CREATING A NEW IMAGINARY FOR LOVE IN RELIGION

Abstract

Ideas of love within religion are usually driven by one of two mythologies – either a personal God who commands love or a mystical God of ineffable love – but both are inadequate for motivating love of neighbour. The first tends towards legalism and the second offers no cognitive guidance. The situation is further complicated by there being different understandings of love of neighbour in the various Abrahamic religions, as exemplified in the approaches of two philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard and Emmanuel Levinas. A better approach is therefore to explore actual practices of love in everyday life, and to discover how love might be performed openly and creatively. One such practice is recognition of vulnerability, and this too is often driven by a mythology, in this case one marked by fear, and by a violence either imposed or avoided. One paradigmatic example is the vulnerability felt by speakers, especially women, in front of an audience. A turning from wilful ignorance of vulnerability and a turning to reliance on collective work, modelled on an awareness of mutual vulnerability and openness to the unknown, will help to change our philosophical and social imaginary. The dark myth of vulnerability can be transformed into finding opportunities in vulnerability for openness to affection and so to an enhancement of life. It is only from the perspective of this new imaginary, and from everyday practices of it, that the double love-command – love of God and love of neighbour – will function as any kind of common ground between religions.

Keywords:

• imaginary
• love
• religion
• vulnerability
• myth
• practices

Notes

1 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Love and Vulnerability: Two Love Commands and One God,” available <https://loveinreligion.org/resources/> (accessed 21 Nov. 2019). Used by permission.

2 For her early use of “myth,” see Mary Midgley, Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay (London: Routledge, 1984) 10–12, 162. For her more technical definition of myth, see idem, The Ethical Primate: Humans, Freedom and Morality (London: Routledge, 1994) 109, 117–18; the latter is repeated and elaborated ten years later in idem, The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, 2004; Routledge Classics, 2011) xi, 1, 2, 5.

3 Here, gender is socially and materially constructed by intersecting mechanisms of discrimination, including race, ethnicity, sex and class; so, the gender of a white, South African, transsexual, upper class “woman” will differ in multiple ways from a black, African-American, heterosexual, lower class “woman” or “man.” For an early statement of gender’s intersectionality, see Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” The University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989): 139–67.

4 HRH Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad, “The ‘Rule of Law of Love’” in Within the Love of God: Essays on the Doctrine of God in Honour of Paul S. Fiddes, eds. Anthony Clarke and Andrew Moore (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014) 29–46.

5 Concerning the obligation to “love your neighbour as yourself,” my thinking has been helped by M. Jamie Ferreira’s method of reading Emmanuel Levinas and Søren Kierkegaard on biblical love commandments; see M. Jamie Ferreira, “Kierkegaard and Levinas on Four Elements of the Biblical Love Commandment” in Kierkegaard and Levinas: Ethics, Politics and Religion, eds. J. Aaron Simmons and David Wood (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008) 82–98.

6 Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995).

7 Emmanuel Levinas, “Existence and Ethics” in Proper Names, by Emmanuel Levinas; trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996) 74.

8 See Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1997) 111–16.

9 Jennifer Hornsby, “Disempowered Speech,” Philosophical Topics 23.2 (1995) 127–47 (134).

10 Michèle Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon (London: Athlone, 1989) 127.

11 Ibid. 128.

12 Judith Butler, Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004) 128–51.

13 Ibid. 21–23.

14 Nancy Tuana, “The Speculum of Ignorance: The Women’s Health Movement and Epistemologies of Ignorance,” Hypatia 21.3 (2006) 1–19 (11).

15 Butler, Precarious Life 29.

16 Le Doeuff, Philosophical Imaginary 128.

17 Butler, Precarious Life 29.