Amor Mundi ends with this stanza;
“Turn again, O my sweetest,—turn again, false and fleetest:
This beaten way thou beatest I fear is hell’s own track.”
“Nay, too steep for hill-mounting; nay, too late for cost-counting:
This downhill path is easy, but there’s no turning back.”
The last stanza of Christina Rossetti’s poem Amor Mundi, typifies St Augustine’s fear of love.
In Love and St Augustine, Hannah Arendt’s doctoral thesis (1929), she discusses three types of love; love as in craving, love for the creator and love of thy neighbor.
Right up front, I will confess I only read the summary of her thesis, and what follows is based on my limited understanding of her philosophical tenets and my interpretation thereof.
Let’s start with love of your neighbors or the Golden Rule. I don’t know about you but I don’t love my neighbors. I barely tolerate them and limit my contact with them to a friendly smile and a wave of the hand. If we talk, I see to it that the subject remains strictly limited to our weather and their health. When asked about my condition, I am always FINE. I am always fine out of love for my neighbors, as I know that good news brings happiness. I like to ignore the notion that some of them would prefer me dead or suffering, in which case, they deserve what they get.
As you are probably know, the Golden Rule, which states that you should treat others the way you would like to be treated, is flawed. What if your friendly neighbor would hate to be treated the way you like it? Perhaps he is a masochist or a sexual deviant, and likes it rough and painful. Some smart-ass came up with the “platinum rule”. “Treat others the way they like to be treated.” Total nonsense of course as we have no way of knowing how others would like to be treated. I will therefore continue applying my rule, call it the stainless steel rule; Talk to strangers about the weather and instruct them to “Have a nice day.”
What about love for your creator? Nothing wrong with that as long as you understand your creator to be nature. Amor Mundi, love the world and all that lives on it, is a splendid motto to live by. Far from easy, but worth a serious attempt. Perhaps start with the easy stuff, like trees, flowers, puppies and harmless pigeons. ( and while on that subject please refer to https://ups-and-downs-of-old-age.com/trees/} From there you can move on to rocks and what lives underneath them, and your neighbors. Make a real effort, even if they fire their guns every weekend.
And finally, there is love as a craving, as in, “I can’t live without her!” or, “Where is the nearest ice cream parlor?” St Augustine, a bit of an expert, used the word appetite, a sort of uncontrollable desire for something we can’t get to at a certain moment in time. Once we reach it and make it ours, the appetite abates and we start to strive towards attaining the next subject of our desire, be it a sex partner or a juicy steak, or a combination thereof.
As mentioned, St Augustine was very knowledgeable on the subject, as he struggled endlessly with his uncontrollable sexual ‘appetite’, something he could not suppress or even temper. According to the German Catholic Theologian, Uta Ranke-Heinemann, he was somewhat of a neurotic, and I quote:
“The man who fused Christianity with hatred of sex and pleasure into a systematic unity was the greatest of the Church Fathers, St. Augustine.. Like many neurotics, he radically separates love and sexuality. Augustine was the father of a fifteen-hundred-year-long anxiety about sex and an enduring hostility to it. He dramatizes the fear of sexual pleasure, equating pleasure with perdition in such a way that anyone who tries to follow his train of thought will have the sense of being trapped in a nightmare. And, finally, the “attitude of the Church’s celibate hierarchy is that the locus par excellence of sin is sex, a view based on Augustine’s pleasure-hating fantasies”
In the end, after fathering several children with as many different women, St Augustine joins the priesthood and develops and preaches the credo of original sin, the lovely idea that we are all born sinful and will end up in hell unless baptized.
Just think of the billions of babies sucking Satan’s tits in hell.
Note: Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in a secular Jewish family and escaped the Nazis in 1941 via France and Portugal. She settled in New York where she died in 1975. She taught at several universities and is probably best known for a controversial book she wrote about Eichmann; Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Banality of Evil, in which she challenges the right of Israel to put Eichmann on trial. She also posits that his actions were not driven by hate and evil but by simple ambition. On trial was anti-Semitism and not that common little administrator, who in line with German law of the time, did his duty.
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