What Love Explain

Christopher Beha did not return to church because someone defeated him in an argument.

His path away from Christianity had been intellectually serious and personally costly. A brother’s automobile accident, his own cancer diagnosis, and repeated encounters with mortality contributed to what might be called disenchantment. The Catholicism of his childhood no longer seemed adequate to the world he had experienced. He read Bertrand Russell, Albert Camus, Arthur Schopenhauer, and other critics of religious belief. He stopped attending Mass. A world without God became, if not entirely consoling, at least intelligible.

Then he fell in love.

Luis Parrales tells Beha’s story in a recent article in The Atlantic, “What Atheism Could Not Explain.” The title is deliberately provocative. Atheists, after all, are perfectly capable of falling in love. Beha’s wife remains an atheist. Nothing in the story suggests that affection, fidelity, or moral seriousness belongs exclusively to believers.

The claim is subtler. Falling in love confronted Beha with something his previous account of reality could describe but could not fully interpret.

A materialist account can tell us a great deal about love. It can speak of hormones, neural pathways, evolutionary pressures, attachment systems, and the social advantages of pair bonding. Such explanations are valuable. Christianity has no theological interest in denying the chemistry of the human body.

But chemistry does not tell us why this particular person should be regarded as precious. It does not explain why her happiness makes a moral claim upon me, why betraying her would be wrong, or why faithfulness should continue after the first intensity of desire has passed. It describes some of the processes by which love is experienced, but it does not settle what love means.

This distinction is familiar in other areas of life. A neurologist might describe what occurs in the brain when a person listens to Bach, grieves at a funeral, or receives the Eucharist. The description may be entirely accurate. Yet the neurological account does not exhaust the music, the grief, or the sacrament.

To explain how an experience occurs is not necessarily to explain what has occurred.

For Beha, love appears to have disclosed value as something encountered rather than invented. The beloved did not become valuable because he decided to assign value to her. Her significance arrived as a discovery. She stood before him as another person whose life could neither be reduced to his desire nor absorbed into his plans.

That discovery challenged more than scientific materialism. It also challenged the modern ideal of the sovereign self.

Much contemporary thought assumes that human beings make meaning for themselves. The world possesses no inherent purpose, but individuals remain free to construct identities, choose commitments, and impose significance upon an otherwise indifferent universe. Meaning becomes an act of will.

Love complicates that picture.

One does not create the beloved. One receives her presence. Love interrupts plans, limits choices, rearranges priorities, and binds one person to the good of another. It can certainly become possessive and destructive, but love at its best requires the self to relinquish its claim to absolute sovereignty.

In that sense, falling in love can become a school of creatureliness.

The Christian doctrine of creation begins with the assertion that life is received. We do not bring ourselves into existence. We do not choose the time and place of our birth, the bodies we inhabit, the histories into which we are born, or the people upon whom our lives initially depend. Before we become agents, we are recipients.

Grace intensifies this pattern. The Christian does not create reconciliation with God but receives it. Baptism is received. Eucharist is received. Forgiveness is received. Even faith, in the classic Christian understanding, is less a heroic achievement than an awakening to a gift already offered.

This may explain why love sometimes becomes an opening to faith. The experience does not prove Christian doctrine. It does, however, weaken the assumption that all value is projected by the autonomous self. It makes possible the thought that meaning may precede us, that goodness may address us from outside ourselves, and that the world may be received as gift rather than treated only as raw material.

There are dangers in this argument.

Romantic love must not be made to bear more theological weight than it can sustain. People fall in love unwisely. Desire can deceive. Relationships can become exploitative. A spouse cannot serve as God, savior, or final source of meaning. To ask another human being to perform those roles is to place an impossible burden upon the relationship.

Christian tradition therefore does not simply affirm desire. It seeks to school desire. Love must become patience, truthfulness, fidelity, forgiveness, and concern for the freedom and flourishing of the beloved. The Church’s task is not merely to bless emotional intensity but to form people capable of keeping promises.

Nor should Beha’s story be turned into another weapon in the cultural struggle between believers and unbelievers. “Atheism cannot explain love” is too broad a claim. Atheist philosophers have developed sophisticated accounts of moral obligation, personal dignity, and human attachment. Believers have no warrant for pretending otherwise.

The more defensible claim is that certain forms of reductive materialism fail to account for the experience of love as it is actually lived. They may identify its mechanisms while overlooking its moral authority. They may explain attraction while leaving fidelity unexplained. They may describe the organism while failing to encounter the person.

The same criticism can be directed toward certain forms of religion. Christianity also fails to interpret love when it reduces marriage to social respectability, treats family life as a political symbol, or employs “family values” as a weapon against those whose lives do not conform to an approved pattern. A theology of love that produces self-righteousness rather than humility has misunderstood its own subject.

Beha’s story offers another possibility.

He did not return to church because Christianity proved useful for protecting Western civilization or restoring social order. He returned because love had made the world appear differently. Another person’s presence suggested that reality might contain more than struggle, mechanism, and self-assertion. The world might be capable of gift.

That suggestion is not a demonstration. Love does not force belief. It leaves room for doubt, as love itself always does. The beloved cannot be known through detached observation alone. She must be trusted, attended to, and received over time. Knowledge of persons requires participation.

Perhaps knowledge of God does as well.

The Christian claim is not merely that God exists somewhere beyond the visible world. It is that the deepest truth of the world is personal and gracious: “God is love.” That confession cannot be established by romance. But falling in love may enable a person to hear it again—not as an abstract proposition, but as a possibility about the character of reality.

Atheism may explain why human beings fall in love. Beha’s question is whether it can explain why love sometimes feels less like an emotion we possess than a truth by which we are possessed.