Why I Hate Isolationism!

Put isolationism together with siblings libertarianism, individualism and cultural liberalism and you have the most repulsive of ideologies. And it has become widely popular, even dominant, especially among the young. You will ask: Aren't Communism, Nazism, and Jihadism worse? No! They are far more materially destructive. But they at least invite to a transcendence of the Ego on behalf of a greater good. These goods are, of course, false gods: care of the poor and oppressed, love for the Motherland, and obedience to the will of Allah. But each is a heresy against integral Christianity: an exaggeration of a definite good to an excess and a denial of other goods. But interiorly, spiritually and morally, I would argue that the isolation of the Self is worse than a disordered allegiance.

In a world of bad, bad, bad actors (China, Russia, Isis, Iran, North Korea) I see that weakness is worse than mistakes in the application of force. Yes, in a world still rife with Hitlers and Stalins, Chamberlain and Churchill remain our defining moral binary.

- Our abandonment of Afghanastan was far worse than our invasion of it.

- Our invasion of Iraq, despised indignantly by the right and the left, was not, in my view, much worse than the alternaties: a blockage that hurt the poor and strengthened Hussein or a hands off approach.

- The worse trajedy of my lifetime was the Rwandan slaughter of about a million innocents. This could have been prevented by 300 marines.

Is it a mistake to take on the role of world policeman? No, not at all. If you are the toughest kid on the block and the only one that can take the bully in a fight, you have no moral alternatives: you have to fight him. The father's sheepdog speech in American Sniper says it best: "there are three types...the sheep, the wolf, and the sheep dog...we are not raising any sheep in this family...and (taking off his belt to his wife's horror) and if I find you are a wolf I will beat the death out of you." We remain the most powerful, rich nation in human history and our moral duty is clear: face down the predators and assist the weak. It is quite simple!

I have asked myself why I am so fiercely internationalist. Two reasons present. First, tempermentally I have always had a vivid imagination about the suffering of others across the glove. One of my clearest memories of childhood is about 7 years old and I learned about the starving babies in China and I paced rapidly back and forth in our small house quite tortured by the thought.

Secondly, the two fundamental facts about the world in which I was born. First, the Cold War: as a Catholic I learned what Communism does to our faith and all our freedoms. I was raised in what some now disparage as a "Manichean" universe: the good and the bad. Secondly, I learned that just prior to my birth all our men risked their lives to defeat Hitler and Japan. I was devastated to learn of the holocaust of the Jews and have never really gotten over it. Yes indeed: I was born into a Manichean world: there are the bad guys and there are the (however flawed and imperfect) the good guys. And I still believe that.

In college (1965-9) I imbibed, of course, all the anti-Americanism of the New Left: military-industrial complex, imperialism, capitalism, racism, et al. And I still see truth in that. Our society is fundamentally flawed, but not inherently evil. The culture of individualism, isolation, and bourgeois materialism is corrosive of the bonds of faith, family and the very human soul. But liberal institutions of freedoms, democracy, rule of law, and market economies basically draw from our Catholic heritage. Their inherent goodness shines brightly in contrast to our enemies.

As a moral conservative and an internationlist patriot I deal with tensions: resistance to the slide into woke cultural liberalism combined with loyalty to my flawed nation and an urgency to share what is best of our heritage with the entire world. It is an interesting positon!

The Ukraine War as a Moral Revival of the West

In the chiaroscoro that it the human drama, the light always shines brightest in the darkness. This Putin invasion, with its targeting of civilians, is a moral outrage and a humanitarian catastrophe. Nevertheless, the light is shining brightly in this ongoing Event.

1. The welcome of refugees by Poland and others is a generoisity of immense proportions. To date 3.3 million refugees have been sheltered in private homes without the stablishment of refugee camps. My daughter's Polish friend's family is hosting her Ukranian's friends familhy.This is heartening!

2. The willingness, indeed the eagerness, of Ukrainian men to fight and die, en masse, for their country, their families, their values, and their legacy is a striking revival of masculine heroism. A world turned hopeless and timid is seeing in the Ukraine: THERE ARE THINGS WORTH DYING FOR! This earthly life is NOT the final or only value. Their fight is proundly inspiring and encouraging!

3. The West, far down the road of decadence and polarization, has found a moral cause and a new, unexpected unity in supporting these victims and this just cause.

4. There are some, how many we cannot know, in Russia who have suffered imprisonment and death to resist the war.

5. In the spectacle of men fighing to the death and women drawing their children-elderly-sickly to safety, a world woke, sterile, and neutered is given a dazzling iconography of the forms of masculinity and femininity in their splendour.

6. A universe of individualism, isolationism and libertarianism sees in the Ukraine the primacy of the corporate person, the community, the greater good.

There are grounds for hope! Actual deaths to date are difficult to count, but it is in the 10s of thousands. By contrast, global deaths from covid are over 6 million; the Rawandan and Bosnian genocides each took over a million; Pol Pot killed almost 2 million. The destruction to buildings and economic infrastructure will be in the billions; but all of that can be rebuilt in time. We can only pray that the war stop soon!

Not since World War II have we seen a global event with such moral clarity. Putin is the bad guy; Zelinsky is the good guy. We are back in the John Wayne and Gary Cooper days! A return to moral clarity and certitude. There is, after all, black and white...good and bad...right and wrong.

But some are still confused. Pope Francis is, as so often, disappointing. Earlier this week he told Patriarch Kirill that there is no longer such a thing as a just war. He avoided a direct confrontation and implied a moral equivalence between the invaders and the defenders in the Ukraine. This dishonored the heroic Ukranian warriors. Fortunately, yesterday he clearly asserted the right of the attacked to self defense and a national sovereignty and identity of their own choosing. But his message remains contradictory, incoherent, confusing.

A different befuddlment afflicts some conservatives of the isolationist persuasion who mimic the far left in rooting most global evil in American adventurist foreign policy. The Post-Vietnam Syndrome has become the Post-Iraq Syndrome and afflicts both ends of the political spectrum. Doug Bandow, in The American Conservative faults American aggressiveness in the Ukraine and its area for provoking Putin's insecurity. Rod Dreher says that the situation is complex and not straightforward. If this invasion is not straightforward than nothing in this world is! There seems to be an assumption, as in a Holywood plot, that the CIA and other dark forces are always lurking in the shadows and doing damage. But it seems to be common sense that the West would welcome the eagerness of the countries formerly under the USSR to enter the universe of free enterpise, democracy and rule of law.

Similarly, moral conservatives (like myself) may have been endeared to Putin by his fierce renunciation of woke culture and glanced away from his brutality. Not now!

Nevertheless, in the long run I rate dictators like Putin as the least of our formidable global enemies: first I place Cultural Liberalism, second Communism, third Jihadism, with dictatorship a distant fourth. History is back! This four-part axis of evil is even more ominous and apocalypic than that which afflicted the globe 80 years ago! The devastation in the Ukraine, like that of the Spanish Civil War, may be a harbinger of worse to come.

We pray for a swift end to this horror!

We pray for God to bring good out of this evil!

We pray for the strength and wisdom to prevail in the face of the Evil of the present and the future!

A New Church Aborning

The Church into which I was born in 1947...post-War, urban, ethnic, late-Tridentine, prosperous, proudly American, fertile, expansive, surging with progressive but wholesome energies that would create Vatican II...collapsed in a spectacular catastrophe in the Cultural Revolution immediately after the Council. It has continued its decline since, strikingly so with the priest scandal and the McCarrick legacy.

It was not destroyed. Diminished in stature, it is an organism still alive, continuous with the past, preserving in a lower, more humble key its essential life of worship, prayer, sacraments, devotions, dogma as truth, family life, and service of the poor. Better yet, there are surges of new life, like a plant that has new shoots or a garden with new flowers and fruits. It is clear that an old order has ended and a new one has begun. What is the outline of this new Church aborning? I suggest the following.

1. Structurally, we see in the lay renewal movements the emergence of smaller, intimate communities of faith which promise to restructure, if not replace, the traditional parish which is weak before a culture turned anti-Catholic. These are promising to the degree that they are evangelical (centered in the person of Jesus), orthodox (in thought and practice), and authentically Catholic in resistance to a thoroughly liberal, bourgeois, technological order.

2. Theologically the vision is crystal clear and firmly in place: the Communio School of John Paul, Benedict and Balthasar, developing the Resourcement Legacy that birthed the Council, presents a splendid theological symphony: faithful to tradition as it is fresh and creative in its acceptance of all that is best in recent history. It remains, of course, in dialogue with more traditional approaches such as Thomism as well as contemporary developments. It is clear,strikingly so in the current pontificate, that liberalism, the "cult of contraception," is inherently sterile even as it remains a temptation in its accomadation to the cultural mainsteam.

3.Politically, the Church cannot align with any political party or ideology. The strong Catholic-Democratic coalition of my childhood collapsed of course in the early 1970s when that party turned anti-Catholic even though about half of Catholics don't yet realize it. The Catholic-Republican alliance of the Reagan years always entailed dissonance with key aspects of Catholic social teaching but has in any case fallen apart in the Trump era. Trumpian populism, which could in theory be transformed into a Catholic-friendly collaboration between moral conservatives and advocates for the poor, is in its current form corrupted by the hopeless personal decadence of Trump himself. Relinguishing any firm alliance, the Catholic can only alternate between the anarchistic detachment of Dreher's Benedicat Option and the pragmatism of Adrian Vermulle's Christian Strategy: retreat from engagment with degenerate political institutions in tension with a readiness to cooperate in the politics of the good on a piecemeal basis. So, at the moment, we of course align ourselves with NATO and Biden in support of the Ukraine; but we do not forget that in the longer Culture War, Biden is more of a traitor-enemy than Putin.

4. Institutionally, McCarrick's ecclesiastical success because of financial wizardry, political shrewdness and sexual perversion has convinced me that the hierarchical Church for its own health and holiness must divest of large institutions (hospitals, schlools, etc.) to devote itself to the Gospel/Liturgy and leave the corporal works of mercy in the hands of the laity. This was the advice of Ivan Illich 70 years ago. It means a poor, humble, holy Church.

5. Culturaly, in a society so totally toxic and decadent...atheistic, technological, scientistic, bourgeois, meritocratic, materialistic, hedonistic, despairing...the Church must be increasingly counter-cultural and resistant. Listening to eccentrics and anarchists (Girard, Illich, Ellul, Day, Berry, and others) we will build within the shell of the decaying order small, organic, evangelical, dynamic communities of solidarity, intimacy, health, faith, hope and love.

These are exciting times to be Catholic. We cherish our childhood memories and preserve all that is best from them; but cannot nostalgically grieve an imagined Camelot. This is the time we are given! God ambitions to do beautiful things with us!

The Therapeutic Ideology (Part 4 of Revisiting "Triumph of the Therapeutic")

In 2022 we see with clarity what Rieff could not when he wrote Triumph of the Therapeutic in 1966: the form of the Therapeutic Ideology that has replaced Christian tradition. Here is its outline:

1. The absolute hegemony of the isolated Self, narcissistic and therapeutic, lonely-autonomous, unhinged, and uprooted from tradition, history, transcendence, family and broader moral purpose.

2.THe dissolution of constitutive family bonds; deconstruction of childhood as filiality, spousality, paternity, maternity. Reconstruction of the de-gendered individual as an unit of production/consumption.Gender as self-choice rather than a gift-that-is-given.

3. Rupture of sexuality from unity/fertility; the triumph of contraception as a culture; legitimation of pornography, homosexuality, transgenderism.

4.Shameless desecration of incompetent human life as without value and the consequent genocide of the helpless unborn, senile and ill.

5. Replacement of smaller, more human, intermediate communities/agencies by the cancerous growth of an expansive state and global corporations.

6. Loss of the sense of a Creation as sacred, enchanted, sacramental, and open to the holy and transcendent as well as awareness of sin.

7. In its place hysteria about "Mother Earth" alone, vulnerable to rape and unguarded by a Creator or responsible stewarts.

8. Ironically, at the same time, dominance of outsized technologies that deplete us of agency/initiative and induce passivity, dependency, lethargy and hopelessess.

9. Scientism that inflates the promise of science and places immense trust in its power.

10. Unacknowledged fear of death that seeks safety in technological and state control of human life.

11. In lieu of diminished allegiance to locality, family, faith, and nation the emergence of identity politics rooted in victimization, self-pity, grievance, powerlessness and resentment in a relentless, hopeless Marxist dialectic of oppressor/oppressed.

12. A bipolar meritocratic, careerist, technocratic society split between the educated/affluent and the marginalized/uneducated/poor.

13.Prevalence of an anti-metaphysic that fails to see Being, abundance, gratuity, transcendence and hope but submerges into scarcity, fear, relentless conflict, rage, and despair.

14. In place of the sense of Time as visited by, enclosed within, and destined for Eternal Life, we have: the lonely Therapeutic Self, entrapped in the flux and conflict of Marxist dialectic, enmeshed in and dependent upon a Macro-Matrix of Hyper-Technology/Mega-Government/Giga-Capitalism, in a meaningless Nietczhean universe, clinging to a Darwinian illusion of inevitable technological progress. The Masters of Suspicion reign supreme!

Things are at least as bad as Rieff feared! This is a Dark Empire we must resist!

The "Catholic" Therapeutic (Part 3 of Revisiting "Triumph of the Therapeutic")

The "Catholic" Therapeutic has pivoted from the solid objectivity of the Faith into subjectivism and narcicissm, however camouflauged. Has turned, in a covert and subtle shift, to the dark side. In pursuit of the wholesome, has discarded tradition and law, the holy, dread of sin, the primacy of the supernatual. This is to be distinguished from the therapeutic Catholic, described in the previous blog, as one who incorporated the therapeutic within orthodox Catholic thought and practice. Substantially, the one is Therapeutic, the second Catholic.

The Catholic Therapeutic is not one who has rejected his Catholic faith in honesty and transparency. Rather he has emptied the inner soul of the faith and replaced it with a psychological surrogate that presents as a more enlightened, contemporary, genuine and "Catholic."

In my college seminary years (1965-9) Carl Rogers was the reiging guru. The priests in spiritual direction were all non-directive: they had nothing to say. They wanted to listen...to a fault. We students had nothing to say. Spiritual direction was one awkward,quiet hour! Eugene Kennedy, Maryknoll-priest-psychologist, was our professor and a rock star in the post-Council euphoria-confusion. He had a huge influence on many classmates as he belittled the "old" and unenlightened Church, went on to leave the priesthood and encouraged many to follow suit with disregard for the process of laicization. Flamboyant in his disdain for old fashioned obedience and chastity, he was a brilliant, gifted man with a way with words and remained prolific, influential and loved by the Chicago National Catholic Reporter set. Close to Andrew Greely, Cardinal Bernadine and others, he was a charter memeber of the "Catholic" liberal elite. Long before he disdained John Paul's catechesis of the human body, I spontaneously developed (even in my more liberal youth) a visceral distate for him. His last public lecture was at the Maryknoll Alumn Centenary Reunion in 2011. As a member of the planning committee for that event, I fiercely opposed the choice but to no avail: everyone thought the world of him. During the talk in the Maryknoll chapel, I almost shook with rage as he disparaged traditional Catholic Eucharistic piety as "cookie worship." If he hadn't been in a wheel chair I would have challenged him to a fist fight! I believe there is a section deep in purgatory for Catholic Rogerians, but it is not as bad as that for the Jungians.

As a Catholic, I agree with Philip Rieff: much better the clear, honest, straightforward atheism of Freud rather than the obtuse, convoluted religiosity of Jung. Jung continues to be a huge influence in Catholic and Christian circles as he presents a sometimes-insightful and sometimes-deceiving depth psychology as an enlightened and superior replacement for faith in God. It is simple enough: Jung does not believe in our transcendent, creator God but replaces him with "God" as the depth of our soul. This is disguised but is a total descent into narcissism: God is me, the deepest part of me. Jung is the embodiment of the Narcissism of our age. But he presents as sophisticated, scientific, enriching...entirely free of ignorance, prejudice, and traditional dependency.

Richard Rohr is the most seductive Jungian in today's Catholic world. He is my nemesis! Everyone...I mean Everyone loves him. I do not! Everyone...I mean Everyone...wants to give me articles and books by Rohr. He must be the most influential Catholic spiritual writer today: what Thomas Merton was 60 years ago. Usually, I get into the second paragraph of his article and as he condemns the established Chruch which I love I want to vomit. I cannot finish an article by him. He is Eugene Kennedy's ghost come back to haunt me! Like Kennedy, he is a brilliant and charming man. He offers an insightful, gentle, peaceful spirituality including compassion, surrender of control, thankfulness, attention to the moment, wholesomeness as he draws from psychology, 12-steps and a range of sources. In its way it is all good stuff. If it came from Oprah Winfrey or an Episcopalian psychologist I would nod approvingly. But coming from a Franciscan Friar it is soft, femmy, new-agey. No! This is not what St. Francis was talking about. I don't see here Jesus crucified! Poverty, chastity and obedience! Love for the actual, incarnate,sacramental, hierarchical Church! Filial allegiance! A supernatural sensibility! A sense of the holy! Hatred of sin!

To be fair: Rohr clearly does a lot of good for a lot of people. Not long ago I enjoyed a wise, balanced podcast given me by my nephew so maybe he and I both are mellowing. He is not saying anything so bad. But he is not my cup of tea. I am all about incorporating psychology into our faith but I take my Catholicism straight, strong, undiluted. The therapeutic has to defer to the Catholic, not viceversa!

The Therapeutic Catholic (Part 2 of Revisiting "Triumph of the Therapeutic")

The last half century has seen the acceptance into Catholic life and practice of the best of psychology and the therapeutic. Our heritage has been enriched by a development that is in part discontinuous but within a greater continuity.

We can locate this trajectory in the context of three motifs that dominated the pontificate of John Paul II: First, the Mercy of God which takes a primacy without eliminating the tension with justice, truth, holiness, wrath and even retribution. Second, his personalism which honors the dignity of the person and so privileges psychology and anthropology. Lastly, his clear focus on the person of Jesus that assured this incorporation was consonant with Tradition. Consider seven examples:

1. The 12 steps of AA is a specific therapeutic that comes straight out of evangelical Christianity with its sense of powerlessness (sin), dependence on a higher power (God), moral inventory (confession), amends (penance), and sponsorship (obedience). Here is the therapeutic in service of an ethos of commitment and purpose and a world remaining enchanted and open to transcendence.

2. Catholic practice of confession is entirely different from what it was 75 years ago due to the positive influence of the therapeutic. Example: masturbation in the old order was straightforwardly a deliberate mortal sin meriting eternal damnation. By contrast, the Catholic Catechism maintains the doctrine of its intrinsic disorder but goes on to consider psychological conditions (anxiety, compulsion, etc.) which mitigate the accountability. So, the objective moral order is upheld even as absolution is granted, normally in a spirit of gentleness and compassion. Whereas Wilhem Reich insisted that the practice of prayer and masturbation were absolutely incompatible, upholding the binary of condemnation versus indulgence, a distinct dynamic occurs before a Presence who is merciful holiness and compassionate purity

3. Similarly, in its treatment of homosexuality the Catholic Catechism clearly uphold the fruitful-unitive meaning of sex but equally firmly affirms the dignity of the person. The act is disordered, not the person. This is a simple, basic distinction that eludes many. Even Cardinal Joseph Tobin in a radio interview said the the Church may have to change its teaching that "the homosexual is disordered." This is a grave misstatement of our faith and, to my knowledge, has not been retracted. Additionally we see Courage, a support group in which the same-sex attracted support each other in chastity. In a different vein, "reparative therapy", popular in Catholic circles, offers attention to psychological wounds that are associated in some (not all) cases with the attraction. This is distinct from "conversion therapy" in that it is NOT an attempt to change sexual direction, but is often placed in the same category and "cancelled" by a gay militance intolerant of talk of "repair."

4. "Healing of memories" (popular in the charismatic renewal of the 70s under the leadership of Ruth Carter Stapleton) is a practice of imaginative prayer whereby painful/traumatic memories are recalled and reprocessed in the presence of Jesus. It is a merge of the evangelical with the therapeutic in a healing intimacy with Jesus Christ.

5. "Deliverance from evil spirits" similarly out of the charismatic renewal, especially as practiced by Neal Lozano, also entails a psycholgical review of childhood, parental and family relationshis, troubling/traumatic memories as well as the identification of obsessive, compulsive, intrusive psychic disturbances. It practices the actual casting out of evil spirits (literally understood) out of baptismal intimacy with Jesus and the gentle-but-powerful action of the Holy Spirit. Here again we find incorporation of the therapeutic into a perspective that is explicitly, unapologetically supernatural.

6. The Neocathecumenal Way, another lay renewal movement, offers a fascinating, extraordinary practice: the scrutiny. Retrieving the intense, prolonged catechumenate of the early Chruch, the spiritual guide (in this case, the catechist who is non-professional, as in the practices of healing of memories and casting out of spirits as well as the 12 steps) leads the disciple in a life review of wounds, disabilities, sins, and compulsions in the context of faith and prayer. After conversation and scrutiny, the disciple is given a concrete, often demanding, task to perform as a sign of love for Christ and the desire to grow closer to him. Examples including: forgiving a wrong and asking for forgiveness, repairing a broken marriage, change in career or living situation, giving a substantial amount of money to the poor, and destroying an occasion of sin such as a computer used for pornography. Here again we find an explicit orientation to Christ, a reliance upon the Holy Spirit, and an amateur psychology that is concrete, practical and radical.

7. In my own large, extended Catholic family of about 100 adults I count about 12 involved with psychology. 12% is a lot. My daughter Margaret Rose is completing her post-doctoral certification in psychoanalysis even as she is living the evangelical counsels of pvoerty, chastity and obedience in a community of women. She has found that this therapy has enhanced her interior freedom and so her life of faith. Phillip Rieff would be curious about this. She studied at the Institute for Psychological Studies (Arlington, Va) which is dedicated to the integration of psychology with Catholic principles. Her mentor on her dissertaion (on the healing power of Beauty) was Paul Vitz who has been a leader of the application of the therapeutic within Catholic life.

Much of my adult life has been a fascination with the role of psychology in the life of faith. Happily, I consider myself a Therapeutic Catholic, always, gratefully, in conversion and recovery.

Revisiting "Triumph of the Therapeutic" after Half a Century (Part 1 of 4)

Philip Rieff's dazzling 1966 classic precisely analyzed the cultural catastrophe that was about to explode at the exact moment he was writing: the loss of faith, of therapies of committment, of communion with higher purposes of community and religion...in favor of the therapeutic self, the psychological man, the isolated (Freudian) ego void of higher moral purpose moderating the irreconcilable war between instinct and culture. Not a culture warrior, he pledges allegiance to no traditional code. As a result, he sees with stark clarity and heightened horror the nihilistic abyss into which the therapeutic self is cast. He emulates his mentor Freud in his cold sobriety, harsh realism, and freedom from illusion. To his credit he disparages the post-Freudians (Jung, Reich, Lawrence) who relinquished the clinical objectivity of the Founder in favor of private, fantasized "religions" of their own imagining. Clearly a deep, sensitive soul, yearning for a faith that eludes him, he mourns the loss of purpose. Like his contemporary Ernest Becker (Denial of Death, he is a secular Jew whose soul is haunted by a longing for an enchanted, beautiful, moral universe that has been lost. His grief is poignant and profound. With Becker he is a heroic soul undergoing the Dark Night of a cosmos without hope or meaning. His is the stoic path of realism, sobriety, and courage in the steady, untiring mediation of id and superego in order to diminish misery and enhance a small domain of freedom without illusion about complete salvation. Possibly due to his Jewish heritage, he has about him a moral splendor even as he is agonizingly bereft of belief. Reading him, the reader wonders: "Okay, faith is a gift from above. But why is such a beautiful spirit denied this gift?"

Writing in 1966, Rieff saw as absolute the contradition between the prior world of transcendence, purpose and enchantment and the new world of sober, scientific therapy and the unhinged, uprooted, isolated self. Reviewing the subsequent half century, three thoughts emerge:

1. Rieff had little sense of the Catholic Faith in its resiliencey, breath, inclusivity ("catholicity") and capacity to welcome whatever is True-Good-Beautiful in the emerging therapeutic. In my adult lifetime, I have observed the positive incorporation of the best of psychology into the Catholic synthesis and the emergence of what I will call "the therapeutic Catholic."

2. In his brutal rejection of the faux, delusional pieties of Jung-Reich-Lawrence he anticipated the unhappy trajectory of liberal Catholicism into what I will call the "Catholic Therapeutic" which is entirely therapeutic and not at all Catholic.

3. Now, fifty years later, we can see the entire form of the "therapeutic faith" that seeks to replace Christian tradition.

The following three blog essays will consider these three throughts, with much gratitude to Philip Rieff.

A Man's Observation of Womanly Love

As a man, I do not know womanly love from the interior. But I have been much loved by many, many women so I know something about it.

One might ask: "Isn't love love, masculine or feminine?" No. There is no generic, androgynous, abstract "love." Each love is particular, concrete, specific: the engagement of this unique lover with this beloved. Love is a "form" that is multiformed and takes concrete shape in a universe of particularities, one of which is gender. Masculine and feminine love share all the same features but in distinct gestalts or combinations. It is as if you gave two chefs the same ingredients and asked them to create a food product: they would be quite different even as they shared the same components. The distinctive forms of feminine love I have noticed: maternal, filial, companionable, and receptive.

Maternal love is the defining form of mature femininity. It is generous, compassionate, spontaneously sacrificial, unconditional, and welcoming. It is fluid, spontaneous, physical-emotional-spiritual, instinctive, and not primarily deliberative. It may be the most powerful force of nature, even stronger than romantic-erotic or paternal love. This love largely structures the entire life of most women: maternal love expressed in family and even career. In my own extended family we number about 100 adults. Women work in education, medicine and counseling by a ration of 35-9; men by a ratio of 13-23. Our women are in these nurturing fields at 80%; our men 36%. Nurturing, paternal love is a strong factor in men; but not as overwhelming as maternal love is for women.

Filial love as receptivity, trust, gratitude and respect is a feminine love I know very well: from my daughters, younger sisters, students and the women in our Magnificat Home residences. Question: is not the sons' and younger brothers' love the same? No, not at all. There is an entirely distinct dynamic, taste and flow to the father/son love. Man to man, even the most fond and trusting, brings with it a constitutive element of tension, conflict, distance. For example, the son needs to distance himself from the father in order to enter into his own adult masculinity and fatherhood. By contrast, the growth of the daughter into maternal maturity does not require such a rupture or distance. The father projects his own insecurities onto his son and complicates the relationship. Not so with the daughter. Under proper circumstances, the love of the father for the daughter is so delighted, carefree and spontaneous that it elicits an effortless trust, receptivity, gratitude and respect from the daughter for her father in his very otherness, strength, and protectiveness. The filial love of the daughter and son are quite different.

Companionable love is where the woman's more closely mirrors the man's: each is longing for companionship in a life adventure of love, of participation together in the Beautiful, the Good and the True. Here there is an equality and similarity; a real partnership; a brother-sister sense of shared and equal mutuality. Even here, however, there is a slight difference: the man's psyche, because of his destiny as father, retains an element of detachmetn and independence; while the woman's heart as maternal and filial is more pourous, receptive, and open.

Receptive love as honorable, true, beautiful dependency is proper for the woman because she gives herself so generously, sacrificially, spontaneously that she must be replenished lest she exhaust herself entirely. In a virtuous, childlike, innocent manner she looks to the man to resupply her as she pours herself out unthinkingly to those around her in need. If that love is not provided, she is vulnerable to become anxious, even hysterical, if not resentful. This receptivity must be seen as a virtue or strength rather than a weakness or deficiency. It is similar to the receptivity and trust of the child; it is wholesome and good. It resembles the receptivity of the second person of the Trinity, the Word, Jesus himself, who in his divinity is equal to the Father even as he is generated and not generating. It resembles Jesus in his own dependency upon Mary and Joseph. Masculine receptivity is different entirely. The male is receptive in his formation by mentors who love him. He is receptive as an infant but that neediness, prolonged into adulthood and not overcome, is an actual deficiency which must be recognized and treated lest it yield disastrous results. He is dependent upon God, the Church and all the authorities in his life. A woman's receptivity correctly elicits the man's generosity which replenishes her and ennables her to continue to pour out her love to others.

Lastly: what I have noticed about feminine erotic and romantic desire. First, it is clear that in general women are not tormented by the desperation typical of male erotic longing. Good for them! On the other hand, there seems to be a greater vulnerability to the illusions of romantic love, the conviction that true happines will be found in companionship with the ideal lover. This, of course, leads to so much disappointment.

Womanly love, as distinct from the manly, is a Mystery, a boundless fascination, a natural-spiritual miracle. It reached its perfection, of course, in our Blessed Mother in her love for her son and for us. Ordinary womanly love, in its mundane workings, is healing, ennobling and sanctifying, especially for us men.

Sidebar: Fleckinstein would appreciate any feedback from women: is this accurate? What is missed? What is off target? But that raises another interesting question. There are a handful of faithful readers of this blog: all men. I am unaware of any women who read it. It clearly is uninteresting, if not distasteful, even for those women who love me in my person in real life. Why is this?

Streams of Attraction

There at least five distinct, but always interwoven, dynamics which draw a man to a woman: tenderness, contemplation of beauty, erotic desire, regressive-infantile longing, and companionship in the True-Good-Beautiful.

Tenderness is appreciation for the woman as precious, delightful, charming, petite, and vulnerable if not already afflicted. It is the urge, of the strong, to protect and provide. It is similar to the instinctive, feminine response to an infant. It is paternal in nature but directed to a woman, rather than a child, it interacts with the other movements creatively, fruitfully, serendipitously.It is as powerfully instinctual as erotic desire even as it shares the delight/reverence of the apprehension of beauty. It is a mild, modulated urge to hold, play, protect, provide. It is not as intimate as erotic desire but not as distant as contemplation of beauty. It can be a restraining influence on libidinal craving. It has an ennobling influence on the man.

Erotic desire is simple and straightforward: the urgent craving for physical closeness/union; the longing to give and receive caress-kiss-embrace and (for the male) to be welcomed by and enter into the Desired. It is not love itself but a raw natural, instinctive and irrational impulse; therefore we refer to the "Desired" rather than the "Beloved." Created by God it is itself good and intended to be sacramental: the physical expression, enrichment, enactment, intensification, and consumation of conjugal love in all its richness as permanent, exclusive, free, frutiful, and faithful. Outside of spousal permanence, in hearts wounded by sin, it easily becomes, in its ferocious dynamism, toxic, destructive, explosive and congenial to lust, abuse, domination, self-deceit, selfishness and infidelity.Correctly restrained and directed, it can enrich wholesome, chaste friendships with energy, fascination and delight. We can imagine Jesus and the saints, unburdened by sin-shame-guilt-compulsion, enjoying erotic energy in freedom, purity and joy.

Contemplation of Beauty, as pure Eros, by contrast, requires distance in order to see the Beloved in all her beauty as Other. Distance, as reverence, is constitutive of the Love, not a barrier to be overcome in pursuit of intimacy. Only thus can the Beloved be truly seen, admired and even adored in her loveliness. The urges/desires of the lover disappear, or at last diminish, in deference to the value, goodness, and beauty of the Beloved.This movement, as awe and detachment, contrasts with erotic desire but the two are not mutually contradictiory. In ideal circumstances of mutual-spousal-vowed fidelity, the two intermingle in an ecstacy of delight. In non-spousal relationships, such contemplation of the beloved friend restrains and purifies erotic desire.

Infantile longing is the residual longing for the mother. Like erotic desire, it is not a form of love but an entirely instinctual, natural, psycho-biological need. It adds urgency and compulsivity to the erotic impulse. It is a wound sustained in the Oedipal passage from emotional enclosure within the love of the mother into the care of the father. As this passage is rarely (or never, excepting Jesus?) completed without damage, it is "normal" and yet defective for a man to long to be free of paternal demands and return to the security of the womb the comfort of the breast, the warmth of unconditional acceptance and enclosure. In the worst case scenario this harm can degenerate into resentment and the violence of misogyny. It can contribute to same-sex attraction. It is not itself sinful but can be an occasion for sin. Recognized and confessed it can fruitfully elicit maternal tenderness and enrich the marriage or friendship. It can be a salutary weakness bringing a humility, tenderness and gentleness to virile strength. Unconfessed it is the Achilles heal that destroys the most virile of men: recall David, Solomon, Samson, JFK, MLK, and a litany of sinful heroes.

Companionship in the Good-True-Beautiful is where we finally find Love in its truth and depth. Here the delight of the lovers in each other opens up beyond themselves to an infinite horizon of all that is honorable, worthy, lovely and good. They enhance the goodness in themselves and draw each other into a Kingdom that far surpasses them: art, humour, study, political loyalty, friends and family including those who came before and who will come afterwards. It attains a particular depth and intensity with the birth of a child. It opens the lovers to the love of Christ in the Church and the rythyms of prayer and worship.

The suggestion here is that every happy marriage, flaming romance, wholesome hetero-friendship, infatuation and flirtation is a unique symphony of these five marvelous melodies.