In the religious lore of India there is a formulation of five degrees of love through which a worshiper is increased in the service and knowledge of his God-which is to say, in the Indian sense, in the realization of his own identity with that Being of all beings who in the beginning said “I” and then realized, “I am all this world!”

The first degree of such love is of servant to master: “0 Lord, you are the Master; I am thy servant. Command, and I shall obey!” This, according to the Indian teaching, is the appropriate spiritual attitude for most worshipers of divinities, no matter where in the world.

The second order of love, then, is that of friend to friend, which in the Christian tradition is typified in the relationship of Jesus and his apostles. They were friends. They could discuss and even argue questions. But such a love implies a deeper readiness of understanding, a higher spiritual development than the first. In the Hindu scriptures it is represented in the great conversation of the Bhagavad Gita between the Pandava prince Arjuna and his divine charioteer, the Lord Krishna.

The next, or third, degree of love is that of parents for children, which in the Christian world is represented in the image of the Christmas Crib. One is here cultivating in one’s heart the inward divine child of one’s own awakened spiritual life in the sense of the mystic

Meister Eckhart’s words when he said to his congregation: “It is more worth to God his being brought forth spiritually in the individual virgin or good soul than that he was born of Mary bodily.” And again: “God’s ultimate purpose is birth. He is not content until he brings his Son to birth in us.” In Hinduism, it is popular worship of the naughty little “butter thief,” Krishna the infant among the cowherds by whom he was reared, that this theme is most charmingly illustrated. And in the modern period there is the instance of the troubled woman already mentioned, supra, p. 98, who came to the Indian saint and sage Rama- krishna, saying, “O Master, I do not find that I love God.” And he asked, “Is there nothing, then, that you love?” To which she answered, “My little nephew.” And he said to her, “There is your love and service to God, in your love and service to that child.”

The fourth degree of love is that of spouses for each other. The Catholic nun wears the wedding ring of her spiritual marriage to Christ. So too is every marriage in love spiritually. In the words attributed to Jesus, “The two shall be one flesh.” For the “precious thing” then is no longer oneself, one’s individual life, but the duad of each as both and the living of life, self-transcended in that knowledge. In India the wife is to worship her husband as her lord; her service to him is the measure of her religion. (However, we do not hear anything there like as much of the duties of a husband to his wife.)

And so now, finally,

what is the fifth, the highest order of love, according to this Indian series? It is passionate, illicit love. In marriage, it is declared, one is still possessed of reason. One still enjoys the goods of this world and one’s place in the world, wealth, social position, and the rest. Moreover, marriage in the Orient is a family-made arrangement, having nothing whatsoever to do with what in the West we now think of as love. The seizure of passionate love can be, in such a context, only illicit, breaking in upon the order of one’s dutiful life in virtue as a devastating storm. And the aim of such a love can be only that of the moth in the image of Hallaj: to be annihilated in love’s fire. In the legend of the Lord Krishna, the model is given of the passionate yearning of the young incarnate god for his mortal married mistress, Radha, and of her reciprocal yearning for him. To quote once again the mystic Ramakrishna, who in his devotion to the goddess Kali was himself, all his life, such a lover: when one has loved God in this way, sacrificing all for the vision of his face, “O my Lord,” one can say, “now reveal thyself!” and he will have to re- spond.

There is the figure also, in India, of the Lord Krishna playing his flute at night in the forest of Vrindavan, at the sound of whose irresistible strains young wives would slip from their husbands’ beds and, stealing to the moonlit wood, dance the night through with their beautiful young god in transcendent bliss.

The underlying thought here is that in the rapture of love one is transported beyond temporal laws and relationships, these pertaining only to the secondary world of apparent separateness and multiplicity. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, in the same spirit, sermonizing in the twelfth century on the Biblical text of the Song of Songs, represented the yearning of the soul for God as both beyond the law and beyond reason. Moreover, the excruciating separation and conflict of the two orders of moral commitment, of rea-

son on one hand, and passionate love on the other, have been a

source of Christian anxiety since the beginning. “The desires of the flesh are against the Spirit,” wrote Saint Paul, for example, to the Galatians, “and the desires of the Spirit, against the flesh.”

Carl Jung, in his analysis of the structure of the psyche, has distinguished four psychological functions that link us to the outer world. These are sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition.

Sensation, he states, is the function that tells us that something exists;

thinking, the function that tells us what it is; eg. A pen, 🖊️ think about it without thinking it’s name and uses.

feeling, the function that evaluates its worth to us; eg.people use it to choose his/her beloved one.

and intuition, the function that enables us to estimate the possibilities inherent in the object or its situation.eg.Suppose there are two different paths in the jungle,then an intuitive person gets a hunch that this route is safe.

Feeling, thus, is the inward guide to value; but its judgments are related normally to outward, empirical circumstance.

Four basic psychological functions by which we apprehend and evaluate all experiences.

Sensation and intuition, which are the apprehending functions.

Thinking and feeling, which are the function of judgement and evaluation.

The wonderful thing about symbology is that it includes all four functions. Jung speaks of a fifth, in the center, that he calls “the transcendent function.