Love and Sacrifice in the Pax Machina
A radical, vulnerable, hidden goodness
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There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable.
– C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
This is an essay about sacrifice, priests in cafés, lovemaking in caskets, and ultimate separation. But we’re going to start with a man whose job was finding and executing radicals.
Sir, he wrote to his commander, these radicals are stubborn. I execute them if they refuse to recant their radical ideology. I torture them if necessary. But some of them are young, and some were radicals a long time ago but not now. Am I going about this the right way? And what about people who are anonymously accused of being radicals? Should I take those accusations seriously?
The commander replied: You’re doing fine. But ignore the anonymous accusations. This is an enlightened age and we don’t stoop to that level.
Loosely paraphrased, that was the back-and-forth between Pliny the Younger and the Emperor Trajan two thousand years ago. Pliny was talking about Christians, who were an illegal sect at the time, and he wanted to make sure that if he was executing people, he had proper grounds for doing so. The Romans were sticklers about the law.
The main accusation against the strange new sect was that they worshiped a deity called “Christ”. That wasn’t a problem in itself, except that they refused to bow down to any other deities. Other than that, the only thing the radicals could be accused of, according to Pliny, was that they chanted hymns, shared feasts, and swore a pledge to keep their promises and not commit crimes. Pretty despicable stuff.
Reading his letter, we find nothing in Pliny’s attitude that could really be called malevolent. Executing people for being really nice may be really horrendous, but it was a banal sort of horrendous—a “banal evil”. Pliny was doing his Roman bureaucratic duty, bitterly cruel as it was.
About a hundred years later, the same bureaucracy caught up to a young radical named Perpetua. Her story feels in some ways modern. Aged 22 or so, and from a rich family, Perpetua comes across as a bit of an activist, stubborn about her cause, and possessed by an outrageous optimism. Her rather conventional father—he could be any American dad—begs her to recant her radical beliefs. When she refuses, he breaks down in distress, pleads, throws himself at her feet. Why is she doing this to her family? And she has an infant son—doesn’t she care about her boy? How could she be this sort of person? So not like the little girl he raised. So un-Roman.
But she will not bow down. She has devoted herself to the new deity called “Christ”, who is inexplicably taking hold of the imaginations of too many people. When the day of execution arrives, Perpetua and her companions are sent into the arena. Their faces are brilliant with joy. Perpetua sings sacred songs. Wild animals are set loose on them; a boar, a leopard, a bear. A wild bull attacks Perpetua and her friend Felicity. Felicity is trampled and Perpetua is thrown to the ground, but she manages to pick herself up (modestly tidying her hair, and covering her exposed parts). She helps Felicity get up, and they rejoin their wounded companions, although by now Perpetua is in some kind of ecstasy. “When are they going to send out that wild bull?” she asks, as if she has no memory of being attacked.
Meanwhile the crowd is growing restless. They want to see more blood, and death. It can seem inexplicable to us. We are not like that, we think. But the Roman arena is a foreshadowing of something recognizably modern. The arena functions as the ancient equivalent of a giant entertainment screen. The crowd is here to watch that screen, that arena, where the prisoners have a virtual quality. They are “virtual” not because they are digital or unreal, but being condemned, their lives no longer have any significance—except as amusement.
Perpetua and her surviving friends exchange a last kiss. Then they move toward the armed swordsmen who have been sent to finish the job. In a touching final moment, a young gladiator stabs Perpetua in the ribs, but he’s so nervous that the thrust doesn’t kill her, and so Perpetua takes his shaking hand and brings the sword to her throat.
She helps the young man keep his honor, while keeping hers.
A few centuries after those young radicals went into the arena singing to their deaths, the Roman Empire flipped on its head and got radical. Suddenly everybody was singing about the Man-God who hung on a cross, a paradox if there ever was one: victory through death. Honor through defeat. And that paradox has haunted the Western imagination for a very long time.
Years ago I was in a chic Toronto café with my Swiss girlfriend Ruth, the two of us sipping our boutique drinks, and at the next table was a solitary Orthodox priest in black robes and a glow on his face. He seemed completely out of place, this monk-like figure, seemingly teleported from another time. We struck up a conversation with him. His name was Father Gabriel, and he remarked, in passing, that we were in a “post-Christian age”, which was an expression I had never heard before. I wasn’t a Christian. At the time I was an eclectic New Ager with Zen sympathies. Although I had grown up in an Orthodox Christian family, I had neither realized that our society was “Christian” (or more properly Judeo-Greco-Romano-Christian), nor that we were post-anything.
For some reason we exchanged addresses, and Father Gabriel would send us an occasional letter or postcard in the years that followed. Then there came a long silence, and we hadn’t realized he had died until we looked him up and saw his obituary.
Post-Christian, he’d said. Obviously, in some fundamental way, Father Gabriel was right. But there is a sense in which we are not quite out of the shadow, or the light, of the Christian era. G.K. Chesterton makes the same observation in The Everlasting Man, pointing out that it’s hard to truly appreciate a thing when you haven’t been entirely separated from that thing. We’re like young people who mock their parents, but live in their parents’ basement and eat their parents’ food, while watching videos that convince them that they’re better than their parents. We think we are no longer Christians, but our collective separation from that identity is still in process. Only in certain moments do we catch glimmers of what the separation means and of what we might be losing. In 1976, when he published The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins was a diehard atheist. He still is, and yet in 2024 he admitted that he considers himself a “cultural Christian”. Even Dawkins has caught that glimmer, it seems.
Still, it’s nearly impossible for us to see with fresh eyes what Saint Perpetua saw in her ecstasy. It isn’t just “believing” in some weird new spiritual idea, but living a life in which the starting assumption is that God is love, and that this love is poured outward toward others.
For the corollary is this: If the outpouring of love is at the heart of ultimate reality, then we, in our worldly reality, must live by the same pattern, even if it means making the ultimate sacrifice—death. Perhaps that is why the God on the cross has been so difficult to dislodge from the Western psyche. We sense we need this love. We can’t imagine anything higher.
Some have tried to dismiss the idea of a highest love, and to redefine it as a form of natural love or common goodness. Even non-spiritual people can care for their family, love their friends, show hospitality to strangers, and die heroically for noble causes. Love might seem to grow as instinctively as flowers in a garden. But as C.S. Lewis observes in The Four Loves,
It is no disparagement to a garden to say that it will not fence and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor roll and cut its own lawns. A garden is a good thing but that is not the sort of goodness it has. It remains a garden, as distinct from wilderness, only if someone does all these things to it.
We cannot love well without cultivating it. At the same time, love itself cannot be reduced to cultivation. It isn’t a matter of developing a certain set of social skills, for instance. Such skills can be important, of course—the ability to listen and empathize, read non-verbal cues, express ourselves sensitively. And yet, just by learning such skills, we may never come into contact with the true nature of love. We may become good at attending to the nuances of social behavior, and to respond with sophistication. We might even master these skills as some politicians and social influencers do, as a means of manipulating people or just signaling our goodness to the world.
Worse, we can get so skilled that we become like gardeners who think our technique with the hoe and shovel is the source of what we are cultivating. The real source, according to Lewis, is beyond the gardener and the technique, in the earth and in the rain and light and heat of the sky.
The origin of the garden is beyond this world, in the eternal. So it is with love.
If the origin of love is eternal, there is a risk of overvaluing the religious expression of it. Saint Perpetua died for her love of God, so we might be tempted to think that the love in our ordinary lives is less valuable than hers. We might even believe that, apart from martyrdom, the only way to experience something as high as Perpetua’s love would be to seek a desolate place, as the Desert Fathers did, and to spend the rest of our lives in prayer, battling spiritual demons and striving for heavenly grace.
Yet thinking this way is like insisting the orchids in the garden are more relevant than the marigolds. Not all of us are designed to be orchids; a great many of us are marigolds, even dandelions and shrubs. There is no greater love in the weary hermit who keeps vigil into the late hours with an icon, than in the weary mother who sits at a sick child’s bedside into the late hours with a thermometer. When we answer the call to Love, we cannot always predict the task we will be called to. We are given different vocations. The challenge is less whether we end up cultivating orchids or marigolds, than whether we are willing to be the gardener in the first place, and to do the hard work of cultivation.
And that is no small toil. Love can demand that we love unlovable people, or deal with unlovable situations. Struggling to hold a marriage together; being patient with an angry teenager; caring for a child with special needs; taking time to help a stranger; being forgiving when our relationships break down. Love exacts a cost. Not just the effort, but the risk of failure. And that risk, Lewis reminds us, makes us acutely vulnerable:
Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
The fear of vulnerability can drive us to want to make our love a hurt-free experience. The urge can be so great that we might want to guarantee a hurt-free experience for others, and still call it “love”. This may be why some people conflate the highest love with unconditional acceptance. Unconditional acceptance has uses in certain situations like psychotherapy, but it doesn’t work as a general principle for all human relationships—as if we could really take this attitude toward the behavior of a terrorist.
But the conflation persists, and the reason is easy to see. Unconditional acceptance allows us to endorse almost anything without the risk of blowback from others. It is the love of the conflict-avoidant. It’s still love, but an amputated love that claims to be unconditional, even though it sets its preconditions clearly ahead of time. When it pervades a society too widely, it dwindles to well-cultivated niceness, or worse, to indifference.
Casual hookups work well in this atmosphere. Person A and Person B will accept each other from 7 to 9 PM this Wednesday for a sexual encounter. They will both be vulnerable, yet transiently, at a safe emotional distance, and in this way they are kept totally safe from the dangers of commitment.
In C.S. Lewis’s view, it’s lovemaking inside of a casket.
In truth, we’ve all spent time in that casket. It might not be the same casket as the next person’s, but we’ve all tried to escape love’s vulnerability by enclosing our hearts. One of the effects is that we become divided from the things that lie outside the walls of the emotional enclosure. Secluded in that space, preoccupied with whatever we’ve wrapped our heart in, we are separated from the wider ecologies of human life. Love is so powerful it can make our world infinitely big, but also infinitely small.
A few years after Ruth and I met Father Gabriel in that Toronto café, our lives flipped upside down and we became one of “the radicals”. We weren’t looking for it, but it happened, and nothing ever quite looked the same again.
One of our first observations was how much separation dominated Western life. We saw it in little things, even trivial things, like how riding in vehicles separates us from the natural landscape that we’re traveling through. We saw it in bigger things too, like how cities and homes can be filled with people who feel separate and isolated from each other.
It was as if our society had agreed we ought to live in separate boxes. As if we had a right to what happened in our own box, but never in other people’s boxes. As if our own lives might be lived out of many different boxes, each with its own rights, each with its own moral rules that didn’t necessarily apply in other boxes.
This might seem a convenient way to exist, even a Machine way, dividing our lives up so that our desires and needs can be satisfied more efficiently. It might also seem safe. A world of well-upholstered caskets. But this sort of world poses a problem for relationships. A husband and wife cannot love each other or their children through a wall. Nobody can really love each other at a distance.
For Christians, the greatest separation is between human beings and God. Some might think that this separation is a peculiarly Christian idea, but it isn’t. As G.K. Chesterton points out, intimations of it can be easily found in pagan mythologies, which often speak of how the earth and sky had once been connected, only to become separated or divided. It’s as if our human psyche has always dimly understood we’ve been cut off from something eternal, and that our destiny is, somehow, to return to it.
The sacrificial love of the Man-God spans this gap between earth and sky. The cross where he hangs is a kind of bridge. That same love spans the gap between people in the world. In that sense the cross is also a key; it opens our boxes to each other, turning them into homes and mansions of togetherness with broad windows and spacious places. Yet the key does not take away every boundary, does not turn one person into another, which is why the highest love is not the same as mere empathy.
Love is not a feeling. Love is a series of actions that support and encourage the other so that they can become aligned with the Highest—which for Christians is Christ1. A life founded on other-centered sacrifice invites us to discover the eternal love in the particular. Love is humanizing by binding us to the people and things of this world. Love creates character by centering our attention on the thing we love with sustained intensity. Love is fire, but a fire that melts and purifies and shapes, and only burns when mishandled. Love is the only power that can turn us into the person we’re meant to be, and away from the person we’re not meant to be. Love is the key that unlocks our upholstered caskets. It raises people from the dead.
Not many of us will become hermits, and fewer still will ever be Perpetuas, but all of us can seek and take hold of the eternal love that is beyond us, and direct it toward the particular love that is beside us, and to never let go of either. They can seem like contrary things, this eternal love and earthly love, pointing in different directions, but such is the symbolism of the cross: a lateral beam and vertical beam, joined at their intersection.
Still, we’re forever tempted to pull these two beams apart, and to separate our particular love from its eternal source, so that it can be controlled and customized. Technology is the latest tool in this effort. Writing in the The Opt-Out Family, Erin Loechner observes:
I am reminded of a conversation I had with a Silicon Valley developer years ago who predicted, accurately, that Big Tech isn’t after only your attention. It’s after your companionship. Your mind and, mostly, your heart. Intimacy… At the time, this idea seemed impossible, laughable even. How could a digital service ever replace companionship?
It’s no longer laughable. People are now forming intimate relationships with AI chatbots, and one day soon, with humanoid robots. Not far behind will be relationships with AI teachers, priests, and maybe, one day, AI parents. These new technologies are going to bring a lot more boxes into our daily lives, where individuals can experience what they want, what they most desire, without the burdens of dealing with real people. Frictionless love, at last.
The optimists will say we don’t have to use these technologies if we don’t want to, or that, if we do, we can use them responsibly. But that argument didn’t help the young people who got hooked on their smartphones, and the intimacy economy will be far more difficult to resist than the attention economy. “Love wins”, they say. But false love can win too.
The more we direct our lives toward machines, the more we separate ourselves from each other: husbands from wives, parents from children, teachers from students, friends from friends, beloveds from beloveds. If there is any evil in this, it won’t be the banal evil of a bureaucracy, but a benevolent evil. We’ll be told it’s good for us, and it will feel like it is. And we might even be told, as the Emperor Trajan told Pliny, that ours is an enlightened age.
There is another view, which is that nothing can take the place of a love rooted in ultimate Reality, and which is incarnated in the lives of real people. This love is the only force that can break down the walls of separation between us, and bind us to each other with real attentiveness and devotion. And when well-cultivated, this love overflows and irrigates the wider ecologies of our daily lives. Our attentiveness to the little things; the care we take in doing our job; our sense of gratitude; our mercy, kindness, patience, wisdom—all of this and more is watered by the love of the Ultimate. The streams that melt from the uppermost peaks run down the entire length of the mountain. We cannot invent this love. We can only look around our spot on the mountainside, find where the water trickles, and get to work on the garden.
There are said to be various reasons why the Roman Empire fell, from barbarian invasions to corruption—even that Christianity undermined its traditional values. But maybe part of the reason Rome fell was a deepening awareness that its highest virtues like courage and honor and sacrifice were not so much wrong, as misplaced in a source that didn’t go deep enough. In that sense, the Roman Empire never fell, but was transformed by seeking its virtues in the ultimate Source—a Source that did not contradict its virtues, but completed them.
The last 80 years of the West have been a time of relative peace, economic growth, and technological expansion. Rome had its Pax Romana, and we have our Pax Machina. We have sought our love in sex revolutions and values revolutions; we have sought it in the genetics of altruism; we are seeking it in machines. And the more our daily existence is bound to machines, the more separation we will experience—human from human, and human from God.
We can’t control the fate of a civilization, but we can seek the highest love. We don’t need to be martyrs or cave hermits. For most of us, if we are willing, the sacrifices will be ordinary and unhistoric. They might seem inconsequential. That bit of extra time or effort that no one will ever see; the suffering we quietly endure, because we know the good that will come of it; the knock on the door and the question, “Are you okay? Do you need help?”
We can’t underestimate what our small devotions of love will do to the world. As George Eliot reminds us in the closing lines of Middlemarch:
Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
4 Quick Things
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(from School of the Unconformed) and I will be leading an eleven-day pilgrimage on the Camino trail in Spain next year, from June 14-24, 2025. Joining us, as co-leader, will be writer/photographer from The Examine. Space is limited so reserve your spot now. You can read all about it here. This is open to everyone, irrespective of religion or background.
Credit to my friend Ellis Potter for this definition, which is adapted from his book How Do You Know That? Potter’s original version reads like this: “Love is not a feeling. Love is a series of responsible choices that promote and encourage the other so that they can become who God intends them to be. The purpose of love is to make us more fully real.”
This article is very helpful as I struggle with the meaning of love. I work with an elderly woman who is disabled and has dementia. We have recently moved back into her home. In the evening, I deeply enjoy cooking dinner and we share the meal together. But for the first four hours, all she wants me to do is to watch her smoke cigarettes and pet her cat. I have long admired the contemplative Christian tradition, but my relatively brief periods of silent mediation have not prepared me for four hours doing nothing... or is this the real measure of love? Simply to be with her, mostly quiet, occasionally responding to small requests like lighting her cigarette or moving her wheelchair closer to the cat. Can I begin to sense the presence of God, the love of God, in this time period? I find myself challenged to love by giving my time freely, without frustration or boredom. I often wonder what a monastic contemplative would think of this 'practice.' Despite my years of Christian practice and prayer, I am finding myself in a new place.
Gardening as a motif was powerfully realistic. I enjoyed printing this out and highlighting through. A couple favorites:
•a C.S. Lewis quote reference “It remains a garden, as distinct from wilderness, only if someone does all these things to it.”
• “The challenge is less whether we end up cultivating orchids or marigolds, than whether we are willing to be the gardener in the first place, and to do the hard work of cultivation.”