The Great Spiritual Debate: Detachment versus Love
Which is the highest spiritual good?
“I hate nothing about you.”
This phrase encapsulates the tension between our twin spiritual capacities of detachment and love. Detachment, especially emotional neutrality, protects us from hating someone or being filled so much with our own feeling that we replace the grace of God with our own dramas, narratives, and sentiments. Loving desire propels us into a strong adoration and connection with the divine. Detachment is essentially negative, that is, removing oneself from the things of the world that stand in the way of relationship with the divine. Love is essentially positive, seeking to establish intimate connection and on-going relationship with the divine.
Detachment is the way of silence, the “negative way”, purification, emptying all that stands between me and the divine. Love is the way of speaking, the “positive way,” the way of fulfillment and joy. In the theology, detachment correlates with “denial” and serves as an “apophatic” approach to the divine, that, literally translated, means “away from speaking.” This is complemented by the “kataphatic” (or cataphatic) “positive way” which correlates with “affirmation” and means “to speak intensely or fervently”.
Detachment vs. love: Are they competitors or teammates?
But before we take sides, and decide what “team” we are on in this debate, let us consider that both detachment and love may be necessary to one another and, more importantly, to our fuller and deeper spirituality.
According to Deirdre Carabine:
(Christian mystic) Pseudo Dionysius describes the kataphatic or affirmative way to the divine as the "way of speech": that we can come to some understanding of the Transcendent by attributing all the perfections of the created order to God as its source. In this sense, we can say "God is Love", "God is Beauty", "God is Good".
The apophatic or negative way stresses God's absolute transcendence and unknowability in such a way that we cannot say anything about the divine essence because God is so totally beyond being. The dual concept of the immanence and transcendence of God can help us to understand the simultaneous truth of both "ways" to God: at the same time as God is immanent, God is also transcendent. At the same time as God is knowable, God is also unknowable. God cannot be thought of as one or the other only.[web 2]
Detachment
In his discourse, “About Disinterest”, influential Christian mystic Meister Eckhart puts Disinterest ABOVE both Love and Humility as the best means of relationship with God. Disinterest here is understood as “detachment from creatures” (understood as non-attachment with objects and subjects of the world).
Teachers praise love and highly as St. Paul did when he said, “No matter what I do if I have not love I am nothing.” Nevertheless I put disinterest [detachment] higher than love.
The reasons Eckhart gives are two-fold: 1) That while love allows a person to move toward God, detachment allows God to move toward the person, and that way, according to Eckhart, is superior. 2) Love compels a person to suffer for God’s sake and see things from their own point of view, while detachment does not compel suffering and opens a person to see things from God’s point of view. Therefore, detachment allows for a kind of graceful acceptance, very similar in tone and substance to Buddhist non-attachment or non-grasping.
I don’t think it is a surprise that this “negative” detached approach would be more embraced by males. It is clean, clinical, and insistent. It exists without the “messiness” of feelings and emotions, which threaten to ostensibly pollute the “truer” disinterested view of God, which involves impersonality rather than human personality. However, might these same all-too-human feelings also MAGNIFY the force of relationship between God and Person, between the divine and the human?
I could easily argue and observe that Jesus himself was NOT a detached individual, but rather a passionate provocateur of love in the midst of pious indifference toward the poor and powerless.
There is explicit elevation of love in the theology of Christianity. In fact God God’s self is be encapsulated in just these three words, “God is love”:
7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 John 4: 7-9)
Yet Jesus also fully recognized the importance of detached humility to ward off the human tendency to put our own importance and practices before a higher divine authority. Jesus asserted as much when he criticized the Pharisees (rabbis and priests) of his day:
42 Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here. I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. 43 Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. 44 You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires (John 8: 42-44)
Thes Pharisees could have benefitted from some detached silence and openness to be moved by God, rather than feeling threatened by a man who challenged their worldly attachment to power.
In important ways, we do need to let go of ourselves, before we can have a mature relationship with the divine. Detachment may indeed be critical to remedy a human tendency to confuse unconditioned spiritual love with one’s own emotional exaltations “in the name of God”. Detachment may very well aid the development of our abilities to discern godly from ungodly, and pious pretension from true and humble service to God.
Love
“So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13)
But what would the world be without love as a the supreme value? Disinterested detachment can easily become indifference and even callousness, as is implicit in the misuse of the phrase “I am not my brother’s keeper” to deny my responsibility to others in the world, to a just society, and to a viable, honored Mother Earth! How can one have any kind of viable or just “dominion” over the earth without love. All action would eventually devolve to self-interest and even cruelty out of boredom if for no other reason.
It was a vital band of devoted lay spiritual women, called the Beguines in the 13th - 16th centuries who best exemplified spiritual Love in the “imitation of Jesus' life through voluntary poverty, care of the poor and sick, and religious devotion.”
Perhaps it was my favorite Christian mystic text, written by a Beguine, Marguerite Porete, that convinced me that unconditional Love was superior to detached Reason. Porrete not only insisted on the superiority of Love, and the affirmation that “God is love” but heretically for her time, asserted that “Love is God”.
Marguerite Porete well understood that many men, in particular, would not get her book nor ‘get’ the power and nature of truly spiritual love.
Theologians and other clerks, you won't understand this book however bright your wits if you do not meet it humbly. And in this way love and faith make you surmount reason for they are the protectors of reasons house. Reason, you will always be half-blind. Love and faith have no shame no honor no fear for what is to come. They are secure, says Love… For such a soul (who loves unconditionally) has no matter in her which prevents her from seeing clearly so that she is alone in it through the power of true humility and she is common to all through the generosity of perfect charity and alone in God since perfect love has taken possession of her.
Conclusion
Who could legitimately follow God or Christ or Buddha or any religiously enlightened figure without Love at the center and Love in the lead? Would one deign to access and assert detached Reason as a replacement of love in the world and in the heavens?
To do so would be pure hubris and foolishness.
It is the nature of the spirit and of God to be thoroughly CONNECTED to all that is good and all that is creation and creator alike. Yes, detachment is necessary in order for his or that human being NOT TO BE consumed, enthralled, or addicted to the things of the world. Without such ability to detach we would be ever-distracted by things, and in so doing make no space for God and Spirit. However without love, we would exist as an empty container— neither attached to the world nor connected with God. Though God may indeed reach us through detachment, silence, and abandonment of self-preoccupation, God takes up residence in our hearts through Love and Love alone.