Love in Translation

Our podcast Awkward Asian Theologians dropped its episode on the theme of love over the weekend.

If we could have summed up the episode in a sentence, it would be that love is not a feeling.

Well, not just a feeling.

Instead, like good asians, we focused on how love as understood within the Christian tradition comes with a particular structure, so as to make love bridge the metaphysical gulf between the universal and particular.

Against this backdrop, Dan and I organised the discussion around two themes encapsulated by two Greek words. The first was ecstasis and as the word suggested, we looked at ecstatic nature of love. Love is not a feeling within the self (and into which all things in the world are drawn), but rather something that we step out of ourselves and into. There is in a sense a loss of self, though paradoxically, it is through that act of stepping out that we find our true sense of self. We drew on Benedict’s Deus Caritas Est (in particular his theme on the purification of love) as a way to enflesh the concept.

The second Greek word was kenosis or self-emptying. In the same way that love is purified insofar as it involves this ecstatic move out of self, love is also purified insofar as it involves an emptying of self. And once again, there is a paradox here, in that the person finds fullness through the act of self emptying.

If we had a chance to re-record, one thing I would also have liked to include is Giussani’s motif of love as the heart of mystery (which we explored in a two-part episode here and here) and revelation. In the engagement with reality, Giussani argued that the person will come to the threshold of mystery as they arrive at the epistemological limit of human knowledge. At the same time, love becomes the underpinning for a revelation that within the structure of reality, the person will come to know the beauty of an other.

But there is more to learn in “Love in Translation”, which can be heard in full on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music.