The Opposite of Love ...

... is not hate, according to Pope John Paul II. The opposite of love is Use . Indeed, one very serviceable definition of sin is “Treating persons like things and things like persons. So idolatry is treating a think like the persons of the Trinity. Murder reduces persons to things called corpses. Theft exalts a thing above the person who owns it. When people stop being persons and become things to use, we are treating them with contempt and are a million miles from the love of Christ.

Conservative Catholics get this when it comes to the Church’s teaching on sexuality. Pornography is wrong because it reduces people to objects. As C.S. Lewis observed, the lustful man does not want a woman. He wants an experience for which a woman happens to be the necessary apparatus. Much of our sexual culture is ordered toward making people treat each other as things, as well as inviting others to treat us as things. As a friend of mine once said of Madonna: “Under all that voluptuous flesh is the soul of an accountant.’

For the same reason, contraception is, in the final analysis, an attempt to treat a thing (sexual pleasure) as more important than persons (both the person you are having sex with and the children who are naturally expected of such a union).

Conservatives get this—about sex.

But when it comes to reducing persons to things in war it’s a whole ‘nother thing.

Catholic Just War doctrine is ordered first and foremost to the fact that Jesus wasn’t kidding when he said “Love your enemies.”  By “enemies” Jesus meant “enemies,” not “charming rogues that, gosh darn it, you kinda like even though they are a bit mistaken.” He meant “people you feel strongly tempted to hate and fear.” Those people.

Because Jesus commanded us to love our enemies, the Church’s Just War teaching is specially designed to make it as hard as possible to go to war. It puts various conditions down that ( as we noted previously in this space ) throw spanner after spanner into the works when we feel that overwhelming itch to just kill those jerks.

The problem is that many people do not treat Just War doctrine as a series of checks designed to make it as hard as possible to kill, or as a system of thought founded on the bedrock principle that man—even the man who is your mortal enemy—is in the image and likeness of God. Instead, they treat it as a sort of trigger system. If you can just pass all the criteria for Just War, or tilt your head and squint through one eye and game the system to pretend to yourself that you have met the criteria, then you *get* to go to war and, once you are at war, you can unleash all holy hell since “war is hell.” And so, for instance, we are routinely instructed in comboxes that reducing persons called children to a pile of ashes at Hiroshima is okay, because, hey! It’s war after all!

The Gospel-Driven Church: The "Logres" and a Redemptive View of Place

It is easy to lose heart among the ruins of any place, but there’s a heritage here, a history, even if to see it we must go all the way back before the Fall to when God said this place was “good.” The gospel would have us keep that in mind, but it would also have us look forward to the day when God proves that he wins out through Christ’s atoning work, that what he declared good will be remade—sans sickness, suffering, and societal breakdown—so that it is a land befitting its Sovereign. The gospel gives us a realistic vision of what the world has become, but it also gives us an optimistic vision of what it will one day be. As a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, and a people for his own possession, we are given a redemptive view of place. Perhaps like C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, this may lead us to seeing the gospel springs beneath the rocky soil of the fallen world. Lewis and Williams favored a concept called Logres , which for them corresponded to the true England beneath the apparent England, the England of Arthur and Camelot and virtuous knights and questing under the banner of God and king. David Downing writes: Lewis imagines that the title has been passed down secretly from generation to generation and that it now rests upon the one appointed to lead the battle against a new type of invasion . . . In his Arthurian books, Williams used Logres to represent the spiritual side of England, the combination of Christian and Celtic ideals, a force that stands against the tides of worldiness and corruption. Lewis brought this concept into his fantasy work in other ways, as well, positioning secret portals between this world and another one in now-iconic wardrobes, paintings, and train stations. The gist of the Logres idea is that God’s original plan for the races, nations, and peoples—and the lands they inhabit—is still here, mostly obscured and hidden, but occasionally bubbling up to the surface, with promise of one day subsuming the ruins with their truer selves. In these literary works, characters captured by a better vision—the vision of Logres—operate according to the true England, the truer and better sense of their place. Likewise, when we are captured by the gospel’s vision, we operate according to the kingdom of heaven, which is the truer and better place, and while it is not fully here yet, is nevertheless “at hand.

Restored gospel according to C.S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis in Context

CS Lewis, writer, dreamer, and mentor

George MacDonald, an anthology : 356 readings

An experiment in criticism