Descent Into Hell

The most perfect, since the most intimate and intelligent, art was pure love. The approach by love was the approach to fact; to love anything but fact was not love.
Love was even more mathematical than poetry; it was pure mathematics of the Spirit. It was applied also and active; it was the means as it was the end.
The end lived everlastingly in the means; the means eternally in the end.

I had been re-reading Descent Into Hell by Charles Williams and came across this quote. (Good book, by the way. Everyone should read it.) I re-read the quote several times, and realized how much that idea has affected my life. And how much it has affected me, especially now. I then began musing on why it affected me, and what exactly it meant.

"To love anything but fact was not love"

I at first couldn't understand what he was talking about. Why would you need to love fact in order to love? Then it hit me: if you aren't loving facts, you aren't loving reality...and if you're not loving reality, then you're not really loving because you are just enjoying what you want to be enjoying. You won't accept reality, and thus make up a fake reality in order to live. Thus anything you 'love' in that fake reality isn't actually love. In order to really love, you have to love something real.

An easy example of this is loving someone for who they are...not who you think they are or who you want to them to be. This happens in the book with the character of Wentworth, who "falls in love" with a girl who doesn't return his affection. He ends up creating a "false Adela" and it destroys him, because he loses sight of facts and gives up on life. He folds so completely into himself that he loses his soul.

True love is loving the person for who they are, not who you want them to be (erasing the parts you don't like, adding parts that you think would be better).

"Love was even more mathematical than poetry; it was pure mathematics of the Spirit. It was applied also and active; it was the means as it was the end.
The end lived everlastingly in the means; the means eternally in the end."

This was also hard to try to figure out...and I'm sure I haven't come close to it. However, a few thoughts initially...
It seems that Williams is saying the closer you come to loving facts and accepting facts, the closer it will bring you to God. I asked myself how this would work...and found the answer in the last couple phrases: "The end lived everlastingly in the means; the means eternally in the end".

The closer you draw to facts, the closer you come to Love. In fact, Williams is arguing you can't truly love if you don't accept facts. It made me consider what's the greatest fact you could accept...and then if you accept that, you will eternally draw near to Love...and Love will draw you nearer.

Those are my musing thoughts of the last week.