The Meanings of Love
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The Meanings of Love Alan Storkey And so I lay my love down at your feet, And, pray, what kind of love shall my eyes meet? 2 The Meanings of Love © Alan Storkey, 1994 ISBN 0-85119-988-8. Key terms: Cultural History. Social Philosophy. Social Interaction. Sociology of Marriage. Christian Love. Romanticism. Post-Modernism. Ideal Love. This book was originally written in the late nineteen eighties and published by Inter- Varsity Press in 1994. Sections of the book amounting to not more than a thousand words can be used for critique, review, and other academic and literary use without permission from the author. Otherwise please request use. Discussion with the author is through [email protected] 3 Contents. Preface 2011 Introduction. 1. Getting Love Wrong 9 4 Preface, 2011. The idea of love has billions of supporters worldwide and is one of the strongest words in the world. It commands both global and also intimate loyalty. The root meaning of love is Christian. Paul’s words that love is “patient, kind; it is not jealous or conceited or proud; love is not ill-mannered, selfish or irritable; love does not keep a record of wrongs; love is not happy with evil, but is happy with the truth. Love never gives up..” will not be gainsaid. They are really the only way to live. The Christian meaning embraces loving God with all our hearts, soul, mind and strength and loving our neighbours as ourselves. It extends to loving our enemies and those who mistreat us. It will endure. Christ educates us to see and grow in love by washing his friends’ feet, describing the Good Samaritan and forgiving his killers. Christian love taps into the love of God for the creation and for us. Because God loves us, we are commanded to love one another. It requires understanding of and being for the other person more than for ourselves. This meaning of love seems incontrovertible, and the challenge to all of us is to love others as part of our love of God. But that is not where the culture in Britain and much of the West is. As the Christian faith has been choked by the weeds of our economic and media lives, so this big love has got lost in the undergrowth. Many of those who learned to love selflessly have died, and new generations are into something else. Love had, in part, sidled from this all-encompassing meaning to focus mainly in the man-woman relationship. This was already a move of idol worship. Suddenly, man-woman life is expected to bear all the weight of this great word and to be the inspiration for all of love. Romantic love and sex were the hope and ambition of the culture, especially in the 40s, 50s and 60s, initially the escape from war into bliss, and then the greatest experience of life, the move into erotic freedom. For a while this romanticism, especially in film, buttressed by Christianity, held the culture of love together. Yet after a generation or more in western culture, though not in Bollywood, these relationships seemed not to be able to bear the weight of expectations. A glance across a crowded room cannot inspire the whole of life. Indeed, often the intoxicated “in love” couple became the most selfish and prone to split up. There were divorces and multiple failed relationships. Jack and Jill fell down the hill, and not even together. As with Anthony and Cleopatra, so Burton and Taylor, could not hack it with love. Romantic Love had to move on. 5 Years ago I remember wandering through a room in the British museum and coming across some Baalim. It was a bit of a shock. I had read about them in the Old Testament as the false gods worshipped in ancient Canaan, and I automatically thought of ancient gods as big figures, but these were tiny figures, little gods and goddesses to fit a household. Post modern gods are a bit like that – not the great gods of progress, romantic love, freedom, nuclear weapons and technology, but much smaller gods and goddesses like the ones in which the Canaanites put their trust to make life good and win battles. By the early nineties, the post modern era, the great romantic hope had fractured. Romanticism was still around, but it needed other gods and goddesses to prop it up. The screen goddess was on the way to becoming a mere celebrity. What were the new gods of love? This was the task of this little book, to find in a rough and ready way what love was seen as being. It was, and is, important, because these points of ultimate trust, these idols creep up on us. They root in our consciousness, not as a focus of prayer and genuine worship, but as a touchstone, the magic by which we hope to live. None of us is immune from them, unless we oppose them in spirit and truth. So the idea is to get them out in the open and examine them. The book comes up with ten such meanings, but makes no claim to be exhaustive. These ten are partly old views with a long cultural history. Love as an ideal has been about since the Middle Ages and romantic love is the same, though it did not really take off until the early 19th century Romantic Movement. Love as feeling is a kind of modern offshoot of real romantic love. Duty is as old as Rome and Christianity. Happiness is a result of the Enlightenment and Romantic Movement. But these older views are challenged by others. The obsessive sexual quest emerged among a few in the late 19th century, but really only got going after the Second World War. The idea of Compatibility is very modern, as is the often unspoken idea that love can be bought. We also look at the way in which the power of love and the love of power are mixed up, and finally at love as achievement or attainment. All of these views, and perhaps more, are contesting in our culture to make love work, because it matters so much to all of us. But they do not. Instead they promote weakness and failure. Identifying these weaknesses did not particularly depend on the author, because thousands of people had reflected on them in one way or another, and the task was merely to bring together these reflections and show the directions in which these kinds of idolatry lead. Each view has its own inner logic; it projects its adherents on a certain road. Love as happiness begins with hope, but then it is tied to self-pity as the individual is sorry for himself or herself when they do not get the 6 psychic rewards of their quest. Surprisingly, or not, those seeking love as happiness become the most unhappy. The book walks down each of these roads and contains a series of little stories which bring out some of the aspects of each of these meanings. The underlying conclusion of the book is that we do not need to be lost in this cultural quagmire. We are like people who are asking the Irishman to tell us the way, and we receive the response, “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here. We can read the book and not make the error. The sense of failure not just of romantic love, but of all of these post-modern constructions of love, can lead to dispair and cynicism. The ad seeking a partner looks for GSOH and must like dogs, not a melding of souls. But that is the wrong conclusion. There remains, by contrast, the deep and rich Christian understanding of love, able to cope with failure, opening up normal intimacy, avoiding all these pitfalls, and free. All of us can receive, learn and live it in relationship with God. The book is therefore merely a signpost back to Christian love. Perhaps a little warning is necessary. This book is only part of the picture of love in our lives. How we are loved, or not, in our families probably matters more. We may be bullied at school. Friends and relationships at work establish the kind of love we are used to, and we all make choices about love every day of our lives that shape our culture of love. Of course, the Christian faith leads us through all of these as well, but this book does not. It is limited to looking at the culture of love. 7 Introduction. A number of themes play into this book. First, love matters to everybody; let us say it is one of the five most important words in the lives of most of us. So, let us think about love, not with the help of some song lyrics, but with a little bit of study. We can give it a bit of time. There are many ways of studying love, but this little book tries to study love culturally. What does it mean to people? Obviously, it means different things to different people - ecstasy, saying you are sorry, rape, the underlying inspiration of life, throwing a friend in the river, and a cuddle at the end of the day. So what are the meanings of love? Second, there is C.S. Lewis. As a scholar he wrote The Allegory of Love, a book exploring the literature and fact of medieval courtly love. He then went on to write a little book, The Four Loves.