Before That Love Celestial: Incarnation

The past two posts looked that the poignant couplet between distance and love, with Byung Chul Han’s notion of “the negativity of otherness” as the lens to explore how, as suggested in my first post, if the negativity of distance is a necessary precondition for truly erotic experience, then keeping that otherness (and consequently the love) alive required keeping the distance between the lover and beloved open.

Closing that distance, as I suggested in the second post, would involve the trauma of a collision between one world and another. This risks not only the integrity of either lover or beloved, but the love between them as well.

If what Han argues is correct - and I believe we could say he is philosophically correct - then what we have here is a paradox, wherein the sought for end in the negativity of otherness, which is oneness with the beloved, also erases that very possibility for love. In its drive for internal consistency, what philosophy is not able to resolve is precisely this paradox.

I bring this up in the closing weeks of Advent because what resolves this paradox is not a philosophical system, but the person of the divine logos, and what we celebrate in the close of Advent - Christmas - is the divine act which brings together these two poles of otherness and oneness.

This is because what we celebrate in Christmas is the logos made flesh, the bringing together of the divine with the human, the universal and the particular, otherness and self. For in the incarnate word, as St Bonaventure put it, lies the paradox coming to us as a person.

It must be said that the dogma of the Incarnation is vital for the Christian faith, not only because it theologically resolves a paradox that philosophy identifies. It also puts into human flesh the very engine for the resolution of this paradox, which is God’s love for his creatures. The care manifested in the far-off heavenly bodies (which we read about in Psalm 8), comes close to us in the love manifested in the muscle and sinews of Jesus of Nazareth.

A blessed Christmas to all.

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