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Winter 2011/2012
Love: "The Eternal Purpose"
Robert Browning spent his life examining love in all its manifestations: human love, divine love, love that leads to murder, love that blinds, love that enlightens, and more. (He wrestled as well with its opposite, hate.) But it is especially in his considerations of divine love that Browning excels.
Author Hugh Martin wrote that "Browning was not a systematic theologian, though he wrote better theology than some of the professionals." His formidable intellect spread itself over many belief systems. He belonged to no sect or denomination, and critcized the hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of most of them. Yet he was a devout believer, especially in the transcendent goodness and love of God. He did not believe in eternal punishment, and found it difficult to accept the literal historicity of parts if the Gospels (as do many Biblical scholars). For Browning, it was the overarching themes of scripture that mattered. To quote Hugh Martin again:
Fundamental to Browning is his belief that human life has meaning because of the plan and purpose of the Creator. Though the 'little mind of man' cannot fully grasp that plan and purpose, we can in part, and we can willingly cooperate with it.
As with most of his writing, Browning's religious philosphy was ahead of his time. In the Victorian age, comfortable mainstream religious beliefs were being upended by critics in France and Germany (Ernest Renan and David Strauss) who sought to reduce Jesus to myth and the Bible to bad history, and by the challenge to the literal interpretation of Biblical creation by Charles Darwin. None of this lessened Browning's less-doctrinaire faith.
Some of Browning's beliefs may be discerned in two of his great poems, Rabbi Ben Ezra and A Death in the Desert, both written in the early 1860's and published in Dramatis Personae (1864). The former is based on the historical figure, Abraham Ben Meir Ben Ezra (1090-1168?), the great Jewish theologian and philosopher who raised Biblical exegesis to a science and, with Maimonedes, is one of the towering theological figures of the Middle Ages.
According to Ben Ezra (and RB), our lives are to be viewed as a whole: God's plan includes both youth and old age (and death), and our essential life is that of the soul and its concomitant obligation to treat others with compassion, respect, and love. The poem is one of hope and cheerfulness, and an antidote to the cynicism of much religious criticism, both of Browning's time and ours. Rather than challenge the rationalistic criticisms of scholars, the poet emphasizes the underlying message of Scripture and its human and divine truths.
In Desert, we see John (author of the fourth Gospel) imagined as dying at a great age in a cave in the desert, companioned by five converts. The poem contains many of Browning's most characteristic religious ideas, and "has been called his most closely reasoned apologia for Christianity, with the possible exception of 'The Pope' in The Ring and the Book," according to Browning scholar William Clyde de Vane.
This is a very rich poem, and deserves close reading, but here is an excerpt about love that speaks to us all:
For life, with all it yields of joy and woe,
And hope and fear - believe the aged friend, -
Is just our chance o'the prize of learning love,
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is;
And that we hold thenceforth to the uttermost
Such prize despite the envy of the world ...
(Suggested further reading: Christmas Eve and Easter Day, Ferishtah's Fancies, and La Saisiaz.)
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