Interlude 4
“Uti & Frui”
[I find myself reflecting on the actress, Roberta, whose image magically manifested itself at the end of chapter 15. There’s another dual aspect of woman at work there, I discovered. There’s Lara, the young woman in the TV series, who has various good relationships with all the other characters in the series, and there’s Roberta, the young lady who played that character some ten years ago. If a person is attracted to the lovely woman in the story, he is in truth more than likely to believe he is infatuated with the actress, not realizing he doesn’t know anything about the actress, except that she is attractive in the story and exceedingly lovely. Now that feminine loveliness is the issue. For the first thing one wants to do is capture the beauty, hold onto it somehow: perhaps find her picture on the internet, pin it up on the wall, post it in a blog, perhaps, as if that beauty would fill the possible emptiness within, when in effect what that beauty should do is lead one to pursue it without, as if beauty were the nature of reality itself.
Augustine makes a distinction between two types of love, use love (uti) and love one can truly enjoy, find real pleasure in (frui), related to our word fruition, I imagine. The purpose of use love is to lead us beyond the object loved to God where we might experience real pleasure and fulfillment.
Here’s one internet account of the two loves: “Augustine distinguishes between the final goal of human life, the enjoyment (frui) of God, and the means we use (uti) in order to arrive at that goal (I, i, 1–iv, 9). All that we do or decide not to do must aim at love of God. Everything else we may use only in order to attain that goal.”
Here’s a second: “In his recent Theology of Augustine: An Introductory Guide to His Most Important Works (6-7), Matthew Levering offers this summary of Augustine’s distinction between use and enjoyment, uti and frui : ‘In loving our neighbors and ourselves, we should do nothing that is not also fully and truly love of God. If we were to act against the love of God, we would thereby fail also to be true lovers of our neighbors and ourselves. With regard to our neighbors and ourselves, ‘use’ therefore signifies rightly ordered love rather than manipulation or instrumentalization.’”
One problem with contemporary culture is that it tends to seduce or betray us into believing that there is nothing beyond the tangible, nothing for us truly to rest in. There is only use. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Lara isn’t real; she’s a fictional character. Roberta is a real woman, one hopes, now ten years older than when she played Lara. Surprise. Inspector Manara in the TV series sleeps around; he’s extremely attractive to women; he and Lara almost got married, but the marriage ceremony was, of course, interrupted and never completed; Lara left town for a better job in the big city. After seeing Lara off on a bus, tearful farewells and all, Manara gives a lovely young woman who just got off that bus a ride back into town on his motorcycle. Coincidentally, the new woman has a room reserved at the place where he stays. Next morning we find him, Inspector Manara, in bed in her room, after a night of ardent passion, we are led to imagine! This is use love, uti. Real marriage could have been an image of a “rightly ordered” love and a proper relationship. But Manara in the series hesitated so long to say “I do” that another motorcycle rider, head covered with helmet, identity obscured, had time to stumble into the church and die in the aisle, thus becoming a fitting image of the consequences of use love: death, a corpse, another limited mystery to be solved immediately. Thus we are, as Eliot might say, “Distracted from distraction by distraction.”
What, a reader might wonder, do all these details have to do with our story? Well it turns out everything and nothing. Our Prince Charming, Godric the Good (at least thus far) is in a love story, clumsy and awkward as that telling might be. (The teller apologizes.) Structurally, the love story usually has an obstacle that prevents the young man and young woman from enjoying their love, best symbolized by a severe and demanding father [see Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism], Prospero in The Tempest pretends to be such a father, though he really desires that Ferdinand and Miranda fall in love and marry once they are off the enchanted island. When the young people have fulfilled his wish by conveniently falling in love, Prospero truly needs to leave them alone in his cave to attend to the evil plots unfolding on the island with other sets of characters. However, before he leaves the two lovers alone, he warns them to stay chaste or their lives and love will suffer disastrously. There will be no true fruition in their marriage.
When, later, Prospero returns to the cave where he left the lovers, with the evil plots now resolved, and with all the other characters gathered before the cave dwelling, we find the entrance to the cave covered with a useful curtain; Prospero then has the curtain thrust aside and “discovers” Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess! What a marvelous story Shakespeare has told, virtually perfect in every aspect: romantic love, Eros, properly bound by Chastity, restraint and reason, uti and frui in right order. And as for the other characters who had intended murder, forgiveness is the operative action on the part of Prospero! Therefore, at the end of that story we have imaged a good society effectively ordered, with the good characters properly in charge and the evil characters properly contained, most of them truly repentant.
Elizabethan culture was in many respects rough, ruthless and barbaric. Consider what they did to Catholic priests when they were caught: the priests were hanged, drawn and quartered. If the reader doesn’t know what that means, he or she (of course) should look it up. Yet at the heart of that very severe culture we find some of the greatest literature ever written: King Lear. Hamlet, Macbeth, As You Like It, The Tempest, The Faerie Queen, Dr. Faustus, etc.. The thing is, we find that those story tellers had keener insight into the nature of reality—Beauty, Truth, Goodness—than writers and thinkers in our own culture. With our cultural blindness and arrogance, our science, our technology, we have locked ourselves into a vast cosmic box that lets us see almost into the beginnings of our universe, beautiful and intriguing as that is, yet lets us understand nothing about its final cause or meaning. We can see back in time almost to the Big Bang; however, we cannot see around us anymore into what it means to be a creature, that is, into the mystery of human identity, into the mystery of why there is a universe at all; in other words, into the mystery of being.
Well, Godric had passed out or fallen asleep with the feverish, demon-inflicted wound. Time to see what happens next in his quest for the beautiful Princess. If I may reflect for a moment on that encounter, Godric, at the time, may not have known it, but essentially in confronting the demon he was also confronting his own interior fallenness, confronted it and defeated it, almost.
Well, no one ever completely defeats that demon. It’s alway there, insinuating itself into every waking moment, looking for an opportunity, a momentary weakness, and then it’s out swords, en guardé, once again! Don’t bother looking around you either; of course they are everywhere, especially in Russia nowadays, perhaps, but that’s not your problem; your problem is the one lurking within, the one you feed regularly and sometimes unknowingly. Call him Nadiel, god of nothing, demon born of original sin.
image: call her Lilith, unsuccessful first wife of Adam, in Hebrew legend and lore.
