Keith Sutherland1 Divine Madness - On the Aetiology of Romantic Obsession
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Keith Sutherland
1
Divine Madness
On the Aetiology of
Romantic Obsession
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Abstract: The paper opens with a brief overview of ‘limerence’ or
obsessive love disorder (OLD) from the perspectives of psychology,
neurology, anthropology, and sociology, but concludes that certain
unique characteristics of the condition suggest that it is better under-
stood as a form of ‘divine madness’, resulting from the failure of the
Platonic ascent of love to follow its natural trajectory. The paper
focuses on Plotinus’s model of the erotic ascent from the one to the
ONE, drawing parallels with the Indian bhakti tradition and other
models derived from transpersonal psychology. The final section
explores the distinction between pagan and Christian Platonism and
the entailments of the latter for secular perspectives on love.
Keywords: limerence; obsessive love disorder; Platonism; Plotinus;
bhakti yoga; transpersonal psychology.
‘The greatest of goods comes to us through mania, insofar as mania is
heaven sent.’ (Plato, Phaedrus, 244a6)
1. Introduction
Although still to be accepted into the APA Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual as an acknowledged psychiatric disorder, the symptoms of
Correspondence:
Email: k.sutherland@exeter.ac.uk
1 Department of Politics, University of Exeter.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 29, No. 1–2, 2022, pp. 79–112
DOI: 10.53765/20512201.29.1.079
80 K. SUTHERLAND
limerence, ‘an acute onset, unexpected, obsessive attachment to one
person (the limerent object)’, are well known, although the aetiology
of the condition is disputed (Willmott and Bentley, 2015). Occam’s
razor suggests that we should always privilege naturalistic explana-
tions for medical conditions (psychiatric and otherwise), but the claim
of this paper is that the unique phenomenology of limerent infatuation
is such that it is better understood as a form of ‘divine madness’,
resulting from the failure of the Platonic ascent of love to follow its
full course. The characteristics of limerence are as follows:
1.1. Focus on the one
Although many of those who are predisposed to limerence are serial
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offenders — there could be a number of ‘limerent objects’ (LOs) over
a lifetime — the author has yet to hear of a single case of someone
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with a limerent attachment to more than one person at a time.
Limerent stalkers (for example Edward Vines’ 25-year obsession with
Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis) always have a single target. It’s
easy to explain the stalking of random females on a Saturday night in
terms of common-or-garden sexual predation, but why the focus of the
limerent obsessive on the one? Why not two, or even three? Given
that most adult females are exchangeable vehicles for gene propaga-
tion, the standard Darwinian sexual selection model doesn’t apply as
males are optimized to spread their seed as widely as possible. And
even if the (male) stalker has a preference for a particular type —
long-legged blonde or whatever — there are a large number of
potential alternatives. Yet only THE ONE will do for the limerent
obsessive, and this is hard to understand from a purely Darwinian
perspective. The argument of this paper is that this is more than a
semantic quibble — the limerent obsessive and the Saturday-night
stalker are different in kind. In the eyes of the former, there is only
ONE limerent object — the condition entails the ‘inability to react
limerently to more than one person at a time’ (Tennov, 1979/1999, p.
24).
For female limerent obsessives, the focus on the one would make
good biological sense, given that the ovum can only be fertilized by
one sperm, so the female would naturally seek the best donor availa-
ble. This would suggest that biological females are more prone to
limerent obsession than males, but there is no evidence to suggest a
gender disparity (ibid., pp. 210, 214).DIVINE MADNESS 81
In her classic work Love and Limerence, first published in 1979, the
psychologist Dorothy Tennov (who coined the term) argues that
although limerence is always directed at a potential sexual partner,
most sufferers value physical consummation far less than other signs
of reciprocation from the ‘limerent object’ (LO) — ‘the goal, the
climax of the limerent fantasy, is not sexual union but emotional
commitment’ (ibid., p 39; pace Freud, 1933; H. Ellis, 1936; A. Ellis,
1960; Fromm, 1956). Whilst Tennov views ‘real’ love as more akin to
mutual affection (storgē in Greek parlance), she draws a categorical
distinction between limerent attraction and lust — the former being a
misdirected version of a love that is not ultimately sexual in nature.
This would also suggest that limerence has little to do with sexual
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objectification, whereby a person is viewed as an ‘inhuman body’
(Nussbaum, 1995; Vaes, Loughnan and Puvia, 2014), as the over-
whelming majority of Tennov’s interviewees were well acquainted
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with their LO and it was inconceivable to them that the LO could be
replaced by someone with similar objective characteristics.
1.2. Ubiquity and intensity
When she was employed as a social worker charged with moving
geriatric patients from a psychiatric hospital into community care,
Olivia Fane (2020) was astonished to find from reading their case
notes that a large proportion were hospitalized as the result of an
unrequited love affair. Such is the intensity of the passion that it
‘literally destroyed them’ (their psychic well-being, that is). Whilst the
condition can sometimes be normalized after a few months, there are
cases of it lasting decades or a lifetime — even when all contacts with
the LO have been severed. The intensity of the pathology is shown by
the fact that Edward Vines was jailed for three years for defying
twelve court orders in his 25-year-long harassment of Newsnight pre-
senter Emily Maitlis. As a Cambridge graduate, Vines was presuma-
bly an intelligent and (otherwise) rational individual, yet he was
prepared to risk everything on account of his infatuation with Maitlis.2
2 Whilst this paper uses Vines’ obsession with Maitlis as a prime example of limerent
obsession, it is orthogonal to the psychological literature on parasocial relationships
(one-sided obsession with a celebrity) in that they knew each other whilst under-
graduates at Cambridge, long before Maitlis acquired celebrity status. In ‘Her Group’
(of 400-odd limerents) Dorothy Tennov only had one example of parasocial relation-
ships — a girl who had a fixation on Paul McCartney (Tennov, 1979/1999, pp. 83–6).82 K. SUTHERLAND
Fane, in her book chapter which inspired this paper, observes that ‘the
symptoms of infatuation seem to have been the same in all cultures
and for all time’, but is content to reduce this to species-wide bio-
psychological commonalities, albeit expressed sometimes as boiling
of the blood (Aristotle), condition of the soul (Galen), epilepsy
(Arabian physicians), romantic love (medieval Christendom), or
possession (Western modernity). Her conclusion is that romantic
infatuation is a form of madness (Fane, 2014, pp. 95–9).
But how could such a universal form of madness develop? Can
evolutionary psychology (EP) come to our rescue? Fane notes that
obsessive love affects exactly the same part of the brain as anorexia
(ibid., p. 98), and there is a plausible EP narrative that claims anorexia
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was a valuable adaptation in the EEA (environment of evolutionary
adaptedness) during times of famine. But it’s hard to imagine a plausi-
ble EP hypothesis for the acquisition of a ‘cognitive module’ that
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would predispose someone to limerent attachment. For a start the EEA
for humans is the hunter-gatherer period where humans spent over
99% of their evolutionary history, and it was the tribe rather than the
nuclear family that was the dominant social institution at the time —
genetic studies suggest that monogamy evolved less than 10–20,000
years ago (Dupanloup et al., 2003). ‘It takes a village to raise a child’,
as the saying goes, and limerent attachment would have obstructed the
widespread food sharing that is a characteristic of hunter-gatherer
societies. And even though family bonding is of value in the extended
developmental process of the human neonate, there is no evidence that
romantic infatuation is the best way of establishing long-term pair
bonding (Fane dismisses it out of hand on the following page of her
essay). Although limerent attachment clearly enables the lover to
overlook the flaws in the other party that might otherwise cause a
budding relationship to be ‘shipwrecked on the reefs of human imper-
fection’,3 once the condition has passed, the disillusion can lead to an
equal and opposite reaction. Arranged marriages tend to last longer
than couples that came together through a passionate attraction, so it’s
hard to see that limerence has any survival value that would be
privileged by natural (or cultural) selection.
3 I am grateful to Professor Gerard Casey for this observation.DIVINE MADNESS 83
1.3. Specificity
Limerence has been likened to alcoholism and other forms of drug
addiction, but would appear to be far more specific, and therefore
more difficult to treat via cognitive and behavioural therapies.
Although an alcoholic may have a favourite tipple, the craving can be
sated by a wide range of alcoholic beverages, and heroin addicts can
be weaned off with methadone and other substitutes. But it’s hard to
imagine that Edward Vines would have been prepared to accept even
a near-identical clone of Emily Maitlis — there was only ONE person
who could satisfy his unrequited passion. If limerence were like any
other form of addiction the parallel would be to someone at an AA
meeting confessing that they were addicted to Château Lafite
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Rothschild 6 September 1970. In addition, most alcoholics and drug
addicts are all too aware of their illness (and would like to be cured),
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whereas the limerent simply sees himself as being in love.
Comparisons have been made between limerence and obsessive-
compulsive disorder (OCD), as they share a common neurochemical
signature (reduced serotonin levels). But although OCD is specific —
in the sense that a mysophobe is unlikely to be also (say) a compulsive
hoarder — nevertheless the mysophobe is obsessive about all germs.
Limerent obsession, however, is focused on one person, so it is hard to
see that it has much in common with OCD. Furthermore, there are no
examples in the limerence literature of the ritual behaviours adopted
by OCD sufferers (locking and unlocking a door or flicking a light
switch a specific number of times). There might be some parallel with
sufferers from intrusive thoughts but, although there is generally a
single theme (violence, sex, religious blasphemy, etc.), the condition
does not generally involve a unique person as a target. If it did, then it
would be an example of the ‘dark’ side of limerent infatuation (see p.
94, below), rather than a variant of OCD.
Psychology is strangely silent on the causes of limerence or
‘obsessive love disorder’ (OLD), merely pointing out that it shares a
common neurological signature with other forms of obsession and
addiction. Neuroscientists have recorded activity in the ventral teg-
mental area of the midbrain (associated with euphoria and addiction)
when people ‘truly, madly and deeply’ in love were asked to think of
their beloved (Fisher et al., 2016), along with reduced activity in the
area responsible for critical thought (Bartels and Zeki, 2004). But it is
hard to see how this demonstrates ‘that passionate love served to
guarantee mate selection, long-term romantic relationships and the84 K. SUTHERLAND
survival of our species’ (Karandashev, 2015). No wonder the
reductive assumption of cognitive neuroscience — whereby psychol-
ogical processes are ‘explained’ by isolating them to localized brain
regions — has been lampooned as ‘The New Phrenology’ (Uttal,
2003).
Even if a reliable biomarker for OLD were found, this doesn’t
explain how the condition develops — heroin addicts become hooked
on account of using the drug, whereas OLD appears to be largely
fuelled by the absence of interaction with the LO. The social psychol-
ogist Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling book The Happiness Hypothesis
(2006) has a chapter devoted to love and attachment, but the word
‘obsession’ doesn’t even appear in the index. The psychological
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understanding of attachment can be traced back to the experiments of
Harry Harlow which tested Freud’s theory (which he appears to have
borrowed from St. Augustine’s Confessions) that the infant’s libido is
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derived from attachment to his mother’s milk, which is then extended
to the object with the breast providing the nourishment (Harlow and
Zimmerman, 1959). Harlow’s experiments refuted both Freud’s
theory and behaviourist notions of operant conditioning by demonstra-
ting that the softness of the surrogate mother (a bundle of cloth) was
more important than the source of nourishment (a milk tube from a
‘mother’ made of wire). But why would this develop into an attach-
ment to a unique person, especially given Conrad Lorenz’s experi-
ments demonstrating that a duckling is perfectly happy to imprint
itself on anything that moves (Lorenz, 1935). And is OLD/limerence a
result of excessive or inadequate maternal bonding? I don’t believe
this has been put to the test.
Modern psychiatry seems happy to follow the same path as its
reductive forebears — the current fad for cognitive-behavioural
therapy (CBT) merely adding to the old animal behaviourist model the
view that the brain is a digital device that can be reprogrammed at
will.4 CBT practitioners pride themselves in having no interest what-
soever in how or why a condition developed, they merely offer a diag-
nosis and ‘fix’ that works at least as well as pharmacological
4 The Platonist philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch anticipated CBT with her acerbic
remarks on ‘existential behaviourism’. Her collection of essays, The Sovereignty of
Good (1970/2001), is a critique of the dominant perspective on philosophy of mind at
the time, according to which ‘atomised’ individuals choose both their identity and moral
personality, detached (magically) from biological, social, and religious constraints
(ibid., p. 46).DIVINE MADNESS 85
intervention. CBT is a uniquely Western phenomenon, the child of the
European Enlightenment, and its positivistic progeny:
People raised in this cultural tradition may never have questioned the
idea that reason is separate from emotion or that humans exist as
separate individual selves, disconnected from each other and from the
social and natural world. It can seem natural to talk about humans as if
they are a type of machine — for example, the brain as a computer… It
also seems natural to talk about thoughts and feelings as ‘irrational’ and
try to use the power of reason to change them. (Boyle and Johnstone,
2020, p. 151)
The origins of CBT can be traced, via Paul Dubois’ ‘rational per-
suasion’ school of psychotherapy, Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive
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Behavioral Therapy (REBT), and Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Therapy,
back to the Stoic philosophy of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius
(Robertson, 2020, p. 17). Modern Stoics emphasize ‘the role of
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responsibility, rationality, and self-disciplined observation of one’s
own mind as a means of modifying psychological well-being’ (Still
and Dryden, 1999, p. 149). CBT developed at the same time as
Rational Choice Theory (RCT) in behavioural economics and shares a
common perspective regarding the atomized individual as a freely-
choosing rational agent intent on optimizing her own (self) interests.
Person-centred therapist Brian Thorne observes that, in addition to
lending itself to the (reductive) ‘spirit of the age’, CBT is ‘attractive to
those who hold the purse strings because its principles can be quickly
taught to psychiatric nurses’ (Thorne, 2020, p. 238).
1.4. Cultural influences
The literary critic Gaston Paris suggested that romantic infatuation is
an Occidental cultural construct invented by French troubadours in the
twelfth century (Paris, 1883). However, anthropological surveys have
found evidence for it in 88% of human cultures — in the remainder
the ethnographic record was too thin to be sure either way (Jankowiak
and Fischer, 1992; pace Stone, 1989). And, given its cross-cultural
ubiquity (Fischer, Shaver and Carnochan, 1990; Shaver, Morgan and
Wu, 1996), one has to question whether limerence/OLD is indeed a
psychological disorder. Excessive hoarding might be an eccentric
pastime but it isn’t a psychiatric illness. However, if limerent infatua-
tion harms the flourishing of either party (or their families) then it is
certainly dysfunctional from a social perspective, but is it appropriate
to ‘medicalise thoughts, feelings and behaviour that are unusual or86 K. SUTHERLAND
differ from the norm’ (Boyle and Johnstone, 2020, p. 10)? Unlike the
diagnosis of physical illness, there is no clear correspondence between
subjective states and neurology, so ‘the transformation of people’s
thoughts, feelings and behaviour into symptoms and illness categories
has to be based on subjective social judgments and what are believed
to be normal ways of thinking, feeling and behaving’ (ibid, p. 20). The
chair of the committee that drew up the fourth edition of the DSM
likened the process to ‘two monkeys throwing darts at a diagnostic
board’ (Frances, 2013, p. 175).
The DSM is largely a political document — written by a committee,
with some categories of disorder decided by vote, its framework so
often disputed that a new version of the manual (with a completely
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different list of disorders) has to be issued every ten to fifteen years.
(Hornstein, 2009, p. 164; cf. Szasz, 1974)
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The compilation process does little more than reflect the cultural
mores of our time — nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ‘mental
disorders’ included both homosexuality5 and drapetomania (a
‘psychiatric condition’ that caused black slaves to abscond), and there
was no exclusively male counterpart to the female mental disorder of
‘nymphomania’. However, Dante’s limerent obsession with Beatrice
Portinari (see p. 97, below) was not seen as a sign of psychiatric
illness in late medieval Florence, and it didn’t result in his social
ostracism — Beatrice and her friends merely laughed at him. Not so in
modernity where ‘the alienation of human culture has so infected our
understanding of this desirous love that we can only think of it as
either a dangerous throwing away of self upon another or as a
manipulative attempt to possess another for our own gratification’
(McIntosh, 1998, p. 168). The difference between the ecstatic poetry
of Dante’s Vita Nuova and the secret torment of the limerent sufferers
described in Tennov’s book is that, whereas the former was a proud
public Confession of love, the latter only ‘fessed up under strict con-
ditions of anonymity (all names were changed).
The overwhelming majority of the limerents in Tennov’s survey
were (otherwise) ‘fully functioning, rational, emotionally stable,
normal, nonneurotic, nonpathological members of society’ (Tennov,
1979/1999, p. 89). According to her extrapolation from her survey
results, limerence is not a ‘mental illness’ — it is an extremely
5 At the 1973 APA Convention, homosexuality was deleted from the DSM roster by a
60/40 majority vote, under pressure from gay-rights activists (Casey, 2021a, p. 48).DIVINE MADNESS 87
common condition which could well affect some 42% of all adults
(herself included), and which affects males and females equally (ibid.,
pp. 181–2, 210). Perhaps this is the reason that limerence/OLD has not
yet been accepted into the DSM as an acknowledged psychiatric
disorder.
In sum, it is really hard to explain the aetiology of romantic
obsession in naturalistic terms (whether using evolutionary, neurol-
ogical, psychological, anthropological, or sociological modelling), on
account of the intensity and specificity of the condition. We may well
need to look elsewhere, especially given the universal limerent
delusion of amour toujours, ‘a love that will last for ever and is
always there’ (Karandashev, 2015, p. 4).
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2. A Divine Madness
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The goal of limerence is not possession, but a kind of merging, a ‘one-
ness’, the ecstatic bliss of mutual reciprocation… a transcendent state
that has no parallel in human experience unless it be that of the religious
mystic. (Tennov, 1979/1999, pp. 120, 166)
The One is both the self-loving source of the derivation and articulation
of all reality in levels of unity and love and the ultimate goal of the
soul’s longing, whose return to its source is a gradual transformation of
the love it originally received from the One. (Bertozzi, 2021)
The claim of this paper is that OLD/limerence is easier to understand
as the result of a spiritual transformation gone wrong, the particular
model adopted here being the Neoplatonic ascent of love. Plato’s
original template posits a continuum of ‘erotic’ attraction, starting
with the love of beautiful bodies and ending with the abstract love of
‘The Good’ (under the aspect of Beauty). According to Socrates’
speech in The Symposium, the lover who is initially attracted to a
single beautiful body soon realizes that the beauty of one body is
closely related to that of another, and will then despise his passion for
a particular body as petty. The erotic ascent then progresses from the
love of beautiful bodies (plural) to beautiful minds and the beauty of
the laws and knowledge, before realizing that these are just individual
instances of beauty in general. The zenith of the ascent is contempla-
tion of the Beauty of the unchanging Good. The ascent is from lust for
a single body to contemplation of the single Good, from the one (via
the many), back to the One (Bertozzi, 2012, pp. 48–9).
The indubitably earthly, physical lover is shaken to his depths by the
encounter with beauty, which is to say, once again something earthly,88 K. SUTHERLAND
physical, apparent to the senses. But in that overpowering emotion he is
carried out of the dimension of the here and now, becomes unborn and
imperishable, and his emotion cannot be satisfied with anything less
than the Whole, the Totality of being, truth, goodness, beauty. (Pieper,
2000, p. 76)
Plato did not hold physical beauty in high esteem, and used the same
term — καλός (érōs) — for ‘beautiful’ at every level of the ascent
(Bertozzi, 2012, p 56). Socrates’ mentor, the prophetess Diotima of
Mantinea, argued that beauty of minds was more valuable than that of
the body and that someone should be treasured ‘if [he] has goodness
of mind even if he has little of the bloom of beauty’ (Plato,
Symposium, 210b). Given that the apex of the ascent is the Good, then
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clearly goodness of mind is a better indicator, as beauty is only a
proxy in the adjectival sense (the ascent to the Good, under the aspect
of Beauty). Love of physical beauty, however, is for most mortals the
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realistic starting point of the ascent, as it ‘shines forth in the realm of
the sensible… it makes the ultimate desideratum nearer to the sensible
condition’ (Bertozzi, 2012, pp. 59, 73), whereas other aspects of the
Good (Justice, Temperance, etc.) are only accessible to ‘a few indi-
viduals’, and ‘through dulled organs’ (Plato, Phaedrus, 250b1):
For of all the sensations coming to us through the body, sight is the
keenest: wisdom we do not see with it — the feelings of love it would
cause in us would be terrible, if it allowed some such clear image of
itself to reach our sight, and so too with the other objects of love; but as
it is, beauty alone has acquired this privilege, of being most evident and
most loved. (ibid., 250d1–5)
As Socrates explains, what we call love (érōs) is precisely this experi-
ence of Beauty in beautiful things, which allows an ascent to the
Intelligible (ibid., 249c2). ‘As the light of the sun makes the pleasant
shade of the tree exist and appear, so the Good makes Beauty shine in
all things beautiful’ (Bertozzi, 2012, pp. 70–1). Phaedrus (250b1–c1)
indicates that Platonic érōs should not be understood as sexual energy
(Bertozzi, 2012, p. 73; cf. Moravcsik, 1971, p. 291; Roochnik, 1990,
p. 120; Allen, 1991, pp. 58–9). The claim of this paper, pace Freudian
sublimation theory, is that limerent obsession is the pathology that
occurs when the Platonic ascent to the Good (under the aspect of
Beauty) goes wrong:
The madness of the man who, on seeing beauty here on earth, and being
reminded of true [divine] Beauty, becomes winged and, fluttering with
eagerness to fly upwards but unable to leave the ground, lookingDIVINE MADNESS 89
upwards like a bird, and taking no heed of the things below, causes him
to be regarded as mad. (Plato, Phaedrus, 249d5)
The principal thrust of Socrates’ argument in Phaedrus is that love
(pace Lysias and his Sophist friends) is a benign force that, by cutting
through humdrum quotidian concerns, brings us into contact with the
divine via theia mania — a god-given state of ‘being-beside-oneself’
(Pieper, 1995, p. 9). As Kant noted, there is a kind of horror
associated with beauty that leads us beyond ourselves, to transgress
our temporal and spatial limitations, to glimpse the ‘really real’ that
evades our grasp and can only be sensually signalled to us through this
strange encounter with the unaccountable source of our yearning
(Jenkins, 2019; cf. Fane and Harris, 2020). It was this encounter with
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the sublime that led the protagonist in Thomas Mann’s novella Death
in Venice to completely renounce his earlier duty-bound and work-
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aholic life — a renunciation that is not entirely unlike that of the
religious mystic — as death to him was preferable to separation from
the source of his intense (but painful) joy. In such cases there is a
complete transcendence of rational self-interest.
Christopher Rowe, the editor of the Penguin edition of Phaedrus,
observes in a footnote that such a person is mad, but only because the
divine possesses him, so people regard him as mad, but for the wrong
reasons — ‘that he is truly possessed goes “unrecognized by the
many”’ (Plato, 2005, n. 118). ‘What the (true) lover really loves,
according to Socrates, is actually Beauty, not any particular beautiful
person’ (ibid., n. 119). Socrates goes on to say that this form of mad-
ness is ‘the best of all kinds of divine possession’ (Plato, Phaedrus,
249c1).
Mann’s novella, Death in Venice, is a modern reworking of Platonic
theory (although you might not recognize that from the movie):
His eyes took in the proud bearing of that figure [of the beautiful youth
Tadzio] there at the blue water’s edge; with an outburst of rapture he
told himself that what he saw was beauty’s very essence; form as divine
thought, the single and pure perfection which resides in the mind, of
which an image and likeness, rare and holy, was here raised up for
adoration… It is only through the medium of some corporeal being that
[the soul] can raise itself again to contemplation of higher things. Amor,
in sooth, is like the mathematician who in order to give children a
knowledge of pure form must do so in the language of pictures; so too
the god, in order to make visible the spirit, avails himself of the forms
and colours of human youth, gilding it with all imaginable beauty that it
may serve memory as a tool, the very sight of which then sets us afire
with pain and longing. (Mann, 1971, pp. 46–7)90 K. SUTHERLAND
Plato explains the overwhelming attraction of beauty in terms of our
memory of divine Ideas experienced prior to our physical incarnation.
Whilst this might be metaphysically challenging (at least to non-
Hindus), naturalistic explanations of the universally powerful
attraction of human beauty are unpersuasive. No doubt physiognomic
symmetry might be a sign of good health and fertility, but the correla-
tion is weak and it still doesn’t explain why we find such features
beautiful. Indeed, it is hard to make sense of the notion of beauty
without reference to the noumenal Idea of Beauty — as to account for
the beauty of a given thing by pointing at its colour, shape, or any
other sensible feature which could well account for another thing’s
ugliness ultimately means not to account for its beauty (Bertozzi,
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2012, p. 55). The Idea is the necessary (a priori) factor to account for
the way in which a thing manifests itself (Spade, 1994, pp. vii–viii;
see also Rosen, 2005, pp. 257–8).
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In his treatise The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto draws a parallel
between the contemplation or ‘divination’ of the numinous and the
recognition of beauty:
While it is still crude, a feeling or fore-feeling of the beautiful begins to
stir, which must come from an obscure a priori conception of beauty
already present, else it could not occur at all… When his taste has been
educated, the man rejects with strong aversion the quasi-beautiful and
becomes qualified to see and to judge rightly, i.e. to recognize as beauti-
ful the outward object in which the ‘beauty’ of which he has an inward
notion and standard really ‘appears’. (Otto, 1923, p. 148)
Social conditioning is an equally implausible explanation, as there are
strong cross-cultural and a-temporal commonalities as to the human
qualities considered to be beautiful, so it really is puzzling. When the
Indian gambler in the Amazon Prime series Sneaky Pete says to the
beautiful croupier that she had been ‘put on earth in order to remind us
of God’, he was not speaking figuratively — echoing Socrates’
observation that earthly objects are only beautiful in so far as they
remind us of our encounter with the divine before we fell to earth
(Plato, Phaedrus, 250a). Or (going from the ridiculous to the sublime),
in the words of St. Gregory Palamas’s homily on the dormition of the
Mother of God: ‘Wishing to create an image of all beauty, and to
manifest clearly to men and to angels the power of His art, God truly
created Mary all-beautiful’ (P.G., CLI, 468 AB).DIVINE MADNESS 91
2.1. From appetitive to donative love
Some scholars (Nygren, 1953; Vlastos, 1973; Nussbaum, 2001) have
argued that the erotic ascent in Plato is purely appetitive and uses the
beloved as a means to an end (the attainment of immortality), in sharp
contrast to the conception of unconditional donative agápē love in the
Christian tradition (see section on Christian Platonism, below). Apart
from Diotima’s claim that the Lower Mysteries give birth to beauty,
and the Higher Mysteries to beautiful speeches, there is scant support
in Symposium for the view that the ascent should turn érōs as lack/
need into a creative and self-giving activity. However, R.A. Markus
does make the claim that the higher stages of the ascent, which
involve a Love of Beauty itself by itself with itself, transforms a
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deficiency into a desire to give and create: ‘a kind of generosity rather
than a kind of need. It culminates in togetherness with the object loved
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and in a creative bringing forth in its presence from the lover’s super-
abundance’ (Markus, 1955, pp. 225–7). Pieper agrees:
Plato also holds that the love which has ascended to behold the source
of beauty is so transformed that it leaves all selfish volition far behind
it; it can best be described as ‘adoration’. Certainly this emerges from
the conclusion of Diotima’s reported speech. (Pieper, 2000, p. 96)
Bertozzi, whilst acknowledging that Symposium is thin on evidence
for the transformation of érōs from appetitive to donative love, draws
support from Plato’s Phaedrus, Republic, Timeaeus, Theaetetus, and
Laws. However, he acknowledges that he could be accused of
anachronism — reading Plato from a Neoplatonic perspective.
3. Neoplatonism
The Platonic ascent was modified by Plotinus (204–270 CE), who
developed the view that love, which is possessive in its lower forms,
becomes increasingly donative at the higher stages of the ascent as the
aspirant becomes infused with the qualities of the Good (‘The One’ in
Plotinian terms). Plotinus and other Neoplatonist philosophers
described érōs as the single force that motivates all life, without which
there would simply be no creation or development. But the ease with
which the Platonic ascent — drawing us to union with the One — can
become decoyed by ‘local attractors’ is nicely illustrated below:
What does érōs do? Very simply, it orients and moves the soul toward
the Good under the aspect of Beauty. If érōs were lacking, the soul
would be aimless, like the demagnetized needle of a compass, unable to92 K. SUTHERLAND
find the North. One will immediately contest that even the magnetized
needle of a compass often fails to indicate the North, for instance when
someone wearing a belt with a large iron buckle is standing very close
to the compass in a direction other than North, say eastward. Far from
upsetting or even just weakening the simile, this objection strengthens
it, for it is the same force that regulates the direction of the needle,
whether toward the North or toward the large iron buckle; in fact, one
could say that in this image the buckle plays the role of the North due to
its proximity to the compass. Something similar happens to a soul
imbued with érōs: it is directed toward Beauty, hence the Good. Surely
its direction can change due to the proximity of something partially or
qualifiedly beautiful, but if érōs were absent, directedness and motion
would vanish altogether. (Bertozzi, 2012, pp. 73–4)
In the terminology of this paper, for ‘belt buckle’ read ‘limerent
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object’ (LO). The issue, from a psychological, societal, and spiritual
perspective, is how best to ensure that the lover’s compass reverts to
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polar North with minimum collateral damage (to both parties). Several
strategies (derived from the limerence literature) come to mind:
3.1. Crushing the crush
The ‘cold shoulder’ approach usually works for a generic sexual
attraction (aka a ‘crush’). Who cares if the chosen belt buckle is not
interested — other models are available. But once the obsession with a
particular belt buckle has set in, then it’s hard to shake free. A pro-
longed absence might do the trick, but is unlikely to work when the
limerent and LO live in the same small community (or the LO appears
every night on TV). And the attempt to crush the crush generally just
deepens it.6 The principal allure of the ice maiden is the belief that a
warm heart lies hidden beneath the cold and unresponsive façade. Just
as the Holy of Holies is hidden behind the veil in the tabernacle
(Exodus 26:31–5), the female veil means that the sinful [low status]
man can come no further. Unfortunately experiments with rats and
pigeons might predict that ‘limerence can live a long life sustained by
crumbs. Indeed, overfeeding is perhaps the best way to end it’
(Tennov, 1979/1999, p. 104). This would confirm the aphorisms
6 Following the work of pyschoanalyst Karen Horney, it has been suggested that romantic
infatuation is a form of masochism (Maslow, 1954; Barbara, 1974). If so then LOs who
choose the cold shoulder remedy for limerence might benefit from reading Thomas
Merton’s story in his book on the Desert Fathers of an acolyte who was so eager for
self-abnegation that he paid people to insult him (Merton, 1960, p. 39).DIVINE MADNESS 93
‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ and ‘familiarity breeds
contempt’.
Needless to say, from the perspective of Neoplatonic spirituality,
crushing the crush simply negates any potential for spiritual develop-
ment that may have been present in the initial erotic attraction and
often leads to the psychopathologies described in the next section.
And, assuming a confluence between Platonism and Christianity (see
section on Christian Platonism), those who seek to crush the crush run
the risk of committing the only blasphemy that cannot be forgiven by
God (albeit in an altogether different context)7 (Matthew 12:30–32;
Mark 3:28–30; Luke 12:8–10; Luke 6:37). Whether or not a particular
manifestation of love is a gift of the Holy Spirit is not for us mortals to
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judge (Luke 6:37), and St. Paul insists that without love the other
attributes of the spirit (glossolalia, healing, prophecy, knowledge, or
even ‘a faith that can move mountains’) are no better than resounding
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gongs and clanging cymbals (1 Corinthians 13:1–2).
Olivia Fane translates érōs into the German Sehnsucht — ‘a com-
pound of the word “sehren”, to long for, and “Sucht”, which means
anxiety, addiction, obsession’ (Fane and Harris, 2020, p. 38, my
emphasis), and agrees with Plotinus, Augustine, and the present paper
that the longing is both divine in origin and ‘universal, cross-cultural,
and the very essence of what it is to be human’ (ibid., p. 39). She
traces the idea back to Virgil’s Aeneid and acknowledges the word
Virgil uses (amor) is generally translated as ‘love’, before recruiting
the usual suspects (romantic poets and composers) to her cause. All
these artists (mis)directed their Sehnsucht towards specific objects,
including their fellow humans, yet Fane views love in the form that
most humans experience it as the exception that proves the rule. The
present paper agrees with Fane that romantic infatuation is a form of
madness, but the universality of the madness shows that it is divine in
origin, pace her earlier attempt at reductive physicalist explanation
(Fane, 2014, pp. 95–9).
7 Cf. Socrates’ claim that Lysias’s speech denying the divine origin of érōs was ‘foolish
and somewhat blasphemous’ because ‘love is a god, or something divine’ (Plato,
Phaedrus, 242d5, e2). It was through shame (aischyne) that Socrates veiled his head
while giving his own (parodic) first speech. The Greek deities appear to be more
forgiving of blasphemy than the Christian God, as Socrates was able to atone for his
‘libel’ with a palinodia: ‘Socrates wishes to recant his shamefully false speech by a
second speech on Love’ (Pieper, 2000, pp. 41–2).94 K. SUTHERLAND
3.2. Consummation
It is rare for obsessive romantic attraction to survive the transition
from Sehnsucht to actualité, and if it does it can lead to further
pathologies, such as jealousy and possessiveness:
Oh, beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster which
doth mock the meat it feeds on. (William Shakespeare, Othello)
This is an example of the ‘dark’ side of limerent infatuation, illustra-
ted by the saying ‘there’s a thin line between love and hate’. The
principle is nicely illustrated by the mood swings experienced by
William Hazlitt during his infatuation with Sarah Walker:
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In her sight there was Elysium, her smile was heaven, her voice was
enchantment; the air of love waved round her, breathing balm into my
heart: for a little while I had sat with the Gods at their golden tables, I
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had tasted of all earth’s bliss. (Hazlitt, 2008, p. 65)
But then just a few months later:
The cockatrice, mocks me… She started up in her own likeness, a
serpent in place of a woman… gliding from me after inflicting the
mortal wound, and instilling deadly poison into every pore. (ibid., p. 97)
The same brain areas are activated by love and hate, and both lead to
extreme behaviour (Zeki and Romaya, 2008). This is entirely con-
sistent with Neoplatonism, which views all human motivation as sub-
ject to a single ultimate cause. A proximal attractor can pull the
magnetized needle away from polar North (it could even swing it
through 180 degrees) and the tug of the dark horse can easily come to
dominate the trajectory of the chariot (Plato, Phaedrus, 254a5). The
transformation of love into hate is accentuated by the cycle of action,
impression, and desire described in the Vedas as vasanas (karmic
imprints, or logismoi in the language of Athonite Christianity). Carl
Jung makes a similar point in his Spiritus Contra Spiritum letter on
addiction: ‘His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level,
of the spiritual thirst for our being for wholeness, expressed in
medieval language: the union with God’ (Jung, 1961). How to convert
a craving for spiritus (alcohol) into a spiritual awakening is the
difficult challenge, and Jung’s solution requires ‘real religious insight
or the protective wall of human community’ (ibid.).
Bertozzi’s magnetized needle analogy has a close parallel with the
view of sin as hamartia — ‘missing the mark’ in Greek. The skill of
archery or spear throwing is to hit the bull’s-eye, but a poor archerDIVINE MADNESS 95
could end up shooting himself in the foot. Denys Turner makes this
point well in his commentary on Augustine’s Confessions:
Augustine knows that there is scarcely any limit to the perversity and
depravity of human desire. Hence the desire for happiness can be
present in desires for utterly self-destructive and self-defeating
objects… for nothing can wholly fail to represent the beauty and good-
ness of God. No one, therefore, can desire anything so as in every
respect to miss the mark of true happiness. Hence, no matter how
mistaken may be my pursuit of happiness it is always in some way a
desire for God. (Turner, 1995, p. 65, my emphasis)
Generally speaking, the course of a love affair is for an initial phase of
intense physical attraction to morph into companionship and attention
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to the everyday needs of the other (storgē in Greek parlance). This is
why the New Testament has little to say on matrimony other than the
procreation and rearing of children and the avoidance of fornication,
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leading Luther to downgrade marriage from a sacrament to a contract,
with binding rights and obligations on both signatories. Matrimony
has nothing to do with the development of unconditional disinterested
love (agápē — the high point of the Christian Platonist ascent) —
that’s why the Catholic Church requires celibacy of its priests. When
someone returns from a hard day at work and finds her dinner on the
table, she doesn’t view its provision (by her spouse) as an act of
caritas. From a Platonic perspective all true love is unrequited
because, as Augustine put it, ‘our heart is restless until it rests in God’
— Plato’s ideal is ‘a soul which receives into its depths the emotion
aroused by sensuous beauty, and simultaneously renounces physical
gratification of that beauty’ (Pieper, 2000, p. 22).8 If an attraction is
consummated, then its erotic energy is converted into mere appetite:
The remedy [for infatuation] is to have sex with the beloved. The crush
will then disappear within three to six weeks. (Fane, 2014, p. 99)
3.3. Transference
Many sufferers from limerence experience it in serial form — moving
from one target to the next over the course of a lifetime. Whilst this
8 This is also the message at the heart of the Bhagavata Purana and the Indian notion of
asceticism as tapas (heat). Just as a seed that is cooked slowly appears the same from
the outside, but cannot germinate, the karmic influences of the vasanas are transformed
by yogic practices, thereby breaking the cycle of action, impression, and desire.96 K. SUTHERLAND
might provide relief for the current LO, it is just kicking the can
further down the road.
3.4. Friendship
Platonic theory views friendship (philia) as a higher form of love than
érōs — both the Lysis and the Symposium argue that the role of the
erastes was to cultivate the love of wisdom in the eromenos through
philosophical conversations, with their power to mesmerize, obsess,
and educate. Alcibiades’ love for Socrates (who had an ‘ugly satyr-
like body’) in the Symposium was on account of his brilliant mind and
discourse. Alcibiades’ attempt to seduce him using conventional
means (physical attractiveness) fails. Socrates was condemned and
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executed for undermining the Greek norm of paiderasteria — ‘All
these men who ought to be chasing boys are presented as besotted
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with Socrates and his conversations’ (Reeve, 2016).
In terms of the magnetism analogy detailed above, one has many
friends, so the various local attractors cancel each other out. For érōs
to transform into philia this needs to happen very early on in the
developmental process and can be difficult, particularly for younger
sexually-charged people — in Plato’s allegory the disordered part of
the soul portrayed by the black horse ‘springs powerfully forward and,
causing all kinds of trouble to his yoke-mate and the charioteer, forces
them to move towards the beloved and mention to him the delights of
sex’ (Plato, Phaedrus, 254a5).
There is a parallel between depictions of the chariot as a metaphor
for the path of liberation in Plato and the Indian Kaṭha-Upaniṣad
(Lupaşcu, 2008, p. 349), which eschews Plato’s dualism of the white
and black horses in favour of tapas and yoga (derived from the
Sanskrit root yuj — to join, harness, or yoke). Indeed, it might be
claimed that all virtues are forms of tapas (Bussanich, 2016, p. 89).
In the Upaniṣadic simile, the case is different, as it depicts the central
task as ‘controlling’ the mind (i.e. the ‘well-tensed [reins]’, yuktena),
whereas the horses — as the senses — are not in themselves ‘bad’,
simply because their behaviour can be either ‘good’ (controlled) or
‘bad’ (uncontrolled). The worldly side of the charioteer, his body,
senses, etc., is not in itself of an inferior, or ‘evil’, nature. (Schlieter,
2016, p. 182)DIVINE MADNESS 97
3.5. Bhakti
In the Indian tradition, divinization (θέωσις) through love is the
spiritual path called bhakti yoga, which generally requires a loving
devotion to a personal god, very often in the form of an icon.9 Many
religions focus on devotion to personal deities, icons, statues, and
relics. Arguably all the Reformation did was to update the reliquary to
codex form, in line with the technology of the age.
But what happens if the object of devotion is made of flesh and
blood? Bhakti yoga is by far the most difficult and perilous of the
solutions to limerent obsession considered so far, as it requires
discernment, self-knowledge, and ascesis. In many cases of obsessive
attraction, the subject believes that the LO is divine — in terms of
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Bertozzi’s analogy, the belt buckle would already be facing due North.
The vernacular use of words like ‘angel’ by lovers is more literal than
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they might think (Hazlitt, 2008, p. 76).
Whenever he sees a godlike face or some form of body which imitates
beauty well, he first shudders, feeling something of the fears he had
before, then reveres what he sees as a god as he gazes at it and, if he
were not afraid of appearing thoroughly mad, would sacrifice to his
beloved as if to a statue of a god. (Plato, Phaedrus, 251a–a5)
From the Indian bhakti tradition, such an approach might even be
encouraged as ‘if one looks upon the beloved as the Chosen Deity, the
mind easily turns Godward’ (Ramakrishna, 1942, Chapter 16, No.
756). Dante certainly saw his attraction to Beatrice Portinari in such
terms, that’s why in the Divina Commedia she was his guide in
Paradiso. Beatrice was only dimly aware of the existence of Dante
Alighiere (both were married), and all he craved was her ‘salutation’.
Whether it’s Dante and Beatrice, Don Quixote and Dulcinea, St.
John Paul II and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, or even fictional
depictions of Mary Magdalene and Jesus, there is the sense that
unconsummated love for a godly person could be part of the θέωσις
(deification) process. In every case there is no suggestion of
impropriety and there is no requirement for reciprocity (limerence
being the inverse of de Clerambault’s syndrome). In Thomas Mann’s
Death in Venice, von Aschenbach believed that Tadzio (who he never
spoke to) might have acknowledged the attention of his devotee once
9 Obryk (2016, p. 241) draws a parallel between the Indian bhakti tradition and both the
personal religion of Socrates and Neoplatonic theurgy.98 K. SUTHERLAND
but accepts that could have been wishful thinking on his part, and in
Dale Wassermann’s musical interpretation of the Don Quixote story,
‘Dulcinea’ had nothing but contempt for the love-struck Knight of the
Woeful Countenance.10 If anything, the lack of reciprocity is an
invaluable safety valve for the developmental process — as Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi, laughing uncontrollably, put it in a lecture, ‘I love you
and it’s no concern of yours!’ (at this stage the limerent craving for
reciprocity has been transformed by the heat of ascetic tapas into a
purely donative emotion). Mann agrees with Plato’s Socrates (and
Maharishi) that ‘the lover is nearer the divine than the beloved; for the
god was in the one but not the other’ (Mann, 1971, p. 48).
However, θέωσις through bhakti yoga is an extremely dangerous
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path, normally only to be practised under the tutelage of an experi-
enced spiritual guide. Referring to the Platonic ascent, Bertozzi notes
that ‘there is no guarantee of success in this task; in fact one should
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not even discount the possibility of a total shipwreck’ (Bertozzi, 2012,
p. 99). It is also necessary for the soul to be of a certain disposition,
‘such as self-transformation or attunement to the beloved is essentially
open to it’ (ibid., p. 319). ‘You must first of all become godlike and all
beautiful if you intend to see God and Beauty’ (Plotinus, Enneads, 1.6
[1] 9.33–34). And the ascent is an ‘orderly affair… either to skip a
stage or to stop at an intermediary stage will result in the failure to
ascend’ (Bertozzi, 2012, pp. 382–4, my emphasis) — the latter leading
to the obsessive romantic attachment that is the topic of this paper.
This is because the erotic intensity increases incrementally at higher
stages of the Neoplatonic ladder, but the corollary (progression from
the particular to the general) does not occur if the process is blocked
— hence my claim that OLD/limerence is best viewed as the Platonic
ascent gone wrong.
10 Don Quixote’s alchemic transformation of the coarse village prostitute Aldonza
Lorenzo into the imaginary Dulcinea of Toboso, the very model of female perfection
(Cervantes, 2005, p. 91), is a good example of what Stendhal called ‘crystallization’ —
the process whereby a branch of a tree left for several months in a salt mine is trans-
formed ‘into an object of shimmering beauty’. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder as
‘the original naked branch is no longer recognizable by indifferent eyes, because it now
sparkles with perfections, or diamonds, which [others] do not see’ (Stendhal, 1975, p.
48). One is reminded of the Revelations of St. Seraphim of Sarov, in which the disciple
complains, ‘I can’t look at you Father — your eyes shine like lightning; your face
becomes more dazzling than the sun, and it hurts my eyes to look at you’ (Lossky, 1991,
p. 228). My suggestion here is that the same Divine Light is responsible for both
Dulcinea’s transformation, Stendhal’s crystallization, and St. Seraphim’s
transfiguration.DIVINE MADNESS 99
For, given the continuous nature of the Neoplatonic conception of
love — érōs in the service of agápē (Thorne, 2012, p. 63) — it’s hard
to tell if the attraction at a particular stage is to the beautiful (con-
ceived as a collection of constantly shifting somatic and psychic traits)
or the Beauty within them. Are the luminous pools of the beloved’s
eyes an invitation to the bedroom, a window on her soul, or the gates
to heaven?11 The second and third commandments prohibit worship of
other gods and graven images, but Orthodox and Catholic Christians
would claim that they are worshipping God through the holy icon or
relic, and the same would apply to the worship of the LO by Dante,
Don Quixote, von Aschenbach, and other ‘bhakti yogis’.
But this is extremely hazardous — although the model is the
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Platonic ascent, the reality is more like a game of snakes and ladders
(Moksha Patam in the original Indian version) than Jacob’s angelic
stairway to heaven. ‘Snakes and ladders’ is an apposite metaphor
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when one considers the depiction of the fall in the Abrahamic
religions and the resultant abhorrence of (female) sexuality.
4. The Rapture or the Rupture?
But, for those with a commitment to moksha (enlightenment), is there
a risk-free alternative?12 Most approaches, both Eastern and Western,
assume that attachment to the embodied self is the biggest obstacle to
spiritual development. At the risk of over-generalization, there are two
distinct approaches to overcoming the self. The via negativa (jñāna
yoga in Eastern parlance) is a process of stripping away the embodied
tendencies that constitute the individual ego, to reveal the individual
self as none other than the cosmic Self (Ātman is Brahman). Writers
in the Western apophatic tradition include Pseudo-Dionysius, the
unknown author of the Cloud of Unknowing, and Meister Eckhart.
The cataphatic path (via positiva) is devotional, as described in this
essay. However, the Hindu devotional deity Kali (in sharp contrast to
the Blessed Virgin Mary, the principal focus of Christian devotion as
the embodiment of grace) is normally depicted with a garland made
from the severed heads of her devotees, indicating the destruction of
the sense of self of the bhakta. The Red Dakini (the Tibetan Buddhist
11 The contrast between the Platonic language of Lowe-Porter’s translation of Death in
Venice and Visconti’s homoerotic movie illustrates the ambiguity involved.
12 From both a Hindu and Neoplatonic perspective all creatures are on a (slow) path to
enlightenment, but most of us don’t even know it.100 K. SUTHERLAND
version of Kali) symbolizes ‘wrathful compassion… If you are pre-
tentious or hypocritical, she will cut off your head with her dagger and
wear it in a garland round her neck’ (Welwood, 1991, p. 154).13
These two contrasting perspectives parallel the observation by Jacob
Singer’s spiritual guide in the movie Jacob’s Ladder that the demons
tormenting him were really angels purging him of self-attachment:
The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won’t let go of
life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But
they’re not punishing you, they’re freeing your soul… But if you’ve
made your peace, then the devils are really angels.
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Mother Divine / Mother of God.
This is the doctrine of self-purgation — or ‘purification’ in Plotinian
terminology, which is an essential prerequisite to the higher stages of
the ascent back to the One. There are no shortcuts. Skipping steps will
only lead to failure in the ascent, and living a moral life (and atoning
for past infelicities) is by no means superfluous, even if virtue is an
inherent characteristic of higher stages of development. ‘Ascent… is a
13 The Indian version depicts Kali dancing on her divine consort Siva, the Supreme Lord
who creates, protects, and transforms the universe. The reason that this essay focuses on
Kali (rather than traditional Indian bhakti models such as the (mutual) love between
Krishna and Radha depicted in the Nārada-pañcarātra) is because it highlights the
dangerous nature of this path for the unprepared limerent.You can also read
