November 29, 2024

We are moving into the season of gifts, the season of desire. We remember all the comic-strip kids with their endless wish-lists, which are their prayers to Santa, the god of children’s desire. There are those who decry this as “the commercialization of Christmas,” of course. I disagree with them. Christianity from its earliest years was an ascetic religion, but Christmas is a double holiday, both pagan and Christian—like much of our mythological heritage—and the pagan spirit has its festive claims, as Shakespeare recognized in Twelfth Night. Twelfth night is the last of the “12 days of Christmas,” from Christmas itself to the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6, a time of eating, drinking, and singing. We all know the song in which “my true love gave to me” a preposterous catalogue of gifts that all meant something once but which only folklorists understand now. Exactly how am I to take it if a woman gives me a partridge in a pear tree? But I think the point is the sheer exuberant profusion of gifts, not whether she thinks I have any use for 12 lords a-leaping. The carol is a verbal cornucopia, an outpouring of the crazy variety of life itself, and the Grail, before it was Christianized, was a kind of cornucopia or vessel of plenty. Exchange of gifts was an important ritual of social cohesion, as Lewis Hyde showed in his brilliant study The Gift (1983).

Children’s gifts are put beneath the Christmas tree, which is the old northern axis mundi symbol of the world tree, its roots in the world below, the stars and planets in its branches, symbolized by the lights and bulbs, and the transcendent mystery at its apex. The Christ child in his manger is God’s gift to the world, and gifts demand reciprocity. Hence the Three Wise Men or Magi with their gold, frankincense, and myrrh. In the introduction to his Nativity Ode, Milton rushes to get ahead of the Wise Men and lay his own poem at the foot of the manger as his offering. Gifts are symbols of human desire, and it is worth exploring our complex and deeply ambivalent feelings about desire.

Jesus emerged from a background of ascetic desert prophets like John the Baptist and whole ascetic movements such as the Essenes, and there are times when he seems to speak with something of their spirit of denial and renunciation, as in Matthew 19, when he tells the weathy young man who has kept all the commandments that that is not enough: he must sell all he has and give it to the poor, for it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. The disciples are dumbfounded: “Who then can be saved?” they ask (19:25). In other words, how far does this go? Must no one own anything? And, by the way, we have given up everything to follow you: “What shall we have therefore?” (19:27). Jesus’ answer is an unsatisfying promise of pie in the sky: their reward will be to sit on 12 thrones in heaven. Maybe those three Wise Men weren’t so wise after all, bringing material goods to one who will grow up to say that you can’t serve both God and Mammon.

Of course, the Church that Jesus founded eventually grew up to be wealthy, and reasons had to be found why the opulence of the Vatican was acceptable. The double standard persists. A few years ago, the head of Home Depot said he was going to stop contributing to the Church if Pope Francis didn’t stop making remarks about the responsibility of the rich to care about the plight of the poor. On the Protestant side, according to the sociologist Max Weber in his famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) the Puritans rationalized the accumulation of wealth in business because it is the deserved reward of a “work ethic.” God approves of hard work, discipline, and delayed gratification in the service of long-term goals. Having a strong work ethic may even be a sign of God’s grace, a sign that the capitalist is one of the Elect. The Christian nationalists must believe something like this, as they have just helped to elect a criminally corrupt billionaire as president, along with the backing of other billionaires. Those who complain they cannot afford to buy groceries are ecstatic about this outcome, even though their economic plight has been in part caused by tax cuts for billionaires the last time their cult leader was president. In short, Christian teachings about worldly desire and material goods are morally incoherent. It would be hard to find a Christian today who takes Jesus’s actually teaching in this regard seriously. If you removed his name from his message, many of his followers would excoriate it as “socialism.”

Jesus preached an intransigent otherworldliness in other areas as well. While he did not condemn sexual desire as evil, he remained unmarried and regarded marriage and family as obstacles to salvation. You cannot serve both God and family. All desire is evil, because desire attaches us to this world. But desire cheats us, because it promises a happiness that cannot be had, or which is at best fleeting. Jesus himself did not practice asceticism, other than living simply and having no place to lay his head. But from the Middle Ages down through my earlier lifetime, the Church encouraged, and sometimes commanded, various practices of self-denial designed to pry Christians loose from their attachment to earthly pleasures. I have to tell my students about these, because they have utterly disappeared, though in the Catholic Church they still existed in vestigial forms when I was young. Even those have been modernized away by now. In the good old days, you had to fast 12 hours before taking Communion during Mass, though all this really meant was you skipped breakfast. Then it was reduced to 3 hours, and is now, so far as I know, optional. You were not allowed to eat meat on Fridays. I think the practice of giving up something during the penetential season of Lent may be still a going thing. Other practices have faded away: sleeping on boards, wearing hair shirts, and, most of all, flogging. Entire penetential cults wandered around ritually flogging themselves. Mass neurosis, no doubt, yet I remember a television interview as late as the 1970’s with a Mother Superior who had to crack down on the practice of nuns in her New York City convent privately whipping themselves in their cells. Desire comes from the body, and the “mortification of the flesh” is designed to show the body who is the master.

The most unruly desire of all is that of sex, which is why Christianity has often been especially obsessed with it. Jesus says that if a married man even looks upon another woman with desire, he is guilty of adultery. To which some honest people have said, “Who then shall be saved?” Jimmy Carter risked losing the 1976 election by admitting—in Playboy, of all places—that he had looked upon other women with desire. Christians have, however, updated their value system. Even conviction for rape is no longer a deal-breaker now. While intercourse may have to be regulated because of the risk of pregnancy, masturbation has been equally condemned as a “sin of impurity.” It is inconvenient for ascetics that sex is necessary for reproduction. The belief grew up that this was not God’s original plan but part of the punishment of the Fall. In common with the animals, we have to perform an undignified and disgusting act in order to reproduce the race. But it is a necessary evil. Augustine, who in his younger years was by his own description what we would now call a sex addict, said that an unfallen humanity would reproduce by will alone, without desire. But in the fallen world, without desire nothing is going to happen. Male desire, anyway: it was held that women, as the “purer sex,” did not feel desire. If they did, there was something wrong with them. Women were supposed to endure sex in order to become mothers.

Moreover, nobody should be having sex except with the goal of making babies. That was still Church teaching when I grew up before Vatican II, which allowed that sex could also be the expression of love between a heterosexual married man and woman. Not to single out Catholicism: Protestant England was similarly prudish about sex during the Victorian era, about which there are many colorful stories about people who, for instance, decorously covered the “naked” legs of pianos. My English girlfriend in grad school taught me the recommendation supposedly given to young women in those days to “Lie back and think of England” while fulfilling your duty to propagate the Empire. Even if the joke is apocryphal, it indicates an attitude. As late as 1971, a theatrical farce could be titled No Sex, Please, We’re British. Gandhi is now said to have picked up his abhorrence of sex from his Western education, not from Hinduism. He told young men to take cold showers to discourage sexual desire, exactly the advice we were given by the little pamphlets that used to be free in racks in the front of the Church, from whose extremely vague advice I tried to learn something as an adolescent. This was what there was of sex education: of course no one would talk about sex openly. Gandhi counseled even married couples to avoid sex, and conducted notorious “experiments” in which he slept naked with young women without doing anything as a way of strengthening will power. Just say no.

We feel superior to such irrational extremism, but yet we are conflicted. We are not comfortable with our own desires, whether those based in the senses and drives of the body or the “lust,” as we call it, for power and possessions externally. Ivan Boesky, whose film counterpart Gordon Gekko said “Greed is good,” was a predatory capitalist, and we do not want to be in the company of the greed-positive school. We cannot stop desiring, yet we are not comfortable either trying to repress desire or trying to feel good about indulging it. That is why I always liked the comic strip Cathy, by Cathy Guisewite. Every single day the character Cathy did battle in two areas, food and clothes. She wanted to eat, felt guilty, gave in and indulged, and felt even guiltier. She went clothes shopping, was appalled by the expense and the materialism, but could not give up and ignore her wardrobe yearnings altogether. Her boyfriend Irving was as addicted to cameras and other electronic gadgets as Cathy was to clothes, but, being a guy, did not feel guilty about his ridiculously impractical expenses. Silly and trivial, but very human. However, the Marxist diagnosis that we are conditioned and controlled by consumer capitalism, while not entirely wrong, is too simple to account for the mystery of desire. The moral of the story is deeper than that.

In one of the verses of “Bird on a Wire,” Leonard Cohen says,

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch
He said to me, “You must not ask for so much”
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door
She cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”

That captures our dilemma perfectly. William Blake went the pretty woman one better. “’More! More!’ is the cry of a mistaken soul,” he said. “Less than All cannot satisfy man.” Jim Morrison of the Doors, who was influenced by Blake, said “We want the world, and we want it now.” But Jim Morrison did not end well. How can something so basic as our desires be such a riddle?

A first step at answering the riddle is to make a distinction between two modes of desire. One is, well, desirable, and one not. We return, as so often in these newsletters, to the idea that we have a choice between two identities. One is what Paul called the “natural man,” who is, more or less, the Cartesian subject, the isolated awareness that says, according to Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.” Everything, even the body itself, is “objective” to this consciousness, external to it, “out there.” Philosophically, this is the famous subject/object split. Depth psychology would name this identity the ego, Latin for “I.” The isolated conscious subject is alienated and isolated from everything but its own awareness. It is the “nothing” spoken of in the title of Sartre’s famous book Being and Nothingness. Such a consciousness has contracted itself away from the external world. It cannot dispense with that world altogether because, according the the philosophy of phenomenology out of which Sartre’s existentialism emerged, we can only know self by its contrast with non-self. Yet the non-self is “other,” and consciousness is alienated from the other and fearful of it.

Blake, working from alternative mythologies such as Gnosticism and Hermeticism, understood this on a symbolic level. For him, as for some of the Gnostics, the Creation of this world was actually a Fall, so the Creation and Fall were a single event, a Creation-Fall. The Creation-Fall was a fall of God himself, although it eventually involved humanity because the divine and the human are one. Blake portrays this Creation-Fall in his early Prophecies as the fall of Urizen, whose name echoes both “reason” and “horizon.” In The Book of Urizen, the fallen world is created by Urizen’s contraction, his attempted withdrawal from everything but his own consciousness. The “Eternals” wonder, “what Demon / Hath form’d this abominable void / This soul-shudd’ring vacuum?” Urizen becomes “A self-contemplating shadow”: “Age on ages he lay, clos’d, unknown, / Brooding shut in the deep.” Los, the spirit of the imagination, to keep Urizen from plunging nihilistically into complete non-being, hammers Urizen out a fallen body, Los being a blacksmith. There follows a parody of the six days of Creation as that body comes into being as Urizen’s prison, yet his provisional salvation. That body is the natural body of us all insofar as we repeat Urizen’s fall on the human level. Alienated consciousness would like to withdraw altogether to become “pure” mind or spirit, “pure” meaning disembodied. Yet at the same time it feels impulses to reach out and unite with various objects of desire outside itself. Urizen speaks a soliloquy “From the depths of dark solitude. From / The eternal abode in my holiness.” He is at this point the inscrutable hidden divinity who gives out the Law for the purpose of curbing sinful desire, “the terrible monsters Sin-bred: / Which the bosoms of all inhabit; / Seven deadly Sins of the soul.” Thus he becomes the ultimate authoritarian, political and religious tyrant rolled into one, imposing a necessary control:

One command, one joy, one desire,
One curse, one weight, one measure
One King, one God, one Law.

Desire is the urge to reach outward and unite with whatever is not-self, but alienated consciousness fears and hates the other. It may (1) attempt to stop desiring, (2) try to attain the object of desire through domination and mastery, or, failing that extermination, or (3) attain the object of desire but find that desire can never be satisfied. Nothing works. As for the first tactic, we can no more stop desiring than we can stop breathing. Anorexics follow the example of Urizen: they try to withdraw from the physical body by contraction, dieting it away until it will no longer exist and they achieve a disembodied freedom. They do succeed in suppressing their appetite, but of course a totally successful contraction would be identical with death. People with eating disorders always say that the motive of the disorder is control, which is also Urizenic, the need to impose “one Law” in order to feel some mastery of the unruliness of life.

There are people who define themselves as asexual, but some of those people use the term to mean merely that they have no interest in intercourse. The number of people who lack sexual desire altogether is probably small, especially since desire is hormonal as well as psychological. The greater part of the human race not only feels sexual desire, but that desire gets more compulsive the more it is repressed, and compulsive sexuality is less driven by pleasure than by mastery. Rape and sexual abuse show an impulse to dominate—to dominate the woman but also to dominate the desire itself, for which the woman is usually blamed. Grabbing them by the pussy, among other phrases our new president has made famous, is a way of showing who’s powerful, who’s boss. Hundreds of boys have been molested by priests who were, yes, sexually deprived by the vow of celibacy, but in fact while the sex drive can be powerful, it has been amplified by the will to power, for priests are power-figures, and the priestly temptation is to have control over a helpless and submissive victim. Such scenarios are a demonic parody of “kink,” of the playful games of dominance and submission that lovers may play to defuse the will to power by transvaluing it. Serious BDSM is likewise a fantasy release of what repression could turn authentically pathological. A BDSM session ends with “aftercare,” the dropping of the voluntary roles and a tender and solicitous interchange. Nevertheless, sex crimes convince some people that sex is the tool of the devil—and repressed sex is, which is why Blake said, provocatively, “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” The devil’s attributes indicate his sexuality: his cloven hooves signify that he is a kind of satyr-figure, part goat, the animal most notorious for its willingness to try to couple with anything. Repressed sexuality may manifest itself as a sadistic tendency in social life. People who are cruel when they don’t need to be are pathologically repressed people, and novelists from Dickens to J.K. Rowling understand clearly that a certain ill-disguised sexual sadism is evident in tyrannical teachers who punish children “for their own good.” Sadism is rampant in prisons as well: the guards brutalize the prisoners, who in turn rape one another. The Nazis were not content merely to kill the Jews but gave in to the desire to “experiment” on them as well.

But fallen desire is no-win. Desire repessed turns vicious, yet desire unleashed turns into the chase after the inaccessible object. As I showed in The Productions of Time, Ovid’s Metamorphoses is an encyclopedia of desire, and especially of unrequited desire, using the figures of Greek mythology as its cast of characters. Apollo chases Daphne, only to have her turn into a tree at the very moment he catches her. Echo pines away for love of Narcissus, who disregards her because he is his own inaccessible object of desire, in love with his own image, and finally either pines away himself or drowns trying to embrace his own reflection in the water. Semele wants to see Jupiter naked, that is, without a humanized form, and is incinerated as if she had touched a high-voltage power line. The female object of pursuit may be deliberately elusive, a femme fatale or what Blake called a Female Will, thrilling in her dominatrix-type power. Male poets may thrill to it too, and write whole sonnet sequences to a Cruel Mistress, who is more exciting than any woman who is actually available. But men may not thrill to it as well, giving rise to the basement rages of incels. The thrill of the chase does drive some men, though, who may become serial seducers of the Don Juan type, the problem being that, as soon as the seducer attains his object, he is no longer interested in her. Shakespeare sums up the whole cycle in the horribly vivid sonnet 129:

Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so…

Should the man marry the object of desire, he may find she is an autonomous individual who does not exist to gratify him. The current interest in “trad wives” and the attempts to imprison women in marriages by denying them birth control or abortions, the whole Handmaid’s Tale syndrome, derives from male insistence that any woman who is not a mere adjunct to male desire is a “feminazi” or unhappy “cat lady.” Women are by no means always content to be mere victims. In her Prologue, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath insists that what women want most is “sovereignty,” and recounts how she has gone to shameless lengths to henpeck her five husbands. The shrew is a stock type, from Shakespeare’s play about her taming to old comic strips such as George McManus’s Life with Father, in which Jigg’s wife Maggie is an ill-tempered and impossible thrower of crockery. When the husband fights back, it becomes a contest of egos. The Wife of Bath’s most recent husband lost his temper on being provoked and hit her so hard so became partially deaf. Or it can be the woman who gives way to a frightening rage against a man who refuses to bow to her. D.H. Lawrence is an authority on such male-female contests of egos. In Women in Love, Hermione clobbers Rupert Birkin with a paperweight, a fierce example of Blake’s Female Will or Jung’s animus possession. On the other hand, in the horrifying chapter called “Rabbit,” Gerald Crich kills a rabbit who resists his strength, sending a message to Gudrun about what happens to those who resist his will. Any number of plays by Strindberg and films by Ingmar Bergman show heterosexual love as a life-or-death contest of wills in which people may lose control and become violent.

Renouncing desire or attempting to gratify it by force do not succeed. But be careful what you wish for. Those who attain the object of their desires will find that desire is insatiable. From this derives all manner of compulsive, addictive behaviors. The desire for food turns into bingeing, the desire for drink into alcoholism, the desire for euphoria into drug addiction, the desire for sex into orgiastic marathons of the Matt Gaetz variety, the desire for worldly goods into hoarding and the obscene accumulation of wealth at the expense of those who barely survive, or the loss of wealth through gambling addiction. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called the image of unquenchable desire the objet petit a, or “object little a.” The “a” stands for autre, other. Disguised as a positive, it is really the image of a lack. Desire for what cannot be attained or, if attained, can never satisfy, is the human condition. Neither asceticism nor indulgence can cure what is wrong with us.

What can? Another mode of being altogether, another “State,” as Blake called it. If destructive desire stems from the subject-object split, positive or creative desire stems from the union of subject and object, a mode of perception unknown to the ego but common enough for all that. The Romantics called it the imagination, and its verbal unit is the metaphor, which says that “A is B” while preserving the individuality of both A and B. In Paul, the “natural man” or self is contrasted with the “spiritual man” or self. Frye spends the most difficult chapter of Words with Power trying to define what “spiritual” is other than a fairy tale, but a quick definition is, the condition in which opposites unite to become a two-in-one. Life is an agon or contest between the natural and the spiritual self, our lower nature and our higher, our selfishness and our capacity to love. The spiritual self is a condition in which self and other give each other and receive each other as gifts in a reciprocal interchange that transforms both and releases energy, in a psychological parallel to nuclear fusion. Given that the distinction comes from Paul, it would appear that there is another possible way of conceiving Christianity rather than ascetic renunciation and otherworldliness. Such a recreated Christianity appears in the work of two great Christian revisionists, Milton and Blake.

In Paradise Regained, Milton tells the story of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness by Satan, expanding the temptations from the mere three in Matthew and Luke into an entire spectrum of all it is possible to desire in this world, from the mere survival-desire for bread at one end to the earthly kingdoms at the other. One by one, Jesus rejects them all, skewering Satan in the process with a wit that is drier than the desert around them. Finally, Satan is so exasperated by a man who appears to desire nothing that he bursts out, “What do you on this earth, then?” and pretends to throw Jesus back like a fish. But the key to Paradise Regained is in an earlier work of Milton, his masque Comus, whose theme is the virtue of temperance. Milton makes clear in Paradise Lost that the physical desires and pleasures of eating, drinking, and sex are not afflictions but God’s gifts—gifts to both human beings and the angels, who enjoy them as well. And on the social level, the essence of love is what Milton calls “conversation,” the equal back-and-forth between two people, the mutual exchange of verbal gifts. But desire must be regulated by temperance, a virtue Milton learned of from book 2 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, in which temperance consists of internal discipline and a balance between the extremes of indulgence, represented by Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss, and possessiveness, represented by Mammon’s cave of hoarded wealth.

However, the Lady in Comus tells Comus that temperance is not merely regulative but transformative. Its discipline, perhaps comparable to some forms of yoga, spiritualizes the body and lifts our being to a higher level. On that higher level, subject and object interpenetrate, one of Northrop Frye’s central terms, in a ritual of mutual becoming, mutual sharing of identity. When we eat, the food becomes us, is metabolized and becomes part of our bodies. That is why the communal meal is such a central human symbol, as readers will be aware reading this on the day after Thanksgiving. At the Last Supper, Jesus took bread and wine and said, “Do this in remembrance of me.” But he took a step further than that, and said, “This is my body. This is my blood.” What on a subject-object level would be the demonic ritual of cannibalism becomes instead the intake of a non-literal spiritual self.

In desire, the other gives itself to me as a free gift, and I internalize it. But it is more blessed to give than to receive, or at least equally blessed. There is a joy of giving away, of surrendering. In sex, it is symbolized by the moment of orgasm, one word for which in the Renaissance was “ecstasy,” which literally means going beyond oneself. At the climactic moment—ideally, at any rate, for not all sex is ideal—we melt, we dissolve like a drop of water into the ocean, as several mystics said about their spiritual consummation with God. Thus desire is a double movement, what Charles Williams called the Way of Exchange. Its symbol in literature is the dance, as in Sir John Davies’ amazing poem Orchestra in the 16^th century. The dynamic decreation and recreation of the two elements of a metaphor is a spatial image whose dynamic equivalent is the basic plot of myth, which is one of going away and return, wandering and nostos, or homecoming. The fact that this is the plot of the Bible, on a level beyond its textual ambiguities and ideological obsessions, is what makes it what Blake called it, “the great code of

art.”

Northrop Frye liked to speak of “literature as possession.” Writing is a kind of Last Supper, in which the writer says, “This is my body. Take it in and make it part of you, and do this in remembrance of me.” In Areopagitica, Milton says that a book is a living thing, the distilled essence of a writer. Remarkably, this theme moves through the Bible as the image of eating a scroll. Ezekiel received his commisssion as a prophet by being commanded by an angel to eat a scroll (Ezekiel 3). “And it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness,” Ezekiel says. It is a strange yet vivid image of inspiration. Jeremiah says, “Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of my heart” (Jeremiah 15:16). In the Book of Revelation, which recapitulates the imagery of the entire Bible, an angel gives John a book and says, “Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey” (Rev. 10:9). From childhood I vividly remember the taste and texture of the Communion wafer when the priest put it on my tongue. It was thin and dry as paper, with a very faint undertaste of sweetness.

Man does not live by bread alone, but by the word. It is true for some of us, at least. When I first read Frye, I was hungry for something without knowing it. I devoured his work, and that of a few other writers; I digested them, internalized them so that they have become truly part of me, and, more important, part of what I have to say. The spirits of those who have inspired me move within my words. I do not know exactly where their identities end and mine begins. Studies of “influence” rarely seem to understand this interpenetration of identities. Moreover, this communion expands beyond individual influence and inspiration. Writers hope their books may survive in the world, but books also survive by being subsumed into the larger body formed by a communal mind and communal imagination, becoming part of a vast and reverberating conversation. Frye spoke of an “order of words,” but that is a bit abstract. Donne expressed it vividly in Meditation 17 as “that library where every book shall lie open to one another.” It is a choir of joined voices. Those who remember me as a child, the few who are left, usually remember one thing: “You were always reading.” Negatively, I read to escape an unhappy home life. But in truth that was not the most important motive. I read and I read because it showed me that desire can be gratified, over and over again. Love has failed me, but reading never has.

One of those Zen masters is said to have said, “Show me the face you had before you were born.” Each of us began as the universe began, in Nothing, and we return, as the universe is predicted to return, to Nothing. But Nothing is the eye of the needle through which we all must pass. In the ending of The Productions of Time, I tried to express, however gropingly, the cycle of desire that moves the sun and other stars, to echo the end of Dante’s Paradiso. Life ends in death, and death is Nothing. But several of Frye’s works suggest mysteriously that at that final point, in the final moment, there is a reversal, what Aristotle called a peripeteia, comparable, he hinted cautiously, to what is called paravritti in the Lankavatara Sutra, and also to the Biblical metanoia, which is also a turning around, a re-orientation often translated by the inadequate and moralizing word “repentance.” In his notebooks, he refers guardedly to a couple of psychological experiences that gave him a personal understanding of this metamorphosis. In Genesis, God creates the world out of chaos, or “the deep,” but that is merely the second movement of Creation, for presumably the angels and perhaps the other Persons of the Trinity had already come into being. To employ a term used in various esoteric traditions, in the beginning, all things emanated from God. Out of Nothing came All. And to All it shall return: Milton likes to quote I Corinthians 15:28, which says that in the end, God shall be “all in all.” In Bach’s Advent Cantata, usually called “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” the first stanza says that our souls ascend, desiring the “uncreated light.” Such intuitions cannot be “believed.” But it may be enough to give us hope that our desires are what is best in us, the desires to give and receive that are what we know of love.