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Touched By The Eternal
By Gilbert Meilaender

"[W]hatever our weaknesses, they alone do not finally define human nature. We are both finite and free. We are constituted by our finite attachments and commitments, but they cannot stand alone. They must be drawn into the transforming power of God's love. And they can be, for our nature has been taken into the divine life through Christ."

No human being exists, or can exist, outside of or apart from relation to God. To try to think of human beings apart from the God-relation is, therefore, an exercise in metaphysical deception. To try to live as if that relation did not encompass us on every side is to fly in the face of reality, to live a lie.

This shared relation to God points to both the source and the goal of our life. As the source of our life, the Creator has bound us together, giving us what our purportedly postmodern world is increasingly reluctant to speak of-a universally shared human nature. Thus Augustine read the story of creation: "God created man as one individual.... God's intention was that in this way the unity of human society and the bonds of human sympathy be more emphatically brought home to man...."¹ As the source of our life, God has made us finite creatures, formed from the dust of the ground, occupying a limited time and space. As the goal of our life, God has made us for himself-free spirits who transcend any given time and space, because we are made to rest in him. This duality within our nature-our creation as both finite and free-locates one of the recurring issues for Christian reflection upon human nature.² But not the only one.

"The Dogma is the Drama," Dorothy Sayers once titled a short essay.³ It is indeed. According to the church's dogmatic utterance, our Lord Jesus Christ, who is "begotten not made" and "of one Being with the Father," is also one who "for us and for our salvation came down from heaven, was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man." We cannot, therefore, ever fully comprehend the drama of human life apart from Jesus, in whom God takes our nature

Gilbert Meilaender is an ethicist who teaches at Oberlin College. He is the author of several books, including Faith and Faithfulness (1991), The Limits of Love (1988), and Friendship (1985).
¹ City of God, XII, 22.
2 Perhaps the classic treatment of this theme in the twentieth century has been volume of Reinhold Niebuhr's The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941).
³ Dorothy Sayers, "The Dogma is the Drama," in The Whimsical Christian (New York:Macmillan, 1978), pp. 23-28.

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into his own life. And similarly, if we switch from that incarnational language to the equally dogmatic assertion that "on the third day he rose again in accordance with the scriptures," we will be driven to describe human nature and life not only in terms of this present evil age but also of the age to come already present in the risen One. And again, we will be unable to express the full meaning of human life apart from its relation to the risen Christ, in whom that life is renewed.

I

Perhaps the oldest and most enduring problem for Christians seeking to talk about our shared human nature is finding a way to do justice to that nature as we know it without supposing that we can ever be whole or can flourish apart from the new life in Christ, through whom we are taken into the life of the eternal God. Shall we pit created or unredeemed nature against the new life in Christ? Shall we suppose that created nature could, almost on its own, grow into what it is meant to be? Shall we suggest that our created nature is whole but incomplete, needing to be supplemented by the relation to God through Christ? Shall we argue that our created nature is always and continuously in need of transformation, as it is brought ever more fully into right relation with God? Alternatives such as these have been the stuff of Christian ethics in the twentieth century-shaping discussion of the relation between eros and agape, and, in a way that focuses more on structures and institutions, denoting different ways of relating Christ and culture.⁴

There are, then, two general issues that arise for Christians when they try to think of human beings always in relation to God. They must reflect upon our created nature in its freedom and finitude. And they must consider the relation of Christ to the moral life. I have no new insight to offer here on such general questions-and certainly no final word for what must continue to be an ongoing discussion among Christians. Instead, I will take a very narrow and particular road as my path into these large and persistent issues. For several years, in a course on moral problems, I have assigned John Updike's Too Far To Go.⁵ A collection of short stories, the book chronicles the disintegration of the marriage of Richard and Joan Maple-and its end in

⁴ The classic works that set the terms of discussion about eros and agape were Anders Nygren's Agape and Eros (London: SPCK, 1953) and John Burnaby's Amor Dei (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1938). A careful summary of the issues involved is Gene Outka's Agape (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972). Equally influential works focusing on structures and institutions were Ernst Troeltsch's The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches (New York: Macmillan, 1931) and H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951). A work that captures both personal and institutional concerns is James Gustafson's Christ and the Moral Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).
⁵ John Updike, Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1979). Most of the stories in this collection were first published separately in The New Yorker. A few were originally published elsewhere. The stories, taken as a whole, however, form a coherent narrative.

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divorce. The Maples prove unable to sustain their marriage through the whole of their lives; that is just too far to go.

The stories are told chiefly from Richard's point of view. I have never found it easy to like or even to sympathize with him, though at least some of my students react quite differently. That fidelity through time should be difficult for him is not surprising, since time itself always seems to be his enemy. Even quite early in their marriage, Richard begins to feel the pressure of sustaining commitment, and he finds the effort tiring. "Courting a wife takes tenfold the strength of winning an ignorant girl." Amid the mundane and deadening realities of daily life, he is one night "taken by surprise at a turning when at the meaningful hour of ten you come with a kiss of toothpaste to me moist and girlish and quick; the momentous moral of this story being, An expected gift is not worth giving." Richard evidently believes what the counselors who surround us on every hand say: we need change and variety if love is to survive. Indeed, he hypothesizes one day that "[r]omance is, simply, the strange, the untried"-a hypothesis likely to be devastating for the marriage vow.

The plumber comes one day, an old man, working on pipes that his father had once installed in the Maples' house. He recommends a new pump with the assurance that it will "outlast your time here." And when he and Richard come out of the cellar into the sudden brightness of the day, "a blinding piece of sky slides into place above us, fitted with temporary, timeless clouds. All around us, we are outlasted." Yet, Richard and Joan are unable to match the forces of nature, unable to make their love outlast pipes and pump.

As Richard rides the subway in Boston, getting the legal papers needed for the divorce, he reads a scholarly paper on the forces of nature. He reads of electromagnetic and gravitational forces, of strong and weak forces, and he thinks of life. "In life there are four forces: love, habit, time, and boredom. Love and habit at short range are immensely powerful, but time, lacking a minus charge, accumulates inexorably, and with its brother boredom levels all."

I have described this as the story of the disintegration of a marriage. That is, however, my description, not the author's. When Richard and Joan finally consummate their divorce in court, Updike creates a wedding tableau. Richard and Joan are each in turn asked by the judge whether they believe that their marriage has suffered irretrievable breakdown. Each in turn answers, "I do." And then, the divorce final, Richard remembers to do what he had, in fact, forgotten at their wedding: he kisses Joan. The scene has about it an air of triumph and completion, not failure or disintegration, and there are plenty of indications that Updike would have us read it this way. When Richard finally moves out of the house and takes an apartment in Boston, he one day discovers that previous tenants of the apartment have scratched their names into the glass of a window, together with the vow: "With this ring I thee wed." And when Richard and Joan are

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having one of their giddy yet agonizing conversations after the separation, each seemingly happy, each communicating with words and gestures that years had made familiar, Richard reflects on one of Joan's gestures. "The motion was eager, shy, exquisite, diffident, trusting: he saw all its meanings and knew that she would never stop gesturing within him, never; though a decree come between them, even death, her gestures would endure, cut into glass." Here again, the suggestion seems to be, is a marriage that succeeds even in separation and divorce.

II

In his foreword to the collection of Maples stories, Updike himself reflects on their meaning. "That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds." When assigning these stories, I have regularly required that students write a short paper reflecting on this passage from the foreword. They are to consider whether the passage really captures the point of the stories. (And it need not, of course, since an author may not always know best what his stories mean.) They are also to evaluate the judgment Updike offers-that, because we are temporal beings, failure to sustain a commitment need not be "invalidating," and, even, that this marriage (as something "real" and not merely "ideal") succeeds.

Students, of course, have many different views. Some-a good number-will, in fact, agree with Updike. They will argue both that the stories support the claim in the foreword and that, in fact, his claim articulates the truth about human life. Nothing lasts, time and boredom do level all. Even if there is something sad in this, it is an accurate picture of human nature. They may also argue that this marriage has, in fact, been successful. Precisely because Richard and Joan have left their mark on each other, because Joan will never stop gesturing within Richard, they have achieved something. A number of students will take a different approach. They will not concede that this marriage should be termed a success, filled as it is with duplicity and selfishness. Nevertheless, these students also are reluctant to deny Updike his point. They hope they might one day do better than Richard and Joan, but they are reluctant to call the Maples' marriage a failure, since they agree that "all things end under heaven." Some marriages end in the death of a spouse, others in divorce, but all end. The difference seems less important than the commonality. One cannot equate a broken promise with failure, since temporality and change are the stuff of human nature and life.

Very few students flatly disagree with Updike's claim, though some will. But such an argument can be made-and should be. "Commitment," Margaret Farley writes, "is our way of trying to give a

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future to a present love."⁶ Certainly commitment is not absent from the Maples' marriage, but commitment always involves our understanding of time, since it is an attempt to bind present and future together. And, Farley writes, "it is not immediately obvious whether commitment is, therefore, a way of resisting time (of making love endure in spite of time, as if there were no time) or of embracing time (giving love a history by giving it a future)."⁷ Updike's statement in the foreword seems to suggest that commitment could only be a way of resisting time, of acting as if there were no time and that this would miss the texture of reality, which is incorrigibly temporal.

No doubt we can all understand this and may ourselves have sometimes felt this way. There is, indeed, a sense in which commitment seems profoundly unnatural to us. Thus, Denis de Rougemont could write that "men and women as they are now must look upon fidelity as the least natural of virtues.... In their eyes and as they put it, faithful marriage can only exist as the result of an 'inhuman' effort."⁸ To press this point too far, however, would be to suppose that human nature could be adequately described by reference to temporality alone; it would miss what Reinhold Niebuhr rightly termed "the basic paradox of human existence: man's involvement in finiteness and his transcendence over it.⁹ For we are not only finite beings, ridden by time, but we also have, to some degree, the capacity to ride time, to give shape and unity to our lives. To fail even to see such possibilities for faithful commitment would itself be profoundly unnatural.

Such failure will inevitably mean that we can imagine fidelity only as, in Farley's words, "a way of resisting time," of trying to live "as if there were no time." That is to say, having first accepted temporality as the sole law of our being, we will then be unable to imagine fidelity as anything other than an utter negation of what we are. Either we must be in time and our commitments must suffer alteration, or we must be more than human and untouched by change. Whatever the defects of his historical analysis, de Rougemont sensed this. He suggested that in the myth of courtly love "Tristan is not in love with Iseult, but with love itself, and beyond love he is really in love with death...."¹⁰ And it is striking to note that Richard Maple is as well. He has a recurring fantasy of his own funeral, of how the women he has loved will attend and weep "at his eternal denial of himself to them." This will, he fantasizes, offer "a satisfaction for which the transient satisfactions of the living flesh were a flawed and feeble prelude.... In death, he felt,

⁶ Margaret A. Farley, Personal Commitments (New York: HarperCollins, 1986), p. 40.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1974), p. 306. Few have, I think, been persuaded by de Rougemont's historical thesis about the myth of Tristan and romantic love, but the concluding chapters, in which de Rougemont turns to what might be called moral theology, are a probing analysis of the place of love and commitment in Christian marriage.
⁹ Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, I, p. 175.
¹⁰ de Rougemont, Love, p. 309.

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... he would grow to his true size." Only in death will he be himself, for only then is he no longer subject to change and alteration. So he must long for death, since he cannot manage a steadfast fidelity within time. Unable to embrace time and give love a history by giving it a future, he must resist its movement. It turns out, therefore, contrary to what Updike writes in his foreword, that death-not temporal human life-becomes "real." Only in death do we reach our "true size." This is the result when we see only our finitude and make temporality alone the law of our being: Human life itself is negated. Perhaps, if we miss the possibility of fidelity within time, we miss the reality of human nature and life.

III

This much we might suggest, simply on the basis of a consideration of our created nature as both free and finite. But those for whom the Christian dogma gives shape to the drama of life will want to say still more. When Christ came into this world, he came to his own, John's Gospel says. The divine love, the steadfast commitment Christ displays, cannot therefore be entirely alien to the needs and possibilities of our human nature. Or, to turn again from the language of incarnation to that of resurrection, the risen Christ is Jesus of Nazareth. His resurrection is the vindication of the earthly life he lived as one of us, even if the resurrected life is not simply the natural completion or fulfillment of that earthly life.

Therefore, however contrary to our nature the marriage vow of lifelong fidelity may sometimes seem, however hard and "inhuman" we may sometimes find it, it is, in fact, the perfection toward which our nature is itself directed. "To be in love is both to intend and to promise lifelong fidelity. Love makes vows unasked; can't be deterred from making them.... Eros is driven to promise what Eros of himself cannot perform."¹¹ The marriage vow, and marriage as an institution of agapeic commitment, exist to help love reach the fruition toward which it is internally ordered.

It is true, of course, that a man or woman in love may find this hard to believe. When in love, we may think eros alone is sufficient to fulfill us. If so, we will soon enough learn how powerful time is. Having made eros our god, we will discover how demonic it, taken by itself, can be. When in love, we may find the marriage vow intolerably stifling, since, by making love a duty, it seems to remove all spontaneity. In this sense, as de Rougemont noted, marriage may seem to us the grave of love.¹² It may seem to be that, but it is not-or not only that. Love alone cannot complete or perfect our nature-unless, of course, like Richard, we can imagine growing to our true size only in death. Christians should be able to imagine more, since they have been taught that maturity is

¹¹ C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960), pp. 158-99.
¹² de Rougernont, Love, p. 314.

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measured by "the stature of the fulness of Christ," who is a living Lord. Not that we could, or should wish to, remove the mystery here-as if we could not understand how someone might think of marriage as the grave of love. For the mystery of human love perfected and completed by being taken into the life of God in Christ is the paschal mystery. "Perfection [of our love] always includes transformation," Josef Pieper writes. And "this transformation perhaps resembles passing through something akin to dying.... Thus it is much more than an innocuous piety when Christendom prays, 'Kindle in us the fire of Thy love.'"¹³ "Perhaps later on," de Rougemont notes, on the other side of that transformation that may seem akin to dying, "a man or woman may find that the folly of the accepted sacrifice was the greatest wisdom; and that the happiness he or she has forgone is being restored, even as Isaac was restored to Abraham. But this can only happen if he or she has not expected it."¹⁴

We must grant the mystery: fulfillment may come the other side of sacrifice. Nevertheless, the possibility of such steadfast commitment cannot be entirely alien to our nature-not if, as the Athanasian Creed teaches, the incarnation means that "God has taken humanity into himself," though without transforming deity into humanity. Were we to look simply at our own possibilities and inclinations, lifelong fidelity might well seem an alien ideal-not suited for our nature, too far to go. The marriage vow would then quite rightly seem irrational. As a prediction rather than a commitment, it could make little sense, at least in our world. Asked to promise lifelong faithfulness, we could only look at the statistics and the experience of our friends and calculate our chances. Indeed, in such a world it would seem almost wrong to ask anyone to make such a vow, if we think simply in terms of what is reasonable to predict "in this nation of temporary arrangements" (as Updike puts it in one of the Maples stories). This, however, would be to isolate our nature from the relation with God established in our creation and affirmed and redeemed in the incarnate and risen Christ, as if we had not been touched by the Eternal. To suppose that we could thus isolate and abstract our nature from the God-relation is to get human nature wrong-and to live a lie. Again, de Rougemont is on target: "When a young engaged couple are encouraged to calculate the probabilities in favour of their happiness, they are being distracted from the truly moral problem."¹⁵ Which is: they are being offered the possibility of commitment. If they suppose that they are being asked only to predict the likelihood that their marriage will endure, they miss the call to covenant-"the decision in

¹³ Josef Pieper, About Love (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1974), pp. 121-122.
¹⁴ de Rougemont, Love, p. 308. It is important to note, lest we underestimate the mystery here, that de Rougemont adds: "And it may also be that nothing rewards our loss: we are among dimensions where ordinary worldly measures no longer avail."
¹⁵ de Rougemont, Love, p. 304.

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itself is made to seem secondary or superfluous."¹⁶ They are simply ridden by time.

This claim is not intended as a denial of what is also true of our human nature, that we sometimes fail in our commitments and cannot sustain them. We live in the tension between this present evil age and the age to come already inaugurated in the resurrection of Christ, and we must live in hope. As we are always still "on the way" and in need of transformation and perfection, we may sometimes experience that transformation as something akin to dying. Commitment is, in Margaret Farley's words, "love's way of being whole when it is not yet whole, love's way of offering its incapacities as well as its power."¹⁷ But whatever our weaknesses, they alone do not finally define human nature. We are both finite and free. We are constituted by our finite attachments and commitments, but they cannot stand alone. They must be drawn into the transforming power of God's love. And they can be, for our nature has been taken into the divine life through Christ. The "real" is not the temporal taken by itself but the temporal bond transformed by God's love. It is the glory and the terror of marriage that in it we attempt to let our earthly commitments be touched and transformed by the Eternal. And it is very much in accord with our nature that we should learn again to pray: "Kindle in us the fire of Thy love."

¹⁶ lbid.
¹⁷ Farley, Personal Commitments, p. 134.