By Samuel Gugliotta
For Variety

PEOPLE “fall” in love. Some unknown chemistry strikes the heart and mind with an overwhelming passion for another; and often, when such extreme passion comes in the door, judgment seems to go out the window.
Here I am not talking about “sex” only. As the philosopher Nussbaum notes, “Adult human sexuality does not aim merely at bodily pleasure and release: if it did, then the Cynic philosopher’s advice to substitute masturbation for intercourse would meet with universal acceptance, and everyone’s life would be a lot calmer. It is because sexuality expresses deep needs that derive from infancy that it is both ethically valuable and ethically disturbing.”
In short, aside from the wonder and beauty of erotic love is a train of negative consequences: partiality, neediness, dependency, and even anger and revenge. A person opens his or her self to an object that is beyond his or her control or possession. We saw that the Platonic solution to love’s ambivalence was to rise to the contemplation of beauty and goodness in itself, independent of the original starting point with actual human connections. The Platonic sage is self-sufficient, but is he or she really happy in a state which lacks real passion for another?
Deeply influenced by the Platonic conception of love’s ascent, but reacting against its culmination in other-worldly abstractions is the Christian conception of love’s ladder, and important aspect of which may be found in the work of St. Augustine. In reading the “Confessions of St. Augustine,” you find yourself it seems in a different world from the cold logic of the ancient philosophers. What you find is not the primacy of Reason, but the overwhelming power of passion and emotion. As Nussbaum notes:
“We hear sighs of longing and groans of profound desolation. We hear love songs composed in anguish, as the heart strains upward in desire. We hear of a hunger which cannot be satisfied, of a thirst that torments, of the taste of the lover’s body that kindles inexpressible longing. We hear of an opening that longs for penetration, of a burning fire that ignites the body and the heart. All of these are images of profound erotic passion. And all of these are images of Christian love.”
On this Christian ladder, the abstract God of the philosophers is brought down to earth and into the heart of the individual. Emotions are restored to a place of value in the good Christian life. Augustine continues to contrast two types of love: the earthly and the Christian, but they are intertwined in the unity of a person’s life. The core of Christian love is the love of God; that is the ascent, but it is the love of God within each of us. The Platonic sage who claims to surpass such messy emotions and becomes omnipotent and self-sufficient, from the Augustine point of view is committing the sin of pride, denying he humanity within us.
As Augustine writes in “The City of God”: “What is pride but a craving for perverse elevation? For it is perverse elevation to forsake the ground in which the mind ought to be rooted and to become, and to be, grounded in oneself.”
The virtue of the Augustine emendation of the Platonic conception of love’s ascent is that it restores emotion to a place of honor in the good life, and also recognizes our imperfections and neediness. But a problem arises in that loving God within the other, how can that love focus on one particular person. Hannah Arendt, in her book, “Love and Saint Augustine, notes, “The lover reaches beyond the beloved to God in whom alone both his existence and his love have meaning…. The Christian can thus love all people because each one is only an occasion, and that occasion can be everyone.”
While such universal love is laudatory, it can also lead to its opposite in isolation. Hannah Arendt states it as follows:
“Just as I do not love the self I made in belonging to the world, I also do not love my neighbor in the concrete and worldly encounter with him. Rather, I love...something in him, that is, the very thing which, of himself, he is not. ‘For you love in him not what he is, but what you wish that he may be.’ This not only preserves the isolation of the lover who is concerned about even those nearest to him only insofar as he loves God in them. It also means that for the neighbor as well love is merely a call to isolation, a summons into God’ presence.... Death is irrelevant to this love, because every beloved is only an occasion to love God. The same source is loved in each individual human being. No individual means anything in comparison with this identical source.”
There is much more to be said on the ladders of love, and next week we will look at other aspects of the Christian edifice.
Puzzles
1. Can you find the proper relations to you if the following hold:
a. Your uncle’s father’s father’s wife?
b. Your aunt’s father’s only grandson?
c. Your mother’s mother’s son’s son?
Answers to last week’s puzzle
1. Any two numbers will do.