A general principle we can take from Freud is that love sparks imagination
into extraordinary state. Being “in love” is like being
“in imagination.” The literal concerns of everyday life,
yesterday such a preoccupation, now practically disappear in the
rush of love’s daydreams. Concrete reality recedes as the
imaginal world settles in. Thus, the “divine madness”
of love is akin to the mania of paranoia and other dissociations.
Does this mean that we need to be cured of this madness? Robert
Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy says that there is only one
cure for the melancholic sickness of love: enter into it with abandon.
Some authors today argue that romantic love is such an illusion
that we need to distrust it and keep our wits about us so that we
are not led astray. But warnings like this betray distrust of the
soul. We may need to be cured by love of our attachment to life
without fantasy. Maybe one function of love is to cure us of an
anemic imagination, a life emptied of romantic attachment and abandoned
to reason.
Love releases us into the realm of divine imagination, where the
soul is expanded and reminded of its unearthly cravings and needs.
We think that when a lover inflates his loved one he is failing
to acknowledge her flaws - “love is blind.” But it may
be the other way around. Love allows a person to see the true angelic
nature of another person, the halp, the aureole of divinity. Certainly
from the perspective of ordinary life this is madness and illusion.
But if we let loose our hold on philosophies and psychologies of
enlightenment and reason, we might learn to appreciate the perspective
of eternity that enters life as madness, Plato’s divine frenzy.
Love brings consciousness closer to the dream state. In that sense,
it may reveal more than it distorts, as a dream reveals - poetically,
suggestively, and, admittedly, obscurely. If we were to appreciate
truly the Platonic theory of love, we might also learn to see other
forms of madness, such as paranoia and addiction, as evidence of
the soul's reaching toward its proper yearnings. Platoninc love
is not love without sex. It is love that finds in the body and in
the human relationship a route toward eternity. In his book on love,
Convivium - his answer to Plato’s Symposium - Ficino, who
is credited with coining the phrase “Platonic love,”
says concisely, “The soul is partly in eternity and partly
in time.” Love straddles these two dimensions, opening a way
to live in both simultaneously. But incursions of eternity into
life are usually unsettling, for they disturb our plans and shake
the tranquility we have achieved with earthly reason.
In order to appreciate the mystery of love, we have to give up the
idea that love is a psychological problem and that with enough reading
and guidance we can finally do it right, without illusion and folly.
We do not care for the soul by shrinking it down to reasonable size.
Our era’s preoccupation with mental hygiene encourages us
to think of all forms of mania as disease. But Plato’s divine
madness is not pathological in our hygienic sense, but more an opening
into eternity. It is a relief from the stringent limits of pragmatic,
sanitized life. It is a door that opens out from human reason into
divine mystery.
