Astonishing the Gods on Loving without Illusion

[This series explores the way some of my favourite novels engage with spiritual things. As much as I will try to avoid discussing major plot points, I will be using quotes from the novels and be discussing how they fit generally into the story. So please take this as a spoiler warning.]

Of all the novels that have shaped how I think about spirituality and the world, I can’t think of any that have had a bigger impact than Ben Okri’s strange modern myth, Astonishing the Gods. I’ve previously commented here about it in terms of learning what you already know and the importance of paying attention. Today I’d like to focus on a different theme that has stuck with me, one that may not seem ‘spiritual’ at first glance but has had big repercussions through my life of faith: this is the need to “love without illusion.”

In the context of the book, our nameless hero has been traveling through a mysterious island city and is resting in a makeshift bedroom that has been set up for him in a piazza. There he meets a dwarf, who first introduces the theme in a conversation about treasuring what you have and finding without seeking. He mentions that those who look for love never seem to find it, and that he himself had never really found love, but only something that looked like love. In other words, he loved an illusion, something masquerading as love. But then the dwarf backtracks a bit, warning our hero of the exhaustion of living without illusion and encouraging him to flee into illusions instead and enjoy them. Our hero is tempted to believe him, but decides instead to dedicate himself to reality, but his resolution is immediately tested, in the form of a beautiful woman who visits his room:

Her body breathed out an unbearable lustful air. So strong was her lust that he began to quiver. Baring her thighs to him casually, she said: “I have hungered for a man such as you for many long years. Do you know what it is like when your body and soul crave a particular person whom you have not met, but whom you sense exists, and for whom you have been waiting for hundreds of years? … In my dreams I have loved you and wanted you. There has been no other, and there never will be. You are my missing soul. To be in your presence alone is like having entered a fairy-tale.”

She goes on, for pages and pages, in her over-the-top, romantic, seduction. He comes under her spell, but notices as he does this that the rest of the piazza becomes mired in a thick fog so that he can no longer see anything. This realization snaps him back to himself and he kindly declines her invitation. Growing furious, she leaves him with the words: “Because you rejected my love, this is my curse on you: Refusing to love an illusion, you will have to love without illusion. I cannot think of anything more cheerless.”

After she leaves and the mists dissipate, he thinks to himself, “That’s something else I will have to learn …I will have to learn to love without illusion.”

This message is so so true. It is not just true of loving in our personal relationships, romantic, family, or friendly. But it is also true for our communities, our churches, our countries, our histories. So much of what passes for love is built entirely on illusions. There are families where being honest is considered to be unloving. Almost all of our popular conceptions of romance are little more than fairy-tales, or projections on others based in our own woundedness. Vast swaths of people think loving their country means rejecting the truth of its past and present failings. But this is not love. This is just attachment to an idea, not based in reality. The truth is we are all flawed. The truth is our communities, churches, and countries have difficult history and have not always done the right thing or lived up to their values. It is certainly true, as both the dwarf and the lustful woman in Astonishing the Gods point out, that loving illusions and falsehoods is easier and a lot more fun. But it is not real love. Real love sees the beloved as they really are, scars, wounds, failings and all, and loves them anyway. This is the secret of love because you can’t love someone without really seeing them as they really are.

Over the past twenty years since I first read Astonishing the Gods, I’ve been struck by this idea over and over again. And I, with the book’s nameless hero, think to myself, “That’s something else I will have to learn …I will have to learn to love without illusion.”