"For a devotee or lover, the being, worshipped or loved, will always be the only one for her or him"
About this Quote
Devotion is a jealous art, and Lionel Blue doesn’t apologize for it. In one clean sentence he fuses the language of romance and the language of religion, insisting that real worship and real love share the same inner grammar: exclusivity. The “only one” isn’t a moral slogan so much as a psychological fact about how devotion works when it’s functioning at full strength. You don’t merely prefer the beloved; you reorganize your world around them.
Blue’s choice of “devotee” alongside “lover” is doing quiet but heavy lifting. It’s a refusal to let modern culture quarantine faith as something quaint and love as something private. Both are totalizing attentions, demanding a kind of perceptual narrowing that makes rivals feel not just unwelcome but unreal. The subtext is slightly unsettling: devotion, whether to God or a person, contains the seed of idolatry and obsession. The same mental machinery that produces tenderness and fidelity can also produce blindness.
Context matters here: Blue was a British rabbi and broadcaster known for translating theology into human-scale feeling. Read against the late-20th-century drift toward choice, self-fashioning, and serial reinvention, the line is almost defiant. It pushes back on the idea that love is best kept flexible, that faith is best kept plural. Instead, Blue frames exclusivity not as narrow-mindedness but as the price of depth. The point isn’t that exclusivity is always good; it’s that without it, “devotion” becomes a hobby and “love” becomes a preference.
Blue’s choice of “devotee” alongside “lover” is doing quiet but heavy lifting. It’s a refusal to let modern culture quarantine faith as something quaint and love as something private. Both are totalizing attentions, demanding a kind of perceptual narrowing that makes rivals feel not just unwelcome but unreal. The subtext is slightly unsettling: devotion, whether to God or a person, contains the seed of idolatry and obsession. The same mental machinery that produces tenderness and fidelity can also produce blindness.
Context matters here: Blue was a British rabbi and broadcaster known for translating theology into human-scale feeling. Read against the late-20th-century drift toward choice, self-fashioning, and serial reinvention, the line is almost defiant. It pushes back on the idea that love is best kept flexible, that faith is best kept plural. Instead, Blue frames exclusivity not as narrow-mindedness but as the price of depth. The point isn’t that exclusivity is always good; it’s that without it, “devotion” becomes a hobby and “love” becomes a preference.
Quote Details
| Topic | Soulmate |
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