How To Correct Myopia

In the story of the vineyard in today's Gospel, Jesus identifies himself with the owner's son (not with the vineyard which stands for Israel). Those who want to exploit the vineyard for their own purposes look at Jesus merely as one who stands in the way and must be eliminated. In their own greed they are blind.

An analogous criticism of techno-science is made by Wendell Berry in his book Life Is a Miracle. He notes (at p. 41-42) that "[t]he abstractions of science are too readily assimilable to the abstractions of industry and commerce, which see everything as interchangeable with or replaceable by something else." This "industrial doctrine of the interchangeability of parts" is applied to "places, to creatures, and to our fellow humans as if it were the law of the world, using all the while a sort of middling language, imitated from the sciences, that cannot speak of heaven or earth, but only of concepts. This is a rhetoric of nowhere, which forbids a passionate interest in, let alone a love of, anything in particular."

"Directly opposed to this reduction or abstraction of things is the idea of the preciousness of individual lives and places. This does not come from science, but from our cultural and religious traditions."

"We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but the defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know. The abstract, "objective," impersonal, dispassionate language of science can help us know certain things . . . [b]ut it cannot replace, and it cannot become, the language of familiarity, reverence, and affection by which things of value ultimately are protected."

Love requires a "seeing" of the other as coming from a transcendent origin, i.e., God. Benevolent love recognizes that connection. It has been defined as "the will that something which has its existence from God should fulfill its existence for God. Benevolent love is a possibility only between creature and creature, for God has no fulfilment to which he strives . . .[I]t is. . . a feature of all relations of love between man and man. It is not one kind of human love but a partial analysis of the whole of human love." O'Donovan, Oliver, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine, 33f, quoted in Zaborowski, Robert Spaemann's Philosophy of the Human Person, at p. 215.

Love is, therefore, connected with reverence. Reverence sees the other as having inherent value given by God, not by me or you. In a talk I heard about phenomenology, Prof. John Crosby stated that this form of seeing is tied to reverence. It is focused on the phenomenon, it attends to it, lets it appear. Attention, reverence, letting the other be in his or her uniqueness: this is love.