My Son is a Spider-man: Confessions of an Ex-Arachnophobe

Spring is in the air and I want to get into the garden! Time to hear about the other kind of plot I ponder. This is a piece I wrote for our community garden's newsletter last spring. Enjoy!

My almost-two-year-old son loves bugs. When he is playing in the backyard, he’ll let out a squeal of delight, announcing, “Pider!” Which means he has found a spider, is pointing at it, and wants me to come and look.

My son makes no distinction in his excitement about bugs—be they ladybugs, earthworms, or centipedes. Butterfly or venomous arachnid, my son is fascinated.

I wish I could’ve said the same for myself. For most of my life I have been terrified of bugs. I was afraid of bees, petrified by spiders, immobilized by centipedes. Bugs were the stuff of nightmares. Merely knowing that a Daddy-long-legs was somewhere in the house was enough to make me run out shrieking until I had conclusive proof that it was dead.

I'm not exaggerating.

While I’m sure my bug-phobia was the source of amusement for some family members, I found it debilitating. So I prayed for help. And God provided: the first house I lived in after I got married had spiders the size of softballs. Huge and hairy. (Again, I'm not exaggerating.) I thought I would die. Or have a seizure.

We eventually learned how to trap these giant wolf spiders, which never actually bit us. But in their place, new, smaller spiders moved in—aggressive spiders that bit us repeatedly. In comparison, the wolf spiders were downright friendly—and we belatedly realized they had been keeping the nasty spiders away.

So I didn’t die, or have a seizure. Now anything less than a tarantula could hardly be called “big” in my books.

God answered my prayer another way when I started to garden. Within a few weeks of breaking ground, I realized that I no longer worried about what creepy crawlies were awaiting me as I dug. I had gloves now. But more than that, I had learned to coexist with the companions of my little garden ecosystem.

Because I realized that I need bees to pollinate my berry bushes. And spiders reduce the amount of predatory bugs that compete with me for my produce. Even centipedes have a place—in fact, my paranoia evaporated in a second when I learned that centipedes eat slug eggs!

So, even if I still wouldn’t want one crawling up my arm, as I teach my son about the world around him, I have introduced many of these bugs—my former enemies—as friends. And I am gratified to see that, so far, he is free and unafraid. I just pray that when he brings home something antennaed and many-legged, I never shriek--so that he never learns to fear these amazing creatures that do us all the service for which they were designed.

All You Need Is Love?

In my previous post, I promised to write more about love and how it can be the motivation for, rather than the antithesis of, doing what’s right. Rather than having to choose between love and duty, love should be what makes us want to do our duty.

I guess it all comes down to our definition of love. Is love a feeling of well-being? Is love an irrational drive that must eventually be satisfied? Is love a rational appreciation of the good? Is “love” synonymous with “value?” Can love have an evil object?

I’m not going to attempt to answer all these questions here, but I will fulfill my promise to report on what Dante and some other old guys thought of love. We can talk about other definitions and how they all pertain to the love vs. duty question later.

(Disclaimer: this post is more academic than I hope future posts will be, so if you get lost, skip it and tune in next time…and if you’re already a versed philosopher, forgive me if I take time to explain things you already know.)

Love in the Middle Ages
Medieval thinkers, who assumed the truth of the Christian scriptures, thought of love as the desire for the loved one to fulfill his/her/its nature. Within this definition, even Hell can be the product of Divine love. Like this:

God loves human beings. Therefore He desires them to fulfill their nature. He created each human with the nature to want to be with Him. But He also gave them free will—so they can, and do, choose to reject Him. Over their earthly lifetimes, God arranges such things as pain and pleasure to remind human beings that the consummation of all their desires can be found only in His presence.

But if, at the end of their life, a human still persists in embracing a nature that rejects God, God permits that to become their true nature. Still loving that human, God wants him/her to fulfill his/her nature. He will not force Himself on us. Accordingly, He allows him/her to reject Him for eternity…and Hell is the place from which God withdraws His presence so they can do just that.

I think it was C.S. Lewis who suggested that Hell’s door is locked from the inside.

(For more on this, see “Dante’s Hell, Aquinas’s Moral Theory, and the Love of God” by Eleonore Stump, published in Canadian Journal of Philosophy Vol. 16, No.2, June 1986, pp. 181-198.)

Platonic Love
Long before the middle ages, Plato had some ideas about love.

Crash course on Plato: everything True and Good and Beautiful is disembodied. Somewhere “out there” is the essence of Beauty which “beautiful” things here in the physical world can only imperfectly attempt to emulate. Somewhere “out there” is the essence of Goodness which “good” things here in the physical world can only imperfectly attempt to emulate…. You get the point. These “essences” he called Forms. Basically people who follow Plato (called “Platonists”) believe the physical world to be irredeemably flawed because it’s physical. By definition, only non-physical concepts (Forms) can be perfect.

Got it?

According to Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, in “Plato’s Eros and Dante’s Amore” (Traditio. 12 (1956): 315-337), Plato believed that souls existed before being placed by the Creator into a body. In this pre-existent state, the soul was in such bliss—able to contemplate the Forms without any impediment by the irksome weight of the flesh—that throughout all of its imprisonment in the body, it longs for and strives to once more return to that heavenly beauty. The love of material objects can be explained in that “the function of the various finite objects of desire is to ‘remind’ us of a beauty once seen and presently forgotten, a beauty so great that we are impelled up the ladder of beautiful forms to possess it” (Mazzeo, 333).

So, for Plato, the feeling of love is basically the soul’s déjà vu when it apprehends anything that contains a spark of Goodness or Truth or Beauty. It is sort of like saying I love my husband’s good qualities, rather than loving my husband himself.

Dante’s Conception of Love
A millennium or so later, Dante had an interesting view: that love motivates all human action—right and wrong. (For those who don’t recognize the name, Dante was the medieval Italian guy who wrote the Divine Comedy chronicling his travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven) Dante viewed love as “the source of every virtue, every vice” (Purgatory XVIII. 14-15).

Dante denied that “every love is, in itself, good love” (Purgatory XVIII. 36). He made a distinction between ordered and disordered love. Ordered love leads to virtue; disordered love leads to vice. He also believed that rational love must be educated as to how intensely it must love each thing. Loving some things too much can be immoral, just as loving something too little can be evil. So love can motivate evil “by choosing the wrong goal, [or] by insufficient or excessive zeal” (Purgatory XVII. 94-96). He argued that all the good and evil done by people can be attributed to proper or improper love.

Dante, like Plato, would say that the soul remembers the inexpressible joy of being in God’s presence before it was confined to the body and, therefore, longs to return to God’s embrace. Love expresses itself through Beauty, which is perceived by the eyes. Love’s object is an individual, which then leads the lover to the love of God. When a soul fixates its love on this earth it is a result of mistaking the model (of God) for the real thing.

He believed that rational love must be educated in its judgment of what is good, so that it seeks not what only seems good, but what actually is good. Dante outlines the three ways in which rational love can exercise mistaken judgment:

(1) when a person views another’s downfall as the key to his/her own success and therefore desires the other’s undoing,

(2) when a person views another’s rise as a threat to his/her own honour and fame and so desires the other to remain low, and

(3) when a person is overcome with anger by being wronged and so seeks only to do another harm (Purgatory XVII. 115-123).

In accord with Dante’s conception of love, one could use the word love interchangeably with “value.” In such a way, even Satan’s hatred of God can be explained in terms of love; Satan could conceivably be accused of falling into the first of rational love’s mistaken judgments, as outlined above. Satan mistakenly thought that his own glory would increase if he could defeat God; he loved his own good more than he loved God. The language used to describe Satan could then be changed so that he is not someone who loves nothing, but someone who loves nothing properly.

So what?
Now that our brains are swirling with philosophical ideas, what do we think the makers of Legend of the Seeker would say about any of this? Can Dante or Plato shed any light on the love vs. duty question? Or would Richard and Kahlan define love in a very different way?

What do you think?