“And then saw I that all the compassion that man has on his even-Christian with charity, it is Christ in him, that all the noughting that he showed in his passion, it was shown again in this compassion … and that his pains and his tribulation surpass so far all that we might suffer, that it cannot be fully thought.”

Julian of Norwich (c.1342–after 1416) lived at the same time as Chaucer. She was an anchoress, a mystic who came to live in a small cell attached to the south side of St Julian’s church, from which she took her name. Established in the cell at least by 1394, she wrote in A Revelation of Divine Love about a series of sixteen mystical “showings” that began with a vision of a cross held before her by a priest on 3 May 1373 as she lay near death.

The first quotation above comes from the closing chapter, chapter 86, of A Revelation of Divine Love. Julian’s unadorned and penetrating question, “What, would you know thy lord’s meaning in this thing?” affirms the human search for meaning. She anticipates a lingering difficulty for her reader, a querulousness, an embarrassment, a refusal to acknowledge curiosity maybe, a genuine puzzlement. “This thing,” the Lord’s passion, is overwhelming. Perhaps it seems vaguely inappropriate, even gauche, to seek to know its meaning, as if doing so were to limit the passion or commodify it in some way, a little like asking, “Will this be on the final exam?”

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Julian pushes past all of this with a simple invitation. She meets us where we are and encourages us to hope that an eminently reasonable and natural question, “What does it mean?” might possibly be met with an answer we can believe in.

She then puts us at ease: “Know it well.” This is an affirmation. There is indeed something to be known and understood, something that can satisfy our deepest intellectual cravings. Maybe the idea of finding meaning seems somehow sterile or one-dimensional. In an Age of Reason or an era of technocratic modernity, many people look to rational explanations to suppress a certain kind of aspiration and vitality. Yet Julian invites us to lean into our desire to know and to find meaning.

To admit even now, finally, to a hunger to know opens up something interior. The simplicity of the response matches that of the question she has posed: “love was his meaning.” This answer meets us before it wrongfoots us. Divine love as expressed in cataclysmic suffering fulfils whatever demands one might have for meaning. The Passion provides intellectual satisfactions, if one is prepared to let it.

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At the same time, what Julian says defies expectations. Coming at the end of an entire book elaborating a vision of the cross, “love was his meaning” activates a paradox. It takes the addressee beyond their capacity to make sense of “the thing” – suffering, the Passion, how an all-powerful God could organize the redemption of a world he created around the sacrifice of his own self – in terms of a satisfied curiosity. We discover that “meaning” has more dimensions than anything we can think or imagine. Christ’s suffering and death, his “noughting,” cannot be fully thought.

The idea of finding meaning in its turn unlocks dimensions of love. Love is more than a feeling. It’s certainly more than sentimentality. Love lives in the reality of Christ’s life and passion; it encompasses questions of identity, substance, and purpose, who, what, why. The vision of the love to which Julian points her readers is clouded over by all our efforts to express or represent its fullness.

Yet this limitation does not cripple us by leaving us within an intellectual puzzle. Rather, Julian affirms all our acts of compassion in the recognition that they are participations in Christ’s love. They too are grounded in the same paradox. We have been drawn into this life, a life of love beyond our capacity to fathom it.

A. Soane didn’t care about form, he was all about emotion.

Nineteenth-century architect John Soane (1753–1837) turned his London home into a living example of the sorts of things he could do architecturally. Eventually becoming professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, he did so for clients and students alike. Upon his death and according to his detailed instructions, his home became the museum it is to this day.

A sign in the breakfast room says that the room boasts a floating dome. What’s a floating dome? While visiting the museum, I heard the question put to an attendant. The volunteer, an architecture student himself, answered in a striking way. Rather than provide even a rudimentary technical understanding of the phrase “floating dome,” he apparently thought to cut to the chase of what really mattered to the great historical figure. He gave the answer quoted above: “Soane didn’t care about form, he was all about emotion.”

I personally was interested in a different sort of response because, presumably like the questioner, I too had no idea what made a dome “float.” I have since discovered that a dome is said to be floating when the building in which it is found doesn’t rely on it structurally. The dome is therefore simply for effect, an emotional effect. Formally, a non-floating dome does the work of supplying a roof for a structure and integrating the forces of its walls or pillars. They are holding it up and it, in its turn, is giving stability and coherence to the whole. Something like that. (If you google “floating dome,” you’ll get pictures of geodesic domes on water, so the phrase may be a term of art, and perhaps a British one at that.)

I’m reminded of Brunelleschi’s dome atop the awe-inspiring Duomo in Florence. Brunelleschi invented a brickwork pattern called spina di pesce (herringbone) to make the structure self-supporting. The dome also relies on a heavy lantern, the top part that pokes up. The downward force of the lantern helps keep everything in place. The dome is functionally integral, the opposite of floating, at least in the sense of the term of art as used in the John Soane Museum. Of course, on a sultry summer day, viewed from one of the nearby hills the duomo absolutely appears to float, but that’s something else again.

Among his achievements, Soane was awarded the contract for the Bank of England, a building he completed in 1833. It had domes and arches in it. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t true that he was “all about emotion” or didn’t care about form. He couldn’t have succeeded as an architect had that been literally true. Yet the point stands. The student was making the case for a particular understanding of Soane’s architectural achievement and he was appealing to reason-and-emotion-in-tension to do so. The trope was doing cultural and interpretive work.

I am here revisiting a theme I have touched on in a post (not for Traces) about the Golden Gate Bridge. I commented on how Ted Danson’s character in Man on the Inside, a retired engineer, augments function with form. In that instance, form provides “the beating heart” to the engineering accomplishment, making the bridge much more than merely rationally “useful.” In the case of the attendant’s not dissimilar but flipped evocation, “form” has become the word associated with reason: the prosaic necessities for holding something up and the head scratching, the mathematical formulas, and the knowledge of materials to go along with that. The passion of the project has shifted away from form to emotion, and with the latter the inference of heartfelt creativity.

In other words (if I may interpret the attendant freely) Soane, like the engineer responsible for the Golden Gate Bridge, could not rest content with mere utility. Context is necessary to understand the meaning of the terms, but the appeal to a tension between reason and emotion, perhaps even reason and love, is similar.

Would it be pedantic to say that the attendant was prising reason and emotion apart? He may have said what he said mostly for effect, because he found the question boorish. His gnomic remark may have issued from disdain at a lack of rudimentary knowledge of architectural terms of art. However, it may have been enflamed by a perceived literalism on the part of the questioner that evinced little interest in emotion and creativity in architecture. He was damned if he was going to cater to terminological rationalism.

More seriously, though, the student’s suggestion of a strict opposition presumed architecture as a zero-sum conflict in which reason was always to be subordinated to emotion. Paradoxically, this felt like a downgrading of love as well. Love is always fascinated by the particularities of a lived situation and the demands, sometimes moral, always intellectual, that a work requires.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn,

Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conquering,

The dreadful joy that slips away so quickly –

All this mean I by Love ….

These are the first lines (modernized) of one of the first Valentine’s Day poems ever written. Chaucer penned them sometime in the late 1370’s or early 1380’s: ninety-eight stanzas in a seven-line form that he may also have invented, a form he devoted to cultic practice:

For this was on Saint Valentynes day,

Whan every foul cometh there to chese his make ….*

*Foul: fowl, rhymes with fool; chese: choose; make: mate

“There” is a parliament of fowls on a hill of flowers presided over by “the noble Goddess of Nature.”

Chaucer has two wry observations to make about love’s relationship to learning. One is that it should be a thing at all. The first line, “The life so short, the craft so long to learn,” is a bog standard aphorism. People have been saying it since the days of Hippocrates’ “Do no harm.” It refers to mastering anything. You’ve got to work hard, you’ll have some ups and downs, stick with it.

The fourth line doesn’t surprise anyone much, but it’s off just enough for the reader to be struck by the simple truth of the admission. The tone of the delivery remains shrouded: it could be wonder, bitterness, petulance, detached frankness. There’s something off, though. Love isn’t supposed to be like that. It’s supposed to be simple, presumably starting with love at first sight. To think of it as a craft doesn’t bode well. One could end up like Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice, he who gives “little delicate compliments” to ladies with “as unstudied an air as possible.” Early in the English tradition, Chaucer signals the social and literary fertility of an implicit tension between study and love.

Literariness is the object of Chaucer’s second wry remark. He makes himself the butt of a joke about love and bookishness, or the difference between knowing and knowing-about:

For even though I know not Love in deed

Nor know how he pays folk their hire

Still, it happens that I full oft in books read

Of his miracles and his cruel ire.

You can almost see Chaucer working himself up, taking himself too seriously, talking himself into his competencies. All the while he suggests the chasm that separates theory from practice, head knowledge from the experience of love.

He knows he’s doing this, naturally: presenting a persona, speaking the ineffable. We haven’t arrived at the unadorned author. We know that. Our danger is to overlook the great authorial presence in this poem (in Chaucer’s works generally) and the gentle jokey seriousness. This apparently is what Chaucer is like: jokey, readerly, reflexive, and utterly committed to the bond of charity sexual, political, ontological.

The poet is going to report on a parliament of fowls he comes across in a dream. First, though, he describes steamier and seedier encounters in the same dream (with more than passing references to Priapus and Venus). We learn to trust his decorum (this isn’t the Miller’s Tale) before we read his journalism. In this phase of his dream, Chaucer writes about seeing the God of Love Cupid and then, among his servants, Craft personified:

Then was I aware …

… of the Craft that can and has the might

To cause by force a creature to do folly –

Disfigured was she, I will not lie.

One senses a difference between this Craft (“the Craft that …”) and the craft pursued in the poem’s opening line.

Forgive me: it’s hard to talk about these things properly. First the easy bit: it’s not like Chaucer anticipates having a problem with William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. Nor is it as though he is upset about the power of sexual attraction and temptation. “To cause by force a creature to do folly” isn’t about young people fumbling on the couch and getting carried away or, as Thomas Merton put it, getting caught with your hand in the cookie jar.

Craft is disfigured because she’s part of a world of artifice, sterility, priapic lust, and wasted love service (Chaucer includes a list of bad lovers – think GOT meets Jeffrey Epstein), a world Chaucer passes through before he comes to Nature and her parliament. This Craft has to do with deleterious ways of loving and writing.

The reason this is difficult to talk about is that the secularizing of literature has made it hard for the person (me, maybe you) wanting to talk about Chaucer on sex in ways that are other than permissive, hugely non-judgemental, and generally nudge-nudge-wink-wink not to sound like or to be perceived as though they’re members of the Moral Majority and have a problem with art-artifice-constructedness-creativity to boot.

There are all sorts of riotous fun and games in the parliament presided over by Nature, who is “full of grace.” Generally, she lets the birds get on with their ordering, their inclinations (“as them Nature would incline”), and their hilarious specious debates. Furthermore, prominent space is given to courtly performativity: Chaucer in no way sets up a nature vs culture or fact vs fiction or givenness vs constructivism world of binaries, nor need (ought) the Christian reader interpreting him in and for our time do so.

Chaucer saw in sexual dalliance and craft a threat to what he calls “common profit,” as did classical writers on the virtues generally. (We talk obsessively about narcissism, but we didn’t invent the myth that gave us the term.) Chaucer saw in classical and Christian ethics as they passed over into cultural discourse in his day an ominous dimension of enculturated sexual practice. I think medievalists like C.S. Lewis, who had an abiding awareness of the occult, and Charles Williams, who wrote compellingly about spiritual warfare in sexual terms, recognized in their studies a strand of culture that was malevolently “disfigurat,” and the loss (or suppression) of this awareness in modern medievalism.

Sexual dalliance is love without thought. Or an idea without love. It is to be caught in a spell. It can befall the aesthete, the rationalist, the hunter, the sentimentalist.

To stand before the Goddess of Nature,

to take hire dom and yeve hire audyence

to accept her judgement and give her heed

is the beginning, not the end, of difficulty. You’re driven by desire, must listen, must talk, try to make it work with some kind of coherence, look around and see everyone else more or less making a hash of it too (not least many of the Christians), all of us sent off again in springtime with her blessing.

But, Lord, the blisse and joye that they make!

I determined to see her exhibit when I got a notice from the AGO with a blurb and a picture of a quilt with the words “Reason Over Passion” stitched into it. I assumed that, as a modern artist, she probably meant the phrase ironically. The title of the retrospective, Heart On, suggested as much, substituting as it does the heart for the head; I wondered what clues her other works provided, along with the curatorial explanations.

The description of the quilt threw me. Wieland was quoting Trudeau, who had recently said, “For many years, I have been fighting for the triumph of reason over passion.” The blurb observed that Trudeau’s words “intrigued her” and offered this explanation: “Concerned about the 1960s race riots and escalating war in Vietnam, Wieland saw in newly elected prime minister Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) an answer to the United States’ increasingly violent and opportunistic imperialism.”

On this interpretation, passion means violence and the lust to dominate. Reason implies restraint and letting others be. We can extend the inferences. In May 1968 Wieland and her partner Michael Snow opened their New York apartment for a “quilt-in” that brought together about 100 people. Together, they produced the French-language version of the quilt, which the artist and her partner subsequently presented to the prime minister. Reason, then, in this context implies common sense, the collective judgement of the people.

A little digging revealed an alternative interpretation to the one of Wieland’s being “intrigued” by a politician’s phraseology. In 1969, Wieland produced Reason Over Passion as an 80 minute movie without dialogue but with the phrase “reason over passion” reproduced as 537 nonsensical anagrams. In the film, she sandwiches the footage she took of Trudeau at the 1968 Liberal leadership convention in between scenery she filmed from a road trip to the east coast and an earlier trip to Vancouver by train. The artist, looking to move back to Canada, declares that she “decided to unite the leader of the land [sic] and cement it with his words, not so much cement as spread them across a continent, reason over passion, overwhelmed, metamorphosed into passion through use.”

In one critic’s estimation, “[Wieland] became a propagandist whose work embodied an earnest declaration, but that by virtue of its intimate, passionate, irrational aesthetic, eagerly and gladly undermined that message.” For Wieland, this same critic avers, passion “seeps out of Canada’s green pastures and paved roads” and into “whatever eternal might remain glorious and free.” The website Quinzaine des Cinéastes agrees with this view. It holds that “as a woman, as an artist (who worked with textiles undervalued as women’s craft not high art), and as a passionate Canadian nationalist, ‘Passion over Reason’ described more of her own approach to art and life.”

Both of these views might be accurate, the one dating to 1968 and the promise associated with a new leader, the other to 1969, reflecting Wieland’s changing opinion of the federal government over time.

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Nonetheless, what is one to make of this either/or? Both prospects will make the Christian uneasy. In many a Christian context, the call for reason to rule over passion is strong. The sentiment also reflects a Stoic ideal: freedom from the passions, what the Stoics called apatheia. A significant streak of Stoicism runs through Christianity (one would expect no less of a great moral system). Yet Christianity offers something more mysterious than Stoicism: a deepening of reason, utterly bound up with and dependent upon the revelation of divine love, which in turn gives (infinitely explorable) definition to love in the great scandal of particularity, the Incarnation.

The paradox of love and reason therefore also resists the artistic inversion of the Stoic paradigm. The contemporary Canadian artist will be grateful for the elevation of works by women, for the recognition of materials and forms once relegated to craft or the scrap heap, for the thrust of non-violence and ecological concern, all of which Wieland helped to effect. Yet the thoughtful person, let alone the Christian artist, can never rest easy with an “irrational aesthetic.” Such an aesthetic undermines itself the moment it opens its mouth.

In her silent, experimental record of the Canadian landscape, Wieland attests to a great presence and mystery. Neither these critics nor the curators apparently have the language to describe what her art helps to reveal, perhaps despite itself. Walking through the exhibit, I see virtually no signs of the artist’s wrestling with religious identity (except for the Spirit of Canada getting nailed by a bear and the sublimation of the religious impulse as a desire to reconcile politics and art). A metaphysically assured aesthetic beckons this generation of Canadian Christian artists, critics, and curators, one that looks to politics and art and to an “eternal” it dares to name, even as it acknowledges the inexhaustibility of its naming and its making.

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An Oxford-based time-travel scientist, Daniel Faraday, whom Desmond meets on the island, gives him instructions to meet his (Daniel’s) earlier self. There, Daniel tells him that he needs a constant that is present in both times as a way to stabilize the oscillations. He knows that only Penny can be that constant. The problem is that he has broken up with her in 1996 and she has moved and changed her number. Desmond needs to be able to contact her from 2004 in order to be able to survive.

During one of his oscillations to 1996, Desmond finds her father, who despises him. The father contemptuously gives him his daughter’s address so she can tell him for herself why their relationship is over. When he arrives at her door on Christmas Eve, he convinces her that he needs her help, that he will need to be in touch with her by phone eight years in the future. When he promises her that he won’t try to contact her before then, she relents. He memorizes her number (she cannot understand why he doesn’t write it down) and on his next oscillation back to 2004 from his location on a ship that has restored its ability to communicate to the outside world, he calls her. Penny has indeed been waiting for Desmond’s call.

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The episode requires that one accept the story’s premises, of course. (Trying to explain the subtleties of time-travel to establish context was always going to be demanding. Suffice to say that the writers got kudos for avoiding a contradiction that could cause viewers to lose interest since at any given point the stakes for characters wouldn’t seem very high). From the inside, this episode offers immense emotional payoff. Desmond is vindicated. He hadn’t left Penny on a whim, he isn’t cruel, and it turns out he also isn’t a coward, an accusation levelled at him by her father that Desmond seems to confirm by not standing up to him. His effort to make contact with her is courageous and he really needs and loves her. Penny is also vindicated. She had defied her father, has remained true to her beloved, hasn’t closed herself off to Desmond’s (past) love entirely, and instead has kept hoping when hope seemed ridiculous. Desmond and Penny really do love each other and each really is worthy of the other’s love. The episode is very satisfying.

How does it work? At bottom, a paradox beyond that of time travel grounds it. The episode turns on love and reason in tension. Desmond’s need is cast in mathematical terms: he needs a constant. Daniel Faraday describes his problem in the language of science: exposure to radiation or electromagnetism. Faraday is the name of a nineteenth-century physicist, Michael Faraday, the father of electricity; for his part, Desmond shares a last name with the famous eighteenth-century sceptical Scottish philosopher David Hume.

Daniel works as a physicist at intellectually iconic Oxford University. Desmond meets him there in his attic research lab, replete with formulae scrawled on a blackboard. The problem, time travel, is a classic intellectual head-banger. All of these signposts establish the problem that Desmond is encountering as an intellectual one. Even the threat to his well-being looks to be cerebral: Daniel’s lab rat Eloise appears to have died of a brain aneurysm after a time-travel experiment.

The name Eloise also conjures the medieval love affair between the student who would become a nun and her philosophical tutor Abelard. The writers are laying groundwork for something more than pure reason. Theoretically, anything could serve Desmond as the required fixed point. Yet the episode’s drama hinges on Desmond’s realization that he needs Penny to be his constant. Narratively and intellectually, the situation is transformed. One anticipates an intellectual problem finding resolution in the domain of love. This possibility involves potential narrative satisfactions with the integration of additional storylines, as well as ones that provoke questions about the limits and needs of the domain of the intellect.

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Penny’s potential role involves wordplay – Desmond needs constancy from his beloved, just as he needs to prove his own constancy. The underlying notion of proving anything borrows from the territory of mathematical formulae, with their QED’s (that which was to be demonstrated). Here, though, proof transcends the popular perception of mathematics, logic, or science: it involves belief on the part of the person to whom proofs are proffered. The event of finding your true love, then realizing you’ve done so, surpasses that of solving an electromagnetic glitch, getting off the island, or even surviving. Desmond gets the satisfaction, and viewers share it, that whatever happens next, he knows Penny loves him and her faithfulness has saved him in the way that matters most.

In this moment, near the exact centre of Lost, the series’ driving questions “What happened?” and “Will these people ever get off the island?” find themselves taken up into a more primordial one: Am I loved? It is a question asked with sharp particularity, of Desmond and Penny. We find that we care intensely, cathartically, for them and their finding an affirmative answer to that question. We enter into it with a selfless, purgative purity. We feel honoured to share it and somehow affirmed in the process, though with no expectation that it must somehow or sometime redound to us personally.

I do not say that the writers intended this effect either structurally (in terms of a design spread over six seasons) or as a message at the heart of the show. The love affair does not dissolve other questions that the show has provoked and that have produced this singularity. To the contrary and somewhat paradoxically, this experience of love fortifies us to persist in the drama, one which involves intersecting lives and intellectual puzzles, for its own sake.

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Work serves as a proxy for reason. The former implies the presence of the latter. Work presumes an objective, as well as a strategy and an agenda for reaching it. One expects work to produce a useful outcome. All this draws on our reasoning powers. These must combine with the exercise of will, to be sure; nonetheless, work connotes rational endeavour.

Whatever love is, it sits uneasily with the idea of work. Sure, there are the sex manuals, and there’s the ponderous advice that if you want a good relationship, you’re going to have to work at it. Rose, though, does not intend anything so prosaic.

The phrase “love’s work” produces a paradox. Love’s work transforms our understanding of needs and of what makes sense. Love transforms our understanding of work. That love has work to do also stimulates reflection on what we mean by love. Its agency elevates it above a mere sentiment or passion. Rose also tacitly invites us to participate in the work that love does.

In all, she challenges the caricature of philosophy as detachment. Like a rose, the title invites the reader into layers of meaning, hidden joys, and action.

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Three Petals

Rose displays the duality of love and reason in her autobiography, one of the petals of Love’s Work. She describes her devotion to the discipline of philosophy as a developing passion: “My passion for philosophy began when I was seventeen.” Recounting her first exposure to philosophical writings in school through the works of Plato and Pascal, she writes: “With rapt but sober elation, I devoured the Republic and the Pensées ….” She moves from rapture to sobriety to bodily appetite. Reading philosophy at Oxford disgusted her, but a tutor rescued her by expressing contempt for bad teaching. “I bloomed in this degradation,” she confesses. “I resumed passionate, holistic, critical reading and thinking, which revived my earlier commitment to justice and to speculation.”

Rose’s experience also instructs her in love’s transcendence: “In personal life, people have absolute power over each other …. There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.” If “democracy” represents the triumph of sensible interactions between two people, love reveals a deeper experience of vulnerability and dependency on mercy. This affirmation, however, does not render love irrational (love as reason’s opposite). Rather, the experience of love revises our perception of reason. This is love’s work. Love transforms reason (or fulfils the law), it doesn’t abolish it.

The experience of love helps us to see that “reason’s claim [to absolute authority] remains unrealized from that transcendent ground on which we all wager, suspended in the air.” Rose would have us see that trust in reason involves an appeal to a “transcendent ground,” the making of a “wager,” and that we live in a “suspended” condition. Reason, she reports, “is forever without ground.”

Groundlessness, though, is not the same thing as relativism or postmodern skepticism: “Relativism of authority does not establish the authority of relativism: it opens reason to new claimants.” Its groundlessness tells us that reasoning is truly difficult. Our situation rightly saddens us. However, to acknowledge reason’s dependency also encourages hope in us. Reason has an “anagogical” dimension: it savours of heaven.

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An appreciation of reason in relation to love produces political engagement. Like love, reason is “risk,” while politics remains “the art of the possible.” In our condition as rational creatures, we affirm that in some world beyond our experience, good intentions produce good results and politics really is the “easy way.” In the meantime, we acknowledge conflict and stake ourselves within it: we “remain in the fray.”

Love’s Work is a slender but challenging volume. The difficulty of its form embodies the understanding of reason in relation to love that Rose affirms. The book does not suffer fools but it repays loving attention. I trace three of its petals here – a lived passion for philosophy, love’s absolute rule, and reason’s groundlessness (but reasonableness nonetheless) – by way of invitation to potential readers who might otherwise put the book down impatiently and by way of reminder to myself of a florescent manifestation of my theme.

In a mere 135 large-print pages, Rose also reflects on the Jewishness of her name, postmodern skepticism as Protestant interpretation of freedom from the law, and living with cancer as symbiosis (to say nothing of symbol). As part of her conviction that both sadness and hope attend reason, she ponders the political meaning of Camelot. A fragment written even closer to her death begins with an appended letter from brave friends who challenged her to read that image more Christianly. On her deathbed, Rose converted to Anglicanism. The fragment was published posthumously as Paradiso.

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Ernest Hemingway has a reputation for being a gruff writer with a spare style. It would seem unlikely, then, that he would deploy something clichéd, if not sentimental. Aren’t we fast perceiving that those possibilities could pose a problem for love-and-reason-in-tension?

You say tomato, I say tomato. In the arts, a convention is a requirement, establishing expectations and holding forth the promise of some sort of revelation in the hands of an artist… until it becomes hackneyed and conventional. Courtly love had conventions, like love at first sight, that eventually became conventional. Detective fiction has conventions, like the incompetent police, that have become conventional. Love and reason in tension is a convention, but its resources run deep. They lie somewhere beyond convention; love-and-reason-in-tension is elemental.

In The Old Man and the Sea, there are relationships (with the potency of love) and there are techniques (expressions of reason). But there’s nothing like a tension between head and heart at play at all. Nothing on the horizon, nothing in the offing. Until suddenly it appears in the story’s climax.

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It’s all so Hemingway: a random day in the life of an old man with whom we sympathize, partly because apparently his best days are behind him, partly just because we’re with him. To borrow the idiom of this kind of story: there’s this guy, and he’s going fishing like he always does. He gets up early and puts his boat in the water with the help of some kid. Then he’s off, all on his own. Whatever. If I sound like one of Raymond Carver’s narrators or Jesse Pinkman, that’s because they stand in this literary tradition.

The old man is vaguely hoping for a big catch: “I worked the deep wells for a week and did nothing, he thought. Today I’ll work out where the schools of bonito and albacore are and maybe there will be a big one with them.” Later we read, “Now is no time to think of baseball, he thought. Now is the time to think of only one thing. That which I was born for. There might be a big one around that school, he thought.”

He goes out far and the day gets late. If we know anything at all about the story from its massive reputation, we know this. If we can remember that state of innocence when we didn’t know what happens: we are dreading the crisis that is surely coming when he’s out too far, not the dissipated loss after his surprising triumph.

Hemingway reveals that loss exquisitely. He leaves the reader with complicated feelings of pain and ambivalence because we don’t stop relishing the old man’s victory and don’t simply set it against the pathetic trip back like a mockery.

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Hemingway casts this triumph, with its enduring lure, in terms of a dynamic tension between the head and the heart. Nothing prepares the reader for the use of this language and it disappears as quickly as it surfaces. For a few glorious moments, though, we confront it in the climax of the battle between the old Cuban and the marlin he has tracked down. In fact, the appearance of the convention is the climax, the ordering of head to heart, the event of the story.

The old man has had the fish on his line for some time. Finally, he sees it and he can’t believe its size: “He saw him first as a dark shadow that took so long to pass under the boat that he could not believe its length. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He can’t be that big.’”

He knows that he is “gaining line” and that soon he will have the chance to harpoon him: “But I must get him close, close, close, he thought. I mustn’t try for the head. I must get the heart.”

The fight continues. He sees that “the fish’s back was out,” that he’s higher in the water. We see the readied harpoon, the coil of light rope in a round basket, the way it is fastened “to the bitt in the bow,” a taut piece of alliteration reinforcing the tightness of the knot. The fish straightens and circles. The old man is pulling, his legs braced. He’s praying for a clear head after a day of hunger, sunlight, and thirst:

Now you are getting confused in the head, he thought. You must keep your head clear. Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man. Or a fish, he thought.

“Clear up, head,” he said, in a voice he could hardly hear. “Clear up.”

Then he is thrusting the harpoon down with all his strength, feeling the iron go in, leaning on it with all his weight. He sees the fish rise out of the water “with his death in him,” seem to hang in the air, then fall with a crash:

The old man felt faint and sick and he could not see well. But he cleared the harpoon line and let it run slowly through his raw hands and, when he could see, he saw the fish was on his back with his silver belly up. The shaft of the harpoon was projecting at an angle from the fish’s shoulder and the sea was discolouring with the red from the blood of his heart.

Both fisher and fish are wholes, made up of head and heart. The old man recognizes the heart as the necessary target and in that moment reveals his own passionate savvy. Together, fisher and fish make up another whole as big as the sea and the sky. In it the old man represents the head and the marlin the heart, and the fish triumphs over the fisher.

Like the sea and like getting old, the tension between head and heart is elemental. Hemingway’s appeal to it serves to elevate the story to the status of myth. Like Sophocles, Hemingway writes with mythic economy. Head and heart here belong to a vision reduced to essentials that are anything but reductive.

The trope of head-and-heart-in-tension is personal and subjective in the sense of subjectivity Meister Eckhart described when he wrote these words:

Among all things there is nothing so dear or desirable as life. However wretched or hard his life may be, a man still wants to live. It is written somewhere that the closer anything is to death, the more it suffers. Yet, however wretched life may be, still it wants to live. Why do you eat? Why do you sleep? So that you live. Why do you want riches or honors? That you know very well; but – why do you live? So as to live; and still you do not know why you live. Life is in itself so desirable that we desire it for its own sake.

The fish’s triumph is to represent life. The old man keeps his head, but the marlin tinctures the sea with his blood: “The sea was discolouring with the red of the blood from his heart.”

The convention bears the impress of the writer’s style. It might seem commonplace elsewhere, even sentimental. Hemingway accepts the risk. He achieves something revelatory in rising to the challenge. As always, the artist bends to the convention; in a good story, the convention, even an elemental one, bends to the artist as well.

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Why does this magnificent book title work so well?

Canadian cultural anthropologist Margaret Visser’s subject is a church in Rome built over the tomb of Saint Agnes, a child martyr of the early fourth century. The book, subtitled Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church, guides its readers through this church, Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura.

The Geometry of Love explains the meaning of architectural details in a building designed to reveal God’s love and elicit a response to that love. The title suggests that divine love expresses itself with a beauty and complexity for which geometry serves as an apt metaphor; it acknowledges and encourages responsiveness to God in craftsmanship; it conveys the notion of a contemplative endeavour (both individual and collective) called into being by the reality of love; and it affirms a transcendent wholeness, the implications of this love constantly unfolding, repeatedly surprising those devoted to it.

For Visser, the way to understand a church is to enter it and inhabit its meaning both physically and metaphorically. She challenges a modern intellectual assumption, that “in order to understand something you are always better off not participating in it.” Detachment was once the gold standard of the scientific method, though twentieth-century developments helped to change that perception. Visser observes that it is now recognized that no one has “a blank slate of a mind, it is therefore detrimental to truth to claim total objectivity.” Truth and objectivity are not the same thing. Participation betokens something like heartfelt and vulnerable engagement. To look lovingly is not to miss the real truth about something, but to find it.

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Visser makes two basic points about Christianity that I find resonant for my theme. The first is that The Geometry of Love acknowledges and affirms contradiction and paradox: “my mind embraced a vast contradiction”; “churches remain – but they remain in order to keep alive a message that is all about movement, about hope and change. In short, a Christian church seems to be – and quite consciously is – a contradiction in terms”; “church and world form a paradoxical pair, in which Christians are expected to be totally devoted to the world, yet not to be taken in by it”; “Christians do not believe that culture has the last word over morality …. Yet for Christians, culture is to be entered into …; there is no such thing as belief unmediated by culture.” The author happily affirms that Christianity insists on going beyond the limits of rationality, though many take this insistence as an affront.

The second is that the paradoxes of Christianity are evoked by the language of love and reason in tension, with emphasis on the revelation of love: “For a thousand years Christians had insisted on the divine half of the great paradox of Christ’s simultaneous divinity and humanity; from now on the mystery of God’s love, of his insistence upon entering into the human condition, would receive the greater share of Christian attention.” One might say that for a thousand years Christians had insisted on the veracity of Christ’s divinity, and subsequently what his self-emptying in the incarnation meant as an expression of love. For Visser, the tension between truth and love in Christian revelation has a historical dimension.

If the paradoxes of Christianity upset dated scientific expectations, they also challenge pernicious aesthetic ones. One of the chapels of Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura emphasizes devotion to the Sacred Heart. The architectural and pictorial representation of this devotion disturbs contemporary aesthetic assumptions about sentimentality, banality, and vulgarity. Visser wants the reader and the visitor to the church to recognize that representation must be appreciated in context. A church, as the embodied expression of a comprehensive vision of reality, provides its own cues for the aesthetic meaning and value of its features.

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The relationship between reason and the heart in The Geometry of Love finds its sublime expression in loving responsiveness to God. Paradoxically, responding to God begins not in the self but in God, who is always already at work in the human heart. The self is not a self-contained rational, decision-making entity; at every turn, it encounters love. In looking forward, as well as backward, the soul confronts a personal reality. Visser borrows the revelation shown to Julian of Norwich: “‘I am what you mean.’” Meaning transcends facts and concepts; it is God himself, the supremely personal reality to whose love we are called to respond, both individually and communally.

The revelation in the Crucifixion and Resurrection is an epiphany of God’s love: “It was the ultimate epiphany of his love,” Visser writes. Freedom accompanies this love, beginning with the freedom to respond to it. God’s kingdom is revealed in a drama concentrated in the sacrifice on the altar, a kingdom of mercy and forgiveness glimpsed only as one participates in it: “Only the freedom inherent in giving, and ultimately the ability to love … somebody who has harmed you, defines forgiveness…. And no law can prescribe forgiveness – it has to come from the individual heart.”

Visser leans into the language of reason and love here: forgiveness finds definition in the act of giving; it eludes law to be found only in the heart.

The revelation of God’s love occurs and is celebrated on the altar. The order and design of the church are centred here, even though no human endeavour can express the depths of this sacrificial love. The passion of the Lord defies understanding, something the apostle Paul talks about when he says that for a good person one might perhaps be willing even to die, but Christ showed his love for us in that he died for us while we were still sinners.

The altar is also the place of the fulfillment of the soul’s desire. In Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura, the tomb of the child saint lies directly below it. The altar gives ultimate meaning to Agnes’s suffering. In imitation of Christ, martyrs like her bear witness in a way beyond the power of words to explain.

The opposite of the law of love is the system of shame and revenge, which appeals to the logic of balance, symmetry, and accounting. A culture embracing such a system, Visser observes, “usually believes also in fate.” Fate assumes a closed, logical system, anthropomorphized as the actions of the gods or reduced to the supposedly explainable interactions of material processes. Meaning, purpose, and freedom evaporate. Reason itself is lost in a self-devouring death spiral.

For Visser, when reason submits to love, it flourishes. Reason thrives in the context of love as “geometry” in the fullest possible sense of that mathematical word. A church is the fruit of love and the paradoxical affirmation of reason that ensues.

Throughout The Geometry of Love, Visser appeals to love and reason in tension. They together point to paradox and contradiction, though contradiction is ultimately transcended in the revelation of divine love. In The Geometry of Love, Visser tacitly argues that the arresting construct present in her title derives from the resources and the affirmations of the Christian religion.

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This is Paulo and Francesca as imagined by Auguste Rodin. Their adulterous story is recorded by Dante in Inferno 5, the circle of the lustful. Francesca recounts what happened:

“We read one day for pastime of Lancelot, how love constrained him. We were alone and had no misgiving. Many times that reading drew our eyes together and changed the colour in our faces, but one point alone it was that mastered us; when we read that the longed-for smile was kissed by so great a lover, he who never shall be parted from me, all trembling, kissed my mouth. A Galeotto was the book and he that wrote it; that day we read in it no farther.”

This affair happened in Dante’s lifetime and led to the lovers’ deaths when Paulo’s brother, Francesca’s husband, discovered them together.

In his poetic retelling of the adultery’s beginning, Dante establishes narrative tension by contrasting reading and lovemaking: “we read one day for pastime of Lancelot, how love constrained him.” The subject matter is tinder, but Dante doesn’t rush things.

Let’s follow the sequence of Francesca’s simple statement. The act of reading between a man and a woman known in hindsight to have been lovers suggests deferral and an attempt, however disingenuous, to redirect energies away from passion. Reading is implicitly its opposite. It suggests the difference between bookish knowledge and experiential knowledge.

The medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, much influenced by Dante, exploits this difference in his love poem The Parliament of Fowls, in which he alludes to the Inferno (though not directly to Francesca’s story). The narrator of Chaucer’s poem doesn’t tell us why he’s not a candidate for love himself, but apparently he’s not. He reads to learn about it, with no prospect of experiencing it himself. Given his condition, his reading makes him an example of the difference between knowing something and merely knowing about it. In the realm of courtly romance, this binary reduces to a stark opposition between knowledge and love, reason and passion. Paolo and Francesca’s act of reading sets up a contrast with what unfolds.

The subject of their reading, the story of Lancelot, itself trades on the paradoxical relationship between love and reason. It also further embeds it in Western European culture. In this story, Lancelot abases himself for the sake of Queen Guinevere, who has been abducted and taken prisoner. He loves her even though she is the wife of his king, King Arthur. At one point in his frantic search for her, having ridden two horses to death, he allows himself to be subjected to the humiliation of being carried in a prisoner’s cart to where the queen is being held.

There’s an internal logic: Lancelot is following (or establishing) the rules of courtly love in being willing to do anything to reach his beloved. Outside its dictates, his actions make no sense: he is contravening the chivalric code of conduct. When he reaches her, Guinevere is insulted by a momentary hesitation to get into the cart that Lancelot displayed and which she learns about, though she later forgives him. She expects him to be willing without thinking to make a fool of himself as a sign of his utter devotion to her.

As a footnote to this story, in one reading of the cycle of Arthurian tales, the whole kingdom comes crashing down because of Lancelot and Guinevere’s adulterous passion. More specifically, events come to a head when Mordred blabs about the affair in court. Now everybody knows, including Arthur, that everybody knows about it; he is forced to act. The entire story of the politics of Logres has built into it a tension between an order of knowledge and law, on the one hand, and the law of passion on the other.

As for Paulo and Francesca, they are alone, they have no misgivings, they are “mastered.” Dante’s word is vinse, conquered. Love, like violence, is an irrational passion that takes them prisoner. Paulo and Francesca become subject to its demands, regardless of the cost to family stability and public honour. For Francesca, the telling of what happened ends with one last reference to reading: “we read no more that day.” Reading serves as a contrast, establishes tension, and finally, as not-reading, becomes a euphemism for the opposite activity of lovemaking.

Rodin captures this tension exquisitely. He imagines these lovers in several different ways.

The sculptures brim with vitality and sensuality. Sculpture, as a form of representation, has a particular inbuilt challenge that involves the reconciliation or proper ordering of reason and passion: how does one release the emotional energy of what looks objectively to be a block of matter?

The Frenchman understands the importance of the reading. In “The Kiss,” he includes the book that is being discarded. The three-dimensionality of this art form affords him a certain opportunity. We can see the presence of the book clearly in the image at the head of this article. Changing media involves interpretive choices. Going from sculpture to image in the following picture unfortunately obscures the book, though one can appreciate the precise attention paid by the photographer to the artistic desiderata of balance and symmetry.

In “The Kiss,” rationality – in one way, at least – is being left behind. For the sculptor Rodin, it nonetheless figures in and contributes to the dynamism of the scene as art. The work transposes a basic but compelling tension in Dante’s own art. Both the poetic and sculpted enactments of the cultural construct of love and reason in tension help us participate in the lovers’ experience itself: their sense of family honour, remembered intonations of the priest, the weight of the room, marital slights real and imagined, fraternal fractures, and very present, very real desire.

Don finds himself at home rummaging through a private shoebox of his own memorabilia. (He is already notoriously private by this point in Season 1). In the pitch, Don acknowledges that “technology is a glittering lure.” Then he sets it aside, with the help of an old Greek mentor, in favour of “a sentimental bond … a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia.” This bond, he says, is “delicate, but potent.” Don replaces technology, emblematic of rational, scientific achievement, with desire.

He takes his boardroom audience on a tour of happy memories, from images of the carefree innocence of children to good-dad moments, from the loving bond between him and his wife as a young couple to the white purity of their wedding day. During this time, Don leads them with a voiceover that underscores emotion. His mentor, he says, taught him the original meaning in Greek of the word nostalgia: “the pain from an old wound.” Don calls it “a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.” Memory alone is an assemblage of facts; nostalgia involves your heart, and pain.

When we engage with memories by looking at a slideshow, he says, we escape the world of technology: “This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine.” In another context, both halves of the declaration might refer to technologies, but here, time travel is the work of the imagination and of the emotions. The device “takes us to a place where we ache to go again.” He then relabels the product: “It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel.” The line hits like a punch because the wheel represents technological rationality, the carousel a yearning, and the latter overwhelms the former. The show has condensed the cultural artefact of love-and-reason-in-tension to two objects, a wheel and a carousel.

At this point, Don still hasn’t pitched the campaign directly. Instead, he meditates on childhood, home, and love. The device “lets us travel the way a child travels, round and round, back home again … to a place where we know we were loved.” A child doesn’t have an agenda or a linear, rational intention; a child meanders, seemingly without purpose, led not by logic but by their whims and imagination.

Only then does Don present a single slide advertising the product, a carousel slide projector accompanied by images symbolic of the carnival ride and lettering from an earlier time. He then returns to the evocation of strong emotion with a final slide showing him and his wife affectionately kissing.

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“Home” is the word Don calls upon to represent a time and place of imagined wholeness. Technology is seductive. Children like the glittering new toy (in one slide, a shiny red Radio Flyer wagon carries Don’s toddler son), the adventure in the park, the trip to see the sights and be awed. As adults, we invest more and more in it to keep us going with a sense of the new, of possibility, of achievement. At the same time, though, nostalgia takes us back to a simpler time when, so we think, we had what we wanted and the world made sense. The word “home” (“back home again … where we know we were loved”) stands for the reconciliation of the tensions of adult life. Things made sense and we were emotionally alive in a way that was ultimately positive. This is the world projected upon prospective Kodak carousel owners. The old wound will be salved.

Don’s own case seems to be one of home as fantasy. As far as anyone is ever allowed to see, it never existed as wholeness for him. The average viewer’s experience may not be as tortured as Don’s, but he stands for Everyman as potently as he does for an anti-hero. The show conveys the notion of trying to recover or recreate home as an ongoing project. This project finds reference points in families in various states of formation and deformation.

In “The Wheel,” the themes and energies of Mad Men find expression in the tension between love and reason figured as nostalgia and negotiating technological modernity.

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Norm Klassen (dphil oxon) is Professor of English at St Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Canada, with a background in theology (B.Th.), history (B.A. Hons), and literature (B.A. Hons). He has taught literature for over thirty years and is the author of two books on Chaucer, one on literary theory, and co-author of another on higher education. The two paradoxes that seem to have preoccupied him in his work in the vineyard have been the relationship between Christianity and culture and that between love and reason.

There is a simplicity to this formulation that is breathtaking and invigorating. It’s breathtaking in the demand it makes: Put all your eggs in one basket. Love God only.

The formulation is invigorating because it simplifies life’s task and makes it seem doable, if only in its simplicity. At least one won’t get tripped up reading the instructions.

It is useful to recall this distinction between enjoyment and use often. I offer the title of this column as a mnemonic aid.

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As for its content, this column affords me the opportunity to collect examples of a commonplace cultural trope: love-and-reason-in-tension. Eventually, I’ll consider contexts for the appeal of the construct. For now, though, I want simply to gather examples to clarify, not least for myself, what I have in mind.

These examples will include the historical and philosophical, such as Plato’s image in the Phaedrus of Reason as a charioteer driving two horses, one of which is Passion, and the Stoics’ radical redescription of the soul as entirely rational, the passions being relegated to the effect of misconstrued appearances. They will range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Some will be drawn from contemporary culture. I intend to meditate, for instance, on the centred episode “The Compass” from Lost (S4.E5), and to comment on the climactic one in Season 1 of Mad Men, in which Don pitches the “carousel” to Kodak.

The basic feature of love-and-reason-in-tension is paradox. It’s there in the phrase “the order of love.” Love carries with it the connotation of consuming desire, utter devotion, taking the plunge into the unknown, allowing your reality to be ordered by your commitment to the object of your love, your beloved. It carries with it the assumption of obedience and therefore of having submitted your will to that of another. This is especially so with reference to the beloved or to love for God. There are other loves – brotherly love, friendship, the love of country; these partly take their meaning from the intensity associated with the love of God or of the beloved or are secondary to them, at least in the context of the trope of love-and-reason.

Yet this love is ordered. It invokes the idea of order and, with it, inalienable rationality. If one is supposed to enjoy only God, then one must be vigilant and keep an eye on one’s heart. One must discern the signs to ensure that some other object of devotion isn’t stealing one’s attention away from what is to be its real object. Often, the ordering of love is a matter of ranking many different things in one’s life so that they collectively reinforce the sense of being ordered to the ultimate love of God. This process of discernment involves interpretation, including recollection, reflection, and articulation (to self, perhaps to others, and, in an interior dialogue, to God). This process is rational and intellectual, at least in part. The injunction to love only God carries with it the expectation of cerebral work.

Enjoying only God (and obeying his order out of love) involves reason in another way, too. There is a dimension of this experience that involves the overwhelming sense of having heard, of having understood, of having had something revealed to oneself: Is this a task that God has set before me? What is it that I am required to do? Have I heard the voice of God rightly? Am I reading this correctly? Is this being said to me? Is this for me?

Sometimes we think of it as conviction, something of an order that one is best advised not to try to explain or dissect. Paradoxically, part of the sense of a required obedience or action is the call to “test the spirits,” to take the counsel of friends, to reflect and act wisely. So this part of responding to love, too, involves the mind, recollection, articulation, interpretation, and discernment.

The processes of affirming the supremacy of love can involve others in radical ways. On the one hand, these processes might seem to be necessarily introspective and largely private. Yet this need not be the case. They can (and normally will) involve sources outside oneself, like Tradition (or Church Teaching) and Scripture. Appealing to authorities involves decisions that have already been made somewhere along the line (and continually reinforced) about what constitutes a source of authority. These decisions involved the mind, though they too always involved reason operating with love in an ever-deepening hermeneutical circle. One responds to authorities with an attitude of the heart; at the same time, one is confident of the coherence of the source of authority. In part, one anticipates an understanding yet to be revealed.

The order of love means many things. In its root Augustinian sense, it means setting the love of God above all other loves. The phrase also involves a meaningful paradox and a call to respond to God with all of one’s being. It is a matter of responding, because antecedent to all of this activity is the soul’s passivity before a God and a Love hungrier for me and nearer to me than I am to myself.

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Norm Klassen (dphil oxon) is Professor of English at St Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Canada, with a background in theology (B.Th.), history (B.A. Hons), and literature (B.A. Hons). He has taught literature for over thirty years and is the author of two books on Chaucer, one on literary theory, and co-author of another on higher education. The two paradoxes that seem to have preoccupied him in his work in the vineyard have been the relationship between Christianity and culture and that between love and reason.