I've been thinking about the difference between love and compassion. Spiritually speaking, compassion is a Buddhist virtue while love is Christian. Some people would say these are the same thing, just differently viewed. I don't believe they are the same at all. Compassion is supposed to be rooted in a recognition of the unity of all life. You are me and I am you and so on. So, compassion is logical because in feeling for you I am feeling for myself in a certain sense. We are all one and compassion is the appropriate response to that spiritual realisation.
Isn't this rather thin gruel? First of all, the logical nature of the thing is demeaning to true feeling. And secondly, if feeling for you is really a form of feeling for me then it's not really feeling for you at all. It isn't self-interested but nor is it seeing you in your own right as a real individual person
I know this is an over-simplification of what Buddhist compassion is but it does point to something real. Compassion is calm, measured, dispassionate. It is kind and good. It is the cool light of the moon. But love is the blazing light of the sun. It bursts its bounds. It can dazzle and even burn. It is not kind or good or even loving in the usual sense of that word because it cannot be contained. It overflows. It is radiant, glorious, intolerant of whatever might limit it. There really is no connection between compassion and love. They are not the same or even similar because love comes from the sea of fire which is the hidden cause and substance of all the created worlds while compassion is the reflection of that fire in matter after it has descended from the throne of God to the worlds below. It is love at second hand. Compassion is the good man's response to the human condition but love is the direct spirit of God as it flows through the universe giving it its very life.
Don't take this to mean that compassion is not a good and worthy thing. But it is not love. Compassion lives for others. Love dies for them.
1 comment:
That's very astute - because I have often read of the ideal kind of love, defined in a way that makes love into a version of compassion. Love is particular and mostly "local"; whereas compassion fits with the approved impersonal/ universal morality of this media age.
I think that love has been (deliberately) degraded in the past decades, by being almost exclusively discussed in terms that binds it up with sex - or indeed, when love (in 1960s pop songs!) is used as a euphemism for sex.
Yet the reality is that for many, probably most, people - their greatest love happens within their birth family - love between parents, siblings etc. And in the past - much more than now - same sex friendship sometimes rose to the level of family love.
Of course there is also real love in some marriages, but this blessing is probably often less common and powerful (and less enduring) than birth-family love.
The observable power of real love - which seems so much much greater than is seen for compassion - is often evident in terms of love's ability to inspire self-sacrifice of time and effort, of money, maybe life itself; and even when such love brings worry, pain, or great sadness - it can endure.
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