The Art of Loving

Erich Fromm wrote The Art of Loving in the early fifties. It’s pretty rad. In his section on Love of God, he writes of the the “true kernel” of monotheistic religion, “the logic of which leads exactly to the negation of this concept of God. The truly religious person, if he follows the essence of  the monotheistic idea, does not pray for anything, does not expect anything from God; he does not love God as a child loves his father or her mother; he has acquired the humility of sensing his limitations, to the degree of knowing that he knows nothing about God.”

Cool so far. Fromm continues:

“He has faith in the principles which ‘God’ represents; he thinks turth, lives love and justice, and considers all of his life only valuable inasmuch as it gives him the chance to arrive at an ever fuller unfolding of his human powers—as the only reality that matters, as teh only object of ‘ultimate concern’; and eventually, he does not speak about God—nor even mention his  name. To love God, if he were going to use this word, would mean, then, to long for the attainment of the full capacity to love, for the realization of that which ‘God’ stands for in oneself.”

Right on.

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