The Hermeneutics of Love: Quotable Snippets (the actual argument is much better than these)
Lovelessness fails to account either for plurality or unity, whereas loving attention always recognizes the “manifoldness”—that is, the irreducibly complex wholeness of a work (or a person, or an event).
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Perichoresis: the eternal loving dance in which the persons of the Trinity are intertwined…To imitate Christ is to learn to practice with our neighbors the perichoretic movements that are so awkward for fallen human beings.
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Above all else [Nietzsche] fears being deceived in faith, hope, and love—after all, all three states of mind open one to deception—and would rather suffer anything than the humiliation of being fooled. This may be said to be the very origin of the hermeneutics of suspicion, the adolescent fear of being caught believing in that which others have ceased to believe in. Nietzsche is so often praised for the daring of his thought, and this is not wholly inaccurate, but whatever daring his thought may have is, paradoxically enough, produced by his exceptional timidity in living.
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Love’s disregard for justifying itself prudentially, its actual inability to justify itself prudentially, is just what gives it the power to build communities—it achieves much by risking much.
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Hope is the virtue by means of which suspicion can be overcome. The charitable reader offers the gift of constant and loving attention—faithfulness—to a story, to a poem, to an argument, in hope that it will be rewarded. But this hope involves neither demand nor expectation; indeed, if it demanded or expected it would not be hope.
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God is the Father who waits patiently but hopefully for the world’s prodigal meanings to return to him and receive his blessing.
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Three—not two—is the “dialogical minimum” [the requisite number of people for charitable reading to occur]…”I can only acknowledge the absolute significance of a given person, or believe in him…by affirming him in God.”
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The best Christian theology has always understood love to be the fullest liberation, and has found love best exemplified in play.
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Love…spills over into territory where it does not belong and where often it is not welcome.
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Love, like the Cross—but then Love is the Cross, and the Cross Love—can be nothing but foolishness in the eyes of this world, and we laugh at foolishness. We laugh mockingly, or we laugh warmly—according to our disposition—but we laugh, because laughter is the natural human response to incongruity. And what could be more incongruous than the claim, in the midst of our misery, that “there ith a love in the world, not all Thelf-interetht after all, but thomething very different”? What could be more incongruous than the conjunction of love and interpretation?
—Dr. Alan Jacobs, A Theology of Reading
