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I've been thinking about the idea of madness as hell since I watched Scorcese's Shutter Island last week — a pretty salient and sobering portrayal of our capacity for psychosis. In some of his recent books Terry Eagleton makes this connection too and has an interesting reading of Christ's descent into hell as a trope for what is required for a transfigured existence. At one point he even says the transformation of our condition can only happen through a revolution which cuts that deep — into the darkness of self-dispossession and madness.

Ultimately, though, I think these and other depictions of our condition demonstrate the truth of Dotoyevsky's understanding of hell in The Brothers Karamazov as “the suffering of being unable to love.” I've always resonated with that line.

Blake, in many ways I think Dostoyevsky's line is a little narcissistic (which might also be hell). I would suggest the fullest reality of hell is first not allowing ourselves to be loved, which then would follow with not being able to love. We can only give what we have received.

That's true, good point. To be honest, I don't remember the immediate context of that line but I wonder if we might also include the inability — and I'm still thinking about Shutter Island here too — to love oneself. Not in an purely narcissistic way, but in the sense of coming to terms with our own existence, especially what we have tried to repress. I wonder if allowing ourselves to be loved is in some ways contingent upon our ability to see ourselves as lovable, to love ourselves in a sense. That we are told to love neighbors as ourselves always gets me in that respect. In that past I have tended to put a narcissistic gloss on that but I wonder if this is what it means: that we have to come to terms with own our madness and see ourselves as someone who can receive love before we can imagine loving others.

To be loved and to love/to love and to be loved…does it have to be sequential?
Is it essential that one must happen before the other?
With regard to love it seems to me that there is a simultaneous capacity/awareness thing that is in fact, a mystical encounter with heaven…so the opposite…a bifurcation of love might be hell.

Kathy, I actually do believe it is sequential because love first comes from God. We have to receive that love in order to give it.

Let me be just a little argumentative for a moment…

Is it possible, as you say, that love comes from God first which in fact would give it a sequential quality with regard to God, but that our experience of being loved and the capacity to love are born in us simultaneously as a result of God's initiative? This to me is the mystical experience of the encounter with God that changes everything…

Kathy, I kind of wonder if we are saying the same thing. The experience of God's love, which is often seen as mystical, is predicated on the act of love. But what I hear you saying is that they can happen at the same time. I would share that thought.

Kathy, I kind of wonder if we are saying the same thing. The experience of God’s love, which is often seen as mystical, is predicated on the act of love. But what I hear you saying is that they can happen at the same time. I would share that thought.