Love is not a four-letter word

S.Pathiravitana

That love is not a four-letter word is the gist of what Pope Benedic XV1 has been trying to clarify, according to reports appearing sometime ago in the press. One of his later encyclicals is said to be ‘a good deal less controversial’ than his previous ones that excluded homosexuals from the priesthood.

He is trying to warn his believers not to confuse lust with love and emphasises that love is not mere sex. I am afraid that this warning may be a wee bit late in coming for there has been quite a change taking place in the meanings of words in the English language in recent times.

Only the other day I was recalling how an American journalist who keeps a regular watch on the habits and behaviour of English words was remarking that there are only six deadly sins now because one of the seven, ‘greed,’ has turned into a virtue in this commercial age of ours.

Similarly, lust too has been knocking on the doors of love quite for some time now and the Pope fearing that the doors might give way one of these days under these blows it has been receiving, has thought of intervening to prevent any such disaster.

As far as the English-speaking world is concerned its modern literature is now full of those four-letter words that once never dared to show their faces in books. As the modern novel is now regarded as a reflection of life, under the literary concept ‘realism,’ it has been hard to keep the four-letter words out of the realistic novel.

This led to a prosecution of the publication of the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover somewhere in the Fifties. One of the witnesses who appeared as a witness for the defence was Richard Hoggart, a respected literary and social critic. Describing how widespread the use of that four-letter word employed by D.H. Lawrence is, he told the court of his experience that morning, when on his way to give evidence, of what he had overheard as he was passing a work site.

He did not edit any of the four-letter words he heard but the staid old London Times not wishing perhaps to irritate its respectable readers reprinted his evidence like this:

“Fifty yards from this court this morning I heard a man say ‘___’ three times, as I went past He must have been very angry with somebody. If you work with people on building sites as I have, you will find that these words occur again and again in conversation. We have no word in English, which is neither a long abstraction nor a vague euphemism for this act. He (Lawrence) wanted us to be able to say at certain moments this is what one does ‘___’ in the most simple, natural way one ‘___’. There is no snigger or dirt.”

But this is not exactly what is worrying the Pope. He is more concerned in saving the word love from falling into the hands of lust. He draws our attention to the distinction that prevailed at the beginning when two Greek words were used to separate the two kinds of love.

One is the word erotica from which we have got the word erotic and the other is agape meaning spiritual love, which somehow never got absorbed into popular speech. I dug into this a little more to find out what really happened.

The views of Jesus did not find favour with the Establishment in his time. Like Socrates, who too fell out with the Establishment of his day, both of them had to pay for it with their lives. This is what Jesus told those who came to hear him when he spoke of loving thy neighbour as thyself:

“ You have heard it said, love your neighbour but hate your enemy. But I tell you Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends the rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”

Then again, “You have heard it said, eye for eye and tooth for tooth. But I tell you do not resist an evil person. If some one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Such views of Jesus did not cut much ice with the Sanhedrin - the highest court of justice in ancient Jerusalem. They came to look upon him as a radical, an anarchist who was trying to overthrow the established order. The anarchist name has stuck with those Christians who have turned pacifists or believers in non-violence.

There is a long distinguished line of those who have adopted the non-violence of Christ.

They say that the book The Kingdom of God is Within You written by Leo Tolstoy has become a text for those who have been called Christian Anarchists. Mahatma Gandhi a Hindu, too, got a few cues on non-violence from Tolstoy after reading his book. The others like H.D.

Thoreau, an American, who wrote a book on Civil Disobedience was another of the Christian Anarchists to inspire Gandhi’s great feats like his salt march and many other non-violent actions he performed. Other European thinkers known to be Christian Anarchists are Soren Kierkegaard better known as an Existentialist thinker and Nikolai Berdyaev a Christian philosopher.

My interest in the four-letter word love began some years ago when I found that our Christian fathers had translated Love thy neighbour into Sinhala as obey asalvesiyaata prema karanu. This phrase created a certain ambiguity in my mind.

For premaya along with senahasa, aadaraya, aalaya are all interchangeable words for love in Sinhala. None of them has the erotic sense that the English word love includes along with motherly, brotherly and other loves and affections. But the Sinhala words are simple and gentle words for love. None of them has any strong emotions at all.

I used to wonder how a Sinhala boy and a Sinhala girl expressed their love to each other in Sinhala. This again may have been due to my reading about experiences in the West where the formula I-love-you has to be mumbled to confirm any love that has sprung between the lovers. Did they say ‘I love you’ or not? The Sinhala scenarios may have changed a bit from the days of my youth so I am unaware of how the dance of love is conducted nowadays.

If I remember right what happened then was a wordless communication where the bodily movements, the anga chalanaya, as they say, spoke a lot. I shall leave it at that and go to my next discovery. In my exploration of the word for love in Sinhala I consulted several dictionaries in the course of which I came across an updated and revised version of Carter’s nineteenth century English-Sinhala dictionary by our late Professor D.E.Hettiaratchi.

He has got it right. The word that he has selected to top the list of names to indicate a variety of loves, some of which I mentioned earlier, is the word maitri. Now that is the word that does justice to the concept of universal love that Christ spoke of and performs the same function as the Greek word agape does for the English language.

Maitri transcends all personal forms of love and is a good replacement for the currently used asalvasiyata prema karanu. and removes any ambiguity that may form in the mind. If adopted it may help to create a better understanding among fellow religionists representing the four major religions of the world in this small island who, after all, are only striving to achieve a universal peace if not a universal love.