A friend was writing a paper for a college course he was taking, and asked for my help. The paper more or less asked whether Shakespeare and the Scriptures are dangerous to today’s society. (My initial answer was “God, I hope so.”)
This student is brilliant, but very linear. He rightly says that the themes of both Shakespeare’s plays (he specifically cites Othello) and the Scriptures are love, and that love is dangerous, but then he tries to define love in his paper based on Othello and I Corinthians 13. (Time out for a great Othello line: “Excellent wretch, perdition catch my soul, but I do love thee, and when I love thee not, Chaos is come again.”) The student said in the paper that love that is defined must be defined by its limits, and these limits are law, which is why people “yearn for justice”, which is a thought I rejected outright: love can’t be limited, and what we should yearn for is mercy. Any sane person would never “yearn for justice.” (Do you long for what you deserve?) As far as the subject of love goes, he equates “dangerous” with “evil” and “detrimental”, and thus takes a predictable course in his definition:
“The only way love can have any significance is if it has absolute definitions and limits.”
This is the major difference, I find between the way I have come to think, and pretty much everyone else. I think the only way love can have any significance is if we understand it cannot be defined adequately, and it sure as hell can’t be limited. My friend’s stringent definition ends up weak and conflicting, and all the more so when he attempts to contrast it with some scientific thinking he misconstrues, specifically that love is just a biological sifting and sorting.
The biology of love is a fascinating thing. People tend to think that in looking at the science, we deny the spiritual element, but I disagree. Looking at the science of things often reveals God’s beautiful fingerprints. This is very true when one looks at the science of love. There are four biological chemicals scientists associate with love: dopamine, norepinephrine, oxytoxcin, and seretonin. Our minds and bodies react in interesting ways as the levels of these four chemicals rise and fall in our systems.
Calvin and Hobbes exhibit a few scientific signs of love...
Scientists are now hypothesizing that dopamine causes one to focus on the beloved and therefore spend more time with them. This rewards the lover with pleasure, and the brain says, “Ooh! Do that again.” The gift of kind attention to another is rewarded by internal pleasure. This is the reciprocal effect: the fact that the giver receives pleasure, is super cool, showing the beautiful selfishness of love: concentrating on others, and doing those things that please and benefit them, is beneficial to the self in the most pure of ways-truly loving another person as they are is a selfless act because it benefits the self. It is also a joy unmatched when that love is reciprocated in kind. (This pleasure is only real when the lover’s sole motivation is the pleasure of the beloved; the self-centered pleasure-seeker will always end up empty.)
It seems the purpose of dopamine may be to connect us to one another. The human need for dopamine is one of the scientific causes of our need for social interaction, and another evidence, in my view, of the hand of God in the creation of humanity. Only God could create such a maddening and paradoxical thing. It seems God created mankind with a foundational need more intense than fight or flight: He placed in us the biological need to give, and of ourselves, no less.
Norepinephrine is the chemical science is now blaming for the looniness of love: the elation and boundless energy (talking, etc… for long stretches of time). It gives us the butterfly effect (“Every time he calls, I get butterflies in my stomach!”), the elevated heart-rate, the day-dreaming, the singing and smiling for no apparent reason, and the all-encompassing early signs of attraction that make falling in love such a beautiful rush. God did not have to give us such a fun gift. What generosity and…love…that displays. He gave us this element of love not only to ensure the species propogates, but because we would enjoy the euphoria love brings.
"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence." -H. L. Mencken
Oxytocin appears to be the chemical associated with the cement of love. It is the bonding agent, the commitment, the sex, the trust. With a concrete bonding, love becomes a reality, and therefore, with the bonding comes the danger: if any of the other factors of love are missing, an unbalanced, weak seal is is made and a false reality is born, and this is the cause of many broken hearts, because when such bonds are broken or torn apart, both pieces are left damaged.
Seratonin, though is the most important chemical of love, in my view, because scientist believe it provides the deeper calming effect of love, the underlying sense of comfort and peace. This is the feeling people seek relentlessly: a safe place to be themselves, a place where their breath can finally be exhaled. Men in lasting loving relationships are gentled, but never controlled or lessened, like a wolf who will now eat from your hand and let you scratch his ears. He still hunts, and he is always the wolf, but he comes back to the place where he’s nourished to rest. Women, on the other hand, seem to be unchained, made wild and free, often becoming a more intense version of themselves: deeper and richer, fuller and stronger. Both reactions to lasting love are due to the sense of innate safety and trust that real love provides. People crave this deep comfort so much, especially in their youth, they often delude themselves into thinking they’ve found it when all they have found is a shallow addiction to the release of norepinephrine in their brain. The fact that lasting love is such a relentlessly pursued treasure indicates the rarity of it.
Love of the agape sort is the only kind that consistantly reaches a depth where seratonin is released in the body. Agape love grants the freedom to grow and safety to be one’s self while at the same time creating a safe haven for that same freedom and safety to be enjoyed by someone else. It never seeks to over-power or diminsh the beloved, in fact, it seeks to give them a space where they are free to be the become the best version of themselves.
This love is that which is able to give even if the love is never reciprocated, it is the love that can live on after death. It is a love that is undaunted by struggle, distance, or hardship. It is absolutely free of fear. It is every part of speech at once: a noun, a verb, a preposition, a pronoun, an adjective, an adverb, an article, and an interjection. It cannot be controlled, confined, or completely understood. We all crave the elusive place where this love exists. It is where love gives completely of itself and the result of that generosity fills not only the beloved, but the lover as well.
I hope you’ve been to this place. I can’t give you clear directions, but you’ll know it when you find it: God lives there.
"A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy." -George Jean Nathan