The Supremacy of Love, Pt. I
by Norm Klassen
The Supremacy of Love
How we know depends on what we love. Love makes all the difference between knowing something and merely knowing about it. When we love someone, we want to be with them, and when we are with them, it’s enough simply to be in their presence. Love inaugurates a remarkable simplicity. We find ourselves freed from distractions or able to overcome them easily.
At the same time, paradoxically, love sharpens our acuity. We notice more, we take in more, we have time for more. Our patience increases, as well as our capacity for endurance. We have a strong sense of direction and everything intervening only reveals another way to the goal. Nothing is superfluous, nothing wasted.
Without love, we may know about something, but we fail to know it intimately. We register and collect facts, but we fail to make connections. We find it difficult to build bridges from the known to the unknown. We ask questions like “What’s the point?” We can’t see a point because we have no sense of the reality of the thing, its being in the world.
Of course, this state is worst where people are concerned. They sense our indifference to their reality, they distrust that we have entered into their lived experience, and they perceive an absence of empathy and imagination where their life is concerned.
We manipulate people, we reduce everything to the status of tools for our purposes. Perhaps worst of all, we come to believe that everyone lives this way and that there’s no way of escaping self-interest. We place a canopy over our understanding of what love can be. Knowledge becomes the only game in town.
Distinguishing between knowing and knowing-about, sage though the contrast may be, involves a temptation. Am I secretly asking, Okay, how do I know things properly? Have I still put the emphasis on knowing? Love overcomes our suspicions and our second-guessing. Love has brought us and all of reality into being, and love is the final destiny of all things. Love makes the world go round:
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end, as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.1
Love intimates completeness: “when the complete comes ….” Love allows us to see things and to experience things whole. In the language of another time, it is simple: everything all at once, defying parsing and discursivity. We have connected with what matters. We have become immersed in it. We have come home.
Love encourages our affirmation of its own reality as well as the assent to its claim upon us, individually and collectively. It encourages a response on our part. Knowledge will come to an end; love has no end. One might say it also has no beginning, except that love seems always to be beginning things. It seems to be the very definition of beginning. Love calls the tune. Love is personality, love is reality. Love never fails. Reason is a gift of love.
Lived Reality
For the followers of Perfect Man, the supremacy of love means that love is first about proclamation and only secondarily about explanation. The story of Perfect Man furnishes those who first know him with a set of lived realities around which they take their identity. Soon these shared points of reference are recreated in practices; eventually, they come to engulf Western culture; they lend the terms for a definition of culture.
An improbable society gathers around the revelation that God is Love. The definition of this claim is inseparable from the events in the life of Perfect Man. These include miracles and teachings leading to transformed lives; they culminate in Perfect Man’s death, his Undeadness, and his going to a Better Place figured as a community of love. The improbable society invests its identity in those events, seeking to organize everything it sees and touches around the Man himself and the events of his life, death, and undeadness. It takes charge of existing narratives, recentring them on Perfect Man as the fulfilment of tropes.
This reorganization represents a kind of pragmatism. If one really thinks something to be the case, then one will act a certain way as a consequence. As a school of thought, pragmatism typically begins and ends in self-interest, and so seems far removed from the injunctions of Perfect Man, whose binding instructions include loving your neighbour as yourself and sacrificing yourself for another. Yet the pragmatist is committed to acting in accordance with reality.
Modern pragmatists typically take science as the arbiter of the real, but if one came to accept an alternative understanding of reality, pragmatism would insist on acting in accordance with the accepted picture. The first followers of Perfect Man were pragmatists in this sense. Their devotion did not indicate credulity. Rather, the fact that these weathered realists formed a new and enduring community supplies one indication that they did so for a reason. From the effect of a community taking shape around Perfect Man one can infer a compelling cause.
Love’s Work
The Perfect Society that takes shape around this event expresses its experience of mystery in the notion of a bond between knowing and loving. The trope is present in the sacred writings it inherits, from their primitive language of sexual union and genealogy to the allegorical epithalamium at their heart. In the community’s additions after the appearance of Perfect Man, it describes the spiritual goal in terms that fuse knowing and loving: “having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know ….”2 The heart has “eyes” for seeing and desiring. They can be “enlightened” to produce a knowing, but it is the heart, not the head, that must respond and must know.
In the centuries that follow, Perfect Society defends its knowing in the midst of pagan philosophies. Its representatives insist, with increasing influence, that its knowing is not only philosophically sound but an advance over the other schools of thought. Canada’s first political philosopher, Charles Cochrane, refers to Roman efforts collectively as “creative politics,” by which he means the maintenance of power in the absence of rational closure both to thought’s subject matter and to its methods, impossible for reason alone to attain.3 In a vision of what a Canada worthy of the epithet “Canada’s century”4 could look like, Cochrane turns to these much earlier commentators on community, who recognize its integral role in any construction of knowledge, which depends on what the community loves. Early writings by members of Perfect Society make the relationship between reason and the heart characteristic of its philosophizing, politics, and morals.
It does so in correction and completion rather than contradiction of these other systems of thought. Love reigns supreme. On the one hand, humanity longs for God with an unquenchable desire, seeking its rest like the cosmos itself in Aristotle’s understanding; on the other, divine love is active and seeking, making and sustaining the universe, itself God’s meaning, as a medieval mystic will put it. Even the Latin word for learning, studium, literally means desire.5 An early thinker and shepherd of souls in Perfect Society offers the formulation that we err when we give up on our desire: we fall into ourselves as into a kind of centre, when we should follow its centripetal and ecstatic movement.6
Ways of Talking
In its God-talk, Perfect Society refuses to disentangle celebration, proclamation, and the insistence on accuracy.7 As it becomes ascendant, this matrix of modalities is transposed into culture. The relationship between reason and emotion, head and heart, comes to serve as a cultural proxy for an evolving discussion in these three modes.
In its practices, Perfect Society celebrates what it holds to be true in such a way as to give “the fullest possible range of significance in the language used” and “to evoke a fullness of vision.”8 In the communicative mode, it turns increasingly outward to bear witness and to put its message into the terms favoured by those whom it engages. It takes “a long and exotic detour through strange idioms and structures of thought.”9 Working in this more “exotic” mode, at some point the question of limits arises. God-talk then relies on its critical mode: it insists on accuracy, especially the apophatic insight that all our language is inadequate. In the formulation of Rowan Williams,
This nagging at fundamental meanings is what constitutes a critical theology, alert to its own inner tensions or irresolutions…. Negative theology remains one of the most basic forms of critical theology, sometimes doing no more than sounding a warning note against the idea that we could secure a firm grip upon definitions of the divine.10
In its insistence on affirming the incomprehensibility of the divine, God-talk in its critical mode returns to the celebratory, and embraces the “gratuitous mysteriousness” of that with which Perfect Society has to do.11 What Williams calls the “mobility” characteristic of God-talk indicates an “essential restlessness in the enterprise” that has to do with a promise of final vision and harvest given by Perfect Man himself.12
In a modern perspective, this set of modalities has been thought to map like a matrix almost perfectly onto “western culture” in a time known as Christendom (a projection both of lovers and haters of the idea). This has happened despite the inherent “mobility” and “restlessness” within Perfect Society. The notion of such a transposition has yielded a definition of culture, which is for Raymond Williams one of the “keywords” in the English language most difficult to define. “Christendom,” especially as applied retrospectively, connotes a comprehensive, monolithic, and static culture. As time progresses, and the seemingly unified culture of Perfect Society fractures and diversifies, the word “culture” (again retrospectively) becomes increasingly associated with one or more of the modalities otherwise held together by Perfect Society, but not all of them together. Perfect Society’s fate is to be trapped in its own matrix. “Culture” pulls the plug on it.
The arts contribute to all three modes of God-talk and take shape through them. Many forms of celebration involve the arts: prayer; liturgical drama; chanting and polyphony; iconophilia; architecture. They also contribute to the mode of communication, adept carriers of those “strange idioms and structures.” This process accelerates with the iconoclasm controversy of the 8th and 9th centuries as Perfect Society confronts from yet another angle the strangeness of what the status of Perfect Man seems to imply.
For those working with the modes of God-talk “through the arts,” no less than for others, at some point the question of limits arises. In this area, a sharp difference develops between the mode as practiced by Perfect Society for the first 1000-plus years of its history and the way it is understood in the modern world. Or perhaps one ought rather to distinguish between the ongoing practice of artists and the modern theory of the artist’s role. In either case, the critical mode of Perfect Society’s God-talk never abandons its confidence in the knowability of the reality concerning which it must be acknowledged there are limits to what can be meaningfully said. It does the opposite, holding most fiercely to the reality that is there, in the light of which, or rather, in the darkness of which, it acknowledges the poverty of its categories and its language.
Art theory becomes a secularized God-talk that rejects its properly critical and apophatic mode. In “Learning in War-Time,” C.S. Lewis suggests Matthew Arnold is the first to use geistlich (spiritual) in a sense cut off from religion. At this point, Arnold and his followers divorce themselves from Perfect Society’s critical mode. Arnold expresses sadness at the retreat of the Sea of Faith, but he remains content to communicate something outside any strictures of Perfect Society. He writes, in “Dover Beach,” of that sea
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.13
The great Victorian intellectual is willing to shed any association with faith; he sees Culture rushing in to fill the void. Sadly, there is in Arnold a dreary refusal to admit a certainty informing Culture’s negations. The cycle of Perfect Society’s circulating God-talk, at least in theory, has been broken.
In their practice, artists persist in evoking a sense of the unsayable. The artist wishing to bear witness to the deposit of faith recognizes a fidelity to Perfect Society that embraces its genuine negations. Ironically, negation gives scope for the true mystic to be recklessly accepted as the profane poet, and vice-versa. In the language of negation, the construct of love-and-reason-and-the-bond-between-them persists, and in the language of head and heart, art continues to hold out the possibility of a critical God-talk alive to its own limitations. A careful discernment is required here. Traces traces the traces of where both sorts of artists might have been and might be tending, and of the movement of this most basic of bonds.
This essay appears in two parts.
Click here to continue reading part two of “The Supremacy of Love” by Norm Klassen.
Norm Klassen teaches in the English Department at St Jerome’s University and in the rhetoric program at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario.
1 Cor. 13:8–10.
Eph. 1:15–18.
Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, 1940. Charles Norris Cochrane lived from 1889–1945.
Sir Wilfrid Laurier coined the phrase “the century of Canada” in a speech given in Toronto in 1904.
Jean Leclercq’s warm account of monasticism bears the title The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (1957).
W.B. Yeats and Chinua Achebe steal this notion back from intervening rationalists.
Rowan Williams refers to celebratory, communicative, and critical modes of theology. Williams, On Christian Theology, xiii–xv.
Williams, On Christian Theology, xiii–xiv.
Williams, On Christian Theology, xiv.
Williams, On Christian Theology, xv.
Williams, On Christian Theology, xv.
Williams, On Christian Theology, xvi; Matt. 13:24–30.
Dover Beach, 26–28.