Love, Ecstatic Love

A misconception when writing about love is the premise that there exists only one kind of love. This is a failure of the English language inherited from Latin.

In Greek, there are different manifestations of love:

ἀγάπη: self-emptying, unconditional, divine love

ἔρως: transcendent unity, desire, the folding of two into one

φιλία: reciprocal goodwill, mutual flourishing, shared virtue

στοργή: natural love, that of parents, the instinctual and quiet binding force

Latin only had two words for love, amor and caritas. Amor the more general word, caritas more closely representing divine and self-emptying love.

In English, we only have the single word 'love', and we make up for this deficiency through a slurry of adjectives. This is not equivalent because we lost the metaphysical and cultural texture that came with the Greek words.

We shall survive by using adjectives, however painful.

The only thing I feel in this moment is love, ecstatic love.

The suspension of 'me' and 'them', the space between God and humanity, the collapse of beast and man, the inheritance of the world's suffering while only feeling joy and thinking, somehow and beyond reason, that "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

Love. So much love for both man and beast, for they all are the same. They carry the logos within them, all beings manifested from God's necessity. The only response from the wonder of God's creations is the gravitational pull to fall to my knees and tremble in awe. The power of unmediated reception of the beauty of this world.

Beauty is an incredible thing when it manages to pierce the discursive intelligence. The moment its light shines through the cracks of our husk, we are seized and captivated by this feeling of transcendence. This is why watching a musician who seems possessed by something higher, like Hiromi, suspends the mechanism of time.

This world is beautiful, its inhabitants are beautiful, and this very consciousness is a beautiful phenomenon. It takes considerable effort from me to step away from the bask of transcendent awe to continue writing this note.

Plotinus described beauty as that which has perfect proportions, which is to say each part is perfect so the sum is perfect. Among our world is that of prefect proportions. All laws that necessarily structure our universe align in perfect coherence with one another, the result of God saying "let there be light." The logos is God's love manifested. The universe is balanced perfectly on the edge between chaos and control, and it perfectly moves towards the heat death. This is perfection at the cosmic scale, which is why geometry is both art and math.

I feel ecstatic love towards all living things in this world because they descend from the logos, the divine order and structuring of this world. In a likened sense, I feel ecstatic love for entropy, sublimation, and other processes. All I wish for in this moment is to fall onto my knees and surrender to the logos itself.

Ecstatic love, or the joyful surrender to the logos. The reception of the remnants of God's love. In other words, all that is necessary from the logos is beautiful. Transcendentally, ecstatically, beautiful.