Loving God and the IQ Bell Curve Meme in the Treatise on the Love of God by St. Francis de Sales
On Being So Smart That You're Dumb
I like organization. I want every object in my apartment to have a permanent, fixed, and predictable place. So also is my thinking—or at least what I wish it would be. I want everything to be clearly one thing and not another, categories to be black and white, and simple principles to be capable of summarizing large bodies of knowledge. Everything I believe, ought to be as clear-cut as are Linnaean taxonomy or the Dewey decimal system (at least on the surface).
When reading a book I thus want it, for my memory’s sake, to be clearly categorizable. Theology books for instance seem clearly categorized in my imagination as either speculative or practical in nature, either focusing on knowledge of God and the Faith or anything pertaining to the intellect in the first case or practical in the other, focused on our actions and our will. Speculative theological works seem divided into dissective treatises like the Summa Theologiae and scriptural commentaries or more mystical works like those of St. John of the Cross. These together focus most on the description and understanding of Divine things. Practical writings seem subdivided into works collecting prayers or about the process of prayer and general practical works about the other practices and requirements of religion. These are about doing in my view and less about understanding. This is obviously a personal and ad hoc systemization, but was my mental model for thinking about theological works, theology itself, and even religion as a whole. Break it down into separate parts, understand each part by how it is different from each other part, and you understand the whole.
And so did I think and feel about theology and religion before and while reading St. Francis de Sales’ Treatise on the Love of God. This book seemed to clearly rest in this dissective and speculative category, a dry boring book that I would and did struggle to get through, but finished out of a sense of obligation. For a priest I had been meeting recommended the Treatise on the Love of God to me to settle qualms and confusions which I had concerning the love of God. How do I know, I wondered and feared, whether I really love God? Do I just have fear and act on the basis of fear? Or does pride motivate me? How could I ever be sure what is motivating me? What, for that matter, is a good motivation? St. Francis de Sales’ book, I thought, would help me understand what the love of God truly is, and help me self-assess such questions about my own love of God by giving some new intellectual tools, thoughts, or concepts. In my view, I did not “know” enough about how to love God, and needed to know more to know how to do it right.
But as I began the book, it seemed in tension with what the priest, in recommending it to me, had said I would gain from reading it: “You’re missing something, you need to actually learn the basics about the love of God. And it’s really simple.” And in one way, I thought, he also seems right, it does sound simple. Everyone has some experience of what “love” means and the concept of “loving God”, while probably mostly analogically related to our human loves, probably has some basic, simple meaning to most. But this might not seem to be saying much. When you don’t think much about something, it tautologically doesn't involve much thought or complexity.
But this seeming simplicity at one level seems in tension with reading a complex theological treatise to understand the love of God better. For, as I began reading, the book didn’t seem to make the love of God feel simple. Its language was confusing and dry. Epideictic but windy, verbose, and full of what were probably at one time great metaphors but which seem to an American 21st-century reader like me to fall quite flat, with lots of references to birds and hens in particular, Jacob’s contrasting relationships with Rachel and Leah, and endless repetition of Song of Songs 1:2 “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” St. Francis de Sales, also the author of the far more renowned Introduction to the Devout Life, made it clear in this book that the work is a continuation, an expansion on that earlier work, a “Treatise … made for a soul already devout that she may be able to advance in her design.” And he follows this up by admitting that “many things … will therefore appear somewhat more obscure than they are.”1 In all, though, it feels like a difficult and confusing work, in no ways a simple one.
Now, one passage early on did provide a somewhat clear definition of “how” we love in general:
The will then perceiving and feeling the good, by the help of the understanding which proposes it, feels at the same time a sudden delight and complacency at this meeting, which sweetly yet powerfully moves her towards this pleasing object in order to unite herself with it, and makes her search out the means most proper to attain this union. The will then has a most close affinity with good; this affinity produces the complacency which the will takes in feeling and perceiving good; this complacency moves and spurs the will forward to good; this movement tends to union; and in fine the will moved and tending to union searches out all the means necessary to get it. … (C)omplacency is but the beginning of love, and the movement or effusion of the heart which ensues is the true essential love.2
Love is thus two related actions in the lover (1) complacency in a good, and (2) the movement tending to union (or act of benevolence). Now, the love of God is thus complacency in God and benevolence, St. Francis de Sales distinguishing elsewhere in the book between cupidity and benevolence, love oriented more towards the gain of the lover and love oriented toward the good of the good loved, respectively. With respect to the love of complacency in God, St. Francis further explains it as expressed in us in prayer and resting in God or what he calls mystical theology. Benevolence with regard to God is for us expressed in alignment of our will with the will of God and loving what he wills. And if we truly love God, he later argues in detail, our love of God will be the highest ordering principle of all of other virtues, actions, and perfections. The love of God is an activity beyond our own power but requires our cooperation, we must work to lean in and follow upon Divine inspirations.
But after reading through the book, I felt like in fact Divine love was, in a practical sense more obscure and more confusing than before. In this respect, the book almost seemed counter-productive as a use of time, and I felt that I had gained far more from the anonymously written Russian classic, The Way of the Pilgrim which I had greedily consumed and loved only a few weeks earlier. To me, that book, not overly intellectual, was thereby far more clear in the little that it did say, that to pray always as St. Paul suggested, and in particular to pray the Jesus prayer literally constantly was a way to holiness. The Treatise on the Love of God, by contrast, said a lot but didn’t seem to give any cohesive picture. Throughout his work, St. Francis de Sales almost seems to overcomplicate love, not really adding anything new that I didn’t implicitly know in vague outline or from other works like Aquinas’s Compendium Theologiae, or C.S. Lewis’ excellent The Four Loves. Of course, I learned a lot of details, but nothing groundbreaking for actually loving God. Sure it was a book that displayed intellectual prowess, and I could recite a few things about Divine love, but I felt even more lost in the morass of “the history of the birth, progress, decay, operations, properties, advantages, and excellences of divine love”3 when it comes to actually loving God.
But a talk with an evangelical co-worker at my new job eventually—but only much later—helped me to understand the key reason I had been assigned the book and how the love of God is simple Afterwards rather, or, in truth, a bit after—the almost six-hundred page required a bit of re-skimming and a lot of re-studying of the table of contents—I had to conclude that my dissective method had me thinking about and approaching theology and religion all wrong, and possibly, let’s just say everything. I, and I believe many of us, have missed the forest for the trees, falling in our faith and religion right in the pejorative center of a popular meme about knowledge and stupidity without realizing it.
To understand this, let’s jump to meme culture. The IQ Bell Curve / Midwit meme is in fact quite meta and self-referential in its meaning, a lowbrow variation on horseshoe theory, that the extremes of a distribution are more alike to each other than they are to the center, moderates, or midwits. Here, the unlearned or little-learned and the extremely learned come to the same conclusion while the midwit, those who know a little but not a lot, come to the opposite conclusion.
The point of the joke is that studying a little or getting a little intellectual without putting in enough sacrifice and effort to really understand a topic will bring you to the wrong conclusions while the unlearned and the very-learned arrive at the truth you missed.
I realized that this meme could be applied to the love of God.4 The priest who assigned me this book, a Fr. Norton, had also assigned me several others that I recently read including Spiritual Childhood by Vernon Johnson on the spirituality of St. Therese of Lisieux, a doctor of the Church alongside St. Frances de Sales, and incredibly intelligent, but with a child-like humility and simplicity in her spirituality. For St. Therese of Lisieux, the love of God is so simple that a child can understand it, and often better performed by the child. Just “love God” and don’t overthink it. And so, those on the left-hand side of the meme comes to the love of God from the unlearned perspective of the child.
In the middle of the meme, by contrast, is where my understanding of theology and religion lay. An overcomplicated morass of different prescriptions and actions that require a lot of thinking and juggling to get right. The love of God, I thought, was maybe in one sense capable of being simply described, but was in actuality so complicated that you need to do lots of thinking and research to learn how to do it right. And this, as my co-worker had described, is also the distracted and convoluted way of the Pharisee, the “hypocrite”, who in the original sense of that word may do a lot of the right things but for the wrong reasons, or perhaps, no reason, who has so overcomplicated everything that he can’t leave his mind. In this, the middle of the IQ bell curve of the meme, one has been distracted by an improper usage of theology and has forgotten the child-like way of St. Therese, forgetting even to love of God because it is thought to be complex to attain or practice. Knowledge here serves not to increase love, but to serve itself, and leads nowhere.
But on the right side of the meme, is the rare, but possible state where knowledge and intellect serve and do not distract from the love of God. Herein, one has returned to the way of simplicity in their love of God, using knowledge of all the details of “how Love works” to grow in love, not letting it bog you down in intellectual confusion. For love itself begins in an understanding of the good but goes beyond it and is in its terminus not an intellectual or rational activity. Love is of the will. And the child-like way, if you are truly in the love of God, does not contradict the way of the learned, if he also truly loves God.
The central point is not to lose the end by overthinking the details of how to get there. And, when I re-perused the Treatise on the Love of God, this is the clear conclusion also of St. Francis de Sales, one that I had earlier missed, likely by this very act of overthinking. Do not, he says, when discussing discerning God’s will, overthink the small details, which prayer to say or what act of charity to perform. Do something and let the love of God itself be the ordering principle of what you choose to do, not intellectual confusion about the relative merits of different prayers or spiritual practices. It is not unhelpful to know about all the different practices, prayers, and options. By focusing more on those than on the Beloved, you are probably not actually be loving the Beloved, and focusing more on the means than the end. Do you worry about whether you love God? For St. Francis de Sales, you do not love God as much as you could, but the desire for the love of God, what St. Augustine (somewhere) also calls “wanting to want” is a sign that you have the beginnings of love. Knowledge thus, properly ordered, leads back to God, perhaps with a concomitant greater understanding of what is taking place, but with the essential, really important part, the love of God, remaining itself simple and unchanged.
In this view, theology can be difficult and religion can be confusing, but only if you make it so, by not letting your study and practices bring you back to the beloved. Don’t overthink love. But if you do, let your thinking bring you back to where you began. Don’t be in the middle of the meme. The Faith, religion, has a simple and unified end, a relationship of lover and Beloved. Dogmas, laws, practices, prayers, customs, all have their purpose, but they are for this end, not the end for them. All is about loving God and growing in the love of God by leaning into the inspirations to love provided by His for love of us and letting that orient and pervade every aspect of our lives. The love of God, is in essence, about your becoming simpler and simpler over time by letting every disparate detail of yourself be unified more and more into a single end and purpose.
And so, the Treatise on the Love of God is helpful in growing in the love of God, but not in the way I thought or it might immediately seem. I think in some ways the metaphors St. Francis de Sales uses are still of an earlier time, dated, and therefore somewhat obscuring, and the language too complicated for most to get much out of it, but the conclusions, when you see through the complexity back to the simple goal aimed at, are clarifying for those like me who had been overthinking theology and religion. In my earlier ad-hoc classification system for theological books, the book is thus trans-categorical, speculative and practical, with the speculative approach serving a practical end, and my very idea of classifying and separating theology and religion into different parts perhaps itself questionable, untrue, and unhelpful. Faith, theology, and religion are really all about one thing, loving God. And for those who don’t want to slog through what I, and Fr. Norton as well, do think to be quite a difficult work, St. Francis de Sales did write a simpler version with the same conclusions, Introduction to the Devout Life. Perhaps check that one out first as St. Francis himself also suggests.
St. Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God., 10.
St. Francis de Sales, 31.
St. Francis de Sales, 6.
A similar variation was portrayed recently on the podcast Conspiracy Pilled, but I can’t remember the exact episode. I must admit that this usage does come from P.J. Williams’ inspiration.