(Edging further along the canyon. The indistinct glare still shown on the other side of the gorge. We still travel on hoping to find a way across. Up ahead, we see a group of sages.)
Huxley: Good-day gentlemen. This is Matt. He hails from what the natives call Myrtle Beach We are today talking about Love.
(I nod. Then I made out St. John among them. He spoke up first.)
St John: How do you know God?
Matt: I’d say you know God when you love Him.
St. John: And why is that?
Matt: Because God is love.
St. John: Very good. You can’t get to God by thought, only by love. Remember that.
Huxley: Yes. Matt wants unitive knowledge, the kind that unifies him to God.
St. John: The only way to get there is to see how much he loves!
Huxley: Right.
Matt: Why exactly?
St. John: Because the mind itself has motives, and those motives are powers that move the mind along. One of these motives is Love. Love draws you up out of your Self and sets you on high.
Huxley: Remember that love is the astrolabe for God’s mysteries.
St. John: I would give you directions to cross the gorge, but each path is different, unique to the traveler.
(Somewhat disappointed, we plodded along. Huxley and I began to talk).
Huxley: Knowing and loving are related in a certain way.
Matt: How?
Huxley: Can you love something without knowing what it is? Or, can you ever know something through and through without loving it?
Matt: What are you saying? That love has its own epistemology?
Huxley: Precisely. Love is a mode of knowledge!
Matt: So, when does Love bring union with God?
Huxley: It’s got to become disinterested and intense enough.
Matt: Why disinterested?
Huxley: If not, it’s a biased love; it’s not undiluted charity. Recall that love is a mode of knowledge. Well, if you’ve got biased love, what kind of knowledge do you have?
Matt: I suppose it’s a partial and distorted knowledge.
Huxley: Of what, though?
Matt: Of the Self, of the world, of things, lives, minds, spirits outside my Self.
Huxley: Right. What happens to someone whose diet is Lust, not Love?
Matt: Oh, this is Shakespeare! The lust-dieted man ‘slaves the ordinances of Heaven’!
Huxley: Right. And that man slaves the ordinances of Heaven because the laws of Nature and the Spirit are subordinated to his cravings.
Matt: So, the lust-dieted mind suffers an ignorance.
Huxley: A voluntary ignorance.
Matt: But he can’t see! How can a blind man help what he can’t see?
Huxley: But he will not see. He puts his hands over his eyes.
Matt: What is the reward of this blindness?
Huxley: It depends. The ambitious or the possessive or the vain or the petulant all fall into their traps. Less obviously, one can sacrifice salvation, enlightenment, or the possibility of escaping the Self, to power, prosperity, or reputation!
Matt (sigh): This spiritual ignorance is terrible.
Huxley: It is. Do you remember Cardinal Richelieu on his death-bed?
Matt: I don’t.
Huxley: His priest told him to prepare his soul before death by forgiving his enemies.
Matt: How did the Cardinal respond?
Huxley: He said simply: ‘I have never had any enemies to forgive, except the State.’ You see, a life full of avarice, ambition, and intrigue made the Cardinal spiritually ignorant. He had no charity for the State. And you now see what this does.
Matt: How sad. The Cardinal is doomed to not knowing the entirety of his soul or anything else.
(At a bend in the trail, Aquinas seemed to be strolling by.)
Aquinas: I could help but here you talking of Love, how Love and Knowledge are related but different.
Huxley: What did you have in mind?
Aquinas: To love God is better than to know Him.
Matt: Why is that to you?
Aquinas: Because to know something is to raise it to my intelligence. But if I love something, I stoop to it in order to become its servant. It’s like the relationship between the miser and his gold!
(At that point, he left us by going around the bend.)
Huxley: Very enlightening! We can know God by reading theology, and we can know God by loving Him: two very different modes of knowing.
Matt: I liked the analogy between the miser and his gold.
Huxley: I did too. It’s like the spectator at an art show. He loves the painting not for what its worth, but because of its beauty.
(We heard footsteps quickening behind us. It was Pascal. He was in a hurry to be somewhere, but we didn’t know where. He heard the last part of the sentence and quickly said something as he passed.)
Pascal: We have to be so careful not to make Truth an idol. Truth and Love can’t be put asunder. So, we can’t love or worship the Truth.
(He scurried by off the path and up the hill on the right with lots of energy and passion. We resumed our discussion.)
Huxley: Charity doesn’t remind you of Love, does it? I mean, in Myrtle Beach.
Matt: Yea, I was about to ask you about that. We use that word to mean ‘almsgiving’, mainly.
Huxley (amused): That’s got to be some kind of philological accident! Or, maybe it’s no accident. Maybe it’s a subtle expression of something.
Matt: Of what?
Huxley: Of a seed that’s very deeply planted is the heart of man: that sprouts into ignorance and blooms into darkness. But charity is really a kind of love, the highest form of love.
Matt: English does have a very inadequate vocabulary.
Huxley: Very much so! Especially with psychological or spiritual talk. I remember St. John from earlier. He is famous for saying, ‘God is Love’. And we repeat it glibly.
Matt: Or that we love our neighbor as our Self.
Huxley: Yes. In Myrtle Beach, what do you think pops in the mind of the average denizen there?
Matt: Probably all sorts of things. They could think of a sex-scene in a movie, or someone caring for someone downtrodden, because that person is a temple of the Holy Ghost.
Huxley: Or lots of other things. But when our vocabulary isn’t clear, neither is our thought. Unclear thought is what a divided human nature loves. But we don’t want division, because we don’t desire to be unregenerate in our being.
Matt: So, what is charity, the highest form of love? What are some of its characteristics?
(To be continued . . . )
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