THREE TO GET MARRIED



by Fulton J. Sheen, Ph.D., D.D. 

Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc. New York


Copyright, 1951, BY FULTON J. SHEEN


Nihil Obstat:
Rt. Rev. John M. A. Fearns, S.T.D., Censor Librorum


Imprimatur: Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York 
April 16, 1951

Permission has been granted for inclusion of quotations from the 
following books in copyright:

"Sex and Common-Sense" by Agnes Maude Royden. New York: 1922, 
G. P. Putnam's Sons.

"Sex, Life and Faith" by Rom Landau. London: 1946, Faber & Faber 
Ltd.

"The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran. Copyright 1923 by Kahlil Gibran and 
used by permission of the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

"The Queen of the Seven Swords" by G. K. Chesterton. New York: 
1933 Sheed and Ward, Inc. Used by Permission Of Miss D. C. 
Collins.

"The Pilgrim of the Absolute" by Leon Bloy. New York: 1947, 
Pantheon Books, Inc.

"Fancies vs. Fads" by G. K. Chesterton. New York: 1923, Dodd, Mead 
& Co. Used by Permission of Miss D. C. Collins.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

It takes three to make Love in Heaven--
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

It takes three for Heaven to make love to earth--
God, Man, and Mary, through whom God became Man.

It takes three to make love in the Holy Family--
Mary, and Joseph, and the consummation of their love, Jesus.

It takes three to make love in hearts--
The Lover, the Beloved, and Love.

     To that Woman 
Who taught the sublime mystery of Love, 
     Mary Immaculate, 
     This book is dedicated

That nations, hearts, and homes may learn 
That love does not so much mean to give oneself to another 
As for both lovers to give themselves to that Passionless Passion,
     Which is God.



Contents

1. The Differences Between Sex and Love 
2. Our Vital Energies
3. What Love Is
4. The Three Tensions of Love
5. It Takes Three to Make Love
6. Love is Triune
7. Unfolding the Mystery
8. Purity: Reverence for Mystery 
9. The Dignity of the Body 
10. Marriage and the Spirit 
11. The Great Mystery
12. The Unbreakable Bond 
13. Generation 
14. Paternity 
15. Motherhood 
16. The Role of Children
17. Mary, Motherhood, and the Home
18. The Dark Night of the Body 
19. For Better or For Worse 
20. Love's Reaction to Loss 
21. Love Endureth Forever



1. The Differences Between Sex and Love

Love is primarily in the will, not in the emotions or the glands. The 
will is like the voice; the emotions are like the echo. The pleasure 
associated with love, or what is today called "sex," is the frosting 
on the cake; its purpose is to make us love the cake, not ignore it. 
The greatest illusion of lovers is to believe that the intensity of 
their sexual attraction is the guarantee of the perpetuity of their 
love. It is because of this failure to distinguish between the 
glandular and spiritual--or between sex which we have in common 
with animals, and love which we have in common with God--that 
marriages are so full of deception. What some people love is not a 
person, but the experience of being in love. The first is 
irreplaceable; the second is not. As soon as the glands cease to 
react with their pristine force, couples who identified 
emotionalism and love claim they no longer love one another. If 
such is the case they never loved the other person in the first 
place; they only loved being loved, which is the highest form of 
egotism. Marriage founded on sex passion alone lasts only as long 
as the animal passion lasts. Within two years the animal attraction 
for the other may die, and when it does, law comes to its rescue to 
justify the divorce with the meaningless words "incompatibility," 
or "mental torture." Animals never have recourse to law courts, 
because they have no will to love; but man, having reason, feels 
the need of justifying his irrational behavior when he does wrong.

There are two reasons for the primacy of sex over love in a 
decadent civilization. One is the decline of reason. As humans give 
up reason, they resort to their imaginations. That is why motion 
pictures and picture magazines enjoy such popularity. As thinking 
fades, unrestrained desires come to the fore. Since physical and 
erotic desires are among the easiest to dwell upon, because they 
require no effort and because they are powerfully aided by bodily 
passions, sex begins to be all-important. It is by no historical 
accident that an age of anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, such 
as our own, is also an age of carnal license.

The second factor is egotism. As belief in a Divine Judgment, a 
future life, heaven and hell, a moral order, is increasingly rejected, 
the ego becomes more and more firmly enthroned as the source of 
its morality. Each person becomes a judge in his own case. With 
this increase of selfishness, the demands for self-satisfaction 
become more and more imperious, and the interests of the 
community and the rights of others have less and less appeal. All 
sin is self-centeredness, as love is otherness and relatedness. Sin 
is the infidelity of man to the image of what he ought to be in his 
eternal vocation as an adopted son of God: the image God sees in 
Himself when He contemplates His Word.

There are two extremes to be avoided in discussing married love: 
one is the refusal to recognize sexual love, the other is the giving 
of primacy to sexual attraction. The first error was Victorian; the 
second is Freudian. To the Christian, sex is inseparable from the 
person, and to reduce the person to sex is as silly as to reduce 
personality to lungs or a thorax. Certain Victorians in their 
education practically denied sex as a function of personality; 
certain sexophiles of modern times deny personality and make a 
god of sex. The male animal is attracted to the female animal, but 
a human personality is attracted to another human personality. 
The attraction of beast to beast is physiological; the attraction of 
human to human is physiological, psychological, and spiritual. 
The human spirit has a thirst for the infinite which the quadruped 
has not. This infinite is really God. But man can pervert that thirst, 
which the animal cannot because it has no concept of the infinite. 
Infidelity in married life is basically the substitution for an 
infinite of a succession of finite carnal experiences. The false 
infinity of succession takes the place of the Infinity of Destiny, 
which is God. The beast is promiscuous for an entirely different 
reason than man. The false pleasure given by new conquests in the 
realm of sex is the ersatz for the conquest of the Spirit in the 
Sacrament! The sense of emptiness, melancholy, and frustration is 
a consequence of the failure to find infinite satisfaction in what is 
carnal and limited. Despair is disappointed hedonism The most 
depressed spirits are those who seek God in a false god!

If love does not climb, it falls. If, like the flame, it does not burn 
upward to the sun, it burns downward to destroy. If sex does not 
mount to heaven, it descends into hell. There is no such thing as 
giving the body without giving the soul. Those who think they can 
be faithful in soul to one another, but unfaithful in body, forget 
that the two are inseparable. Sex in isolation from personality does 
not exist! An arm living and gesticulating apart from the living 
organism is an impossibility. Man has no organic functions 
isolated from his soul. There is involvement of the whole 
personality. Nothing is more psychosomatic than the union of two 
in one flesh; nothing so much alters a mind, a will, for better or for 
worse. The separation of soul and body is death. Those who 
separate sex and spirit are rehearsing for death. The enjoyment of 
the other's personality through one's own personality, is love. The 
pleasure of animal function through another's animal function is 
sex separated from love.

Sex is one of the means God has instituted for the enrichment of 
personality. It is a basic principle of philosophy that there is 
nothing in the mind which was not previously in the senses. All 
our knowledge comes from the body. We have a body, St. Thomas 
tells us, because of the weakness of our intellect. Just as the 
enrichment of the mind comes from the body and its senses, so 
the enrichment of love comes through the body and its sex. As one 
can see a universe mirrored in a tear on a cheek, so in sex can be 
seen mirrored that wider world of love. Love in monogamous 
marriage includes sex; but sex, in the contemporary use of the 
term, does not imply either marriage or monogamy.

Every woman instinctively realizes the difference between the two, 
but man comes to understand it more slowly through reason and 
prayer. Man is driven by pleasure; woman by the meaning of 
pleasure. She sees pleasure more as a means to an end, namely, 
the prolongation of love both in herself and in her child. Like Mary 
at the Annunciation, she accepts the love which is presented to her 
by another. In Mary, it came directly from God through an angel; in 
marriage, it comes indirectly from God through a man. But in both 
instances, there is an acceptance, a surrender, a Fiat: "Let it be 
unto me according to thy word." (Luke 1:28) The pagan woman who 
has not consciously thought of God is actually half woman and 
half dream; the woman who sees love as a reflection of the Trinity 
is half woman and half Spirit, and she waits upon the creative work 
of God within her body. Patience thus becomes bound up with her 
acceptance. Woman accepts the exigencies of love, as the farmer 
accepts the exigencies of nature, and waits, after the sowing of the 
seed, the harvest of autumn.

But when sex is divorced from love there is a feeling that one has 
been stopped at the vestibule of the castle of pleasure; that the 
heart has been denied the city after crossing the bridge. Sadness 
and melancholy result from such a frustration of destiny, for it is 
the nature of man to be sad when he is pulled outside himself, or 
exteriorized without getting any nearer his goal. There is a closer 
correlation between mental instability and the animal view of sex 
than many suspect. Happiness consists in interiority of the spirit, 
namely, the development of personality in relationship to a 
heavenly destiny. He who has no purpose in life is unhappy; he 
who exteriorizes his life and is dominated, or subjugated, by what 
is outside himself, or spends his energy on the external without 
understanding its mystery, is unhappy to the point of melancholy. 
There is the feeling of being hungry after having eaten, or of being 
disgusted with food, because it has nourished not the body, in the 
case of an individual, or another body, in the case of marriage. In 
the woman, this sadness is due to the humiliation of realizing that 
where marriage is only sex, her role could be fulfilled by any other 
woman; there is nothing personal, incommunicable, and therefore 
nothing dignified. Summoned by her God-implanted nature to be 
ushered into the mysteries of life which have their source in God, 
she is condemned to remain on the threshold as a tool or an 
instrument of pleasure alone, and not as a companion of love. Two 
glasses that are empty cannot fill up one another. There must be a 
fountain of water outside the glasses, in order that they may have 
communion with one another. It takes three to make love.

Every person is what he loves. Love becomes like unto that which 
it loves. If it loves heaven, it becomes heavenly; if it loves the 
carnal as a god, it becomes corruptible. The kind of immortality 
we have depends on the kind of loves we have. Putting it 
negatively, he who tells you what he does not love, also tells what 
he is. "Amor pondus meum: Love is my gravitation," said St. 
Augustine. This slow conversion of a subject into an object, of a 
lover into the beloved, of the miser into his gold, of the saint into 
his God, discloses the importance of loving the right things. The 
nobler our loves, the nobler our character. To love what is below 
the human, is degradation; to love what is human for the sake of 
the human, is mediocrity; to love the human for the sake of the 
Divine, is enriching; to love the Divine for its own sake is sanctity.

Love is trinity; sex is duality. But there are many other differences 
between the two. Sex rationalizes; love does not. Sex has to justify 
itself with Kinsey Reports, "But Freud told us," or "No one believes 
that today"; love needs no reasons. Sex asks science to defend it; 
love never asks "Why?" It says, "I love you." Love is its own reason. 
"God is love." Satan asked a "Why?" of God's love in the Garden of 
Paradise. Every rationalization is farfetched and never discloses 
the real reason. He who breaks the Divine Law and finds himself 
outside of Christ's Mystical Body in a second marriage, will often 
justify himself by saying: "I could not accept the Doctrine of 
Transubstantiation." What he means is that he can no longer 
accept the Sixth Commandment. Milton wrote an abstract and 
apparently a philosophical treatise on "Doctrine and Discipline of 
Divorce," in which he justified the divorce on the grounds of 
incompatibility. But the real reason was not what he set down in 
the book; it was to be found in the fact that he wished to marry 
someone else while his wife was living. What is important is not 
what people say, but why they say it. Too many assume that the 
reason people do not come to God is because they are ignorant; it 
is more generally true that the reason people do not come to God 
is because of their behavior. Our Lord said: "Rejection lies in this, 
that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to 
light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts 
shamefully hates the light." (John 3:19, 20) It is not always doubt 
that has to be overcome, but evil habits.

From another point of view, sex seeks the part; love the totality. 
Sex is biological and physiological and has its definite zones of 
satisfaction. Love, on the contrary, includes all of these but is 
directed to the totality of the person loved, i.e., as a creature 
composed of body and soul and made to the image and likeness of 
God. Love seeks the clock and its purpose; sex concentrates on the 
mainspring and forgets its mission to keep time. Sex eliminates 
from the person who is loved everything that cannot adapt itself to 
its carnal libido. Those who give primacy to sex for that reason are 
anti-religious. Love, however, does not concentrate on a function, 
but on personality. An organ does not include the personality, but 
the personality includes the organ, which is another way of 
repeating the theme: love includes sex, but sex does not include 
love.

Love concentrates on the object; sex concentrates on the subject. 
Love is directed to someone else for the sake of the other's 
perfection; sex is directed to self for the sake of se]f-satisfaction. 
Sex flatters the object not because it is praiseworthy in itself, but 
rather as a solicitation. It knows how to make friends and 
influence people. Most sound minds resent flattery because they 
see the egotism behind the screen of altruism. The ego in sex 
pleads that it loves the alter ego, but what it loves is really the 
possibility of its own pleasure in the other ego. The other person is 
necessary for the return of the egotist upon himself. The egotist 
finds himself constantly being encircled by non-being, 
purposelessness, meaninglessness; he has the feeling of being 
exploited. Refusing to be related to anything else, he soon sees 
that nothing is for him: The whole world is against him! But love, 
which stresses the object, finds itself in constantly enlarging 
relationships. Love is so strong it surpasses narrowness by 
devotedness and forgetfulness of self. In history, the only causes 
that die are those for which men refuse to die. The more love 
grows, the more its eyes open to the needs of others, to the 
miseries of men, and to compassion. The remedy for all the 
sufferings of the modern brain lies in the enlargement of the heart 
through love, which forgets itself as the subject and begins to love 
the neighbor as the object. But he who lives for himself will 
eventually find that nature, fellowman, and God are all against 
him. The so-called "persecution complex" is the result of egotism. 
The world seems against him who wants everything for himself.

Sex is moved by the desire to fill a moment between having and 
not having. It is an experience like looking at a sunset, or twirling 
one's thumbs to pass the time. It rests after one experience, 
because glutted for the moment, and then waits for the 
reappearance of a new craving or passion to be satisfied on a 
totally different object. Love frowns upon this notion, for it sees in 
this nothing but the killing of the objects loved for the sake of 
self-satisfaction. Sex would give birds flight, but no nests; hearts 
emotions but no homes; throw the whole world into the experience 
of voyagers at sea, but with no ports. Instead of pursuing an 
Infinite which is fixed, it substitutes the false infinity of never 
finding satisfaction. The infinite then becomes not the possession 
of love but the fruitless search for love, which is the basis of so 
many psychoses and neuroses. The infinite then becomes 
restlessness, a merry-go-round of the heart which spins only to 
spin again. Real love, on the contrary, admits the need, the thirst, 
the passion, the craving, but it also admits an abiding satisfaction 
by adhesion to a value which transcends time and space. Love 
unites itself to being and thus becomes perfect; sex unites itself to 
non-being and thus becomes irritation and anxiety. In love, 
poverty becomes integrated into riches; need into fulfillment; 
yearning into joy; chase into capture. But sex is without the joy of 
offering. The wolf offers nothing when he kills the lamb. The joy 
of oblation is missing, for the egotist by his very nature seeks 
inflation. Love gives to receive. Sex receives so as not to give. Love 
is soul contact with another for the sake of perfection; sex is body 
contact with another for the sake of sublimation.

A body can exhaust itself, but it cannot nourish itself. If man 
needed only nourishment, he could devour love as he devours 
food. But having a Spirit which needs the Divine Love as a unitive 
force, he can never be satisfied by devouring the love of another 
person. A potato has a nature; a man is a person. The former can 
be destroyed as a means to an end; the human may not. Sex would 
turn man into a vegetable and reduce a person to an animal. Sex 
makes hungry where most it satisfies, for the person needs the 
person, and a person is a person only when seen in an image of 
God.



2. Our Vital Energies

Freudianism interprets man in terms of sex; Christianity interprets 
sex in terms of man. The romanticist loves love; the Christian loves 
a person. There is a world of difference between sex loving sex and 
a person loving a person. Sex tries to be simultaneously both the 
receiver and the giver of passion; both the subject and the object. 
In sex the male adores the female. In love the man and woman 
together adore God. As a result of this dismemberment of sex from 
personality, sex is cerebralized, in the sense that it is made an 
intellectual problem. In normal human beings, sex is physical and 
organic. In the abnormal, it is something thought about, studied, 
dissected, and reduced to statistics and reports. In the older 
barbarism, sex was considered as physical. In the newer barbarism 
it is mental. Much advertising is based on sex. Instead of 
concupiscence arising from the body, it is now made to rise within 
an artificially stimulated imagination.

There is no doubt whatever that sex is an important energy in 
human life, but is it the basic energy as so many psychologists 
contend? Or is it, better, only one of the branches on the tree of 
life? Instead of being the reservoir, may it not be one of several 
channels through which the original Life Endowment is 
communicated? As water is basically H[2]O and can appear as 
liquid, steam, and ice, so there may be in the human person a 
fundamental dynamism and power, which comes from the soul-
body unity, and which flows out in three different directions.

Man is not a soul. As St. Thomas says: "My soul is not myself." But 
the soul of man is the actuating principle of the body and makes it 
exist as a body, unifies it, possesses it, and develops it. The 
parents prepare the body; God infuses the soul and makes the 
person. The union of the body and spirit form one being! The 
original source of Power, Energy, Thought, Action, Love, and 
Passion comes from the soul united to the body! This Original 
Energy, which we will call Vita, has three principal manifestations, 
because man may be considered as related (a) to himself, (b) to 
humanity, and (c) to the cosmos.

In relation to himself, Vita appears as self-preservation, a 
consciousness of dignity, an urge to be all that one ought to be. 
Personality feels itself, therefore, as a bearer of inalienable rights 
and liberties which are given by God, and which no state or 
dictator can take away. The right to life inspires not only needed 
physical development, but mental and spiritual development, as 
well. In brief, it implies not only a self-respect, but also a very 
legitimate self-love, which strives for perfection. "You are to be 
perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matt. 5:48)

In relation to humanity, this Vita manifests itself in the generation 
of the human species, the begetting of a family, which in turn 
becomes the unit of a state and society, in which his personal 
rights and liberties are conditioned by the rights and liberties of 
others for the sake of the good of all.

In relation to the universe, the Vita takes another channel, which is 
that of compensating for the poverty of personal being through 
having, which becomes the ownership of private property as the 
economic guarantee of external liberty, as the soul is an inner and 
spiritual guarantee.

These three distillations of Vita are good because given by Divine 
Goodness. And all three emanations go together. No one would 
ever be so shortsighted as to describe man's role as self-
development, leaving out his magnificent power of cooperating 
with God in the begetting of new areas of love. Neither would one 
be so narrow as to describe man in terms of the things on which he 
works, or which he eats, or with which he clothes himself. It would 
be like describing an elephant in terms of his tusk, or his tail, or 
his trunk alone.

But, and here is the important fact, the right to self-preservation 
could become egotism, and the power of generation could become 
license, and ownership could be monopolistic capitalism or 
communism, if there ever were a basic disturbance of the Vita and 
the God-given relations of soul and body. And that is precisely 
what did take place in what is called the Fall of Man. The fringes of 
this truth modern psychology has rediscovered in the conflicts 
and tensions and anxieties which go on inside of man. Something 
has happened to man to make him what he is. Whatever he is, he is 
not what he ought to be. All the disorder and anarchy both within 
himself and society possess the earmarks of being due to an abuse 
of freedom. Even though man now and then acts as if he lived in a 
jungle, one can still see in some of his actions that he once played 
in a Garden.

It is not our point here to describe the rebellion of man against His 
Creator. Every one analyzing his conscience can find examples of 
what happened, especially when he becomes sad and remorseful 
because he has hurt someone he loved. When the mainspring of a 
clock becomes broken, all the works are still there, but they do not 
function. In like manner, as a result of the rebellion against Divine 
Love, the Vita, the fundamental soul-body unity in man, lost its 
balance; it did not become intrinsically corrupt. A derangement 
took place among the three outlets of the Vita. In relation to 
himself, man became inclined not always to do what he ought, but 
to do what he pleased, even though he hurt others and himself. In 
relation to the human race, man, because he was endowed with 
reason, could manipulate the levers of life, which animals could 
not do, and could seek the pleasures of the flesh without assuming 
responsibilities. Finally, in relation to the cosmos, he became 
inclined to want more than he needed in the way of property, or to 
use illegitimate means to acquire what he did not have, or else to 
deprive others of what was their own.

If the pendulum denies its dependence on the clock, it is no longer 
free to swing. Because man denied his dependence on God, Who 
alone is the Source of his independence, the harmony of his nature 
became disturbed. There sprang up in his Vita what is called 
libido, or concupiscence, a tending toward certain things in 
defiance of rational restraint. Abnormality was introduced in all 
the three channels of the Vita. From now on legitimate self-love 
could become Egotism and Selfishness; the union of two in one 
flesh could become Sex, in the modern sense of the term; and the 
right to property could become Communism, Monopolistic 
Capitalism, and Revolution. They need not become any of these 
things, for man still has human freedom, but it became harder for 
man to keep the lower passions tamed and under control. This 
concupiscence or libido is not a sin; it is more like a temptation, 
which becomes a sin only when the will consents to this disorder. 
This original catastrophe to human nature made man eccentric, 
that is, inclined to get off center, from which tendency has come 
the need of Abnormal Psychology.

The first of these concupiscences becomes Pride or Egotism, the 
second becomes Lust, and the third, Avarice or Greed, and from 
these three flow all the sins that a human can commit. Note that 
there are three concupiscences or libidos, and not one of them is 
to be identified with the Vita. Pride is not the basic energy of life, 
nor is Sex, nor Greed, but all three are tendencies toward disorder 
in the one basic energy or Vita.

Most psychologists are narrow, in the sense that they take one of 
these to the exclusion of the others. Freud takes Sex and forgets 
the other two equally important libidos. Adler takes Pride, and 
Jung takes Greed or Security. Psychology will never give a total 
understanding of man until it incorporates all three and relates 
them to something more basic in man. Freud is right in speaking 
of the importance of sex in man, as a man is right in describing the 
importance of a trunk to an elephant. Our complaint is that it is 
not scientific, because not total. The libido is not sex, but sex is 
one of the expressions of the libido. The inferiority complex is not 
the basic libido of life, but it is one of them. The desire for 
security is not the sole explanation of man, but it is an important 
part of the explanation. Each of the great schools is one-third 
right. Of the three, Freud has chosen the one which is certainly the 
most appealing to a dis-God-ed generation. It is also very 
important, because the other libidos are not both personal and 
social. Pride involves only one individual and avarice involves 
things. But sex implies two persons, and through them humanity. 
Freud dropped one dim hint that possibly he was too narrow, for 
toward the end of his life he suggested widening the term sex. But 
it was never widened enough to include even remotely the other 
two eccentric tendencies and disharmonies without which no 
psychology is complete.

If sex were as "natural" as the sex psychologists assume it is, there 
should never be associated with it the sense of shame. But if 
anarchy was introduced into human nature by an abuse of 
freedom, it follows that the shame accompanying sex has some 
hidden relationship to man's rebellion against God.

Sacred Scripture tells us that before the Fall, Adam and Eve were 
"naked but not ashamed." They were naked and not ashamed 
because the passions were completely subject to reason, and there 
was not yet in the human body a tendency on the part of the 
passions to rebel against reason. The nakedness without shame 
was due in part to that inner spiritual perfection. It is a well-
attested fact that those people who are most impoverished in their 
souls try to cover up this inner destitution by extreme luxury on 
the outside. The more naked the soul, that is, the more devoid of 
virtue, the greater the need of the body to give the appearance of 
possession through fantastic dress, display, and ostentation. The 
more the soul is clothed with virtue, the less is the need of outer 
compensation. The poor boy who wishes to be known as rich must 
make a display of riches. The boy who is really rich needs no such 
prop. We meet the reversal of this distinction of the poverty and 
riches of the body and soul in the ceremony known as the clothing 
of nuns. In many communities, the day the young lady becomes 
professed she dresses first as a rich bride and is adorned with 
many jewels. Some believe this is to express the fact that she is the 
Bride of Christ. That such is not the case is evident from the fact 
that after she pronounces her vows, she goes to her cell and 
exchanges the elaborate gown for the humble and menial habit of 
her community. The implication is that now that her soul is 
adorned with the beauty of God's grace, there is no longer need for 
seeming richness of the body. It is very likely that Adam and Eve, 
instead of being naked in our sense of the term, had reflected in 
their bodies an effulgence of light, which came from Original 
Justifying Grace in the soul. As a result, one perceived less a body 
than a person bearing the Divine Image.

It was only after our First Parents rebelled against God that they 
disturbed the equilibrium of their human nature. It need hardly be 
stated here that Catholic tradition has never taught that their sin 
was the marriage act. On the contrary, God told our First Parents to 
"increase and multiply." As St. Augustine says: "He who says that 
there would have been neither copulation nor generation but for 
the sin, simply makes sin the origin of the holy number of the 
saints." The position of St. Thomas is that there was far greater 
pleasure in the marriage act before Original Sin. "There would not 
have been less pleasure then, as some people have asserted. 
Rather the same pleasure would have been all the greater, 
inasmuch as man's nature was then purer, and his body was 
therefore capable of more exquisite sensations."

No one sins against Love without hurting himself. A triple 
concupiscence, or tendency to excess, resulted from Adam's and 
Eve's turning from God. What effect did that have on the second 
manifestation of Vita, or generation? As regards the marital act, St. 
Thomas says we "must distinguish two features in the present 
state of things: One which is natural, namely, the conjunction of 
male and female for the purpose of generation.... The other is a 
certain deformity consisting in immoderate concupiscence. The 
latter would not have been present in the state of innocence, for 
then the lower powers were already subject to reason." This 
tendency to derationalize or irrationalize the passion of 
generation, along with acts associated with it, is what is embraced 
in the modern use of the term "sex." It includes, therefore, what is 
good (the passion of the flesh to generate), and what is evil 
(namely, its disorder and excess).

It was after the loss of grace that our First Parents perceived 
themselves to be naked and were ashamed. To some extent, the 
sense of shame may be natural, but it now begins to appear as 
associated with guilt. Shame can be, and often is, the expression of 
the tension and antinomy which in its higher realms was a 
rebellion against God. Original Sin tore them from the union with 
God through grace, which is a participation in the Divine Nature. 
But the disruption of the union of man and God had an echo in the 
disturbance of the union of soul and body. The big cog in the 
machine broke, so the little cogs went out of order, too. Nothing 
better describes and represents this initial rebellion against God 
than the tendency of the body to rebel against the spirit. Shame is 
one of the expressions of that rent.

It must be repeated that it was not because of sex that Adam and 
Eve were ashamed, for they had sex, and they used it before their 
sin. It may very well be that the unsatisfying character of the 
union, in the sense that it does not fulfill the infinite longings of 
the soul for unity, is a reminder of how the finite was torn from the 
infinite and the creature from his Creator.

St. Augustine also states that in a sense shame is related to 
disobedience. Positively, this would mean that when there is 
perfect obedience to God, there is no shame. This confirms, 
somewhat, the spiritual truth that Catholic educators have 
observed, namely, that as obedience to the law of Christ increases, 
concupiscence or the passions actually diminish. The sex passions 
are not the same in all persons. They are so much under control in 
some, that they resist them with the same automatic reflex as the 
blinking of their eye when dirt gets into it. The history of 
mysticism reveals that temptations of the flesh become less as one 
gets closer to God, although the temptations to pride may increase 
The Holy Eucharist, which is the Body of Christ, when worthily 
received, does diminish the uprisings of concupiscence. There is 
not the hardship imposed on a celibate priest that the sex-world 
would imagine, for, given power over the Physical Body of Christ, 
he already has the cure for the rebellion of his own physical body. 
In a lesser degree, parents who are married by a Sacrament and 
live their married life in union with a love of Christ probably feel 
between themselves an almost complete extinguishing of a sense 
of shame, precisely because of their obedience to the Spirit.

There is also another reason for shame, which is more related to 
the natural order. Sex is rightly called a mystery. It has its matter 
and form. Its matter is the physical power of generation; its form is 
its power to share in the creative purposes of God. Because sex is 
related to creativity, and God is the source of all creativity, sex is 
seen to have an intimate bond with religion. Because it is a 
summons to share in Creation, and because man and woman are 
God's coworkers in quarrying humanity, there is an awesomeness 
about the act. That is why all peoples have associated marriage 
with a religious ceremony.

But everything that is mysterious tends to be hidden and 
concealed. The Eastern World is much more aware of this than the 
Western World. That is why the consecration in the Eastern 
religions takes place behind a screen, whereas in the Western rite 
it is more public. The very hiding of the mystery of 
transubstantiation is a highly developed form of the concealing of 
anything which has to do with God. Since, in the natural order, 
there are few acts more mysterious than the union of two humans 
in one flesh, it follows that there should be a tendency on the part 
of man and woman to veil and hide themselves from others when 
they enter into the performance of that act which, in the 
supernatural order, symbolizes the mystery of Christ and the 
Church, and which in the natural order makes them co-creators 
with God. Here the explanation would not be a sense of shame in 
the sense of guilt, but rather a sense of shame in the sense of 
reverence. This is what Pius XII said in an address to mothers: "The 
sense of modesty is akin to the sense of religion."



3. What Love Is

It takes three to make love, for lover and beloved are bound 
together on earth by an ideal outside both. If we were absolutely 
perfect, we would have no need of loving anyone outside 
ourselves. Our self-sufficiency would prevent a hankering for what 
we have not. But love itself starts with the desire for something 
good. God is good. God is being, and therefore has no need of 
anything outside Himself. But we have being: Creation may be 
described as the introduction of the verb "to have" into the 
universe.

What makes us creatures is the fact that we are dependent; all that 
we have, we have received. Because we are not perfect, we 
constantly strive to make up for what is lacking, or to complement 
our having by having more. The craving for private property, for 
example, is one of the natural aspirations of man, for by it man 
hopes to enlarge his personality and to extend himself by owning 
things.

Love has three causes: goodness, knowledge and similarity.

It is possible for man to mistake what is good for him, but it is 
impossible for him not to desire goodness. The prodigal son was 
right in being hungry: he was wrong in living on husks. Man is 
right in trying to fill up his life, his mind, his body, his house with 
what is good; he may be wrong perhaps in what he chooses as a 
good. But without the desire for goodness, there would be no love, 
whether it be love of country, love of friend, or love of spouse. 
Through love every heart seeks to acquire a perfection or a good 
which it lacks, or else to express the perfection that it already has.

It follows then that all love is produced by goodness, for goodness 
by its nature is lovable. It may be difficult to understand why 
certain people are loved, but of this we can be sure: those who love 
see a goodness in them which others do not see. God loves us 
because He puts His Goodness into us and finds it there. We love 
certain creatures because we find goodness in them. Saints love 
those whom no one else loves, because after the manner of God, 
they put goodness into other people and find them lovable. If it be 
asked why the drunkard loves alcohol, why the libertine loves 
perversion, or why the criminal loves stealing, it is because each 
of them sees some good in what he does. What each seeks is not 
the highest moral good, for endowed with free will, each can 
always choose a partial rather than a total good, thus making a god 
of his appetites. Evil in order to be attractive must at least wear the 
guise of goodness. Hell has to be gilded with gold of paradise, or 
men would never want its evil. If evil were always called by its 
right name, it would lose much of its appeal. When the 
exaggerations and perversions of sex are called the "Kinsey 
Report," they give an air of scientific goodness to that which would 
have no appeal if it were called "lust." Goodness by its nature is 
lovable, and love finds it impossible not to pursue goodness. 
Goodness is perfective of our being, and thus compensates for the 
meagerness of our having.

If one is asked why he is in love with a particular person, he may, 
if he is a logician, put his argument into some such form as this:

     It is our nature to love goodness: 
     But X is good: 
     Therefore, I love X.

As we have said, this goodness is not always moral goodness; it 
can be physical goodness, or utilitarian goodness. A person is then 
loved because of the pleasure he gives, or because he is useful, or 
because "he can get it for you wholesale." But good he must be, 
under one of his aspects, otherwise he would not be loved.

The second cause of love is knowledge. A woman cannot love a 
man unless she has had at least some knowledge of him. 
"Introduce me to him" is a demand for knowledge preceding love. 
Even the dream girl of the bachelor has to be constructed out of 
fragments of knowledge. The unknown is the unloved. The love of 
the animal begins with the knowledge that comes through its 
senses, but the knowledge of man comes from his senses and his 
intellect. As love comes from knowledge, so hatred comes from 
want of knowledge. Bigotry is the fruit of ignorance.

Though at the beginning, knowledge is the condition of love, in its 
latter stages love can increase knowledge. A husband and wife who 
have lived together for many years have a new kind of knowledge 
of one another which is deeper than any spoken word, or any 
scientific investigation; it is knowledge that comes from love, a 
kind of intuitional perception of what is in the mind and the heart 
of the other. It is possible to love more than we know. A simple 
person in good faith may have a greater love of God than a 
theologian, and as a result a keener understanding of the ways of 
God with the heart than psychologists have. Goodness alone in 
isolation from knowledge could not prompt love; it must first be 
proposed to the mind and understood as good.

Knowledge can be either abstract or emotional. Geometry is 
abstract knowledge, but knowledge about sex is emotional 
knowledge. An isosceles triangle arouses no passions, but sex 
knowledge can do so! Those who advocate indiscriminate sex 
education to prevent sexual promiscuity forget that, because of 
the emotional tie-up, sex knowledge could lead to sex disorders. It 
is argued that if a man knew there was typhoid fever in a house, he 
would lose the desire to go into it. True, but the knowledge of sex 
is not the same as the knowledge of typhoid fever. No one has a 
"typhoid" passion to break down doors with quarantine warnings, 
but the human being does have a sex passion, which needs a 
control.

One of the psychological reasons why decent people shrink from 
vulgar sex discussion is because by its very nature it is not a 
communicable kind of knowledge. Its method of communication is 
so personal as to make the two who are involved shrink from 
making it general. It is too sacred to be profaned. It is a 
psychological fact that those whose knowledge of sex has passed 
to a unifying love in marriage are least inclined to bring it back 
from the realm of their inner mystery to that of public discussion. 
It is not because they are disillusioned about sex but because it 
has passed on to love, and only two can share its secrets. On the 
other hand, those whose knowledge of sex has not been 
sublimated into the mystery of love, and who therefore are most 
frustrated, are those who want to talk incessantly about sex 
matters. Husbands and wives whose marriages are characterized 
by infidelity are most loquacious on sex; fathers and mothers 
whose marriages are happy never speak about it. Their knowledge 
has become love; therefore they do not need to gossip about it. 
They who presume to know so much about sex actually know 
nothing about its mystery, otherwise they would not be so gabby 
about it.

The third cause of love, besides goodness and knowledge, is 
similarity. This is a denial of the oft-repeated axiom that 
"opposites attract." Opposites do attract, but only superficially. 
Tall men marry short girls; fast talkers marry good listeners; and 
tyrants marry Milquetoasts. But in a more profound way, it is not 
unlikeness but likeness which attracts.

The likeness between persons can be twofold: one arises from two 
persons having the same quality actually, as, for example, a 
mutual love of music. This likeness causes the higher love of 
friendship, in which one wishes good to the other as to himself. 
This is what is meant when it is said that two persons are a 
"perfect match," or "they were made for each other." The other kind 
of likeness arises from one having potentially, or by way of desire 
or inclination, a quality which the other has actually, for example, 
a poor girl wanting to marry a rich man. The stingy man loves the 
generous man because he expects from him something he desires. 
The vicious man can love the virtuous man when he sees virtue in 
conformity with what he would like to be. This kind of likeness 
causes love of concupiscence, or a friendship founded on 
usefulness or pleasure. In this kind of love, the lover loves himself 
more than his friend. That is why, if the friend ever prevents him 
from realizing what he wants, his love turns to hate.

Because we are imperfect beings, we seek to remedy our lack by 
possessions. Thus people who are "naked" on the inside, in the 
sense that they have no virtue in their soul, try to compensate for 
it by excessive luxury on the outside. What one person lacks it is 
hoped the other will supply. Because the human heart desires 
beauty as its perfection, the ugly young man seeks to marry a 
beautiful rather than an ugly girl. On the surface, it would seem 
that his ugliness is the opposite of her beauty, but really it is his 
love of beauty (which he does not possess actually), which attracts 
him to that which is beautiful.

The loves of all hearts are so many mirrors revealing their 
characters. Weak men in high positions surround themselves with 
little men, in order that they may seem great by comparison 
Capitalists who became rich because they struck some of God's 
wealth in the earth, love to build libraries to parade a learning 
which they do not possess. They love in appearance that which is 
similar to what they love in hope and desire. The woman who 
wishes to be a social climber will cultivate friends who are 
"useful," because of this similarity. They have what she wants to 
have: social prestige. Saints love sinners, not because they both 
have vice in common, but because the saint loves the possible 
virtue of the sinner. The Son of God became the Son of Man 
because He loved man.

On this subject no one has written with greater precision than St. 
Thomas Aquinas, who in his monumental summary of Divine 
Wisdom points out that there are four effects of love. Because he 
envisages love as something higher than sex or a biological 
function, his observations apply in varying degrees to both human 
and Divine love. These four effects of love are: unity, mutual 
indwelling, ecstasy, and zeal.

All love craves unity. This is evident in marriage where there is the 
unity of two in one flesh. When a person loves anything, he sees it 
as fulfilling a need and seeks to incorporate it to himself, whether 
it be the wine that he loves, or the science of the stars. In 
friendship, the other person is loved as another self, or the other 
half of one's soul. One seeks to do the same favors for him as one 
would do for oneself, and thus intensify the bond of union 
between the two. Whether it be love of wisdom, spouse, or friend, 
love is a unifying principle of both lover and beloved. Aristotle 
quotes Aristophanes as saying: "Lovers would wish to be united 
into one, but since this would result in either one or the other 
being destroyed, they seek a suitable or becoming union, to live 
together, speak together, and share the same interests."

Because love creates unity, we have explained why some heroic 
souls are willing to take on the sufferings and sins of others. A 
loving mother faced by a child's pain would take on that pain, if 
she could, in order to free her child of it. She feels the pain as her 
own, because her love has made her one with the infant. Just as 
love in the face of pain takes on the pain because of oneness with 
the beloved, so love in the face of evil takes on the sins of others, 
because of oneness with the beloved. This sacrificial love reached 
its highest psychological expression in the Garden of Gethsemane, 
where Christ so identified Himself with sinners that He began to 
sweat crimson drops of blood. It reached its greatest physical 
expression on Calvary, when He offered His life for those whom He 
loved. But before Gethsemane and Calvary, the law that love tends 
to unify the lovers produced the Incarnation, in which God, Who 
loved man, became man to save him from his sins.

As saints become one with Our Lord through the identification of 
their will with God's Will, so those who love unto marriage become 
"two in one flesh." The human heart would never be reaching out 
for unity, either socially, economically, or sexually, were there not 
within it a fundamental sense of incompleteness, which only God 
can perfectly satisfy. The sense of emptiness in a person pushes 
him on to overcome his deficiencies, until ultimately he becomes 
one with what he loves. Incidentally, since love produces unity, it 
follows that one must be careful about that with which he is 
ultimately unified. Unity with God is necessarily immortal love. A 
love that has no higher destiny than the flesh will share the 
corruption of the flesh. Our Lord made the fact of sex 
identification one of the reasons for His condemnation of divorce. 
"But I tell you that the man who puts away his wife (setting aside 
the matter of unfaithfulness) makes an adulteress of her, and 
whoever marries her after she has been put away, commits 
adultery." (Matt. 5:32)

Sex love creates a completeness between man and woman which 
goes far beyond any other unities of the social or political order! 
That is why the State which respects the family unity as the basis 
of civilization is much more unified than a civilization which 
ignores it. A divorce-ridden civilization is already in cause, a 
disrupted civilization. It may take a few decades for the cracks in 
the family to become earthquakes in the political order, but one 
must not conclude, because its tombstone is not yet erected, that 
the civilization is not already dead. "Thou dost pass for a living 
man, and all the while art a corpse." (Apoc. 3:1) The State may 
break the outer bond uniting husband and wife through divorce, 
but it can never break the inner bond which unity in one flesh has 
created. To justify their breaking of the unity, they may say: "Love 
has deceived me." Rather it is they who have deceived love. And 
their deceit began with the day when they confused love and "sex 
thrill." They never loved in the first place, for love never takes 
back that which it gives, even in unfaithfulness. God never takes 
back His love, though we are sinners. We may betray Him, but He 
never abandons us.

Mutual indwelling, the second effect of love, literally means that 
in love one inheres or exists in the other. The passion of love is 
not satisfied with mere possession but even seeks to assimilate the 
other into itself. There is hardly a woman in the world who has 
ever held a babe, who did not say: "This child is so sweet. I would 
like to eat it." Hidden in these words is the mystery of assimilation 
which reaches its peak in Holy Communion, where the God 
Incarnate satisfies our desire for complete inherence with His 
Divinity and Humanity, under the form and appearance of bread.

If love did not imply inherence, there would be no psychological 
explanation for the fact that the harm and injury which is done to 
our friends can be felt as done to us. This love in the supernatural 
order becomes an inherence which is identical with fixation. 
Sanctity is fixation in the love of God. Married love is fixation in 
human love for the love of God. "He who dwells in love dwells in 
God, and God in him." (1 John 4:17)

This indwelling of the thing or person loved is a fact in an 
intellectual as well as an affective way. The astronomer loves the 
stars, and he has the stars in his head, not in their material being 
but in a manner which is peculiar to his spiritual intellect. But if 
the universe were not in his head, he could not love the universe. 
Here the thing loved is in the lover. In affection, the lover inheres 
in the beloved, and the beloved in the lover. What is it that makes 
the lover so curious and interested in all that the beloved does? 
Why is every tiny gift treasured, every word recalled again and 
again to memory? Why is every scene colored by the vision of the 
beloved, if it be not that in some way there is no peace without 
complete inherence of the one in the other? No lover is ever 
satisfied with a superficial knowledge of the one loved. The lover 
of music can never have too much knowledge of music. The lover 
of God never knows the words "too much." Those who accuse 
others of loving God or religion too much, really do not love God at 
all, nor do they know the meaning of love. Those who are united in 
love, enjoy and are pained at the same things. The Psalmist who 
loved God would say that his heart was cast down at the thought of 
those who broke the law of God.

This mutual inherence, as the second effect of love, adds 
something to unity in marriage. Unity of the flesh now becomes 
unity of the mind and heart. The intermittent carnal oneness 
demands another kind of unity than the flesh. St. Paul says 
husband and wife ought to act toward one another "as if married in 
the Lord"; that is, as conscious of their vocation to be one in 
Christ. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote: "Two human loves 
make one divine." Mutual inherence is much more than a sharing 
of interests and an exchange of properties: rather these are the 
effects of a deeper fellowship which reaches into the core of their 
being.

Love that is held together only by the flesh is as fragile as the 
flesh, but love which is held together by a spiritual oneness and 
based on a love of a common destiny, is truly "until death do us 
part." What makes a true mutual inherence is not the sharing of the 
same sensations of pleasure. Rather the "sister-soul" and "brother-
soul" are formed in the daily communion with the same joys, 
sorrows, efforts, and sacrifices. One can yearn for another after 
knowing flesh unity, but it is impossible to yearn for another after 
soul unity. It is not enough just to share the same words and the 
same enjoyments; one must also share the same silences. "Mary 
treasured up all these sayings, and reflected on them in her heart." 
(Luke 2:19) Those who do not yet love one another deeply have 
need of words; those who deeply love, thrive on silences.

The third effect of love is ecstasy, which means being "carried out 
of oneself." In a broad kind of way, because love makes the lover 
dwell on the beloved, he is to some extent already taken out of 
himself. Adolescents are often surprised that their elders know 
they are in love. But the fumbling with tasks and the skipping of 
meals indicate they are in a dreamer's state. They are already 
lifted out of their natural way of acting. The Greeks describe a 
strong love as "madness," not in the sense of abnormality, but 
inspiration. The poet who was inspired was said to be "mad" with 
his love, as in romantic language today, the lover describes 
himself as being "mad" over his beloved. Employers are not 
reluctant to allow their employees to take a week or two off, 
knowing that they are practically useless during the time of 
"ecstasy." As Shakespeare wrote: "This is the very ecstasy of love." 
Later on they are said to be "getting down to earth," as if to imply 
that previously they had their heads in the heavens.

The professors who are absent-minded about their studies, to the 
extent that on rainy nights they put the umbrella to bed and stand 
in the sink all night, are proving that love makes us indifferent to 
our ordinary surroundings. Where there is great love, people can 
put up with every manner of hardship because of the quality of 
love which lifts them up from their environment. The hovel of the 
husband and wife who are in love is not nearly as boring as the 
rich apartment of the husband and wife who have ceased to love 
one another. The saint, like Vincent de Paul, has such a love of 
God's poor that he forgets to feed himself. The particular spiritual 
phenomenon of levitation, in which saints in their ecstasies are 
lifted bodily off the ground, is a still higher manifestation of a 
love in which matter seems powerless to restrain the spirit.

The difference between love of humans and love of God is that in 
human love, ecstasy comes at the beginning, but in the love of 
God it comes only at the end after one has passed through much 
suffering and agony of soul. The flesh first has its feast, and then 
the fast and sometimes the headache. The spirit has first the fast, 
and then the feast. The ecstatic pleasures of marriage are in the 
nature of a "bait," luring lovers to fulfill their mission, and they are 
also a Divine credit extended to those who later on will have the 
burden of rearing a family.

No great ecstasy of flesh or spirit is ever given for permanent 
possession without casting out something. There is a price tag on 
every ecstasy! The glory of an Easter Sunday cost a Good Friday. 
The privilege of the Immaculate Conception was an ecstasy given 
before the payment, but Mary had to pay for it at the foot of the 
Cross. Our Lord gave her "credit" but she later paid the debt.

Young couples who equate marriage and the thrill often refuse to 
reimburse Nature with children and thus lose love, as the violinist 
with a gift for music, who does not practice, loses the gift. "Take 
the talent away from him." (Matt. 25:28) The first love is not 
necessarily the lasting love. The thrill of the young priest at his 
First Solemn Mass, and the near ecstasy of the nun at her clothing, 
are like "candy" given by God to urge them to climb spiritually. 
Later on the sweetness is taken away, and it takes a supreme effort 
of the will to be all one ought to be. So with the honeymoon of 
marriage. The term itself indicates that at first the love is honey, 
but afterwards it is as changeable as the moon.

The first ecstasy is not the true ecstasy. The latter comes only 
after purging trial, fidelities through storm, perseverance through 
mediocrities, and pursuit of Divine destiny through the 
allurements of earth. The deep ecstatic love that some Christian 
fathers and mothers have after passing through their Calvaries is 
beautiful to behold. True ecstasy is really not of youth, but of age. 
In the first ecstasy, one seeks to receive all that the other can give. 
In the second ecstasy, one seeks to give everything to God. If love 
is identified with the first ecstasy, it will seek its duplication in 
another, but if it is identified with unifying, enduring love, it will 
seek the deepening of its mystery.

Too many married people expect their partner to give that which 
only God can give, namely, an eternal ecstasy. If man or woman 
could give that which the heart wants, he or she would be God. 
Wanting the ecstasy of love is right, but expecting it in the flesh 
that is not on pilgrimage to God is wrong. The ecstasy is not an 
illusion; it is only the "travel folder" with its many pictures urging 
the body and soul to make the journey to eternity. If the first 
ecstasy reaches its climax, it is an invitation not to love another, 
but to love in another way. And the other way is the Christ Way.

Zeal, the fourth effect of love, is that particular passion which 
makes us want to spread and diffuse the love which we know, and 
to exclude everything which is repugnant to it. The romantic lover 
seeks out those companions who will listen to his praise of the 
beloved, and to whom he can show her picture. The saint in love 
with Christ becomes a missionary and travels even into lands 
where the name of Christ has never been heard, in order that other 
hearts may share the passion for the Tremendous Lover. In carnal 
love, St. Thomas says, "husbands are said to be jealous of their 
wives, lest association with others prove a hindrance to their 
exclusive individual right. In like manner, those who seek to excel, 
are moved against those who are above them, as though they were 
a hindrance to their own ambitions."

In the higher lover of friendship, zeal is not only positive, such as 
becomes apostleship in religion, but is also negative, in the sense 
that it seeks to repel all that is contrary to the will of God. When 
Our Lord entered the Temple of Jerusalem and found it prostituted 
by the buyers and sellers, He fashioned a whip of cords and drove 
them out: "I am consumed with jealousy for the honour of the 
house." (John 2:17)

From the mother bird defending her nest of young to the martyr 
dying for the Faith, love pours itself out in zeal of the right kind. 
But the wicked can also be zealous for the evil which they love, 
whether it be the miser for his gold, or the adulterer for his 
accomplice, or the Communist for his world revolution. Those 
things for which we would spend our energy to defend, or die to 
keep, are the measures of our zeal! Love is the cause of everything 
we do. The subjects we talk about, the persons we hate, the ideals 
we pursue, the things that make us angry, these are indicators of 
our hearts. Few realize how much they betray their characters in 
revealing what their hearts love most. "Out of the abundance of the 
heart, the mouth speaketh." If our loves are wrong, our lives are 
wrong, as well.

What zeal is to religion, fidelity and fecundity are to marriage: 
devotion to the person loved, and the extension of that love in the 
family. This fidelity is not born of habit which is akin to organic or 
economic necessity; rather, it is an affirmation that this person 
has an absolute significance for life. This kind of zeal not only 
crushes all alien biological desires; it also is based on the fact that 
the other person is the one whom God has willed for us, "for better 
or for-worse, for richer or poorer, until death do us part." As 
Euripides said: "He is not a lover who does not love forever." And 
as Shakespeare sang:

     Let me not to the marriage of true minds 
     Admit impediments. Love is not love 
     Which alters when it alteration finds, 
     Or bends with the remover to remove: 
     O no; it is an ever-fixed mark, 
     That looks on tempests, and is never shaken; 
     It is the star to every wandering bark, 
     Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

     Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 
     Within his bending sickle's compass come: 
     Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 
     But bears it out even to the edge of doom. 
     If this be error, and upon me prov'd, 
     I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

Zeal also manifests itself spiritually, in bringing other souls to God 
and physically, by begetting children for God. Fruitfulness is the 
natural effect of the love of tree and earth, of missionary and 
pagan, of husband and wife. Love does not thrive on moderation. 
Zeal is generosity. The love that measures the sacrifices it will 
make for others takes the edge off aspirations. Our Lord said that 
zealous love had two characteristics first, it is forgiving, and 
second, it recognizes no limits. It is forgiving, because it knows 
that God's forgiveness of me is conditioned upon my forgiveness 
of others. Love never wears magnifying glasses in looking on the 
faults of others. Married life requires this zeal in the shape of 
forbearance, which is not a gritting of teeth in the face of 
annoyance, nor the cultivation of indifference; it is, rather, a 
positive and constructive action putting love where it is not found. 
One feels under an obligation more exquisite and divine than a 
marriage contract.

Zeal knows no limits. It never pronounces the word "enough." Our 
Lord said that after His followers had done all they were supposed 
to do, they were to consider themselves as "unprofitable servants." 
Knocking the boundaries out of love, He said: "But I tell you that 
you should not offer resistance of injury; if a man strikes thee on 
the right cheek, turn the other cheek also towards him; if he is 
ready to go to law with thee over thy coat, let him have it and thy 
cloak with it; if he compels thee to attend him on a mile's journey, 
go two miles with him of thy own accord." (Matt. 5:39, 41)

In Divine service and in marriage, therefore, there should be a 
generosity which goes quite beyond the limits of justice. The 
neighbor who offers to come in for an hour to help and stays two; 
the doctor who in addition to a professional call "drops in just to 
see how you are"; the husband and wife who vie with one another 
in love; all have understood one of the most beautiful effects of 
love: its zeal, which makes them fools for one another. "We are 
fools for Christ's sake." (1 Cor. 4:10)



4. The Three Tensions of Love

Despite the highest idealism, there are potentials for conflict in 
marriage. Marriage has three basic tensions which are always 
inseparable from it, because they are grounded in the 
metaphysical nature of man.

All love craves for unity, a moment when separatedness is 
vanquished and there is a fusion of entities in a center outside of 
both. Flesh, though a means to unity when united to a soul, is in 
itself an obstacle, because matter is impenetrable. A block of 
marble cannot be made one with another block without losing the 
identity of either. But the spiritual is a bond of unity. Two persons 
learn poetry without one depriving the other of his knowledge; 
poetry thus becomes the bond of their unity. Matter is the basis of 
division; spirit the root of unity. The flesh is a means to unity 
because it is bound up with a soul in a living person. To the extent 
that love loses its soul, it loses its unity. When the spirit is gone, 
there is left only a mere body proximity which bores and fatigues.

This passion for a crescendo of intimacy until oneness is achieved 
cannot be completely satisfied in the physical order, because after 
the act of unity, there remains the status of two separate 
personalities, each with his or her individual mystery. The paradox 
is clear: the souls of lovers aspire to unity, but the body alone, 
though the momentary symbol of that unity, is nevertheless 
exclusive of it. The flesh is impervious to that kind of unity which 
alone can satisfy the spirit. No marriage is free from this tension. 
The tension increases as the body goes through the motions of 
love without the soul, and it decreases as the soul loves through 
the body. The greatest relief there is to this tension is the 
begetting of children, for here the seeming disproportion between 
a passion for unity and the failure to make it permanent is 
compensated for by the child, who becomes a new bond of unity 
outside father and mother. Husband and wife never feel the 
emptiness of their relations one with another when it is filled up 
with a new body and a soul directly infused by God, the Creator. 
God made man right, and man is unhappy as he tries to defeat 
those laws which make for his happiness.

The basic reason why erotic experiences outside of marriage 
create psychological strain is because the void between spirit and 
flesh is more closely felt. Here is the key to the different mental 
states following a true conjugal union and an adulterous 
excitement. The first is what is called the payment of a "debitum." 
"He, not she, claims the right over her body, as she, not he, claims 
the right over his." (1 Cor. 7:14) Because it is a combination of 
justice involving a debt of love, it satisfies the spirit. The second, 
because it involves no justice, but only body-surrender without 
soul-love, never nourishes the spirit, but leaves a sense of void 
and emptiness and potential hate. The first synthesizes the body-
soul relations; the second brutalizes it. While the spirit craves 
unity, the carnal tends toward separateness through its very 
promiscuity. Those psychologists who think that the problem of 
marriage is merely one of sexual adjustment start with the 
assumption that man and woman are no different than two beasts 
in the forests. The difference between the animal and the human is 
to be found in the ontological structure of the human creature, 
who is in a constant state of conflict because he knows he has 
wings to fly to the heavens and yet must walk the earth. No shame 
or remorse attend the marriage act even in the face of this body-
soul tension, because the body is used as a channel for the 
communication of the spirit. Then marriage sanctifies and 
becomes an occasion of merit. The craving for the infinite is to a 
great degree satisfied, either because the mutual love of husband 
and wife reflects the union of Christ and the Church, or because 
their love ends in bearing the fruit of progeny.

The second tension inherent in marriage is between the person 
and humanity. Married love is personal, unique and jealous, in the 
right sense of the word. It implies secrecy, togetherness, and 
resents intrusion. For that reason, it never speaks of its love in 
public and never demonstrates it. It is a curious psychological fact 
that those who make their personal love public, and "dear" one 
another with saccharine epithets, are very often those who when 
alone quarrel and fight.

Associated with this personal quality of married love is the fact 
that by its very nature carnal love is social. in the sense that it is 
ordained by God for the citizenship of earth and the filiation of 
the Kingdom of Heaven. Some functions of the human are 
individual, such as seeing and hearing. Every man must blow his 
own nose and make his own love. But married love also implies 
social relationship, namely, the propagation of the species. In 
other language, love is personal, but sex is social, as the right to 
property is personal, but the use is social. Love looks to a 
helpmate who is human; sex to humanity. That the latter looks 
beyond the personal is evident from its somewhat automatic 
character. It is not completely subject to personal control. It 
reaches a point where it goes beyond the person to the 
continuation of the human species. If sex were given by God solely 
for the satisfaction of the individual, it would in all instances be 
subject to the individual control, like eating. But its reflex 
character suggests that God has a hand in preserving the race, 
even when the individual would distort the social purpose solely 
for his individual pleasure.

This tension between person and race is not insoluble. When both 
love and sex have their normal God-given outlets, the 
contradiction is resolved in the child. The personal love of 
husband for wife becomes a social contribution in the child. At the 
same time, the personal element in their love is recovered, in the 
fact that they can call the child their own. "My son" or "my 
daughter" represents the social being personally owned.

As man lost faith in God, he also lost belief in his soul, and this 
increased the tension. Not only did he reach a point where he 
became unconcerned as to whether or not he saved his soul, but he 
even denied that he had a soul to save. Left with only a body, he 
had to decide which part of the body would be the most important. 
There were only two possible functions of the body from which a 
choice could be made: eating, which preserved individual life, and 
mating, which guaranteed social life. Sacred Scripture records that 
some ancients made their belly a god; it was left to our day to 
make sex a god. Thus there was substituted for the body-soul-God 
relationship, the sex-body tension. Sex then became isolated from 
soul and God and became only a means to the satisfaction of man, 
who is now described as a "physiological bag filled with 
psychological libido."

It must not be thought that the difference between the Christian 
and the pagan view is the difference between soul and body. The 
choice is never between body and soul, as if either one could be 
completely excluded. Rather, it is between giving the regnancy to 
body or to spirit. To be antibody, or to be against any of its 
functions, is anti-Christian, just as it is anti-Christian to be anti-
soul. The harmonious rhythm of both is the fulfillment of the 
Divine Decree: "What God has joined, let not man put asunder." 
(Mark 10:9) With God the body is ransomed from the isolationism 
of mere matter, while the soul is transfigured, thanks to the flames 
of passion which nourish both self-life and begotten life. Without 
God and the soul, the body has no guarantee of the continuation of 
its thoughts or the fruits of its passions. With God the body can 
minister either to the mutual helpfulness of husband and wife, to 
the rearing of a family, or to the ecstasies of a John of the Cross.

The third tension is that of the finite and the infinite. No human 
heart wants love for two more minutes or two more years, but 
forever. There is nothing as timeless as love. In its romantic 
moments it uses the language of eternity and Divinity and heaven, 
the better to bespeak its everlasting aspirations. But along with 
this longing for love without satiety, of ecstasy without end, there 
is the dull, drab realization that we do not completely possess it. 
The marriage that started as a masked ball, in which everyone 
seemed sweet and fair and romantic, soon reached the crisis when 
the masks were removed and one saw the characters for what they 
really were. As the poetess wrote:

     "Yes" I answered you last night 
     "No" I say to you today; 
     Colors seen by candle light 
     Do not look the same by day.

Thomas Moore, pursuing the same idea, wrote:

     Alas! How light a cause may move 
     Dissension between hearts that love--
     Hearts that the world in vain had tried, 
     And sorrow but more closely tied; 
     Which stood the storm when waves were rough, 
     Yet in a sunny hour fell off; 
     Like ships that have gone down at sea, 
     When heaven was all tranquillity.

The paradox of love is that the human heart, which wants an 
eternal and ecstatic love, can also reach a moment when it has too 
much love and wishes to be loved no longer. Francis Thompson in 
a poem tells how he picked up a child to hold, and held him in his 
arms, and how the child cried and kicked to get down. On 
reflecting, he wondered if that is not the way some souls are 
before God. They are not ready to be loved by Him. Certainly some 
such moment comes in the human order when there is a tug of war 
between wanting love and not wanting it. What is this mysterious 
alchemy inside the human heart which makes it swing between a 
feeling that it is not loved enough and the feeling that it is loved 
too much? Torn between longing and satiety, between craving and 
disgust, between desire and satisfaction, the human heart queries: 
Why should I be this way? When satiety comes, the Thou 
disappears, in the sense that it is no longer wanted. When longing 
reappears, the Thou becomes a necessity. Loved too much, there is 
discontent; loved too little, there is an emptiness.

The answer to this tension is evident. The human heart was made 
for the Sacred Heart of Love, and no one but God can satisfy it. The 
heart is right in wanting the infinite; the heart is wrong in trying to 
make its finite companion the substitute for the infinite. The 
solution of the tension is in seeing that the disappointments which 
it brings are so many reminders that one is on pilgrimage to Love. 
Both the being loved too much and the being loved too little can 
go together when seen in the light of God. When the longing for 
infinite love is envisaged as a yearning for God, then the finiteness 
of the earthly love is seen as a reminder that "Our hearts were 
made for Thee, O Lord, and they can be satisfied only in Thee."

The tug between what is immediate and what is interior now 
vanishes, as the very enjoyment which the immediacy of the flesh 
gives becomes the occasion for joy in the interiority of the soul, 
which knows that one is using it for God's purposes and for the 
salvation of both souls. The synthesis of life is achieved when the 
instincts are integrated to spirit and made useful to the ideals of 
the spirit. There is for the Christian no such thing in marriage as 
choosing between body and soul, or sex and love. He must choose 
both together. Marriage is a vocation to put God in every detail of 
love. In this way, the dream of the bride and groom for eternal 
happiness really comes true, not in themselves alone, but through 
themselves. Now they love each other not as they dreamed they 
would, but as God dreamed they would. Such a reconciliation of 
the tension is possible only to those who know that it takes three 
to make love.

Only God can give what the heart wants. In true Christian love, the 
husband and wife see God coming through their love. But without 
God the infinity must be sought in the finitude of the partner, 
which is to gather figs from thistles. Eternity is in the soul, and all 
the materialism of the world cannot uproot it. The tragedy of the 
materialist psychologies of our day comes from trying to make a 
bodily function satisfy the infinite aspirations of the soul. It is this 
that creates complexes and unstable minds and divorce courts. It 
is like trying to put all the words of a book on the cover. Eliminate 
the Divine Third from human love, and there is left only the 
substitution of cruel repetition for infinity. The need of God never 
disappears. Those who deny the existence of water are still thirsty, 
and those who deny God still want Him in their craving for Beauty 
and Love and Peace, which He alone is.

Man has his feet in the mud of the earth, his wings in the skies. He 
has sensations like the beasts and ideas like the angels, without 
being either pure beast or pure spirit. He is a mysterious 
composite of body and soul, with his body belonging to a soul, and 
his soul incomplete without the body. The true order is the 
subjection of body to soul and the whole personality to God. "It is 
all for you, and you for Christ, and Christ for God." (1 Cor. 3:23) 
Man is the pontiff of the universe, the "bridge builder" between 
matter and spirit, suspended between one foundation on earth and 
the other in heaven He is also, fundamentally, a being in tension 
with an anxiety of the kind felt by a sailor halfway up to a crow's 
nest on a stormy sea. His duty calls him to the nest above; his 
earth-bound character makes him fear falling from his ladder.

No action of man in all its aspects can be said to be completely 
animal nor completely spiritual. Though he can generate spiritual 
thoughts, like "fortitude," yet the raw material for such thinking 
has to come through his senses. Eating and mating not only imply 
decision on the part of the spirit, but even delight the spirit. 
Sleeping is a human act; the will to sleep is the act of a human 
being.

There is not a single error of history which is not a perversion of 
this mysterious body-soul unity. Some considered the body 
impure, such as the Manicheans; some considered the soul a 
parasite or a myth, such as Freud or Nietzsche. Everyone must 
decide for himself how this pull of opposites is to be resolved. 
There are only two answers possible: one is to give primacy to the 
body, in which case the soul suffers; the other is to give primacy 
to the soul, in which case the body is disciplined. The Christian 
answer to this polarity is unmistakable: "How is a man the better 
for it, if he gains the whole world at the cost of losing his own 
soul?" (Matt. 16:26) "And there is no need to fear those who kill the 
body, but have no means of killing the soul; fear him more, who 
has the power to ruin body and soul in hell." (Matt. 10:28)

This ontological tension inherent in man, because of his 
composition of dust and living breath, has been accentuated into 
disorder by original sin, and is the basic reason why man suffers 
temptations. "The impulses of nature and the impulses of the 
spirit are at war with one another." (Gal. 5:17) "Watch and pray, 
that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit is willing 
enough, but the flesh is weak." (Matt. 26:41)

The word "temptation" is never applied to the body-soul discipline, 
but it is to the soul-body servitude. No one says, "I was tempted to 
let him live," but one does say, "I was tempted to kill him." The 
regency of the soul is order, for herein the lower is subject to the 
higher, as plants are subject to animals, and animals to man. The 
granting of the primacy to the sensate against the intellectual is a 
descent, a loosening of bonds, a "fall." This does not mean that the 
sensible experience in itself is a "temptation," but only when it is 
enjoyed at the expense of the soul. The pleasure of seeing a 
setting sun is not hostile to the spirit, but the sensible experience 
of drunkenness is adverse to the spirit. Reason, in the first 
instance, transcends the body and inspires the soul to give glory 
to God for His creation; in the second instance, the body is a 
vampire against the spirit and militates against its peace, which is 
conditioned on the observance of the order of the cosmos, namely, 
the body-soul-God relationship.

Because of this body-soul, or animal-spirit, tension in humans, it is 
possible to understand love either in one of two ways: as body-
primacy or soul-primacy. In the first instance, love is carnal and 
identified with what the modern world calls sex. In the second 
instance, love is both spiritual and physical. The great 
philosophers have called the first, "the love of concupiscence," or 
the primacy of the sensate, and the second, the love of 
benevolence, or love for the sake of another. The Greeks, too, had 
their words for it. In their language, Eros is a passionate, 
overwhelming desire to possess and enjoy the affections of 
another. Agape is love founded on reverence for personality, its 
delight being to promote the well-being of the other; its joy is 
contemplation rather than possession. The two loves are good 
when understood. The Divine Command to love one's neighbor as 
one's self implies a lawful self-love. Here as elsewhere it takes 
three to make love. Love of self and love of neighbor both require 
love of God.

The libido of modern psychology is Eros or carnal love divorced 
from Agape, or personal love, the body denying the soul, and the 
ego affirming itself against God. It was this kind of love which St. 
Paul condemned: "Because natural wisdom is at enmity with God." 
(Romans 8:7) Sex understood in the modern way is Eros-love 
severed from responsibility; it is desire without obligation. 
Because it is lawless desire, it is therefore Godless desire. That is 
why eroticism and atheism always go together.

As soon as one condemns this limitation of the word love to the 
physiological order, one is immediately accused by the carnalists 
of saying that the Christian is opposed to sex love. The Christian is 
not opposed to sex love, otherwise there would be no sacrament of 
marriage. The Christian position can be stated as follows: Carnal 
love is a steppingstone to Divine Love. The Eros is the vestibule to 
Agape. Purely human love is the embryo of the love of the Divine. 
One finds some suggestion of this in Plato, who argues that love is 
the first step toward religion. He pictures love for beautiful 
persons being transformed into love for beautiful souls, then into 
a love of justice, goodness, and God, Who is their source. Erotic 
love is, therefore, a bridge which one crosses, not a buttress where 
one sits and rests. It is not an airport, but an airplane; it is always 
going somewhere else, upwards and onwards. All erotic love 
presupposes incompleteness, deficiency, yearning for completion, 
an attraction for enrichment; for all love is a flight towards 
immortality. There is a suggestion of Divine Love in every form of 
erotic love, as the lake reflects the moon. Love for other hearts is 
intended to lead to the love of the Divine Heart. As food is for the 
body, as body is for the soul, as the material is for the spiritual, so 
the flesh is for the eternal. Sex is only the self-starter on the motor 
of the family.

Christianity is full of this transfiguration of carnal love into the 
Divine. The Savior did not crush or extinguish the erotic flames 
that burned in Magdalene's heart, but He transfigured them to a 
new object of affection. The Divine commendation that was given 
to the woman who poured out the ointment on the feet of her 
Savior reminded her that love which once sought its own pleasure 
can be transmuted into a love that will die for the beloved. For that 
reason, Our Lord referred to His burial at the very moment of the 
pouring, when her thoughts were closest to life.

On a higher plane, we find that, thanks to the mysterious alchemy 
of religion, the noble love that the Blessed Mother had for her own 
Son in the flesh is expanded to a love so wide that she becomes the 
mother of all men. In marriage Eros leads to Agape, as the children 
draw the husband and wife out of their mutuality into the love of 
otherness. As the purpose of the vow of chastity is the crushing of 
the selfishness of the flesh for the purpose of a larger service in 
the Kingdom of God, so in a diminished way, the begetting of 
children enlarges the field of service and loving sacrifice for the 
sake of the family. In a well-regulated moral heart, as time goes on, 
the erotic love diminishes and the religious love increases. In 
marriages that are truly Christian, the love of God increases 
through the years, not in the sense that husband and wife love one 
another less, but that they love God more. Love passes from an 
affection for outer appearances to those inner depths of 
personality which embody the Divine spirit. There are few things 
more beautiful in life than to see that deep passion of man for 
woman, which begot children, transfigured into that deeper 
passion for the Spirit of God. It sometimes happens in a Christian 
marriage that when one of the partners dies, there is no taking of 
another spouse, lest there be the descent to lower realms from that 
higher love, from the Agape to the Eros.

The evolution of Eros to Agape in true love has two moments In the 
first, the body leads the soul; in the second, the soul leads the 
body. At first, the physical dominates the soul to some extent, 
inasmuch as it is carried along by the winds of passion. In the 
second moment, the soul predominates, even suggesting that the 
body play its God-destined role. Love now becomes more spiritual. 
The moral training of children, the deep concern for their spiritual 
well-being, become paramount problems of married life. From this 
interest in souls and salvation, all the physical services flow. 
Generally this transformation from Eros-primacy to Agape-primacy 
takes place in sacrifice. No love ever mounts to a higher level 
without a touch of the Cross. Love that remains on a horizontal 
plane dies.

In family life, this transfiguration of Eros to Agape takes place 
generally at birth, when something lower dies and something 
nobler is born. In domestic love, the bursting of the bonds of 
duality through a child's birth creates new loyalties, more self-
sacrificing devotion, and psychologically liberates husband and 
wife from egotism. The word "love" is used less, but the deed-love 
comes more and more into play as altruism, kindness and 
sympathy.

What happens when the Divine order is not worked out, and the 
erotic love is not used as the embryo for the Divine? This question 
puts the finger on the failure of most modern marriages, which 
look on love not as opening on the heavens, but as stooping with 
the flesh. When marriages are devoid of religion, which alone can 
suggest that the love of the flesh is the preface to the love of the 
spirit, then the other partner is often made the object of worship in 
place of God. This is the essence of idolatry, the worship of the 
image for the reality, the mistaking of the copy for the original, 
and the frame for the picture.

When love is limited to the satisfaction of egotistic desire, it 
becomes only a spent force, a fallen star. When it deliberately 
refuses to use the sparks which God gave it to enkindle other fires; 
when it digs wells, but never drains the water; when it learns to 
read, but never knows: then does love turn against itself, and 
because it desires only to enjoy its own life, it ends in hatred or 
mutual slaughter.

When the other partner becomes an idol and the object of worship 
because there is no God to adore, erotic love turns against those 
who have abused it. Each partner begins to feel the torturous 
contradiction between the infinite longing for Divine Love which it 
spurned, and its poor finite realizations and satieties in the human 
form. Both try to live a moment in which Satan's promise would be 
realized: "You will be like gods." But when there is no Agape to 
bridle Eros, then the furies are unleashed when the other partner is 
discovered not to be a God, much less an angel, or even a fallen 
angel. Because the other partner did not give all he promised to 
give (but which he was incapable of giving because he was not 
God) the other feels betrayed, deceived, disappointed, and 
cheated. No human being is Love, but only lovable. Only God is 
Love. When the creature takes the place of the Creator and is made 
to stand for love, then erotic love turns to hate; the other partner is 
discovered to have feet of clay, to be a woman instead of an angel, 
or to be a man instead of an Apollo. When the ecstasy does not 
continue, and the band stops playing, and the champagne of life 
loses its sparkle, the other partner is called a cheat and a robber, 
and then finally called to a divorce court on the grounds of 
incompatibility. And what grounds could be more stupid than 
incompatibility, for what two persons in the world are perfectly 
and at all times compatible?

A search for a new partner begins on the assumption that some 
other human being can supply what only God can give. The new 
marriages become only the addition of zeros. Instead of seeing 
that the basic reason for the failure of marriage was the refusal to 
use married love as the vestibule to the Divine, the divorced think 
that the second marriage can supply what the first lacked. The 
very fact that a man or a woman seeks a new partner is a proof that 
there never was any love at all, for though sex is replaceable, love 
is not. Cows can graze on other pastures, but there is no 
substitution for a person. As soon as a person becomes equated 
with a package to be judged only by its wrappings, it will not be 
long until the tinsel turns green and the package is discarded.

This arrangement enslaves a woman, because she is much more a 
creature of time than man, and her security becomes less and less 
through the years. She is always much more concerned about her 
age than a man, and thinks more of marriage in terms of time. A 
man is afraid of dying before he has lived, but a woman is 
basically afraid of dying before she has begotten life. A woman 
wants the fulfillment of life more than a man. It is less the 
experience of life that she craves, than the prolongation of life. 
Whenever the laws and the customs of a country permit an 
arrangement whereby a woman can be discarded because she has 
dishpan hands, she becomes the slave, not of the dishpans, but of 
man.

So selfish is erotic love alienated from Divine Love that sometimes 
it will permit no flower to grow except its own. It may even resent 
the conversion of the partner to God on the foolish grounds that 
there will be less love for self if God is loved, or that love will be 
more pure and less Freudian. Opposition to religion is often one of 
the consequences of erotic love, forgetting as it does that love is 
widened by contact with Divinity. The result is that persons 
become reduced to mere chattels who exist for no other purpose 
than to be possessed. It makes little difference to weary souls 
whether that which possesses them is a foreign ideology, a body, a 
Utopia, a drink, or a pill. The fact is that they are so disgusted with 
themselves and their goalless living that they surrender 
themselves to a totalitarian system which will dispense with 
personal responsibility. Eroticism and Communism, Freud and 
Marx, are not so far apart.

If love remained only in the flesh and were like a bitter weed that 
would suffer no flowers to bloom except its own, love would be 
most miserable, for love then would only be a quest and not a 
communion. Love that is only a search or a quest is incomplete. All 
incompleteness ends in frustration. The difficulty all who are 
married must feel, is the paradox of the romance and the marriage, 
the chase and the capture. Each has its joys, but never perfectly 
are they combined here below. The marriage ends the courtship; 
the courtship presupposes no marriage. The chase ends with the 
capture. How is this contradiction met? There is only one way that 
will not sear the soul, and that is to see that both the marriage and 
the courtship are incomplete. The courtship was really a quest for 
the infinite, and a search for an unending, ecstatic, eternal love, 
while the marriage was the possession of a finite and fragmentary 
love, however blissful might be its moments. The search was for 
the garden; it ended in eating the apple. The quest was for the 
melody; the discovery was only a note.

At this point Christianity suggests: Do not think that life is a snare 
or an illusion. It would be that only if there were no Infinite to 
satisfy your yearnings. Rather, husband and wife should say: "We 
both want a Love that will never die and will have no moments of 
hate or satiety. That love lies beyond both of us; let us, therefore, 
use our marital love one for another to bring us to that perfect, 
blissful love, which is God." At that point, love ceases to be a 
disillusionment and begins to be a sacrament, a material, carnal 
channel toward the spiritual and the Divine. Husband and wife 
then come to see that human love is a spark from the great flame 
of eternity; that the happiness which comes from the unity of two 
in one flesh is a prelude to that greater communion of two in one 
spirit. In this way, marriage becomes a tuning fork to the song of 
the angels, or a river that runs to the sea. The couple then sees 
that there is an answer to the elusive mystery of love, and that 
somewhere there is a reconciliation of the guest and the goal, and 
that is in final union with God, where the chase and capture, the 
romance and the marriage, fuse into one. For since God is 
boundless eternal Love, it will take an ecstatic eternal chase to 
sound its depths. At one and the same eternal moment, there is a 
limitless receptivity and a boundless gift. Thus does Eros climb to 
Agape, and both move on to that greatest revelation ever given to 
the world: GOD IS LOVE.



5. It Takes Three to Make Love

Love is the basic passion of man. Every emotion of the human 
heart is reducible to it. Without love we would never become 
better, for love is the impetus to perfection, the fulfillment of what 
we have not. Love, in the broad sense of the term, is found 
wherever there is existence. It has the same dimensions as being. 
Whatever has an inclination, whether it be fire to burn upwards, 
flowers to bloom, animals to beget, or man to wed, has love. 
Chemical elements love one another through the law of affinity of 
one element for another, as two atoms of hydrogen and one of 
oxygen make water. Plants love the earth, the sun, the moisture, 
through the Divinely implanted laws of vegetation; animals love 
through the Divinely infused instincts which guide them to the 
end for which they were created. But when it comes to man, there 
is no determined instinct, but reason and freedom by which he can 
freely choose that which will complement and perfect his nature. 
What instinct is to the animal, that the free will is to man. Choice 
is without reason in beasts, but it is rational in man.

Animal love is tied down to what can be tasted, seen, touched and 
heard, but man's love is as universal as goodness, beauty, and 
truth. Man can know and love not only a good meal, but Goodness. 
He may not always love what is best for him but this never 
destroys his power to love Love, Which is God.

Love is an inclination or a tendency to seek what seems good. The 
lover seeks union with the good which is loved in order to be 
perfected by it. The mystery of all love is that it actually precedes 
every act of choice; one chooses because he loves, he does not 
love because he chooses. The youth loves the maiden not because 
he chooses her from among maidens, but rather he elects and 
selects her as unique because he loves her. As St. Thomas puts it: 
"All other passions and appetites presuppose love as their first 
root." All other passions, even those which seem the enemy of 
love, are related to it, such as fear and hate. Fear rises from a 
danger of losing what is loved, whether it be wealth, possessions, 
or friends. Hatred springs from an antipathy against those who 
would do violence to our loves. Hatefulness, bitterness, envy and 
fretfulness are all perverted kinds of love.

Love is very different from knowledge. When the mind is 
confronted with something above its level--for example, an 
abstract principle of metaphysics or mathematics--it breaks it 
down into examples so that it can understand it. The reason why 
many teachers fail in their profession is because the! do not know 
how to bring down to a lower and concrete level the subject which 
they teach. Maybe they do not know the subject, for the test of 
knowing anything is the ability to give an example for it. Theses 
with footnotes, into which are thrown the knowledge that is not 
understood, are easier to write than a popularization of that same 
subject for a beginner. Some are thought to be learned when they 
are only confusing. The Word Incarnate spoke in terms of parables 
illustrating eternal verities, such as judgment of the good and bad, 
under the analogy of the separation of sheep and goats. If we 
understand anything, we can make it clear. If we do not 
understand it, we can never explain it.

But love acts just the opposite to knowledge. Love goes out to meet 
the demands of what is loved. The intellect pulls higher things 
down to its level; the will, which is the seat of love, lifts itself up 
to the level of the good which it loves. If one loves music, one 
meets the demands of music by submitting to its laws; if one 
wishes to win the love of a poet, one must cultivate some 
appreciation of poetry. Because love goes up to meet the beloved, 
it follows that the nobler the love, the nobler the character. We live 
on the plane of our loves.

If, then, anyone wishes to judge his character, all he has to do is to 
answer the question: "What do I love most?" As Our Lord put it: 
"Where your treasure-house is, there your heart is too." (Matt. 6:21) 
Our favorite topic of conversation is the telltale of Our deepest 
love. It would be wrong to judge people solely by the snatches of 
conversation one overhears on the streets and in dining rooms, for 
these would make it appear that for many men business is their 
greatest love, while for women, it is fashion or style. Actually, 
however, there are two basic loves which everyone has without 
exception: love of self and love of others. The first is the basis of 
self-preservation; the second is the root of friendship and 
community. Love exists not in isolation or suspension, it craves 
involvement with others because love is essentially a relation. 
Love of self becomes the love of others, either for the sake of 
association or for the continuation of humankind.

These two loves of self and neighbor ought to go together, but 
they often pull in opposite directions. On the one hand, we cannot 
cling to ourselves and love ourselves apart from all others, 
because he who is absolutely alone is loveless. On the other hand, 
we cannot cling entirely to others, for though they offer occasion 
of love, they also set limits to our love. They do this either 
because they are not absolutely lovable, or because they are really 
not worth clinging to at all. Loving self alone has many 
disadvantages: it forces us to dwell in quarters that are too 
cramped and squalid for comfort; it confronts self with a self that 
in some moments is not only unlovable, but even intolerable; and 
it makes us want to get away from ourselves because we find we 
are not very deep. Probing into the depths of our ego to find peace 
is too often like plunging into a pool without water. After a while, 
our self-centeredness ends in self-disruption, as we discover we 
have no center at all. No one can love himself properly unless he 
knows why he is living.

Love is useless when alone, as it is in sleep or death. It is really 
possessed only by giving it to others. Love is a sign of our 
creatureliness, the strongest proof that we are not gods and have 
not all we need within ourselves. If we were God, we would have no 
need of loving anything else, for love would find its perfection 
within itself, as in God. We must love others because we are 
imperfect; it is the mark of our indigence, a reminder that we came 
from nothingness, and that of and by ourselves love is incomplete 
and sterile. Yet in giving to others, we are often disappointed; 
some want to use us, others to possess us. The involvement does 
not come up to our expectations; the one whom we thought was a 
good angel turns out to be a fallen one. Some contacts with others 
are like boomerangs; they throw us back on ourselves poorer than 
when we left, and therefore embittered. Torn between the 
independence of their own ego and dependence on other egos, 
tossed between worship of self and worship of others, many hearts 
develop a restlessness and a fatigue which keep the rich busy 
running to psychoanalysts to have their anxiety explained away, 
and the poor having recourse to the cheaper charlatans of 
alcoholism and sleeping tablets. It is interesting how a 
materialistic civilization describes the rich as suffering from an 
"anxiety neurosis," and the poor as being plain "nuts" or 
"crackpots." If no true solution of the tension between love of self 
and love of others is found, legitimate self-love degenerates into 
egotism, pride, skepticism, and arrogance, while love of others 
degenerates into lust, cruelty, and hatred of the spiritual. Cynics 
are disappointed egotists, and revolutionists of violence are 
disgruntled altruists. Perverted self-love, when it became political, 
created Individualism, or Historical Liberalism; perverted love of 
others, when it became political, created Totalitarianism.

There is a solution to this problem of tension between love of the 
ego and love of the non-ego, or the independence of the ego and 
its dependence on other egos, but it is not to be found either in the 
ego or the non-ego. The basic error of mankind has been to assume 
that only two are needed for love: you and me, or society and me, or 
humanity and me. Really it takes three: self, other selves, and God; 
you, and me, and God. Love of self without love of God is 
selfishness; love of neighbor without love of God embraces only 
those who are pleasing to us, not those who are hateful. One 
cannot tie two sticks together without something outside the 
sticks; one cannot bind the nations of the world together except by 
the recognition of a Law and a Person outside the nations 
themselves. Duality in love is extinction through the exhaustion of 
self-giving. Love is triune or it dies. It requires three virtues, faith, 
hope, and charity, which intertwine, purify, and regenerate each 
other. To believe in God is to throw ourselves into His arms; to 
hope in Him is to rest in His heart in patience amidst trials and 
tribulations; to love Him is to be with Him through a participation 
of His Divine Nature through grace. If love did not have faith and 
trust, it would die; if love did not have hope, its sufferings would 
be torture, and love might seem loveless. Love of self, love of 
neighbor, and love of God go together and when separated fall 
apart.

Love of self without love of God is egotism, for if there is no 
Perfect Love from Whom we came and for Whom we are destined, 
then the ego becomes the center. But when self is loved in God, the 
whole concept of what is self-perfection changes. If the ego is an 
absolute, its perfection consists in having whatever will make it 
happy, and at all costs; this is the essence of egotism, or 
selfishness. If union with Perfect Love is the goal of personality, 
then its perfection consists not in having but in being had, not in 
owning but in being owned, or better still, not in having but in 
being.

Union with Perfect Happiness or God is not something extrinsic to 
us, like a gold medal to a student, but is, rather, intrinsic to our 
nature, as blooming is to a flower. Without it we are unsatisfied 
and incomplete. The self actually is always craving for this Divine 
Love. Its insatiable urges toward happiness, its anticipated ecstasy 
of pleasures, its constant desire to love without satiety, its 
reaching for something beyond its grasp, the sadness it feels in 
attaining any happiness less than the infinite--all these constitute 
the mating call of God to the soul. As trees in the forest bend 
through other trees to absorb the light, so every self is striving for 
the Love which is God. If this Love seems contrary to some 
people's desires, it is only because it is contrary to their developed 
egotism but not to their nature. God has not given to self 
everything it needs for happiness; He kept back one thing which is 
needed, Himself. On this point, there is a similarity between the 
temporal unhappiness on earth and the eternal unhappiness in 
hell: the soul in each instance lacks something.

There is not a golfer in America who has not heard the story, which 
is theologically sound, about the golfer who went to hell and asked 
to play golf. The Devil showed him a 36-hole course with a 
beautiful clubhouse, long fairways, perfectly placed hazards, 
rolling hills, and velvety greens. Next the Devil gave him a set of 
clubs so well balanced that the golfer felt he had been swinging 
them all his life. Out to the first tee they stepped ready for a game. 
The golfer said: "What a course! Give me the ball." The Devil 
answered: "Sorry, Comrade (they call one another 'Comrade,' not 
'Brother' in Hell), we have no balls. That's the hell of it." And it is 
just that which makes hell: the lack of Perfect Life, Perfect Truth, 
and Perfect Love, which is God, Who is essential for our happiness.

God keeps something back on earth, not as a punishment, but as a 
solicitation. The poet George Herbert has told us that God poured 
out wealth, beauty, and pleasure on man, but kept back Himself:

     For if I should (said He) 
     Bestow this jewel also on creatures, 
     He would adore My gifts instead of Me, 
     And rest in nature, not the God of nature, 
     So both should losers be. 
     Yet let him keep the rest 
     But keep them with repining restlessness; 
     Let him be rich and weary, that at least, 
     If goodness lead him not, yet weariness 
     May toss him to My Breast.

It takes some effort to grow in this love, for as the art of painting 
is cultivated by painting, and speaking is learned by speaking, and 
study is learned by studying, so love is learned by loving. It takes 
considerable asceticism to banish all unloving thoughts and to 
make us eventually loving. The will to love makes us lovers.

There are four stages the soul passes through in its love of God: (a) 
the soul which starts with loving self for its own sake soon realizes 
its own insufficiency, seeing that loving self without God is like 
loving the ray of sunlight without the sun. Perhaps the soul at this 
point also sees that even the self would be quite unlovable unless 
love-energy or lovableness had been put into it by God. (b) God is 
loved not for His own sake, but for the sake of the self. At this 
stage, there are prayers of petition because God is loved because 
of the favors He gives. This was the love of Peter when he asked of 
the Lord: "What do we get out of it?" (c) God is loved for His sake, 
not ours. The soul cares more for the Beloved than for what the 
Beloved gives; in the romantic order it corresponds to that moment 
when the beloved no longer loves the suitor because he sends 
roses, but because he is lovable. It is like the love of a mother for a 
child who seeks no favor in return. (d) The final stage is one of 
those rare moments when the love of self is completely abandoned 
and emptied and surrendered for the sake of God. This would 
correspond to a moment in a mother's life when she ceases to 
think of her own life in order to save her child from death. In this 
kind of Divine Love, the self is not destroyed but transfigured. 
This is the "love that leaves all other love a pain."

As a person uses the scalpel on his soul and analyzes his psyche, 
he discovers more and more how unlovable he is. The flights from 
self, the plunges into the irresponsibility of artificial 
unconsciousness, prove that man cannot bear himself. Without 
God Pascal rightly described the self as despicable, or the "moi 
haissable." Fundamentally, it is because God loves us that we 
ought to love ourselves. If He sees something worthwhile in us and 
died to save us, then we have a motive for loving self rightly. As a 
person feels ennobled when a beautiful and gracious friend loves 
him, then what shall be the ecstasy of a soul at that moment when 
it awakes to the shattering truth: God loves me!

It is easy to love those who love us, and Our Divine Lord told us 
that there was no reward in this. But what about the number of 
people in the world whom we regard as unlovable? One of the 
strongest social arguments for God is this: there must be a God, 
otherwise so many people would be unloved The love of God 
makes it possible to love those who are "hard to love." Why should 
we love those who hate us malign us, who trample on our feet to 
get to the first seats in a theater? There is only one reason: for 
God's sake. We may not like them, for liking is emotional, but we 
can love them, for love is in the will and is subject to command 
"But I tell you, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 
pray for those who persecute and insult you." (Matt. 5:44) Because 
we love God, we can love anyone for His sake, as a lover will 
cultivate a love of lobster for the sake of the beloved. When 
therefore some particularly repulsive individual comes our way, 
and we are inclined to reject his presence even for a brief span of 
time, we ought to think of God appearing to us at that moment 
saying: "Listen, I put up with him for forty years; can't you put up 
with him for ten minutes?"

The love of God also reminds us that we ought not to judge the 
neighbor by his appearance. If he had all the graces and 
opportunities we have had, how much more he might love God. 
The Pharisee in the front of the Temple who kept the law and gave 
the amount deductible from income tax to the poor was 
uncommended by God, while the publican who poured out his soul 
to God, begging pardon, went back to his own house justified. It 
was this thought that made Philip Neri say, as he saw a condemned 
man go to the gallows: "There goes Philip except for the grace of 
God." After a while all these people, who before seemed so 
unattractive, are actually seen as much better than we; spiritually 
we get to a point where we feel their sin as our own, and take on 
their debts in penance, as the Savior took on ours, because we love 
them in God.

Love of neighbor, in like manner, when suffused by the love of 
God, never uses the neighbor for one's own pleasure. Nothing has 
so much contributed to the debasement of human relationships as 
the idea that friends are won by flattery. True love helps the 
neighbor to fulfill his vocation in God and thus it coincides with 
his own. As St. Paul told the Romans: "We who are bold in our 
confidence ought to bear with the scruples of those who are 
timorous; not to insist on having our own way. Each of us ought to 
give way to his neighbor, where it serves a good purpose by 
building up his faith." (Romans 15:1-2) In human relationships we 
limit the horizon of our affection to those whom we love. Few are 
the Samaritans who love those who hate them. Nothing can extend 
this horizon as much as recognizing not those alone whom we 
love, but those whom God loves, and that is everybody. Thus the 
soul becomes like God, the "creator" of the one we love. In Him we 
make them lovable. Not only does a love of God prolong God's 
Creation, it even continues His Redemption, at least to the extent 
that we would re-create or redeem those whom we love.

Imagine a large circle and in the center of it rays of light that 
spread out to the circumference. The light in the center is God; 
each of us is a ray. The closer the rays are to the center, the closer 
the rays are to one another. The closer we live to God, the closer 
we are bound to our neighbor; the farther we are from God, the 
farther we are from one another. The more each ray departs from 
its center, the weaker it becomes; and the closer it gets to the 
center, the stronger it becomes.

The secret of happiness is for each man to live as close to God as 
he can, and he will thereby live closer to his neighbor. This is the 
solution to the riddle of Love. In Him self-love becomes perfected; 
in Him also we love our neighbor as ourselves and for the same 
reason. If, therefore, I hate anyone, I hate someone God made; if I 
love myself to the exclusion of God, I find that I hate myself for 
not being all I ought to be.

Love at first seems a contradiction: How can one love self without 
being selfish? How can one love others without losing self? The 
answer is: By loving both self and neighbor in God. It is His Love 
that makes us love both self and neighbor rightly. God has first 
loved us while as yet we were sinners. Love of self avoids egotism 
by love of self-perfection, which is achieved by loving God. Love 
of others avoids totalitarianism, or the losing of self by absorption 
in the mass, through the loving of others in the spiritual 
brotherhood of "Our Father."

The poor frustrated souls who are locked up inside their own 
minds keep their little egotistic heads too busy and their selfish 
hands and feet too idle. If they would begin loving their neighbor 
for God's sake, they would soon find themselves loving their own 
moral perfection, which consists not in seeing their self-will but in 
living according to God's will. This double law of love of self and 
neighbor in God is the secret of life, for Our Savior, after giving 
the law of love of God and neighbor, said: "Do this, and thou shalt 
find life." (Luke 10:28)

God never intended that the "I" and the "Thou" should be 
separated. God is no obstacle to the full enjoyment of self, nor is 
He a competitor to the love of neighbor. But when love becomes 
triune, God is installed in the center of the "I" and the "Thou," thus 
preventing the "I" from being an egotist and the "Thou" from 
becoming a tool or instrument of pleasure. Such love is God in 
pilgrimage. But if we would seek the reason why it takes three to 
make love, we must look into the heart of God Himself.



6. Love Is Triune

The love of husband and wife is perfected as it becomes triune; 
now there is the lover, the beloved, and love--the love being 
something distinct from both, and yet in both. If there is only the 
mine and thine, there is impenetrability and separateness. Not 
until there is a third acting element, as the soil in which the two 
vines intertwine, is there oneness. Then is the impotence of the I 
to completely possess the Thou overcome in the realization that 
there is a bond outside pulling them together, hovering over them 
as the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary, turning the I and Thou into 
a We. It is this that lovers mean when, without knowing it, they 
speak of "our love" as something distinct from each.

Without a sense of Absolute Love, which is stronger than the 
independent love of each for the other, there is a false duality 
which ends in the absorption of the I into the Thou or the Thou 
into the I. In divorce cases, this is called "mental torture" or 
"domination." Really, it is egocentricity, in which one ego loves 
itself in the other ego. The I is projected into the Thou and is loved 
in the Thou. The Thou is not really loved as a person; it is only 
used as a means to the pleasure of the I. As soon as the other 
ceases to exhilarate, the so-called love ceases. There is nothing 
left to hold such a couple together, because there is no third term. 
There may be idolatry when there are only two, but after a while 
the "goddess" or the "god" turns out to be of tin. There is a world of 
difference between loving self in another self, and giving both self 
and the other self to the Third Who will keep both in undying love. 
Without the Love of God, there is danger of love dying of its own 
too-much; but when each loves the Flame of Love--over and above 
their two individual sparks which have come from the Flame--then 
there is not absorption but communion. Then the love of the other 
becomes a proof that he loves God, for the other is seen in God 
and cannot be loved apart from Him.

The difference between this Triune Love as the basis of the love of 
husband and wife, and its modern counterpart, which is duality, 
with its tension and conflict, is this: in the latter, each loves the 
other as a god, as an ultimate. But no human can long bear the 
attribute of divinity; it is like resting a marble statue on the stem 
of a rose. When the "deity" of the other is deflated, either because 
it is exhausted or because one becomes accustomed to living with 
a "god" or a "goddess," there is a terrific sense of ennui and 
boredom. To the extent that the other is blamed, there begins to be 
cruelty because of the supposed deceit. How much wiser the 
Japanese were as regards their Emperor! They made him a god, but 
they also made him invisible and untouchable; otherwise the 
hollowness of his divinity would have been detected. A man who 
makes himself a god must hide; otherwise his false divinity will be 
unmasked. But God can become a child and talk in parables and 
never lose His Divinity.

In authentic love, the other is accepted not as a god, but as a gift 
of God. As a gift of God, the other is unique and irreplaceable, a 
sacred trust, a mission to be fulfilled. As Dante said, speaking of 
Beatrice: "She looks on Heaven, and I look on her." There are 
perhaps few more touchingly beautiful spectacles in all the world 
than that of a husband and wife saying their prayers together. The 
prayer of a husband and wife, said together, is not the same as two 
distinct individuals pouring out their hearts to God, for in the first 
instance, there is an acknowledgment of the Spirit of Love which 
makes them one. Because both are destined for eternity, it is 
fitting that all their acts of love have that eternal flavor in which 
their souls in prayer and their bodies in marriage attest to the 
universality of admiration not only for God, but also for each 
other. As Maude Royden says:

"Not I and Thou are significant to one another, but to each of 
us that Third.... Nameless, it has bound us from the beginning, 
though still covered by a dazzling light when we met each other, 
unconscious that the Third is more powerful than are both of us. 
But now we know it. It has disclosed itself to us between your and 
my isolation, and our love has become a testimony to our 
impotence to love, our bond an indication of something over us. 
Now we know it, we poles eternally separated, eternally drawn to 
each other, imposed upon each other, we have and hold one 
another, not for our sake, but that in this event of I and Thou that 
Third may take form, and with it we two as well.

". . . He has, to our eternal gratitude, chained together the 
human elements in us; he has, to our still profounder gratitude, 
thrown us back upon ourselves and led each one by himself to the 
trust that the last solitude of any human being is not to be filled 
by any other human being, even the most beloved. He has blessed 
us with the knowledge that marriage also, in the idiom of religion, 
is created "toward God".... He, The Third and One in whom we are 
united, is henceforth our law and our liberty; in Him and through 
Him is our bond holy, our solitude relieved, Nature freed from its 
dumb existence in itself, the dualism and the opposition of our 
souls bound up in the more exalted and relieved from the tragedy 
of their separation.

"Now for the first time can I love thee. Now thou art more 
than thou alone and my love no longer founders on thee, since it 
reaches out beyond thee to all that is worth loving, which thou art 
to me. I love thee; now it means this; I love, I am a lover, because 
thou existest. Now forever we embrace infinitely more than merely 
one another; in embracing each other, we give testimony of that by 
which we are embraced. So thou hast become to me the best that 
one human being can become to another; the sign and pledge of 
the lovableness of the ultimate ground whence all things rise. If it 
is of such that it is said: "What therefore God hath joined together 
let not man put asunder"; then it does not lie in our power to 
become divorced--for our bond is knotted and preserved by a third 
hand. Therein lies at the same time the significance of our divided 
self--also the sense of our "one for the other." "

It takes three to make love. What binds lover and beloved together 
on earth is an ideal outside both. As it is impossible to have rain 
without the clouds, so it is impossible to understand love without 
God. In the Old Testament, God is defined as a Being Whose Nature 
it is to exist: "I am Who am." In the New Testament, God is defined 
as Love: "God is Love." That is why the basis of all Philosophy is 
Existence, and the basis of all Theology is Charity, or love.

If we would seek out the mystery of why love has a triune 
character and implies lover, beloved, and love, we must mount to 
God Himself. Love is Triune in God because in Him there are three 
Persons and in the one Divine Nature! Love has this triple 
character because it is a reflection of the Love of God, in Whom 
there are three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity is 
the answer to the questions of Plato. If there is only one God, what 
does He think about? He thinks an eternal thought: His Eternal 
Word, or Son. If there is only one God, whom does He love? He 
loves His Son, and that mutual love is the Holy Spirit. The great 
philosopher was fumbling about for the mystery of the Trinity, for 
his noble mind seemed in some small way to suspect that an 
infinite being must have relations of thought and love, and that 
God cannot be conceived without thought and love. But it was not 
until the Word became Incarnate that man knew the secret of those 
relations and the inner life of God, for it was Jesus Christ, the Son 
of God, Who revealed to us the inmost life of God.

It is that mystery of the Trinity which gives the answer to those 
who have pictured God as an egotist God sitting in solitary 
splendor before the world began, for the Trinity is a revelation that 
before creation God enjoyed the infinite communion with Truth 
and the embrace of infinite Love, and hence had no need ever to 
go outside of Himself in search for happiness. The greatest wonder 
of all is that, being perfect and enjoying perfect happiness, He 
ever should have made a world. And if He did make a world, He 
could only have had one motive for making it. It could not add to 
His perfection; it could not add to His Truth; it could not increase 
His Happiness. He made a world only because He loved, and love 
tends to diffuse itself to others.

Finally, it is the mystery of the Trinity which gives the answer to 
the quest for happiness and the meaning of Heaven. Heaven is not 
a place where there is the mere vocal repetition of alleluias or the 
monotonous fingering of harps. Heaven is a place where we find 
the fullness of all life's greatest values. It is a state where we find 
in their plenitude those things which slake the thirst of hearts, 
satisfy the hunger of starving minds, and give rest to unsolaced 
loves. Heaven is the communion with Perfect Life, Perfect Truth, 
and Perfect Love: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy 
Spirit.

Here is the answer to the riddle of love. Love implies relation. If 
lived in isolation, it becomes selfishness; if absorbed in 
collectivity, it loses its personality and, therefore, the right to love. 
The ultimate reason why it takes three to make love is that God is 
Love, and His Love is Triune. All earthly love worthy of the name is 
the echo of "This Tremendous Lover," Who is not an individual 
Ego, but a Society of Love. As every sentence implies a subject, 
predicate, and object, so all love implies a triple relationship of 
Lover, a Beloved, and the Unifying Love. No example is quite 
adequate to describe this inner life of God! The wisest of all 
pagans, Aristotle, once described God as Pure Actuality, which is 
as far as reason alone can go. He distinguished between two kinds 
of activity: transitive, in which the activity moved from the inside 
out, like heat from a radiator; and immanent activity, which is like 
thinking and willing within man. All life has some immanent 
activity, but it is imperfect, since it is bound up with transitive 
activity. For example, the tree has immanent life, but the fruit it 
generates falls from the tree; the animal has immanent life, but 
when it begets its kind, the newborn animal lives an independent 
existence. The most perfect immanent activity on earth is that of 
man, who can generate a thought which does not fall from his 
mind like an apple from a tree. It remains inside his mind to 
perfect and to enrich it!

God is perfect immanent activity. The best example that we can 
find on earth for the inner life of God is the study of the human 
mind! Because it faintly reflects the Trinity, we first study its 
nature, then use it to exemplify the Triune life of God.

The mind conceives a thought--say, "justice," "faith," or 
"squareness." Not one of these thoughts has size, weight, or color. 
No one ever saw "justice" striding along a country lane or sitting 
down to a meal. Whence has the idea come? It has been generated 
by the mind, just as the animal generates its kind. For there is 
generation in the mind, as there is generation in the life of the 
plant or animal, but here the generation is spiritual. There is 
fecundity in the mind, just as there is fecundity in the lower types 
of life, but here the fecundity is spiritual. And because its 
generation and its fecundity are spiritual, what is begotten 
remains in the mind; it does not fall off outside it, as the seed 
from the clover. The embryo of the animal was once a part of its 
parents, but in due course of nature it was born; that is, separated 
from the parent. But in intellectual conception, when a thought is 
born of the mind it always remains within the mind and never 
separates itself from it. The intellect preserves its youth in such a 
way that the greatest thinkers of all times have called intelligence 
the highest kind of life on this earth. This is the meaning behind 
the words of the Psalmist. Intellectum da mihi et vivam--"Give me 
knowledge, and I will live." The more inner life one has, the more 
knowledge. Since God is perfect immanent activity, without 
dependence on anything outside Himself, He is Perfect Life.

Now we come to the other faculty of the soul, the will. As the 
intellect thinks and seeks Truth, so the will chooses and pursues 
Goodness. Choice comes from within. The stone has no will; its 
activity is wholly determined by force imposed on it from without. 
It must, in servile obedienc