Let me begin by saying something about how the Sacred and Profane Love podcast came to be and what its future is. My podcast began as an extension of a three year, 2.1 million dollar research project titled, “Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life,” which was generously supported by the John Templeton Foundation. The project’s aims were explicitly interdisciplinary: Candace Vogler and I brought together philosophers, religious scholars and theologians, psychologists, and other social scientists to investigate whether some conception of self-transcendence could help to make ordinary cultivation and exercise of virtue a source of deep happiness and meaning in human life. While the project produced many traditional research outputs, including an edited volume, it also had public facing components, including a well-trafficked blog; a few years into it I decided to launch a podcast that explored our central questions in a different way—viz., by focusing on literature rather than philosophy, theology, or the social sciences.
Originally, I had no idea if anyone would listen to the podcast, but judging by the fact that it is now often the first thing people mention when they meet me, it seems to have gained some traction, and the hope is to see it continue to grow over the next few years. Although I am still releasing a few episodes over the coming months with support from the John Templeton Foundation, going forward next year it will be underwritten by The Institute for Human Ecology, which is a research institute housed at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. The IHE is a multi-disciplinary institute that supports work focused on questions about the nature of human flourishing, so it fits well with my own work. This new partnership means that after a brief hiatus from blogging and releasing new episodes, I’ll be back to podcasting in the upcoming months, and I plan to continue the podcast so long as there continues to be a reasonable demand for it.
My podcast explores the intersection of moral philosophy and literature, and is titled “Sacred and Profane Love” because of the painting I chose for its logo, a striking image of a battle between divine and earthly love by the Roman artist Giovanni Baglione. Baglione’s painting makes explicit reference to a famous depiction of Cupid by his contemporary Caravaggio, titled amor vincit omnia. In Caravaggio’s painting, Cupid towers triumphantly over the scattered symbols of human striving, clutching his arrows with an impish grin. The title of Caravaggio’s famous piece comes from Virgil’s Eclogues; the full quote it references is “omnia vincit amor; et nos cedamus amori,” which is often translated as, “love conquers all; let us all yield to love.” Although we now associate this phrase with the romantic platitude that only love can overcome all obstacles and divisions, Virgil’s words come from the mouth of the heart sick Gallus, who is conquered by love (Gallus, in anguish from eros unsatisfied, kills himself after uttering these famous last words).
Baglione is playing with these themes in his painting; he responds to Caravaggio’s playful Cupid with a piece that depicts the superior power and triumph of divine over earthly love. Baglione’s image is not hard to interpret, but it has a deeper meaning; Baglione is speaking to Caravaggio directly in his painting—in fact, he is attacking and provoking him (note that the devil’s face bears a non-accidental resemblance to Caravaggio). Baglione and Caravaggio were bitter rivals in the competitive world of Roman art. Although Baglione knowingly imitates Caravaggio’s distinctive style, his admiration is tinged with a jealous envy of Caravaggio’s manifestly superior talent and fame. The painting is (no doubt unintentionally) simultaneously a representation of the triumph of sacred love and a testament to the potential for profane love to lead us into folly and ruin. For it is Baglione’s worldly ambition—his craving for recognition and power as an artist—that creates the bitter resentment and jealousy that constitutes the painting’s deeper meaning. Ironically, Baglione’s depiction of the ultimate triumph of sacred love announces to the world that its creator has been conquered by profane ambition; in attempting to accuse Caravaggio, Baglione unwittingly implicates himself.
I love Baglione’s painting because it captures the central thrust of my podcast in deliciously ironic fashion, which is to explore the relation between love, virtue, happiness, and life’s purpose or meaning. In each episode we explore how and what we love can conquer in two distinct senses: when well-ordered through the cultivation of virtue, love can help us to conquer ourselves so that we can lead deeply happy lives, but when disordered, love can conquer us, by making us jealous, wrathful, selfish, lustful, and overcome with despair. Moreover, the layers of meaning in the painting—intended and unintended—brings out the fact that we bring our own lives to art, whether as creators or consumers. As someone who thinks of art as a central aspect of human experience, I am interested in the fact that how we look at and interpret art determines how we are affected by it, and how this, in turn, is inevitably bound up in our own life experience; this interpretive and affective dynamic includes most especially our own experiences of passionate desire—its perils and its promise, its profane and sacred dimensions. It is the power of the artist’s representation of love to transform us in a deep and permanent way that interests me—how art potentially shapes our character by changing our imaginative landscape, thereby helping to shape how we ourselves think, feel, and desire.
Each episode of the podcast focuses on a work of literature that explores these themes. The format of the podcast is a conversation, typically with a philosopher, theologian, or literary critic. My aim is to show that part of the value of reading truly great literature is its potential impact on our character, how it can shape what we are able to see and what we desire. I also wanted to capture the excitement of intellectual exchange and intellectual friendship. For me, philosophy is a deeply personal enterprise, because it happens through the sort of dialogue that is potentially the basis of a very deep form of friendship, (this sort of friendship is explored in episode six). These friendships are the center of my own life, and bring me great joy, and I wanted to model that kind of exchange for others, especially for university students.
I have talked about art and morality, but my podcast focuses on literature in particular. I wanted to turn to literature because I believe that it is a very specific mode of access to the truth, especially moral truth. Whereas philosophical theory operates at the level of the abstract and general, literature operates in the particular and the concrete. So, while the philosopher can demonstrate the essential structure of vice, the novelist can show us how vice works to destroy the life of a particular person in a particular way. The novelist operates, not at the level of judgment and belief, but at the level of imagination and perception, which brings us closer to the realm of personal choice and action. I also think that literature is one of the best sources for our knowledge of human nature, which I think is a kind of general self-knowledge. Fiction expands the moral imagination such that we see reflections of ourselves and our own lives in the characters we come to invest ourselves in; in this way it often serves to reveal to us some uncomfortable truths about ourselves. This recognition can serve to correct some of our deep-seated tendencies towards self-deception.
So far I have released fourteen episodes, but let me focus in on one of them in order to give readers a sense of what the podcast is all about. Episode four, with philosopher, poet, and literary critic Troy Jollimore (Chico State), explores how romantic ideology and illusion can destroy our ability to experience genuine human love, thereby placing deep happiness out of reach. What makes Emma Bovary such a compelling and sympathetic character is that she has internalized familiar but false romantic tropes about love that ultimately make her incapable of experiencing real love. Emma is convinced that love is manifested primarily in such feelings she that had read about in books. Emma remains enthralled to the realm of fiction and fantasy, and as a result she is unable to enter into her own life in an authentic way; in particular, the romantic ideology of love that guides her choices, the promise of the fever of happiness she so desperately desires, ultimately makes her unable to know anyone in her life in a deep way, least of all herself. Emma skims the surface of her own life, trying to escape reality, or at least to reshape it according to her own fantasy of what it should be like. In reading of Emma’s desires and eventual demise, we see the potential for our own lives to go similarly astray. Flaubert once remarked, “Emma Bovary, c’est moi.” Flaubert’s novel is great art precisely because we can all affirm his admission to some extent; Emma Bovary, whether we like it or not, is all of us, a human being whose life is fundamentally shaped by how and what she loves.
Jennifer A. Frey
Jennifer A. Frey is currently an assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of South Carolina. Her research lies at the intersection of philosophy of action, ethics, and meta-ethics. She has co-edited a book titled, Self-Transcendence and Virtue. She also writes for The Virtue Blog, and she hosts a popular philosophy and literature podcast, called, “Sacred and Profane Love.”
