Love and Death
I. Love
“Love” is such a little word – one syllable, four-letters – that it hardly encompasses its many faces. C.S. Lewis, in his Four Loves once delineated “love” as affection, philia, eros, and caritas, but there are many gradations of love even within these four, simple categories. But what is clear, even in the many faces of love, is that the act of love is dialogic, i.e., there must be two in order for love to occur: One must love another. In other words, one is the lover and another is the beloved. Restated in this way, eros becomes a major force when speaking of love in human affairs. Often seen as the one love that is in conflict with the other loves, eros becomes a force that is either rejected, accepted, or transcended, but is always problematic. Many writers have discussed this conflict of eros within Man, from antiquity to modernity. Some of these writers are Plato in his Republic, Virgil in his Aeneid, Augustine in his Confessions, and Dante in his Divina Commedia.
At first glance, Plato’s Republic seems unrelated to the topic of love and the problem of eros. Creating in speech an ideal city with the ideal ruler, the philosopher-king, the Republic’s concerns do not seem to be with the concerns of love. But of the three interlocutors – Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, and Glaucon – it is Glaucon for whom Socrates creates the Kallipolis, the Beautiful City. Dissatisfied with the city of strict utility and bare necessity – a City of Pigs, as Glaucon calls it, Socrates adds luxuries and higher goals to this city. But one must always remember that the Kallipolis is only a macrocosmic analogy for Man, and therefore, what Socrates is actually constructing is the Beautiful Man. Socrates clearly sees that what drives Glaucon is eros – the love of body, the love of the sensual. In creating Kallipolis, the Beautiful City, balanced in reason, thymos, and eros and ruled by a philosopher-king who yearns to be relieved of his sovereign position because of his love for the Idea but remains as ruler out of duty to his people, Socrates taps into the native, unformed eros of Glaucon. This is an eros which Socrates speaks as the driving motivation behind the tyrant, a ruler whose rule is enslaved by his unformed eros, which seeks the grubby, sensuous shadows of his cave-like domain. Ridding such eros takes a type of education that is nigh impossible, that is only possible in speech: the segregation of parents and children, the raising of children in quasi-boot camps / academies, the strict curriculum with the goal to create rabidly loyal citizens, the strict censorship of music and poetry, the inculcation of the Noble Lie. But in creating Kallipolis for Glaucon, Socrates does not rid Glaucon of his eros but, instead, redirects his eros from the shadows of everyday reality for the blinding light of Kallipolis and the philosophic life. In short, Socrates turns Glaucon’s eros, which remains intact, to philosophy.
One does not see this gentle conversion of eros in Virgil’s Aeneid. As seen throughout the epic but especially in the Dido Incident, Aeneas’ conflict is between the public love of his people, the future Rome, and the private love of domesticity, especially of wife, i.e., eros. During the fall of Troy, Aeneas almost does not escape when he realizes that his wife is dead, but his father, the future of his son, and the future of the last remaining Trojans spur him to leave. At Carthage, his love for Dido nearly overcomes his love of the future Rome. Eros literally inflames his heart for love of Dido, and he becomes Dido’s consort, building Dido’s city and forsaking the future city in Italy. It is only when he is shamed into realizing his uxuriousness does Aeneas leave Dido and Carthage and, one would think, his passionate eros for the hard, dry duty towards his people, his country, and his future Latin wife. But Aeneas’ passions, his eros, will always be a problem for this future father of Rome, and perhaps for Rome itself, as seen in his irrational, impassioned rage against Turnus at the end of the Aeneid.
Thus, by the time one arrives at Augustine’s Confessions, one is not surprised that Augustine’s main problem with turning to God is his cor, his heart, especially the erotic leaning of his heart. His eros only resides within himself and his body – his love of sin, his love of sensual pleasure, his love of a religion that stresses that the universe and its god is only matter, is only body. Even when mentally converted to the idea of the spirit, with the Neoplatonists, and soon after spiritually converted to God, Augustine still struggles with continence. Only when Augustine, exhausted and suffering with fighting his eros, submits– puts before the feet of Christ, so to speak -- his eros in the Garden in Milan does Augustine finally understand – Christ loves him as he is, sins and all. Christ is the lover, and Augustine is the beloved, and all Augustine must do is submit to this sacred eros.
In similar fashion, Dante’s Divina Commedia narrates the journey of a man from sinful lover to graced beloved. What is notable in this journey, however, is that Dante the Pilgrim has a guide, first Virgil and then Beatrice. In the dark woods of his soul, Dante is so far away from his original love (Beatrice) that the only soul who can guide him from those woods, through Hell, and up through Purgatory is a damned soul, Virgil the Poet. One sees that Dante loves Virgil as a son loves his father, but this love is not enough for the redemption of either Dante nor Virgil. Virgil is a virtuous man, but he exhibits no expectation for hope – he has lost hope. Dante, on the other hand, while exhibiting filial love for his poet-father, like a son begins to outgrow his father, to become a man. While in Hell, Dante, naïve and afraid, gawked and asked Virgil many questions. At one point, Virgil covers Dante’s eyes before the city gates of Hell. But as he comes through the dark abyss that is the center of Hell, where Satan resides encased in ice, and arrives at the shore of Purgatory, Dante starts to have the sort of hope reminiscent of the lover, yearning to see and know his beloved. Dante begins to know more as his poet-father begins to know less, and at the Garden atop Purgatory, Virgil crowns and miters Dante – who has outgrown his filial love – and makes way for Beatrice.
One realizes soon enough that it is Beatrice all along which spurs Dante’s eros. It is Beatrice, spurred by Mary, who sends Virgil to help her earthly lover rise from his sinful eros, towards his original love of Beatrice when she was flesh and blood, and from his eros for Beatrice the woman towards the love of God, whose love is overpowering, stable, and moves the universe. Dante’s love remains eros – the higher he and Beatrice rises through the spheres, the brighter and more beautiful Beatrice becomes until Beatrice’s beauty surpasses her earthly beauty, which had captured Dante’s heart and poetic imagination. Certainly Dante’s love moves from the love of another to the love of God, but his love of God occurs through eros, through the love of Beatrice, who remains a real woman – and not an unsexed spirit – for Dante.
Thus, one sees the treatment of the workings of eros in Man. For Plato, it is a powerful drive that must be harnessed towards seeking wisdom and truth. For Virgil, it is an obstacle towards political and public stability, an obstacle which can never be removed from the soul. For Augustine, it is a passion that is intended to be good – as creation is originally good – but by human sin becomes twisted and evil and can only be redeemed by another, by the love of God. Finally, for Dante, it is a force that draws Man to God, if only Man does not mistake God’s Creation for God. As said before, “love” is such a small word, and within that small word holds power to move man, peoples, nations, and the universe.
IV. Evil
Evil has always been a problem that has occupied many thinkers in the Western tradition. While non-Judeo Christian thinkers have tackled the problem of evil, seeing it as an intellectual mistake (ignorance) or a disordering of or lack of self-control of the soul’s reason, eros, and thymos, the problem of evil becomes complicated with the advent of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which posits that all of Creation is good, and the originator of that Creation – God – is also good, that the universe is not split between order and chaos. But while the Greek and Hebrew traditions may disagree upon the source of evil, both agree that the actor of evil upon the human sphere is Man himself. One can see the workings out of the problem of evil, as acted out by man, in Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Divina Commedia, and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
In Plato’s Republic, the problem of evil is the problem of injustice. Why are there bad governments? Why do people treat each other unjustly? In the creation of a city in which there is no injustice, Socrates negatively defines injustice without exactly defining injustice, faulting those in power for creating a government that reflects the state of their souls. This is seen in the description of a tyranny, in which only injustice reigns because the only recourse of law and order is within the disordered, arbitrary eros of the tyrant who is a slave to his passions. Evil seems to be an imbalance between reason, eros, and thymos, of which reason, informed by proper education which questions all received knowledge and traditions, ought to be the ruler over the two parts of the soul but is not. The cure for evil, then is proper education, i.e., better knowledge of what is real and what is not. But, as seen in the nigh impossibility of creating the Beautiful City in the Republic, the problem of evil is not easily solved.
In contrast, in Augustine’s Confessions, one sees the problem of evil within the context of the goodness of Creation. Evil as pure evil literally does not exist because evil is a void, a lack, a lesser, a swerving of the original path of the good. To quote Milton, “Man is free to fall,” and thus the source of evil is within man’s will freely choosing a lesser good over a greater good, and, ultimately, God, the greatest good. Unlike Plato, Augustine states that no amount of knowing the good will change a man who is disposed to evil, freely choosing the lesser good over God. It is not a matter of reason but, as mentioned earlier, eros, i.e., the orientation of one’s love. Creation is good, but if one loves Creation while forgetting about God, then one has made Creation evil. Augustine makes this clear, when he speaks of why he must be celibate when he becomes a Christian. While other Christians can be continent in their marriage (i.e., sex, as intended is good), Augustine, aware that his eros is disordered in regards to sex such that he cannot see it as a gift for life but as a temptation to sin, becomes celibate.
Dante dramatizes and gives numerous examples of this swerving of the original path of the good in his Divina Commedia. Dante the Pilgrim is in the dark woods of evil because he has forgotten the sacred telos of his poetry, of remembering Beatrice and her beauty and virtue as a way to God. In his sweet, new style, he has become enthralled in his power as a poet without thanking the one who gave him the gift of that power in the first place. Thus, it is apt that a pre-Christian, Virgil the Poet, becomes his guide as teacher in the examples of vice, similar to Plato and Aristotle, for he has forgotten what vice and the results of sin looks like. In Hell, there is no hope because there is no repentance – the sinners cannot see themselves as the reason for their damnation but blame God or other people. For example, Francesca faults “love” for her unrepentant lust, not herself. Moreover, in Hell, the ugly, spiritual state of the damned is externalized like a Technicolor, multimedia pop-up book primer. Dante sees Francesca and Paolo’s lust externalized in eternal winds, blowing them about, even though Dante’s first reaction to Francesca’s story was sympathy. He sees Ugolino gnawing the head of Ruggio, damned for eating his children. He sees sowers of discord split in two, suicides turned into trees, and other unrepentant sinners in muck, with sores, in flames, or in ice. Only when he can become harsh to the sinners – in one instance he kicks the head of a sinner incased in ice in righteous indignation – does Dante come back from the sweet seduction of sin, as seen in his original sympathy with Francesca’s story.
Finally, one sees the problem of evil as the suffering of the innocent in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Again, the problem of evil is couched in the Judeo-Christian tradition: If God is so good and powerful, then why does he allow the suffering of good, innocent people? This is the same cry of Job, which Dostoevsky dramatizes in his novel. But one sees, in the three brothers Alyosha, Ivan, and Dmitri, that fallen Man must acknowledge his fallen nature, that suffering is an intricate part of humanity that cannot be avoided or taken away with easy, quick fixes, but serves as an invitation for a community of shared suffering and thus shared love. For Alyosha, the youngest brother, his quick fix was his desire that Fr. Zosima be a saint creating miracles, and thus the corruption of Fr. Zosima’s body smashes Alyosha’s hope to avoid sin and suffering. Although Alyosha could have chosen to remain angry and isolated in his suffering -- akin to Judas Iscariot – he opens himself to his suffering, becoming open to others who suffer, and, with that shared suffering, is able to become a teacher and a healer, as seen in his treatment of Grushenka in her rooms and his role as teacher and mentor for Kolya and the other young boys. Similarly, Dmitri, the oldest brother, saw his quick fix with eloping with Grushenka, but his unsatiable eros constantly makes unaware of those who suffer around him – including the suffering of Grushenka and Kolya’s father – until he becomes a suffering innocent himself – a man unjustly accused and then convicted of his father’s murder. It is only after his dream of the Babe – a poor, hungry, frost-bitten baby whose family cannot take care of it – does Dmitri realize his connection with the suffering, with his complicity with evil in the world. Unfortunately, Ivan, the middle brother, damns God for the suffering of innocent children while remaining unable to enact any change in the alleviation of that suffering. In his story of the Grand Inquisitor, the Grand Inquisitor also faults Christ for giving a religion that is impossible to enact, is ineffectual in helping the poor and the weak, and is irrelevant. But Ivan’s devil makes it clear that the source of evil is mediocrity, in people remaining lukewarm to suffering such that they know it is a problem but do nothing about it. It is notable that the words that the devil speaks in his aphorisms are Ivan’s very own words; the source of evil is in man’s will to choose, and Ivan has chosen not to participate in the world, the world of the suffering, thereby denying the goodness of the world and his place in it.
Thus, one sees evil as acted out by man in Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Divina Commedia, and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. While these writers approach the problem of evil differently, all agree that the actor of evil upon the human sphere is Man himself. As long as Man remains caught up in solipsism, whether in pursuit of satisfying one’s tyrannical appetites, in not seeing God behind Creation, in never blaming oneself for one’s sins, or in denying one’s participation in the community of suffering, then the problem of evil will always occupy thinkers, now and in the future.
© Fall 2002