Athena was not her real name, but it would have suited her. As I leaned over to help her with an essay in our High School English class, I tried to disguise how delirious the scent of her perfume made me.
“Focus, Ellett,” I told myself. Taking her pencil, I scratched out ways of reconstructing Athena’s sentences before she offered me an immortal line of her own:
“Kent, you are so nice,” she said.
A more confident man would have returned the compliment, or sensed the opening and actually asked if “nice” could get him a date. Instead, I remember wondering why I was so terrified of the things I wanted most.
Our desires frighten us for many reasons. Chief among them is the fear they can never be satisfied. I have a friend who is afraid to go to England because he fears that going there will ruin his idealized version chivalric myth. We fear that actually going out with Athena will reveal that she is not the intoxicating goddess for which our hearts pounded in High school. Even as a teen, I sensed what Evelyn Waugh knows: “our crushes are merely hints and symbols” of a kind of love that often eludes us. We want to be known deeply as well as to be a source of someone else’s delight. We want to share freely, deeply and yet find in another person a source of continual discovery.
Our thirst for this intimate union is infinite; the problem is that people are not. So, most of us grow frustrated with our deep longings as long as we try to satisfy them with people—even the very best people. But does that mean that our inner romantic is a liar? Is romantic aspiration just hormones playing tricks on us?
I don’t think so. Most people don’t stand in the British Museum before the statue of the Muse Thalia or gazing upon Rosetti’s painting of Dante’s Beatrice the way some watch a porn star dance. The sense of longing which these profound works of art awaken in us is related to but are not primarily about that kind of eroticism. Dante’s fascination with the dazzling beauty of Beatrice, for instance, began when he was but a 9-year-old pre-pubescent boy. It simply will not do to dismiss Dante’s crush as sexual fantasy. Even Rosetti, whose rendering of Beatrice is perhaps subject to the criticism of being too sensual, is on to something much more than mere biochemistry.
One testimony to the power of this longing for the transcendent is its persistence. No matter how many break-ups we endure—no matter how boring this world of loneliness can become, we can’t quite extinguish this longing.
The Philosopher-poet Samuel Coleridge couldn’t let it go. At times his romantic obsession is somewhat embarrassing. He even developed the literary figure of Asra--to talk about the beauty of the infinite in his rather troubled relationships with women. In his poem, “To Asra,” he lauds a love that somehow always continues to grow, expanding his soul. Yet, the last line of the poem surprises the naïve reader who might think the poem is just about a simple love affair. It asks Asra’s age, and Coleridge tells us, “eternity.”
Coleridge seems to be following the Apostle Paul’s own literary strategy when he attempts to redirect our relational longings toward God. In Ephesians 5 the Apostle describes the intimacy of the ideal union between husband and a wife before surprisingly punching us: “I’m talking about Christ and the church.” Paul is pointing to our need for a spiritual lover. G.K Chesterton rather famously remarked that every man who steps “into a brothel is searching for God.” While it’s infinitely more benign, the same could be said of every young woman who searches for Prince Charming in her next boyfriend.
No parent will simply let their daughter go unwarned about searching for the infinite in the finite, or as an angel once said searching for the living among the dead. For the same reason it will never suffice in the face of Beatrice to say, “she has a certain, je ne sais quoi--”a certain, secular "I-don't-know-what” quality about her. For the fact is that we do know something of the kind of infinite desire she awakens in us, and we do know that when we actually get to know the person who evokes this mystery that this person is not, in herself, what we thought we were looking for.
Augustine learned that our longing for beauty cannot be satisfied by merely having relationships with human beings. He gave this approach the old college try, but he kept crashing into a sense of emptiness until he found the fulfillment in the infinite beauty of God. It was only then that all his human loves became energized by the experience of real union.
This is all, perhaps, a round-about way of saying that our romantic longings are not foolish. To borrow Wordsworth’s phrase they are real “intimations of immortality.” Every schoolboy who inwardly trembles at the sight of a Beatrice or an Asra or an Athena stands in a long line of passionate wisdom that knows that in taking up Athena’s pencil I was not just enjoying being close to a girl. My attraction to Athena was more than biochemistry. What I sensed in that moment was something mysteriously other. What exactly was it that seemed so different about her? I can’t say. My words fail. But I do know that what it was, has ever since caused my heart to ache for another world.
