(no subject)

[proximoception]

Then one of them, [which was] a lawyer, asked [him a question], tempting him, and saying,/Master, which [is] the great commandment in the law?/Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind./This is the first and great commandment./And the second [is] like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself./On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
Matthew 22:35-40

Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world./They are of the world: therefore speak they of the world, and the world heareth them./We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error./Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God./He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
1 John 4:4-8

Communism has been called a Christian heresy. Clearly it has been many other things as well, but historically this is hard to argue against. Among Western European intellectuals the moral side of Christianity outlasted the folk religion aspect and even the theology, blending with enthusiasm for the new (and present) Messiah, Progress. Christian morality is, depending on who you talk to, held to be either completely impossible or next to impossible to practice, and the various Communisms inherited this problem. Failures abound; and any partial success raises the question: can a society based on shared goods and responsibilities and understanding be limited to just a farm, just a nation, just the future? There is always a guilt in Communism, always more to be done for humankind that you aren't doing. And where there is guilt there is need for an authority to assuage it. And authorities like to keep themselves around and find ways to bring back more guilt to assuage. And there, typically, it all goes bad.

Yet any Christianity is itself a heresy, of prior Christianities, of the much-debated historical Jesus, of his own sources in Plato, the Pentateuch, Isaiah, and possibly Far Eastern traditions; and, as with any codified response to life, a heresy from common sense, from the teachings of reality. I think the counterturn restores something, and enough that though I reject Christianity (more politely as I get older) at every level, and certainly reject as much of Marxism, I cannot reject something in Communism.

In the excerpts above, from the New Testament writings, among contradictory lead-ins and trappings two rather astonishing formulas are ventured: that to love man is 'like unto' loving God; and that 'God is love.' Both of these can be interpreted Gnostically: loving man is like loving God because man is God... God is love so the love inside man is God, is the only God. The quote from the Epistle of (pseudo-)John also puts one in mind of the Lucretian universe, where all movement is based on attraction, and this is identified with love. But what's most important here is that both passages, though only in their climaces, are tossing out every other element of Jesus-ism but emphasis on love. Love is all of worship, all of the law, all of divinity itself. Conscientious Christians would hasten to reply that what this love is can only be understood in the context of the rest of the Biblical message, involving afterlives and sins and deaths by proxy and graces and a few thousand other implements. But the rest of us have loved and know what love is. And these phrases, when we hear or read them understanding but undefended, burn us at a depth unknown to superhuman, extrahuman, inhuman dreamings.

We know what love is but cannot easily describe it. There are a million different loves, of different shapes, intensities, durations, flavors; and yet, we feel, a point at which all overlap, firm enough to hang a word on. But that one must love everybody all the time entirely is a thought-murdering concept; it is logically unassailable but diffuses us past our limits. We aren't "one"; our self-unity, like our unity with others, is a wandering among recurrences, not a fixity. Even our dress of skin and walking-stick of habit can desert us in our many insensibilities. Our loves change places, change directions, change styles. And if it were true that there is a something that always abides, as well as a second something that always returns... there is always a third something ever new, and we cannot adequately distinguish them even in hindsight. And aren't there times when we love but don't know what we love? And times when some of us claim to love nothing at all?

And what is love's nature? We love ourselves, more or less; is love then identity, a seeking out and joining with lost parts of us? Or is other-love fundamentally different from self-love, a pressing ourselves up against what is unlike us, perhaps to take its shape, to become otherwise rather than be more ourselves?

Should love be separated from desire? Or from morality? What do people mean by distinguishing love from true love? Can one truly love only sexually? Only people? Or truly only the objects we take them for, the bounded false existences we write for them in our imagination?

I have answered most of these questions for myself, as surely you have, but recognize there was still room to make them. What I don't think there's room to question is that love is what more than anything directs, colors, sustains and *creates* society. It doesn't do this the way ripples spread from a pond-dipped toe, simply and gently and in every direction at equal pace. But it's still the priority and central principle, what we should do and what we're always doing somehow. It's what's common to us. It is the most accurate summary term for human action and aspiration; not our God but our worship. The structuring and protecting and furthering of this worship, including as it must the safety and prosperity of the worshippers, is the only proper role of government, of economy. And this is communism, a people acting together for a people's shared good. Even what's called capitalism is defended in these terms, when God is let go, when hate as anything but a manifestation of self-love is let go. Capitalism is the best attempt at communism to date. But let's keep looking.