The festival of love and roses which we celebrate on February 14 was not invented by a greeting card company. Nor is today properly called Valentine's Day. Today is actually Saint Valentine's Day, although it's unclear exactly who in particular Saint Valentine was. According to the encyclopedia of saints maintained by the Vatican, there are seventeen Saint Valentines, but none has officially been recognized by the Catholic Church as the patron saint of lovers.
The most compelling version of the story of Saint Valentine's Day is, like all great tales, mostly about love and death. It begins during the third century of the common era, a time of considerable strife and political upheaval in the Roman Empire. Because of the turmoil, the Roman Emperor Claudius II (also known as Claudius the Cruel) found himself with a pressing need for an especially fierce army. He required men who were eager to leave home and lusting for battle. Concluding that happily married men would make indifferent soldiers at best,
Claudius decreed that no one in the realm could be engaged or married. Despite the decree, a sympathetic Italian bishop named Valentine persisted in performing clandestine marriages for his young parishioners. When Claudius discovered Valentine's secret nuptials, the Emperor had the Bishop clubbed to death and beheaded on February 14 in the year 270.
Although Valentine's Day celebrations today reflect none of the tragedy of its namesake's fate, this nonetheless seems a good time to reflect on the nature and vicissitudes of love, both human and divine. And I can think of no better way to begin than by looking at one of the great love stories in our time: the relationship between the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch and her husband, the critic and novelist John Bayley. Iris Murdoch died just this past Monday. She was 79 years old and was stricken by Alzheimer's disease.
Iris Murdoch was first and foremost a philosopher. She was personal friends with and wrote extensively about Jean-Paul Sartre, she studied with Ludwig Wittgenstein, and she lectured in philosophy at Oxford University. Early in her career, however, she switched from writing philosophy to writing fiction. Fiction was for her the means of dealing with life's largest and most basic issues, and a way to determine and articulate what comprises moral behavior. What she wanted was for her fiction-she ended up writing 26 novels-was to help ordinary people caught in the rough-and-tumble of everyday life to want those things that would make life better not only for them, but for everyone else as well. As one reviewer once noted, she tried to teach us to desire better desires
That is certainly not what caused John Bayley to fall in love with her one afternoon in Oxford when he was in his late 20s and she was in her early 30s. He first caught a glimpse of her one day when she rode past his window on her bicycle. On their first date, they went to a dance at St. Antony's, a former Anglican convent. On the way into the dance hall, Iris tripped on her long dress and fell down the steps, injuring her ankle. So that evening, they spent more time talking than they did dancing. It was a revelation. John writes that they talked until two in the morning without stopping. "I had no idea I could talk like that," he says, "and I am sure she never knew she could either I think Iris was accustomed only to talk properly, as it were: considering, pausing, modifying, weighing her words. To talk like a philosopher and a teacher. Now she babbled like a child. So did I." Years later, he found an entry in one of her manuscripts dated the night of that dance. It simply read: "St. Antony's Dance. Fell down the steps, and seem to have fallen in love with J. We didn't dance much."
But they did love much, apparently, although their life together wasn't always easy. Iris, for her part, lived life in a way that tested John's love and devotion. She had numerous sexual liaisons with other men, the details of which she kept from him. Early on, he described their relationship as one in which the two of them moved closer and closer-apart. Yet their devotion to one another was extraordinary; they were married for forty years. In the end, he took care of her as
Alzheimer's slowly ravaged her brilliance and her personality. Their relationship seems to have been based on the kind of love Iris Murdoch spoke about in her essay "The Sublime and the Good," when she said that true love is the best way to overcome isolation and the absorption with one's crippled and constricted self. "Love," she said, "is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real."
Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Let's think for a moment about what it might mean if that statement is true. It means that whatever happens between another person and me is not determined solely by my general need for love or affection or companionship or approval. It is driven by the very specific nature of my relation to another person who is very real and is very much not me: a person who has a different history than I do, and different hopes and different fears and different ways of dealing with the vicissitudes of life. In other words, love never happens in general. It always develops between two particular and unique people, each of whom must come to the difficult realization, if love is to flourish, that the other person is real,.
The French linguist and feminist scholar Luce Irigaray makes the same point more subtly when she talks about the language we use in relation to each other. Much of the time we use transitive verbs and direct objects that operate as a one-way street. I hit the ball: I as subject hit the ball as object. The transitive verb moves the action from subject to object. I hit the ball: the verb is transitive and the impact is direct upon the object of the action.
The movement of words from one person to the next often has a similar effect. The words we use are designed to have a direct effect upon the person who is the object of our speech. Our aim is either to subjugate or motivate the object we address. The point is not to establish an emotional connection with another person whose experience is as real and valid as our own. The point is to get the other person to see what we want them to see or do what we want them to do. We want to make the point, clinch the sale, win the battle. It comes as no surprise to discover that men have a particular affinity for this kind of language. Used in this way, words have transitive force: they carry the impact from subject to object. Language is not mainly about establishing a two-way communication, about making an emotional connection. It's about getting something done.
Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal, wrote in yesterday's Times that his favorite book on love is the First Letter to the Corinthians. "I don't mean the part that advises against marriage," he says. "I mean the part that now gets read at weddings: love is not jealous or boastful, does not insist on its own way, and so on. What strikes me about this passage," he continues, "is its contrast with the modern Darwinian conception of love. In the Darwinian view, love between man and woman evolved as a tool of genetic self-interest. Love is jealous by design; it does insist on its own way; it isn't patient and kind, as Paul recommends. Sure, love seems generous at first, during the valentine phase, but, to a hard-core Darwinian, that's just the sales pitch. In First Corinthians, Paul is describing a kind of love that's not natural-or at least a kind that doesn't naturally endure. But that's the point." He concludes: "Love starts out hormonal, but to mature it has to morph into something-if my fellow Darwinians will pardon the expression-spiritual."
Indeed. Love operates in a different domain. Love is not about getting something done. It is about communication, about realizing that someone else is not just an object to manipulate or control, but is a real subject as well. Love is about bearing witness, accepting the unique and irreducible presence of another. Recognizing that another person is both different and real, according to Irigaray, means "respecting you as an other, accepting that I must draw myself to a halt before you as something insurmountable, a mystery, a freedom that will never be mine." I recognize that you are and will always be different from me, that I cannot see through you and thus you will never be entirely visible to me. But that recognition is the beginning of a new way of relating, one based not on manipulation of an object, but on communication with another subject. It's not a world of force and impact. It's a realm of attention and openness-openness to you. "To you" is an indirect object: the action engages it, but in a very specific way. I listen to you; I respond to you. Not to anyone in general, but to you in particular. The title of Irigaray's book, by the way, is I Love to You. Put simply, what she's trying to point out is the difference in language and in life between "I hit the ball" and "I listen to you."
"I listen to you" is not about gathering in some bit of information that we need in order to, say, finish a shopping list or complete an agenda. I listen to you" is to listen to the voice of another person as something that is unique and uniquely new to me: unknown. It is to listen with patience and respect for the mystery of another to emerge before us. I listen to you not on the basis of what I already know and feel, but rather as the revelation of a truth that has yet to manifest itself-a truth that is yours, a truth of the world revealed through and by you. As I listen, I give you a silence in which your future, and perhaps my own as well, may begin to emerge and lay its foundation. Or as Iris said, love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
The "I love to you" part for Iris and John at the end of her life was dealing with her Alzheimer's disease. John rose to the occasion-he ministered to her needs at the most basic levels. Her illness did not repulse him. Rather, it drew them to each other. Near the end of his memoir, John writes, "Life is no longer bringing us closer and closer apart. Every day we move closer and closer together. We could not do otherwise."
Imagine what could happen if we too would love each other in that way: patiently, kindly, specifically, according to the needs of the other. It's the kind of divine love we read about in the letter to the Corinthians. The kind of love that focuses on listening carefully to each other. Bearing witness to our greatest fears and our deepest sorrows. Caring gently for fragile hearts and struggling souls. This is a kind of love that doesn't come easily. It requires making a commitment to you; it requires the indirect object: I love to you. Now abide faith, hope, and love: these three. But the greatest of these is love. Happy Valentine's Day. Copyright AllSouls 1999.