What’s Love Got To Do With it? Lessons in Love from William Shakespeare

New: "Popieluszko: Freedom is Within Us" The Anticlerical Pope

What’s Love Got To Do With it? Lessons in Love from William Shakespeare

What’s Love Got To Do With it? Lessons in Love from William Shakespeare | Joseph Pearce | CWR

The sobering lesson of Romeo and Juliet falls today on deaf modern ears

Oh what’s
love got to do, got to do with it,

What’s love but a second-hand emotion;
What’s love got to do, got to do with it,

Who needs a heart

When a heart can be broken.

— Tina Turner

Love is a
smoke rais’d with the fume of sighs;

Being purg’d, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes;

Being vex’d, a sea nourish’d with loving tears.

What is it else? A madness most discreet,

A choking gall, and a preserving sweet...

I have lost myself; I am not here:

This is not Romeo, he’s some other where.

— Romeo

… if love be blind,

It best agrees with night. Come, civil night,

Thou sober-suited matron, all in black …

Come, night; come, Romeo …

Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night,

Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night,

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

— Juliet

What is love? For Tina Turner it’s
an emotion, second-hand and second-rate. For Romeo, it’s mere madness;
something sweet and bitter on which we choke; something that makes us lose
ourselves and our senses. For Juliet it’s a blindness that makes us prefer the
darkness to the light.

For John Lennon, it’s all we
need....

All we need is love, love, love is
all we need; all we need is tawdry emotion and the bitter-sweet madness that
makes us blind to everything except the darkness of the Night. If this is love,
it can go to Hell. Indeed, if this is love it’s already going there.

But is this love?

For St. Paul, love is the greatest
of all the virtues. For Christ, the two great commandments are to love God and
to love our neighbor. On the deepest theological level, God is love. God and Love are One. It is ironic, therefore, that
Jesus Christ and John Lennon are in apparent agreement. Love is all we need.

The problem is that John Lennon
does not mean the same thing as Jesus Christ when he speaks of love. For Lennon
and his legion of admirers, love is about doing our own thing; it’s about
marching to our own drum. In other words, it’s ultimately self-centered. It’s
about me and not the other. For Christ, love is about laying down our lives for
our friends—and for our enemies. It’s ultimately selfless and self-sacrificial.
It’s about the other and not me. In short, and to put the matter bluntly, the
“love” that Lennon espouses is the very opposite of the love that Christ
practices and preaches.

This primal difference between the
two loves—one true, the other false—is at the heart of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Continue reading at www.CatholicWorldReport.com.