THE NATURE OF LOVE
The secret of the universe, as by slow degrees it reveals itself to
us, turns out to be personality. When we consider, further, the
form under which personality realizes, itself, we find it to consist
in the struggle of personality to grapple with the objective
mystery. When, in a still further movement of analysis, we
examine the nature of this struggle between the soul and the
mystery which surrounds the soul, we find it complicated by the
fact that the soul's encounter with this mystery reveals the
existence, in the depths of the soul itself, of two conflicting
emotions, the emotion of love and the emotion of malice.
The word "love" has been used so indiscriminately in its surprising
history that it becomes necessary to elucidate a little the particular
meaning I give to it in connection with this ultimate duality. A
strange and grotesque commentary upon human life, these various
contradictory feelings that have covered their "multitude of sins"
under this historic name!
The lust of the satyr, the affectionate glow of the domestic
habitué, the rare exalted passion of the lover, the cold, clear
attraction of the intellectual platonist, the will to possession of the
sex-maniac, the will to voluptuous cruelty of the sex-pervert, the
maternal instinct, the race-instinct, the instinct towards
fetish-worship, the instinct towards art, towards nature, towards the
ultimate mystery--all these things have been called "love" that we
should follow them and pursue them; all these things have been
called "love" that we should avoid them and fly from them.
The emotion of love in which we seem to detect the ultimate
creative force is not precisely any of these things. Of all normal
human emotions it comes nearest to passionate sympathy. But it is
much more than this. The emotion of love is not a simple nor an
easily defined thing. How should it be that, when it is one aspect
of the outpouring of the very stuff of the soul itself? How should it
be that when it is the projection, into the heart of the objective
mystery, of the soul's manifold and complicated essence?
The best definition of love is that it is the creative apprehension of
life, or of the objective mystery, under the form of an eternal
vision. At first sight this definition might seem but a cold and
intellectual account of love; an account that has omitted all
feeling, all passion, all ecstasy.
But when we remember that what we call "the eternal vision" is
nothing less than the answer of love to love, nothing less than the
reciprocal rhythm of all souls, in so far as they have overcome
malice, with one another and with the mystery which surrounds
them, it will be seen that the thing is something in which what we
call "intellect" and what we call "feeling" are both transcended.
Love, in this sense, is an ecstasy; but it is an ecstasy from which
all troubling, agitating, individual exactions have been obliterated.
It is an ecstasy completely purged of the possessive instinct. It is
an ecstasy that brings to us a feeling of indescribable peace and
calm. It is an ecstasy in which our personal self, in the fullest
realization of its inmost identity, loses itself, even at the moment
of such realization, in something which cannot be put into
words. At one moment our human soul finds itself harassed by a
thousand vexations, outraged by a thousand miseries. Physical
pain torments it, spiritual pain torments it; and a great darkness
of thick, heavy, poisonous obscurity wraps it round like a
grave-cloth. Then, in a sudden movement of the will, the soul cries
aloud upon love; and in one swift turn of the ultimate wheel, the
whole situation is transformed.
The physical pain seems to have no longer any hold upon the soul.
The mental misery and trouble falls away from it like an
unstrapped load. And a deep, cool, tide--calm and still and full of
infinite murmurs--rolls up around it, and pours through it, and
brings it healing and peace. The emotion of love in which
personality, and therefore in which the universe, finds the secret of
its life, has not the remotest connection with sex. Sexual passion
has its place in the world'; but it is only when sexual passion
merges itself in the sort of love we are now considering that it
becomes an instrument of real clairvoyance.
There is a savage instinct of cruel and searching illumination in
sexual passion, but such an instinct is directed towards death
rather than towards life, because it is dominated, through all its
masks and disguises, by the passion of possession.
Like the passion of hate, to which it is so closely allied, sexual
passion has a kind of furious intensity which is able to reveal
many deep levels of human obliquity. But one thing it cannot
reveal, because of the strain of malice it carries with it, and that is
the spring of genuine love. "Like unto like" is the key to the
situation; and the deeper the clairvoyance of malice digs into the
subterranean poison of life, the more poison it finds. For in finding
poison it creates poison, and in finding malice it doubles malice.
The great works of art are not motivated by the clairvoyance of
malice; they are motivated by the clairvoyance of love. It is only
in the inferior levels of art that malice is the dominant note; and
even there it is only effective because, mixed with it, there is an
element of destructive hatred springing from some perversion of
the sexual instinct. Whatever difficulty we may experience in
finding words wherewith to define this emotion of love, there is
not one of us, however sceptical and malign, who does not
recognize it when it appears in the flesh. Malice displays its
recognition of it by a passion of furious hatred; but even this
hatred cannot last for ever, because in every personality that exists
there must be a hidden love which answers to the appeal of love.
The feeling which love has, at its supreme moments, is the feeling
of "unity in difference" with all forms of life. Love may
concentrate itself with a special concentration upon one person or
upon more than one; but what it does when it so concentrates itself
is not to make an alliance of "attack and defence" with the person
it loves, but to flow outwards, through them and beyond them,
until it includes every living thing. Let it not, however, be for a
moment supposed that the emotion of love resembles that vague
"emotion of humanity" which is able to satisfy itself in its own
remote sensationalism without any contact with the baffling and
difficult mystery of real flesh and blood.
The emotion of love holds firmly and tightly to the pieces and
fragments of humanity which destiny has thrown in its way. It
does not ask that these should be different from what they are,
except in so far as love inevitably makes them different. It accepts
them as its "universe," even as it accepts, without ascetic dismay,
the weakness of the particular "form of humanity" in which it
finds _itself_ "incarnated."
By gradual degrees it subdues these weaknesses of the flesh,
whether in its own "form" or in the "form" of others; but it is quite
contrary to the emotion of love to react against such weaknesses of
the flesh with austere or cruel contempt. It is humorously
indulgent to them in the form of its own individual "incarnation"
and it is tenderly indulgent to them in the form of the "incarnation"
of other souls.
The emotion of love does not shrink back into itself because in the
confused pell-mell of human life the alien souls which destiny has
chosen for its companions do not satisfy, in this detail or the other
detail, the desire of its heart. The emotion of love is always
centrifugal, always outflowing. It concentrates itself upon this
person or the other person, as the unaccountable attractions of
likeness and difference dictate or as destiny dictates; but the
deepest loyalty of love is always directed to the eternal vision; for
in the eternal vision it not only becomes one with all living souls
but it also becomes one--though this is a high and difficult
mystery--with all the dead that have ever loved and with all the
unborn that will ever love. For the apprehension of the eternal
vision is at once the supreme creation and the supreme discovery
of the soul of man; and not of the soul of man alone, but of all
souls, whether of beasts or plants or demi-gods or gods, who fill
the unfathomable circle of space.
The secret of this kind of love, when it comes to the matter of
human relationships, may perhaps best be expressed in those
words of William Blake which imply the difficulty which love
finds in overcoming the murderous exactions of the possessive
instinct and the cruel clairvoyance of malice. "And throughout all
eternity, I forgive you: you forgive me: As our dear Redeemer
said--This is the wine: this is the bread."
This "forgiveness" of love does not imply that love, as the old
saying runs, is "blind." Love sees deeper than malice; for malice
can only recognize its own likeness in everything it approaches. It
must be remembered too that this process of laying bare the faults
of others is not a pure process of discovery. Like all other forms of
apprehension it is also a reproduction of itself. The situation, in
fact, is never a static one. These "faults" which malice, in its
reproductive "discoveries" lays bare, are not fixed, immobile,
dead. They are organic and psychic conditions of a living soul.
They are themselves in a perpetual state of change, of growth, of
increase, of withering, of fading. They are affected at every
moment by the will and by the emotion of the subject of them.
They project themselves; they withdraw themselves. They dilate;
they diminish. Thus it happens that at the very touch of this
"discovering," the malice which is thus "discovered" dilates with
immediate reciprocity to meet its "discoverer"; and this can
occur--such is the curious telepathic vibration between living
things--without any articulate act of consciousness.
The art of psychological investigation is therefore a very
dangerous organ of research in the hands of the malicious; for it
goes like a reproductive scavenger through the field of human
consciousness increasing the evil which it is its purpose to collect.
The apostolic definition of "charity" as the thing which "thinketh
no evil" is hereby completely justified; and the profound Goethean
maxim, that the way to enlarge the capacities of human beings is
to "assume" that such capacities are larger than they really are, is
justified also.
Malice naturally assumes that the "faults" of people are "static,"
immobile, and unchanging. It assumes this even in the very act of
increasing these faults. For the I static and unchanging is precisely
what malice desires and seeks to find; for death is its ideal; and,
short of pure nothingness, death is the most static thing we know.
Love is not blind or fooled or deluded when it waives aside the
faults of a person and plunges into the unknown depths of such a
person's soul. It is not blind, when, in the energy of the creative
vision, such faults subside and fall away and cease to exist. It is
completely justified in its declaration that what it sees and feels in
such a person is a hidden reservoir of unsatisfied good. It does see
this; it does feel this; because there arises, in answer to its
approach, an upward-flowing wave of its own likeness; because in
such a person's inmost soul love, after all, remains the creative
impulse which is the life of that soul and the very substance of that
soul's personality.
The struggle between the emotion of love and the emotion of
malice goes on perpetually, in the depths of life, below a thousand
shifting masks and disguises. What we call the "universe" is
nothing but a congeries of innumerable "souls," manifested in
innumerable "bodies," each one confronted by the objective
mystery, each one surrounded by an indescribable ethereal
"medium."
What we call the emotion of love is the outflowing of any one of
these souls towards the body and soul of any other, or again, in a
still wider sense, towards all bodies and souls covered by the
unfathomable circle of space.
I will give a concrete example of what I mean. Suppose a man to
be seated in the yard of a house with a few patches of grass in
front of him and the trunk of a solitary tree. The slanting sunshine,
we will suppose, throws the shadows of the leaves of the tree and
the shadows of the grass-blades upon a forlorn piece of trodden
earth-mould or dusty sand which lies at his feet. Something about
the light movement of these shadows and their delicate play upon
the ground thrills him with a sudden thrill; and he finds he "loves"
this barren piece of earth, these grass-blades, and this tree. He does
not only love their outward shape and colour. He loves the "soul"
behind them, the "soul" that makes them what they are. He loves
the "soul" of the grass, the "soul" of the tree, and that dim,
mysterious, far-off "soul" of the planet, of whose "body" this
barren patch of earth is a living portion.
What does this "love" of his actually imply? It implies an
outflowing of the very stuff and substance of his own towards the
thing he loves. It implies, by a mysterious vibration of reciprocity,
an indescribable response to his love from the "soul" of the tree,
the plant, and the earth. Let an animal enter upon the scene, or a
bird, or a windblown butterfly, or a flickering flight of midges or
gnats, their small bodies illumined by the sun. These new comers
he also loves; and is obscurely conscious that between their
"souls" and his own there vibrates a strange reciprocity. Let a
human being enter, familiar or unfamiliar, and if his will be set
upon "love," the same phenomenon will repeat itself, only with a
more conscious interchange.
But what of "malice" all this time? Well! It is not difficult to
indicate what "malice" will seek to do. Malice will seek to find its
account in some physical or mental annoyance produced in us by
each of these living things. This annoyance, this jerk or jolt to our
physical or mental well-being, will be what to ourselves we name
the "fault" of the offending object.
The shadows will tease us by their incessant movement. The tree
will vex us by the swaying of its branches. The grass will present
itself to us as an untidy intruder. The barren patch of earth will fill
us with a profound depression owing to its desolate lack of life and
beauty. The dog will worry us by its fuss, its solicitation, its desire
to be petted. The gnats or midges will stir in us an indignant
hostility; since their tribe have been known to poison the blood of
man. The human invader, above all; how loud and unpleasing his
voice is! The eternal malice in the depths of our soul pounces upon
this tendency of grass to be "a common weed," of gnats to bite, of
dogs to bark, of shadows to flicker, of a man to have an evil
temper, of a woman to have an atrocious shrewishness, or an
appalling sluttishness; and out of these annoyances or "faults" it
feeds its desire; it satisfies its necrophilistic lust; and it rouses
in the grass, in the earth, in the tree, in the dog, in the human
intruder, strange and mysterious vibrations of response which add
to the general poison of the world. But the example I have selected
of the activity of emotion may be carried further than this. All
these individual "souls" of human, animal, vegetable, planetary
embodiment, are confronted by the same objective mystery and
surrounded by the same ethereal "medium."
By projecting a vision poisoned by malice into the matrix of the
objective mystery, the resultant "universe" becomes itself a
poisoned thing, a thing penetrated by the spirit of evil. It is
because the universe is always penetrated by the malice of the
various visions whose "universe" it is, that we suffer so cruelly
from its ironic "diablerie." A universe entirely composed of the
bodies and souls of beings whose primordial emotion is so largely
made up of malice is naturally a malicious universe. The age-old
tradition of the witchery and devilry of malignant Nature is a proof
as to how deep this impression of the system of things has sunk.
Certain great masters of fiction draw the "motive" of their art from
this unhappy truth.
And just as the universe is penetrated through and through by the
malice of those whose universe it is, so we may suppose that the
ethereal "medium" which surrounds all souls, before they have
visioned their various "universes" and found them to be one, is a
thing which also may be affected by malice. It is an open question
and one which, in the words of Sir Thomas Browne, "admits a
wide solution," whether or not this ethereal "medium," which in a
sense is of one stuff both with the objective mystery and with the
substratum of the soul, is itself the "elemental body," as it were, of
a living ubiquitous soul.
If this should be the case--and it is no fantastic hypothesis--we are
then provided with an explanation of the curious malignant
impishness of those so-called "elementals" who tease, with their
enigmatic oracles, the minds of unwise dabblers in "psychic
manifestations."
But what we are concerned with noting now is that just as the
primordial malice of all the souls it contains continually poisons
the universe, so the primordial love of all the souls it contains
continually redeems and transforms the universe. In other words it
is no exaggeration to say that the unfathomable universe is
continually undergoing the same ebb and flow between love and
malice, as are the souls and bodies of all the living things whereof
it is composed.
And what precisely is the attitude of love towards the physical
body? Does it despise the physical body? Does its activity imply
an ascetic or a puritanical attitude towards the body and the
appetites of the body? The truth is quite the contrary of this. What
the revelation of the complex vision indicates is that this loathing
of the body, this revulsion against the body, this craving to escape
from the body, is a mood which springs up out of the eternal
malice. It is from the emotion of love in its attitude to the body
that we arrive at the idea of the sacredness of the body and at the
idea of what might be called "the eternal reality of the body."
This idea of the eternal reality of the body springs directly from
those ideas of truth, beauty and goodness which are pre-existent in
the universe and therefore springs directly from that emotion of
love which is the synthesis of these.
The forms and shapes of stars and plants and rivers and hills are
all realized and consummated in the form and shape of the human
body. The magic of the elements, the mystery of earth and air and
water and fire, are incarnated in this miracle of flesh and blood. In
the countenance of a human child, in the countenance of a man or
a woman, the whole unfathomable drama of life is expressed. The
most evil of the children of men, asleep or dead, has in his face
something more tragic and more beautiful than all the waters and
all the land.
Not to "love" flesh and blood, not to will the eternal existence of
flesh and blood, is not to know "love" at all. To loathe flesh and
blood, to will the annihilation of flesh and blood, is to be a victim
of that original "motiveless malignity" which opposes itself to the
creative force.
This insistence upon "the eternal idea of the body" does not
necessarily limit "the idea of the body" to the idea of the human
body; but practically it does so. And it practically does so because
the human body evidently incarnates the beauty and the nobility of
all other forms and shapes and appearances which make up our
existing universe.
There may be other and different bodies in the unfathomable
spaces of the world; but for those among us who are content to
deal with the actual experiences which we have, the human body,
summing up the magical qualities of all other terrestrial forms and
shapes, must, as far as we are concerned, remain our permanent
standard of truth and beauty.
The substitution in art, in philosophy, and in religion, of other
symbols, for this natural and eternal symbol of the human body is
always a sign of a weakening of the creative impulse. It is a sign
of a relative disintegration of the power of "love" and a relative
concentration of the power of "malice." Thus when, by an abuse of
the metaphysical reason, "thought-in-the-abstract" assumes the
rights of a personality the principle of love is outraged, because
the eternal idea of the body is denied.
And when, by an abuse of the psychological reason, the other
activities of the soul are so stressed and emphasized that the
attribute of sensation is forgotten, the principle of love is outraged,
because the eternal idea of the body is denied. The principle of
love, by the necessity of its own nature, demands that the
physiological aspect of reality should retain its validity.
When, therefore, we come to consider the relation of this "eternal
idea of the body" to those invisible "sons of the universe" whose
power of love is inconceivably greater than our own, we are
compelled, by the necessity of the complex vision, to encounter
one of those ultimate dilemmas from which there appears to be no
escape. The dilemma to which we are thus led may be defined in
the following manner.
Because the secret of the universe and the ultimate harmony
between the pre-existent ideas by which all souls must live can be
nothing less than what, in this rarified and heightened sense, we
have named "love" and because the objective pattern and standard
of this love is the creative energy of those personal souls we have
named "the sons of the universe," therefore "the sons of the
universe" must be regarded as directing their desire and their will
towards what satisfies the inherent nature of such love. And
because the inherent nature of such love demands nothing less
than the eternalizing of the idea of flesh and blood, therefore the
"sons of the universe" must be regarded as directing their desire
and their will towards the eternalizing of the idea of flesh and
blood.
And just as the will and desire of these "invisible companions of
men" must be regarded as directed towards the eternalizing of this
idea whose magical "stuff of dreams" is one of the objects of their
love, so the will and desire of all living souls must be directed
towards the eternalizing of this same reality. And because the love
of all living souls remains restless and unsatisfied when directed to
any object except the "eternal vision" and because when directed
to the "eternal vision" such love loses the misery of its craving and
becomes satisfied, therefore the "eternal vision" must be regarded
as the only object which can ultimately and really satisfy the
eternal restlessness of the love of all living souls.
But the inherent nature of love demands, as we have seen, the
permanent reality of the physiological aspect of the universe. That
is to say, the inherent desire of the love of all living souls is
directed towards the eternalizing of the idea of flesh and blood.
From this it follows that since the "eternal vision" satisfies the
desire of love "the eternal vision" must include within it the
eternal idea of the body.
Both "the sons of the universe," therefore, and all other living
souls are compelled, in so far as they give themselves up to the
creative energy, to direct their will towards the eternalization of
this idea. But is there not an inevitable frustration and negation of
this desire and this will?
Are not both the "companions of men" and men themselves denied
by the very nature of things the realization of this idea? Is not the
love of man for "the sons of the universe" frustrated in its desire in
so far as "the sons of the universe" cannot be embodied in flesh
and blood? And is not the love of "the sons of the universe" for
man frustrated in its desire in so far as the physical form of each
individual soul is destroyed by death?
It seems to me that this dilemma cannot be avoided. Love insists
on the eternity of the idea of the body. Therefore every soul who
loves "the sons of the universe" desires their incarnation. But if
"the sons of the universe" could appear in flesh and blood for the
satisfaction of any one of their lovers, all other souls in the wide
world would lose them as their invisible companions. But although
this dilemma cannot in its literal outlines be avoided, it seems that
the same inherent nature of love which leads to this dilemma leads
also to the vanishing point or gap or lacuna in thought where the
solution, although never actually realized, may conceivably exist.
What love desires is the eternalizing of the idea of flesh and blood.
It desires this because the idea of flesh and blood is a necessary
aspect of the fulness and completeness of personality. But though
the idea of flesh and blood is a necessary aspect of personality,
every actual incarnation of personality leaves us aware that the
particular soul we love has something more of beauty and nobility
than is expressed.
This "something more" is not a mere hypothetical quality but is an
actual and real quality which we must assume to exist in the very
stuff and texture of the soul. It exists, therefore, in that
"vanishing-point of sensation," as I called it, which we have to think
of, although we cannot define it, as constituting the soul's essential
self. Those pre-existed ideas which find their synthesis in the
emotion of love are undoubtedly part of the unfathomable
universe. But they are this only because they are interwoven
with the unfathomable soul which exists in each of us. The
"something," therefore, which is the substratum of the soul and its
centre of identity is a thing woven out of the very stuff of these
ideas.
This is the "vanishing point of sensation" to which I have referred,
the point namely where what we call "mind" blends indissolubly
with what we call "matter." The emotion of love which desires the
eternalization of the idea of flesh and blood would be on the way
to satisfaction, even if it never altogether reached it, if it were able
to feel that this beauty and nobility and reality which exist in this
"vanishing point of sensation" which is the very self of the soul
were actually the living essence of flesh and blood, were, in fact, a
real "spiritual body," of which the material body was the visible
expression.
It is the inherent nature of love itself, with its craving for reality,
which leads us to the verge of this conception; and although this
conception can never, as we have seen, become more than a
"vanishing-point of sensation" we have at least the satisfaction of
knowing that if we were able to define the thing more clearly it
would cease at once to be the object of love; because it would
cease to be that mysterious fusion of "mind" and "matter" which it
is the nature of love to crave.
Without the necessity then that these immortal ones whom I call
the "sons of the universe" should satisfy the love of human souls
by any physical incarnation, they may be considered as leading
such love upon the true way by simply being what they are; that is
by being living souls. For, as living souls, they also must possess
as the centre of their being, a "spiritual body," or fusion-point of
"mind" and "matter," which is the inner reality of flesh and blood.
This "spiritual body" of "the gods" or the "sons of the universe"
must necessarily be more noble and more beautiful than any
visible embodiment of them could possibly be; though human
imagination and human art have a profound right to attempt to
visualize such an impossible embodiment; and the purest and most
natural form of "religion" would be the form which struggled most
successfully to appropriate such a visualization.
And just as the human soul can satisfy something, though not all,
of its desire for the eternalizing of flesh and blood in the "spiritual
bodies" of these "invisible companions," so the gods can
themselves satisfy something, though not all, of their love for the
individual soul in the reality of the soul's "spiritual body."
All this may carry to certain minds an ambiguous and even
distasteful association; but I think it will only do so to such minds
as are reluctant to analyse, to the furthest limit, their own capacity
for the kind of "love" I have attempted to describe; and possibly
also such minds as are debarred, by some sub-conscious element
of "malice" in them, from even desiring to develop such a
capacity.
The ambiguity and unsatisfactory vagueness in what I have been
attempting to indicate may perhaps be in a measure dissipated by a
direct appeal to concrete experience. When one analyses this
emotion of love in relation to any actual human object I think it
becomes clear that in our attitude to the physical body of the
person we love there is a profound element of pity.
The sexual emotion may destroy this pity; and any emotion which
is sensual as well as sexual may not only destroy it but turn it into
a very different kind of pity; into the "pity," namely, of a torturer
for his victim. But I feel I am not wrong in my analysis of the kind
of "love" I have in my mind, when I say that the element of pity
enters profoundly into our attitude towards the body of the person
we love.
It enters into it for this reason; namely because the physical body
of the person we love does so inadequately and so imperfectedly
express the beauty of such a person's soul. "Love is not love"
when the blemishes and defects and maladies of the physical form
of the person loved interfere with our love and cause it to
diminish. And such blemishes and defects and maladies _would_
interfere with love if love were not in its essence profoundly
penetrated by pity.
It may be asked--"how can love, which is naturally associated with
beauty and nobility, endure for a moment in the presence of such
lamentable hideousness and repulsiveness and offensiveness, as
exists in some degree in the physiological aspects of us all?" It is
able to endure because in the presence of this what it desires is, as
I have said, not so much the actual physical body of the object of
its love as the "eternal idea" of such a body.
When the individual soul allows itself to demand with too
desperate a craving the actual incarnation of these "sons of the
universe" it is in reality false to its desire for the "eternal idea of
the body," because no actual incarnation of these immortal ones
could realize in any complete sense this "eternal idea."
In the same way when we feel the emotion of love towards any
human soul, our attitude towards the physical form of such a soul
must of necessity be profoundly penetrated by pity and by a tender
and humorous recognition that such a physical form only
expresses a very limited portion of the unfathomable soul which
we love.
If, with a desperate craving to contradict the essential nature of
love, we insist upon regarding the physical body as the complete
expression of the soul, we fall into the same fatal weakness as that
into which those fall who demand a physical incarnation of the
"companions of men," and along with such as these we are false to
love's true craving for the "eternal idea of flesh and blood."
In other words, this craving of love for "the eternal idea of the
body" does not imply that we are false to love when we are unable
to change our natural repugnance in the presence of the repulsive
and the offensive into attraction to these things. Love certainly
does not mean a morbid attraction to what is unattractive. The
sexual emotion, the emotion which we call "being in love," does
sometimes include this morbidity, just because, by reason of its
physiological origin, it tends to remain the slave of the
physiological. But although love does not imply a morbid
attraction to the repulsive and the offensive, and although the
presence of the repulsive and offensive in connection with those
we love is a proof to us that "the eternal idea of the body," is not
realized in the actual body, it is clear that "love is not love" when
it allows itself to be diminished or destroyed by the presence of
these things.
What love really demands, both with regard to the universe and
with regard to any individual soul in the universe, is not so much
the retention of the physiological aspect of these things, _as we
know them now_, but of the physiological aspect of them implied
in such a phrase as "the eternal idea of matter" or "the eternal idea
of flesh and blood."
It may be put still more simply by saying that what love demands
is the existence of something in what we call "matter" or the
"body" which guarantees the eternal reality of these aspects of life.
It does not demand that we should love the repulsive, the
offensive, the false, or the evil, because these exist in the bodies
and the souls of those we love.
Everything in the universe partakes of the eternal duality. The
hideous, the false and the evil are not confined to what we call
"mind" but exist in what we call "matter" also. Consequently love,
when in its craving for complete reality it demands "the eternal
idea of the body" does not demand that this eternal idea should be
realized in any actual body.
When a demand of this kind is made, it is not made by love but by
the sexual instinct, and it is invariably doomed to a ghastly
disillusion. For it is just this very craving, namely that in some
actual human body "the eternal idea of the body" should be
realized, that the sweet and terrible madness of sexual love
continually implies. But real love, the love which is the supreme
synthesis of those ideas which represent the creative power in the
ultimate duality, can never be disillusioned.
And it cannot be disillusioned because it is able to see, beneath the
chaotic litter and unessential debris of "matter," the eternal idea of
"matter" and because it is able to see, under the lamentable
repulsiveness and offensiveness of so much actual flesh and
blood, "the eternal idea of flesh and blood."
Love's attitude toward this element of litter and chaos in the
universe is sometimes an attitude of humorous toleration and
sometimes an attitude of destructive fire. Love's attitude towards
the repulsive and the offensive in human souls and bodies is
sometimes an attitude of humorous toleration and sometimes an
attitude of destructive fire.
But along with this passion of destruction, which is so essential a
part of the passion of creation, and along with this humorous
indulgence, there necessarily mingles, where human beings are
concerned, an element of profound pity. The best concrete
example of the mood I am trying to indicate is the emotion which
any one would naturally feel in the presence of some torturer or
tyrant whom he had slain, or even whom he had surprised asleep.
For the prerogative of both sleep and death is that they obliterate
the repulsive elements of flesh and blood and set free its eternal
idea.
And this is true of death even after the ghastly process of chemical
dissolution has actually begun. A loathing of matter as matter, a
hatred and contempt for the body as the body, is therefore a
manifestation not of love but of the opposite of love. Such a
loathing of the physiological is a sign of a weakening of the
creative energy. It is also a sign of the stiffening of the resistant
"malice," or "motiveless malignity," which opposes creation. What
the energy of love directs its desire and its will towards, is first the
"eternal idea of the soul," the idea of the rhythmic harmony of
"mind" and "matter" fused and lost in one another, and then "the
eternal idea of the body," the idea of the rhythmic projection of
this invisible harmony upon the visible fabric of the world.
Thus we arrive at the only definition of the nature of love which is
satisfactory to the deepest moments of feeling experienced by the
human soul. In such moments the soul gathers itself together on
the verge and brink of the unknown. Something beyond the power
of our will takes possession then of all that we are. In our
momentary and transitory movement of the complex vision we are
permitted to pass across the ultimate threshold.
We enter then that mysterious rhythm which I have called "The
Eternal Vision"; and in place of our desire for personal
immortality, in place of our desire for the possession of any person
or thing, in place of our contemplation of "forces" and "energies"
and "evolution" or "dissolution," in place of our struggle for
"existence" or for "power," we become suddenly aware that in the
outflowing and reciprocal inter-action of the emotion of love there
is something that reduces all these to insignificance, something
that out of the very depths of the poisonous misery of the world
and the irony of the world and the madness of the world utters its
defiant Rabelaisian signal, "Bon espoir y gist au fond."