In the previous post, I observed that what is true of a
married couple—what God has joined, man must not put asunder—is true of other
things as well. Just as the divorce
between a husband and his wife divides what ought not be divided, so too those
today who divide faith and reason either insisting on faith alone or reason
alone, wrongly try to rend and tear a seamless garment—to the detriment of
both. In the same way that modern man has often wrongly parted
faith from reason, he has also sought to divide the indivisible in other
spheres. He has sought to divide love
from responsibility.
Not long ago, I was engaged in my dissertation research in
Rome where I was staying in an apartment in Centocelle with an Italian and two
Americans. When one of those Americans,
a Californian, and I were walking to the subway to Rome, he was telling me of
his various love interests. When I
suggested in reply that it was only possible to love one women, he
objected. He suggested that it was only
possible to love one woman responsibly,
but that one might still love other women.
The conversation moved onto other
subjects, but I could not help reflecting that my then-roommate had fallen into
an error common in the modern world in trying to divorce love from
responsibility. In reality, however,
such a “love” is scare worthy of the name.
Love without responsibility is no more love than a story
without plot is a story. In reality,
responsibility is at the center of the story.
It suggests duty, an obligation not to self, but to others. It means not only something a man might want
to do, but something that he ought to do, whether he will or no. This responsibility causes love to look not
to self, but outward. It is what leads a
soldier to fall on a grenade for his friends, a wife to care for a sick or
alcoholic husband, a parent to suffer for a child.
Where real love, complete with duty and responsibility,
would have a man look outward modern man often prefers to look inward. He would make himself happy for it is his
life to live, he must look out for number one, do what makes him happy, and be
true to himself. An man who looks too
much to himself, however, cannot look to anything outside of him. Such a man can rise to no responsibility nor
answer a call to duty. Those things
would require him to look outward, but our modern individualist looks only
inward. Rejecting any real obligation or
responsibility, real love becomes impossible and all that remains is a poor
shadow where one loves not others, but as Fulton Sheen says, but only one’s own
self in others. One loves another not
for their sake, but for one’s own.
This poor shadow of love has fallen across much of modernity
and modern relationships, which only suffer for it. The divorce between love and responsibility
may be seen in the use of contraception where a couple accepts the pleasure
associated with sex, but none of the responsibility. The man rejects both the potential obligation
of having to support a woman whose own career may be injured by having a child
and the responsibility to raise that child.
Indeed, the tremendous responsibility of having a child and the
rejection of responsibility may explain the decreasing birthrate in an
individualistic western society. It may
explain the high rate of abortion, for little other explanation of the 4,000
children aborted each day is possible, than that their parents reject their own
responsibility towards them. The burden
of a child seems too great only when love is too small.
Other examples might be multiplied. There is the high divorce rate, the tendency
for couples to live together without marriage, or even the promise of it. All these show what happens when a modern world rejects the responsibility associated
with love. A traditional captain might
go down with the ship, but a modern captain would be first in the
lifeboat. Such a love scarce deserves
the name, but is rather a pale shadow of what it ought to be. In yet another case, what God has joined, man
has put asunder.
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