Recent film A Life Less Ordinary asks this question. In a world where marriages/relationships always fail, two angels must create a marriage that doesn’t from the unlikeliest pair. When Robert’s (Ewan McGregor) down-at-heel life collapses, he makes a desperate kidnap on stinking rich boss’s daughter, Celine (Cameron Diaz). The angels under the guise of mercenary private investigators require jeopardy (“always works”) for matchmaking success. The film-makers’ require comic exploitation of violence and foul language for a tongue-in-cheek celebration of romantic comedy that is admirably sustained without any sex scenes (and bizarrely just the one kiss). Jeopardy piles high and collapses only to build again to the climax in which neither angels nor archangels are able to prevent Robert’s death in order to clinch the marriage. Only an act of God is sufficient to save his life (my mind flicked to John 5: 7–8).

An epilogue sees the couple discuss the conclusions that can be drawn; Psalm 107: 8 not included. The characters are, however, reflecting on their story from their limited point of view, unaware of any supernatural dimensions, thus, Providence becomes fate/destiny, and love something that “comes from somewhere strange and wonderful that we don't know about or understand”.

Although the evolutionistic dogma that love is just “an emotional adaptation to a physical necessity” is rejected, there is no positive alternative. As with morals and significance/meaning, our culture cannot live without real love and yet has no rational explanation for it. The pull between the way that we have been created and a philosophy that defines love as an illusion that can be boiled down to biology, is expressed nowhere more clearly than in Freud himself, when he wrote to his fiancee, “When you come to me, little Princess, love me irrationally”.

Although there is alacrity in being “totally irrational and absurd” like this, it avoids the cynicism of True Romance “If you're tired of relationships try a romance”, while facing up to lack of answers in a way that I have never come across before. These producers achieved something like this in respect of questions of significance/meaning with Trainspotting's “Choose life, etc.” monologue.

Love exists, but why, how? Why is there not no love? This odd question is a variation on the mindbender “Why is there not nothing?” or rather “Why is it that anything (as opposed to nothing) exists?”. That’s perhaps the basic question of all, it is a very difficult question to answer because it asks not only for an explanation of how things began but also for an explanation of the reasons and meaning behind it.

Even if we try to patch up the hole that the question makes with something like the Big Bang theory, we are at a loss as to why and even how, if we are simply the product of primeval slime, things such as morals, as love, as meaning and significance can be said to exist. We cannot live without these things and yet we have no rational explanation for them.

How can there be an objective world of money, property, marriage, governments, elections, football games, cocktail parties and law courts in a world that consists entirely of physical particles in fields of force, and in which some of these particles are organised into systems that are conscious biological beasts, such as ourselves?

John Searle (philosopher) Times Literary Supplement 12/1/96

If however, the answer to why anything exists resides in the fact of God’s existence then the question poses no problem either in terms of cause or of reasons and significance. There is no problem in accounting for these areas of love, morals and significance for this is simply the way in which we have been created.

Whether or not the half-answers of the epilogue vaguely echo a God-centred definition of love, it’s interesting that residual Christian motifs have been turned to. Still however, it's a long way from 1 John 4: 16 and Song of Songs 8: 6–7 ( flame of Yahweh'), and will the feel-good ending erase questions raised in people’s minds?

Both the duty and the opportunity to proclaim real love as the gift of God to man as made in His image should be recognised by those with a Christian world view.

Set me as a seal upon your heart,
As a seal upon your arm;
For love is strong as death,
Jealousy as cruel as the grave;
Its flames are flames of fire,
A flame of the LORD.
Many waters cannot quench love,
Nor can the floods drown it.
If a man would give for love
All the wealth of his house,
It would be utterly despised.

(Song of Songs 8:6-7)

We can pour into this one mention of the word love all the meaning that we learn in the New Testament as well. The emphasis here is that love is not only an irresistible and durable force but that it has a special relation to God himself, it is a flame (or possibly even a lightning bolt) of the LORD. This is why there is not no love, when we look at Ephesians 5:21-23 we find the answer to this again, that our love is/should be in relation to Christ’s love. It is the gift of God.

He gave us from his fire of fires, and bade
Remember whence it sprang …

(Robert Browning Any Wife To Any Husband)

Matthew Vogan