When Love Becomes Too Perfect

Carrère is captivated by Christianity’s vision of salvation, yet he recoils from its radical demands. The Gospel asks us to loosen our grip on the very things most people consider life’s greatest blessings. Marriage, children, wealth, reputation, and ambition all become secondary to membership in the family of Christ. Even love is transformed. Rather than reserving our deepest affections for spouses, children, and friends, Jesus appears to call us to a love that embraces every person without distinction.

Here Carrère hesitates.

Can love that is distributed equally still be called love?

Or does it become so universal that it loses the very qualities that make it recognizably human?

Perhaps love can become so perfect in theory that it dissolves in practice. I would call this Affection Dilution: the condition in which extending equal love to all people weakens the depth, intimacy, and preferential character that give love its meaning within families and close friendships. A love that refuses to distinguish between one’s child and a stranger risks becoming less an experience than an abstraction.

Carrère contrasts this Christian vision with what he sees as the Jewish ideal of the good life. There, holiness is not achieved by retreating from the world but by inhabiting it faithfully. One marries. One raises children. One prospers through honest work. One celebrates weddings, feasts, and holy days. One delights in generosity, hospitality, longevity, and community. The covenant is lived not apart from earthly existence but within it. Family and flourishing are not distractions from God; they are among the ways God is honored.

Christianity, by contrast, often appears suspicious of those very satisfactions. Earthly success fades. Family loyalties yield to discipleship. Wealth becomes a spiritual hazard. This world is not the destination but the waiting room for another kingdom.

Carrère never fully resolves the tension between these two visions of the good life.

My sense is that his temperament inclines him toward the Jewish embrace of earthly flourishing. He admires Christianity’s uncompromising moral vision, but he cannot surrender the conviction that family, friendship, beauty, and the ordinary joys of this world are not obstacles to a meaningful life. They are, in many ways, the very substance of it.