Jonathan Pageau: Love as the Driving Force of Human Existence

all right so so dante wrote this amazing uh text called the comedian this is what i'm going to be talking about most but he was as you if you studied dante a little bit he was part of a brotherhood of poets uh that were focused on the notion of love now love in the comedy can be seen as the animating force behind everything that dante talks about and not only the animating force in the story but really presented as something like the animated animating force of everything that is the manner in which the world exists and for us as modern people that is a very strange thing to think to think that the world exists through love let's say but hopefully by the time i'm done speaking to you at least understand how we could think something like that or how it is that people could could think that way so dante has dante has is this whole massive experience of going down into health encountering all these people that are suffering uh for different sins and then all going up to purgatory encountering again people that are expiating some of their sins and then moving up into heaven where there's this slow ascension all the way up into god but when you read the text you realize that for example the people in hell they rush into hell themselves they want to be there and there's a sense in which the people that are at the different levels of reality that dante encounters they want to be where they are and the reason why they want to be where they are is because of love that is it is something like in the lower spheres let's say in hell and in purgatory it's something like ill-directed love or sometimes lack of love or sometimes excessive love of things that are good but that there's too much love attributed to them um so i want to read i'm not going to read a lot from the actual poem but i want to read at least a few things from the from the poem um and so this is taken from the translation by john chiardi and uh i'm going to read a little text from the 17th 17th canto in the purgatory so if you want to look it up later you can look it up and so in that in that moment in purgatory there's a little pause and uh dante's guide virgil uh we'll talk about why it's virgil a little bit later but dante's guide virgil gives him a little speech on love and he says neither creator nor his creatures move as well you know he said but in the action of animal or mind directed love natural love may never fall to air the other may by striving to bad ends or by too little or by too much fervor while it desires the okay so i think that's that all right so while desires the eternal good and measures its wish for secondary goods and reason this love cannot give rise to sinful pleasure but when it turns to evil or shows more or less zeal than it ought for what is good then the creature turns on its creator thus you may understand that love alone is the true seed of every merit in you and all acts for which you must atone and so love is basically i'm going to be simple about it love is basically that which makes you move whatever it is that makes you move in the world you can understand as love now it's strange for us to think that way because we always think about love just in terms of romanticism or like let's say the love that we have for children an easier way to maybe understand it would be to use a a word like care for example or attention that is the things we the the reason why we move in the world is always because of care now that can mean something like i need to eat and so i care enough to move to get something in the fridge right it means that i need like i i care enough about certain things to get dressed in the morning i care enough about certain things to walk out and you know that because you know that when people become depressed often it often expresses itself in a lack of care a lack of love you could say that is as the love and the person becomes cold that person becomes unable to do things and it's not even it's not like necessarily a physical thing it's not like they're they're they have an infirmity in them or that they're they're weak or that they're physically incapable of doing things is that they're incapable of finding motivation that they're incapable of love or their love is cold in them and so so dante a little bit later in this same in the same uh chapter virgil says all men though in a vague way apprehend a good their souls may rest in and desire it each therefore strives to reach his chosen end and so everybody in them we have an intuition of that which is good and that is what makes us move and we have a sense that we'll rest in that good so this is very simple like it's not a it does end up in a very kind of deep theological mystical idea but at the basis it's this it's the idea that i'm hungry i eat an apple and i find rest in that good right i'm tired i go to sleep i find rest in that good so everything that makes us move makes us move with desire towards something which we think that will give us a form of rest from that desire so love expresses itself as this burning you could say in us that drives us forward towards this other thing now this is true of course for little things but it's definitely very true about in terms of relationships in terms of erotic love that is erotic love has the same structure right we move into erotic love with the desire to find rest in that moment right in that because a love expresses itself as a kind of pain right as a kind of suffering as we long for that the things that we don't have as we long for our beloved as we long for that which is drawing our attention drawing us towards it right so it's something like anticipation anticipation is actually a form of of suffering it's a it's a strange mix of suffering and pleasure right it's a it's like this this goal that appears to be the shining thing that appears to you in front of you whether it's like i don't know whether it's having a good meal in a restaurant whether it's going to see a new play or whether it's seeing your beloved there's this this thing that pulls you and the anticipation is excitement but it is also a kind of suffering and you you you move towards the the possibility of finding rest in your in your in the thing that is beloved and the thing that you are moving towards now dante says that so the idea is that the people that are everything that is good in you is happens through love but everything also that you need to excavate that does all the bad stuff in you is through love as well and you can understand that in terms of a simple way to understand is like any bad habit that you have right a bad habit is is a uh let's say it's sparked by love and so let's say with someone who smokes it's easy to find a very simple bad house someone who smokes like someone who smokes will have created this pattern of love in them which will both which will make them desire the object and so if you haven't had a cigarette in a certain amount of time you're going to feel that pull and that pull will be both anticipation and suffering and then when you take when you get your hit of nicotine then all of a sudden you feel that rest in the thing that you love and so it's that's true for any bad habit that you have like whether it's ocd washing your hands whether it's like any kind of behavior that drives you you'll feel that anticipation that that suffering and the desire to find resolution in in in the love in the in the object of that which is desired and so the idea is in dante especially is that to a certain extent you could imagine that all things that exist in the world are good they are a good and that we are meant to move towards them as we move towards a good at the level at which they are meant to be loved um so let's see where he he mentioned it so he says but when it turns to evil the love or shows more or less zeal than it ought for what is good then the creature turns on its creator and so the idea is when we love something to the level at which it's supposed to be loved then it will be normal but if we love something excessively then it will lead us into hell um and of course this is something that we understand like anybody that has been madly in love with someone can understand the danger that that is there because it's especially a very strong attraction if you're very strongly attracted to someone all of a sudden the desire to find that resolution especially if it's unrequited love especially if the person you desire does not does not answer your your desire then then the suffering can be huge and if it's disproportionate it can lead you into total despair right and we everybody knows someone to whom that's happened someone who falls into despair out of excessive love for someone but that is of course something which can happen not only in terms of of a lover or in terms of the beloved it can happen who someone who's trying to get who's applying for a job and that their desire to apply for that job is so strong it is pulling them they want it they want it so bad and then when it is it is unrequited then it will lead you into into suffering now it's true that way but it's also true that if you disproportionately love something which is not meant to be loved at the level that you're loving it then you will have other problems and so the alcohol is a great example right you know you drink with friends you use it as a social lubricant there's this there's this there's this capacity to engage in uh let's say the pleasure that alcohol can bring you at a level that is normal that a level in which it will only act as a a step into higher loves which is that you know i like to have a drink with my friends because it loosens the mood and then i can really have a great time with my friends and so now this love for alcohol which is which is not wrong in itself is at the right level it's at a level that leads me up towards a higher love but if i become too focused on the lower love then it can lead me into despair because it won't it's as if i'm trying to make it fill a hole that is too big for what i'm using to fill it with because the the truer love let's say the love of a person is much higher than obviously should be much higher than it's something which will fill us more than the love for something like alcohol but if i'm so if i'm not careful i'm trying to basically i mean you've heard you've seen this trope in any kind of movie right it's like i'm like i'm feeling something i'm missing in terms of love in terms of some desire i have to be loved by my father whatever like or to love by someone else and i'm i'm compensating through something like alcohol um but this can also be true like i said of people that is even the love we have of each other can become excessive um there's actually a wonderful version of that in another story which deals with this kind of voyage into the afterlife cscs lewis wrote a book called the great divorce and in this book he has a similar story as dante where he he visits the the the other world and um he gets a let he get it's basically lessons about how we live now even dante's book i i'll tell you secret it's not really about the afterlife it's really about now it's really about how we live now the same with with c.s lewis's great divorce and so in this book there's a there's a beautiful image of a woman who arrives in the afterlife and as soon as she arrives in the afterlife she asks to see her son who preceded her in death and the angel that is there i forget who the guide is says yes don't yes you will see your son but before there are a few things we need to go through before you see your son and the woman is like no i want to see my son like i i knew when i would die that i would see my son so bring me my son and once again the angel says no your son is here don't worry you'll you'll see your son and she starts to like she starts to get really animated and she said who is this god that will separate me from my son like what kind of god would separate a mother from her son and so i want to see my son now and the answer is no not right now you can't see your son and it drives her so mad that she runs out of paradise into hell where now she asks she demands that they bring her son into hell with her so she can be with him and it's a very it's a very powerful vision of even how our human relationships if the amount of love or if the manner in which we love those around us can become uh disordered and can lead us into cannot only lead us into a way that makes us go to hell but really a desire to bring other people into hell with us this is something which is which is fascinating something that i've noticed in terms of bad habits for example you can see that with uh with people that uh that take drugs they have a strange desire to get other people to do it and it's very fascinating it's like they actually invert the relationship where their love of the drug is so strong that they they see it as the mediator towards their relationship towards others that is they want to pull other people into their love almost to justify their love or almost to to to help them feel that this love is appropriate and so they'll they'll actually want to pull people into their web into their bad habit with them in order to to kind of justify their love and so people pulling others into hell with them is something that happens quite a bit as well and i'm sure many people have had an experience uh experience like that um all right i want to read you another nice little passage from dante so what dante does is he basically in his way of describing the world he describes what you could call something like appropriate love or the manner in which loves can scale up can scale into each other how the loves can build on each other in order to lead us towards more let's say to higher more lofty loves and not get trapped in these lower loves that we that we all have but that can become dangerous if we don't if we try to fill our existential hole with them you could say um and so so in in the um the way that the whole story is set up right is that at different levels of reality have different people so in dante's poem there are people that are in limbo there are people that are in hell there are people that are in purgatory and there are people that are in heaven and there are people that are at different levels of heaven so the story starts with dante falling into despair he falls into despair he's at the middle of his life he's been exiled from his city he basically has lost all the things that help he helped him understand who he was and so he is faced with these three beasts that they're preventing him from going further he's he's stuck in a deep dark forest and he can't go further he has these three beasts that are facing him and so he's stuck so in order to get out of that there appears to him the poet virgil now for those who don't know virgil is a roman poet of the first century who wrote especially the aeneid which is his most famous poem um and so dante encounters this poet who's dead who's been dead for a very long time and virgil starts to guide him around these monsters but has to go down into hell and then come back up to go up the the the levels of purgatory but at some point dante asks uh virgil like you know how is it that you came to to to greet me like how is it that you came to get me in my despair and so what dante describes is that virgil is in purgatory he's sorry he's in limbo he's at the gate of hell and then someone from above came to see him so beatrice came to see virgil and beatrice is dante's uh muse you could say it's the it's it's a woman that dante encountered at some point in his life he's never had a relationship with her he never um he was never married to her she had her own life but he saw her as this this thing that awakened love in him when he was young so he encountered this woman it awakened loving him and she became for him the ideal of of human love of of arrows the idea of like erotic love in in the positive sense that this thing would draws you forward which becomes your motor to make you do things so beatrice sends beatrice comes down to to virgil and says virgil why don't you go see dante dante's in trouble and he and and you should go and see him so that he can move forward and she says i was contacted by saint lucia who was dante's uh patron saint and then there's a hint in which that saint lucia was contacted by someone else by another lady and so it's not said in the text but it's the virgin mary basically and so so you have this interesting setup where the virgin mary comes down from god come from christ comes down from christ encounters saint lucia and says lucia dante is in trouble maybe we could do something about it your patron saint and now this patron saint goes down encounters uh beatrice who's the woman that awakened love in dante she says why don't we go help dante she goes down to limbo and now she encounters the pagan poet the greatest poet that has ever lived you could say uh before dante in his estimation and now this poet goes out to find dante now we can obviously understand this in a narrative way it's a nice little trope it's a nice little narrative but it's telling us about the manner in which loves work the man in which loves stack up on each other and so now you saw it from top down right you saw basically god calling god telling or christ telling the virgin mary telling late saint lucia telling uh beatrice et cetera et cetera all the way down but now you can also see it going up right because that's what's going to happen with dante so as dante moves up moves down first into hell then goes up at some point virgil will leave him and will be replaced by beatrice as a guide and as it doesn't it doesn't map on exactly but it maps on well enough as he goes up then he then beatrice at some point is replaced by bernard of clairvaux who was a great theologian in the middle ages and then bernardo claiboro leads him up and at some point bernard leaves and the virgin mary herself takes dante up into the presence of christ so that he then enters into the presence of god so this is you can understand that this is really telling us about how love works about how loves can build on each other and so dante's love for poetry right dante's love for poetry but not also you could you could say in terms of virgil what he rep what he represents is also all of the secular world right so there's an there's a because he's a pagan he represents let's say secular reality so all the secular reality all of these things whether it's poetry whether it's science whether it's just things that exist in the secular world they are the first thing that draws dante into the possibility of loving and so his attraction to these things his attraction to literature his attraction to poetry let's say awaken something in him now if he stayed there he would become he would become that stuffy professor that lives in books and that doesn't have any connection with reality and maybe you've met people like that that live in a world of literature but have no relationships have no their lives are a complete mess like their their relationships are a completeness they're they're basically uh like sociopaths but they know they know literature like they look they they're really experts in poetry and all this stuff so that's a possibility but no dante that possibility of of of understanding patterns in in the world patterns in literature makes it possible for him to fall in love and now he falls in love with this woman but this woman is is actually unattainable to him and so here again this could be it's both a positive and a negative it's positive because it brings him higher now it's an actual human relationship it's not just fictional or like people on paper it's a real flesh and blood person standing in front of him you know who his he who now his erotic love can be directed towards but then again that's the same now it's a very it's something which is positive but could be negative if he just stayed there because someone and again you know this like someone who's in a relationship and that relationship fills all their needs and then they find out that the person is cheating on them or then without then it things fire out of control and they end up getting a divorce and their lives are ruined forever because all their love was put there something which is good but which is not all good right and so this is now so then dante dante's love for beats chris leads him up towards a now a more spiritual love right a more spiritual but particular love which would be something like his patron saint you can imagine like an angel you can imagine it like the capacity to love something like uh it could be something higher in general like it could be something like a an ideal you know moving towards an ideal working towards an ideal working towards something which is higher even than our just our human relationships and becomes a manner in which our human relationships can be bound together for some people it could be something like a cause you know for some people it could be something like uh like a team you know like a sports team this is it's lower than a patron saint it can help you understand how these la these loves can kind of scale up into other loves and of course now this love leads them now cosmically to the highest form of of love which is ultimately this moving into the virgin and then ultimately into god himself as the absolute good you could say um and so it's important this is something which for modern people it's hard to understand it's like it's hard to understand this because we tend to understand god as an arbitrary being which exists in heaven or whatever um you know that's just this arbitrary being but there's a sense in which the medieval person or the medievals understood god as the source of all good the infinite source of all good and therefore all are love should move slowly towards the good now those goods are like i said they are they are smaller things they move into virtues they move into ideals but then ultimately they also have to move up towards let's say the source of love itself or the possibility of love itself maybe is the best way to understand that and trinitarian theology is basically a description of love trinitarian theology is about how something obviously it's not a thing right how the source of all things is both one and many at the same time if you want to understand love that's basically a definition of love love is the capacity to be both one and many at the same time so if you love someone properly you will want that person to exist outside of you because if you suck them into you right if you basically annihilate them into your desire then they will they'll cease to exist you'll turn them into shadows you'll turn them into dreams but true love is the capacity to both be fully one with that which is loved while letting that thing completely exist outside of you that is true love and in the trinity that is what you find you find basically a kind of self-emptying love in which the different persons of the trinity completely give themselves to the other while not fusing together and becoming just a monad you could call it um so this description of god ultimately this is what it's when we say god is love it's not an arbitrary thing but it's a it's an actual description of how god or how the source of all things animates our experience animates everything that we participate in um and so this is when this is why dante i mentioned it i mentioned this earlier in one of the speeches i read he says all men though in a vague way apprehend a good their souls must rest in and desire it each therefore strives to reach its his chosen end but there's a manner in which that desire for the good leads up into the good itself leads up into the the highest good and there's a manner in which that the lower goods can be transmuted or transformed into something which leads you higher and this is something which is obviously there in in christianity but it's not there only in christianity you find it in for example in in plato so in the symposium you really do find an image of something like that where the symposium is a drinking party and of course in the greek culture there was uh there was this erotic relationship between between men of different ages and so the older men and the younger men would have these erotic relationships and it would be seen in greek culture it was kind of it was kind of iffy or it was okay but they weren't sure about it and there's a way in which socrates in the in the symposium he comes into contact with alcibiades and elsa bybes is a very he's a very passionate person he's an extremely passionate person he's extremely driven he has a lot of ambition and he really wants to he he he's like he takes up a lot of room like he's he's a glorious young man you know and everybody looks at him everybody wants him everybody is attracted to him uh and so ultimately alcibiades according to greek uh tradition is the one who will betray greece who will betray athens um but we don't know that yet and so alcibiades tries to seduce socrates and socrates is constantly if you read the text it's wonderful socrates is there without sabbaties and alcibiades is trying to seduce him and socrates is constantly receiving that receiving alcibiades desire and turning it towards higher goods and he's constantly trying to like say to to bring him to contemplate the forms to contemplate higher goods uh and of course alcibiades gets very frustrated in the story he's like he gets very annoyed he ends up let's say um admiring uh socrates but you there's a sense in which in the bigger story of the symposium and greek culture there's a sense in which the fact that alcibiades was not able to temper his passions was not able to temper his loads now not only for socrates but in general like you can understand that someone who is extremely uh that has a lot of desire to succeed that is extremely motivated to make it in the world is someone that is driven right and is willing to do anything to reach their goal and so in the case of alcibiades that love that strong passion that he had would lead him ultimately to betray uh athens and so if he had learned to moderate his love and moderate his passions he might have been able to let's say turn them towards higher goods and uh and he wouldn't have uh he wouldn't have gone the dark route that that uh that he has that he has in the in the story of greece um and so when you look at in the story of dante you can understand that in a christian manner the best way to understand it is something like compassion and so you can understand that the way that the love that moves up is something like admiration or something like veneration something like seeing seeing something as a model that attracts you towards it and then the love which comes down from the higher goods is something like self-sacrificial or compassionate and so it's by it's through compassion that the virgin calls down on these lower loves to then draw dante in and dante isn't ready for the higher things so there's a way in which he must he must let's say truly explore the loves that are there present present to him that is his desire to become a great poet his desire to to learn about poetry is something which is good and he needs to fully he needs to fully accomplish you could say but also always knowing that it eventually has to move up towards higher and and higher goods

Channel: Kintore College

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Id: 91ka7aX5WY8

Length: 33min 12sec (1992 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 09 2021