The Loves of Dracula and Frankenstein

One evening an old Cherokee told His Grandson 

about A Battle that goes on inside people.

He said, "My Son, The Battle is between 

Two Wolves inside us all.

One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The Other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith."

The Grandson thought about it for a minute 

and then asked His Grandfather: 

"Which wolf wins?"

The Old Cherokee simply replied, 

"The One you Feed."

THE BLIND HERMIT

Who is it? You're Welcome, 

My Friend, Whoever You are.
    
Come in, My Poor Friend. 

Noone will Hurt you here. 

If you're in Trouble, perhaps I can Help you. 

But you need not tell me about it if you don't want to. 

What's the matter? 

You're Hurt, My Poor Friend. Come. Sit down.
    
Perhaps you're afflicted too. 

I cannot See and you cannot Speak. Is that it?
    
I have prayed many times for God 

to send me A Friend. 

It's very lonely here. 

And it's been a long time since any human being came into this hut. 

I shall look after you and you will comfort me. 

Now you must lie down and go to sleep. 

Yes, yes. Now you must sleep. 

 

Our Father, I thank thee that in thy great mercy, thou hast taken pity on my great loneliness and now out of the silence of the night has brought two of thy lonely children together, and sent me a friend to be a light to mine eyes and a comfort in time of trouble. Amen.
    
Before you came, I was all alone. 

It is Bad to be Alone.

“GOD is Love.” says St. John. 

When I first tried to write this book I thought that his maxim would provide me with a very plain highroad through the whole subject. I thought I should be able to say that Human Loves deserved to be called Loves AT ALL, just in so far as they resembled That Love Which is God. 

The first distinction I made was therefore between what I called Gift-Love and Need-Love. The typical example of Gift-Love would be that Love which moves A Man to Work and Plan and Save for The Future Well-Being of His Family which he will DIE without Sharing or SEEING; of the second, that which sends a lonely or frightened child to its Mother’s Arms.

There was no doubt which was more like Love Himself. Divine Love is Gift-Love. 

The Father gives all He is and has to The Son. The Son gives Himself back to the Father, and gives Himself to The World, and for The World to The Father, and thus gives The World (in Himself) back to The Father too.

And what, on the other hand, can be LESS like anything we believe of God’s Life than Need-Love? He lacks nothing, but OUR Need-Love, as Plato saw, is “The Son of Poverty.” 

It is the accurate reflection in consciousness of our actual nature. We are born helpless. 

As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.

I was looking forward to writing some fairly easy panegyrics on the first sort of love and disparagements of the second. And much of what I was going to say still seems to me to be True. 

I still think that if all we mean by Our Love is a Craving to BE Loved, we are in a very deplorable state. 

But I would not now say (with my master, MacDonald) that if we mean only this craving we are mistaking for Love something that is not Love AT ALL. 

I cannot now deny the name Love to Need-Love. Every time I have tried to think the thing out along those lines I have ended in puzzles and contradictions. 

The reality is more complicated than I supposed.

First of all, we Do Violence to most languages, including our own, if we do not call Need-Love “Love.” 

Of course language is not an infallible guide, but it contains, with all its defects, a good deal of stored insight and experience. If you begin by flouting it, it has a way of avenging itself later on. 

We had better not follow Humpty Dumpty in making words mean whatever we please.

Secondly, we must be cautious about calling Need-Love “Mere Selfishness.” 

‘Mere’ is always a dangerous word. No doubt Need-love, like all our impulses, can be selfishly indulged. A tyrannous and gluttonous Demand for Affection can be a horrible thing thing. 

But in Ordinary Life no one calls a child selfish because it turns for comfort to its mother; nor an adult who turns to his fellow “For Company.” 

Those, whether children or adults, who do so least are not usually the most selfless. 

Where Need-Love is felt there may be reasons for denying or totally mortifying it; but NOT to feel it is in general the mark of The Cold Egoist. 

Since we DO in reality NEED one another (“it is Not Good for Man to Be alone”), then the failure of this Need to appear as Need-Love in consciousness —in other words, the illusory feeling that it IS Good for us to be alone — is a bad spiritual symptom; just as lack of appetite is a bad medical symptom because Men DO really need Food.

But thirdly, we come to something far more important. Every Christian would agree that a Man’s Spiritual Health is exactly •proportional• to his Love for God. 

But Man’s Love for God, from the very nature of the case, must always be very largely, and must often be ENTIRELY, a Need-Love. This is obvious when we implore forgiveness for our sins or support in our tribulations. 

But in the long run it is perhaps even more apparent in our growing — for it ought to be growing — awareness that our whole Being by its very nature is One Vast Need; incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered, crying out for Him who can untie things that are now knotted together and tie up things that are still dangling loose. 

I do not say that Man can never bring to God anything at all but sheer Need-Love. Exalted souls may tell us of a reach beyond that. 

But they would also, I think, be the first to tell us that those heights would cease to be True Graces, would become Neo-Platonic or finally diabolical illusions, the moment A Man dared to THINK that he could LIVE on them and henceforth drop out the element of Need. 

“The Highest,” says the Imitation, “does not stand without The Lowest.” 

It would be a Bold and Silly Creature that came before its Creator with the boast,

“I’m no Beggar. I Love You disinterestedly.” 

Those who come Nearest to a Gift-Love for God will next moment, even at the very SAME moment, be beating their breasts with The Publican and laying their indigence before The Only Real Giver. 

And God Will Have it So. 

He addresses our Need-love: “Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy-laden,” or, in the Old Testament, “Open your mouth wide and I will fill it.”

Thus one Need-Love, The Greatest of All, either coincides with or at least makes a main ingredient in Man’s Highest, Healthiest, and Most Realistic Spiritual Condition. 

A very strange corollary to follows. 

Man approaches God most-nearly when he is in one sense •least• LIKE God. 

For what can be more unlike than Fullness and Need, Sovereignty and Humility, Righteousness and Penitence, Limitless Power and a Cry for Help?

This paradox staggered me when I first ran into it; it also wrecked all my previous attempts to write about Love. 

When we face it, something like this seems to result.

We must distinguish two things which might both possibly be called “Nearness to God.” 

One is Likeness to God. God has impressed some sort of Likeness to Himself, I suppose, in all that He has made. Space and Time, in their own fashion, mirror His Greatness; all Life, His fecundity; animal Life, His Activity. 

Man has a more important Likeness than these by Being RATIONAL. 

Angels, we believe, have Likenesses which Man lacks: Immortality and Intuitive Knowledge. In that way all Men, whether Good or Bad, all angels INCLUDING those that fell, are more like God than the animals are. Their natures are in this sense “nearer” to the Divine Nature. 

But, secondly, there is what we may call Nearness of Approach. 

If this is what we mean, the states in which a Man is “nearest” to”