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- Anurag Chauhan
Of Love: Francis Bacon on the Rational Spectrum of Love in a Man’s Life
Nuptial love makes mankind; friendly love perfects it; wanton love corrupts it.
The definition of love, or rather the perception of love, that the generations of mankind have been refining since time immemorial has more or less become a kind of truism to say, like an old chestnut that has heightened the passion of love to an emotional Everest of human imaginations.
We have had John Keats expressing his love for Fanny Brawne in his 1819 letter — “My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet — You have ravish’d me away by a Power I cannot resist; and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have endeavoured often “to reason against the reasons of my Love.”
And Kahlil Gibran on love, in his enlightening magnum opus “The Prophet”, when he says,
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love. When you love you should not say, “God is in my heart,” but rather, “I am in the heart of God.”
Francis Bacon's essay "Of Love"
At the dawn of the 17th Century, we got to see but a rather refreshing exploration of the idea of love, when the philosopher and the father of empiricism Francis Bacon (1561-1626) illuminated the rational spectrum of love, more in a pragmatic sense of it.
The contrast between Bacon's view of love came out even more prominently due to the well-romanticized emotion and feeling of love. But it is more contrasting than being fundamentally contrarian in its essence. As the father of empiricism, Francis Bacon laid the foundations of the newly invigorated sense of endeavours for man’s search for truth, based only upon inductive reasoning of the observations, at the time when the Renaissance was peeping into the era of the modern age.
In his essay “Of Love”, Francis Bacon delineates the coherent understanding of love as it is observed in the real world and how society reflects its inherent value systems in the ever-changing idea of love, which finds new definitions in varying times and periods of evolving mankind.
Bacon goes a few steps further and operates a real empiricist dissection of the idea of love, but on the grounds of what we observe more on the social and economic stages of man’s life, and not much into what many other greats have propounded and experienced on the other side of the spectrum of human understanding of love.
Mad Degree of Love
Francis Bacon takes on the world of theatre (or “stage” as he speaks) and the priorities it has, in his view, taken up over the course of its own development. He says that the “stage” is more beholding to love, than the life of man.
“For as to the stage,” he explains, “love is ever a matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief; sometimes like a siren, sometimes like a fury.”
In Bacon’s view, love has always been a subject of interest to the virtuosos of the theatre and plays (maybe he alludes to his contemporary William Shakespeare here) as it lures them into the depths of their imagination, while the life of a man has been seen as more about the mischiefs or a matter of femme fatale as the sirens (seductive women, the ones who are likely to cause disaster to a man) or the furies (the spirit of punishment).
Francis Bacon furthers his argument with his observation, “that amongst all the great and worthy persons (whereof the memory remaineth, either ancient or recent) there is not one, that hath been transported to the mad degree of love: which shows that great spirits, and great business, do keep out this weak passion.”
Bacon calls love a “weak passion” and that it can take even the wisest of men may slip into the mad degree of love, of which he provides us with two examples in (Greek) history as Marcus Aurelius, the half-partner of the empire of Rome, and Appius Claudius, the decemvir and lawgiver.
He says, “whereof the former was indeed a voluptuous man, and inordinate; but the latter was an austere and wise man: and therefore, it seems (though rarely) that love can find the entrance, not only into an open heart, but also into a heart well-fortified, if watch be not well kept.”
Francis Bacon magnifies his point of view of love by quoting Epicurus, who was an ardent Empiricist, believing that the senses are the only reliable sources of information about the world. He rejected the Platonic idea of “Reason” as a reliable source of knowledge about the world apart from the senses.
It is a poor saying of Epicurus,
Satis magnum alter alteri theatrum sumus: as if man, made for the contemplation of heaven, and all noble objects, should do nothing but kneel before a little idol., and make himself a subject, though not of the mouth (as beasts are), yet of the eye; which was given him for higher purposes.
Unravelling the saying, Bacon explains: “as if man, made for contemplation of heaven, and all noble objects, should do nothing but kneel before a little idol, and make himself a subject, though not of the mouth (as beasts are), yet of the eye; which was given him for higher purposes.”
Francis Bacon finds it strange that this passion of love and its emotional Everest has been taken to intellectually insurmountable limits, and how it stands tall facing the nature and value of things — “that the speaking in a perpetual hyperbole, is comely in nothing but in love.”
To Love and To Be Wise
Francis Bacon raises his arch-criticism of the emotional blindness of love, and seeks to put it to its right place, as he sees it, in the structure of a society. “Neither is it merely in the phrase;” Bacon says, “for whereas it hath been well said, that the arch-flatterer, with whom all the petty flatterers have intelligence, is a man’s self; certainly, the lover is more.”
Bacon sees the sense of falsity in the foundations of the emotional Everest of love when he holds it true that lovers are even greater flatterers than the arch-flatterer of man that is his own self, as compared to the cunning flatterers we live among in the society.
He says, “there was never a proud man who thought so absurdly well of himself, as the lover doth of the person loved.” And so, Bacon commends the saying,
That it is impossible to love, and to be wise.
“For it is a true rule,” Francis Bacon says, “that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque, or with an inward and secret contempt.”
Francis Bacon admonishes men for this passion of love, which he says loses not only other things but itself. He says that “As for the other losses, the poet’s relation doth well figure them: that he that preferred Helena, quitted the gifts of Juno and Pallas. For whosoever esteemeth too much of amorous affection, quitteth both rich and wisdom.”
Francis Bacon cites the story of Judgment of Paris from Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses, when Eris the goddess of strife threw an apple inscribed “to the fairest” into a banquet held by the Gods. Three goddesses, Hera, Athena and Aphrodite, claimed that it should belong to them, and the task of choosing between them was delegated to the mortal Paris, son of King Priam of Troy.
Hera (the Greek equivalent of “Juno”) promised him land and riches, Athena (often given the epithet “Pallas”) victory in battle, and Aphrodite the love of the most beautiful women in the world. In the end, Paris chose Aphrodite, who told him of the beauty of Queen Helen of Sparta, with whom Paris later eloped, leading to the Trojan War and his own death.
Bacon explains his point, through this story from the epic poem, that whosoever sought to climb to the top of the emotional Everest of love, has found his fate in the fallen valleys with the loss of riches and wisdom.
Francis Bacon puts stress on the aftermath of falling for this passion of love, and says, “This passion hath his floods, in very times of weakness; which are great prosperity, and great adversity; though this latter hath been less observed: both which times kindle love, and make it more fervent, and therefore show it to be the child of folly.”
He illustrates that when ignorance clouds one's sense of righteous judgement, it affects even more greatly in times of adversity in man’s life. And Bacon makes this point for the passion of love, that the times make it more intense and hence prove to be a fallacy in the future.
That those do best, Francis Bacon says, “who if they cannot but admit love, yet make it keep quarters; and sever it wholly from their serious affairs, and actions, of life; for if it checks once with business, it troubleth men’s fortunes, and maketh men, that they can no ways be true to their own ends.”
Love: Peril Paid in Pleasure
Francis Bacon wonders when the martial men, soldiers or warriors, fall for the passion of love, and thinks, “It is but as they are given to wine; for perils commonly ask to be paid in pleasures.”
He says, “There is in man’s nature, a secret inclination and motion, towards love of others, which if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh men become humane and charitable; as it is seen sometime in friars.”
Francis Bacon expounds the ecologically fundamental nature of men to seek unity among others in the name of love, and so struggle for the passion of love, to climb the emotional Everest of love. He says that those who instead of climbing this emotional Everest of love, do the reverential “parikrama” (revolution) of that mountain become the men of charity and universal love.
Nuptial love maketh mankind; friendly love perfecteth it; but wanton love corrupteth, and embaseth it.
Read and contemplate on Kahlil Gibran's brilliant insight on love in his masterpiece "The Prophet", and the experiential depth of love in the letters of John Keats that he wrote in his unfortunately short life.
Get your own copy of the Essays of Francis Bacon from here.
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