Complex Love

I recently returned from facilitating a retreat at Holy Spirit Provincial Seminary in Brisbane, on the metaphysics of Christ’s passion in light of the metaphysical work of Ferdinand Ulrich’s Homo Abyssus. I am grateful for the experience and also for the feedback given to me by the seminarians.

One facet of the input dealt with the life giving creativity that arises as a result of the nothingness of Created Being. It is precisely because Being, like God, is not a thing like you and I are things, Being is able to participate in God by completely giving of itself. It is the relentlessness of this self-less giving that in turn, gives rise to myriad subsistent forms of new life.

One of the questions that arose in question time was need for complexity, whether the complexity of the metaphysical infrastructure of Being or of the subsistent beings that live on the earth.

The answer came to me when I remembered a segment on the pre-fall state of creation in Augustine’s City of God, which was so capably Kristen Deede-Johnson’s Theology, Political Theory and Pluralism. In that segment, Augustine painted a picture in which the pre-fall state was marked by a stupendous complexity, far more diverse than what we have on this side of original sin (this was indicated by rather humourous references to creatures with massive feet and those able to fart out whole symphonies with no odour).

The crux of the answer was that it was precisely in the complexity that expressed the utter creativity of God. This creativity in turn is a sign of excess, or more importantly, an excess of love in keeping with God’s nature. Complexity thereby expresses divine charity, and diversity is creaturely participation in, rather than deviation from, divine nature.

Seen from another angle, complexity thereby embodies what Byung Chul Han calls a “negativity of otherness”, an inability to fully capture an object. It is this inability that forms the bedrock from which relation, desire, and indeed love, will grow. By contrast, building on an earlier argument from some years ago, the drive to simplify and streamline everything lays the foundation to eradicate this “negativity of otherness” and as such, it lays the foundation for the curtailing of any love and relation.

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