Irrationality of Love

Modern senses of reason and rationality tend to be driven by, in part, and maybe a big part, a kind of self-interested focus where the person is said to be reasonable when they calculate, in the decision-making process, whatever tends toward one’s own benefit. Sometimes this is quantified into an encompassing term like ‘efficiency.’ Such a love is empty. I tend to think, however, that there is a sense of rationality that comes from the way we are made in God’s image. A rationality that comes from this ontological basis has to do with God’s nature as being Love. While the natural person can experience selfless love to a degree (sometimes people refer to “unconditional love of parents toward their children”), it is a shadow, and those who have been made into “a new creation” are being changed into creatures made of this irrational love. A decision-making process where the person actually considers not what will tend toward self-preservation, but the good of God, another, and then oneself, is the name of this game — the irrationality of love.

Love in modern Western thinking tends to be about what one can get from another person. “If you love me, then you’ll do x for me” tends to be justified by the idea that people are (supposedly) by nature self-focused, even when one admires or cares about and for another. However, this kind of love is not the essence of the kind of rationality that comes from selfless love. “Love is not self-seeking,” writes Paul. What would our world look like with a fundamentally different kind of rationality considered in all of our analyses, especially political analysis? How would our Democracy (as some call it) look if that which drives individual decisions were an eye toward the good of others, both concretely as the persons within one’s vicinity and abstractly as those within the broader spheres of community? I think it would look like the offended party contributing to the good of the offender. I think it would look like humility. I think it would look like all the qualities that are missing in public conversation today about who and what constitutes the very person of Jesus, the God-man. Thoughts? Feelings?