Gorgeous Lovin: Love and Perception: Marc Gafni

posted by Gafni assistant

Love is a perception of the full divine wonder that is your beloved.

It is like Dante’s description of his first sighting of Beatrice, “Something like the glory of God walking towards him.” Or for those of us who don’t speak in the bombastic language of “the glory of God,” we turn to more personal existential description of Tolstoy’s Levin, husband to Anna Karenina, on the night of her giving birth to their child.

Levin

…jumped out of bed, hardly conscious of himself and without taking his eyes off her for a moment, put on his dressing gown and stood still gazing at her. He had to go but he was unable to move, so struck was he by the look on her face…..her flushed face, with soft hair escaping from under her night cap, was radiant with joy and dissolution. Little as there was of artificiality and the conventionalist in Kitty’s character, Levin was still astonished at what was laid bare to him now when every veil had been removed and the kernel of her soul shone though her eyes. And in this simplicity and in this baring of her soul he could see her, the woman he loved, more clearly then ever.

Tolstoy understands that love is the perception of the soul’s nakedness. To love someone is to see them in all of the rawness of their authenticity, that is to say — in their divinity. It is about Levin the lover that Recanati, Rennaisance mystic wrote, “All love is the love of God.”

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