The Art of Loving in Uncertain Times

In January, I emerged from the campus library with a stack of books, titles I had written in the back of the notebook I’d been keeping in the winter months, because they had been referenced in other works of interest at the time.  One of these was Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving. I found its opening half rich and interesting and then I was interrupted by other necessities, a major writing project, and the beginning of the spring semester.  Three months passed, and then came COVID-19 school closures and the governor’s stay-at-home orders. I cleaned, among other things, my nightstand, and found, hidden behind and beneath a collection of numerous other books and notebooks and magazines, this slim volume. Suddenly it seemed timely.

When Fromm published The Art of Loving, in 1956, he was fifty-six years old and a prominent psychoanalyst living in Mexico City after fleeing Nazi Germany, first for the United States. He had already published, to wide acclaim: Escape From Freedom, Man For Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, and The Sane Society. I have yet to read these. All seem equally apropos to the moment at hand.

Certain questions emerge now: how do we care for one another? Certain truths about purpose tend to make themselves known when others fall away. Among those separated by lockdown, relationships may be alternately strained by distance and more deeply and poignantly appreciated. For members of the same household living together, a new closeness may emerge, along with a surfacing of irritation and frustration. The heart hopes for renewal and the heart sickens with separation.

Fromm makes it clear that the casual reader looking for a simple tutorial in loving well will be disappointed, and he makes his thesis clear at the outset: “Love is not a sentiment that can be easily indulged in by anyone, regardless of the level of maturity reached by him.” He goes on to explain that love is unattainable without true humility, courage, faith, and discipline.

The book opens with an epilogue from Paracelsus:

“He who knows nothing, loves nothing . . . the more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love  . .  . anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as the strawberries knows nothing about grapes.”

A central question opens the book: “Is love an art?” A central premise is that it is, and the purpose is to explore how understand and practice towards mastery, and to cultivate an awareness of the pitfalls and barriers to the development of healthy practice. Modern society, as Fromm sees it, is ripe with these barriers.

Chief among these are principles of capitalism which pervade modern Western society, and which are antithetical to love in all of its forms: brotherly (love between equals), maternal (love for the helpless), divine (love for God), and erotic (desire for deep union with another soul). The last of these, unsurprisingly, is the most fraught with illusion and pitfalls. Fromm highlights the problem with the popular “market model” of love that pervades Western culture, which dictates that “two persons fall in love when they believe they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values.”  The practicality of such a model is problematic because it is egocentric and because it tends to exclude possibilities for transcendence. When it comes to popular psychology of relationship, Fromm finds fault in the "teamwork" model of partnership, which is based in corporate models favored by capitalist societies, and which reduces the individual to a mere means to an end while failing to recognize the divinity of each "partner" as an end in themselves, while also tending to forestall any chances of transcendence within this limited framework. The idea of “falling” is also problematic because it is oppositional to the posture of mature love, which is standing in active and focused attention, with full concentration on loving. Falling is wild, passive, and unpredictable; standing is done with calm intensity, with the fully active engagement of an individual’s highest potential, and with constancy.

Considering the art of such a stance, Fromm orders his study of loving into two parts: theory and practice.  Mastery of both, fused in to one, epitomizes the mastery of any art. These combine with a third essential factor, namely that “the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern.”

William Blake, Elohim Creating Adam

His theory of love begins with a theory of man. A defining characteristic of man, in Fromm’s view, is his original “awareness of aloneness and separateness, of his helplessness before the faces of nature and of society.” It is recognition of this state that Fromm recognizes as the original pain of humanity. The sudden shame felt by Adam and Eve, as Fromm sees it, was precisely the result of this awareness. It is appropriate that the story of humanity in the Christian tradition begins here. The recognition of one’s separateness is the original source of shame, and also of guilt and anxiety; reunion may come only through the transcendence of deep and mature love (be this brotherly, maternal, or erotic — any of which, in its pure form will bring deep and lasting union with all other beings and with God).

It’s an old question: how to overcome the prison of alienation in favor of at-one-ment. Various cultures before today’s Western (and increasingly global) one have had various ways of connecting to nature and to one another. Primitive societies had various seasonal rituals by which communal orgiastic states were achieved. These were often violent and destructive in nature, but undoubtedly provided a form of transcendence. In order to attain more lasting and life-giving forms of transcendence, Biblical man was challenged to set aside these practices for the purpose of graduating towards a budding understanding of a model of mature love (hence all of the Old Testament admonishment of sex-and-religion practices, which people were constantly drawn back into for reasons that are as understandable as the pull of addiction). Man’s craving for transcendence beyond his own separateness is so deep and relentless that it will either find resolution or fuel individual or communal pathologies. There is no in-between.

In the Christian tradition, the coming of Christ represents this call to graduate toward a more mature relationship with God, an experience of divine love that is neither an all-protecting mother or a punishing father. In reminding his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount, “You are the salt and the light,” Jesus calls people to recognize this deep union with creation, not with passive poses of submission or supplication, but as active participants in creation.

We would do well to remember this today, particularly when uncertain circumstances of global unrest tend to cause such desperate anxiety that people often cling to false senses of certainty which miss the point, prevent growth, and silence human agency. These are wild optimism (everything will be fine, just wait) and dire pessimism (everything is ending, just wait). Both are passive. The alternative is loving faith, and as many wise thinkers have pointed out, the opposite of faith is not doubt; the opposite of faith is certainty. In uncertain times, we are called to love. We are reminded that our vulnerability is not our own, but one that is shared by all other humans.  The addictions, compulsions, depressions, and widespread anxieties that plague so many of us modern society are symptoms of our failure to know and understand how to be -- which is as students of this art. In a world where so many activities are routinized, prefabricated, under constant surveillance, “how should a man . . . not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living?”

As I am finishing these notes, I step outside for an afternoon walk and on it I listen to Krista Tippet’s On Being Interview with Rebecca Solnit, author of many volumes, including one published in the wake of the 2016 election, called Hope in the Dark. In it, Solnit speaks of the need for better metaphors and truer stories. The ones we tend to be most familiar with, when it comes to crisis moments like this one, have to do with falling apart, and the fragility of human beings. But what is also true is the “joy of disaster” which comes from the escape from separateness, from the natural coming-together in the midst of crisis moments, a tendency that points towards quite another story: one of human nature’s remarkable capacities to embody the call to be the salt and the light of the world, to participate in the ever-renewing spirit of creation which is not only his ancestry and his birthright, but the healing hand for his original pain, and it is made of the same substance as his own, raised in celebration, submission, awe, and wonder — all opposites to certainty, and each fundamental to faith — and art, and love.