Eros God Quotes

Nico, you can do this," Jason said. "It might be embarrassing, but it's for the scepter." Nico didn't look convinced. In fact he looked like he was going to be sick. But he squared his shoulders and nodded. "You're right. I- I'm not afraid of a love god." Favonius beamed. "Excellent! Would you like a snack before you go?

The story of Psyche finally made sense to him- why a mortal girl would be so afraid. Why would she risk breaking the rules to look the god of love in the face, because she feared he might be a monster. Psyche had been right. Cupid was a monster. Love was the most savage monster of all.

Poor Nico di Angelo. The god's voice was tinged with disappointment. Do you know what you want, much less what I want? My beloved Psyche risked everything in the name of Love. It was the only way for her to atone for her lack of faith. And you- what have you risked in my name? "I've been to Tartarus and back," Nico snarled. "You don't scare me." I scare you very, very much. Face me. Be honest.

The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being. Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves. It is an image, a foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us without a rival. It is even (well used) a preparation for that.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again. Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong. Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good. The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone. From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; 'I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work,' And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the dead, Who can speak for the dumb? All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. Defenseless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.

Gods, I wish the world was full of passive women.He thought for a moment longer, then scowled. On second thoughts, what a nightmare that'd be. It's the job of a man to fan the spark into flames, not quench it...

With good reason, love's messengers, Eros and Kama, are armed with bows and long-distance arrows. No being, god or mortal, can choose love. Love comes despite ourselves; and then, if we have not already done so, we have the task of becoming our selves so we may welcome love.

Relaxing me from head to feet Love masters me, the bitter sweet O'er thy limbs breathing; Yea, Eros now, the god born blind Sweeps my soul like the mountain wind Through the oaks seething.

Love is a great spirit. Everything spiritual is in between god and mortal.

You can't deny Eros. Eros wills trike, like lightning. Our human defenses are frail, ludicrous. Like plasterboard houses in a hurricane. Your triumph is in perfect submission. And the god of Eros will flow through you, as Lawrence says, in the 'perfect obliteration of blood consciousness.

God's love, and hence the love with which we come to love God, is eros and agape at once: a desire for the other that delights in the distance of otherness.

When two individuals love each other, they become free from the Leviathan, they create space it cannot control. Eros shall always triumph, as the true message of the gods, over all titanic creations.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” p.71 “Affection is taken as the image when God is represented as our Father; Eros, when Christ is represented as the Bridegroom of the Church.” p.78 “The little pockets of early Christians survived because they cared exclusively for the love of “the brethren” and stopped their ears to the opinion of the Pagan society all around them.” p.70 “Friendship is even, if you like, angelic. But man needs to be triply protected by humility if he is to eat the bread of angels without risk.” p.87

Do you know the German word, sehnsucht," he asked. "Yes," I answered. "The idea of an inconsolable longing for what we don't understand. You believe that longing is for God. Or heaven. And that we can confuse it with longing for someone or something else.

Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.

I covet him. His hot body over mine, sweaty and smelling like grass after the rain. I want to live that moment of Eros again and again and again. Never having enough of him, the masculine image of me, a piece of art, unique masterpiece of God, that is calmly sleeping beside me.

When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat. So in the lyric poets, love is something that assaults or invades the body of the lover to wrest control of it from him, a personal struggle of will and physique between the god and his victim. The poets describe this struggle from within a consciousness – perhaps new in the world – of the body as a unity of limbs, senses and self, amazed at its own vulnerability.

I was pondering the Greek ideals of love. Agape, of course, the highest love, the love that Gods feel. Then eros, romantic love; and philia, the love of friends; and storge, the love of family.

Yes, eros and agape are different, but the stifling of the former leads to a distortion of the latter.

if someone got to see the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality, but if he could see the divine Beauty itself in its one form? Do you think it would be a poor life for a human being to look there and to behold it by that which he ought, and to be with it? Or haven't you remembered that in that life alone, when he looks at Beauty in the only way what Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth no to images of virtue but to true virtue. The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.

I'd felt certain of his eros in the months before this unsterile kiss, but perhaps some small and niggling part of me had believed it pity or forbearance, that his medieval virtues compelled him to love me in my dying. But non! It was this wink of time when I whorled toward understanding, into and resting in the arms of love we shared--an uncommon and vulnerable combination of the four loves we'd traveled with and toward: agape, storge, philia, and now, unquestionably, eros. Our journey--riddled with both pain and joy--culminated in a kiss I would never have anticipated as the revelation it became, as the comfort and mastery of love.

The family's function is to repress Eros; to induce a false consciousness of security; to deny death by avoiding life; to cut off transcendence; to believe in God, not to experience the Void; to create, in short, one-dimensional man; to promote respect, conformity, obedience. . .

The Orphic symbols center on the singing god who lives to defeat death and who liberates nature, so that the constrained and constraining matter releases the beautiful and playful forms of animate and inanimate things. No longer striving and no longer desiring ‘for something still to be attained,’ they are free from fear and fetter – and thus free per se. The contemplation of Narcissus repels all other activity in the erotic surrender to beauty, inseparably uniting his own existence with nature.

Eros mumbled something. "I'm sorry?" said Aphrodite. "Whatwouldjesusdo." "What would Jesus do?" said Aphrodite. "Let me tell you something. Jesus was a very good boy. He would do exactly what his mother told him to." "But-" "Jesus was supposed to be a god, right?" said Aphrodite. "Ergo, he did revenge. All gods do revenge." "Not exactly. He said you should turn the other-" "What else does your Jesus say?" Aphrodite interrupted. "I thought you didn't care." "Let me see," said Aphrodite. "I remember. 'Honour thy father and mother'." "One, that wasn't Jesus. And two, it's hard to honour your father when there are so many candidates for who he might be." "That's not very nice," said Aphrodite. "You know who your father is. It's your cousin Ares." [...] "I wish the Virgin Mary was my mother," grumbled Eros eventually.

I must have pissed off some god. Zeus? Eros? Must be Poseidon. Shouldn't have peed in the Baltic Sea during my misspent youth.

...and Eros, fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them.

We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, to someone else. But as Mr. Erskine also pointed out, Eros with his bow and arrows is not the only blind god. Justitia is the other one. Clumsy blind gods with edged weapons: Justicia totes a sword, which, coupled with her blindfold, is a pretty good recipe for cutting yourself.

Women, porn assets, whether they know it or not, are objects They are whores. These whores deserve to be dominated and abused. And once men have had their way with them, these whores are to be discarded. Porn glorifies the cruelty and domination of sexual exploitation in the same way popular culture, as Jensen points out, glorifies the domination and cruelty of war. It is the same disease. It is the belief that “because I have the ability to use force and control to make others do as I please, I have the right to use this force and control.” It is the disease of corporate and imperial power. It extinguishes the sacred and the human to worship power, control, force, and pain. It replaces empathy, eros, and compassion with the illusion that we are gods. Porn is the glittering façade, like the casinos and resorts of Las Vegas, like the rest of the fantasy that is America, of a culture seduced by death.

I did believe, at first, that I wanted only justice. I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our motives when we're about to do something harmful, to someone else. But as Mr. Erskine also pointed out, Eros with his bow and arrows is not the only blind god. Justitia is the other one. Clumsy blind gods with edged weapons: Justitia totes a sword, which, coupled with her blindfold, is a pretty good recipe for cutting yourself.

While we might say that we have fallen in love or developed a crush on someone unsuitable, the Greeks tended to externalize the causes of such experiences. We fall in love, they were struck by an arrow shot by the god Eros, for example. A sophisticated language of psychology simply didn’t exist at the time that Euripides was writing, so things which are internalized for us were often launched upon a Greek from without.

Soul Mates and Twin Flames are not profane, they are a spiritual gift for each other to further their oneness with their soul, and the divine.

The sons of gods received a hero's training, divine gifts, and everlasting fame. Their daughters, like Helen, were prizes to be won.

We came upon a massacre at the Shrine of Prometheus. The humans were ripped to shreds. There was no one ieft alive to say what happened, said Eros.

I realized my mother had charm and verve. If I blew on her name, ROSE, the letters would shuffle around and come out as EROS, the god of love, winged but lame.

Baby, tonight, I am your god,” he said, squeezing her flesh. “And you’re the woman that’s going to bring Eros to his knees.

Gold-haired Phoebus borne by Koios's daughter after she joined with Kronos's son Zeus god of high clouds and high name. Artemis swore the great oath of the gods to Zeus: 'By your head, I shall always be a virgin untamed, hunting on peaks of solitary mountains. Come, grant me this grace!' So she spoke. Then the father of the blessed gods nodded his consent. Now gods and mortals call her by her thrilling eponym, The Virgin Deer Hunter. Eros, loosener of limbs, never comes near her

Then, having accomplished what he wanted to do, Eros decided to stop the futile battle. He recalled Phobos & Deimos from Mars & sent him Anteros & Himeros instead. And immediately, the God of Hate turned into the God of Passion.

The air of a deposed prince. falsehood as restorative-if they wouldnt do that if they wouldnt do all that they do. the body as traitor the body as foe. she's thinking about mythology,about reluctant daphne/ relentless apollo. if she could, as daphne did, cry out to mother earth for protection. and have every suitors find a laurel tree in his arms. people would still look up to her. misjudge her. misunderstand her. worship her evn[damn druids]. or carve someone elses name into her. 'oh sweetie dont take things so seriously: the world is your oister' just as she thot, the world is something slimy in a shell. he's so proud of his knavery. okay, she's been vainglorious about her sins too but shes tired of that. 'if you love someone you accept him as he is, but if you accept him as he is than you dont really love him because if you did youd want whats best for him and that usually means he should be better than he is. a meadowy susuration that she used to pretend to like. but not anymore. shes sick of 'huh?' too, that interjection of ignorance. 'love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.'-Feodor Dostoyevsky. she wants to kiss him. but just in some neutral way. some agape-not-eros way. like disciples kiss. or brave french freedom fighters. 'for i the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visisting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children'-Exodus 20:5 'its just stuff that i thot was interesting. its not, you know, a rorshach. its not like somebody could read this and figure me out.' 'transylvania has beautiful nights. ill just open the window and slip out of this cumbersome crucfix.' 'like the Torah said, dont just hate somebody in your heart; rebuke him.'" -Margaux with an X

Who was I to meddle in people’s love lives? Mine was a mess. My heart wanted the one thing it wasn’t allowed to have — love with someone besides my cupid-appointed soul mate. I was so screwed up, I made the dysfunctional relationships on Jerry Springer look wholesome.

And, talking about the God of Love, Eros, who had grown up from the cute angelic Cupid with his ten colourful darts & golden bow, now wanted to be the God of True Love. He locked himself in embrace with his lovely wife, Psyche, all day & night, since, as he put it, Psyche was the Soul, & he, Eros, was the Body. And thus, Body & Soul should always be together. And he had, accordingly, set his golden bow & quiver of colourful darts aside.

of the problem was that Chaos got a little creation-happy. It thought to its misty, gloomy self: Hey, Earth and Sky. That was fun! I wonder what else I can make. Soon it created all sorts of other problems—and by that I mean gods. Water collected out of the mist of Chaos, pooled in the deepest parts of the earth, and formed the first seas, which naturally developed a consciousness—the god Pontus. Then Chaos really went nuts and thought: I know! How about a dome like the sky, but at the bottom of the earth! That would be awesome! So another dome came into being beneath the earth, but it was dark and murky and generally not very nice, since it was always hidden from the light of the sky. This was Tartarus, the Pit of Evil; and as you can guess from the name, when he developed a godly personality, he didn't win any popularity contests. The problem was, both Pontus and Tartarus liked Gaea, which put some pressure on her relationship with Ouranos. A bunch of other primordial gods popped up, but if I tried to name them all we’d be here for weeks. Chaos and Tartarus had a kid together (don’t ask how; I don’t know) called Nyx, who was the embodiment of night. Then Nyx, somehow all by herself, had a daughter named Hemera, who was Day. Those two never got along because they were as different as…well, you know. According to some stories, Chaos also created Eros, the god of procreation... in other words, mommy gods and daddy gods having lots of little baby gods. Other stories claim Eros was the son of Aphrodite. We’ll get to her later. I don’t know which version is true, but I do know Gaea and Ouranos started having kids—with very mixed results. First, they had a batch of twelve—six girls and six boys called the Titans. These kids looked human, but they were much taller and more powerful. You’d figure twelve kids would be enough for anybody, right? I mean, with a family that big, you’ve basically got your own reality TV show. Plus, once the Titans were born, things started to go sour with Ouranos and Gaea’s marriage. Ouranos spent a lot more time hanging out in the sky. He didn't visit. He didn't help with the kids. Gaea got resentful. The two of them started fighting. As the kids grew older, Ouranos would yell at them and basically act like a horrible dad. A few times, Gaea and Ouranos tried to patch things up. Gaea decided maybe if they had another set of kids, it would bring them closer…. I know, right? Bad idea. She gave birth to triplets. The problem: these new kids defined the word UGLY. They were as big and strong as Titans, except hulking and brutish and in desperate need of a body wax. Worst of all, each kid had a single eye in the middle of his forehead. Talk about a face only a mother could love. Well, Gaea loved these guys. She named them the Elder Cyclopes, and eventually they would spawn a whole race of other, lesser Cyclopes. But that was much later. When Ouranos saw the Cyclops triplets, he freaked. “These cannot be my kids! They don’t even look like me!” “They are your children, you deadbeat!” Gaea screamed back. “Don’t you dare leave me to raise them on my own!

How had he believed that nameless, faceless orgasms would ever satisfy him? He’d spent his life worshipping at the altar of a silent, absent god who promised everything but delivered something fleeting that always left him wanting. He’d trafficked in lust masquerading as eros. But nothing had been further from reality. Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.

Affection and Eros were too obviously connected with our nerves, too obviously shared with the brutes. You could feel these tugging at your guts and fluttering in your diaphragm. But in Friendship—in that luminous, tranquil, rational world of relationships freely chosen—you got away from all that. This alone, of all the loves, seemed to raise you to the level of gods or angels. But then came Romanticism and "tearful comedy" and the "return to nature" and the exaltation of Sentiment; and in their train all that great wallow of emotion which, though often criticised, has lasted ever since. Finally, the exaltation of instinct, the dark gods in the blood; whose hierophants may be incapable of male friendship. Under this new dispensation all that had once commended this love now began to work against it. It had not tearful smiles and keepsakes and baby-talk enough to please the sentimentalists. There was not blood and guts enough about it to attract the primitivists. It looked thin and etiolated; a sort of vegetarian substitute for the more organic loves.

He crossed the bridge and followed a little path that ended at a Greek temple dedicated to Eros. The god himself lay face downward in a pile of old newspapers and bottles. From

Fairest of the deathless gods. This idea the Greeks had of him is best summed up not by a poet, but by a philosopher, Plato: "Love—Eros—makes his home in men's hearts, but not in every heart, for where there is hardness he departs. His greatest glory is that he cannot do wrong nor allow it; force never comes near him. For all men serve of him their own free will. And he whom Love touches not walks in darkness.

And, whilst talking about making love,it was only a short while ago that Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, got to know what love was. And once having experienced love-making, she had turned herself into the Goddess of Love-Making & could not stop making love. And thus, Eros yearned to be reborn as Cupid, the God of Love, so he too would be able to find out what love-making was all about, and become the God of Love-Making.

The soul’s unquenchable eros for the divine, of which Plotinus and Gregory of Nyssa and countless Christian contemplatives speak, Sufism’s ‘ishq or passionately adherent love for God, Jewish mysticism’s devekut, Hinduism’s bhakti, Sikhism’s pyaar—these are all names for the acute manifestation of a love that, in a more chronic and subtle form, underlies all knowledge, all openness of the mind to the truth of things. This is because, in God, the fullness of being is also a perfect act of infinite consciousness that, wholly possessing the truth of being in itself, forever finds its consummation in boundless delight. The Father knows his own essence perfectly in the mirror of the Logos and rejoices in the Spirit who is the “bond of love” or “bond of glory” in which divine being and divine consciousness are perfectly joined. God’s wujud is also his wijdan—his infinite being is infinite consciousness—in the unity of his wajd, the bliss of perfect enjoyment. The

Love rules the elements, Love rules the stars, Love rules the gods, his peers— his sway over them exceeds yours over your goats and sheep. All flowers are the works of Love all trees are his creations; through his power do rivers flow, and winds blow.

if someone got to see the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality, but if he could see the divine Beauty itself in its one form? Do you think it would be a poor life for a human being to look there and to behold it by that which he ought, and to be with it? Or haven't you remembered that in that life alone, when he looks at Beauty in the only way what Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth no to images of virtue (because he's in touch with no images) but to true virtue (because he is in touch with the true Beauty). The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.

And thus, the Titans & titanesses made love without passion And so did the Gods & Goddesses. They only had Longing[Pothos], Love[Eros] & Reciprocal Love[Anteros] between them, but no Passion. And this fact accounted for the unimaginative number of offspring that some of them had. And the unimaginative tendency of Gods & Goddesses to take aunts & uncles, sons & daughters & even granddads & grandmas to wife or to husband. So much so that some Gods & Goddesses preferred to produce offspring asexually, even without Love. As Hera begot Hephaestus.

But this little bow & its ten harmless darts, once in the hands of the Godling, became a magic bow & a lethal weapon, since the Godling was Eros reborn. And its ten darts which were of the seven colours of the rainbow or spectrum, plus white, black & grey, when shot at Gods, Goddesses, Nymphs, Mortals & any others, could inspire the same feelings of love, hate & confusion as Aphrodite used to inspire in others with her girdle. As, indeed, as soon as Cupid was born, the Goddess of Love had lost her magic girdle. Since a Goddess of Love, who was already in her seventies, had no more use for such toys.

Science and psychotherapy have also done much already to liberate us from the prison of isolation from nature in which we were supposed to renounce Eros, despise the physical organism, and rest all our hopes in a supernatural world [...]. This liberation is, in other words, a very partial affair even for the small minority which has fully understood and accepted it. It leaves us still as strangers in the cosmos-without the judgment of God but without his love, without the terrors of Hell but without the hope of Heaven, without many of the physical agonies of pre-scientific times but without the sense that human life has any meaning.

All the intrigues of the Gods & Goddesses were the works of Eros, of course. And as the Gods & Goddesses relaxed & lay limp, after the union of love, Love himself wished that he could relax & lay limp too. But he could not, since he was at odds with himself. He tried to figure out what went wrong & concluded that it all went wrong at the beginning, with the Big Bang. It was those aspects of himself, Eros[Love], Anteros[Mutual Love] & Pothos[Longing], which first united the Sky & the Earth in the primordial egg in the union of love. But it was Himeros who uncoupled them as Passion was fickle & capricious. And Chaos, naturally, followed Passion.

It’s not God I want, it’s someone in skin!" a child once cried out to his mother. With an almost unbearable honesty, he expressed the extravagant—and even sacrilegious—nature of parent-child love. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me," God boomed in the desert. But parents and children do have a way of filling the universe with each other.

Eros, honoured without reservation and obeyed unconditionally, becomes a demon. And this is just how he claims to be honoured and obeyed. Divinely indifferent to our selfishness, he is also demoniacally rebellious to every claim of God or Man that would oppose him. Hence as the poet says: People in love cannot be moved by kindness, And opposition makes them feel like martyrs.

Eros, Lord Phanes, Protogonus,         god of love, of Chaos, Gaea, and Tartarus,                 be merciful: bless these remains of a bear which Hadrian slew         on His steed and sacrifices for You; and in consideration of His noble worth true Thy shaft through the smooth purpled loins of that One divine Youth whom He shall love and worship in Truth— forever!   ~ Hadrian, ca. 125 CE

Fairest of the deathless gods. This idea the Greeks had of him is best summed up not by a poet, but by a philosopher, Plato: "Love—Eros—makes his home in men's hearts, but not in every heart, for where there is hardness he departs. His greatest glory is that he cannot do wrong nor allow it; force never comes near him. For all men serve of him their own free will. And he whom Love touches not walks in darkness.

Just as the Triune God lives as an endless momentum of attraction and joy, so God makes himself available not as an object for dispassionate scrutiny but through an overture of enticement, through which by the Spirit's agency we are made to long for God's presence, indeed, thirst for God. God "attracts our attention" by the outgoing Spirit, enabling us to respond, catching us up into the divine life. Indeed, can we not say that to experience the allure of God is nothing other than to experience the Spirit reconciling us to the Father through the Son and thus reordering our desires? No wedge need be driven between agape and eros provided the latter is not allowed to introduce notions of subsuming the "other" under manipulative restraint; indeed, as David Bentley Hart puts it, God's love, and hence the love with which we come to love God, is "eros and agape at once: a desire for the other that delights in the distance of otherness." As far as created beauty is concerned, beauty in the world that glorifies this God will also evoke desire--a yearning to explore and take pleasure in whatever is beautiful. There need be no shame in this provided our delight is delight in the other as other, and as long as we regularly recall that our love for God is the cantus firmus that enables all other desires to flourish.

I really should simplify my existence. How much trouble is a person required to have? I mean, is it an assignment I have to carry out? It can’t be, because the only good I ever knew of was done by people when they were happy. But to tell you the truth, Kayo, since you are the kind of guy who will understand it, my pride has always been hurt by my not being able to give an account of myself and always being manipulated. Reality comes from giving an account of yourself, and that’s the worst of being helpless. Oh, I don’t mean like the swimmer on the sea or the child on the grass, which is the innocent being in the great hand of Creation, but you can’t lie down so innocent on objects made by man,” I said to him. “In the world of nature you can trust, but in the world of artifacts you must beware. There you must know, and you can’t keep so many things on your mind and be happy. ‘Look on my works ye mighty and despair!’ Well, never mind about Ozymandias now being just trunkless legs; in his day the humble had to live in his shadow, and so do we live under shadow, with acts of faith in functioning of inventions, as up in the stratosphere, down in the subway, crossing bridges, going through tunnels, rising and falling in elevators where our safety is given in keeping. Things done by man which overshadow us. And this is true also of meat on the table, heat in the pipes, print on the paper, sounds in the air, so that all matters are alike, of the same weight, of the same rank, the caldron of God’s wrath on page one and Wieboldt’s sale on page two. It is all external and the same. Well, then what makes your existence necessary, as it should be? These technical achievements which try to make you exist in their way?” Kayo said, not much surprised by this, “What you are talking about is moha—a Navajo word, and also Sanskrit, meaning opposition of the finite. It is the Bronx cheer of the conditioning forces. Love is the only answer to moha, being infinite. I mean all the forms of love, eros, agape, libido, philia, and ecstasy. They are always the same but sometimes one quality dominates and sometimes another.

In love, in other words, those phases are present, in its content, which we cited as the fundamental essence of the absolute Spirit: the reconciled return out of another into self. By being the other in which the spirit remains communing with itself, this other can only be spiritual over again, a spiritual personality. The true essence of love consists in giving up the consciousness of oneself, forgetting oneself in another self, yet in this surrender and oblivion having and possessing oneself alone. This reconciliation of the spirit with itself and the completion of itself to a totality is the Absolute, yet not, as may be supposed, in the sense that the Absolute as a purely singular and therefore finite subject coincides with itself in another finite subject; on the contrary, the content of the subjectivity which reconciles itself with itself in another is here the Absolute itself: the Spirit which only in another spirit is the knowing and willing of itself as the Absolute and has the satisfaction of this knowledge. In love, on the contrary, the spirit’s opposite is not nature but itself a spiritual consciousness, another person, and the spirit is therefore realized for itself in what it itself owns, in its very own element. So in this affirmative satisfaction and blissful reality at rest in itself, love is the ideal but purely spiritual beauty which on account of its inwardness can also be expressed only in and as the deep feeling of the heart. For the spirit which is present to itself and immediately sure of itself in [another] spirit, and therefore has the spiritual itself as the material and ground of its existence, is in itself, is depth of feeling, and, more precisely, is the spiritual depth of love. (α) God is love and therefore his deepest essence too is to be apprehended and represented in this form adequate to art in Christ. But Christ is divine love; as its object, what is manifest is on the one hand God himself in his invisible essence, and, on the other, mankind which is to be redeemed; and thus what then comes into appearance in Christ is less the absorption of one person in another limited person than the Idea of love in its universality, the Absolute, the spirit of truth in the element and form of feeling. With this universality of love’s object, love’s expression is also universalized, with the result that the subjective concentration of heart and soul does not become the chief thing in that expression – just as, even in the case of the Greeks, what is emphasized, although in a totally different context, in Venus Urania[8] and the old Titanic deity, Eros, is the universal Idea and not the subjective element, i.e. individual shape and feeling. Only when Christ is conceived in the portrayals of romantic art as more than an individual subject, immersed in himself, does the expression of love become conspicuous in the form of subjective deep feeling, always elevated and borne, however, by the universality of its content.