The Way of Love
I recently re-read Carl Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections. After ploughing through the complexities of Jung’s views, I was struck by the simplicity – and simple truth - of the final passage in chapter 12 “Late Thoughts.”
‘Love "bears all things" and "endures all things" (I Cor. 13:7). These words say all there is to be said; nothing can be added to them.’
Jung never wrote a truer word. Of course, Jung being Jung, he proceeded to say more by way of clarification. He proceeded to define this ‘love’ as ‘something superior to the individual, a unified and undivided whole.’ Jung closes on ‘the mystery of love.’ The phrase ‘God is love,’ he states, affirms the complexio oppositorum of the Godhead. Being a part, man cannot grasp the whole. Thinkers and writers on God and religion are charged with saying the unsayable. Why not just stay quiet? If we were to be quiet, how would anyone know? Is the world ultimately all an inner state of being?
Having studied Dante in depth, I can relate to Jung’s view. In The Comedy, Dante seeks to convey through language that which transcends language. In The Unheard Cry for Meaning, Victor Frankl makes a statement that encapsulates the task that Dante undertook: ‘The more comprehensive the meaning, the less comprehensible it is.’ (Victor Frankl, The Unheard Cry for Meaning: Psychotherapy and Humanism 45-47). I well appreciate the paradoxes and difficulties of seeking to name the nameless and express in limited human form that which is ultimately inexpressible. I elaborate at length on this in my Dante book. Those who know maintain their silence – but some things need to be sung, and even said, in thanks and praise. And, as Viktor Frankl came to understand from the pit of the concentration camps, meaning begs a cry. That, I venture to suggest, is the origin of language and music – people had something to say and a message to convey.
Redundantly or otherwise, Jung continues:
‘He may assent to it, or rebel against it; but he is always caught up by it and enclosed within it. He is dependent upon it and is sustained by it… "Love ceases not" .. Man can try to name love, showering upon it all the names at his command, and still he will involve himself in endless self-deceptions. If he possesses a grain of wisdom, he will lay down his arms and name the unknown by the more unknown, ignotum per ignotius — that is, by the name of God. This is a confession of his subjection, his imperfection, and his dependence; but at the same time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error.’
Indeed yes. This points to the Greatest Love of all, the Love that enfolds, nourishes, moves, and sustains all things. As the chapter ran to its conclusion, I anticipated a reference to Dante and the experience of being turned by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars:
“Here force failed my high fantasy; but my desire and will were turned—like a wheel revolving uniformly—by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” (Dante, Commedia, Paradiso 33: 140-145).
That’s the revolution that I support. Those without love will never achieve the ideals they pursue, with however burning a sense of injustice, only their perversion into their opposite.
I turned next to Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. Describing a scene that took place in the concentration camp in which he was held, Frankl writes of the transcendent power of love as the ultimate and highest goal:
‘Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us." That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was be-ginning to rise. A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.
‘Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."’
The greatest truth that human thought and practice both have to teach is this: that the salvation of man is through love and in love.
As the poet-singer Leonard Cohen put it in The Future:
I've seen the nations rise and fall
I've heard their stories, heard them all
But love's the only engine
Of survival
I would compare these words to those written by Middleton Murry in The Price of Leadership:
It can be no cause for astonishment to the Christian mind that, in an economic order of which the characteristic is that the physical energy at the disposal of society has been multiplied a thousandfold in the last hundred and fifty years, the natural man by his natural actions should be preparing to bring moral degradation and universal catastrophe upon himself. ... It is not enough to admit that the history of postwar Europe has plainly shown that the working-class has no intention and no power to dictate, and that what happens when it is foolish enough to say that it intends to do so is that it is dictated to by a satanic nationalism. It is imperative to realise why this happens and why it must happen. It happens and must happen because, by no conceivable operation of the 'ordinary self of mankind, or any class of mankind, can the 'classless society' imagined by Marxist Socialism be brought into being. Such a society will be brought into being by Christian love - 'that seeketh not its own' - or not at all.
Middleton Murry, The Price of Leadership:
I would ponder long and hard on those words.
Idealistic? Not in the least. The Love involved here is not the warm mushy feeling of ‘All You Need is Love,’ but is a hard-headed realism, the harder path to tread. The conclusion ‘Love is the answer’ doesn’t come close to doing justice to Dante’s full meaning. Dante gives us the somewhat terrifying conclusion that there is no escaping the endless Love. But what Dante is really concerned to emphasise is a final turning of desire and will, the transformation that proceeds deep within the inner self through contact with the Love as the unmoving centre of the universe which moves all things.
To know more, you will have to read my Dante book. Or, better, just go direct and read Dante.
The full text of The Way of Love, 1 Corinthians 13: 1-13
The Way of Love
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”