The Love Cult

Love as a conviction, as an attachment to someone or even to something, can be a profound individual experience. I don't happen to believe that it is the most profound or significant feeling that a human being can have in life. But when it is authentic, when it is too much at times for the person who feels it, when it shakes us and becomes almost too much for the inadequate language we have for our feelings, then it is certainly not to be discussed lightly and is properly nobody's business but our own. Nobody else would really understand it. In the deepest sense love is incommunicable, since by taking us out of ourselves it forces us to find words for feelings that usually are unexpected and often are not even wanted. Our attachment --when it is genuine, when it starts in a certain pain--can be different in sensation from anything we have known. That is why love, when we really love, can be actively disturbing; for once we are concerned with the object of our love and less with ourselves. In that flight from ourselves as the usual center of the world, there is certainly no guarantee that our love will be reciprocated, that it will last, that it will even be known.

No, it is certainly not with the depth of love nor with the possible anguish of love that I quarrel; it is with the word "love"--the buttery little symbol of our self-satisfaction and society's approval. "Love" as a password, as a badge, as an announcement of how kindly we are and how goodly and how full of generosity and acceptance and warm feelings--this word as a slogan and advertisement of our good intentions is what I have come to dislike. For the word is easy, it costs us nothing (not even a feeling of love) and, like an excessive tip to a waiter, is meant to purchase a good opinion of ourselves. I dislike the easiness with which we now use this word in America, I dislike the glibness which it expresses and the unlovingness it so often suppresses. But most of all I dislike "love"-as-a-formula for its superstitious attempt to stave off the truth by incantations. We live in a world of such menace from our fellow human beings and of such fear of our fellow human beings that it is surely a strain on our honesty to speak of human beings as "loving." What primitive men once feared in the storms and cataclysms of nature--something which in their ignorance they thought malevolently directed against them--we now know to be true of human beings in society. Not only do most people love us not at all--some of them would gladly kill us. Much of what we think of as "love" in ourselves or in others is simply conservatism. We get attached to people, houses, cities, mechanical appliances, and associate with them a pattern of satisfaction. There are a few people, I know, who can transcend themselves altogether in their attachment to a person or an idea; the saints are saints precisely because they have a rare attachment to God and more to God than to anything mortal. But I for one will never recover from the Second World War, and when I think of the millions of children slaughtered for love of country, when I consider how many crimes have been committed, and how many more have been considered, in the name of a love that was deep but fundamentally selfish and tyrannical, I genuinely wonder why the word is so much prated. For love of a parent, many people are unable to love others in later life; for love of an idea, crimes are committed against defenseless populations; for love of God, those who love Him a little less verbally, or in a different ritual, have been tortured to death.

Why then do we talk so much in the name of love, why is the word the easiest to use and the most self-satisfying? What is the mysterious satisfaction we seek to obtain by the word? Of course one reason is that human beings rarely do love in any true sense, but are so acculturated to the use of the word that they acquire some necessary social approval by it. The Russians, who came relatively late to Western manners, are very quick to reprove publicly any of their people who do not behave nicely at table. The reproach is that someone is not cultured, and there mark can hurt. In the same way, Americans, and more usually American women, are very quick to say of some action or gesture that it is not loving--and there are few of us brave enough to admit that in some situations or even in general, unloving is what we are. As the novelist Saul Bellow once complained--"Would we be told to love if love were as natural as breathing?" So little is it natural to us, in fact," that representations of love by the most acute psychological novelists, like Stendhal, emphasize with almost clinical observation the confusing arrival of new sensations rather than concern with the beloved. This side of Eros (who is only one of the many gods of love; in America we favor a more domestic figure) is one of the great subjects of the European novel, for as Louis Ferdinand Celine once said, physical love is the fact which stands outside all our verbal systems and ideas. This is what has made the great European novelists identify physical love with the truth inadmissible by society. In Proust's greatest single work, Swann's Way, Swann himself, the fastidious and painstaking intellectual who has been accepted in the most snobbish ranks of French society despite his Jewish blood, suddenly finds himself losing all control and all care for his position in his obsessive need to possess Odette, who is essentially a prostitute. Yet when, at the end of his "sickness," Swann says ruefully that he went to all this trouble for a woman who "wasn't even my type," we recognize the empirical spirit, the fidelity to the disconcerting facts of human experience, wherever they may lead us, that is the peculiar fascination of great fiction.

Proust says in his novel that he who "possesses" a person really possesses nothing--of course, it is the pride of conquest, not of actual possession, that is associated for a man with physical love. Yet if you look at the history of "love" as an idea, you can see that "possession" was associated even with spiritual love. In what is perhaps the most profound explanation of love, Plato's Symposium, Socrates makes it clear that love is our highest recognition of what is most' unlike ourselves. It is an excellence of a being unlike ourselves that we want to attach ourselves to. We want to possess what we are not. But by the quality of our recognition of what is excellent and even perfect of its kind, we can also not seek to possess it. This is why Saint Augustine's definition of love is so rare and moving--I want you to be. The beauty of this phrase lies in its surprise. It is the most concrete example I know, in Western culture, of how love can ennoble itself. By contrast, most statements about love deal neither with the physical facts, as Proust does, nor with the kind of aspiration. which at certain moments we faintly detect in ourselves. The usual thing is the glib assurance that everybody "loves"--or with a little encouragement, can. The love that Saint Augustine speaks of must be won out of the endless battle with our own suspicious human nature, against the actual wickedness of the human animal. But this love, when it is real, can rise to sublime concern for another person.

Yet beautiful as such an intimation of the highest power of love can be, the fact remains that we are always being counseled to love--that is, to talk as if we loved--but keep falling back. Why is the term honored so much in our culture that we lie for its sake, lie even when we are just thinking aloud, lie to protect the mere term from dishonor? Is it only because without the word to hold us in, we would tear each other to bits? After all, to be unloving is not necessarily to be aggressive and destructive. Bad as we are (and never have human beings thought so little of themselves as they have since the First World War), we are not--at least not all of us, and surely not any of us all the time--so violent. Why, then, do we lie that we love, pretend to love? Why, indeed, do we try so hard to love?

Surely one reason is that without "love" as a concept, the world seems exactly as indifferent to us and our most tenderly cherished personal strivings as in certain unbearably lucid moments around three in the morning we recognize it to be. The peculiarity of Christianity among the great world religions is that it establishes God as not merely creating the world (not all religions do even that), but as creating it out of love for man, out of the spirit of love. God is love. He works in love for us. He so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son...The sublime "good tidings" that the word gospel literally stands for is this unprecedented loving intervention in the affairs of men by God in His incarnation as Christ. With the idea of God as Love (which expressed something different from the Old Testament God's loving concern for man), of God creating man out of love alone, a protective new relationship unfolded for Christians, between themselves and a universe somehow more their own, now tenderly aware of man(for whom Christ died) and cherishing him in the hope of spiritual perfection. Out of love God created man; out of (continued on page 126)Love Cult(continued front page 64) love God redeemed man of his primal sin and offered him salvation. In return even the emotion that a man felt for his wife now became a symbol of the divine love. The world, under the influence of Christianity, now came to seem a loving world. Love created it. Of love was it made.

And without love, what was it? Without love, the world was dark and capricious as it had been to the ancients, as mysterious and incalculable as Providence appears to the Jews. Without love the world--the true world, the spiritual world--was without form, as it had been before the creation. Without love, as Satan said in Paradise Lost, "Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell." This was what the great Christian novelist, Dostoievsky, said about those unable to love; the wretchedness Father Zossima describes in The Brothers Karamazov is to fail in love for the world. Not to love, in the Christian tradition of the word, was to cut oneself off from life. And so deeply woven into the fabric of Christian civilization was the idea of God as love that, scholars are beginning to discover, the conscious eroticism of the troubadours in the early Middle Ages (the beginnings of the cult of romantic love) may actually mark the beginnings of Protestant heresy. Yet to lavish so much adoration on a woman, even though it was done in playful ritual--officially a symbol of devotion to the Virgin--was nevertheless to honor and to retain the "practice of love." Whatever may have split and weakened the Christian faith through the centuries, "love" as its unique theology and its special badge of faith has remained with it. In America, such sects as Transcendentalism retained the idea of God's love long after they had virtually ceased to believe in God. The Christian idea that love, as an expression of God's concern, can heal, is of course the foundation of Christian Science. "Love" for many Christians, and for many non-Christians, has not only survived but replaced the idea of God. It is only by understanding love's role as a theology, even for many ex-Christians and non-Christians, that one can begin to understand the force that it has in our culture. It is the sine qua non, literally--without it we feel that we are lost. Without it our universe is suddenly without rhyme or reason; we have no shelter against the possible dissolution of the only society that we are used to.

So deep is this conservative and domesticating influence of "love" as a commandment that it has virtually reoriented psychoanalysis in the direction of ethical goals which Freud never intended for it. As Freud once pointed out in a letter, "...psychoanalysis also has its scale of values, but its sole aim is the enhanced harmony of the ego, which is expected successfully to mediate between the claims of the instinctual life [the 'id'] and those of the external world; thus between inner and outer reality....We believe that it [psychoanalysis] cannot reveal to us anything but primitive, instinctual impulses and attitudes...worthless for orientation in the alien, external world." Freud was concerned with sexual instincts; these were necessarily at war not only with existing laws and morals, but often enough with the softening and conventionalizing spirit which already went by the name of "love." He showed, as the great European novelists had done, how much that we call "love" is the separable force that we can more truly call lust or desire, and how much the spirit of "love," as conventionally honored, can conceal or suppress the force of this desire.

In Freud's view, it was not love that needed understanding and expression, but all those component instincts and biological forces that go to make up the amalgam that the word has been used to conceal. Freud felt that "love" as a term had been honored enough in our culture; the instinctual forces below the surface engaged his attention. Far from flattering human society that its ruling motive was one of love, he insisted that the generations of men in the primal past had succeeded one another by force of conquest, arising in a spirit of deep sexual competitiveness and jealousy. Even in his own family and clan, man was ruled not by selfless affection but by incestuous longings which by now he had forgotten that he felt. He was engaged in a constant reliving of the past with which he had never come to terms. His only relief from the anxiety of struggling endlessly with his impulses was in a longing for death--a longing he would not even acknowledge to himself, so little was he aware of the bitter struggle going on in himself with the demands of physical love. As Freud saw it, man was a battleground between the exuberant but frightening spirit of Eros, and that of Thanatos, the wish for death to free us. Eros exhilarates us to a renewed sense of our human possibilities, but he disturbs the order we have so grimly built up. To give in to Eros is to reach down to a force in ourselves that we are constantly trying to pacify and to domesticate and to civilize.

Love is not a heresy now; it is the only guarantee left to us of the status quo. This, in our day, is the magic of the word. "Love," in America today, is what retains and re-establishes and secures; this is why "love," for which Proust's Swann almost died and for which Anna Karénina did die, now stands for those pacified and pacifying qualities that we hope will let us be. In Freud's eyes, a man was sick if he could not consciously and bravely deal with the profound stirrings of Eros; in the eyes of, say, Dr. Smiley Blanton, author of the popular manual Love or Perish, it is the failure to love that may doom us all. Notice that Freud spoke of biological instincts that exist; Dr. Blanton and, on a much higher level, the influential Dr. Erich Fromm, speak of feelings of love that must be strengthened. Dr. Fromm's appeal is directed from a strong core of European liberal idealism; he is concerned with love as the creator of a new society, not the domestic love which alone means so much to American women--and therefore to American men. But the effect of Dr. Fromm's books is, in the American context, to strengthen the fond American belief that it is love and love alone that holds the world up at all just now.

It is not even love in itself, direct feelings of love for another, that I discern in the solemn repetitions of the word; it is the wistful longing that the world be kept whole, that it may be kept what it was, that it be kept still. It is rare indeed for a truly conservative novelist, like James Gould Cozzens, to show that in the death of what once was love, the deepest values of our society have gone, too. By Love Possessed is not my favorite among Cozzens' novels, but it should be remembered that the subject of his book is the decline of the most elementary moral notions among our "best" people--and that one of his examples is the selfish and faithless addiction to "love" among such people. Cozzens really is a conservative: he has a concrete image of a past society, of past values, that he cherishes and respects above all others. But the anxious and even panicky use of "love" today is to hold up a rickety world, or almost any world, in the absence of any positive values of our own. Without "responsible," "mature," "decent" interpersonal relationships, we may all go to hell. No wonder that on every side just now I seem to hear psychiatrists and counselors and ministers saying--"Love, you monsters! Love, damnit all, love! Do you want to rock the boat and destroy us all?" What was in the earliest days of civilization a prime discovery by the human spirit, and later a sublime construction of theology, has now become a threat. Love, or we'll think less well of you! Love, or else the whole joint-stock company of modern humanity, dependent on the loving restraint of its members, will still not be enough to keep the missiles and H-bombs from going off! Love!--so that I may not die.

Yet more than fear of war, which can only mean fear of ourselves and our fellow men, it is the poverty of our daily language that impels us to invoke love like the name of a political party. It has become our only absolute. What God has meant to so many, what in times past the good society has meant to many again, what was once summed up by words like justice, now the quick sound of "love," like a card quickly being shuffled off the top of the deck, means in contemporary American culture. Students of language have a name for the quick automatic response that is expected in a culture: "counterwords." Love is now our chief counterword. On Broadway now, as in popular versions of psychoanalysis, there is no value to live for but "love." "Love," that is, as a symbol of your status, for love of a person is hardly something to boast of or to think of as comfortably growing like money in an interest account. If you have "love," you've got it made, as people make it in business. The family that loves together stays together. It shows how very nice we are. "Love" is a very American thing; not many Europeans love as much as we do. A psychiatrist turned-writer once told me that European novelists like Camus and Sartre lacked "the spirit of love." To be without this warm, gushing, confiding spirit (so quick to advertise itself like toothpaste) is now, apparently, the hell of exclusion that Dostoievsky reserved for those unable to love. And the usual American song is less often: I love, than it is: I need love. On Broadway, "love" means a psychological health necessary to the only kind ofperson that we now recognize. Yet see how quickly love-as-neecl becomes love-as-value. In PaddyChayefsky's television play Marty, the sense of pathos involved in needing love so much made for a dramatic situation that one could understand if not particularly admire. But in his more recent play, The Tenth Man, we find an old man in a Jewish house of worship not merely praising the hero for loving the heroine, but ending the play on the affirmation that such love is all that we mean by God nowadays.

Love as "security," love as guarantee that the home will stand up, the city, the world, even God himself--what a strange thought. If love has ever really meant anything, it has meant the largest possible risk. How can I, by loving, bind another to myself? And how can another bring me safety? Yet we all believe in this, whether we admit it or not, and the reason goes deep. The real terror of our days is not merely that we civilized people view society as savages once viewed nature--something awesome and beyond control. It is that so many of the words that we use to signify our deepest allegiance and loyalty, the words that convey our bottommost trust and faith, have vanished for us--so that, for many people, it is virtually the magic of love and love alone that seems to hold the world up at all. That is why, on Broadway, where a work can live only if it is immediately liked by its audience, plays like Archibald MacLeish's J.B. and William Inge's Come Brick, Little Sheba and Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire are popular. MacLeish re-establishes the "private" world of love for a wife as the only one to which! a modern Job stricken by the (significant) irrationality of misfortune can return. Inge and Williams, in their different ways, re-establish in the word "love" a kind of primal authority that is essential to the overwhelming concern of these playwrights with the word "home." Even in Williams, who is so talented and so concerned with the force of sex, "love" takes away the "hardship," as Freud grimly called it, of sex.

Whether as nostalgia or as commercial salesmanship, you just can't beat love nowadays. Love is associated with the most sublime insights of a religion which is honored more in the breach than in the observance, and which survives every breach, in a sense thrives on it, by holding out such high hopes for love. Love, in fact, is what we most admire when everything else has failed our admiration. Its promise is enormous: "For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!" And, of course, this concept of love also soothes, it beckons, it replenishes our stale and disillusioned imaginations with the word which is the very incarnation of a better opinion of ourselves. In a society which is not merely anxious about its future but, more seriously, shoddy with outworn beliefs, exploded mythologies, a language debased by commercialism and popular entertainment and shallow mass education, "love" alone seems to stand up. On it, at least, we try to stand.