Love
Article
Love is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 10, 2023 and September 20, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “France. Wine. Love. And the final one is Freedom”; “Added to these four were three virtues unique to Christianity, believed to be revelations from God that mankind would not identify if left to their own devices. These three are faith, hope, and love”. It most often appears alongside A Poet in Paradise, Adam, Agrippa d’Aubigné.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: June 10, 2023
- Last seen: September 20, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- A Poet in Paradise (1 shared issues)
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- Adam (1 shared issues)
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- Agrippa d’Aubigné (1 shared issues)
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- Alfred (1 shared issues)
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- Alfred Adler (1 shared issues)
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- Art Spiegelman (1 shared issues)
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- Auschwitz-Birkenau (1 shared issues)
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- Ballad (1 shared issues)
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- Bastille (1 shared issues)
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- Bastille (1 shared issues)
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- Berlin Conservatory (1 shared issues)
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- Buddhism (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
The apathetic stage was omnipresent in the camp, and Frankl clearly equates it with loss of the will to live. He attributes his own survival of this stage to two main anchors that occupied his mind and held him strongly tied to sanity and reality. One of them was love, and specifically constant thoughts of his wife, Tilly Grosser, who was taken to a women's camp nearby. These are probably the most poetic instances in this most pragmatic book — Frankl's recollections of the times he’s thinking about her. They are usually preceded by him discerning some sliver of beauty in the monotone camp life. He never saw his wife again.
Once, an elderly practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how could I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” “Oh,” he said, “for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!”. Whereupon I replied, “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering — to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.” He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of sacrifice.
Dear reader, please imagine a young and talented man in his twenties. He is, as they often are, a poet, a fighter, a lover. His name is Guillaume du Vintrais. He was born in 1553, and at the tender age of seventeen he moved from Gascony to Paris, in order to live his life to the fullest. He was immediately in love with the city, and the city returned the affection. He wrote venomous epigrams, he fought in duels, he raked his way through Paris’ beau monde. One of his friends was young Henry of Navarre, the future king Henry IV. Another was Agrippa d'Aubigné, a famous poet in his own right. His book of one hundred sonnets, called “Wicked Songs of Guillaume du Vintrais”, has such titles as “Burgundy wine”, “The Kindest of Valois”, “Elixir of Hekate”, “A Poet in Paradise”, “Pigeon post” and so on. A lot of his poems are dedicated to a mysterious “Marchioness L.”; those, as you can imagine, are more romantic ones. Generally, his poetry has quite a specific combination of debauchery, blasphemy, camaraderie, romanticism and philosophy that can be described as “d’Artagnan meets François Villon”.
Beneath that, not all that well hidden, the Ballad is Chesterton’s love song to conservatism as he understands it. In it Chesterton weaves the ideas that he has been writing about all his life and creates a cohesive narrative theme. The Ballad is like a melody that all his other works, fiction and nonfiction, dance to. Chesterton wrote many books, yet none seemed to stand higher than the others in terms of quality or popularity. Because of this he has been called “the master without a masterpiece” (though, appropriately, the quote itself seems legendary: I have found it referenced everywhere but I cannot find the source). I disagree: the Ballad of the White Horse is his masterpiece. It is Chesterton boiled down to his essence. Within it we find two core themes of Chesterton’s body of work: hope in defiance of fate, and the eternal revolution.
Critics of virtue ethics will often question how you can know what virtues the virtue ethicist should cultivate. In Catholic theology there is no such problem, as they have seven official virtues specified. Four of these virtues they inherited from Greek philosophy and they represent the practical and straightforward virtues that any rational man is likely to find worthwhile: prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude. Added to these four were three virtues unique to Christianity, believed to be revelations from God that mankind would not identify if left to their own devices. These three are faith, hope, and love.
Love is fairly easy to comprehend, though you could write volumes on its nuances as a virtue. Faith is more controversial, but still graspable: just as we have faith that the plane won’t crash when we take a long flight, Christians have faith in God’s promises. They hold to their belief, in the face of doubt. Hope, however, is harder to grok..