Like Barbed Lightning

Strong Love in Dante, Lewis, and Eliot

God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.

1 John 4:16

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The word ‘love’, at least in the English language, has been greatly weakened - hollowed-out even - these past few decades. It has become associated in the public mind primarily with romantic love and has also been debased by a series of sentimental slogans - ‘All you need is Love’, ‘Love Wins’, ‘Love is Love’, etc. There’s a massive disconnect between the way love is presented and what it actually, metaphysically is. We want and need the reality - our souls cry out for it - yet it’s as if we can’t get at it for the fluffy packaging and often wilful misrepresentation. It’s a core want, a core need - absolutely essential if we are to flourish and thrive. Yet love as it’s currently understood is too weak a container to hold the depth and urgency of this fundamental drive.

It’s a blessing then that the great writers are here as always to propel us forward. First Dante, who at the end of The Divine Comedy comes face to face with Being itself. He beholds three concentric rings - symbolic of the Trinity and geometrical perfection - then a human face, and finally the blinding revelation that the power that initiates and sustains the created order is pure and simple love - ‘that love which moves the sun and all the stars’:

And as I seemed to change, that Light Itself seemed to change. For now, within Its depths I clearly saw three distinct circles of three colours, but bound together within the same space. Like two rainbows, the first circle reflected the next, and the third was like fire, breathed forth equally by both the others. My words here cannot adequately express my weak recollection, which itself is weak because even it is far from what I actually saw. O Eternal Light, living within Yourself alone, and knowing only Yourself, Your love radiates itself in glory, knowing and being known.

As I gazed intently on the reflection of the first circle’s movement within the second one, there appeared to be imprinted upon it the image of a man, and I became completely focused on it. Like a geometer who strives but cannot uncover the principle whereby the circle might be squared, just so did I grapple with this new mystery before me, as I struggled to discern how the image of our humanity could fit within that circle. In the end, my wings were not able to take me to those heights, but like a bolt of lightning that flashed within my mind, I suddenly understood and my great desire was fulfilled.

At this point my towering fantasy lost its power, but my will and desire came together like a perfectly balanced wheel turned by that Love which moves the sun and all the stars.

What we have here is a strong, directional love, both cosmic in its implications (the three rings) and deeply personal (the human face). ‘Love makes the world go round’ one might then say, but this trite phrase downgrades the dynamic, explosive nature of the love Dante describes and makes it a synonym for tolerance, compassion, kindness, and not much more. There’s nothing wrong with these three in and of themselves, of course, but there’s a fiercer, more combative side of love that’s subsequently been left out of account. Without this aspect, tolerance curdles into indulgence, while kindness and compassion collapse into self-negating empathy. Something more potent is required, and this is what we encounter at the end of C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra (1943), when Ransom, the protagonist, meets and communes with the angelic intelligences - the planetary rulers - of Mars and Venus:

The faces surprised him very much. Nothing less like the ‘angel’ of popular art could well be imagined. The rich variety, the hint of undeveloped possibilities, which make the interest of human faces, were entirely absent. One single, changeless expression - so clear that it hurt and dazzled him - was stamped on each and there was nothing else there at all. In that sense their faces were as ‘primitive’, as unnatural, if you like, as those of archaic statues from Aegina. What this one thing was he could not be certain. He concluded in the end that it was charity. But it was terrifyingly different from the expression of human charity, which we always see either blossoming out of, or hastening to descend into, natural affection. Here there was no affection at all: no least lingering memory of it even at ten million years’ distance, no germ from which it could spring in any future, however remote. Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot from their faces like barbed lightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression could easily be mistaken for ferocity.

This is a robust, almost war-like depiction of love - ‘charity’, as Lewis calls it here - a universal gold standard, as it were, much more objective and impersonal than contemporary conceptions. Ransom’s tête-à-tête, in this sense, is akin to Dante’s vision of the rings. Where does the human face come in then? How does this ‘pure, spiritual, intellectual’ love map on to our individual lives? T.S. Eliot shows us how in Little Gidding. Because love is such a strong and solid thing - hard, bright, clear, and firm - it has the strength and the capacity to meet the full force of our sin head-on and burn it all away. Not just that, but the weight of all the evil and devastation the world can throw at us as well. It is a purifying fire, a winnowing fire, a saving, redeeming, transformative fire:

We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

So if you’re struggling with shame or embarrassment, and if you feel unloved, unwanted, cursed and unregarded, then lift up your eyes to Heaven, for there is a love out there that has the might and authority to bless you, heal you, and raise you from the dead. That love is ‘in here’ as well. It is the very fabric of reality - its warp and woof, its essence and its texture.

Even now, especially now, in full consciousness of your fallibility and weakness, you are aligned with this tremendous power, the driving, motive force behind the universe and everything that lives and breathes within it. If God is on our side like this, then who indeed can be against us?

One day, maybe sooner than we think, all the dross and tinsel will be rolled up like a scroll and only the Real will remain. Dante summarised this primal Reality in just ten words - ‘that love which moves the sun and all the stars’ - St. John in just three - ‘God is love.’

In the last analysis, there is nothing more or other than this, and that’s enough to hold and embrace everything that exists, from single suffering individuals like you and me to an infinity of galaxies, planets, and stars.

OMNIA VINCIT AMOR.