"Love is as strong as death"

I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position man can, through the loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.” (Frankl, 57)

A love beyond borders, beyond presence, beyond time, beyond death: that’s the kind of love Viktor Frankl advocates in Man’s Search for Meaning, his autobiographical doctrine of “logotherapy.” Logotherapy, also called the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, is an existential therapy based on the premise that “the striving to find meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man” (121). Frankl developed this model of therapy in his early Viennese practice but personally put it to the ultimate test during his internment in such infamous Nazi concentration camps as Auschwitz and Dachau.

The above excerpt speaks of the power of Frankl's love for his wife to sustain him through sufferings. He later writes, “Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance” (58). At the time of this realization, he didn’t know his wife had been gassed upon admittance to the camp. Even if he had known, Frankl confidently states that his enjoyment of her memory would not have been compromised. The power of his love would still compel him to endure.

Such love absolutely blows my mind. It moves me to thirst for more in life, to make people my priority, to hope. One of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies, Under the Tuscan Sun, revolves around this point. Aphrodite smites Francis Mayes over and over again, yet she recognizes the reality of the young love of Pawel and Chiara and fights for it. Chiara’s father protests the match, denying the existence of true love and citing Francis’ personal experience as an example of its nonexistence. Francis bravely responds, “No. I looked for it and I didn’t find it. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” Personal experience can be a cruel discourager, but we cannot lose hope in the essential Truth of love in its every sense: a man for his wife, a friend for a friend, a father for a son, a God for his people.