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Love and the Abyss: An Essay on Finitude and Value.

Article Excerpt
Ellis, Ralph D. (2004). Love and the Abyss: An Essay on Finitude and Value. Chicago, Ill: Open Court Publishing Company, 271 pp., ISBN 0-8126-9457-0, $25.95 (paper).

The search for meaning in the human journey is certainly neither a new subject nor one resolved with any sense of finality. It is what spurs us along the journey, slows us down, and even at times threatens to enervate us when we temporarily have lost our sense of its threads seaming the fabric of our lives. It is the stuff of literature, philosophy, theology, psychology, art, music, dance. Whether or not we are clearly focused on its primacy in our lives, it is always there, even if sometimes only in the shadowy sense of something forgotten along the path of youth and innocence.

In Love and the Abyss, Ralph D. Ellis wishes to ground his search for meaning in this world among his fellow men and women. In an era of the dispensable, he reclaims value for humanity. In fact, his work is a celebration of and appreciation for human life. There are no caveats. This life is not more worthy than that by virtue of any of its attributes or accomplishments. It is simply human life per se before which he suggests that we stand in a posture of awe-filled reverence.

And perhaps this request for all of us to simply cease doing, to wait and watch for the unfolding of being is the work's most basic phenomenological stance. To allow the opening of the lotus, gradually, without particular demands or expectations--simply to be a willing witness to a human life as potentially replete with meaning--may be to allay the existential angst which so oft overwhelms us as we hurriedly attempt to make meaningful lives instead of allowing for them by non-doing.

Throughout Love and the Abyss, Ellis is profoundly concerned with not concocting meaning in the service of diffusing our ontological anxiety. We may not always agree with the meanings he dismisses as improbable or impossible, but we can understand his concern with prematurely soothing ourselves rather than confronting the ultimate possibility of human finitude. Ellis asks us to first and foremost find meaning in this world of the here and now rather than assume that all ambiguity will be resolved in the there and then. We might even extrapolate that finding meaning in the present rather than in any future, not only the other-worldly one he clearly rejects, calls for committed presence in our lives, and hence a richer possibility of being vibrant human beings with the profound value he believes we radiate.

Ellis explores the metamorphoses we undergo in the exchanges of energy which are the basis of authentic and authenticating human relationships. He has a profound understanding of abnormal psychology and the errant pathways our relationships so often take, thereby undermining any potential they might have to fuel our own or another's growth, let alone a sense of meaning rich enough to give us cause to continue the sometimes arduous journey of life. Thus, as he explicates what he believes to be the quintessential relationship which he will call a "spiritual partnership," he also differentiates the latter from its counterfeits and blemished forms.

And so, ultimately, Love and the Abyss seeks to describe this phenomenon, "spiritual partnership," insofar as it represents for the author the ground of...