
“I love him to hell and back and heaven and back, and have and do and will.”
The Way (1913).
Poetry quotes, New Thought Pastels (1913)
Context: Hell is wherever Love is not, and Heaven
Is Love's location. No dogmatic creed,
No austere faith based on ignoble fear
Can lead thee into realms of joy and peace.
Unless the humblest creatures on the earth
Are bettered by thy loving sympathy
Think not to find a Paradise beyond.
“I love him to hell and back and heaven and back, and have and do and will.”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Source: A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles"
Assessing St. Augustine's perspectives in "Augustus to Augustine", p. 37
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Context: Man … always acts either self-loving, just for the hell of it, or God-loving, just for the heaven of it; his reasons, his appetites are secondary motivations. Man chooses either life or death, but he chooses; everything he does, from going to the toilet to mathematical speculation, is an act of religious worship, either of God or of himself.
Lastly by the classical apotheosis of Man-God, Augustine opposes the Christian belief in Jesus Christ, the God-Man. The former is a Hercules who compels recognition by the great deeds he does in establishing for the common people in the law, order and prosperity they cannot establish for themselves, by his manifestation of superior power; the latter reveals to fallen man that God is love by suffering, i. e. by refusing to compel recognition, choosing instead to be a victim of man's self-love. The idea of a sacrificial victim is not new; but that it should be the victim who chooses to be sacrificed, and the sacrificers who deny that any sacrifice has been made, is very new.
“O, then, what graces in my love do dwell, That he hath turn'd a heaven unto a hell!”
Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream
“I’ll follow thee and make a heaven of hell,
To die upon the hand I love so well.”
Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream
The Clod and the Pebble, st. 3
1790s, Songs of Experience (1794)
Source: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience