We think of love as a personal experience, but for our ancestors it was a force that was independent of human minds. Perhaps it’s time we embraced the old thinking, writes Mark Vernon

In the early years of the Renaissance, Dante Alighieri concluded his masterpiece The Divine Comedy with a vision of cosmic love. After seeing the worst in hell, and preparing for the best in purgatory, he united with the celestial dynamism that is “the Love which moves the sun and the other stars”.

Famous words. Every Italian schoolchild knows them and countless other people wonder at them too. Modern folk might be inclined to read the lines metaphorically, as an expression of Dante’s moment of ecstasy; as if he’d undergone the mother of all psychedelic trips. But in fact something less ephemeral, more fundamental was being expressed. For Dante and his contemporaries, love was not primarily a feeling or a practical duty, experienced at a personal level, and sometimes called compassion or charity. It was a universal force and a matter for knowledge, integral to the warp and weft of reality.

Shakespeare, writing 300 years later, could still describe love as independent of human minds, though intimately informing them. Sonnet 116 calls love celestial and star-like, unalterable and unbending; “Love’s not Time’s fool” precisely because it is not affected by creaturely imperfections. “O no! it is an ever-fixed mark | That looks on tempests and is never shaken.”

But Shakespeare’s century was probably the last in which love could be unquestioningly linked to eternity. The scientific revolution has blossomed since, and love has been demoted. Physicists since Newton have developed sophisticated understandings of the universe that draw on impersonal processes, not networks of affinity. Biologists since Darwin have repeatedly told us that love is merely a by-product of natural selection; love’s lovely feelings are a delusion, fooling breeding adults to live not for themselves, but for their offspring and, thereby, for the species.

Long gone is love as divine participation, it seems. As Alfred, Lord Tennyson lamented in the lines of “In Memoriam”: love had been “creation’s final law”; but nature, red in tooth and claw, “shrieked against” this creed. And we wonder at poor mental health, darkness in culture and politics, and excessive, addictive consumption.

And yet, love is still celebrated not only for its romantic but redemptive power in song lyrics, imagery and plot lines. Love is all you need; it lifts us higher; it is that which survives us. The older spirit somehow persists. And I suspect that developmental psychology illuminates why and how.

Initiated by the research of figures like Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget, there has emerged an account of psychological maturation across the lifespan of human individuals that forms a basic pattern: our awareness of love expands as we move through phases of crisis and awakening.

Consider a newborn who doesn’t yet know the difference between itself and others. We can imagine the nursling, cradled in loving arms, dwelling in a dream of undifferentiated unity. However, sooner or later the infant starts to have experiences that suggest its being is not the only being in the cosmos. Food and comfort fail to appear as if by magic. Sustenance comes from another, who moreover seeks something in return: a confirmatory gurgle or kick. The realisation will be shocking, which is why babies, at least on occasion, refuse to be comforted. However, in time, if helped through the distress with the arts of consoling and holding, a wider perception breaks through. Relationship is available. Love is not just with self, but another. The world has grown as the child has suffered and developed.

The path does not end there. Another crisis will be provoked, often when the newfound twosome is interrupted by the presence of a third – perhaps a second parent or sibling. Again, if this unwanted discovery is borne well enough, another previously unimagined possibility comes into view. There are further lovely people and things as well.

Three dimensional love is more tremendous, not only because the world widens again, but also because now the child can feel the presence of a love that is independent of, though connected to, itself – between its parents, say. A youngster who can trust the presence of this external love, and so be vulnerably curious about it, will develop an ability to contemplate it, as they look on, as if from outside. Turned back by the child towards itself, this type of awareness, in time, forms the basis for reflective self-consciousness. That is another remarkable cognitive novelty, fostered by love.

Development does not stop there. Further stages are marked by additional anxieties and crises followed by growth and, with luck, a cognitive flexibility that can move backwards and forwards across these varieties of love. A repertoire of self-love, love of others and love for the unknown equips the individual for an interdependent life. And then, another element might be spotted.

A person might conclude that there always was more love, unconditionally awaiting recognition. The repeated experiences of crisis, survival and expansion can suggest that there is a field of love within the fabric of being into which everyone is born and grows. This undying presence of love exceeds human origins and even the created order – a perception that settles with the ability to let go and participate selflessly with it.

Someone might conclude that love is not only a personal experience but a pre-existing feature of reality, which they have come to know via their struggles and discoveries. They might feel they have gained a clue about the Love that moves the sun and the other stars, should they come to read Dante.

I work as a psychotherapist and I increasingly feel that finding a way of reconnecting with the benign presence that is within us and beyond us, behind us and before us, is crucial for any resilient sense that life’s trials can be embraced. As Carl Jung concluded: the only genuine cure for neurosis is to outgrow the anxiety by relating more actively to this more, which he called “the approach to the numinous”.

Culturally, such a realisation seems increasingly necessary, as well. And who knows: maybe the apparently mounting crises that fill the news will tip us back towards an appreciation of the glorious participation that our forebears knew, not as a deluded fantasy, but as fundamental and essential; a worldview that they trusted to be true.

This article appears in Idler #97.

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