Re: quick response
Posted by kit on 2026-August-30 09:00:29, SundayIn reply to Re: quick response posted by diogenes on 2026-August-27 12:48:37, Thursday
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I think we are talking about love in clearly different ways. While I think your list of things that constitutes love is laudible, and I would of course agree that many of those things epitomise human love at its very best, only one of them - I think - is absolutely essential. For me, in fact, there is no essential difference between me saying "I love God," and saying "I love my Mum", or "I love lobster thermidor," or "I love Nottingham Forest FC," or even "I love purifying the Fatherland of its racial enemies," except the extent to which each instance deviates from love in its fullness. Hatred, for that matter, is merely love looked at through the wrong end of the telescope - every hatred is really just a disordered or misdirected or delusional love. When I talk about love, I think the essential thing I mean is desire. All love - spiritual or carnal, lofty or mundane, or perverse and destructive - entails desire, and therefore implies some kind of lack or incompleteness in us that the lover is striving to fill. Sexual desire of course is part of this, which is why I think Western (i.e., Augustinian) Christianity is actually not as unambiguously anti-erotic as is often assumed. (The Eastern Church is more uncomporomisingly ascetic, though asceticism too is of course shot through with all manner of acknowledged and unacknowledged erotic contradictions.) Of the defining features of love you mention, the only one that strikes me as absolutely essential is grief. On this at least Christians and the Lord Buddha are in full agreement: suffering separation is part of the nature of human love. Jamal may not feel grief when football dies, but if he regrets not being able to play football (because he's laid up for a month with a broken leg, or his coach got arrested for showering with the under-11s, or whatever), then I think we can say that in some measure he does indeed truly love football (and not merely 'enjoy' it, which seems to me an evasion). And if we are indeed trapped in a dilemma where all our earthly loves only seem to bring us misery, and yet love also seems to be (for reasons that - as you say - almost need no articulation) our destiny as human creatures, then perhaps the only solution is a love that itself needs nothing. Not even for us to love it in return. |
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