Geek Love
In which I nerd out over Allan Bloom and Nietzsche and don't say "modernity" even once
Hail, creatures! In this edition, mostly just random thoughts about ecstasy and obedience. When you whack the dancing Dragon you never know what strange candies will spill from its maw!
When Will Somebody Publish The Virgin Review of Books?
Last month I read Allan Bloom’s Love and Friendship, which is somewhere between an argument and a ramble through works Bloom loved, edited posthumously and dedicated to his own lover. My basic thoughts are: I liked the Plato stuff the best, Bloom’s praise of Jane Austen was a list of reasons I dislike reading Jane Austen, you should never try to figure out what Shakespeare “really thought” about stuff because it’s not the point; every time Bloom says “Biblical religion” he basically means purity culture, which is understandable-ish but not illuminating; and even I am not this defensive of Falstaff!
It’s a book about the idolatry of marriage: a book in which the history of the novel is a history of the replacement of religious awe with falling in love. There are insights there (ethics is based on love) but also it’s the swathe of novelry that interests me the least. Lol if you wanted to, you could probably argue that what people call “the Catholic literary tradition” in the 20th century was mostly an attempt to write away from the novel’s idolatry of marriage, reshaping the novel’s characteristic problems and situations so that the familiar novelistic actions flow out of an underlying orientation toward God. That’s too schematic, obvs. But I’d enjoy making the argument that “the celibacy novel” is a contradiction in terms and also a fair description of the secret hearts of Brideshead and End of the Affair and, of course, Kristin Lavransdatter.
Things I dogeared: “The praise of madness can be understood only to the extent that reason itself must be informed by an apprehension of the beautiful or the good in order to be truly what it is. In his most explicit passages about philosophy, Socrates treats it as an erotic activity, nay, the erotic activity.” I always like this exercise of asking what, beyond reason, is necessary to make reason a guide to one’s life rather than just a kind of calculator where you type in premises and it spits out syllogisms. The ecstatic contact with beauty is one of my favorite possibilities for this extra thing. (Although meanwhile Alcibiades is in the back of the class typing 80087322 into his Reason, turning it upside down, and giggling, “Hey! Hey Socrates! Reason says, ‘BOOBLESS.’”)
Ecstasy vs. reason is one of those dichotomies where Christianity tries to just choose both sides as hard as possible. So also absurdity vs. design. For reason to work as a guide, there must be some correspondence between our reason and the world; reason must in some way be mirrored in the world itself, this is a point Bloom makes in discussing Erixymachus and the problems of “atomism.” The atheist can argue that reason is the name we give to an important subset of the processes of thought which mostly correlate with survival (or gene whatevers, I’m not an evopsych person). Or you can also just point out that there’s a lot of absurdity in the world too. The Logos is a Person, truth is an available target for our eros; the Logos was crucified, reason reveals its triumph in and through absurdity.
I think there’s a parallel here to be drawn, marriage/reason vs. celibacy/absurdity, and you could also draw in Diotima’s thing about eros (and therefore philosophy, and Socrates himself!) as the child of both Resource and Poverty.
On a cautionary personal note, I’ll say that there’s a strain of well-meaning Christian thinking in which the sexual renunciation of gay Christians is an especially powerful witness because it expresses the fact that all our sexuality is “really” an arrow toward God; eros cannot be fulfilled on its own terms, always highlighting, even at the moment of its greatest fulfillment, our persistent lack and longing. (Bloom, discussing the fable of the round people from the Symposium, says, “[F]or those who have really plumbed the depths of the erotic experience, there is a haunting awareness that one wants something beyond, something that can poison our embraces.”) On the one hand yes, true. On the other hand, both the troubles and the satisfactions of celibate people are mostly domestic rather than sublime, and that’s fine, that’s good #actually. It’s important for the well-being of gay people that we point out that our loves can be not only sacrificial but ordered. Our unfulfilled love witnesses to God in its unfulfillment, its unslaked desire. Our ordered love witnesses to God in its order, in the peace it brings.
C’mon Take a Little Walk With Me Arlene and Tell Me, Who Do You Love?
I also re-read my senior essay from college, on “Nietzsche’s rejection of eros.” I’m linking to it because this is, after all, Modern Humiliation Monthly. It was exciting to revisit this desperately adolescent collage of everything I felt when I was twenty.
The argument re: Nietzsche I think holds up pretty well. For the bearer of Germany’s most luxuriant mustache, “[T]he options open to each of us are: ‘Yes’ to oneself; ‘No’ to some other; or ‘No’ to oneself. This picture lacks symmetry; the fourth option, that of beginning one’s ethics with a ‘Yes’ to some other, is nowhere discussed. Yet this is the basic starting point for any attempt to make love the basis of ethics.” Or, if you want it in even more-impenetrable jargon, “To have someone else as one's purpose is not the same as having the void as one's purpose.”
The underlying personal claim I’m obviously trying to promote, though, is, “Reshaping your life and ethics in response to love is fine. It’s good! Love leads to regret, self-criticism, seeking paths other than the path of greatest personal happiness, self-forgetting, binding, sacrifice, suffering. And what of it!!!! If you really loved you wouldn’t care.”
(“She is the only unicorn in the world who knows what love is. And regret.” All of my philosophy is but a footnote to The Last Unicorn….)
And it turns out that that’s sort of right, but it really matters who (or, to be grammatically correct, Whom) you love. The character of the beloved is the central question. I took forever to learn how important that question really is. It’s the heart of basically everything I’ve worked on since 2016: Punishment: A Love Story and Tenderness and, of course, Christ’s Body, Christ’s Wounds. If you want a capsule version, try this essay on the enslaved mystic Ursula de Jesús, who needed terribly to know whether the God she loved knew how to love a black woman.
In the senior essay I quote only part of a devotional poem by Judah Halevi:
I love my foes, for they learned wrath from You,
For they pursue a corpse whom You have slain.
The day You hated me I loathed myself,
For I will honor none whom You disdain.
That’s high-romantic, it’s the bridal mysticism of the moth to the flame, it’s attractive if you’re a certain bad kind of person. But I wish I’d realized how important it is that the poem ends like this:
Until Your anger pass, and You restore
The people whom You rescued once before.
One Last Pastry from the Vanquished Dragon
Obedience is not a rote conformity, but the addition of your own individuality, your strangeness, to the command of the one obeyed. You were created new and strange in part so that (let us speculate) the strangeness and newness of your obedience would delight your Creator.
icymi
I wrote about my lifelong love of Canis lupus, and our estrangement from the animals.
Now Playing
Irma Thomas, “The Soul of a Man”
This picture from the Allan Gardens in Toronto is one of the only Creative Commons options for images of “Allan Bloom.” I was hoping for something fleshier!