Love itself is knowing.
Along with the winter winds and rain, sleet and snow, thaws and freezes, there is something else which is in the air of February. Love.
What do we mean by love? How do we think about love? Can we think about it or, better yet, how can we not think about love. Is it simply a chemical? Is it merely a biological urge? It is something erotic and physical? Or do we think of it in terms of romanticism and sentimentality? How do we think love?
There is a rich tradition of thinking about love in the discourses of religious philosophy. In other words, there is a theology of love. Frequently in Chapel, the service begins with a Scripture sentence from the Gospel according to St. John. “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God.” In the Jewish Scriptures, too, there is a rich and wonderful seam of love poems that reflect on God’s relation to his creation.
One of the most remarkable books of the Jewish Scriptures is what is variously called The Song of Songs, The Canticle of Canticles, or The Song of Solomon. It is a compilation of erotic and sensual love poems spanning many centuries before being set down in its present form about the 3rd century BC. It never mentions God but has been received in the Jewish understanding as depicting the nature of God’s relation towards and with the people of Israel. Intimate and evocative, it is full of famous and memorable phrases about love and has contributed to a rich tradition of thinking about love in ways that go beyond the erotic and the sensual much like Plato’s dialogue The Symposium. There the operative word is eros and yet that word, so erotically and sexually charged, leads us on an upward journey of education, leading us to the Form of the Good.
The Song of Songs has been viewed at times in the Christian tradition as part of the theology of amor, to use another word for love. Not a very long book, it nonetheless inspired Bernard of Clairvaux in the 12th century to give a series of eighty-six sermons on various passages of The Song of Songs to the monastic community of the Cistercian order. It is a kind of treatise on love and reminds us that love is an essential feature of intellectual and spiritual communities such as our School. It belongs, in other words, to the cultivation of a culture of learning. It is about the love of learning without which our schools become merely factories producing automatons, chained in little cubicles, enslaved to the digital economy.
As Bernard puts it, amor ipse est intellectus, “love itself is knowing.” It is not ratio, an instrumental reason, but intellectual – the gathering of knowledge into understanding. What drives that is the passion, even the eros or the amor; in short, the love of learning. That love of learning is ethical. At once contemplative and active, it is always about seeking the Good and therefore about seeking the good of others. This counters the despairing and distressing ways in which we manipulate and use one another, treating one another as means and objects and not as persons worthy of respect.
The love of learning is an essential feature of any School worthy of the name. In Chapel, this week we have been exploring the deeper meanings of love which shape and inform, counter and correct other forms of love – the erotic and the physical, the romantic and the sensual. Along with a reading from The Song of Songs, we have had the story from Luke about “going up to Jerusalem” in which Jesus tells the disciples what that will mean in terms of his passion and death “and they understood none of these things.” There is our unknowing, our blindness, but the spiritual journey of Lent is about learning the lessons of love. In part, it begins by knowing our unknowing and thus wanting to know. Such is the love of learning.
As well we had Paul’s great hymn of love from 1st Corinthians 13 about “faith, hope and charity” or love which is “the greatest of these.” This trinity of graces is about the divine love which seeks our good, though we see “but in a glass darkly.” We seek to know even as we are known in God’s love. That love not only seeks our good but sets us in motion for the good of others. Our love of learning is bound up in our care for one another. The wonderful ancient motet used during the foot-washing ceremonies on Maundy Thursday, recalling Christ’s loving service, captures this connection. Ubi est caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. “Where there is charity and love, there is God.” Such things all belong to the cultures of learning, to the love of learning.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy