At long last, Science has proven that love truly exists. Infatuation
transforms body chemistry in measurable ways. The brain regions from which
criticism emanates take a vacation. That walking-on-air feeling stems,
in fact, from the giddying rush of testosterone and the fluctuation of
serotonin levels (according to ‘Love,
the great gender bender’, New
Scientist,
8 May 2004).
These neuronal ticklings must have existed in the earliest homo sapien,
who after all shared our brain chemistry, but the romantic love of our
present culture does not stretch back to prehistory. There are no hearts
pierced by arrows scribed into the rock at Lascaux or Altamira. Love as
we now construe it burst into the European world as chevalerie, or
chivalry, in the eleventh century. Of itself, the word actually means a
horserider, or chevalier,
which shows the class who first felt the dainty sentiment of amor.
The height of civilization at the time was Islamic Spain, where poets harked
back to the Hebrew Psalms, and an exceptional human love given as a metaphor
for the love of God. This poetry of love rode across the Pyrenees into
the French court of Count William of Aquitaine, called the Troubadour,
who discarded its religious metaphor, and instead went a wooing with sugared
words.
While
Normandy’s William the Bastard was brutalising Anglo-Saxons,
the lusty Troubadour celebrated
amor, the love of a mistress, in
his songs or
chansons. So, romantic love began its dizzy progress
to the very heart of human affairs. The craze became for every knight to
find and court his lady love. Of course, brutality was sadly still the
order of reality, but the beautiful myths of Tristan and
of the Grail knights brought a new representation
of love to the world. And in their subtle way undermined the frost that
had settled over Christian thought. The institute of marriage remained
a business transaction, but courtly love now obsessed the aristocratic
world. In their
aubades,
the minstrels wrote of the longing they felt as they parted at dawn from
their illicit true-loves. In its first
flush,
amor was
a cult of adultery.
In
far more recent times, the ideal of love displaced even the traditional
arranged marriage — except of course for the bluest blooded of royal
families, who must still find a virgin of the right belief-system. The
first love songs are little different from those of our own time, and every
generation since has sung its own — from Francis the troubadour, who
became a famous saint, to Damien Rice, some of whose fans would doubtless
grant him sanctification.
In
the fourteenth century, Pierre de Molins wrote these recognisable sentiments:
‘A fool’s plans often come to naught; Alas! I am living proof
of this proverb, for Love oppresses my body with thoughts and beliefs,
and breaks my heart; thus I must endure bitter sadness for you in secret,
honoured lady to languish thus in a strange country.’
Amor makes a fool of reason, and reduces the grizzled sage to
infancy. It enslaves its addicts, pushing aside every other passion. It
is more heady than any drug — alcohol, cocaine and chocolate merely
imitate the havoc it wreaks upon the brain cells (‘Love is the drug’, New
Scientist, 23 November 2002). Love is the heart’s own drug. Indeed,
it heartens — urges courage — and wakes resolve in even the terminally
hopeless. Amor can
swim oceans and climb above the clouds without oxygen. Or at least faint
dizzied in the attempt.
In
Plato’s
Symposium,
sexual, charitable, familial, intellectual (or platonic) love and the love
of a spouse are discussed. Chaste Christians spoke of the purity of
agape —where
they awaited the downrush of the Holy Spirit — or of
caritas: translated
as ‘charity’ where St Paul elegantly poeticized the tinkling of
bells and the faith that moves the mountains. Debauchees celebrate the
love called
eros,
and in many cults have professed its transformative power.
Amor was
long the kitchen-sink cousin — fêted as a pretty, but rather tawdry,
relative of these grander affairs. In Joseph Campbell,
amor gained
a potent champion who promoted its spiritual virtues, and raised it to
a par with the other more exalted forms of love.
Through romantic love, Campbell felt that the ego-abandonment long vaunted
by metaphysicians could be simply and directly achieved. Instead of years
of starving, staring or chanting, the adept could in a moment transcend the
trivial self — that vainglorious obstacle to enlightenment — and achieve the
poverty of spirit for which the mystics yearn. This rapture is the very moment
where Beatrice’s beauty pierces Dante’s heart, where Romeo and Juliet’s glances
first entwine.
Through amor the self is lifted to the service of something infinitely
more important — the beloved. It could easily be suggested that the
love some feel for God or humanity, for their leader or their football team,
are extensions of this dedication. Freudians might argue that amor itself
is an extension of the infantile relationship to the mother. But Freudians
never fall in love, so how are they to know? Jung saw infatuation as a projection
into the beloved of idealized characteristics from an inborn archetype.
Smart chap, but how to cage that giddy feeling with the comparative sobriety
of words?
Campbell
believed that the realization of
amor will be the gateway
to spiritual understanding for future generations. He rejected the Levantine
Father God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, because that
Creator is
forever separated and aloof from His
creatures. Campbell
favoured the Oriental view that we conscious creatures are an extension
of the Divinity, in our depths longing only to undo that mournful separation.
Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind. The kingdom is within you,
as Jesus indeed opined (Luke 17:21). By giving ourselves unselfishly to
another human being, in
amor, we can learn to give ourselves unselfishly
to the great, single Self spoken of in the
Upanishads, the
Divinity of which in Campbell’s view we are all a part.
The Levantine religions rejected the Mother Goddess. Although she is named
in the Old Testament — Asherah or Astarte — few now remember that
she gave birth to the God of the Semites, having been the focus of worship
for many millennia by their ancestors. She was eventually banished from the
Hebrew temples in the late seventh century BCE. Some say that she returned
to Christianity behind the veil of Mary Virgin, hailed as ‘the mother
of God’.
Campbell dates the western suppression of women to the determination that
the Great Mother was an ‘abomination,’ by the Hebrews. When the
Greek patriarchies overthrew the ancient matriarchies, they arranged marriages
between their warrior gods and the conquered goddesses; so the female principle
retained its energy. Given our pride at progress, it is hard to admit that
women had more rights in Egyptian, Greek and Roman society than they have
had through most of the many centuries of Christian belief. The rejection
of the one female disciple, Mary Magdalene, points to the continuing subjection
of women in Christianity (read more about this in Power
and Belief). There
is no basis in scripture for the campaign to denigrate the Magdalene. It
was the invention of misogynists eager to retain authority for the domination
of men.
The
original Taoists flew in the face of Chinese custom by exalting the female
above the male. The warrior gods had less to offer than Kuan-Yin, mother
of compassion, spirit of acceptance and humility. In their philosophy, perfection
is achieved by the harmony of active and passive in everchanging continuum.
Which is otherwise called
love.
Indian gods have a female aspect, called the
shakti, and described
as their power. In truth, all religions seem to trace back to a cult of
sun and moon,
lingam and
yoni (the male and female organs
of generation; to put it bluntly). And the complex relationship of love
between the Mother Goddess and her consort is this same
amor. The
resurrection as it existed for millennia before its appropriation to the
Christ, came about through the Mother’s love for her consort. Isis brought
Osiris back from the dead; as she had and would under their many names
in almost every culture throughout human time. Perhaps
we are ready to rediscover that love, and the original meaning of resurrection.
Love
is what is best in us. It has no measure in testosterone, though scientific
examination is illuminating, and can only expand our understanding. Many
people experience the flush of infatuation without the constancy of true
amor.
There is even a psychological theory that infatuation — literally, being overtaken
by
silliness — is the first part of a natural cycle that closes
after about seven years. When, presumably, the seven-year itch occurs.
Aaron Beck wrote the classic
Love is Never Enough, to show how deliberate
communication skills can be developed to maintain love. How
we can accommodate the returning perceptions post-infatuation, as the critical
faculties reawaken.
A simple statistic: a study has shown that successful couples have a ratio
of five compliments to each criticism. Surely, such couples also accept
their partner’s failings as their own, and respond to their partner’s
mistakes as they do to their own. Love is a unity with the beloved, where
the interests of the partner are paramount — even more important than
our own. Any decent parent has experienced this in the desire to take on a
child’s pain, rather
than having the child suffer it. When love works, your spouse becomes your ‘other
half’. A soulmate, rather than a cell-mate.
In
The
Symposium, Plato attributes a story to the great playwright,
Aristophanes, who says that Zeus divided the original over-confident humans
that he ruled over. He split each four-legged, four-eyed individual into
two, leaving them desperately seeking their lost wholeness in promiscuity.
Only when reunited could they be once more powerful: ‘this becoming
one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need. And the
reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the
desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.’
Campbell’s
emphasis upon this wholeness in his own experience is revealed in the marvellous
Reflections
on the Art of Living.
William Blake posited the extremes of love — love seeketh not itself
to please and love seeketh only self to please (see The
Clod and The Pebble).
Surely, in love the beloved becomes more important than the self, and selfishness takes
on a new meaning, where the only pleasure of the self is to safeguard
and to exalt the beloved. This love is misappropriated in the lonely,
who give themselves to fanaticism, so desperate are they to prove their
love.
The songsters
tell us that
what the world needs now is love,
or that
all we need is love, and
perhaps that is the simple truth. But what kind of love do we need? Jesus
went so far as to teach even the love of enemies — a terrible shame that he
has had so few true followers, and none of them heads of state, for all
their sanctimonious genuflections. That Christian love would surely transcend
all the love-limiting rules of the pharisees. Who, alas, just like the poor,
are with us always.
Love
is indeed
the sweetest thing.
It is stimulated from the outside, but its chemistry awaits wihin for that
stimulation. Any true lover must realize that the sensations of pleasure
attributed to the beloved actually arise internally. Tantric cults and
immortalist Taoists capitalize on this, and so sometimes preach an infatuation
with the
self,
without proper regard for the
other, the sexual partner who for
them becomes simply a vehicle through whom to achieve selfish ends. A horrifying
corollary of this attitude came in the 1990s, when a whole Tantric community
found itself infected with AIDS, because of a belief in the magical potency
of its practices. Campbell points to the personhood of the
other,
the beloved, the realization of another self outside of
my self,
which is perhaps the maturity that allows us to leave the infant state
of selfish sociopathy.
Existence has meaning only because of love. Take away our pleasure in the
world, our affections, and the world is empty. Feel love for a moment, and
in that moment the whole universe is filled with delight. The phlegmatic or
emotionless personality is not fully human. In the same way, the emotion-ridden
are not fully human either. Love must fulfill both the emotional and the rational.
Love is without reservation or neurosis. Love is aesthetic, but teaches that
the world is according to the glasses through which we look. There
is nothing wrong with looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses; how
much better than grey? Of course, Science has yet to develop a suitable eye-chart
to test this hypothesis.
There is no meaning of love, because love is itself the meaning.
January 2005
