a technologically attained reality today: more and more military operations are done from a safe distance, the soldier is sitting far from the front, pushing buttons or moving a joystick in front of a screen to direct a rocket or a drone. A Ukrainian gamer-turned-drone operator said video games have helped him fight Russians. He told Reuters his mother said his gaming would come to nothing— but now he’s making deadly drone strikes. Already years ago, the notorious Wagner Group was also searching for experienced gamers.[7] It is against this background that “Peace be with you” should be read today: when Jesus said it, it was as a simple greeting of his comrades, the apostles—“peace” is here a social category, a way of being-with-others here and now, not an inner stance or a distant goal. “Peace” is a mode of existence of the Holy Spirit. Those who have it have the power to love unconditionally, with the love commanded by God.
In this true love, I do not love a neighbor for his/her properties, I love him/her for a void that is in him/her beyond his/her properties. This nothing—whose stand-in (or place-holder) is what Lacan called objet a, what is in you more than yourself—is the focus of love, or, as Simone Weil put it: “Where there is nothing, read that I love you.” A scene from the end of the movie A River Runs Through It makes this clear. Rev. Maclean gives a sermon about being unable to help loved ones who are destroying themselves and will not accept help: all that those who truly care for such a self-destructive person can do is to give unconditional love, even without understanding why.[8] This is the Christian stance at its purest: not the promise of salvation but just such unconditional love, whose message is: “I know you are bent on destroying yourself, I know I cannot prevent it, but without understanding why I love you unconditionally, without any constraint.”
Do these lines not evoke the enigmatic scene in Gethsemane from Matthew where Jesus tells his disciples who lie tired around him: “I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me” (Matt 26:36–38)? Liza Thompson pointed out that Jesus is here “asking for solidarity. Not followers or crowds to listen to his teachings but an act of togetherness. And it comes from a place of such radical vulnerability that it disrupts notions of Jesus as some kind of hierarchical leader.”[9] Jesus himself is here on the path to his self-destruction (he knows that he will die in terrible pain the very next day), and the only thing he asks his followers is to give him their unconditional love, even without understanding why.
This also allows us to provide the only consistent Christian answer to the eternal critical question: was God there in Auschwitz? How could he allow such immense suffering? Why didn’t he intervene and prevent it? The answer is neither that we should learn to withdraw from our terrestrial vicissitudes and identify with the blessed peace of God who dwells above our misfortunes, from where we become aware of the ultimate nullity of our human concerns (the standard pagan answer), nor that God knows what He is doing and will somehow repay us for our suffering, heal our wounds, and punish the guilty (the standard teleological answer). The answer is found, for example, in the final scene of Shooting Dogs, a film about the Rwandan genocide, in which a group of Tutsi refugees in a Christian school know that they will be shortly slaughtered by a Hutu mob. A young British teacher in the school breaks down in despair and asks his father figure, the priest (played by John Hurt), where Christ is now to prevent the slaughter. The priest’s answer is: Christ is now present here more than ever, he is suffering here with us.[10] Chesterton marvels at this in Orthodoxy:
When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.[11]
This is why Christianity is
terribly revolutionary. That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have His back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents forever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king.[12]
The mystery of suffering is not resolved by reason but by solidarity, by the Incarnation. God joins humanity in its fallen state, that is, in its condition of being without God in the world. This could only mean death: God becomes, like us, without God, that is, without himself.
This is why so many essays are entitled “a politico-theological treatise”: a theory becomes theology when it begins to imitate Jesus Christ on the cross—when it becomes part of a full, vulnerable, incarnate, subjective political engagement. As Kierkegaard pointed out, I do not acquire faith in Christ after comparing different religions and deciding that the best reasons speak for Christianity—there are reasons to choose Christianity, but these reasons only appear after I’ve already chosen it, i.e., to see the reasons for belief one already has to believe. And the same holds for Marxism: it is not that, after objectively analyzing history, I became a Marxist— my decision to be a Marxist (the experience of a proletarian position) makes me see the reasons for it, i.e., Marxism is the paradox of an objective “true” knowledge accessible only through a subjective partial position. This is why Robespierre was right when he distrusted materialism as the philosophy of decadent-hedonist and corrupted nobility, and tried to impose a new religion of the Supreme Being of Reason (the main target of his hatred was Joseph Fouche, a radical atheist and an opportunist plotter). The old reproach to Marxism that its commitment to a bright future is a secularization of religious salvation should be proudly assumed.
This is also why the genuine dimension of Christian doubt does not concern the existence of God: its logic is not “I feel such a need to believe in God, but I cannot be sure that he really exists, that he is not just a chimera of my imagination.” (A humanist atheist can easily respond to this: “then drop God and simply assume the ideals God stands for as your own.”) An authentic Christian is indifferent toward the infamous proofs of God’s existence. What the position of Christian doubt involves is a pragmatic paradox succinctly rendered by Alyosha in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov: God exists but I am not sure whether I believe in him[13]—where “I believe in him” refers to the believer’s readiness to fully assume the existential engagement implied by such a belief.
The question of the ‘existence of God’ is not really at the heart of Dostoyevsky’s labors…. Alyosha’s uncertainty about whether he ‘believes in God’ is an uncertainty about whether the life he leads and the feelings he has are the life and the feelings that would rightly follow from belief in God.[14]
It is in this sense that every theology is political, confronting us with the question of our social engagement. That’s why I fully endorse Nogaro’s motto: “Con Gesù non occorre credere, basta amare” [With Jesus, you do not need to believe, you just love.]
I likewise agree with Nogaro that “Infatti— magari inconsapevolmente—tutte le genti attendono Gesù e hanno il desiderio di ‘incontrarlo’ ” [in fact— perhaps unconsciously—all people await Jesus and have the desire to meet him], but I would not read this statement as an assertion of direct teleology— in my view, there is a subtle retroactivity at work in it. The arrival of Christ was an unpredictable absolute Event, and after this event happened, we are compelled to read the entire preceding history as announcing it. In a similar way, one should also understand why Immanuel Kant claims that, in some sense, the world was created so that we can fight our moral struggles in it: when we are caught in an intense struggle which means everything to us, we experience it as if the whole world will collapse if we fail; the same holds also when we fear the failure of an intense love affair. There is no direct teleology here, our love is the result of a contingent encounter, so it could easily not have happened—but once it does happen, it decides how we experience the whole of reality. When Benjamin wrote that a big revolutionary battle decides not only the fate of the present but also of all past failed struggles, he mobilizes the same retroactive mechanism that reaches its climax in religious claims that, in a crucial battle, not only the fate of us but the fate of God himself is decided.
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This essay was originally published in New Polity, Issue 5.4 (March 2025). We recommend you subscribe for all their best essays.
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Notes:
[1] Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, vol. 9, The Kindly Ones (New York: DC Comics, 1996), part 9 (issue 65), 7–8.
[2] G. K. Chesterton, “Tolstoy and the Cult of Simplicity,” in Twelve Types (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1906), 164.
[3] Rúben Gallo, Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 169–170.
[4] Hanif Kureishi, Shattered (London: Penguin 2024), 154–55.
[5] Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 19 (London: Hogarth, 1961), 52.
[6] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1995 [1908]), 136, 139.
[7] Mia Jankowicz, “Ukrainian soldier credits video-game obsession for his ability to strike Russian targets with drones,” Yahoo! News, August 14, 2023, www.yahoo.com/news/ ukrainian-soldier-credits-video-game-154351722.html.
[8] A River Runs Through It, directed by Robert Redford, 1999.
[9] Liza Thompson, personal communication.
[10] Shooting Dogs, directed by Michael Caton-Jones, 2005.
[11] Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 145.
[12] Ibid.
[13] See Rowan Williams, Dostoyevsky (London: Continuum, 2008), 8.
[14] Ibid.
The featured image is “Bernger von Horheim in the Codex Manesse” (early 14th century), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
