Love is not the most powerful thing in the world.

Been reading rather extensively for the last couple of days and i fell in love with the prologue of The Unknown Terrorist. For all its hilarity, it makes certain sense and has a ring of truth to it. And if truth is what it really says, not only is that a warped sense of the world and love, but one that would shake many believers' idea of their God and humankind....

The idea that love is not enough is a particularly painful one. In the face of its truth, humanity has for centuries tried to discover in itself evidence that love is the greatest force on earth.

Jesus is an especially sad example of this unequal struggle. The innocent heart of Jesus could never have enough of human love. He demanded it, as Nietzsche observed, with hardness, with madness, and had to invent hell as punishment for those who withheld their love from him. In the end he created a god who was "wholly love" in order to excuse the hopelessness and failure of human love.

Jesus, who wanted love to such an extent, was clearly a madman, and had no choice when confronted with the failure of love but to seek his own death. In his understanding that love was not enough, in his acceptance of the necessity of the sacrifice of his own life to enable the future of those around him, Jesus is history's first, but not the last, example of a suicide bomber.

Nietzsche wrote, "I am not a man, i am dynamite". It was the image of a dreamer. Everyday now somebody somewhere is dynamite. They are not an image. They are the walking dead, and so are the people who are standing round them. Reality was never made by realists, but by dreamers like Jesus and Nietzsche.

Nietzsche began to fear that what drove the world forward was all that was destructive and evil about it. In his writings he tried to reconcile himself to such a terrible world.

But one day, he saw a cart horse being beaten brutally by its driver. He rushed out and put his arms around the horse's neck, and would not let go. Promptly diagnosed as mad, he was locked away in an asylum for the rest of his life.

Nietzsche had even less explanation than Jesus for love and its various manifestations: empathy, kindness, hugging a horse's neck to stop it being beaten. In the end, Nietzsche's philosophy could not even explain Nietzsche, a man who sacrifice his life for a horse.

Written by Richard Flanagan in The Unknown Terrorist.

♥ Clarisse ♥