In February 2020, Pamela Anderson separated from her movie mogul husband of 12-days, Jon Peters, declaring: “Life is a journey and love is a process. With that universal truth in mind, we have mutually decided to put off the formalization of our marriage certificate and put our faith in the process.” Britney Spears described falling out of love overnight with a former teenage boyfriend in her now famous April 1999 Rolling Stones cover story, saying, “I just woke up one day and click, it was gone.” Oxford Reference online brings together “2 million digitized entries across Oxford University Press’s Dictionaries, Companions and Encyclopedias” and defines love as “An intense feeling of fondness or attraction, deeper and stronger than liking, especially when associated with a romantic or sexual attachment to someone.”
All three of these examples share something in common, namely, the belief or conviction that love is a feeling, an “intense feeling,” which, like most other feelings, can run its course and be “gone.” Love is more a “process” than a “formalization” as one might expect to find, for example, in a “marriage certificate.”
While only a small sample, the above examples reflect some of the more common perspectives on love in the early 21st century. Love is a feeling. It is more fluid and open than formal and restraining. It is spontaneous, akin to Heraclitus’s metaphor of the river, wherein “no man ever steps in the same river twice.” In its most genuine form, love has no form but rather flows continuously with no constraint, at least until it doesn’t flow anymore.
This understanding of love is reflected in the marked increase among Catholic couples who are cohabitating before marriage. The Bishops of Pennsylvania defined “cohabitation” as “the relationship of a man and woman who are sexually active and share a household, though they are not married.” According to a survey of U.S. adults conducted by the Pew Research Center in October 2019, 62% of Catholics said that casual sex outside of marriage was “sometimes or always acceptable.”
What is less understood, however, is how these popular notions of love tend to oppose love and law in a way that is foreign to a biblical perspective on love and human relationships. According to these popular understandings, when St. Paul taught that “one who loves another has fulfilled the law” (Rom. 13:8), it is interpreted to mean that the law is left behind, its formalism and justice set aside by the meeker, more positive, less judgmental disposition of love. But this is a misinterpretation for several reasons.
First, if love is a feeling and, as St. John teaches us, “God is love” (1 Jn. 4:8), then God is a feeling. I’ll leave it to the better reflection of the reader to draw out the disastrous implications for all of us were it true that God is a feeling. There are too many to recount here, but suffice it to say that Jesus was not “feeling it” amid His consummate act of love upon the Cross on Good Friday.
Secondly, when Paul teaches that “one who loves another has fulfilled the law,” he doesn’t mean we leave the law behind. Instead, he teaches us something about love, namely, love fulfills the law and does not break the law. Deeds violating the law of God are not deeds of love, since love fulfills the law instead of breaking it. So, for example, entering the bridal chamber outside of marriage, which today is widely construed as “making love,” is a violation of the Sixth Commandment of the Decalogue and so cannot be called love, at least not from within a biblical perspective. Missing Mass on Sunday violates the Third Commandment of the Decalogue. This is more than a failure to follow the rules. It is a failure to love because love fulfills the law and does not violate it.
This is consistent with the teaching of Christ who declared, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” (Mt. 5:17). We do not leave the law behind in the fulfillment of love. Rather, in love, we fulfill the law instead of neglecting it or otherwise setting it aside in all its formalism by violating it.
St. Bonaventure made a similar point when he taught that the law of God is not “kept in the same way in the old and new law, but better in the new, and more completely in the fatherland. For God lives according to the laws that he gave” (see Collations on the Hexaemeron, Conference Thirteen, #17). If God lives according to the laws that He gave us, and God is love, then love is never lawless. Thus, when we violate the law, we are not so much growing in the perfection of love as sowing lawlessness in ourselves and in others. But lawlessness has nothing to do with the One True God who is love.
So, whence comes this idea that love dispenses with the formal requirements of the law to thereby render love lawless? Paul opposes Christ and a figure he calls the “lawless one” in his second letter to the Thessalonians (2:8-9). He describes the lawless one as “one whose coming springs from the power of Satan in every mighty deed and in signs and wonders that lie.” Constrained now by “the restrainer” the “lawless one” will appear when the restrainer is removed. He will be let loose for a time during which he will sow “wonders that lie,” but Christ will ultimately destroy and render him powerless “by the manifestation of his coming.”
We might be tempted to conclude that we are living in the final era when the “lawless one” will be let loose to wreak havoc upon our world, but this is not necessarily the case. Paul also stated in the same letter, “For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work” (2 Thess. 2:7), and Jesus called Satan a liar and the “father of lies” (Jn. 8:44). At the very least, these texts indicate the deceptive source of subtlety evident in any notion of love with lawlessness as its fruit. It also gives new meaning to Paul exhorting the Ephesians to live “the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15) which means living love in truth by fulfilling the law of God instead of violating it, since true love is never lawless. The truth about love comes from the nature of God who, being love, fulfills the law, since even “God lives according to the laws that he gave,” meaning He will never lie.
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