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Below is the opening address I gave at the wedding of my friends Serge and Donna this past weekend. With their kind permission, I publish it here for your consideration.
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When I first began to gather my thoughts on what to say today, I decided to think about the weddings I’ve been to in the past and reflect on what was said by the ministers presiding on those days. At those weddings, and I suspect at most religious weddings, the emphasis of the minister’s sermon was on the association between love and god, and it contained many references to the wisdom of the scripture and its teachings.
I, however, am not a very religious man, and am not well disposed to speak to you today about love in that regard. What I am, however, is a constant student of history, and so I thought that today I would speak of love in the context of the saga of human history, rather than the context of heaven and Earth. For I promise you, love is no less wondrous when viewed from this perspective.
First, a note about the definition of love, for it can be quite tricky. In her book “A Natural History of Love”, Diane Ackerman writes:
“When I set a glass prism on a windowsill and allow the sun to flood through it, a spectrum of colors dances on the floor. What we call “white” is a rainbow of colored rays packed into a small space. The prism sets them free. Love is the white light of emotion. It includes many feelings which, out of laziness or confusion, we crowd into one simple word.”
So when I speak of love today, I will be speaking specifically of romantic love – that very intimate shade of love that bonds two people together in a way that is difficult to put into simple words. But I think we all know the feeling I’m talking about, and I could spend the rest of the day just trying to give some barely operable definition of it.
If you go back to the dawn of Western human history, love was there. A Sanskrit word that roughly translates to “he desires” is perhaps the first written reference to love that we have. The first examples of romantic prose and poetry we have date from the time of the Pharaohs in ancient Egypt. The emotion expressed in these works is recognizable very much in its modern form, but with an essential difference. Love to the Egyptians was an adolescent flutter. It was fun, irresponsible, and absolutely not meant to last. Marriages were arranged, and love could never be anything other than a passing crush before adult life began.
To the Greeks, love was plain tragic. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is a perfect example of the perils of love to the Greek mind, and it was one of the most popular tales in Greek mythology during their day. Orpheus, the son of a Muse and a mortal king, fell in love with Eurydice, a nymph, who then tragically died. Determined not to lose her, Orpheus played magic songs upon his lyre to charm his way into the land of the dead, and there with the sweetest music ever played, convinced Hades to let him take Eurydice back to the living world with him. Hades cautioned Orpheus, however, that if he looked back to gaze upon her before they both had reached the surface of the world, that she would be lost to him forever. He managed the entire journey resisting the urge to look upon her, and as he exited the cave through which he’d entered the Underworld, turned to look upon his love again. To his horror, though, she had fallen behind him in their travel, and was still within the cave when he turned. She spoke but one word, “farewell” and then was gone forever. Orpheus was not much longer for the world himself, and the lesson to a young Greek man or woman was that love was a dangerous and disastrous thing.
To reinforce this perspective on love, love was embodied in the goddess Aphrodite, thus placing love as one of the mysteries of the natural world, alongside the seas, the stars, and the course of the future. Love was not a thing natural to mortal humans, but rather an immortal power that happened to humans. Love had no place in marriage and no place in adult human life. Indeed, a young man or woman should hope fervently to avoid the attentions of a nymph or goddess, lest his life become tragic, and ultimately his destiny become beyond his control.
With the rise of the Roman Empire, the literature of love flourished as never before, yet on the public stage it remained a fleeting and dangerous thing to indulge in. The Romans were an exceptionally stoic people, and the uncontrollable urges of love were best avoided by a true and virtuous Roman man or woman.
During these ages of classical antiquity, love was an ideal cherished by young people, poets, and free thinkers. Yet the practical realities of life, which were very demanding in those times, made the complete realization of love impossible. Love requires time, comfort, and privacy – none of which were in ready supply during that age.
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With the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity as the central font of culture in Europe, love swiftly became marginalized. The circumstances of life were more precarious then they had been for hundreds of years before, for one thing. Further, love came to be defined by the relationship between God and his children, not between a man and a woman. It was no longer merely troublesome or potentially tragic, it was heretical. If love had been dangerous to the Greeks, it was now a guaranteed path to ruination of mind, body, and soul.
Yet the concept of love, and people’s obsession with it, survived that era, and in the 11th century, love once again burst onto the scene, dressed within the game of expectation and anticipation called courtly love. In playing at courtly love, the man and his lady had no intention of marrying – both were probably already married by arrangement – or even of consummating the relationship. In today’s world, the ready availability of gratification for just about any of our wants makes it hard to grasp the appeal of courtly love – which very specifically ruled out ever achieving gratification. Love slowly became legitimized, because in this form it was harmless and even possibly virtuous, as the chief purpose of a knight’s love was to inspire him to virtuous deeds. That a woman would inspire a knight to greatness rather than God was certainly heretical, but many of the knights who first practiced this form of love were Crusaders – who had learned of it from Muslim writings – and largely beyond reproach as possible heretics.
The progress of love was slow, but unremitting. Women found their status elevated by it, artists found their hearts conquered by it. Over time, the very culture or Europe was transformed, and one can argue that the seeds of modern liberal democracy were planted by that first knight who pledged to love his lady.
I am not alone in this opinion, in case you’re wondering. The author C.S. Lewis once wrote:
“French poets, in the eleventh century, discovered or invented, or were the first to express, that romantic species of passion which English poets were still writing about in the nineteenth. They effected a change which has left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or our daily life untouched, and they erected impassable barriers between us and the classical past or the Oriental present. Compared with this revolution, the Renaissance is a mere ripple.”
And so love was a part of Western culture to stay. Yet it was not until Shakespeare’s day that people began to insist upon making love a durable relationship, and the foundation of marriage. The growth of population and the rise of prosperity throughout Europe began to make such far-fetched ideas possible and practical. More people meant greater privacy – through the possibility of anonymity; and more prosperity meant more comfort and more time at leisure, to be expended on the object of one’s affection. Over the centuries since, love has gradually moved from the periphery to the center in Western life, and today it is assumed that men and women arrive at the marriage altar full of love for one another, and purely of their choosing.
This is a short version of the long history of love in the Western world, but hopefully it has been enough to give you a perspective on its remarkable tale. And hopefully you can appreciate its importance as nothing less than a pillar of our Western tradition.
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Yet of late I find myself asking the question, has it come too far? Not that love has out-stayed its welcome, but has it become too essential? As with so many elements of human existence that were once the subject of great struggle and effort, is it possible that it’s ready accessibility to us today has changed our relationship with it, and caused it in some respects to lose its luster?
A friend recently said to me, “love is overrated.” To which I quickly replied, “Only to those who have it.” But her statement nevertheless rings true, for it seems today that we are led to believe that love is some magical healing force that will cure all ills, right all wrongs, and give meaning and purpose to an otherwise directionless life. Love is seen as something we all need, must have, cannot do without. And this is certainly true of some other expressions of love, such as the unconditional love of God or family, or the love of true friends, but it cannot rightly be said of romantic love. Furthermore, it places an unfair burden upon love, by suggesting that the absence of other, more essential, loves in your life can be assuaged by the presence of romantic love.
It seems that the lesson is obvious, yet frequently missed – that the more we demand from love, the less we find that it satisfies. And therefore love must be placed within its context. Love is a luxury, made possible by our world of freedom and plenty, and in that respect it may very well be the pinnacle of human endeavor.
Yet the world has known happiness and inspiration without love for far more years than it has had it. To suggest that love is the only avenue by which your heart may be content is folly. And to arrive upon it and expect perfection and tranquility from it is to hasten its downfall. Love is light and delicate, and will only endure when you are careful not to burden it with too many of your hopes and dreams – for love is a hope and a dream, all unto itself. Be gentle with love, and love will reward you, always.
So today, as we celebrate the love between Serge and Donna, and honor its place in their lives by accepting it as the foundation of their marriage, let us take a moment to consider just how extraordinary it truly is. Today, let us give love its due. Thank you for listening. |
