Dreaming the Future Closer

This post about unconditional love has been percolating for a while.  The whole idea of unconditional love, while highly esteemed, does not often seem to get a lot of serious theological attention, especially in modern pagan circles.  The image of unconditional love in Christianity, in particular, seems bound up with a problematic ethos of martyrdom.

Yet, the idea of unconditional love as a force capable of overcoming our limited human boundaries possesses a deep religious significance.  Religion proper thrives on devotion and it is in unconditional love that devotion finds its ideal.  Rather than do away with it entirely, I want to consider it more closely.

My focus is with monotheistic accounts since it is so well-developed there, but I want to emphasize that the lessons extracted from that ought to apply to polytheistic devotion as well and I hope to develop that more in the future.

First, let us start with the dangers associated with it.  The importance of absolute devotion to a teacher/guru or a divinity plays a role in a number of spiritual paths, only some of which are explicitly monotheistic.  Bhakti yoga, for one, emerges out of a polytheistic background, even though it tends toward monotheism.

Unconditional love for another, be it human or divine, suggests to us the negation of the lover’s self, the replacement of the desires of the self for the desires of the beloved.  Mystical poetry of all stripes provides us with exemplars of this attitude, where even the neglect of the beloved itself becomes an occasion for the lover to engage in self-abnegation.  In so many words, the mystic proclaims ‘Better that I suffer than that I place demands, conditions, upon my love for the beloved.’

The Sufi, the cloistered Christian ecstatic, the passionate yogi, have this in common; so, too, does the ideal courtly lover of romance or the ideal disciple of an Indian guru.  Despite the commonality of the experience, despite the shared emphasis on unconditional love, none of these figures are proper examples of genuine unconditional love.

At best, these figures represent moments on the way toward a realization of unconditional love.  This seems counter-intuitive at first, but I want to draw attention to the language employed by those who talk about unconditional love.

The language speaks of a beloved for whom they negate themselves, whose desires they strive to realize instead of their own.  The beloved’s desires are conditions.  Self-abnegation for the sake of another replaces one set of conditions for another, the love that remains, however, is profoundly conditioned.

The ecstatic sense of release experienced by the mystic or the lover as they give themselves over to the beloved, focuses on the lover’s subjective experience of love.  Many will want to defend the mystical love, point to the limitations of language in expressing the experience, but the mystic’s effort to talk and think about the experience in language makes clear the importance of the mystic’s subjective experience.

That said, the subjective movement does serve an important function.  It provides the lover with a priceless image of an other external to the subject, an alterity, some thing irreducible to their self.  The experience is dangerous, though, because it risks substituting an image of that objective other for the other itself.

Lacanian psychoanalysis provides us with a clear model of this process, a sort of spiritual melancholia, in which we enshrine our mourning and attempt to identify ourselves with the other.  At the limit of the symbolic and the imaginary, encounter the Real, and each time turn back from it, speak of it, make an icon of it, and forget the Real itself.

The enshrining of the beloved by the lover takes on a pathological quality.  The affirmation of the beloved’s neglect effectively shields us from the reality of the beloved.  Since they do not want us, we can occupy ourselves with our fantasied representation of them.

Self-abnegation corrupts the ideal of unconditional love, allowing it to become yet one more selfish experience with which we shield ourselves from unconditional love.

Unconditional love requires that the love be unconditioned by both the lover and the beloved.  Unconditional love must affirm the beloved without taking on the beloved’s real or imagined conditions.  To the extent that the beloved does not return the love, denies the love, the love remains conditioned, by expectation if not outright demand.

The realization of unconditional love is not a private venture, but a profoundly social one, one that remains incomplete so long as it is not shared.  Annemarie Schimmel, in Mystical Dimensions of Islam, cites a delightful tale by the Turkish Sufi Attar which expresses this well.  The tale features thirty birds who go out seeking the King of Birds:

…the thirty birds who have undertaken the painful journey in search of the Simurgh, the king of birds, realize that they themselves—being si murgh, “thirty birds”—are the Simurgh. (307)

The goal, the beloved, is not some external thing, but the sum total of their relationship to each other, realized through loving participation in their shared journey.

This connects, too, the importance of prophecy, of the figure of the prophet, in the religions of unconditional love, well expressed by Ala’uddaula Simnani (here summarized by Schimmel):

[the mystic needs to return] to the sober state in which he becomes aware, once more, of the subjectivity of his experience….’intoxication’ is…the station of the saint, whereas the prophet excels by his sobriety, which permits him to turn back, after the unitive experience, into the world…(368-69)

Soberly, the prophetic figure realizes the incompleteness of the subjective and returns to the world in order to make it a better medium for the cultivation of love.

Therein, too, lies the ethical heart of a commitment to unconditional love, to work toward its realization rather than dwell upon the imagination of it.  It reveals love as a commitment to liberation, something which, while theoretically achievable, remains ever-elusive in a practical sense.