Asking the Question
Today we ask what love is. Given how many people have tried to analyze the sensation, action, and essence of love, I suspect this attempt will leave us with more questions than answers, but we humans have always asked unanswerable questions. Why stop now?
So what is love? There’s the welling up of tenderness in a mother’s chest when she gazes upon her child, the sensation of hormones that surge through a lover’s bloodstream, the unconditional regard of friends for one another, the reverent respect of student for teacher.
But there’s also the adoring gaze of a hound for its human companion, the geese who spend their lives devoted to one mate, the clownfish who swim unmolested among the anemone, and the mycorrhizal fungi that seek the tree’s roots. Can these not be examples of love? After all, the mother’s warmth is driven by hormones, our lusts controlled by pheromones. Perhaps our loving is less conscious than we like to imagine.
On the other hand, love is surely more than the rush of chemicals through our body.
How we understand love depends, in part, on our worldview. Scientists will define love differently from poets, and poets differently from politicians. What religious tradition you favor also has something to do with how you see love.
Love and Hierarchy
For instance, Zoroastrianism, and to a greater or lesser degree, the three religions of the book (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) view their deity, Ahura Mazda (or Yahweh or God or Allah), as all good. Life is a battle between this goodness and evil. Humans are meant to spread happiness by aligning themselves with the divine.
In such faiths, there are rules, like the commandments God gave Moses, and good people follow them. Angra Mainyu is the force of destruction and evil in Zoroastrianism, as Satan is in Christianity. Good people fight against the temptations of the evil one.
These teachings encourage us to see dichotomies everywhere. There are heaven and hell, life and death, good and evil, love and hate. God is of heaven and life and good and love. Everything hellish and cruel, all evil and hatred, come from somewhere else, and, at the end of time, they will be abolished. Ahura Mazda will prevail, and those residing in Hell will be reunited with their god, and nothing will be bad or sad again. [2]
Few of us believe this literally, but most of us recognize that some things are moral, while some are not. We have limits beyond which we will not go, or hope to never go. Maybe we decide we won’t torture or kill or betray a friend, that we won’t lie or cheat. These things are wrong, for they hurt others. They are the antithesis of godliness and of love.
Yet even if we subscribe to this way of understanding right and wrong, we often realize that circumstance can make sinners of us all. We, too, can fail, so we should not be too harsh on others who miss the mark. Would such mercy not be a kind of love?
Love as the Longing to Survive
But what if everything is one? There’s the yin and the yang, the singularity out of which all matter was born. If we see the universe this way, with no divisions to separate us, then good and evil, hatred and fear, are simply part of the experience. Whatever we think or do, it is a manifestation of the One. So what if that One were Love?
If the Oneness is itself Love, there would be nothing but love. All that we despise and feel guilty about, both the things that come from Ahura Mazda and those that come from Angra Mainyu, are aspects of love.
How could this be?
If we think of those awful things we do to one another as coming, not from some evil force within us, but from our longing to live, to maintain the integrity of our selves, our families, our homes, maybe it will make sense. After all, if we believe evil lies outside us, we will create monsters from other people, animals, objects, not because Satan is taunting us, but because the ache in our heart is intolerable. We do it because we’re afraid, because the log in our eye makes it hard to see, and we become confused.
When we reject, abuse, and taunt, we do it because we think it will ease our pain. We fear the loss of status, family, safety, integrity, home, and we fight back against anything we think will take that from us. Never mind that our enemies are often more imagined than real; nor that we’d be better off without some of what we cling to; nor that sometimes, when we let go, we allow new gifts to appear. Still, we cling. We fight for what we have. It’s human nature, and it’s why we suffer.
Equanimity
Most religious leaders have taught this in one way or another. Treat your neighbor as yourself, the world is an illusion, grasping causes suffering, this world of woe is temporary, life is ever-changing. The answer is kindness, acceptance, equanimity, prayer, meditation, silence, letting go.
If we do these things, that does not mean we will cease to care. Friends, beauty, happiness will still matter. We will find pleasure in the song and the story. But if we live at peace with who we are and what we have, will we love more lightly? Is that how we can keep love from making us cruel? Or is such a love, one that leads to hate, really love, after all?
Maybe it is less that love causes us to hate as that love is all there is.
Separate and One
The poet, Eavan Boland, speaks to this in his poem about the painting “Back from Market” by Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin. The artist has depicted a maid servant, home from shopping. In a shadowed storage room, she sets down her loaves of bread, still clinging to her bag from which protrudes a hare’s hind legs. The woman’s ears are pricked to catch a conversation in the adjoining room.
Boland points out that what the painter revealed on canvas is but a snippet of a life, a servant trapped, “fixed,” in time. As such, it holds nothing of danger, or passion, or past, or death. The woman might be safe in that shadowy room for eternity, but she is not alive, and thus she cannot love. That is a limitation of “great art,” as the poet puts it.
But the one who views the painting is not limited to this point in time. Indeed, from whatever see or hear, we create a story that moves and flows and contains desire. While looking at this image, Boland imagines a marketplace where marketeers and market-goers are bound together in a mutual dance of survival. They may seek to take advantage of one another, but they nonetheless depend on each other. They are “linked.” Though they, and we, are united in some way, they, and we, are also individual and “distinct.” Boland likens these imagined ones to birds, who might travel in flocks, yet whose blackness stands out starkly against drifting snow. [1]
The contrast in his poem, if not in the painting, reveals the life force beneath the picture, the sharpness with which we are defined. This very sharpness, though, our separateness, is what makes it possible for us to love.
Understanding Life
Let’s think about life. If defining love is impossible, defining life is only a little less so. Yet, consider this definition: life exists when individual bodies, covered by some sort of membrane capable of containing within it the water necessary for life’s survival, actively seek to mitigate the effects of entropy on their physical manifestations by sleeping and eating and expelling waste and other important daily tasks. To this, other scholars will add the caveat that life also longs to replicate its essence by splitting into two pieces or laying eggs or birthing children. Life appears to be imprinted with a desire to make its mark on the world.
So we have life, but where did it come from?
We don’t know. We can cite the Big Bang. By itself it doesn’t explain life, but it was certainly a beginning of sorts, and it did lead to the formation of our planet and the swelling of life upon it.
But how did that initial singularity arise? Perhaps it was “life’s longing for itself.” That’s what Kahlil Gibran offers as the reason we have children. [Gibran, Kahlil, “On Children,” The Prophet, New York: Knopf, 1923.] Life instills such a longing in every thing and person that exists. Animals seek to bond and form unions, just as we do. Even inanimate objects appear to want to be together, like oxygen and hydrogen. They strive to survive, offering to support and trade with one another when necessary. You could say that matter contains a life force that longs for itself.
Coming Together and Breaking Apart
Probably this sounds absurd. Inanimate objects have no longing. But without the attracting and repelling forces of the universe, life would never have developed. The strong force and gravity attract, and the electromagnetic force, while it can attract, also repels. The weak force causes particles to decay, and decaying things break down rather than hold together. [3]
So the basic forces of the universe bring us together, but also tear us apart. Love does the same thing, bringing us together with its longing and tearing us apart with its jealousy and anger and lashing out in betrayal and rage.
If things did not break apart, however, life, at least as we understand it, would not exist. What allows the universe to function as a place with coherent entities we call planets, comets, mountains, and people, is that a force exists that repels and destroys as well as binds. If all we did was clomp together, the universe would be an enormous ball of immovable matter. Life couldn’t exist within or on top of this motionless clump. The forces that held matter together could not be undone, for there would be nothing to unravel them. Entropy would be thwarted, as would decay.
In such a universe, there would be no “us” and “them,” which might sound nice, but without those distinctions, we could never be in relationship. Throughout the universe, and in all universes, there would be existence without time or thought. In all the universes, then, there would be no love.
Love as All There Is
Or maybe there would be love. One can imagine love doesn’t need life in order to exist. The universe, God, Ahura Mazda, whatever that Oneness is, might itself be love. Without an object to accept love’s arrow, though, this divine love seems pretty useless. Without relationship, without the ability for emotion and thought to arise and spread, for heart to touch heart, what’s the point?
Since we’re here, able to ask these questions, it seems that the One wondered that, too.
Of course, the universe–all the universe–could be an accident of a restless, explosive singularity. We might be the lucky manifestation of matter that has spent billions of billions of billions of centuries arising and fading and clumping and shattering before ending up with life. Or maybe this has happened endless times before.
Life’s Longing for Itself
Regardless of how or why life started, this life force seems to long for something to love. Maybe I don’t know what love is, but I’m pretty sure that love needs the strong force and the repellent electromagnetic force, it needs gravity and the weak force. Without them, it, like the universe, would not exist. Thus, love demands a universe that can withstand both clumping and disintegrating, that can birth atoms, but also clownfish. For love to arise out of the chaos of life’s beginning, it must not only find a way to accumulate into objects, but also to tear itself in two.
The danger is that sometimes, though we long to unite and become one with our beloved, there are also weak forces and repellent forces that rise to the surface, as inimical to life and love as is the stasis Boland saw within all “great art.” Within most of us is at least a faint hunger for timelessness or dissolution. Sometimes this sense of lack drives us to choose death over life.
As Boland reminds us, in life lies danger. Otherwise, it is not alive.
So we need the yin and the yang, the good and the bad, the bonding and the breaking apart. Love may be the creative and gentle aspect of existence, but that is not all it is. Is entropy really a thing of the devil if its destructive force make life possible in the first place? And if entropy is necessary for life, isn’t is also necessary for love? Without pain and heartache, rage and disbelief, where would love be?
Love, God, and Compassion
Maybe we can’t define love as a thing with shape and color and feathers, nor understand what kind of force it might be. After all, we get confused, thinking lust is love, associating punishment with love. Yet if love is everything, then love is this and that, as well.
If love is everything, then how do we decide what is right and good and kind and necessary? Isn’t it better to be good than bad, to love than hate? We are not gods that we can destroy with impunity, perhaps doing so because we know the universe would implode if we did not. We cannot claim our wrath is love.
At the same time, if all is one, and all is love, if we feel at-one with everything, then we generally act from a place of compassion. We care, and act as if we care.
I still don’t know what love is. Perhaps, like God, it is better expressed through poetry. Even so, I know that love contains both life and death within it. How do we make right and wrong from that? So maybe, instead of trying to live as if we were love itself, or to reflect love, or to build our morals around love, we should focus on being compassionate.
Which leads to the next question: what is compassion? It seems our work is never done.
In faith and fondness,
Barbara
Credits
- Boland, Eavan, “From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin,” New Collected Poems, New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2005, 17. You can see both the poem and the painting at http://inwardboundpoetry.blogspot.com/2009/05/786-eavan-boland-from-painting-back.html.
- “Zoroastrianism,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism, accessed February 12, 2022.
- See Greene, Brian, Until the End of Time, New York: Knopf, 2020.
Copyright © 2022 Barbara E. Stevens. All Rights Reserved.