Footsteps

Two millennia ago, in a letter to Corinthians, with a great sense of certainty that could only be understood in the subject of factual statements, Paul wrote:

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child; I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
Bible, New International Version, I Corinthians, 13

I heard these words for the first time in the movie Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski-1993). At the time, I did not know they are from the Bible and I realized it later on when I read a review of the movie in my favorite film magazine. In that movie, Julie (Juliette Binoche) survives an accident which causes the life of her husband and her child to figure out later that her husband had affairs with another woman and that woman is now pregnant from him. Through the movie, Julie overcomes her distaste for a world that she can’t understand anymore and finishes the composition of a music piece whose lyrics are the above words.

More than a hundred years ago, a great philosopher of modern times, with a similar tone of prophecy in his words, told us of another aspect of human life that is a world apart from what Paul had said before. He wrote:

“My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (--its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on.”
Frederick Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p.636, Walter Kaufmann translation