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THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE
BY
EMIL LUCKA
TRANSLATED BY
ELLIE SCHLEUSSNER
[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.1
_First published in Great Britain 1922_
(_All rights reserved_)
_Printed in Great Britain by_
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, LONDON AND WOKING
PREFACE
The object of this book, which is addressed to all cultured men and
women, is to set forth the primitive manifestations of love and to throw
light on those strange emotional climaxes which I have called
"Metaphysical Eroticism." I have taken no account of historical detail,
except where it served the purpose of proving, explaining and
illustrating my subject. Nor have I hesitated to intermingle
psychological motives and motives arising from the growth and spread of
civilisation. The inevitable result of a one-sided glimpse at historical
facts would have been a history of love, an undertaking for which I lack
both ability and inclination. On the other hand, had I written a merely
psychological treatise, disregarding the succession of periods, I should
have laid myself open to the just reproach of giving rein to my
imagination instead of dealing with reality.
I have availed myself of historical facts to demonstrate that what
psychology has shown to be the necessary phases of the evolution of
love, have actually existed in historical time and characterised a whole
period of civilisation. The history of civilisation is an end in itself
only in the chapter entitled "The Birth of Europe."
My work is intended to be first and foremost a monograph on the
emotional life of the human race. I am prepared to meet rather with
rejection than with approval. Neither the historian nor the psychologist
will be pleased. Moreover, I am well aware that my standpoint is
hopelessly "old-fashioned." To-day nearly all the world is content to
look upon the sexual impulse as the source of all erotic emotion and to
regard love as nothing more nor less than its most exquisite radiation.
My book, on the contrary, endeavours to establish its complete
independence of sexuality.
My contention that so powerful an emotion as love should have come into
existence in historical, not very remote times, will seem very strange;
for, all outward profession of faith in evolution notwithstanding, men
are still inclined to take the unchangeableness of human nature for
granted.
The facts on which I have based my arguments are well known, but my
deductions are new; it is not for me to decide whether they are right or
wrong. In the first (introductory) part I have made use of works already
in existence, in addition to Plato and the poets, but the second and
third parts are founded almost entirely on original research.
E.L.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE 5
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION 9
FIRST STAGE: THE SEXUAL INSTINCT 21
SECOND STAGE: LOVE
CHAPTER
I. THE BIRTH OF EUROPE 39
II. THE DEIFICATION OF WOMAN (FIRST FORM OF
METAPHYSICAL EROTICISM):--(_a_) The Love of the Troubadours;
(_b_) The Queen of Heaven; (_c_) Dante and Goethe;
(_d_) Michel Angelo 115
III. PERVERSIONS OF METAPHYSICAL EROTICISM:--
(_a_) The Brides of Christ; (_b_) Sexual Mystics 217
THIRD STAGE: THE BLENDING OF SEXUALITY AND LOVE
I. THE LONGING FOR THE SYNTHESIS 231
II. THE LOVE-DEATH (SECOND FORM OF METAPHYSICAL EROTICISM) 251
III. THE CONFLICT BETWEEN SEXUALITY AND LOVE.--THE SEEKER
OF LOVE AND THE SLAVE OF LOVE 266
IV. THE REVENGE OF SEXUALITY.--THE DEMONIACAL AND THE OBSCENE 275
CONCLUSION: THE PSYCHOGENETIC LAW.--THE INDIVIDUAL AS AN
EPITOME OF THE HUMAN RACE 284
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
Since the triumphant days of the Mechanists some twenty-five years ago,
the wedge of Pragmatism--a useful tool to be used and discarded--has
been driven between materialism and idealism, and it appears that the
whole tendency of philosophy is now in the latter direction. Even in
England the influence of Bergson has led modern thought away from the
pure materialism of the monists, and it seems probable that Benedetto
Croce's _Philosophy of the Spirit_ will carry the movement a step nearer
towards the idealistic concept of reality. And among the latest signs of
the new tendency must be counted the brilliant work of Emil Lucka, the
young Austrian "poet-philosopher," whose conception of the development
of love must rank with the most daring speculations in recent
psychology.
In the great reaction of the last century, love, that most cogent motive
of human thought and action, fell from its high estate and came to be
regarded as an instinct not differing in any essential from hunger and
thirst, and existing, like them, from the beginning, eternal and
immutable, manifesting itself with equal force in the heart of man and
woman, and impelling them towards each other. But Emil Lucka, in his
remarkable new book, _The Three Stages of Love_ (which was recently
published in Berlin, and has already created a sensation in literary
circles abroad), leads us on to speculative heights from which we may
look back upon the whole theory of evolution not as a bar but as a
bridge. "My book is intended as a monograph of the emotional life of the
human race," he says in the preface, and "I am prepared to meet with
rejection rather than with approval." There has been abundance of
criticism and controversy, but Lucka has stated his case and drawn his
conclusions with such admirable precision and logic, that his work has
aroused admiration and appreciation even in the ranks of his opponents.
Love is a theme which at all times and in all countries has been of
primary interest to men and women, and therefore this book, which throws
an illuminating ray of light in many a dark place still wrapped in
mystery and silence, not only impresses the psychologist, but also
fascinates the general reader with its wealth of interesting detail and
charm of expression.
The three vitally important points which the author develops are as
follows:--
Love is not a primary instinct, but has been gradually evolved in
historical time.
Ernst Haeckel's biogenetic law is expanded in a psychogenetic law.
Only man's emotions have undergone evolution, and therefore have a
history, while those of woman have experienced no change.
Lucka's book will probably not please the advanced feminists, but the
delicate, although perhaps involuntary homage to her sex which is
implied in his theories ought to rouse a feeling of gratification in the
heart of every right-feeling woman. The very limitations and
restrictions which he lays upon her raise and glorify her. For while man
has been the "Odysseus wandering through heaven and hell, passing from
the bestial to the divine to return again and become human, woman has
always been the same, unchangeable and without problems. That which he
has set up to-day as his highest erotic ideal, the blending of sexual
and spiritual love, has been her natural endowment from the beginning.
Never perfect, he falls into error and sin where she cannot err, for her
instinct is Nature herself, and she knows not the meaning of sin."
Schopenhauer's "instinct of philoprogenitiveness" has to-day become an
article of faith with the learned and the unlearned. This _sub-conscious
instinct for the service of the species_ which, in love, is supposed to
rise to consciousness, and whose purpose is the will to produce the best
possible offspring, is conceded by scientists who reject not only
Schopenhauer's metaphysic, but metaphysic in general. Even Nietzsche,
that arch-individualist, has proved by many of his pronouncements, and
most strikingly by his well-known definition of marriage, that he has
not escaped its fascinations. "Schopenhauer ignores all phenomena which
are not in support of his myth," says Lucka, who denies this instinct of
philoprogenitiveness and would substitute for it a "pairing-instinct."
"The experience of others," he argues, "not our own instinct, has taught
us that children _may_, not necessarily _must_, be the result of the
union of the sexes. Into the mediaeval ideal which reached its climax in
metaphysical love, the idea of propagation did not enter. Moreover, the
desire for children is frequently unaccompanied by any sexual desire,
and therefore to manufacture an instinct of philoprogenitiveness is
fantastic metaphysic, and is entirely opposed to intellectual reality.
This was well understood in the long period of antiquity which strictly
separated the sexual impulse and the desire for children."
Lucka distinguishes three great stages in the evolution of love. In
vivid and fascinating pictures he unfolds the erotic life of our
primitive ancestors, basing his statements on accepted authorities. The
sexual impulse in those remote days, unconscious of its nature and
far-reaching consequences, was entirely undifferentiated from any other
powerful instinct. Every woman of the tribe belonged to every male who
happened to desire her. As is still the case with the aborigines of
Central and Northern Australia, the phenomena of pregnancy and
childbirth were attributed to witchcraft.[1] The concept of _father_ had
not yet been formed; the family congregated round the mother and saw in
her its natural chief; gynecocracy was the prevailing form of
government. In early historical and pre-classical times, promiscuity was
systematised by religion in India and the countries round the
Mediterranean and survived in the Temple Prostitution and the Mysteries.
Man as yet felt himself only as a part of nature, and aspired to no more
than a life in harmony with her laws. The worship of fertility and the
endless renewal of life was the object of the orgiastic cults of Adonis
and Astarte in the East, and Dionysus and Aphrodite in Greece; unbridled
licentiousness and blind gratification of the senses their sacrament.
With the growth of civilisation and the development of personality there
slowly crept into the minds of men a distaste for this irregular
sexuality and a desire for a less chaotic state of things. This longing
and the wish for legitimate heirs gradually overcame promiscuity and, in
Greece, led to the establishment of the monogamous system. It must not
be assumed, however, that the Greek ideal of marriage bore any
resemblance to our modern conception. True, the wife occupied an
honoured position as the guardian of hearth and children and was treated
by her husband with affection and respect, but she was not free. Nor was
her husband expected to be faithful to her. Marriage in no way
restricted his liberty, but left him free to seek intellectual
stimulation in the society of the hetaerae, and gratification of the
senses in the company of his slaves. Love in our sense was unknown to
the ancients, and although there is a modern note in the legends of the
faithful Penelope, and the love which united Orpheus and Eurydice, yet,
so Lucka tells us, these instances should be regarded rather as poetic
divinations of a future stage of feeling than actual facts then within
the scope of probability. Even Plato, in whom all wisdom and
ante-Christian culture culminated, was still, in this respect, a citizen
of the old world, for he, too, knew as yet nothing of the spiritual love
of a man for a woman. To him the love of an individual was but a
beginning, the road to the love of perfect beauty and the eternal ideas.
On the threshold of the second stage of the erotic life stands
Christianity, which, in sharp contrast to antiquity and to the classical
period, sought the centre and climax of life in the soul. The founder of
the "religion of love" _discovered_ the individual, and by so doing laid
the foundation for that metaphysical love which found its most striking
expression in the deification of woman and the cult of the Virgin Mary.
How this change of mental attitude was brought about is worked out in a
brilliant chapter, entitled "The Birth of Europe." The revivifying
influence of Christ's preaching and personality was stifled after the
first centuries by the rigid dogma and formalism which had altered his
doctrine almost past recognition. The Church was building up its
political structure and tolerated no rival. Art, literature, music, all
the enthusiasm and profound thought of which the human mind is capable,
were pressed into her service. Independent thought was heresy, and the
death of every heretic became a new fetter which bound the intellect of
man. But about the year 1100, when the mighty edifice was complete, and
the pope and his bishops looked down upon kings and emperors and counted
them their vassals, when the barbaric peoples which made up the
population of Europe had been sufficiently schooled and educated in the
new direction, a longing for something new, a yearning for art, for
poetry, for beauty, began to stir the hearts of men and women. It found
expression in the ideal of chivalry, the Holy Sepulchre and the Holy
Grail, and suddenly love, bursting out in a brilliant flame, shed its
radiance on the sordid relationship which had hitherto existed between
the sexes, and transfigured it. Woman, the despised, to whom at the
Council of Macon a soul had been denied, all at once became a queen, a
goddess. The drudge, the patiently suffering wife, were things of the
past. A new ideal had been set up and men worshipped it with bended
knees.
"She shines on us as God shines on his angels,"
sang Guinicelli.
It was in a small country in the South of France, in Provence, that the
new spirit was born. The troubadours, wandering from castle to castle,
sang the praise of love, genuine love, the earlier ones without
admixture either of speculation or metaphysic. The dogma that pure love
was its own reward inasmuch as it made men perfect, was framed later on.
"I cannot sin when I am in her mind,"
wrote Guirot Riquier, and Dante, in the "Vita Nuova," calls his beloved
mistress "the destroyer of all evil and the queen of all virtues." The
monk Matfre Ermengau, who wrote a text-book on love, says:
Love makes good men better,
And the worst man good.
The later troubadours drew a much sharper distinction between spiritual
and sensual love. The latter was regarded as degrading and base (at
least in principle) and woe to the man who held, or rather, avowed,
another opinion. His reward was the contempt of every man and woman of
culture. "I ask no more of my mistress than that she should suffer me to
serve her," protested Bernart de Ventadour.
It goes without saying that, in spite of this high ideal, sensuality
flourished undiminished, and a troubadour who loudly sang the praise of
chastity and blatantly professed his entire disinterestedness in the
service of his mistress, did not see the least inconsequence in carrying
on a dozen intrigues at the same time with other women. Sordello, one of
the best known poets of this period, was charged by a contemporary with
having changed his mistress over a hundred times, and he himself,
impudently bragging, proclaims that
None can resist me; all the frowning husbands
Shall not prevent me to embrace their wives,
If I so wish....
Another poet, Count Rambaut III., of Orange, recommended to his
fellow-men as the surest way of winning a woman's favour, "to break her
nose with a blow of the fist." "I myself," he continued, "treat all
women with tenderness and courtesy, but then--I am considered a fool."
As may be expected, sublimated, metaphysical love was not without its
caricatures and eccentricities. One of the most grotesque figures of the
period of the troubadours was Ulrich von Lichtenstein, a German knight.
As a page, we are told, he drank the water in which his mistress had
washed her hands. Later on he had his upper lip amputated because it
displeased his lady-love, and on another occasion he cut off one of his
fingers, had it set in gold and used as a clasp on a volume of his poems
which he sent as a present to his inamorata.
At the famous Courts of Love, the most extraordinary questions were
seriously discussed and decided. A favourite subject for debate was the
relationship between love and marriage, and some of the decisions which
have been preserved for us prove without a doubt that those two great
factors in the emotional life were considered irreconcilable. At the
Court of the Viscountess Ermengarde of Narbonne, the question whether
the love between lovers was greater than the love between husband and
wife was settled as follows: "Nature and custom have erected an
insuperable barrier between conjugal affection and the love which
unites two lovers. It would be absurd to draw comparisons between two
things which have neither resemblance nor connection."
The contrast between the new, spiritualised love and the older, sexual,
instinct created that dualism so characteristic of the whole mediaeval
period. Sexuality and love were felt as two inimical forces, the fusion
of which was beyond the range of possibility. While on the one hand
woman was worshipped as a divine being, before whom all desire must be
silenced, she was on the other hand stigmatised as the devil's tool, a
power which turned men away from his higher mission and jeopardised the
salvation of his soul. Wagner portrayed this dualism perfectly in
_Tannhauser_. "A man of the Middle Ages," says Lucka, "would have
recognised in this magnificent work the tragedy of his soul."
It was but a small step from the worship of a beloved mistress to the
cult of the Virgin Mary. The Church, hostile at first, finally
acquiesced, and "through her official acknowledgment of a female deity,
open enmity between the religion of the Church and the religion of woman
was avoided." A woman, that is to say, the Virgin Mary, had stepped
between God and humanity as mediator, intercessor and saviour.
Both Dante, the inspired woman-worshipper of the Middle Ages, and the
more modern Goethe, saw in metaphysical love the triumph over all things
earthly. And far above either of these intellectual heroes looms the
awe-inspiring figure of Michelangelo, the scoffer, to whom love came
late in life; in his ecstatic adoration of Vittoria Colonna, the
enthusiasm of Plato and the passion of Dante are blended in a more
transcendent flame.
Sexual Mystics and the Brides of Christ present the darker aspect of
metaphysical love. All the latter, including even Catherine of Siena (a
clever politician who kept up a correspondence with the leading
statesmen of her time), Marie of Oignies, and St. Teresa, are
stigmatised as victims of hysteria and consigned to the domain of
pathology.
While the first stage was characterised by the reign of unbridled sexual
instinct, the second by the conflict between spiritual and sensual love,
the third stage represents our modern conception, the blending of
spiritual and sensual love, which is "not the differentiated sexual
instinct, but a force embracing the psycho-physical entity of the
beloved being without any consciousness of sexual desire." It shares
with the purely metaphysical love the lover's longing to raise his
mistress above him and glorify her without any ulterior object and
desire. "In this stage there is no tyranny of man over woman, as in the
sexual stage; no subjection of man to woman, as in the woman-worship of
the Middle Ages; but complete equality of the sexes, a mutual give and
take. If sexuality is infinite as matter, spiritual love eternal as the
metaphysical ideal, then the synthesis is human and personal." The
apotheosis of this perfect love Lucka finds in the _Liebestod_ (the
death of the lovers in the ecstasy of love), in Wagner's _Tristan und
Isolde_.
An interesting chapter on erotic aberrations, the demoniacal and the
obscene, completes the third part of the book.
There may be much in Lucka's theories which will rouse the scepticism of
the monists; some of his deductions may appear to his readers a little
strained, but no thinking man or woman can read his brilliant
_Conclusion_ without denying him the tribute of sincere admiration. In
this last chapter he applies Haeckel's biogenetic law to the domain of
the spirit. As the human embryo passes through the principal stages of
the development of the individual from lower forms of life, so the
growing male must pass through the stages of psychical development
through which the race has passed. The gynecocratic government of
prehistoric time is revived in the nursery, where the mother rules
supreme and the sisters dominate. The normal, healthy school-boy,
preferring the company of his school-fellows to all others, shunning his
mother and sisters, ashamed of his female relatives, is the modern
individual representative of those early leagues and unions of young men
who opposed matriarchy and finally brought about its overthrow and the
establishment of male government. The promiscuous sexuality
characteristic of adolescence reproduces the first, merely sexual, stage
of the erotic life of the race in the life of the individual. As a rule
this phase is followed by a period of woman-worship; love has conquered
the sexual instinct and the latter is felt as base and degrading.
Atavism is not so much the persistence of the earlier, as the absence of
the later stages of psychical development.
I need not emphasise the fact that the three stages are often
intermingled and not traceable with equal clearness in the life of every
individual. Many men never advance beyond the first stage and others are
fragmentary and undeveloped; but certain phases are more or less
distinguishable in every well-endowed male individual. Lucka finds a
perfect illustration of his theory in the life and works of Richard
Wagner, whose operas _The Fairies_ (based on Shakespeare's _Measure for
Measure_), _Tannhauser_, and _Tristan und Isolde_, successively
illustrate the three stages through which the great poet-composer and
impassioned lover passed, and reflect the principal halting-places in
the erotic evolution of the race. In _Parsifal_, Wagner's last and
maturest work, he conjectures a potential fourth stage, divined by the
genius of the great musician and thinker, a sublimation of our modern
ideal, a stage when love will be freed from all sexual feeling (a
conception not unlike Otto Weininger's), but to which we have not yet
attained and which we are even unable fully to grasp.
I have not been able to do more than touch upon the principal features
of this book, the fame of whose brilliant author has long spread beyond
the boundaries of his own native country. Emil Lucka was born in Vienna
in 1877, and has already achieved a number of remarkably fine books,
most of which have been translated into Russian, French, and other
foreign languages. He is as yet unknown in England, this being the first
of his works to appear in English.
ELLIE SCHLEUSSNER.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] _cf._ Hartland's "Primitive Paternity" and Frazer's "Golden Bough."
THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE
THE FIRST STAGE: THE SEXUAL INSTINCT
To the generations slowly rising from the dark abyss of time to the
twilight of the Middle Ages, the satisfaction of the sexual instinct
offered fewer difficulties than the gratification of any other need or
desire. With every unpremeditated and cursory indulgence the craving
disappeared from consciousness and left the individual free to give his
mind to the acquisition of the necessities of life which were far more
difficult to obtain. Primitive, prehistoric man lived in the moment.
When there was plenty of food he gorged to repletion, heedless of the
starvation which might be his fate to-morrow or the day after. His
thought had neither breadth nor continuity. It never occurred to him
that there might be a connection between an abrupt and quickly forgotten
embrace and the birth of a child by a woman of the tribe after what
appeared to be an immeasurable lapse of time. He suspected witchcraft in
the phenomena of pregnancy and childbirth (to this day the aborigines of
Central and Northern Australia do not realise the connection between
generation and birth). As a rule it was remembered that a certain woman
had given birth to a certain child by the fact of her having carried it
about and fed it at her breast. Occasionally it was forgotten to which
mother a child belonged; perhaps the mother had died; perhaps the child
had strayed beyond the boundaries of the community and the mother had
failed to recognise it on its return. But it was clear beyond all doubt
that every child had a "mother." The conception of "father" had not yet
been formed. Experience had taught our primitive ancestors two
undeniable facts, namely "that women gave birth to children" and "that
every child had a mother."
We must assume that sexual intercourse was irregular and haphazard up to
the dawn of history. Every woman--within the limits of her own tribe,
probably--belonged to every man. Whether this assumption is universally
applicable or not, must remain doubtful; later ethnologists, more
particularly _von Westermarck_, deny it because it does not apply to
every savage tribe of the present day. Herodotus tells us that
promiscuity existed in historical times in countries as far removed from
each other as Ethiopia and the borders of the Caspian Sea. There can be
no reasonable doubt that sexual intercourse took the form of
group-marriage, the exchange or lending of wives, and other similar
arrangements.
The relationship between mother and child having been established by
Nature herself, the first human family congregated round the mother,
acknowledging her as its natural chief. This continued even after the
causal connection between generation and birth had ceased to be a
mystery. In all countries on the Mediterranean, more especially in
Lycia, Crete and Egypt, the predominance of the female element in State
and family is well attested; it is reflected in the natural religions of
the Eastern races--both Semitic and Aryan--and we find innumerable
traces of it in Greek mythology. The merit of discovering this important
stage in the relationship of the sexes is due to _Bachofen_. "Based on
life-giving motherhood," he says, "gynecocracy was completely dominated
by the natural principles and phenomena which rule its inner and outer
life; it vividly realised the unity of nature, the harmony of the
universe which it had not yet outgrown.... In every respect obedient to
the laws of physical existence, its gaze was fixed upon the earth, it
worshipped the chthonian powers rather than the gods of light." The
children of men who had sprung from their mother as the flowers spring
from the soil, raised altars to Gaea, Demeter and Isis, the deities of
inexhaustible fertility and abundance. These early races of men realised
themselves only as a part of nature; they had not yet conceived the idea
of rising above their condition and setting their intelligence to battle
with its blind laws. Incapable of realising their individuality, they
bowed in passive submission to nature's undisputed sway. They were
members of a tribe, and the fragmentary existence of the single
individual was of no importance when it clashed with the welfare of the
clan. The family--centred round the mother--and the tribe were the real
individuals, in the same way as the swarm of bees, and not the
individual bee, makes the whole. They lived in complete harmony with
nature; they had no spiritual life, no history, for civilisation and the
creation of intellectual values which are the foundation of history
depend on the rise of a community above primitive conditions.
Differentiation had hardly begun to exert its modifying influence; all
men (not unlike the Eastern Asiatics of our day) resembled each other in
looks, character and habits.
In the countries on the Mediterranean (as well as in India and
Babylonia) the first stage of sexual intercourse, irresponsible and
promiscuous, was systematised by religion. The annual spring-festivals
in honour of Adonis, Dionysus, Mylitta, Astarte and Aphrodite,
celebrated unbridled licentiousness. The whole community greeted the
re-awakening vitality of the earth by an unrestrained abandonment to
passion. Man aspired to be no more than the flower which scatters its
seed to the winds. The incomprehensible lords of cupidity and rank
vegetation did not suffer the individualisation of desire. The complete
union of the male and female qualities, as manifested both in nature and
man, was solemnised in the Orgies, and not by any means the relationship
of an individual man to an individual woman, or sexuality connected with
individuals and dominated by them. Nor was this unfettering of instinct
a symbolical act; for it to be so, man must have stood over against
nature as an intellectual being, mirroring and transforming her acts by
his own deeds. He was as yet far from this. His ambition did not reach
beyond the desire to fulfil nature in himself. Before the majesty of
sex--worshipped in the vague, shadowy mothers of mankind, Rhea, Demeter,
Cybele, and their human offspring, the phallic Dionysus and the
hundred-breasted goddess of Ephesus--the individual with his piteous
limitations shrank into insignificance. Sex was immortal, sex and
primary matter, the [Greek: ulê] contrasted by Aristotle with the
[Greek: eisos], the form. "The female principle is the mother of the
body, but the mother of the spirit is the male." The substance of those
ancient cults was birth and death, meaningless, purposeless, apparently
without rhyme or reason; their sacrament the perpetual union of the
sexes. Between the succeeding generations there was but one bond, the
natural bond of motherhood. It was the first tie realised by mankind, a
tie not felt as a concrete relationship between two individuals, but as
a general, maternal, natural force. The presiding divinities were the
"mothers," the eternal, incorporeal deities, enthroned outside time and
space, and therefore immortal givers of life and preservers of mankind.
Before their silent greatness the desire of man to know his whence and
whither, to win shape and individuality, became blasphemy. They had
given immortality to sex, but upon the individual they had laid the
curse of death.
Thus we have first a stage of fatherless, natural conception,
corresponding with the philosophical theories which maintained that all
created things had sprung from the elements. Later ages discovered a
spiritual principle, a becoming, or an eternal being, and finally a
conflict between spirit and matter.
But the general attitude towards sexual intercourse underwent a change
as soon as here and there individuals appeared who were conscious of
their individuality. Natural selection could not come into play in a
community the members of which resembled one another so closely that all
personal characteristics were obliterated in a general monotony. One
woman was as good as another, although in all probability a healthy,
youthful and strong individual would be preferred to a sickly, puny
specimen. But apart from this, the wish to choose a partner instead of
being content with the first comer, must have coincided historically
with the outward, and later on with the inward differentiation of the
race. I cannot prove my theory by quoting chapter and verse from ancient
writers, but obviously a feeling of preference could not have arisen
until individuals had begun to show very noticeable traces of
difference. Therefore with growing differentiation a new factor--modest
at first and operating within narrow limits--the factor of choice, had
come into the sexual life. The slow development of personality gave
birth to the feeling which rebelled against universal sexual intercourse
and gynecocracy in general. The men desired to shape their own world;
they had no share in the immortality of maternal life. As (relatively
speaking) single individuals they stood over against the material bond
of the generations living in the chain of the mothers. Demigods, the
sons of the gods of light and mortal mothers, were credited with the
salvation of men from a confused, chaotic existence, and the
introduction of new conditions of life, no longer based on the dictates
of nature but on the moulding genius of man. "Hercules, Theseus and
Perseus overthrew the ancient powers of darkness. They laid the
foundations of man's great achievement, civilisation, and were the
first to worship the gods of light. They delivered humanity from the
gross materialism in which it had hitherto been steeped; they were the
awakeners of spiritual life, which is a higher life than the life of the
senses; they were as incorruptible as the sun from whence they came, the
heroes of a new civilisation distinguished by gentleness, a higher
endeavour and a new dispensation." (Bachofen.)
Heinrich Schurtz has proved (though not in connection with matriarchy)
that side by side with the family, unions of unmarried men existed in
many countries at a very early time. The object of these unions, which
had nothing of the rigidity of blood-relationship, was fellowship. As
soon as the boys had outgrown the care of their mother they were
compelled to combine for the purpose of playing games and later on for
war and hunting; these men's unions therefore were the outcome of the
necessary conditions of life. It is obvious that innovations and
inventions of all sorts originated in these unions rather than with the
temperamentally conservative women, and that we have to look upon them
as the hotbed of all spiritual and social evolution. These
confederations and leagues not based on a natural or blood-relationship,
but on a feeling of brotherhood and friendliness, might well have been
an attack upon the natural ties of the family, an expression of a
feeling of hostility to and contempt for women, and probably stood in
close relationship to a striking characteristic of the past: a widely
spread homosexuality.
Whether Schurtz gives us a correct picture of these men's unions or not,
there can be no doubt that the struggle against matriarchy originated in
them. This struggle led eventually to the victory of the male principle,
the acknowledgment of the authority of the father, the institution of
male government which deprived women of all legal rights, and the
dominion of the spiritual; the victory of the gods of light over the
dark lords of fertility. This revolution of principles was perhaps the
completest revolution humanity has ever known.
A long road, marked by numerous compromises and limitations, led from
casual intercourse to the final establishment of the monogamous system.
Free intercourse had been sanctioned by the gods, who suffered no
restrictions and modifications, and sacrifices in the shape of a
temporary universal unfettering of instinct were required to pacify
their anger and reconcile them to the new system. The first and most
important of these compromises was the temple-prostitution practised by
many nations in Asia Minor, the Greek Archipelago, India and Babylonia.
Many a girl gained in this way the marriage portion which enabled her
later on to find a husband, to whom she invariably remained strictly
loyal. Thus all religious requirements were satisfied. At first this was
an annually recurring rite, but gradually it became an isolated ceremony
in the life of every female individual. "In the place of the annual
surrender," says Priester, "we now have a single act; the hetaerism of
the matrons is succeeded by the hetaerism of the maids; instead of being
practised during marriage, it is practised in spinsterhood; the blind
surrender has given way to a yielding to certain individuals."...
With the growth of civilisation a few girls, the hierodules, were set
apart for the purpose of pacifying the offended deities and their act
ransomed the rest of the female citizens.
It was not on erotic grounds, but for political and social reasons that
the Greek introduced monogamy. The reason which weighed in the scales
more heavily than all others was the necessity for legitimate offspring.
It was natural that a man of property should desire a legitimate heir
who would inherit it on his death. The right of succession from father
to son, incorporated later on in the Roman Right, originated during this
period. But this was not the only advantage connected with the
possession of a son: religion taught that after death the body required
sacrificial food which could only be provided by the legitimate male
descendants of the deceased. (The same belief was held by the Indians
and Eastern Asiatics.) In several Greek States marriage was compulsory
and bachelors were fined. At the same time the contraction of a marriage
did not interfere with the personal freedom of the man; he was at
liberty to go to the hetaerae for intellectual stimulation (unless he
happened to prefer the friends of his own sex) and to his slaves for the
pleasures of the senses. His wife, although she was not free, was
respected by him as the guardian of his hearth and children. There was
but one legal reason for divorce: sterility, which frustrated the object
of matrimony. Conjugal love as we understand it did not exist; it is a
feeling which was entirely unknown to the ancients.
With the exception of the gradually weakening hold of religion on the
imagination of the people towards the decline of the Roman Empire, no
perceptible change occurred in the social life of the old world until
the dawn of the Middle Ages. To quote Otto Seeck: "A wife had no other
task than to produce legitimate offspring; and yet she gave herself airs
and graces, embittered her husband's life with her jealousy and bad
temper or, worse even, set all tongues wagging with her evil conduct. Is
it to be wondered at that marriage was merely regarded as a duty to the
State, and that a great number of men were not sufficiently patriotic to
take such a burden upon their shoulders?"
Thus the victory of the male spiritual principle over universal sexual
intercourse ushered in the second stage which checked the sexual impulse
and directed it upon certain individuals, a distinction however, which
bears no relation to love.
Monogamy had conquered, in principle at least and as an ideal.
The profoundly mystical core of the most powerful Greek tragedy which
has come down to our time, the _Orestes_ of Aeschylus, represents the
victory of the new gods of light over the old maternal powers. Orestes
has sinned against the old law, for in order to avenge his father's
death, he has slain his mother. The sun-god Apollo and the sinister
Erinnys, the upholders of the old maternal right, are waging war over
the justifiableness of the deed. To the Erinnys, matricide is the
foulest of all crimes, for man is more nearly related to the mother than
to the father. But Apollo had commanded the deed, so that the father's
murder should not remain unavenged.
Not to the mother is the child indebted
For life; she tends and guards the kindling spark
The father lighted; she but holds his pledge.----
he explains. And the answer is the lament of the Erinnys:
Thus thou destroy'st the gods of ancient times!
Athene, the virgin goddess, the motherless daughter of Zeus, appearing
as mediator between the opponents, decides in favour of the new
dispensation which places the father's claim above the mother's. Orestes
is free of guilt; his deed was justifiable according to the canons of
the new law. The tragedy is the symbolical commemoration of the victory
of the male principle in Greece. But Athene is the embodiment of the new
hermaphroditic ideal of the Greek which stood in close connexion to
their homosexuality, and with which I propose to deal later on.
There is a psychical law ordaining that nothing which has ever quickened
the soul of man shall be entirely lost. Were it not so, the storehouses
of the soul would stand empty. New values are created, but the old
verities endure; as a rule they are relegated to a lower sphere, to
inferior social layers, but they persist and frequently merge into the
new. This law applies without exception to the relationship between the
sexes; we shall come upon it again and again. During the second stage,
characterised by the spiritual love foreign to the ancients, the purely
sexual impulse continued as an unimpaired force, but it had lost its
prestige and was not only regarded as ignoble and base, but also
stigmatised as sinful and demoniacal. The hearts of men were stirred by
new ideals.
A similar attitude, perhaps not quite so uncompromising because the
contrast was less pronounced, existed in classical Greece. The more
highly developed, self-conscious Hellenic genius, shrinking from
promiscuous intercourse, had systematised the instinct and set up a new
ideal in Platonic love. But below the surface raged the unbridled
natural force, and in perfect harmony with the Greek spirit--it was not
hysterically hidden, but assigned a place in the new system. Wrapped in
the obscurity of the Mysteries, concealed from the gaze of the new gods
of light, it attempted to assuage its inextinguishable thirst. The
Mysteries were the annual tribute paid as a ransom by Apollo-worshipping
Hellas to chaotic Asia, so that she might be free to pursue her higher
psycho-spiritual aims. The brilliant civilisation of Athens was based on
the dark cult of the Mysteries. On the festivals of the hermaphroditic
Dionysus and Demeter, which are identical with the cults of Adonis and
Mylitta, the impersonal, generative elements were worshipped. Thus,
below the surface of the Greek State, founded on masculine values and
attempting to restrict intercourse for the benefit of a more
systematised progeniture, flourished the orgiastic cult of the ancient
Eastern deities, who had vouchsafed to mortals a glimpse of the great
secret of life in the ardour of procreation and conception. The women
upheld the religion of passion as an end in itself; bacchantes, men in
female attire, emasculated priests, sacrificed to the blindly bountiful
gods. We are told that Dionysus conquered even the Amazons and converted
them to his worship. Euripides described in the _Bacchantes_--the
subject of which is the war between the uncontrolled sexual impulse and
the new order of things--how Dionysus traversed all Asia and finally
arrived in Hellas accompanied by a crowd of abandoned women. But his
religion was more than a cult of wine and sensual pleasure, it embraced
a gentle worship of nature, throwing down the barrier between man and
beast--impassable by the spirit of civilisation--and lovingly including
every living creature. We read in the _Bacchantes_ that the women who
had fled from the town to follow the irresistible stranger, Dionysus,
dwelled in the mountains, binding their hair with tame adders, carrying
in their arms the cubs of wolves and the young deer, and feeding them
with the milk of their breasts; that milk and wine welled up when they
struck the earth with the thyrsus; and so on. Dionysus implores
Pentheus, the representative of the Hellenic masculine system, not to
venture undisguised among the maenads: "They'll murder you if they
divine your sex," and, knowing the secret of the male and female temper:
. . . . . . . . . First let
His mind be clouded by a slight disorder
For, conscious of his manhood he will never
Wear women's garb; insane, he's sure to wear it.
Pentheus, recognising in Dionysus the foe of a more spiritual conception
of the law, the _effeminate stranger_ who had driven the women to
madness, is torn to pieces by the frenzied bacchantes who fall upon him,
led by Agave, his mother, and sacrificed to the _bull-god_ Dionysus. At
the conclusion of this strange and profound epos, Agave recovers her
senses and curses the acts which she has committed in her madness ...
women submit to the new spiritual dispensation. We realise now why Hera,
the tutelary goddess of the newly introduced monogamous system, hated
Dionysus and attempted to kill him before he was born.
The subject treated in the beautiful myth of Orpheus is the
relationship between the primitive sexual impulse and its
individualisation on a single personality. For seven months Orpheus
bewails the death of Eurydice and regards all other living creatures
with indifference. This loyalty offends and infuriates the women of
Thracia, who divine in it a spirit inimical to a life in harmony with
nature. One night, during the celebration of the Dionysian rites, they
attack the poet--the representative of the higher Hellenic poetical
ideals--and rend him limb from limb. But as the head of the murdered
singer floats down the river, the pale lips still frame the beloved
name: Eurydice! It is certain that in those remote legendary days such
love did not exist. But the prophetic Greek spirit contrasted
promiscuous intercourse with love for a single woman.
So far we have encountered only a general, not an individualised, sexual
instinct and, in a limited measure at least, a struggling tendency
towards individualisation. But even so it was merely a question of
instinct, and did not bear the least resemblance to love as we
understand it to-day. _Love_ did not exist in the old world. I admit
that in the legend of Orpheus we are face to face with a sentiment which
is not unlike modern love, but, as far as I am aware, this is an
isolated case in Greek history, and may be regarded as a divination of
something new, just as we find unmistakable anticipations of
Christianity in Plato's writings. Such phenomena--the occasional
occurrence of which I do not altogether deny, although I regard them as
on the whole improbable as far as the sphere of my research is
concerned--are not infrequently met with in history, but their effect
upon civilisation was nil; they were presentiments, incomprehensible in
their day, and for this very reason probably preserved as curiosities.
In spite of the fact, however, that in those far-off days spiritual love
of a man for a woman was unknown, we find Plato contrasting "a base and
degraded Eros with a divine Eros." Pausanias says in the "Symposium":
"The man who loves with his senses only, loves women and boys equally
well. He loves the body more than the soul.... His only striving is to
obtain the object of his desire, and he cares not whether it be worthy
or unworthy. The Eros he worships is the ally of that younger goddess in
whom male and female attributes are blended. But the other Eros is the
companion of Aphrodite, Urania, the divine; unbegotten by a father,
unconceived by a mother, she is the offspring of the male element, the
elder one, unstained by passion.... The sensualist who loves the body
more than the soul is base. His love passes away like the object of his
passion. But the companion of the Olympic goddess is the Eros who fills
the hearts of the lovers with the longing for virtue. The other Eros is
the confederate of the debased Aphrodite." And Aristophanes, another of
the participators in the feast, says: "The yearning does not seem to be
a desire for the pleasures of the senses, the one taking delight in his
intercourse with the other; far from it, it is obvious that each soul is
craving for something which it cannot express in words, but can only
divine and conjecture." And the mysterious Diotima revealed to Socrates
an entirely novel principle in erotic life; the principle which guides
man beyond the pleasures of the senses and--through love--leads him to
the divine. "The slave of his senses runs after women; but he who loves
with his soul and strives to win immortality through virtue and wisdom,
seeks a great and beautiful soul that he may surrender himself to it
completely." But in the opinion of the classical ages, a beautiful soul
was only to be found in the body of a man; woman belonged to the lower,
animal spheres; she was destined for the pleasure of the senses and the
propagation of the race. Plato's theory of ideas is the philosophical
victory of the male-spiritual principle over nature, matter and their
warden: woman. (Perhaps it is even the revenge of the Greek genius for
man's original enslavement.) "Love between men," continues the seer,
"forms a stronger tie, a closer friendship, than love between parents
and children; it has a mutual share in children which are immortal and
far more beautiful than the children of men." She teaches Socrates that
this noble love is at the root of all the magnificent creations of the
spirit, as carnal love is the origin of human life. "Until he becomes
aware that the beauty of all bodies is closely related, a man must love
an individual with all his heart. If a man will follow after beauty, he
is foolish not to conceive the beauty of all bodies as one and the same.
As soon as he has learned this, he will become a lover of all beautiful
forms; his fervent passion for one will diminish, he will scorn the
individual and hold it cheap."
With the Hellenic homosexuality an element foreign and even hostile to
the original and natural bi-sexual sensuality crept into the erotic life
of the human race; it found its classical representation in the Platonic
dialogues "Symposium" and "Phaedros." In conscious opposition to all
sexuality Platonic love (what is usually called Platonic love is based
on an obstinate misunderstanding) turns to the purely spiritual, that is
to say, the conceptions of truth, beauty and goodness; it is a yearning
for the supernatural, and it knows itself as the path to it. In the
mutual love of all noble souls lies the germ of all higher things; it is
the way to the gods of light which, in this connection, are conceived
philosophically as ideas, though in the true Hellenic spirit as
objective ideas, the prototypes and culminations of everything human. To
grasp the meaning of Platonic love it is essential to realise
that--unlike the spiritual woman-worship peculiar to the Middle
Ages--it is not a personal feeling of one individual for another;
platonically speaking, the love for an individual is only a first stage;
the path which leads to the love of beauty and the eternal ideas. The
characteristic of this metaphysical love which Plato was the first to
conceive, was therefore love for the universal, and not love for an
individual. The latter, as we shall find later on, is the characteristic
of the true or, more modestly speaking, specifically European conception
of love. Platonic love, finally, was the perception of perfection, the
Socratic knowledge; its alpha and omega was not, as the mystic and true
erotic would have it, its ardour and passion, the fulness of its own
being. It had an alien purpose: the knowledge of things divine, by a
later period Christianised and understood as the divine mysteries. To
Plato, the essence and climax of antique, ante-Christian culture, every
individual, even the beloved mistress, was but a preliminary, a
finger-post, pointing the way to the perception of perfect beauty. True
virtue is the outcome of profound knowledge; it transforms men into
gods. The purely spiritual woman-worship of the Middle Ages was only
another aspect of this yearning to attain to virtue and perfection
through the love of an individual. We must not lose sight of the fact
that it was already strongly emphasised and upheld in the Platonic ideal
of love.
In the dark excesses of the Mysteries the beauty of the human form
counted for nothing; voluptuousness and intoxication ruled. In the
Asiatic cult of the sexes there was no room for beauty, no time for
selection. The Greeks were the discoverers of the beauty of the human
form. Beauty kindled the flame of love in their souls, beauty was the
gauge which determined their erotic values. Their ideal was a
_kalokagathos_, a youth beautiful in body and soul.
In "Phaedros" Plato contrasts with far greater force than in the
"Symposium" him "who craves for sensual pleasure like the beasts in the
fields" with him "who strives after beauty and perfection." To the
latter "the face of the beloved is the reflection of the sublimely
beautiful." He would like to sacrifice to her, as to the immortal gods.
All beautiful bodies represent to him in an increasing measure the idea
of the beauty of form, which again is subordinate to the beauty of the
soul. It points the way to metaphysical beauty, the eternal and
imperishable idea of mankind. Socrates could scorn the beauty of the
individual because he saw in it merely an imperfect reflection of
perfect beauty. In its truest sense Platonic love is, therefore,
impersonal; it is not spiritual love for a human being, but a peculiar
characteristic of the Greek cult of beauty. We shall again meet this
principle of beauty-worship in metaphysical love, the adoration of
woman; thanks to Plato, it has for all time become the inalienable
property of the human mind. The striving to rise above all individualism
was another ideal which a later period revived. But the pivot round
which the emotions revolved was the love for a beloved individual, the
modern, European, fundamental motive, as opposed to the antique Platonic
cult of ideas. Thus Plato, too, was a citizen of the old world, at whose
threshold stood universal sexual intercourse, tolerating nothing
personal, knowing of no individuals, acknowledging only unchecked,
uncontrollable instinct, and whose decline was again characterised by
the extreme impersonality of ideas. It had traversed the path of human
existence in a huge cycle. Starting from an unconscious existence in
complete harmony with nature, it had passed through individualised man
to the loftiest spiritual conceptions in the impersonal world of ideas.
The Hellenic ideal of beauty was almost invariably realised in the male
form. The Greeks of the classical period disdained woman; she was for
them inseparably connected with base sensuality, but their contempt had
its source partly in a feeling of horror. The days when matriarchy was
the form of government were not very remote; it survived in a great
number of myths and also, subconsciously perhaps, in the soul of man. To
the Greek mind woman was the embodiment of the dark side of love, and it
was merely the logical conclusion of this conception when, at a later
period, she was regarded as the devil's tool. It is certain that the
origin of the idea must be sought in Plato's time.
In intercourse with women man dimly felt the vague elementary condition
from which he had struggled hard to emerge, and fled to the more
familiar companions of his own sex. Would not love between man and man
deliver him from the basely sensual, strengthen his spirituality and
lead him to the gods? In this connection Zeus is called in "Phaedros"
[Greek: philios], the maker of friendships. Plato, in propounding this
doctrine, drew thereby the most radical conclusion of the new,
apparently male, but at heart hermaphroditic ideal of civilisation,
conceived in the heroic epoch and elaborated and brought to perfection
by the Greek of classical times. This ideal was the victory of the
spiritual principle over promiscuous sexuality and irresponsible
propagation and, quite in the true Hellenic spirit, it was again
interpreted materially.
Because individualised love was an unknown quantity to the ancients,
they ornamented their sarcophagi with symbols of ecstatic life, with
dancing and embracing fauns and maenads. Generations passed away, but
new ones arose, embracing and begetting life--for life was eternal.
Death was vanquished in the ecstasy of the nameless millions, for the
true meaning of life lay in the preservation of the species. The death
of the individual did not have a deep and poignant meaning until the
soul had become the centre and climax of life. An individual had passed
away for ever--nothing could recall him. Death had become the final
issue, the terror, because it destroyed the greatest of all things:
self-conscious man. But love, too, had changed; it was no longer sexual
impulse, depending on the body and perishing with it, but a craving of
the soul, conscious of itself and stretching out feelers far beyond the
earth. A new pang had come into the world, but also a new
reconciliation.
THE SECOND STAGE: LOVE
CHAPTER I
THE BIRTH OF EUROPE
The memory of the figure and preaching of Christ had so powerfully
influenced the centuries that it had gradually permeated and transformed
not only the Platonic doctrine of ideas--that maturest fruit of Greek
wisdom--but also the Semitic mediaeval monotheism. Something new had
sprung into being, something which expressed a hitherto unknown feeling
for life and for humanity, vague and uncertain in the beginning, but
growing in clearness and uniformity. On the throne of the Roman emperors
sat a bishop, whose power was increasing with the development of the new
civilisation, and whom the final victory of the new transcendental
world-principle had made master of the world. The building up of this
new civilisation had absorbed the intellectual force of a thousand
years; it had monopolised thought and every form of energy. The reward
was great. For the first time in the annals of the world the
questionings of brooding intelligence were fully answered, the anguish
of the tortured soul was stilled. The purpose of the universe, the
destiny of man, were comprehended and interpreted, good and evil being
finally known. At the close of the first Christian millenary, all moral
and intellectual values were grouped round and dominated by one supreme
ideal; the loftiest value in this world and the next, side by side with
the greatest secular power, were in the hands of the Church; together
with the imperium she had succeeded to the spiritual and ethical
inheritance of the dead civilisations. Without her uncouth barbarism
reigned, and it was her task, while elaborating the system of the
universe for which she stood, to teach and convert the new nations, to
spread a uniform Christian civilisation.
On the mere face of it it must seem strange that a religion which had
grown on foreign soil, out of foreign spiritual assumptions, should have
been accepted so readily and quickly by nations to whom it must have
been alien and unintelligible. The love of war and valour of the
Teutonic tribes and Christian asceticism were diametrically opposed
ideals, and very often their relationship was one of direct hostility. I
need only remind the reader of the contempt expressed for the chaplain
by Hagen (in the "Song of the Niebelungen"). On the other hand, the
ancient Celtic and Teutonic races shared one profound characteristic
with the Christian world, the consequences of which were sufficiently
far-reaching to raise the religion of Christ to the religion of Europe.
The characteristic common to the still uncultivated European spirit and
Christianity, and meaningless alike to the Asiatic barbarians, the Jews
of the Old Testament and the Greeks, was the importance which both
attached to the individual soul. Through the Christian religion this new
intuition which saw in the soul of man the highest of values, became the
centre and pivot of life and faith--a position to which even Plato, to
whom the objective, metaphysical idea was the essential, never attained.
It had been the most personal experience of Christ, and centuries after
his death the nations rediscovered it as their highest value. It
entitled Christianity to become the natural religion of Europe, and the
soul of its new system of civilisation. It formed the most complete
contrast to all Asiatic cults, Brahminism and Buddhism, a fact which,
since Schopenhauer, one is inclined to overlook. To the Indian, the soul
of man is not an entity; his consciousness is a republic, as it were,
composed of diverse spiritual principles and metaphysical forces which
are not centralised into an "I-centre," but exist impersonally, side by
side. This may be a great conception, but it is foreign to the feeling
of the citizen of Europe. To the latter the I, the soul, the
personality, is the pivot round which life turns. The evolution of the
European world-feeling is in the direction of the independent
development of all psychical forces and their fusion into a unity of
ever-increasing intimacy. New values will be created, but the fusing
power of the soul will strive with growing intensity to co-ordinate and
unify the internal and external life; personality will recreate the
world in conformity with its own purposes, that is to say, it will found
the system of objective civilisation. The incapacity of the Indian to
produce a civilisation perfect in every direction is explained by his
one-sided, morally-speculative thought. The world is to him nothing but
a moral phenomenon, he admits no other explanation; he seeks its true
meaning and the possibility of its salvation in the realisation of the
vanity of life, not in the liberating deed, and not in the inward
change.
The kernel of matured and spiritualised Christianity, which reached its
apex in the German mystics, lies in the soul of man, eager to shed
everything which is subjective and accidental, and become spirit,
profound, divine reality. Eckhart, the great perfecter of this European
religion, deliberately and in direct contradiction to the dogma of his
time, placed man above the "highest angels," whom he considered subject
to limitations; "man," he argues, "thanks to his freedom, is able to
reach a goal to which no angel could aspire. For he is always new,
infinitely exalted above the limitations of the angels and all finite
reason." Of the relationship between the soul and God he says; "The soul
of the righteous man shall be with God, his equal and compeer, no more
and no less." The Upanishads, on the other hand, maintain that the core
of the world is not to be found in the soul of the individual but in
Brahma, the universal soul, outside whom there is no reality. "The
individual soul is but a phantasm of the universal soul, as the
reflection of the sun in the water is but a phantasm of the sun." The
sole purpose of the world is the extinction of individual consciousness,
its absorption in Brahma, the end of all suffering: "When feeling has
ceased, pain must cease, too, and the world be delivered." The Indian
lacks the central conception of love, for which he substitutes
knowledge. Primitive Christianity conceived the connection between body
and soul, the encumbering of the soul by the body, as it were, as a
temptation or a punishment; according to the Vedas, it is merely a
delusion to which the sage is not subject. Before his keen vision, the
deception falls to the ground, and by this very fact he is delivered. To
the feeling of Europe and Christianity, however, life and the universe
are genuine, deep realities, the touchstone of the soul. Love is the
soul's greatest treasure and the only true path to God; knowledge can
never take its place. "The divine stream of love flowing through the
soul," says Eckhart, "carries the soul along with it to its origin, to
the bourne of all knowledge, to God."
The very general identification of the Christian and Indian mystics--a
fact which is accounted for by their common metaphysical tendency--is
based on an error; Indian mysticism and Christian mysticism originated
in different concepts; here the centre of all being is laid in love and
in the soul of man, there it is contained in knowledge and in Brahma.
But ultimately, at the termination of the world-process, they will meet,
although coming from different directions. "While the soul worships a
God, realises a God and knows of a God," says Eckhart, "it is separated
from God. This is God's purpose, to annihilate Himself in the soul, so
that the soul, too, shall lose itself. For God has been called God by
the creatures." The words "The soul creates God from within, is
connected with the divine and becomes divine itself," are highly
significant. To the Vedantist the soul of man is an emanation from the
world-soul: "Although God differs from the individual soul, the
individual soul does not differ from God." At this point it is no longer
an easy matter to distinguish the feeling of the Christian mystic from
the feeling of the Brahmin; though their valuations of man, life and the
world differ, nay, are even opposed to each other, they finally meet in
God. We read in the Vedanta: "The force which created and maintains the
universe, the eternal principle of all being, dwells entirely and
undividedly in every one of us. Our self is identical with the supreme
deity and only apparently differentiated from it. Whosoever has mastered
this truth has become at one with all creation; whosoever has not
mastered it, is a stranger and a foe to all creatures."
I do not intend to depreciate Indian wisdom; I merely desire to point
out its inherent dissimilarity to Western thought; my task of laying
hold of the spirit of Europe in its crises and watching its growth is
bound to be advanced by this division.
The religious experience of Christ, based on the realisation of the
divine nature of the soul, and the road of the soul to God, has
established the fundamental Western principle. A world-system was built
up which emanated from the innermost depth of the individual soul and,
very consistently, related all existing things, heaven and earth, the
creation and the destruction of the world, salvation and perdition, to
the soul of man. This was achieved with the aid of a naïve metaphysic,
created by the Greek genius and externalised by the crude intellect of
barbarians; this metaphysic drew its whole content from a unique
revelation, and the essential was frequently hidden by dialectic and
speculation. One may safely say that the first millenary strove, if not
exactly to set aside the original principle of Christianity, yet to bind
it by dogma in such a way that it often became completely obscured. A
long training was necessary before the immature nations of barbarians
were fit to become citizens of the spiritual world, before they could
fully assimilate the new traditions and grasp their innermost meaning,
which by this very fact became altered and modified. This process of
education came to a temporary conclusion about the year 1100. At last
the European nations had outgrown the guardianship of the Church with
its antiquated methods; a new, a creative epoch was dawning; the
civilisation of Europe, opposed to all barbarism and orientalism, rose
like a brilliant star on the horizon of the world. Spontaneous feeling
for the race, for nature and for the divine verities had again become
possible.
I shall have to exceed the limits of my subject in this chapter, for I
propose showing the seeds from which, in the time of the Crusades, the
new soul of the European, throwing off the lethargy of the first
Christian millenary, began to grow with extraordinary vigour and
rapidity; that new soul which experienced a wider, if not deeper,
unfolding in the period of the Renascence, and to this day pervades and
fertilises our spiritual life. I might have been less digressive, but I
hope that two reasons will justify my prolixity; the first is the great
importance of the subject from the point of view of a history of
civilisation, and the second and more particular one is its close inner
relationship to my principal theme. For, in complete contrast with the
sexuality on which heretofore the relationship between husband and wife
had been based, a new feeling, that of spiritual love, had come into
existence and quickly reached its climax. Projected not only on the
other sex, but also on God and on nature, it permeated the age and
explains its great and unprecedented manifestations: the spiritual love
between man and woman (which deteriorated later on into the deification
of woman), the new religion of the German mystics, the awakening
appreciation of the beauty of nature, the sudden outburst of German
poetry--no sooner born than it reached perfection--the specifically
European Gothic architecture, so completely independent of the old art.
All these new creations had their origin in the strange craving of the
period for something novel and romantic, something hitherto unknown.
This longing begot the ideal of chivalry and a wealth of half human,
half preter-human conceptions, such as the Holy Sepulchre and the Holy
Grail. And all at once, something unprecedented, something of which the
race had as yet no experience, had come to pass: love, which had nothing
in common with sensuality, which was even deliberately hostile to it,
love which welled up in one soul and flowed into the other--presupposing
personality--love was there! If, therefore, I have gone into detail, I
hope that it has served to elucidate the principal theme of this part of
my book, namely, the spiritual part of man for woman aspiring to the
metaphysical, which is so alien to our modern feeling.
It is necessary to begin by sketching a background which shall set off
the new phenomenon. The spiritual achievement of the first millenary was
the construction of the Christian system of the universe the Church had
complete knowledge of all things in heaven and earth--symbols merely of
the eternal verities; her wisdom almost equalled divine wisdom, for the
secrets of life and death had been revealed and surrendered to her; St.
Chrysostom's words uttered in the fourth century, "The Church is God,"
had become a fact. The profoundest wisdom, the greatest power, were
hers; the loftiest ideal had been realised as it has never been realised
before or since. As the wisdom of the Church had been a direct gift of
God, so her power, too, had divine origin and reached beyond this
earthly life. The Church alone held the key to eternal bliss, her curse
meant everlasting damnation. To be excommunicated was to be bereaved of
temporal and eternal happiness. A man who had been excommunicated was
worse off than a wild beast; he was surrendered to the devils in hell,
and he knew it. There was but one road to salvation: to do penance and
humbly submit to the Church. This has been symbolised for all times by
the memorable submission of the Roman-German emperor, who stood for
three days, barefooted and fasting, in the snow in the courtyard of
Canossa, before he was received back into the kingdom of God. The
kingdom of God was synonymous with the Church; Jews and pagans were the
natural children of the devil, but the dissenter, the heretic who dared
to question a single proposition of the divine system, or was bold
enough to think on original lines--in other words in contradiction to
tradition--voluntarily turned his back on God, and with seeing eyes went
into the kingdom of the devil. He was wholly evil, and no earthly
punishment fitted his crime. The emperor Theodosius, as far back as A.D.
380, had called such heretics "insane and demented," and the burning of
their bodies at the stake which prevented their souls from falling into
the hands of the devil, was looked upon as a great and undeserved mercy.
But not only during their lifetime, but after their death, too, the hand
of the Church fell heavily on all those who had strayed beyond her pale;
their bodies were dragged from their graves and thrown into the
carrion-pit. A man whom the Church had excommunicated was buried in the
cemetery of a German convent. The Archbishop of Mayence ordered the
exhumation of the body, threatening to interdict divine service in the
convent if his command were disobeyed. But the abbess, Hildegarde of
Bingen (1098-1179), a woman of great mental power and an inspired seer,
opposed him. Having received a direct message from God, she wrote to the
bishop as follows: "Conforming to my custom, I looked up to the true
light, and God commanded me to withhold my consent to the exhumation of
the body, because He Himself took the dead man from the pale of the
Church, so that He might lead him to the beatitude of the blessed.... It
were better for me to fall into the hands of man than to disobey the
command of my Lord." The saint had interpreted the will of God, and the
archbishop, sanctioning a sudden rumour that the deceased had received
absolution at the eleventh hour, yielded. But the bishop's yielding by
no means countenanced the belief that God might, for once, tolerate the
body of an excommunicate in sacred ground, far from it--the vision of
the abbess Hildegarde had merely served to correct an error.
All those who dared to oppose the clergy by word or deed were doomed to
everlasting perdition--this was a fact which it were futile to doubt; at
the most, a man shrugged his shoulders at certain damnation for the sake
of mundane pleasures--a rich legacy in the hour of death might save him.
Not infrequently the fear of the devil was transformed into
indifference, and sometimes even into demonolatry. A single ungodly
thought might involve eternal death, and as many a man, more
particularly many a priest, realised his inability to live continuously
in the presence of God, he surrendered his soul to the anti-god, not
from a longing for the pleasures of the senses, but from despair. The
worship of the devil, far from being an invention of fanatical monks,
actually existed, and was often the last consolation of those who held
themselves forsaken by God. The hierarchy did not hesitate a moment to
make the utmost use or the power conferred upon them by the mental
attitude of the people. The government of kings and princes, in addition
to the ecclesiastical government, could only be a transient, sinful
condition; the time was bound to come when the pope would be king of the
earth, and the great lords of the world his vassals, appointed by him to
keep the wicked world in check, and deposed by him if he found them
incapable, worshippers of the devil, or disobedient to the Church. The
whole world was a hierarchy whose apex reached heaven and bore, as the
representative of its invisible summit, the pope. He stood, to quote
Innocent III., "in the middle, between God and humanity." The same great
pope has left us a document entitled _On the Contempt of the World_,
which treats of the absolute futility of all things mundane. There is no
reason to look upon the union of this unquenchable thirst for power and
complete "other-worldiness" as a contradiction. The kingdom of God,
Augustine's _Civitas Dei_, must of necessity be established that the
destiny of the world may be fulfilled. Every pope must account to God
for his share in the advancement of the only work which mattered, and
the greater the power the ruler of this world had acquired over the
souls of men, the more he trembled before God, weighed down by the
burden of his enormous responsibility. "The renunciation of the world in
the service of the world-ruling Church, the mastery of the world in the
service of renunciation, this was the problem and ideal of the middle
ages" (Harnack). But not only the pope, every priest, as a direct member
of the kingdom of God, was superior to the secular rulers. This was
taught emphatically by the great St. Bernard of Clairvaux, for instance,
and Gregory VII., the wildest fanatic of the kingdom of God, said, in
writing to a German bishop: "Who then who possesses even small knowledge
and reasoning power, could hesitate to place the priests above the
kings?" Even the emperor Constantine, though he was still largely under
the sway of the imperial idea, distinctly acknowledged the bishops as
his masters; according to the legend he handed to the Bishop of Rome
the insignia of his power, sceptre, crown and cloak, and humbly held the
bridle of the prelate's horse.
The theoretic backbone of this mental attitude was the doctrine of the
Fathers of the Church and the older scholasticism, pronouncing the
illimitable power of human perception; the world's profoundest depths
had been fathomed, its riddle finally solved; there was consequently no
room for philosophy, the endless meditation on the meaning of the world
and the destiny of man. Science had but one task: to bring logical proof
of the revealed religious verities. The greatest champion of this view
was Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), who in his treatise, _Cur Deus
Homo_ proved that God was compelled to become man in order to complete
the work of salvation. Abélard preached a similar doctrine, but carried
away by the fervour of thought, arrived at conclusions which he was
forced to recant ignominiously; for at the end of his chain of evidence
he did not always find the foregone conclusion which should have been
there. This system of a final and infallible knowledge of the world is
the very foundation of ecclesiastical government. The priest alone has
all knowledge, for he has the doctrine of salvation. Had it occurred to
any man to defend his own opinions in contradiction to the system of the
Church, that man would speedily have come to the conclusion that the
devil had tempted him to false observations, or false deductions, and
his submission to the Church would have been the outward sign of his
victory over the evil which had blinded his spiritual vision. A man had
to choose between the worship of God and the worship of the devil, there
was no alternative. Nobody knew the limits of human knowledge;
everybody, the learned ecclesiastic as well as the unlearned, plain man,
believed others to be in possession of the key to profound secrets and
unlimited power. One thing only was needful: to possess one's self of
the philosopher's stone; therefore the belief in witchcraft and the
fear of certain men supposed to be endowed with supernatural power--the
priests--were but the obvious results of a world-system, founded on a
revealed and exact religion.
The Latin poets, whose study would probably have counteracted the
universal barbarism, were regarded as dangerous, the gods of antiquity
being identified with the demons of the Scriptures. This view was
responsible for the loss of many a valuable manuscript. The favourite
haunts of the demons were the convents, originally designed as
battlefields on which the struggles with the demons were to be fought
out, but frequently perishing in superstition and ignorance. Every monk
had visions of devils; miracles occurred continually; the torturing
problem was as to whether they were worked by God or the devil. Nature
was merely a collection of mystic symbols, divine--or perhaps
diabolical--allegories, whose meaning could be discovered by a correct
interpretation of the Bible. Everything which could possibly happen was
recorded in the Scriptures; they contained the true explanation of all
things. It was only a matter of selecting the right word and
interpreting it correctly, for every word was ambiguous and allegorical.
Every natural occurrence--an eclipse of the sun, a comet, or even a
fire--stood for something else; it was the symbol of a spiritual event
concealed behind a phenomenon. The allegorical interpretation of the
Bible was carried to the point of abstruseness because every word was
considered of necessity to have an unfathomably profound meaning. The
following amazing interpretation is by the highly-gifted German poet and
mystic, Suso: "Among the great number of Solomon's wives was a black
woman whom the king loved above all others. Now what does the Holy Ghost
mean by this? The charming black woman in whom God delights more than in
any other, is a man patiently bearing the trials which God sends him."
Abélard's interpretation of the black woman is even worse; he maintained
that though she was black outside, her bones, that is her character,
were white. A really remarkable deed of bad taste was committed by the
monk, Matfre Ermengau, the author of the _Breviari d'Amor_, at a time
when civilisation had already made considerable strides. He sent his
sister a Christmas present, consisting of a honey-cake, mead, and a
roast capon, accompanied by the following letter: "The mead is the blood
of Christ, the honey-cake and the capon are His body, which for our
salvation was baked and pierced at the Cross. The Holy Ghost baked the
cake in the Virgin's womb, in which the sugar of His divinity
amalgamated with the dough of our humanity. In the Virgin's womb the
Holy Ghost also spiced the mead and prepared it from wine; the spice is
divine virtue, the wine is human blood. In addition He caused the holy
capon to issue from the egg; the yolk of the egg is the deity, the white
is humanity, the shell is the womb of the Virgin Mary ...," etc.
The religion of Christ was lost, man had become a stranger to his own
soul--celestial warnings, signs of the Judgment Day, daemonic
temptations, surrounded him, as far as he paid heed to anything
super-sensuous on all sides. The French chronicler, Radulf Glaber (about
A.D. 1000), might have been writing a satire on antiquity when he warned
his contemporaries of the demons lurking everywhere, but more especially
dwelling in trees and fountains. Of a learned man who was studying the
classic poets, he said: "This man, confused by the magic of evil
spirits, had the impudence to propound doctrines contradictory to our
holy faith. In his opinion everything the ancient poets had maintained
was true. Peter, the bishop of the town, condemned him as a heretic. At
that time there were many men in Italy believing this false doctrine;
they perished by the sword or at the stake." We have a letter, written
at the same time by Gerbert, who later on became Pope Sylvester II., to
a friend, beseeching him to obtain for him manuscripts of the Latin
philosophers and poets. He wrote textbooks of astronomy, geometry and
medicine, and introduced the Arabic numbers and the decimal system into
Europe. In consequence he, too, was accused of magic and intercourse
with Arabian pagans. A chronicler relates that he sold his soul to the
devil and became pope through the devil's agency; and that, when he was
on the point of death, he ordered his body to be cut to pieces so that
the devil should not carry it away.
To-day we find it difficult to realise such a state of mind. Every man
of our period who takes the smallest interest in things spiritual--be he
the most orthodox ecclesiastic--at least knows that there are capable
people in the world whose opinions differ from his, who seek fresh
knowledge; he knows it, even though he may pretend that they are people
who have gone astray and have been abandoned by God. No one can be
entirely blind to the new values created by human intellect. But the men
of the Middle Ages were swayed by a monstrous dualism, and despite their
belief in the illimitable power of human cognition, they unquestioningly
accepted the sacred tradition and rejected the naïve evidence of the
senses and intellect whenever it seemed to contradict the dogma. Thus
mediaeval science did not represent what it represented in antiquity,
and what it represents now, the study of the true relationship of
things, but rather the application of truths revealed once and for all.
There was nothing more to be discovered, and therefore scientists took a
delight in logical and dialectical speculations which to a man of our
day seem senseless and childish. Far into the Renascence, natural
history was a medley of ancient traditions, oriental fables and
superficial observations. The strangest qualities were attributed to
animals with which we come almost daily into contact. The following
quotations are culled from a Provençal book on zoology: "The cricket is
so pleased with its song that it forgets to feed and dies singing."
"When a snake catches sight of a nude man, it is so filled with fear
that it does not dare to look at him; but if the man is dressed, the
snake looks upon him as a weakling and springs upon him." "The adder
guards the balsam; if a man desires to steal the balsam, he must first
send the adder to sleep by playing on a musical instrument. But if the
adder discovers that it is being duped, it closes one of its ears with
its tail and rubs the other one against the ground until it is filled
with earth; then it cannot hear the music and remains awake." "Of all
animals there is none so dangerous as the unicorn; it attacks everybody
with the horn which grows on the top of its head. But it takes such
delight in virgins that the hunters place a maiden on its trail. As soon
as the unicorn sees the maiden, it lays its head into her lap and falls
asleep, when it may easily be caught." Of the magnet we learn among
other things that it restores peace between husband and wife, softens
the heart of all men and cures dropsy. "If a magnet is made into a
powder and burnt on charcoal in the four corners of the house, the
inhabitants imagine that they cannot keep on their legs and run away,
sorely affrighted; thieves frequently profit by this fact. If a magnet
is placed under the pillow of a sleeping woman, she is compelled, if she
is virtuous, to embrace her husband in her sleep; if she has betrayed
him, she will fall out of her bed with fear."
All this information was the common property of the period; Richard of
Berbezilh, for instance, an "aesthetic" troubadour, tells us that--like
a still-born lion's cub which was only brought to life by the roaring of
its dam--he was awakened to life by his mistress. (He does not say
whether it was by her roaring.) Conrad of Würzburg compares the Holy
Virgin to a lioness who brings her dead cubs, _i.e._, mankind, to life
with loud roaring. Bartolomé Zorgi, another troubadour of the same
period, likens his lady to a snake, for--he explains--"she flees from
the nude poet and her courage only returns with his clothes." During the
whole mediaeval period the unicorn was a well-known symbol of virginity,
more especially of the virginity of Mary. The _Golden Smithy_ of the
German minnesinger, afterwards monk Conrad of Würzburg, contains a
rather abstruse poem which begins:
The hunt began;
The heavenly unicorn
Was chased into the thicket
Of this alien world,
And sought, imperial maid,
Within thine arms a sanctuary.... etc.
Natural history was in a parlous state, and geographical knowledge was
equally spurious. The Church was averse to natural research, for the
only problem in the world was the salvation of man from everlasting
damnation. Not only Tertullian, but several Fathers of the Church,
regarded physical research as superfluous and absurd, and even as
godless. "What happiness shall be mine if I know where the Nile has its
source, or what the physicists fable of heaven?" asked Lactantius. And,
"Should we not be regarded as insane if we pretended to have knowledge
of matters of which we can know nothing? How much more, then, are they
to be regarded as raving madmen who imagine that they know the secrets
of nature, which will never be revealed to human inquisitiveness?" Here
one is reminded of a remark made in "Phædros" by _the wisest of all
Greeks_, who refused to leave town because "what could Socrates learn
from trees and grass?" And Julius Cæsar wrote an account of his wars to
while away the time when he was crossing the Alps.
Very likely the system of the Church would have been less rigid had it
not largely been occupied in dealing with ignorant barbarians. In the
case of Celts and Teutons, a complete and unassailable form of dogmatics
with its corollary of hieratical intolerance was the only possible
system. The traditions of these peoples were far too foreign to
Christianity to allow Christian germs to flourish in their soil. And the
new nations, accepting what Rome offered to them, were completely
unproductive in their adolescence. The achievement of this fatal first
millenary might be formulated as follows: "The civilised world of
Western Europe was united under the government of the Church of Rome; on
all nations it had been impressed in the same combination of words and
similes that they were living in a sinful world; they knew when this
world had been created and when its Saviour had appeared; they knew that
its end would come together with the bodily resurrection of the dead and
the terrible day of the Last Judgment; they knew that demons were
lurking everywhere, seeking to destroy man's soul, and that the Church
alone could save him. All these facts were as unalterable as the return
of the seasons."
The fundamental sources of antiquity had been sensuality and asceticism,
the elements of the Middle Ages abstract thought and historical faith;
now emotion was to become the principal factor. It welled up in the soul
and soon dominated all life. The fountain which had been dried up since
the dawn of the Christian era, began to flow again in a small country in
the south of France. The civilising centre had again shifted westwards,
as in the past it had shifted from Asia to Greece, and from Greece to
Rome. In the course of the first thousand years Greece and Asia Minor
had separated themselves from Europe, and founded a distinct culture,
the Byzantine, which exerted no influence on the development of Europe.
But not even Italy, the scene of the older civilisation, was destined to
give birth to the new; maybe the memory of the antique, ante-Christian,
period was too powerful here. Its cradle stood on virgin ground, in
Provence, a country wrested from Celts and Teutons by the Roman eagles,
ploughed by the Roman spirit, preserving in some of its coast towns,
notably in Marsilia, the rich remains of Greek settlements, something of
Moorish influence in race and language, and fusing all these
heterogeneous elements into a splendid whole. But why this important
spiritual centre should have been formed just here it is difficult to
say.
For the first time the system of ecclesiastical values was confronted by
something novel, which was not--like the old Teutonic ideal of the
perfect warrior--tainted by barbarism, but may be described as the
system of mundane court values. This new ideal was not founded on an
authority which had to be accepted in good faith; it had its direct
origin in the passionate yearning of the human soul. Man had
re-discovered himself and become conscious of his personal creative
force. A very great thing had been accomplished; the seed which, slowly
gathering strength, had lain in the soil for a thousand years, had at
last burst its husk, and was rapidly growing into the magnificent tree
of the European civilisation. In silent opposition to the system of the
accepted ecclesiastical values, the new ideal of _pretz e valor e
beutatz_ (worth and value and beauty), of _cavalaria_ and _cortezia_
(chivalry and courtesy), was upheld in Provence. Four worldly virtues,
wisdom, courtly manners, honesty and self-restraint, were contrasted
with the ecclesiastical cardinal virtues. The courts of the princes
became centres of new life and art. The new spiritual-aesthetic concept
of feasting and enjoyment transformed the former orgies of eating and
drinking. Woman, who had heretofore been excluded from male society, was
all at once transferred to the very centre of being; for her sake men
controlled their brutal tempers and exerted themselves to please by
good manners, taste and art. She, whom the Church had done everything to
depreciate, who had been denied a soul at the Council of Macon (in the
sixth century), had become the very vessel of the soul; man looked up to
her and bent his knee before the newly-created goddess.
The cultivation of the new courtly manner coincided with the nascent art
of the troubadours. There was no gradual growth and development in the
latter; at the very outset it had reached perfection. The first
troubadour whose name has come down to us was Guillem of Poitiers, Duke
of Aquitania (about 1100); great lords and barons gloried in the
exercise of this new art. Every court boasted its poets, hospitably
received and loaded with presents; the great ones of the earth were
beginning to exercise that patronage of art and letters which in the
Renascence reached such extravagant proportions. Every distinguished
poet employed salaried musicians, the joglars (jongleurs), who wandered
from court to court, singing their masters' new songs. Others again, the
comtaires, related romances of love and adventure, gathering round them
a rapt throng of lords and ladies. Courtly manners and lofty principles
quickly became the recognised ideal; the man who was satisfied with the
pleasures of the senses was held in contempt; the greatest reproach was
"vilania"; in the "Yvain" of the French epic poet Chrestien de Troyes,
this universal feeling is thus expressed:
A courtier counts though he be dead,
More than a rustic stout and red.
Dante and his circle, as well as the best of the troubadours,
substituted for the "cortois" of the superficial Chrestien the "cor
gentil," the noble heart, which they accounted more precious than rank
and wealth and power. "Wherever there is virtue there is nobility," says
Dante, "but where there is nobility there need not necessarily be
virtue." A time had come when personal distinction was in every man's
grasp, no matter whether he was learned or unlearned, a nobleman or a
commoner. Certainly the commoner was never on an equality with the
aristocrat, partly because he was dependent on the largess of the great.
Even Dante was compelled to seek princely patronage, and not until the
Renascence do we hear of writers whose sarcastic tongues were so dreaded
that they became independent of charity.
In opposition to the monkish ideal of a contemplative life which had
hitherto obtained, a new ideal, the ideal of the courtier's life, was
upheld; ecclesiastical saintliness was contrasted with knightly honour.
Beauty, which at the dawn of the Christian era had fallen into ill
repute and had become associated with unholy, and even diabolical,
practices, had again come into its kingdom. Above everything it was the
beauty of woman which was re-discovered--or rather, in its new,
spiritual sense, newly discovered--and claimed the enthusiasm and love
of the best men of the period. After a thousand years of gloom and
brutality, joy and culture shed their radiance on a renewed world. The
ideal of chivalry bore very little resemblance to the old Teutonic ideal
of the hero; the older ideal had been based entirely on the appreciation
of physical strength; but chivalry was the disseminator of culture,
leaving ecclesiastical culture, which hitherto had been synonymous with
civilisation, a very long way behind. "Mezura," "masze" (the [Greek:
mphstoês] of the Platonic Greeks) was the new criterion, as compared
with the barbarian's want of restraint.
I do not propose to give a description of the life at the courts of
Provence. The news of it travelled north, and everywhere roused a desire
to imitate it. The need of a renewed life was powerfully stirring all
hearts. Men yearned for beauty and spontaneity, for passionate life,
unprecedented and romantic. This was especially the case in the north,
in France and in Germany, and above all in Wales, the country of the
imaginative and highly-gifted Celts. Here life was harder, poorer, more
barbaric; the cultured mind suffered more from its brutal surroundings
than it did in the favoured south. It was here that the great legends of
the Middle Ages, so clearly expressive of the yearning of the period,
were first collected. The early Middle Ages had produced epic poems,
treating scriptural subjects (such as the Harmony of the Gospels of the
monk Otfrit, written in the ninth century), and celebrating the exploits
of popular heroes, as, for instance, the German Song of Hildebrand, and
the French "Chansons de Geste," which contain episodes from the lives of
Charlemagne and his nephew Roland. The true epic, arising from the rich
and poetical Celtic tradition, came into existence in the eleventh
century in the North of France and immediately burst into extraordinary
luxuriance. The legends of the heroes of the dreamy Celtic race--King
Arthur and his knights, Merlin the magician, the knights of the Holy
Grail--travelling across France, became the common property of the
civilised European nations, and filled all hearts with longing and
fantastic dreams. Chrestien de Troyes, in his romances, extolled
knightly exploits and the service of woman, thus producing by the
combination of the older and the newer ideals the novel of adventure
which has fascinated the world for centuries. It is a mistake to believe
that Don Quixote has struck at the root of it; to this day the masses
wax enthusiastic in reading of the doughty deeds of knights, the beauty
of ladies and their unswerving, undying love.
In addition to the great and heroic subjects, there were lesser, more
intimate, and frequently sentimental, romances, especially enjoyed and
widely circulated by the ladies. The baron, riding forth, left his young
wife at home, shut up in her bower and surrounded by spies; sometimes
even physically branded as his property. A prisoner behind bars, her
imagination went out--not to the unloved husband who had married her for
the sake of her broad acres, and could send her back to her parents as
soon as he found a wealthier bride (he had but to maintain that she was
related to him in the fifth degree and the Church was ready to annul the
marriage), not to him, her lord and master, but to the unknown knight,
the passionate lover, who would gladly give his life to win her. A
jongleur arrived with stories of the courts where love was the only
ruler; where the knights willingly suffered grief and want, if by so
doing they could serve their lady; where the lover, in the shape of a
beautiful blue bird, nightly slipped through the barred windows into the
arms of his mistress. But the jealous husband had drawn barbed wire
across the window, and the lover, flying away at dawn, bled to death
before the eyes of his grief-stricken lady. The jongleur would tell of
the knight who had fallen passionately in love with a beautiful damsel
of whom he had but caught a passing glimpse; month after month he worked
at digging an underground passage; every night brought him a little
nearer to her bower--she could distinctly hear the dull sounds of his
burrowing--until at last he rose through the ground and took her into
his arms. These and similar tales, doubtless all of them of Celtic
origin--preserved for us in the charming "Lais" of Marie de
France--brought tears to the eyes of many a lonely wife and gave shape
to her vague longing. There was no reason why a man, and a lover to
boot, should not transform himself nightly into a blue bird. Those
simple stories in verse fulfilled every desire of the heart; imagination
supplied in the north what the south offered in abundant reality. But
Marie de France, the first woman novelist of Europe (about the end of
the twelfth century), deserves to be remembered for another reason; she
was the first poet voicing woman's longing for love and
romance--woman's adventure. The charming _Lai du Chevrefoile_ ("The
Story of the Honeysuckle") relates an episode from the loves of Tristan
and Isolde, the famous lovers, legendary even at that time. Tristan and
Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, Fleur and Blanchefleur--these were the
admired and mythical lovers of whom the poets sang and dreamed. All the
world knew their adventures; all the world repeated them again and
again, reverently preserving the identical words and yet unconsciously
remoulding them. At the recital of their loves, hand clasped hand; "on
that day we read no more," confessed Dante's ill-fated lovers.
The longing, so characteristic of the North of Europe, to see the world
and meet with adventures, was in Provence and Italy less pronounced.
These favoured climes possessed so many of the things dreamed of and
desired by other countries. Events, strange as fiction, actually
occurred. Count Raimond of Roussillon, for instance, imprisoned his wife
in a tower because the troubadour, Guillem of Cabestann, was in love
with and beloved by her. He waylaid the lover, killed him, cut his heart
out of his breast and sent it, roasted, to his countess. When she had
partaken of it, he showed her Guillem's head and asked her how she had
enjoyed the dish. "So much that no other food shall ever pass my lips,"
she replied, casting herself out of the window. When the story spread
abroad, the great nobles rose up in arms against Raimond, and even the
King of Aragon made war on him. He was caught and imprisoned for life,
and his estates were confiscated. Guillem and the countess were buried
in the church, and for a long time after men and women travelled long
distances to kneel at their grave. The charming poems of Melusine and
the beautiful Magelone, which to this day delight the reader, were
composed during the same period.
Before the eleventh century poetry in the true sense of the word did not
exist. There were only Latin Church hymns and legends, perverted
reminiscences of antiquity, and, in the vulgar tongue, legends of the
saints and simple dancing-songs for the amusement of the lower classes.
Thanks to the relentless war which the clergy waged against them, a few
only have been preserved. There can be no doubt that Provence was the
birthplace of European poetry. The "sweet language" of Provence was the
first to reach perfection and perfect maturity. It drove the language of
the German conquerors eastwards and prepared the ground for the French
tongue.
The beginning of the twelfth century saw the birth of the poetry of the
troubadours, which possessed from the first in great perfection
everything that distinguishes modern lyric poetry from the antique.
Instead of the syllable-measuring quantity, we now have the emphasising
accent; the rhyme, one of the most important lyrical contrivances--and
in its near approach to music the most striking characteristic of modern
lyrical poetry as compared with the antique--reaches perfection together
with the complete, evenly-recurring verse which is still to-day peculiar
to lyrical art. The poems of many of the troubadours pulsate with
passionate life, and bear no trace of the traditional or the
conventional. The martial songs of Bertrand de Born stride along with a
rhythm reminiscent of the clanking of iron. I quote the first verse of
one of these:
Le coms m'a mandat e mogut
Per N'Arramon Luc d'Esparro,
Qu'eu fassa per lui tal chanso,
On sian trenchat mil escut,
Elm e ausberc e alcoto
E perponh faussat e romput.
The count he sent to me one day
Sir Arramon Luc d'Esparro;
A song I was to make him--so
That thousand shields with ring and stay
And mail and armour of the foe
To fragments shivered in dismay.
The poetry of the Provençal troubadours had already passed its prime
when, in the other European countries, lyric art was still in its
infancy. The crusade against the Albigenses (1209), undertaken by
Gregory VII. with the object of killing the new spirit and the new
secular civilisation, drove many troubadours to Italy, among others the
famous Sordello, who is mentioned in Dante's _Divine Comedy_. Others
went to Sicily, to the court of the art-loving Emperor, Frederick II.,
where a distinct, but not very original, poetic art arose. In Italy the
perfection of mediaeval poetry was reached in the "sweet, new style"
immortalised by Dante. But not only the great Italians, the trouveres
from the North of France also, and--to some extent--the German
minnesingers, were influenced by the art, and above all, the ideals
which had originated in Provence. The poetry of the earliest Rhenish and
Austrian minnesingers closely follows German folklore, and the songs of
Dietmar of Aist and others are still quite innocent of any trace of
neo-Latin characteristics. But very soon the technical perfection of the
Provençal poetry and the Provençal ideal of courtesy and love, famous
all over Europe, strongly influenced the German mind.
The new poetry and the ideal of chivalry and the service of woman were
the first independent developments able to hold their own by the side of
ecclesiastical culture. The rigid Latin was superseded; the soul of man
sang in its own language of the return of spring, the beauty of woman,
knighthood and adventure. Poetry became the most important source of
secular education, and as each nation sang in its own tongue, national
characteristics shone out through the individuality of the singer.
Provençals, Frenchmen, Germans and Italians realised that they belonged
to different races. This was particularly the case during the Crusades
when, under the auspices of the Church, the nations of Europe had
apparently undertaken a common task.
In Provence, in France and Germany, every poem was set to music, and
thus, simultaneously with the lyrical art, secular music was evolved.
J.B. Beck, the greatest authority on the music of the troubadours,--the
music of the minnesingers has been studied very little,--says, "The
poetry of the troubadours and trouveres represents in its totality a
collection of songs which in their frequently amazing naïveté and
melodiousness, their spontaneity and sound music, intimate congruity of
melody and text and extraordinary originality, have been unparalleled to
this day." All these songs are distinguished by graceful simplicity; but
the ear of the non-musician can hardly perceive the originality on which
Beck lays such stress. In any case, the music is inferior to the
frequently perfect text. This same period saw the inception of our
present system of musical notation.
The new poetry created a desire for "literature," thus giving impetus to
the already existent art of illuminated manuscripts. Every prince kept a
salaried army of copyists and illuminators, producing the manuscripts
to-day preserved and studied in our museums. Studios where this work was
carried on existed at various art centres, especially--as far as we are
able to tell to-day--at the papal courts at Avignon--that meeting-ground
of French and Italian artists--in Paris and at Rheims. These workshops
were the birthplace of miniature painting, which reached perfection in
the famous Burgundian "Livres d'Heures."
To-day the science of aesthetics is attempting to trace the influence
which emanated from the French and even from the earlier English
workshops, and spread over the whole continent. It is very probable that
the French art of miniature painting of the first half of the thirteenth
century was mother of the later North-European art of painting. It was
in Northern Europe that, independently of Hellenic and Byzantine
influence, a new art originated, of which Max Dvorak says: "It would
hardly be possible to find an external cause for the quick and complete
disappearance of the elements of the Neo-Latin art. The past was simply
done with, and an absolutely new period was beginning. Thus the new art
was almost without any tradition." Dvorak calls this complete change the
most important in the history of painting since antiquity. George, Count
Vitzthum, has proved that the famous Cologne school of painting modelled
itself on Northern-French, Belgian, and a quite independent English
school of illuminators. It is even suggested that the English style of
miniature painting influenced Europe as far as the Upper Rhine. It is
also very significant that the Dutch art of the brothers van Eyck, whose
sudden appearance seemed so inexplicable, is now proved to have had its
source in the North of France. On the other hand, we have drawings of
three ecstatic nuns showing decided originality; Hildegarde of Bingen,
already mentioned on a previous occasion, has herself ornamented her
book, _Scivias_, with miniatures which, according to Haseloff, in spite
of their primitive style, reveal a bizarre plastic talent, and are
therefore closely related to her intuitions. Alfred Peltzer speaks of
"fantastic figures surrounded by flames." The two other nuns were
Elizabeth of Schönau, and Herrad of Landsberg; these two were entirely
under the influence of the dawning mysticism.
I will here quote a few more passages from Dvorak, who, in dealing with
the individual arts, does not lose sight of the whole. "Simultaneously
with a new literature," he says, "we have a new art of illustration, new
miniatures, no longer drawing inspiration from antiquity.... We meet the
new style in its full perfection wherever it is a matter of a new
technique (in the art of staining glass, for instance, or of
illustrating profane literature)...." He speaks of a new decoration of
manuscripts invented in Paris in the first half of the thirteenth
century. Thus the close and causal connection between the new poetry
and the illumination of books is clearly apparent, and it may be said
without exaggeration that the Provençal lyric poetry and the
North-French and Celtic cycles of romance led up to the new European
style of painting which did not come to perfection until two centuries
later. (Nothing positive can be said about the influence of France on
Italian art; the monumental character and the art of Cimabue, Giotto and
the Sienese does not, however, suggest that they were much influenced by
the art of miniature painting, but rather hints that they drew
inspiration from antique frescoes.)
I must add a few words on the subject of those miniatures which are not
easily accessible to the layman, but reproductions of which are
frequently met with in books on the history of art. In addition to
religious subjects, the whole courtly company which lives and breathes
in the legends of the Round Table, kings and knights, poets, minstrels,
and fair damsels, hawking, jousting, banqueting and playing chess,
everything which stirred the poet's imagination, is depicted. The spirit
of the romances which in modern times enchanted the English
Pre-Raphaelites, six centuries ago provided food and stimulus to the
industrious illuminators whose names have long been forgotten.
If the art of miniature painting never rose--excepting in its wider
consequences--to universal significance, mediaeval architecture stands
before our eyes magnificent as on the first day. Until the middle of the
twelfth century the monumental structures of Europe were directly
influenced by the later Hellenic civilisation. The Byzantine basilica
was slowly transformed into the Neo-Latin house, and thus, in this
important domain also, Europe drew her inspirations from antiquity. But
only the ground-plan of the Gothic cathedral, that is to say, the idea
of a nave with side-aisles, was traditional and borrowed from Neo-Latin
models. From this invisible ground-plan rose something absolutely
original and autochthonic. This new, specifically Central-European style
of architecture was developed on soil where there were no antique
buildings to stem the new life with their overwhelming domination, and
to bar the way of artistic inspiration with their ominous "I am
perfection!" In every branch of art antiquity had proved itself a foe,
until at last the Renascence was sufficiently mature to assimilate and
overcome the antique inheritance so completely that it became an
excellent fertiliser for the new art. The essence of the Gothic style is
the dissolution of all that is heavy and material--the victory of spirit
over matter. Walls were broken up into pillars and soaring arcades;
monotonous facework was tolerated less and less, and every available
inch was moulded into a living semblance. The result may be studied in
the incomparable façades of many of the cathedrals in the North of
France; and in tower-pieces almost vibrating with life and passion such
as that of St. Stephen's in Vienna. The conflict between matter and pure
form is settled--for the first and only time--in Gothic architecture.
The Greek temple with its correct proportions possessed no more than
perfection of form without spiritual admixture; it was perfect as marble
statues, which are an end in themselves, and do not point the way to
spiritual truths. Gothic architecture is probably unique in its blending
of æsthetic perfection of form and infinite spiritual wealth; in the
fusion of these two elements in a higher intuition. It is the balance of
the two characteristics of genius, inexhaustible wealth and the striving
for harmonious expression. It marked the first powerful working of the
Teutonic spirit on the world; its metaphysical yearning together with a
genuine love of nature, found in this art its own peculiar traditionless
expression, just as it found expression in the newly-evolved mysticism
which no longer re-echoed Aristotle and his commentators, but drew
inspiration from its own intuition. For this reason Gothic architecture
never became acclimatised in Italy. The soaring tower, more especially,
never appealed to the Italian architect.
Ornamentation and capitals, previously a combination of geometrical
figures, which may have been architecturally great and imposing, but was
always more or less formal and rigid, disappeared; the new masters,
whose names have been forgotten, looked round them and drew inspiration
from nature. The forest trees of Central Europe became pillars; grouped
together, apparently haphazard, they reflected a mystical nature pulsing
with mysterious life. Spreading and ramifying, growing together in an
impenetrable network of foliage, they bore buds, leaves and fruits.
Every pinnacle became a sprig, even the pendant icicles reappeared in
the gable-boards. But the assimilation of natural objects did not cease
there; tiny animals, light as a feather, run over the tendrils, lizards,
birds, even the gnomes of German mythology, find their way into the
Gothic cathedral. Not the traditional Greek acanthus leaf, but the
foliage of the North-European oak grows under the hands of the sculptor.
Even the cross is twisted into a flower; the sacro-sanct symbol of the
Christian religion is newly conceived, newly interpreted and moulded so
that it may have a place. The Gothic cathedral with its soaring arches
free from all heaviness is the perfect expression of that cosmic feeling
that inspired Eckhart and reached its artistic perfection in Dante.
But the soul of the mystic in stone contains the same elements as the
soul of Eckhart, who was also a schoolman. The confused and complex
scholastic world of ideas which corresponded so well with the mediaeval
temper and, together with the new art, had emanated from Paris, is
closely akin to Gothic architecture. For the Gothic style and
scholastic thought share the characteristics of the infinitely
constructive and infinitely cleft, the infinitely subtle and
ornamental--perhaps the last trace of the spirit of the north as
compared with the simplicity of the south.
As if from fertile soil, a world of sculptured men and beasts sprang
from the façades of the new cathedrals. The figures on the cathedrals of
Naumburg, Strassburg, Rheims, Amiens and Chartres are far superior to
the artistic achievements of the dawning renascence in Italy. They are
real men, full of life and passion, no longer symbols of the
transcendental glory of the world beyond the grave. "All rigidity had
melted, everything which had been stiff and hard had become supple; the
emotion of the soul flows through every curve and line; the set faces of
the statues are illuminated by a smile which seems to come from within,
the afterglow of inward bliss" (Worringer).
A longing went through the world, stimulating faith in miracles and a
desire for adventure, a longing which no soul could resist. Nothing
certain was known of countries fifty miles distant; the traveller must
be prepared for the most amazing events. No one knew what fate awaited
him behind yonder blue mountains. The existence of natural laws was
undreamt of; there was no improbability in dragons or lions possessing
power of speech. A period incapable of distinguishing between the
natural and supernatural will always indulge in those fancies which are
best suited to its temper. Be the native country never so poor, the long
darkness and cold of the winter never so hard to bear, far away in the
East, or in Camelot, the kingdom of King Arthur, life was full of beauty
and sunshine. The legends of King Arthur powerfully affected the
imagination; they were read, secretly and surreptitiously, in all
convents; on a sultry summer afternoon, during the learned discussion of
their preceptor, one after another of the pupils would fall asleep; the
preceptor, suddenly interrupting himself, would continue after a short
pause: "And now I will tell you of King Arthur," and all eyes would
sparkle as the pupils listened with rapt attention. Francis of Assisi
called one of his disciples "a knight of his Round Table," and three
hundred years later Don Quixote lost his reason over the study of those
legends; some of the finest works of art of the present time, Wagner's
"Lohengrin," "Tristan and Isolde," and "Parsifal," take their subject
from the inexhaustible treasure of the Celtic epic cycle. The longing
for experience and adventure had laid hold of the imagination to an
extraordinary degree. The recital of wondrous adventures no longer
satisfied the listener; he yearned to participate in them. The young
knight, trained in athletics and courtesy, and possessing a little
knowledge of biblical history, left his father's castle to face the
unknown world. There was a sanctuary, mysterious, almost supernal,
carefully guarded in the dense forest of an inaccessible mountain. A
knight whose heart was pure, and who had dedicated himself to the
lifelong service of the divine, could find it; but he would have to
wander for many years, through forests and glens and strange countries,
alone and solitary, before his eyes would behold the most sacred relic
in the world, the Holy Grail.
The time was ripe for a great event, a universal and overwhelming
enterprise which could absorb the passionate longing. Maybe that the
wisdom of the great popes--half unconsciously, certainly, and under the
pressure of the age, but yet led by an unerring instinct--guided this
stream into the bed of the Church; the vague craving found a definite
object: the Crusades were organised. The Holy Sepulchre, the most sacred
spot on earth, was in the hands of the heathens; it was despised and
defiled--what greater thing could a man do than hasten to its rescue
and wrest it from the grasp of pagans, giants and sorcerers? In the
fantastic imagination of the men of that period the Lord's sepulchre was
nothing but the earthly realisation of their yearning for the Holy
Grail.
As far back as A.D. 1000 Gerbert had sent messengers to all nations,
exhorting them to hoist their banners and march with him to the Holy
Land. It had been prophesied that he should be the first to read Mass in
Jerusalem; a few ships were actually equipped at Pisa--the first attempt
at a Crusade. But at that time Europe was not yet quite prepared for the
extraordinary, almost incomprehensible, enterprise--the conquest of a
country which hardly anybody had ever seen and in which nobody had any
practical interest. Before such an enterprise could be carried out all
hearts must be filled by that uncontrollable and yet vague longing, so
characteristic of the great period of fantasy. The suggestion that the
wealth of the East, exciting the greed of the western nations, led to
the Crusades, is an absolutely indefensible idea. Doubtless, rumours of
the fabulous treasure of the Orient had stirred the imagination of
Europe, appealing far less, however, to the cupidity of the individual
than to his desire for something strange, new and incredible. It was
impossible to foresee the result of the first Crusade; the crusader went
to a strange land in order to fight--the return was in God's hand. There
have been at all times men coveting wealth, but to make such men the
instigators and organisers of the Crusades is a deliberate attempt to
represent a characteristic and unique event in the history of the world
in the light of a commonplace and every-day occurrence. In the first
enchanted wood a man might chance upon a beautiful princess sitting
beside a fountain, nude and weeping; but it was equally possible that a
giant would rush upon the Christian knight, break his shield and exact
heavy penalties. It was possible to win the kingdom of a sultan or
emir--it could be achieved by bravery and in a duel--and become a great
king, for a king in those days was no more than a large landed
proprietor. Such dreams were actually fulfilled in the most
extraordinary way. Gottfried of Bouillon, a poor Alsatian knight, might
have become King of Jerusalem, had he not refused to wear a crown of
gold in a land where his Saviour had worn a crown of thorns, and
contented himself with the title of "Protector of the Holy Land."
The embattled citadel of Jerusalem, like the Holy Grail, was pictured as
being situated outside the world. _There_ the longing which had become
so vast that it had outgrown the earth, would be stilled. A direct way
must lead from Jerusalem, the centre of the earth--it still takes this
position in Dante's _Divine Comedy_--to Paradise. Was it not the spot
where the Cross of the Saviour had been raised? Had not once before
heaven opened above the city to receive His risen body? Was it not the
scene of countless miracles in the past? Why should it be different now?
Men knew practically nothing of Palestine; they had in their minds a
fantastic picture tallying, in every respect, with Biblical accounts;
doubtless, the footprints of the Redeemer could easily be traced
everywhere; the possession of the country promised the fulfilment of
transcendental dreams.
The impulse and the strength necessary for the organisation of the
Crusades were spiritual phenomena inherently foreign and even hostile to
the Church; but thanks to the mental superiority of the popes of that
period, and the overpowering conception of a divine kingdom, they became
the instruments of the greatest triumphs vouchsafed to the Church of
Rome. The hosts, driven across the sea by inner restlessness and
ill-defined longing, in reality fought for the aggrandisement of the
Church. The great Hildebrand resolved to lead all Christendom to
Jerusalem, to found on the site of the Holy Sepulchre the divine
kingdom preached by St. Augustine, and invest--a risen Christ--the
emperor and all the kings of the earth with their kingdoms.
The crusader and the knight in quest of the Holy Grail present together
a paradoxical combination of the Christian-ecclesiastical and the
mundane-chivalric spirit, which is quite in harmony with the spirit of
the age. These two worlds, inward strangers, formed--in the Order of the
Knight-Templars, for instance--a union which, while possessing all the
external symbols of chivalry, attributed to it heterogeneous,
ecclesiastical motives; the glory of battle and victory, the caprice of
a beautiful damsel, were no longer to become the mainsprings of doughty
exploits; henceforth the knight fought solely for the glory of God and
the victory of Christianity. In addition to King Arthur's knights, the
classical Middle Ages worshipped the ideal of these priestly warriors
who waded through streams of blood to kneel humbly at the grave of the
Saviour, of those seekers of the Holy Grail who dedicated themselves to
a metaphysical task. King Arthur's Round Table served the actual orders
of knighthood as a model. Not only the Franciscans of Italy, but also
slow, German mystics, such as Suso and the profound Johannes Tauler,
delighted in borrowing their similes and metaphors from knighthood.
Tauler speaks of the "scarlet knightly robes" which Christ received for
His "knightly devotion": "And by His chivalric exploits he won those
knightly weapons which he wears before the Father and the angelic
knighthood. Therefore Christ exults when His knights elect also to put
on such knightly garments ...," etc.
Not infrequently the Saracens behaved far more generously than the
Christian armies. A German chronicler, Albert von Stade, tells us that
A.D. 1221 "the Sultan of Egypt of his own free will restored the Lord's
Cross, permitted the Christians to leave Egypt with all their
belongings, and commanded all prisoners to be set free, so that at that
time 30,000 captives were released. He also commanded his subjects to
sell food to the rich and give alms to the poor and the sick."
Occasionally the pope entered into an alliance with the enemies of
Christendom against the emperor, if the latter proved troublesome. A.D.
1246 the Sultan of Egypt (Malek as Saleh Ejul) taught Innocent IV., the
speaker of all Christendom, the judge of the Christian peoples, the
following lesson: "It is not befitting to us," he wrote to him, "that we
should make a treaty with the Christians without the counsel and consent
of the emperor. And we have written to our ambassador at the court of
the emperor, informing him of what has been proposed to us by the Pope's
nuncio, including your message and suggestions."
The most pathetic symptom of the restlessness of the age was the
Children's Crusade in 1212, which, even at its actual occurrence, caused
helpless amazement. The reports of two German chroniclers are
sufficiently interesting to be quoted verbally: "In the same year
happened a very strange thing, a thing which was all the more strange
because it was unheard of since the creation of the world. At Easter and
Whitsuntide many thousands of boys from Franconia and Teutonia, from six
years upwards, took the Cross without any external inducement or
preaching, and against the wish of their parents and relations, who
sought to restrain them. Some left the plough which they had been
guiding, others abandoned their flocks, or any other task which they had
been set to do, banded together, and with hoisted banner began to march
to Jerusalem, in batches of twenty, fifty and a hundred. Many people
enquired of them at whose counsel and admonishment they were undertaking
this journey, (for it was not many years ago that many kings, a great
number of princes and countless people had travelled to the Holy Land,
strongly armed, and had returned home without having accomplished their
desire,) telling them that in their tender years they had not yet
sufficient strength to achieve anything, and that therefore this thing
was foolish and undertaken without due consideration; the children
answered briefly that they were obeying God's will, and would willingly
and gladly suffer all the trials He would send them. And they went their
way, some turning back at Mayence, others at Piacenza, and others at
Rome; a small number arrived at Marseilles, but whether they crossed the
sea or not, and what happened to them, no one knows; only that much is
certain, that of all the thousands who went forth, only very few
returned." Another chronicler wrote: "And at this time boys without a
leader or guide, left the towns and villages of all countries, eagerly
journeying to the lands across the sea, and when asked whither they were
wending, they replied: 'To Jerusalem, to the Holy Land.' Many of them
were kept by their parents behind locked doors, but they burst open the
doors, broke through the walls and escaped. When the Pope heard of these
things he sighed heavily and said: 'These children shame us, for they
hasten to the recovery of the Holy Land while we sleep.' No one knows
how far they went and what became of them. But many returned, and when
they were asked the reason of their expedition, they said they knew not.
At the same time nude women were seen hurrying through towns and
villages, speaking no word."
If it had not been for the Crusades, something else must have happened
to relieve the unbearable tension. The world was longing for a great
deed, a deed overstepping the border-line of metaphysics, and its
enthusiasm was sufficient guarantee of achievement. In the case of the
individual, vanity and boastfulness played no mean part. Thus the
Austrian minnesinger, Ulrich of Lichtenstein, proposed taking the Cross
"not to serve God but to please his mistress." It is quite probable,
though not historically proved, that this veritable Don Quixote dreamed
of decorating the Holy Sepulchre with his lady's handkerchief, but in
the end he remained at home. A journey to foreign lands, to return after
years of yearning for the beloved, her loyalty, or her treachery,
supplied the romantic imagination of the age with endless material. The
story of the Count von Gleichen and his two wives is famous to this day.
A charming Provençal song tells of a maid who, day after day, sat by a
fountain weeping for her lover. At this spot they had bidden farewell to
each other, and here she was awaiting his return. One day a pilgrim
arrived, and she at once asked for news of her knight. The pilgrim knew
him and had a message for her. After a short conversation he threw back
his cowl and drew the delighted maiden into his arms, for it was he
himself, her lover, who after many years of absence had returned and was
first visiting the spot where, years ago, he had said good-bye to her.
But there was another motive, a religious one, which, joined to the
universal lust of adventure, dominated the whole mediaeval period to an
extraordinary degree; that motive was the idea of doing penance
and--after all the failures of life--returning to God. The Crusades
offered an opportunity for combining one's heart's desire with this
spiritual need. Of all good works there were none more pleasing to God,
and every participator was promised forgiveness of his sins. In the
troubadours' songs of the crusaders there is a strong yearning for
penance and sanctification, quite independent of the idea of the
delivery of the Holy Sepulchre from the rule of the infidels.
All I held dear I now abhor,
My pride, my knightly rank and fame,
And seek the spot which all adore,
The pilgrim's goal--Jerusalem.
sang Guillem of Poitiers, one of the gayest of the troubadours.
Only very few of the more thoughtful minds realised that divine thoughts
have their source in the soul of man, and that these Crusades were
obviously a senseless undertaking (not to mention the fact that God does
not need human assistance). "It is a greater thing to worship God always
in humility and poverty," said the abbot, Peter of Cluny, "than to
journey to Jerusalem in great pomp and circumstance. If, therefore, it
is a good thing to visit Jerusalem and stand on the soil which our
Lord's feet have trod, it is a far better thing still to strive after
heaven where our Lord can be seen face to face." Both the great
scholastic, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux, were of the
same opinion. "They shall aspire not to the earthly, but to the heavenly
Jerusalem, and travel there not with their feet, but with the desire of
their hearts." And "They seek God in external objects, neglecting to
look into their hearts, in whose innermost depths dwells the divine."
And yet those same men, who even then seemed to have outgrown biblical
religiosity, were under the spell of the all-absorbing idea of the age.
Bernard solved the contradiction in the following way: "It is not
because His power has grown less that the Lord calls us feeble worms to
protect His own; His word is deed, and He could send more than twelve
legions of angels to do His bidding; but because it is the will of the
Lord your God to save you from perdition, He gives you an opportunity to
serve Him." In these words a significant change of the fundamental idea
can already be traced. Peter of Cluny worked for the Crusades, and
Bernard, one of the most influential and venerable personalities of the
Middle Ages, a man before whose word the popes bowed down, journeyed
through the whole of France, inciting all hearts to fanatical
enthusiasm. Whoever heard him preach forsook his worldly possessions and
took the cross, clamouring for Peter himself to lead all Christendom.
"Countless numbers flocked to his banner, towns and castles stood
forsaken and there was hardly one man to seven women. The wives were
made widows during the lifetime of their husbands." Thus Bernard wrote
to the Pope, travelling through Germany, healing the sick by his mere
presence, and preaching to the people in a tongue no one could
understand. But the personality of this physically delicate man, whose
body was only kept alive by his spirit, touched all hearts. The prudent
Emperor, Conrad, resisted for a long time, and would have nothing to do
with such an aimless enterprise. But Bernard's first sermon in the
cathedral at Speyer, on Christmas Day, moved him to tears. Bernard left
the pulpit and pinned the cross on the shoulder of the kneeling emperor.
By this symbolical act the metaphysical spirit of the time, of which the
Church had obtained control for her own purposes, visibly became master
of political common-sense.
The Crusades were one of the great movements matured by the
newly-awakened metaphysical yearning. The same spirit in another,
profounder, way, manifested itself in the efforts of religious reform
which were being made here and there. "The appearance and spread of
heresy has always been the gauge by which the religious life of the
individual must be measured," says Büttner very pertinently in his
preface to his edition of Eckhart. For the first time since the days of
Christ true religious feeling was again quickening the hearts of men;
the ecclesiastical dogma, which until then had represented absolute
truth, no longer satisfied their need. Soon opposition, timidly at
first, made itself felt. Laymen ventured to interfere in the domain of
religion. All knowledge--and consequently all tradition and
religion--had been for a thousand years the exclusive possession of the
clergy; those laymen who had any culture at all knew a little Latin and
a few scholastic propositions. All this was changing. Despite reiterated
ecclesiastical prohibitions, parts of the Bible were translated into
the vulgar tongue and eagerly studied by ignorant folk; everywhere men
appeared to whom religion was a matter of vital importance, men who
strove to find God in their own souls, instead of blindly accepting the
God of foreign doctrine.
The more obvious cause of the growing dislike to ecclesiastical
authority was the immorality of the priests. The contrast between the
professions of humility, and the greed, vice and tyranny of the clergy
was too pronounced. The ecclesiastical offices were publicly sold.
Divine forgiveness was cheaper than a new garment; every priest was
allowed to keep a mistress if he paid a tax to the bishop. Two poems of
the troubadour, Guillem Figueiras, express the state of affairs very
bluntly: "Our shepherds have become thievish wolves, plundering and
despoiling the fold under the guise of messengers of peace. They gently
console their sheep night and day, but once they have them in their
power, these false shepherds let their flock perish and die." In the
other poem he says of the priest:
He lies in a woman's arms all night,
And wakes--defiled--in the morning light
To proffer the sacred host.
Worse invectives even, no less forcible than those of later reformers,
he hurled against Rome. "In the flames and torments of hell is thy
place!... Thou hast the appearance of an innocent lamb, but inwardly
thou art a raging wolf, a crowned snake, begotten by a viper, the friend
of the devil!" Even the good-natured German minnesinger, Walter von der
Vogelweide, found bitter words against Rome: "They point our way to God
and go to hell themselves." Bernard of Clairvaux, the supporter of the
Church, sharply criticised the abuses of pope and clergy in his book,
_De Consideratione_: "The property of the poor is sown before the door
of the rich, the gold glitters in the gutter, the people come hurrying
up from all sides; but not to the neediest is it given, but to the
strongest and to him who is first on the spot." He accused the pope of
extravagance and luxury: "Was Peter clothed in robes of silk, covered
with gold and precious stones? Was he carried in a litter surrounded by
soldiers and vassals?" And he uttered a word which to this day is a
historical truth: "In all thy splendour thou art the successor of
Constantine rather than the successor of Peter."
Dissatisfaction with the life of the clergy and the tyranny of Rome was
the more external reason which, although it vexed even those who were
indifferent to religion, did not question the sacred tradition; the
other reason was more a matter of principle; it was rooted in the desire
for a religious revival and openly attacked perverted truths. The
dreaded, hated, and cruelly persecuted heretics were fearless men,
sturdily fighting for their convictions. The fundamental ideal of these
reformers was the suppression of the outward pomp of the Church and the
return to the simplicity of the gospels. Their fates varied. The gentle
St. Francis of Assisi was canonised; the illumined Eckhart, on the other
hand, was tortured; most of them, like the ardent Arnold of Brescia,
were burnt at the stake. This conduct of the hierarchy towards the truly
religious men is easily explained. The Church was faced by a problem; on
the one hand, the genuine and profound piety of these men was
unmistakable, but on the other, the contrast of their teaching with
Church tradition was too obvious, and by many of them too strongly
emphasised to be silently ignored.
The Provençal heretic, Peter of Bruis, seems to have been the first
reformer who preached against iconolatry and even objected to the images
of the Crucified. He ordered churches to be razed to the ground because
he acknowledged only the invisible community of the saints. He was burnt
at St. Giles' by an infuriated mob. More powerful, and far more
numerous than his followers, the Peterbrusians, were the Cathari and
the Waldenses (founded by Peter Valdez A.D. 1177) who soon spread to
Northern Italy and amalgamated with the sect of the Lombards. The
Cathari advocated a simple and ascetic life, in accordance with the
teaching of primitive Christianity, refrained from all ecclesiastical
ceremonies and despised the sacraments, particularly baptism. More
radical than later reformers, they rejected the doctrine of
transubstantiation, and saw in the eucharist only a symbol of the union
of God and the soul. This made their name synonymous with heresy. But by
far the most famous of heretical sects was the sect of the Waldenses or
Albigenses. It numbered amongst its adherents--if not publicly, at any
rate secretly--many of the great Provençal lords, and there can be no
doubt that this community was permeated by the spirit of a renewed
Christianity, the Christianity of St. Francis and the German mystics.
The Albigenses believed that not Christ, but His semblance only, had
been crucified; they rejected the God of the Old Testament and their
doctrine of the two creators,--the devil who created the objective
world, and the true God who created the spiritual world--is reminiscent
of the loftiest Parseeism and the profoundest gnosticism. They regarded
man as placed between good and evil; the choice lay in his own hand. An
extraordinary poem by Peire Cardinal--not by any means a
heretic--breathes this spirit. He confronts God not with the customary
humility, but as one power confronts the other. "I will write a new
poem, and on the day of the Last Judgment I will read it to Him who has
created me from nothing. If He should condemn me to everlasting
damnation, I will say to Him: Lord, have mercy on me, for I have always
striven against the wicked world," (the troubadour here alludes to his
many polemic poems) "and save me from the torments of hell. The heavenly
host will marvel at my speech. And I shall say to God that He sins
against His creatures if he delivers them into the hands of the devil.
Rather let Him drive away the devils, for then He will win more souls
and all the world will be blessed.... I will not despair of Thee and
therefore Thou must forgive my sins and save my soul and my heart. If I
had not been born I should not have sinned. It would be a great wrong
and a sin if Thou didst condemn me to burn in hell everlastingly, for
truly I may accuse Thee of having sent me a thousand evils for one
blessing."
Most terrible was the punishment inflicted upon Provence by Innocent
III. That highly intellectual pope realised that he was faced by a
revival of the true religious instinct from which the authority of the
Church had far more to fear than from all sultans and emirs put
together. The system of absolute, immutable values was threatened with
destruction. In the year 1208 the Spanish nobleman Dominicus Guzman
founded the order of the Dominicans and the Inquisition, which invaded
Provence together with the papal army supported by France for political
reasons. Half a million men were butchered in order to crush the spirit
understood by a few hundreds at most; one stake was kindled by the
other; in the memory of man no greater sacrifice to tradition and dogma
had ever been made. Simon de Montfort, the head of the expedition, sent
the following laconic report to the pope: "We spared neither sex nor age
nor name, but slew all with the edge of the sword."
The troubadours bewailed the desolate country, the beauty that was no
more. Montanhagol, although greatly intimidated by the Inquisition,
wrote a long poem on the subject, and the otherwise unknown Bernard
Sicard de Marvajols laments:
Oh! Toulouse and Provence,
And thou, land of Agence,
Carcassonne and Beziers!
As once I beheld you--as I behold you to-day!
Jacob of Vitry, a cultured French prelate, took a different view. He
inveighed against the "foolish poems, the lies of the poets, the
sing-song of the women, the coarse innuendoes of the jesters." "Such
vermin flourishes on the stream of temporal abundance; it literally
crawls over all food, for, as a rule, the meal is followed by a deluge
of idle talk." A reconciliation of the two worlds was impossible.
While the Waldenses flourished in Provence, various heretical sects
arose in the west of Germany and in the Netherlands; prominent among
them were the Apostolics, who took the Gospels literally, and introduced
communism and polygamy, and the communities of the Beghards and
Beguines, which roused little public attention, and did not aim at
reform, but advocated a life of contemplation. They found supporters in
all ranks of the community, and were connected with the later German
mystics. An indictment preserved for us proves the religious originality
of one of those sects, "The Brethren of the Free Spirit," who upheld the
heretical view that it were better that one man should attain to
spiritual perfection than that a hundred monasteries should be founded.
At the same time the inspired seer and hysterical nun, Hildegarde of
Bingen, wrote wild letters to the popes, denouncing the vice existing in
the Church and the degradation of religion. "But thou, oh Rome, who art
well-nigh at the point of death, thou wilt be shaken so that the
strength of thy feet shall forsake thee, because thou hast not loved the
royal maiden righteousness with an ardent love, but with the torpor of
sleep, and thou hast become a stranger to her. Therefore she will desert
thee if thou do not call her back." Pope Adrian IV. replied, almost
humbly: "We long to hear words of warning from you, because men say that
you are endowed with the spirit of the divine miracles." St. Bernard
craved Hildegarde's prayer, two emperors, popes, bishops and abbots
corresponded with her, requesting her prayer and advice, and the
interpretation of difficult passages of the Scriptures. Hildegarde
replied in an obscure, apocalyptical language: "In the mysteries of the
true wisdom have I seen and heard this."
Prophets predicting the revival of the Gospel of Christ and the
regeneration of the world appeared in the north and south. The Italian
monk and fanatic, Joachim of Floris (about A.D. 1200), preached that
this regeneration was predestined to happen. A precursor of Hegel, he
taught three eras: the dominion of the Father, or the first era,
characterised by fear and the severity of the law; the dominion of the
Son, or the era of faith and compassion; and the dominion of the Holy
Ghost, or the era of love. This last era was beginning to dawn, and in
many places Joachim's words were regarded as the prophecies of a seer.
Thus the monk, Gerhard of Borgo San Domino, claimed for the dawning
third era the preaching of a new gospel of the Holy Ghost, an
unmistakable proof that the spirit of heresy was the outcome of
religious enthusiasm.
The people despised the clergy, and were favourably disposed to every
reformer; at the same time they were entirely under the sway of a
superstitious awe of the administrators of mysterious magic which, by
appropriate practices, or by means of presents, could be turned to
advantage. The fetichism of relics flourished everywhere; a sufficient
number of pieces of the Cross of Christ were sold and worshipped to
furnish trees for a big forest--to say nothing of the bones of numerous
saints with which many monasteries, more especially French monasteries,
did a lucrative trade. Even at the time this traffic repelled the finer
intellects; in A.D. 1200, Guibert, the abbot of Novigentum, preached
against the cult of the saints and the worship of relics, adducing all
the well-known arguments which to this day, however, have proved
insufficient to overcome the evil. In Guibert's words, "It was an
abominable nuisance that certain limbs should be detached from the body,
thereby defying the law that all bodies must turn to dust. How can the
bones of any man be worth framing in gold and silver," he asked, "when
the body of the Son of God was laid beneath a miserable stone?" He
exhorted the people to turn from the visible and obvious to the
invisible. He maintained that the worship of relics was opposed to true
religion because "not until the disciples were bereaved of the bodily
presence of Christ could the Holy Ghost descend upon them." He even
rejected the prevalent, entirely materialistic, view of a life after
death, and dared to suggest that the torments of hell should be
interpreted spiritually. "The eternal contemplation of the Lord is the
supreme bliss of the righteous; who could dare to deny that the misery
of the damned consists in the eternal bereavement of the face of the
Lord?"
Religion had been lost; what should have been a vital force had become
as far as the most learned were concerned a knowledge of historical
events. Many saw in a return to evangelical simplicity and love the only
remedy; but it was the life, not the preaching of a man, which once
again was vouchsafed to the world as a great example. "Nobody has shown
me what I should do; but the Most High Himself has commanded me to live
according to the Gospels." Francis of Assisi accepted the accounts of
the life of Christ with the utmost naïveté; he neither searched for an
allegorical meaning (as the theologians did), nor did he subordinate the
man Jesus to the divine principle of the _logos_ (in the manner of the
great mystics). To him the imitation of Christ meant a ministry of love;
he did not conceive religion as dogma and the political power of a
hierarchy, but as a state of the heart. This is a characteristic which
he shares with Eckhart, the great recreator of European religion,
although he was fundamentally alien to him. St. Francis never uttered a
single hostile word against tradition or the clergy; he never inveighed
against the corruption of morals and religious indifference, as other
reformers did; he exerted a reformatory influence solely by his life,
for he possessed the secret of the great love. During his whole life he
was averse to laying down rules for his followers, although continually
urged to do so by popes and bishops. His importance does not lie in the
foundation of an order with certain regulations and a specific object,
but in the fact that he was a vital force. He broke the norms of the
Church whenever it seemed right to him to do so, for he was absolutely
sure of himself; without being ordained he preached to the people in his
own tongue, probably the first man (after the Provençal Peter Valdez)
who did so; without possessing the slightest authority he consecrated
his friend Clara as a nun. Innocent III., who made the suppression of
heresy the task of his life, showed great intelligence and wisdom in
sanctioning St. Francis' sermons to the people and acknowledging his
unecclesiastical brotherhood. This probably transformed a dangerous
revolutionary into a faithful servant of the Church. Maybe the Church
was indebted to St. Francis for being saved from a great early
reformation; signs of it were not wanting, and another Arnold of Brescia
might have arisen and brought about her overthrow. It is doubtful
whether the Church would have come out of a Franciscan crusade as
victoriously as she came out of her struggle with Provence.
St. Francis regarded science with indifference. "Every demon," he said,
"has more scientific knowledge than all men on earth put together. But
there is something a demon is incapable of, and in it lies the glory of
man. A man can be faithful to God." With those words he had inwardly
overcome tradition and theology, and direct knowledge of the divine had
dawned in his soul. He even forbade his brethren to own copies of the
Scriptures. God in the heart--that was the core of his doctrine. With
all his wonderful intuition he was absolutely innocent of the pride of
ignorance; he really felt himself smaller than the smallest of
men--unlike the bishops and popes who called themselves the servants of
the servants of God, without attaching the least meaning to it. How
characteristic of his simple mind was his passionate insistence on the
respectful handling of the vessels used at holy Mass, because they were
destined to receive the body of the Lord. And yet he hardly knew
anything of the symbolic transmutation of bread and wine--he accepted
the miracle without a thought, like a child.
In the year 1219, St. Francis took part in a Crusade. While the battle
of Damietta was raging, he went into the camp of the Saracens and
preached before the Sultan, who received him with respect and sent him
back unharmed. According to the legend, he then went to Bethlehem and
Jerusalem, where the Sultan, touched by his personality, gave him access
to the sacred shrines. To Francis this pilgrimage to the Holy Land had a
profound meaning, for to him Christianity meant the imitation of Christ.
Although he lived on bread himself, and poverty was his chosen lady, he
regarded the asceticism of the early Middle Ages as futile and rejected
it. The fire of life burned in him so ardently that he gave no thought
to the morrow, and literally followed the admonition of the Gospels: "So
likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he
cannot be My disciple." We read in the _Fioretti_ (perhaps the oldest
popular collection of poems in existence) that he expressly prohibited
asceticism as a principle; an idea too foreign to the spirit of the age
to have been an invention. He also disapproved of the secluded monastic
life, then the universal ideal of the _vita contemplativa_, and
insisted on his followers living in the world, radiating love and
sustaining life by the charity of their fellow-men.
There is an anecdote contained in the _Fioretti_, reflecting the great
superiority and lucidity of his mind. On a cold winter's day he and
Brother Leo were tramping through the deep snow. "Brother Leo," said St.
Francis, "if we could restore sight to all blind men, heal all cripples,
expel evil spirits and recall the dead to life--it would not be perfect
joy." And after a while: "And if we knew all the secrets of science, the
course of the stars, the ways of the beasts--it would not be perfect
joy--and if by our preaching we could convert all infidels to the true
faith--even that would not be perfect joy." "Tell me then, Father," said
Brother Leo, "what would be perfect joy?" "If we now knocked at the
convent gates, cold and wet and faint with hunger, and the porter sent
us away with harsh words, so that we should have to stand in the snow
until the evening; if we thus waited, bearing all things patiently
without murmuring--that would be perfect joy: the mercy of
self-control."
"He met death singing," says his biographer, Thomas of Celano, the
author of the magnificent _Dies irae, dies illa_. On his deathbed St.
Francis composed and sang without interruption the Hymn to the Sun, that
lofty song of praise in which the sum total of his noble life, love for
all created things,--is comprised and transfigured. It expresses a new
form of devotion, composed of the ecstasy of love and perfect humility.
He embraced in his heart his brother Sun, his sister Moon, the dear
Stars; his brother Wind, his sister and mother Earth; and on the day of
his death this _brother seraphicus_ added to it a powerful and touching
song of praise of his "brother Death." The legend has it that a flock of
singing-birds descended on the roof of the cottage in which he lay
dying; the songs of his "little sisters" accompanied him to the world
beyond the grave.
We are justified in comparing this death, which was sustained by the
fundamental forces of that era, soul and emotion, to that other, more
famous, death of antiquity. Socrates died without in the least
succumbing to any personal feeling, supported by the purely logical
consideration that it was expedient to obey the laws of the State. His
death was the application of a universal proposition to an individual
case, and because no one could accuse Socrates of a dialectical error,
the conclusion, his death, had to take place.
Francis and some of his successors realised in their lives the simple,
religious, fundamental emotion of love in a way which the people could
clearly understand. "God's minstrels" was the name given to his
followers, because they spoke and sang of the love of God without
ecclesiastical ceremony. Jacopone da Todi (1236-1306), probably next to
Dante and Guinicelli the greatest poet which Italy has produced, praised
the transcendent love of God in ecstatic verses. He was the religious
counterpart of the troubadours; his passionate devotion to the child
Jesus, the Madonna and the Crucified, eclipses their most ardent lyrics.
These southerners could not forgo the visible emblems of their religion;
the infinitely simple principle that only he who calls nothing his own,
and desires no earthly goods, is perfectly free, and can never fall foul
of his neighbour, was, if not lived up to, at any rate understood and
respected. The grateful hearts of the people surrounded the name of St.
Francis with legends; the study of his life inspired Giotto, the father
of the new art, to the study of plant and animal life. The story of St.
Francis is written on the walls of the cathedral at Assisi, the first
monumental work of Italian art.
St. Francis re-lived the terrestrial life of Jesus; in one direction he
excelled his model, for though the love of Christ embraced all mankind,
the heart of St. Francis went out to all things, beasts and plants and
stars. He applied the words, "Whatsoever ye do to the least of my
brethren, ye have done unto me," to _Brother Bear_ and _his sisters the
little birds_. He was one of the first men, since the Greek era, who saw
nature in its true aspect and not as a hieroglyphic of the divine word.
Men had realised with a feeling of helplessness the dangers of the
elements, without perceiving their magnificence; they had speculated on
and attempted to decipher the secret language of the terrestrial and
celestial phenomena. The discovery of the beauty of nature, and with it
the revival of aesthetics, was an essential part of the new-born
civilisation. This fact was accomplished--in an almost sentimental
way--by the troubadours and minnesingers. But the relationship of St.
Francis to nature was something very different. The co-ordination of man
and beast--in his sermon to the birds, for instance--cannot be called
anything but frankly pagan. St. Francis said to his disciples: "Tarry a
little while in the road while I go and preach to my little sisters, the
birds." And he went into the fields and began to preach to the birds
which sat on the ground; and straightway all the others flew down from
the trees and flocked round him, and did not fly away until he had
blessed them; and when he touched them, they did not move. And these
were the words which he spoke to them: "My brothers and sisters, little
birds, praise God and thank Him that He has given you wings with which
to fly and clothed you with a garment of feathers. That he admitted your
kind into Noah's ark so that your race should not disappear from the
earth. Be grateful to Him that He has given you the air for your
kingdom; you sow not, neither do you reap, but your Heavenly Father
gives you abundance of food. He gave you the rivers and fountains; He
gave you the mountains and valleys as a refuge, and the high trees so
that you may build your nests in safety. And because you can neither
spin nor cook, God clothed you and your little ones. Behold the
greatness of the love of your Creator! Beware of the sin of ingratitude
and diligently praise God all day!" And when he had thus spoken, the
birds opened their beaks, beat their wings and bowed to the ground.
More than a hundred years later (1300-1365), a man was living in Swabia
whose soul was kindred to the soul of St. Francis: Suso, who is, as a
rule, classed with the mystics. He had a profound, typically German love
of meadow and forest, and expressed it more exquisitely than the best
among the minnesingers. "Look above you and around you and behold the
vastness of heaven and the speed of its revolutions. The Lord has
emblazoned it with seven planets, each of which--not only the sun--is
far larger than the earth; he has adorned it with myriads of radiant
stars. See how serenely the glorious sun is riding in the cloudless sky,
giving to the earth abundance of fruit! Behold the verdure of the
meadow! The trees are bursting into leaf and the grass is springing up;
behold the smiling flowers and listen to glen and dale re-echoing with
the sweet song of the nightingales and little singing birds; the beasts
which the bitter winter drove into nooks and crannies, and into the dark
ground, are emerging from their hiding-places to rejoice in the sun and
seek a mate. Young and old are glad with an exceeding joy. Oh! Thou
gentle God, how fair art Thou in Thy creatures! Oh! fields and meadows,
how surpassing is your beauty!" Or: "My dear brethren, what more shall I
say to you than that my eyes have seen many gladsome sights. I walked
across the flowering meadows and listened to the heavenly harps of the
little birds praising their gentle and loving Creator so that the woods
echoed with their songs." And, more compassionate even than St. Francis:
"I will say nothing of the children of man; but the misery and sorrow
of all the beasts and little birds, and all created things, is well-nigh
breaking my heart; and having no power to help them, I sighed, and
prayed to the Most High, Most Merciful Lord, that He would deliver
them." His description of a paradisean meadow sounds like the
description of a picture by Fra Angelico: "Now behold with your own eyes
the heavenly meadow! Lo! What summer joy! Behold the kingdom of sweet
May, the valley of all true joy! Glad eyes are gazing into glad eyes!
Hark to the harps and fiddles, the singing and laughter! Young men and
maidens are leading the dance! Love without sorrow shall reign for
ever...." etc. There is a picture, drawn by this same Suso, representing
the journey of man through life, his departure from God and his return.
In this picture the path of humanity is renunciation and asceticism;
death flourishes his scythe above the heads of a dancing couple, and
underneath is written: "This is earthly love; its end is sorrow"; to
such an extent was this sincere and sensitive man under the influence of
the traditional hatred of the world which Eckhart, his great master, had
completely overcome.
Provençals and Italians sang the delight of spring, and the German
minnesingers greeted it as the deliverer from all the hardships of the
severe winter; with the latter it was more a childish delight in the
open-air life which had again become possible, after the long
imprisonment of winter, than pure joy in beauty. But some of the German
epic poems, "Tristan and Isolde," for instance, contain genuine, sincere
descriptions of sylvan beauty. The student of art, especially the German
art of the Renascence, cannot help being struck by the extraordinary
love with which quite insignificant objects of nature, such as a bird,
or a flower, are treated. The familiar things of every-day life were in
this way brought into connection with solemn biblico-historical
subjects.
There is no doubt that at all times a certain keen perception of the
beauty of nature has been inherent in some favoured individuals; but the
universally accepted opinion that only the supernal was really
beautiful, and that terrestrial beauty was merely its reflected glory,
was too strong even for them. Thus we have seen Suso translating the
beauty of the earthly spring to the kingdom of heaven.
At the same time men were beginning to travel to distant countries for
the sole purpose of seeing new scenes and acquiring fresh knowledge. The
famous Venetian, Marco Polo, was the first European who (in 1300)
visited Central Asia, crossed China and Thibet, and brought news to
Europe of the fairyland of Japan. Sight-seeing as an end in itself was
discovered. Long sea-voyages for commercial purposes were no novelty,
but no human foot had ever trod the summits of the Lower Alps, unless it
had been the foot of a peasant whose cattle had strayed. Petrarch was
the first man (in 1336) to climb a barren mountain, the Mont Ventoux in
Provence, voluntarily undergoing a certain amount of fatigue for sheer
delight in the beauty of nature. This was a great, an immortal deed,
greater than all his sonnets and treatises put together. In a long
letter which has been preserved to us, he describes with much spirit and
erudition this extraordinary ascent, before whose profound significance
all the Alpine exploits of our time shrink into paltry gymnastic
exercises.
The beauty of nature discovered and appreciated, interest began to be
evinced in the relationship existing between the various phenomena and
there arose a desire to obtain ocular proof of what was written in the
venerable books--perhaps even make new discoveries. The first man of any
importance in this direction was the German Albrecht Bollstädt (Albertus
Magnus), who, although he contributed more than any other man to the
promulgation of Aristotelian philosophy, wrote a book on natural history
founded on personal observation; his great English contemporary,
however, Roger Bacon, is the true father of modern experimental science.
It was he who coined the expression "scientia experimentalis," and
framed the principle that all research must be based on the study of
nature. He maintained that experience was the "mistress of all
sciences," and said: "I respect Aristotle and account him the prince of
philosophers, but I do not always share his opinion. Aristotle and the
other philosophers have planted the tree of science, but the latter has
not by any means put forth all its branches or matured all its fruit."
This thought, though it seems to us self-evident, was of great moment in
the age of scholasticism. Bacon spent ten years in prison; but in spite
of everything, he was so much under the influence of scholasticism that
he considered it the task of philosophy to adduce evidence for the truth
of the Christian dogma.
Here it is essential roughly to sketch the essence of the philosophical
thought of that period, and point out the way which led from the
Christianity of the Fathers of the Church and scholasticism to the
religion of unhistorical Christianity, the so-called mysticism.
Scholasticism had reached its climax in the thirteenth century;
universities were founded in Paris, Oxford and Padua, and he who aspired
to the full dignity of learning had to take his degrees there; even
Eckhart did not neglect to obtain his scholastic education in Paris.
Scholasticism was an imposing and yet strangely grotesque system of the
world, built up--before a background of blazing stakes--of scriptural
passages and ecclesiastical tradition, lofty, pure thought and
antique-mediaeval superstition. Its fundamental problem, the
determination of the border line between faith and knowledge, was purely
philosophical. While the older scholasticism, based on Platonic
traditions, endeavoured to bring these into harmony with Christianity,
that is to say, prove the revelations by dialectics, Albertus Magnus
and, authoritatively, his pupil, Thomas Aquinas (1226-1274), strictly
distinguished, by the use of Aristotelian weapons, the rational or
perceptive truths from the supernatural verities or the subjects of
faith. This distinction, made in order to safeguard dogma, quickly
revealed its double-face. The handmaiden philosophy rebelled against her
mistress theology, and asked her for her credentials. According to the
classic and dogmatic doctrine of Thomas, the natural verities alone
could be grasped by human understanding; the supernatural or revealed
truths (the dogmas) were beyond proof and scientific cognition. To
submit them to research was not only an impossible task, but Thomas
stigmatised every effort in this direction as heresy, fondly believing
that he had once and for all safeguarded the position of faith. But more
resolute and profound thinkers, although not in so many words attacking
the authority of the Scriptures, and leaving Thomas' border-line
unquestioned, found the unfathomable truths not in ecclesiastical
tradition but in their own souls, thus investing "faith" with a new
meaning, unassailable by criticism.
The idea of drawing a line between perceivable or rational truths and
imperceivable or divine truths, is fraught with the burning question as
to the limits of human knowledge, a question which to this day remains
unanswered. In the course of time the limits were extended in favour of
imperfect knowledge (but the character of the unknowable was
problematised and questioned). While Thomas was still convinced of the
possibility of proving the existence of a God by the power of the human
intellect, Duns Scotus removed the problem of the existence of a God and
the immortality of the soul from the domain of science, and made both
propositions a matter of faith. William of Occam, more uncompromising
than Duns Scotus, maintained the absolute impossibility of acquiring
knowledge of supernatural things, and taught--on this point, too,
anticipating Kant--that objective knowledge acquired through the senses
should precede abstract knowledge. The last conclusion of nominalism was
thus arrived at, the existence of universal conceptions, or universals,
supposed to exist outside material things--the curse of the Platonic
inheritance--declared to be impossible, and reality conceded to the
individual only. Roscellinus, the founder of this doctrine, had still
been content to deny the existence of the conception of "deity," leaving
the individual persons, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, as real individuals,
untouched.
We see from the foregoing that the universally derided scholasticism
travelled along the whole line of modern thought: from the "realism" of
Thomas, which leaves the universals as yet unassailed by doubt and
occupying the very heart of knowledge, past the first and, to our view,
very modest doubts of the nominalists, to the agnosticism of Bacon, Duns
and Occam.
With the new position of decided nominalism the foundation was prepared
for the experimental sciences on the one hand, and mysticism on the
other. For the conclusion that things supernatural are a closed book to
us may have two results: on the one hand, the rejection of the
transcendental and the victory of science; on the other, the need to
descend into the profoundest depths of the universe and the soul, and
grasp by intuition what common sense does not see.
The time was ripe and the consummators came: Dante in the south, Eckhart
in the countries north of the Alps. With regard to Dante, I will say one
thing only; he gathered together all the achievements of the new art and
transcended them in a work which has never been surpassed. The
profoundly symbolical words, "The new life is beginning," are written at
the commencement of his _Vita Nuova_, and with his _Divine Comedy_ the
art of Europe had attained perfection.
It is necessary to give a more detailed account of Eckhart. He had been
almost forgotten in favour of his pupils, Tauler and Suso, and the
unknown author of the _Theologica Germanica_ (to which Luther wrote a
preface), but to-day a faint idea of the great importance of this man is
beginning to dawn upon the world. Eckhart was the greatest creative
religious genius since Jesus, and I believe that in time his writings
will be considered equal to the Gospel of St. John. He grasped the
spirit of religion with unparalleled depth; everything produced by the
highly religious later mediaeval era pales before his illumination.
Compared to him, St. Augustine, St. Bernard, and even St. Francis
dwindle into insignificance; all the later reformers are small beside
the greatness of his soul. Every one of his sermons contains profound
passages, such as "God must become I and I must become God." "The soul
as a separate entity must be so completely annihilated that nothing
remains except God, yea, that it becomes more glorious than God, as the
sun is more glorious than the moon." "The Scriptures were written and
God created the world solely that He may be born in the soul and the
soul again in Him." "The essence of all grain is wheat, of all metal
gold, and of all creatures man. Thus spoke a great man: 'There is no
beast, but it is in some way a semblance of man.'" "The least faculty of
my soul is more infinite than the boundless heavens." "Again we
understand by the kingdom of God the soul; for the soul and the Deity
are one." "The soul is the universe and the kingdom of God." "God dwells
so much within the soul that all His divinity depends on it." "Man shall
be free and master of all his deeds, undestroyed and unsubdued."
Eckhart was the first man who thought consecutively in the German
vernacular, and who made this philosophically still virginal language a
medium for expressing profound thought. In addition he wrote Latin
treatises which were discovered a short time ago; I have not read them,
but I have no doubt that his profoundest convictions were expressed in
the German tongue. The Latin language has at all times fettered the
spirit far more successfully than the still untainted and living German.
The religious genius of a single individual had created Christianity.
But from the very beginning it was misunderstood; the salvation of the
world was linked to the person of a man who had aspired to be an example
to the whole race. The term, "Son of God," was understood in the sense
of the hero-cult of antiquity; possibly the Jewish faith in a Messiah,
the politico-national hope of the Children of Israel, was a good deal to
blame for this. A historical event was translated into metaphysic. The
only truly religious man was made the centre of a new mythology and
naïvely worshipped. It may sound like a paradox, but it is a fact that
the whole of the first millenary was inwardly irreligious; it concealed
its want of metaphysical intuition behind the falsification of
historical events. The entire mediaeval (and a large proportion of the
Protestant) theology laboured to obtain an intellectual grasp of the
doctrine of a unique historical salvation of humanity and frame it into
a dogma. And thus occurred that unparalleled misunderstanding (a
misunderstanding which never clouded the mind of India) which based
religion, the timeless metaphysical treasure of the soul, on the
historical record of an event which had happened in Asia Minor, and had
come down to us in a more or less garbled--some say entirely
falsified--version. This was the great sin of Christianity: It regarded
a historical event, revealing the very essence of religion, and
consequently capable of being formulated, as a divine intervention for
the purpose of bringing about the salvation of the world, instead of
recognising in the sublime figure of the founder of the Christian
religion a great, perhaps even perfect, incarnation of the eternally
new relationship between God and the soul. It promulgated the strange
thought that only the one soul, the soul of the founder, was divine, and
instead of teaching the divinity of humanity, it taught the divinity of
this one man only--Jesus became a God who could no longer be looked upon
as the perfect specimen and prototype of the race, but before whom it
behoved man to kneel and pray for salvation. Perhaps it was not possible
to understand the new doctrine in any other way; before men can conceive
the idea of their divinity, they must have become conscious of their
souls.
This complete misunderstanding and externalising of religion which took
place in the first millenary, and which can never now be retrieved, is
fundamentally pagan, antique. The record of the salvation of the world,
achieved by a hero once and for all time, the historification of the
divine spark which is daily re-born in the soul, entirely corresponds to
the Greek myths of gods and demi-gods which before their new, symbolical
interpretation, were taken quite literally. I am not now concerned with
the problem of how far the antique heroes and Eastern mysteries directly
influenced the conception of the figure of Christ; I only wish to
emphasise the profound contrast between true religion which springs up
in the soul of the individual, and historical tradition. If there is
such a thing as religion, it must exist equally for all men, for those
who accidentally received a report of a certain historical event, as
well as for those who remained in ignorance of the fact. All heretical
demonstrations were rooted in a vague realisation of this contrast. But
Eckhart accomplished the unparalleled deed of once more building a
bridge between the soul and the deity; of relegating to the background
all the ineradicable historical misrepresentations or, if there was no
alternative, of unhesitatingly proclaiming them as erroneous, or
interpreting them symbolically. "St. Paul's words," he says, for
instance, "are nothing but the words of Paul; it is not true that he
spoke them in a state of grace." He did not regard the Scriptures as the
bourne of truth, but as subsequent proof of the directly experienced
truth of the divine event. With this conception Christianity had reached
its highest stage. Henceforth the origin of all truths and values was no
longer sought in doctrine and authority, but in the soul of man; God was
neither to be found in the heavens nor in history, but in the soul; the
soul must become divine and creative; it had found its task: the
recreation of the world. It was true, St. Augustine had said: "_Non
Christianised, Christi sumus_," but this saying had never been
understood, and very probably St. Augustine had not meant it in its
literal sense. At last the fundamental consciousness of Christianity had
triumphed: the principle of the "Son-of-Godship" inspired the soul of
the mystics; in future religion must emanate from the soul and find its
goal in God; written documents and--in the case of the profoundest
thinkers--examples were no longer needed. The heretical sects had been
content to reject post-evangelical tradition, in order to lay greater
stress on the words of Christ. They were genuine reformers, but they
were as much constrained by the historical facts as the Roman Catholic
Church, and their standpoint has to this day remained the standpoint of
the Protestant professions of faith.
The fact of this new conception attaching no importance to the
historical Jesus of Nazareth (had he never lived it would have made no
difference) made of it a new religion. By putting aside this external
and accidental moment, it placed the metaphysical and purely spiritual
core of Christianity, the fundamental conviction of the divinity of the
soul, and the will to eternal life, within the centre of religious
consciousness, and by so doing put itself beyond the reach of historical
criticism and scepticism, Eckhart, more than any other teacher, was
profoundly convinced of the freedom and eternal value of the soul. "I,
as the Son, am the same as my Heavenly Father." He taught that Christ is
born in the soul, that the divine spark is continuously re-kindled in
the soul: "It is the quality of eternity that life and youth are one,"
and that man must become more and more divine, more and more free from
all that is unessential and accidental until he no longer differs from
God. It is only a logical conclusion to say that a perfect man,
mystically speaking, is God; his being and his will are in nothing
differentiated from absolute, universal, divine will--German mysticism
agrees in this with the Upanishads. Kant would have said that the
principles of such a man would become cosmic laws; sin would be the
estrangement from God, the will to draw away from God.
The profound and only mission of religion is the endowment of man in
this hurly-burly of life with the consciousness of eternity. Religion
places our transient life under the aspect of eternity, and therefore it
must, in its essence, remain a stranger to things temporal. Only that
moment in the life of a man can be called religious which lifts him
beyond himself, out of his petty, narrow existence, conditioned by and
subject to accidents, into timeless, universal life; which gives him the
certainty that historical events can never be regarded as definite and
ultimate--that moment which has the power to set free, to deliver, to
save. Thus it is irreligious to regard an event which occurred on the
temporal plane--and were it the greatest event which ever befell on
earth--as the pivot of metaphysical value for all men; to link the
salvation of the world to an occurrence which was relatively accidental,
to base the consciousness of eternity on the knowledge of a fact. This
would be a victory of time over eternity, a victory of irreligion over
religion.
I regard it as the greatest achievement of that great time that
spontaneous religion again became possible. Eckhart rediscovered the
divine nature of man; never has the consciousness of timeless eternity
been expressed as he expressed it in his tract, _On Solitude_. Doubtless
there have been men before him who possessed direct religious
intuitions, and now and then gave timid utterance to them; but the
authority of tradition has always been too great, and they never did
more than compromise between the historical events on which the
Christian religion is based and the genuinely religious experience of
their own souls. Eckhart, too, was careful not to offend against the
letter, and his pupils, after suspicion had fallen on them, made many a
concession in terms, and perhaps even in thought. St. Augustine already
had steered a middle course between the historical and the religious
conception, in his phrase: _Per Christum hominem at Christum deum_, and
Suso (in his _Booklet of Eternal Wisdom_) followed his lead. "Thus
speaks the eternal wisdom: If ye will behold me in my eternal divinity
ye must know and love me in my suffering humanity. For this is the
quickest road to eternal salvation." The brutality of the tenet which
maintains that all those are eternally lost who, without their own
fault, have no knowledge of the salvation of the world (especially
therefore, those who died before the event), was a stumbling-block to
many thoughtful minds. The patriarchs of the Old Testament were looked
upon as saved--to some extent--by the fact of their being the ancestors
or prophets of Christ; but pagans and Greeks, including Aristotle, were
condemned even by the great Dante. At the conclusion of his _Divine
Comedy_ Dante proved himself a truly inspired mystic, for he gave to us
the profoundest vision of the divinity which has ever been vouchsafed to
man. But his genius was directed and restricted by the dogmas of the
Church; his religious standpoint was the standpoint of the early Middle
Ages and dogmatic Catholicism. As poet and lover he was the inaugurator
of a new world; here he represents the culmination and conclusion of the
condemned world-system. He was the iron landmark of the ages--Eckhart,
the creator of eternal values.
The foremost of the precursors of Eckhart was Bernard of Clairvaux
(1091-1153). He was the exponent of the love of God which he placed
above knowledge; in one of his letters he calls love "the existence of
God Himself," basing his definition on the passage in the Gospel of St.
John, "God is Love." "Love is the eternal law which created and
preserves the universe; the whole world is governed by love; but
although love is the law to which all creation is subject, it is not
itself without law, but it is a law unto itself. Serfs and mercenaries
are ruled by laws which are not from God, but which they made
themselves; some because they do not love God, others because they love
the things of this world better than God.... They made their own laws
and subordinated the universal and eternal laws to their own will. But
those (who live righteously) are in the world as God is: neither serfs
nor mercenaries, but the children of God and, like God Himself, they
live only by the law of love." "His greatest happiness is complete
absorption in the vision of the divine and forgetfulness of self." "All
love is an emanation of that one love. It is the eternally creative and
governing law of the universe." "To be penetrated by such emotion is to
become deified. As a drop of water in a cup of wine is completely
dissolved and takes the taste and colour of the wine, so also, in an
indescribable manner, is the human will absorbed in the divine will, and
transformed into the will of God. For how could God become all in all if
anything human were left in man?" "They are completely immersed (the
martyrs) in the infinite ocean of eternal light, in radiant
eternity...." The entranced soul "shall lose all knowledge of itself
and become completely absorbed in God; it shall become unlike itself in
the measure as it has received the gift of becoming divine." Sensuous
metaphors from the Song of Songs and the Psalms are again and again
intermingled with these lofty thoughts. But in spite of his divine
emotion, in spite of his anticipations of the German mystics, Bernard
took the standpoint of ecclesiastical orthodoxy whenever he was not in
the ecstatic state; his contemplative mind was unable to grasp the
importance of independent thought, a fact amply proved by his inglorious
quarrel with Abélard, the greatest thinker of his time. This quarrel was
a typical illustration of the difference between the believer and the
thinker. Bernard forgot all about love, and did not hesitate to stir up
unpleasantness whenever he could do so. So he wrote to Pope Innocent
II.: "Peter Abélard is striving to destroy the Christian faith, and
imagines that his human intellect can penetrate the depths of the divine
mind.... Nothing is hidden from him, neither in the earth below, nor in
the heavens above; his intellectual pride exceeds all limits; he attacks
the doctrines of faith, and ponders problems far above his intellectual
capacity; he is an inventor of heresies ...," etc. Thanks to his
machinations, Abélard was compelled to recant at the Council of Sens,
and was condemned by the Pope to eternal silence. Berengar of Poitier
took Abélard's part, and in a satirical treatise ventured to criticise
St. Bernard's conduct: "Thus philosophise the old women at the looms. Of
course, when Bernard tells us that we must love God, he speaks a true
and venerable word; but he need not have opened his lips to do so, for
it is a self-evident truth." As a matter of fact, these words branded
and contradicted the merely subjective emotional mysticism; to the
emotional mystic salvation lies in the "absorption in God," in
shapeless, thoughtless contemplation. Richard of St. Victor, founding
his theories on St. Bernard, established six stages of meditation. The
Franciscan monk, Bonaventura, the famous author of the _Biblia
Pauperum_, added a seventh, a complete rest in God--"like the Sabbath
after the six days of labour." To Bonaventura, as later on to Dante, the
world was a ladder leading up to God.
If we turn from these thinkers of the Neo-Latin race, who in spite of
their undeniable mysticism were completely under the dominion of the
Church--to German mysticism, we find above and beyond mysticism, we find
above and beyond love, a new principle: The soul of man is the
starting-point of religious consciousness and the content of the
religious consciousness is the soul's road to God. The nativity of
Christ ceased to be regarded as a historical event, and became the birth
of the divine principle in the soul of man. In passing I will mention a
German nun, Mechthild of Magdeburg (1212-1277), who anticipated some of
the great thoughts of Eckhart, although she was incapable of grasping
their mutual connection. "The Holy Trinity and everything in heaven and
earth must be subject to me" (the soul), were words in the true spirit
of Eckhart, leaving St. Bernard far behind. Mechthild found metaphors of
true poetical grandeur when she spoke of the union of the soul with God.
"The dominion of the fire has yet to come. That is Jesus Christ in Whose
hands the Heavenly Father has laid the salvation of the world and the
Last Judgment. On the Day of Judgment He shall fashion cups of wondrous
beauty out of the crackling sparks; therein the Father will drink on His
festival all the holiness which through His dear Son He has poured into
human souls."
Emotional mysticism was the prevailing form of mysticism in those days;
even Eckhart's pupil, Suso, belonged to this class of mystics. This
vague sentimentalism saved many a mind from the rigid dogmas of the
Church, and as its vagueness could be interpreted in more than one way,
it caused very little offence; but these visions and ecstasies, which
are so often mistaken for true mysticism, have done much to bring the
latter into contempt with the seriously minded. Eckhart did not
acknowledge it as genuine mysticism and directly condemned it in many of
his writings; and as he rejected mystic sentimentalism, clearly divining
its pathological cause, so he also rejected asceticism and all religious
ceremonies. The evangelical poverty of the Franciscan monks was an
object of loathing to him. St. Francis (and thirty years before him
Peter Valdez) had naïvely interpreted the imitation of Christ as a life
of absolute poverty, and had been relentless in his denunciation of
worldly wealth, which every monk of his order had to renounce. He
himself never touched money, seeing in it the source of all evil. His
transcendent treasure was "Holy Poverty"; Jacopone wrote an ardent hymn
to "Queen Poverty," and even Thomas, the representative of Dominican
erudition, theoretically took up the cudgels on its behalf. But even in
the primitive Church the principle of worldly and spiritual poverty was
widely spread and encouraged. In the defence of poverty, which was
practically nearly always synonymous with idleness and begging, and
therefore roused much hostility among the people, Bonaventura pointed
out (in his treatise, _De Paupertate Christi_) that Jesus Himself had
never done any manual work. The universal preference for a contemplative
life encouraged the tendency, and the extreme charitableness of the
Middle Ages made its realisation possible. Work was frequently looked
upon as a punishment--a view which could easily be upheld by reference
to Adam's expulsion from Paradise--and inflicted upon the monks for
offences against the rules. Dante's friend, Guido Cavalcanti, expressed
the natural sentiment that poverty is a distressing condition, in a
canzone which bristles with insults hurled at the Queen of the
Franciscans:
Yea, rightly art thou hated worse than death,
For he, at length, is longed for in the breast.
But not with thee, wild beast,
Was ever aught found beautiful or good;
For life is all that man can lose by death,
Not fame and the fair summits of applause;
His glory shall not pause
But live in men's perpetual gratitude.
While he who on thy naked sill has stood
He shall be counted low, etc.
D.G. ROSSETTI.
The concept of the German mystics was infinitely more profound than the
concept of the merely external poverty of the Franciscans, which in the
case of St. Francis and Jacopone was an inherent characteristic and
pure, but in the case of the others more or less vicious. "Man cannot
live in this world without labour," says Eckhart, "but labour is man's
portion; therefore he must learn to have God in his heart, although
surrounded by the things of this world, and not let his business or his
surroundings be a barrier." There is a passage in the book of an unknown
author, entitled _The Imitation of Christ's Poverty_ (formerly ascribed
to Tauler), which reads as follows: "Poverty is equality with God, a
mind turned away from all creatures; poverty clings to nothing and
nothing clings to it; a man who is poor clings to nothing which is
beneath him, but to that alone which is greater than all things. And
that is the loftiest virtue of poverty that it clings only to that which
is sublime and takes no heed of the things which are base, so far as it
is possible." "The soul while it is burdened with temporal and transient
things is not free. Before it can aspire to freedom and nobility it must
cast away all the things of the world." "Nobody can be really poor
unless God make him so; but God makes no man poor unless he be in his
inmost heart; then all things will be taken from him which are not
God's. The more spiritual a man is, the poorer will he be, for
spirituality and poverty are one...." Pseudo-Tauler even affirms that a
man "can possess abundant wealth and yet be poor in spirit." The meaning
of this is clear: He whose heart is not wrapped up in the things of the
world, will find his way to God; a soul which is without desire is rich.
But there was a still greater contrast between the naïve religion
represented by St. Francis of Assisi and the religion of Eckhart. The
former lived entirely in the obvious and visible; the love of all
creatures filled his heart and shaped his life. The heart of the mystic
too, was filled with love, but it was love transcending the love of the
individual, love of the primary cause. In the last sense Eckhart taught,
contrary to traditional Christianity, and in conformity with Indian
wisdom, that the soul must be absorbed into the absolute and that
everything transient and individual must cease to exist. "The highest
freedom is that the soul should rise above itself and flow into the
fathomless abyss of its archetype, of God Himself."
Even St. Bernard was not quite free from this mystical heresy (_cf._ the
previously quoted passages). "When he has reached the highest degree of
perfection, man is in a state of complete forgetfulness of self, and
having entirely ceased to belong to himself, becomes one with God,
released from everything not divine." Even compassion must cease in this
state, for there is nothing left but justice and perfection.
We recognise here a characteristic of all those who are greatest among
men: of Goethe, for instance, of Bach, or Kant: namely, the
correspondence of intense personality and the most highly developed
objectivity; for the greatest personality ceases in the end to
distinguish between itself and the world, has eradicated everything
paltry, selfish and subjective and has become entirely objective,
impersonal, divine. St. Francis knew nothing of this consciousness. "God
has chosen me because among all men He could find no one more lowly, and
because through my instrumentality He purposed to confound nobility,
greatness, strength, beauty and the wisdom of the world." He was the
disciple of the earthly Jesus, Who went through life the compassionate
consoler of all those who were sorrowful. But Eckhart aspired "to the
shapeless nature of God." "We will follow Him, but not in all things,"
he said of the historical Jesus. "He did many things which He meant us
to understand spiritually, not literally ... we must always follow Him
in the profounder sense." Compared to the religion of Eckhart, the
religion of St. Francis is the faith of a little child, picturing God as
a benevolent old man. Such a religion is equally true and sincere, but
it represents an earlier stage on the road of humanity. If Christianity
were--as we are occasionally assured--the religion of Jesus, then the
great mystics cannot be called Christians. And yet St. Augustine's: "We
are not Christians, but Christs," was fulfilled in them.
The profoundest depth of European religion, of which Eckhart was the
exponent, and which found artistic expression in Gothic art, was not
sounded by music until very much later. Bach, more emphatically in the
High Mass and the Magnificat, but also in his purely instrumental music,
brought the universal feeling of mysticism to absolute artistic
perfection. The deep religious sentiment which pervades the High Mass is
so far above all cults, that it has no real connection with any
historical faith--it is pure consciousness of the divine.
The peculiar state of the soul, called mysticism, could never become
popular, or exert any very great influence. A few men, such as Tauler,
Suso, Merswin, and the unknown author of the _Theologica Germanica_
handed on--not by any means always unadulterated--the doctrine they had
received from Eckhart--which at all times appealed to a few
thinkers--but the real influence on the world and on history was
reserved for the reformers. The reformer, in his inmost nature, is
related to the people; his soul is agitated by formulas and ceremonies,
to which the mystic is indifferent; they are to him obstacles to his
faith and he strains every nerve to destroy them. He has every
appearance of the truly free spirit, but he is secretly dependent on
that against which he is fighting. He suffers under its inefficiency;
his deed is the final reaction against his environment; salvation seems
to him to lie in the improvement of existing conditions, and not until
he has succeeded in accomplishing his purpose can he hope for religious
peace. The mystic is possible in all states of civilisation. He is not
dependent on external circumstances; his whole consciousness is filled
with one problem only, before which everything else pales: the
relationship of the soul to God. But the reformer is possible only under
certain circumstances. He, too, starts from an inner religious
consciousness, but his problem is soon solved, and he devotes all his
energy to the world. The mystic is not even aware of the difference
between his own conception of God and traditional religion; he is under
the impression that he is still an orthodox believer, long after he has
broken fresh ground; for he has taken from the traditional doctrine
everything which he can re-animate. The remainder is dead as far as he
is concerned. To accuse him of heresy appears to him as a monstrous
misunderstanding.
Thus mystic and reformer drink from the same well of direct religious
consciousness. But while in the case of the mystic the well is
fathomless, it is much more shallow in the case of the reformer. Certain
of himself, he directs his energy to the conversion and reformation of
the world. He resembles in some respects the public orator and
agitator; he has a grasp of social conditions, strives to influence his
surroundings by word and deed, and is ready to sacrifice his life to his
convictions. The mystic remains solitary and misunderstood. Luther, who
was to some extent influenced by German mysticism, fought, at his best,
against the dogma of historical salvation.
It is the tragic fate of all religions that they must crystallise into a
system. A reflection of the enthusiasm which animated their founders
still falls on their disciples: Follow me! But the second generation
already demands proofs, tradition and clumsy miracles; reports are drawn
up and looked upon as sacred--religion has become a glimpse into the
past. Most people never have any direct religious experience, their
salvation lies in the dogmas, the universally accepted doctrines. The
founder of a new religion is always regarded by his contemporaries as
abnormal, and is persecuted accordingly; not in malice, but of
necessity. Arnold of Brescia died at the stake; St. Francis was no more
than a heretic tolerated by the Church, and Eckhart escaped the tribunal
of the Inquisition only through his death.
I have attempted to show in diverse domains of the higher spiritual and
psychical life, how powerfully _the Christian principle of the
individual soul, the real fundamental value of the European
civilisation_, manifested itself at the time of the Crusades, and
everywhere became the germ of new things. The deepest thinkers teach the
deification of man as the culmination of existence, the ultimate purpose
of this earthly life, and claim immortality for the soul. This position,
which may roughly be conceived as the raising of the individual into the
ideal, has determined the European ideal of culture and differentiated
it from all Orientalism, including even the loftiest Indian philosophy.
Every attempt to substitute for this fundamental concept and its
emotional content something else--whether it be pantheism, Buddhism, or
naturalism--will always remain a failure.
Side by side with the splendid achievement of the German mysticism, the
Teutonic race has always been apt to give practical proof of its
individualism by endless petty quarrels and by splittings into numerous
cliques. But even before this race began to play a part in history, at
the beginning of the third century, the principle of the individual soul
was outwardly carried to extremes. While it was the ideal of the man of
antiquity to serve the higher community of the State with body and soul,
nascent Christianity cared solely for the salvation of the individual
soul, and frequently proved this by quite external evidence, by living a
hermit's life in the desert, for instance. Children left their parents,
husband and wife separated, dignitaries forsook their office to seek
solitude and prepare their souls for the world beyond the grave. The
first convents--the outcome of Christian individualism and
asceticism--were founded; and the anti-social extreme of this
individualism acquired such ominous proportions that the Emperor Valens
in the year of grace 365, was forced to legislate against the monastic
life.
This hatred of the world, which was quite in harmony with the spirit of
Christianity, was only overcome by the profounder concepts of German
mysticism, for in the primitive dualistic view of the first millenary
the renunciation of the world was the only possibility of avoiding sin.
The Emperor Justinian decreed that any man who induced a consecrated nun
to marry him should be punished by death. The thought that personal
greatness did not consist in renouncing the world but in living in it
and overcoming it, had not yet been conceived.
The delight in the human form, characteristic of antiquity, was
extinguished, a crude dualism denied all antique values. The body must
be hated, so that the soul could flourish. But as the Hellenic period
was preceded by vague, unindividualised, material life, so the
impersonal, chaotic, spiritual life of the first thousand years of
Christianity matured the individual soul. It found its climax in Dante
and Eckhart, the greatest poet of the Neo-Latin race, and the most
illumined religious genius of Germany. These two men, who were
contemporaries (Dante died in 1321 and Eckhart in 1329), finally
revealed the character of two kindred nations, completing and
fructifying each other. In Dante the great artistic power of the
Neo-Latin race appeared for the first time in its full intensity; it
took possession of the whole visible universe, and poured new beauty
into the traditional myths of Christendom. Eckhart experienced and
recreated the shapeless depths of the soul, the regions of the blending
of the soul with God. With these two men Europe definitely severed
herself from antiquity and barbarism, henceforth to follow her own star.
The new world had come into existence! Renascence, the lucky heir,
gathered the ripe fruit from the tree of art which had blossomed so
marvellously. God was no longer sought in the depth of the soul, all
emotion was projected into the world of sense. Churches were built, not
from an irresistible impulse, but as store-houses of the pictures which
were painted with amazing rapidity. The fundamental principle of
personality was externalised in the Renascence. Vanity and boasting,
traces of which frequently appeared in the age of chivalry, grew
exuberantly. No less manifest than the incomparable genius and _esprit_
of the heyday of the Renascence--although far less frequently commented
on--was the desire to be conspicuous, to shine, to display wealth and
learning. The essence of personality, instead of being sought in the
soul, was sought in outward magnificence. As a matter of fact, the much
extolled Renascence only perfected the various branches of art and
poetry, which had sprung up in the period of the Crusades. The latter
was the time of the planting of the tree of European culture; all that
followed was merely its growth and ramification. Only exact science had
its origin in the Renascence, and this fact, in historical perspective,
must be regarded as the supreme glory of this period. However
paradoxical it may sound--the "impersonal" science is the perfection of
the European system of individualism, its most potent weapon for taking
spiritual possession of the world and all that the world contains. The
consciousness of personality had to permeate the whole soul before it
could recover its external function: organic existence justified by
itself. While art borrows from nature and mankind all that we ourselves
deem beautiful, perfect, valuable, and imposes on the world a man-made
law--science strives to understand all things and all creatures
according to the law which dominates them; it strives to comprehend
nature and humanity--even where they are foreign and hostile--not
according to human values, but according to their inherent nature--and
this is only possible when the individuality of all things is respected.
The method of science has slowly become the perfect weapon by whose aid
Europe has attained the mastery of the world; it rests on the
fundamental feeling for the material, and is capable of confronting the
"I" with the whole system of natural phenomena, the "not-I," and
expresses the final victory of comprehending spirit over matter.
CHAPTER II
THE DEIFICATION OF WOMAN
(THE FIRST FORM OF METAPHYSICAL EROTICISM)
_(a) The Love of the Troubadours_
In the long chapter on the Birth of Europe, I have attempted to bring
corroborative evidence from all sides in support of my contention that
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed the birth and gradual
development of a new value of the highest importance: the value of
individuality, impersonated by the citizen of Europe. We are now
prepared to realise the psychological importance and the importance for
progress of one of the greatest results of this new development--the
spiritual love of man for woman. From this subject, the specific subject
of my book, I shall not again digress.
We are aware that the man of antiquity (and also the Eastern nations of
to-day) recognised between man and woman only the sexual bond,
uninfluenced by personal and psychological motives, and leading in
Greece to the institution of monogamy on purely economical and political
grounds. In addition to this bond there existed a very distinct
spiritual love, evolved by Plato and his circle and projected by one man
on another member of his own sex. In the true Hellenic spirit this love
aspired to guide the individual to the ideal of perfection, the beauty
and wisdom of the friend serving as stepping-stones in the upward climb.
In Christianity the spiritual love of the divine became the greatest
value and the pivot on which the emotions turned. The primitive
Christian scorned the body, his own as well as that of his fellow; he
despised beauty of form, and regarded only the divine as worthy of love.
Woman was disparaged and suspected; all thinkers, down to Thomas and
Anselm, looking upon her merely as a snare and a pitfall. The period
discussed in detail in the foregoing chapter ushered in a new and, until
then, unknown feeling. In crude and conscious contrast to sexuality,
deprecated alike by classical Greece and primitive Christianity,
spiritual love of man for woman came into existence. It was composed of
three clearly distinguishable elements: the Platonic thought,
maintaining that the greatest virtue lies in the striving for absolute
perfection; the entirely spiritual love of the divine, sufficient in
itself, and representing the final purpose of life, as developed by
Christianity; and the dawning knowledge of the value of personality.
From these three elements: the noblest inheritance of antiquity, the
central creation of Christianity, and the pivot of the new-born European
spirit, sprang the new value which is the subject of the second stage of
eroticism. The position of woman had changed; she was no longer the
medium for the satisfaction of the male impulse, or the rearing of
children, as in antiquity; no longer the silent drudge or devout sister
of the first Christian millenary; no longer the she-devil of monkish
conception; transcending humanity, she had been exalted to the heavens
and had become a goddess. She was loved and adored with a devotion not
of this earth, a devotion which was the sole source of all things lofty
and good; she had become the saviour of humanity and queen of the
universe.
The rejection of sensuality is an inherent part of the Christian
religion; only he who had overcome his sinful desires was a hero.
Spiritual love was as yet unknown, only the sexual impulse was realised,
and that was looked upon as a sin; there was but one way of escape:
renunciation. This view is very clearly expressed in the legends of
Alexius, and in Barlaam and Josaphat (which although of Indian origin,
had found a German interpreter and were known all over Europe). The
latter legend tells how Prince Josaphat, a devout Christian, married a
beautiful princess. On his wedding night he had a vision of the
celestial paradise, the dominion of chastity, and the earthly pool of
sin. Recognising in his bride a devil who had come to tempt him, he left
her and fled into the desert. Many legends illustrate the incapacity of
the first millenary to realise the relationship between the sexes in any
other sense. Woman was evil; the struggle against her a laudable effort.
Very probably the stigmatising of all eroticism during that long spell
of a thousand years was necessary. Only the unnatural condemnation of
love in its widest sense, a hatred of sex and woman such as was felt by
Tertullian and Origen, could result in the reverse of sexuality--purely
spiritual love with its logical climax, the deification and worship of
woman. There can be no doubt that the Christian ideal of chastity was
largely responsible for the evolution of the ideal of spiritual love.
The identity of love and chastity was propounded--in sharp contrast to
sexuality and--more particularly amongst the later troubadours, such as
Montanhagol, Sordello, and the poets of the "sweet new style" in
Italy--with a distinct leaning towards religious ecstasy.
Infinite tenderness pervaded the nascent cult of woman. It seemed as if
man were eager to compensate her for the indignity which he had heaped
upon her for a thousand years. His instinctive need to worship had found
an incomparable being on earth before whom he prostrated himself. She
was the climax of earthly perfection; no word, no metaphor was
sufficiently ecstatic to express the full fervour of his adoration; a
new religion was created, and she was the presiding divinity. "What were
the world if beauteous woman were not?" sang Johannes Hadlaub, a German
poet.
Once more I must revert to personality, the fundamental value of the
European. In antiquity, even in Greece and Rome, personality in its
higher sense did not exist. The hero was the epitome of all the energies
of the nation, a term for the striving of the community; the statesman
was the incarnate political will of the people; even the poet's ideal
was the representation of the Hellenic type in all its aspects.
Agamemnon was no more than the intelligent ruler, Achilles the
headstrong hero, Odysseus the cunning adventurer. The individual was a
member and servant of the tribe, the town, the state; each man knew that
his fellow did not essentially differ from him; and even at the period
when Hellas was at its meridian the individuals were, compared to modern
men, but slightly differentiated. But the Greek differed from the
Oriental, the barbarian, inasmuch as he felt himself no longer a
component part of nature, but realised his distinct individuality.
We find the first germs of the new creative principle of personality in
the Platonic figure of Socrates who, first of all, conceived the idea of
a higher spiritual love, blended it with the love of ideas and separated
it sharply from base desire. Though his conception was not yet personal
love in the true sense, it was nevertheless a spiritual divine love. The
Greek State could not tolerate him, and sentenced him to death. But this
same Socrates also said (in "Crito") that man was indebted to the State
for his existence. "Did not thy father, in obedience to the law, take
thy mother to wife and beget thee?" This sentiment was as antique as it
could well be, and the death of Socrates--as related by Plato--was the
most magnificent confirmation of the Greek idea that the individual,
even the wisest, was entirely subordinate to the community.
The civilisations of China and Japan are impersonal even to a greater
extent than the civilisation of ancient Greece. Percival Lowell
maintains that the diverse manifestations of the spirit of those
countries can only be understood if regarded from the standpoint of
absolute impersonality. He sees in a "pronounced impersonality the most
striking characteristic of the Far East", "the foundation on which the
Oriental character is built up." It is very instructive to observe how
it determines the individual's conception of birth and marriage,
thoughts and acts, life and death. It is carried to so great an extreme
that special terms for "I," "you," "he," do not even exist in the
Japanese language, and have to be replaced by objective circumlocutions.
Not content with the fact of having been born impersonal, it is the
ambition of the inhabitant of the Far East to become more and more so as
his life unfolds itself. Witness the heroic exploits of Japanese
soldiers during the last war: individual soldiers frequently went to
their death for the sake of a small advantage to their group. We
Europeans regard this in the light of heroism--and it would be heroism
in the case of a European. But with the sacrifice of his individual life
in the interest of the community, the Japanese instinctively yields the
smaller value. In the same way Greeks and Romans did not attach very
much importance to life; suicide was very common, and frequently
committed without any special motive. As true love is based on
personality, it is impossible for the modern East-Asiatic to know love
in our sense. Lowell agrees with this: "Love, as we understand it, is an
unknown feeling in the East." He reports that Japanese women will appear
before strangers entirely nude, without the least trace of
embarrassment--as would Greek women!--because they are innocent of that
other aspect of personality--the feeling of shame. To be ashamed implies
the desire of concealing something individual and intimate; where this
is not the case, there can be no feeling of shame. Finally, I should
like to point out that the perversity and sexual refinement peculiar to
China and Japan are attributable simply to the fact that the limits of
sexuality cannot be overstepped, and that sexuality is therefore
dependent on vice and perversity to satisfy its craving for variety.
The first manifestation of overwhelming personality appears in Jesus,
and he created the religion of love. In him personality and love were
convertible forces, one might even say they were identical. He, first of
all, revealed their mysterious intimate connection, and clearly showed
that love can only be experienced by a distinct personality, because it
is an emanation of the soul and not a natural instinct.
It was, again, personality which, in the twelfth century, produced a new
force: spiritual love projected not only on God and nature, but also on
woman. Now only had personality acquired its true significance; it no
longer meant--as it did in the mature Greek world--the individual
separated from his environment, the individual with a conscious
beginning and a conscious end, but the principle of the synthesis, a
higher entity above the mere individual, the source of all values and
virtue.
Personality is the self-conscious, individual soul, producing out of its
own wealth the universal ideal values, and re-absorbing and assimilating
these ideal values in their higher form. It admits of the fusion of the
subjective with the universal and eternal, with the religious and
artistic, the moral and scientific values of civilisation. "Personality
is the blending of the universal and the individual," said Kierkegaard,
expressing, if not exactly my meaning, something very near it.
I shall endeavour to depict the spiritual love of man for woman--the
position cannot be reversed--from its inception to its climax. I shall
submit abundant evidence to make the great unbroken stream of emotion
clearly apparent, and indicate all its tributaries. I do not pretend
that I have exhausted the subject--that would be impossible. The works
from which I have drawn may be safely regarded as the direct outpouring
of emotion; those purely lyric poets were entirely subjective and ever
intent upon their own feelings; there hardly exists one Provençal,
old-Italian, or mediæval love-song without the "I."
Spiritual love first appeared as a naïve sentiment--unconscious of its
own peculiar characteristics--in the poems of the earlier troubadours of
Provence. There is a poem in which the Provençals claim the fathership
of the cult of woman; their opponents do not deny it, but add that it
was an invention which "could fill no man's stomach." These words
express the great and insurmountable barrier between pure spiritual love
and pleasure. The Christian dualism: soul-body, spirit-matter, had
invaded the domain of love.
Spontaneous, genuine love, untainted by speculations and metaphysics, is
found in the songs of the earlier troubadours. The greatest among all of
them, Bernart of Ventadour, was the first to praise chaste love. If any
champion of civilisation deserves a monument, it is this poet.
Dead is the man who knows not love,
A sweet tremor in the heart.
Love's rapture fills my heart
With laughter and sighs.
Grief slays me a hundred times,
Joy bids me rise.
Sweet is love's happiness,
Sweeter love's pain.
Joy brings back grief to me,
Grief, joy again.
Guillem Augier Novella expressed the feeling of being "elated with
exaltation and grieved to death" as follows:
Lady, often flow my tears,
Glad songs in my mem'ry ring,
For the love that makes my blood
Dance and sing.
I am yours with heart and soul,
If it please you, lady, slay me....
Aimeril de Peguilhan is of opinion that the pain of love is no less
sweet than the joy of love:
For he who loves with all his heart would fain
Be sick with love, such rapture is his pain.
And Bernart again:
God keep my lady fair from grief and woe,
I'm close to her, however far I go;
If God will be her shelter and her shield,
Then all my heart's desire is fulfilled.
And:
My mind was erring in a maze,
That hour I was no longer I,
When in your eyes I met my gaze
As in a mirror strange and shy.
Oh, mirror sweet, reflecting me,
Sighing I fell beneath your spell;
I perished in you utterly
As did Narcissus in the well.
In the same poem he goes on to say that he will ask for no reward, but
finally concludes:
My fervent kisses her sweet lips should cover,
For weeks they'd show the traces of her lover.
The German minnesinger, Heinrich of Morungen, called woman "a mirror of
all the delights of the world," and sang:
Blessed be the tender hour,
Blest the time, the precious day,
When my brimming heart welled over,
When my secret open lay.
I was startled with great gladness,
And bewildered so with love,
I can hardly sing thereof.
The sensuous element still dominated Bernart and his contemporaries to
some extent. In their poems, all of which are genuine and sincere, the
longing for kisses, sometimes for more, is frankly expressed, but the
tendency towards the not sensuous and super-sensuous is already
apparent. The lover loves one woman only, and would rather love in vain,
patiently enduring every pang she causes him, than receive favours from
another woman, were she beautiful as Venus her self.
Bernart says:
My sorrow is a sweet distress
To which no alien bliss compares,
And if my pain such sweetness bears,
How sweet would be my happiness!
Elias of Barjols:
Full of joy I am and sorrow
When I stand before her face.
Bonifacio Calvo:
There is no treasure-trove on earth
Which I would barter for my pain;
I love my grief, but spite and wrath
Run riot in my heart; my brain
Is reeling--and I laugh and cry.
Jubilant and desperate,
Exultant, I bewail my fate.
Quarter! Lady, ere I die.
The earlier troubadours were still ignorant of the later dogma which
made chaste love the sole fountain of virtue and the road to
perfection--the beloved woman can make of her admirer what she wills--a
saint or a sinner.
Thus Guillem of Poitiers says:
Love heals the sick
And a grave does it delve
For the strong; mars the beauty of beauty itself,
Makes a fool of the sage with its magic,
A clown of the courteous knight,
And a king of the lowliest wight.
The equally early Cercamon:
False can I be or true for her,
Sincere or full of lies,
A perfect knight or worthless cur,
Serene or grave, stupid or wise.
Raimon of Toulouse:
In the kingdom of love
Folly rules and not sense.
It was typical of this enthusiastic love that the social rank of the
beloved, the mistress, was invariably above the rank of the lover. The
latter was fond of calling himself her vassal and serf, proclaiming that
she had invested him with all his goods; even kings and German emperors
composed love-songs, although in all probability they would have
achieved their purpose far more quickly by other means; but in all cases
we find the characteristic attitude of the humble lover, looking up to
his mistress. The underlying thought is obvious: Love, the loftiest
value in all the world, is the great leveller of all social differences,
a force before which wealth is as dust. "I would rather win a kind
glance from my lady's eyes than the royal crown of France," was a
favourite profession of the poets. Montanhagol, for instance, in a
rhymed meditation, stated that a lady was wise in choosing a lover of a
lower social rank, because not only could she always count on his
gratitude and devotion, but she would also have more influence over him,
a fact which in the case of a social equal or superior was, to say the
least, a little doubtful. This supreme reverence for love soon became an
accepted doctrine. We constantly meet the thought that chaste love alone
can make a man noble, good and wise. I will select a few illustrations
from a wealth of instances:
Miraval:
Noble is every deed whose root is love.
Peire Rogier:
Full well I know that right and good
Is all I do for love of her.
Guirot Riquier:
The man who loves not is not noble-minded,
For love is fruit and blossom of the highest.
And:
Thus love transfigures ev'ry deed we do,
And love gives everything a deeper sense.
Love is the teaching of all genuine worth.
So base is no man's heart on this wide earth,
Love could not guide it to great excellence.
Giraut of Calenso said of the City of Love that no base or ignorant man
could enter it, and the Italian Lapo Gianni sang:
The youthful maiden who appeared to me
So filled my soul with pure and lofty thoughts,
That henceforth all ignoble things I scorn.
Dante in the _Vita Nuova_ calls Beatrice "the destroyer of all evil and
the queen of all virtues."
The very thought of the beloved makes a good man of the lover:
"I cannot sin when I am in her thoughts."
asserts the sincere Guirot Riquier, and he prays Christ to teach him the
true love of woman.
While it was a generally accepted theory that love was the source of
man's perfection, I know of only one passage (by Raimon of Miraval)
contending that woman, also, was perfected by love; everywhere else we
meet the universal and silently accepted opinion that the essence of
womanhood is something unearthly, unfathomable and divine. Perhaps the
most classical formulation of the new doctrine, to wit, that spiritual
love is the begetter of all virtue and the mother of chastity, outside
which there is nothing divine, is to be found in the poems of the
somewhat pedantic Montanhagol:
The lover who loves not the highest love,
Is like a fool polluting precious wine.
Let loftiest love alone within thee move,
And purity and virtue will be thine.
Guirot Riquier expressed a similar sentiment:
For chaste and pure my love has always been,
From my "sweet bliss" I've never asked a boon;
If I may humbly serve her night and noon,
My life be her inalienable lien.
Walter von der Vogelweide says: "Love is a treasure heaped up of all
virtues."
As time went on the barrier erected between true spiritual love and
insidious sensuality became more and more clearly defined; the former
pervaded the erotic emotion of the whole period. Parallel with chaste
love, sensuality continued to exist as something contemptible, unworthy
of a noble mind; and it must be admitted that according to the
contemporary "Fabliaux," later German comedies and Italian and French
novels, the sexual manifestations of the period, were of incredible
coarseness. As against these, spiritual love was not merely an artistic
and theoretic concept, but the profound emotion of the cultured minds,
and remained a powerful and creative force even in later centuries.
Spiritual love and sexuality were irreconcilable contradistinctions; the
man who thought otherwise was looked upon as a libertine. The following
passages from the poems of the troubadours and their heirs, the Italian
poets of the _dolce stil nuovo_, will prove the historical reality of
this relationship, the ideal of the declining Middle Ages. We need take
no account of the German minnesingers, for although they shared the same
ideal, they did not influence principle in the same way as the neo-Latin
poets.
Bernart of Ventadour:
Lady, I ask no other meed
Than that you suffer me to serve;
My faith and love shall never swerve,
I'm yours whatever you decreed.
Peire Rogier:
Mine is her smile and mine her jest,
And foolish were I more to ask
And not to think me wholly blest.
'Tis no deceit,
To gaze at her is all I need,
The sight of her is my reward.
Gaucelm Faidit:
Of all the ways of love I chose the best,
I love you, love, with ardour infinite,
Yours is my life, do as you will with it.
Nor kiss I ask, nor sweet embraces, lest
I were blaspheming....
The most enthusiastic champions of pure love were Montanhagol, Sordello
and Guirot Riqiuer. The former maintained that a lover who asked for
favours incompatible with his lady's honour, neither loved her nor
deserved to be loved.--"Love begets purity, and he who knows the meaning
of love can never forsake virtue."
There is a controversy between Peire Guillem of Toulouse and Sordello,
which contains the following passages:
Of all mankind I never saw
A man like you, Sordell', I wis,
For he who woman does adore
Will never flout her love and kiss.
And what to others is a prize
You surely don't mean to despise?
Honour and joy I crave from her,
And if a little rose she bind
Into the wreath, Sir Guillem Peire,
From mercy, not from duty, mind,
That would be happiness indeed,
Oh! that such bliss should be my meed!
A humble lover such as you,
Sordell', in faith, I never knew.
Sir Peire, methinks what you express
Is lacking much in seemliness.
In another poem the talented Sordello says:
My love for her is so profound
I'd serve her, spurn and scorn despite
Ere with another I'd be found--
Yet I'd not serve without requite,
and in another, after stating that he loves his lady so much that he
would thank her even if she killed him, he continues:
Thus, lady, I commend to thee
My fate and life, thy faithful squire
I'd rather die in misery
Than have thee stoop to my desire.
The knight who truly loves his dame
Not only loves her comely face,
Dearer to him is her fair fame
Undimmed, unsullied by disgrace.
How grievously I should offend
Thy virtue, if I spoke of passion;
But if I did--which God forfend!
Sweet lady, stoop not to compassion.
Although Sordello appeared so extremely modest, yet he was grieved to
death because his lady did not return his love. There is a poem in which
he compares himself to a drowning man whom the beloved alone could save.
This spiritual love (then as now) puzzled the commonplace, and was
misunderstood and regarded with scepticism. Bertran d'Alaman taunted
Sordello with his "hypocritical happiness" and "the whole deception of
his love," and Granet, in a satirical poem, cast doubt upon his
sincerity.
It is very significant to find that Sordello, that typical champion of
chaste love, kept up a number of questionable liaisons with all sorts of
women. Bertran reproached him with having changed his lady at least a
hundred times, and he himself shamelessly confesses:
The jealousies of husbands ne'er amaze me,
For in the art of love I do excel,
And there's no wife, however chaste she may be
Who can resist me if I woo her well.
And if her husband hate me I'll not grumble,
Because his wife receives me in the night,
If mine her kiss, if mine sweet love's delight,
His pain and wrath my spirit shall not humble.
No husband e'er shall rob me of my pleasure,
None can resist me, what I wish I gain,
All do I love and never will refrain
Spite husbands' wrath to rob them of their treasure.
It may seem strange at first sight that this enthusiastic exponent of
pure love should have led such a double life. But Sordello's conduct is
not in the least paradoxical; in accordance with the tendency of the
period, he carefully distinguished in his own heart between sexuality
and love; before the one he lay prostrate, unable to find words enough
in self-depreciation, so that he might the more exalt his mistress; but
with respect to all other women he was a mere sensualist. We read that
although he was "an expert in the treatment of women" in her presence
his voice forsook him and he lost all self-control. Petrarch, who--while
living with a very earthly woman--extolled all his life long a lofty
being whom he called Laura, was akin to Sordello, although he was a far
less brutal character. The latter approached the type of the seeker of
love, the Don Juan.
In a tenzone between Peirol and the Dauphin of Auvergne, the former
maintains that love must die at the moment of its consummation. "I
cannot believe," he says, "that a true lover can continue to love after
he has received the last favour." (Otto Weininger agrees with this.) But
Peirol winds up with the subtle suggestion that though love be dead, a
man should always continue to behave as if he were still in love.
The troubadours never weary of drawing a line between _drudaria_ and
_luxuria_, pure love and base desire. _Mezura_, seemliness, is
contrasted with _dezmezura_, licentiousness. Pure love is regarded as
the creator of all high values, luxuriousness as their destroyer. In the
same way the German minnesingers distinguished between "low" love and
"high" love.
As both cultured minds and the upper classes, contemning sexuality,
acknowledged spiritual love only, it follows as a matter of course that
the avowal of such sentiments became good form; the motif that the
honour of the beloved must be carefully shielded, and that no desire
must dim her purity, occurs again and again. But it should not be
forgotten that a poet may love a sentiment for its own sake, without
being in the least influenced by it. Many a troubadour drew inspiration
from an emotion which all praised as the supreme value; even if he had
no earthly mistress, he adored the sublime sentiment. Not infrequently
it happened that a troubadour who had been loud in praise of high love
and denunciation of base desire--a trick of his trade--suddenly came to
himself and changed his mind. Folquet of Marseilles, for instance, after
more than ten years of vain sighing, came to the conclusion that he had
been a fool.
Deceitful love beguiles the simple fool
And binds with magic thongs the hapless wight;
That like a moth lured by the candle-light,
He hovers, helpless, round the heartless ghoul.
I cast thee out and follow other stars
Full evil was my meed and recompense--
New courage steels my fainting heart, and hence
I kneel at shrines which passion never mars.
In an interesting poem Garin the Red implores _Mezura_ to teach him the
way to love purely and nobly; but he is anything but pleased with his
instructress, and comes to the conclusion that her whole wisdom is "just
good form" and nothing else.
But by my merry mood impelled
I kiss and dally night and morn
And do the things I feel compelled
To do--or else, with tonsure shorn,
I'd seek a cloister....
Elias of Barjols, finding that his love will never be returned, and
having no mind to sigh all his life in vain, renounces love altogether.
"I should be a fool if I served love any longer!"
"All you lovers are fools!" exclaimed another. "Do you think you can
change the nature of women?" This is one of the very rare criticisms of
woman; as a rule we hear only of her angelic perfection, wisdom, beauty
and aloofness.
The distinguished poet Marcabru was a woman-hater, and enemy of love
from the very beginning. He said of himself that he had never loved a
woman and that no woman had ever loved him.
The love which is always a lie
And deceiver of men, I decry
And denounce; I had more than enough.
Can you count all the evil it wrought?
When I think of it I am distraught.
What a madman I was to believe,
To sigh, to rejoice and to grieve;
But no longer I'll squander my days,
We have come to the parting of the ways. Etc.
He was indefatigable in abusing the tender passion, and had a great deal
to say about the immorality of women. But it is characteristic of the
strong public opinion of the time that even this misogynist (who,
perhaps, after all was only a disappointed man) praised "high love."
The subject also found its theorists, prominent among whom was the
court-chaplain Andreas, who wrote a very learned book on love in Latin.
He expressed in propositions and conclusions what the contemporary poets
expressed in verse, proving thereby that spiritual love was not merely a
poetic fiction but the profoundest belief of the period, supported by
the full complement of its philosophical weapons. "In the whole world
there is no good and no courtliness outside the fountain of love.
Therefore love is the beginning and foundation of all good." He also
proved that a noble-minded man must be a lover, for if he were not, he
could not have attained virtue. "Love disregards all barriers, and makes
the man of low origin the equal and superior of the nobleman."
This conception of spiritual nobility, which was later on perfected in
the theory of the _cor gentil_, only existed in Provence and in Italy;
it remained unknown in France and Germany.
Andreas drew a distinction between base love, the _amor mixtus sive
communis_, and pure love, the _amor purus_. "Love," he maintained, fully
agreeing with the poets, "gives to a man the strength of chastity, for
he whose heart is brimming over with the love of a woman, cannot think
of dallying with another, however beautiful she may be." He proved from
substance and form that a man cannot love two women. In the _Leys
d'Amors_, a voluminous fourteenth-century Provençal treatise, largely a
text-book of grammar and prosody, we read: "And now lovers must be
taught how to love; passionate lovers must be restrained, so that they
may come to realise their evil and dishonourable desires. No good
troubadour, who is at the same time an honest lover, has ever abandoned
himself to base sensuality and ignoble desires." The same author opined
that a troubadour who asked his lady for a kiss, was committing an act
of indecency. On the other hand, Andreas was very broad-minded in
drawing the line between both kinds of love, allowing kisses, and even
more, in the case of true love. (The best troubadours disagree with him
in this respect.)
A scholasticism of love, modelled on ecclesiastical scholasticism and
substituting the beloved woman for the Deity, was gradually evolved.
Love, veneration, humility, hope, etc., were the sacrifices offered at
her shrine. She was full of grace and compassion, and was believed in as
fervently as was God. Some of the poets were animated by a curious
ambition "to prove" their feelings with scholastic erudition, and more
especially by the later, Italian, school, _amore_, _cor gentil_,
_valore_, were conceived as substances, attributes, inherent qualities,
etc. The allegories of _amore_ played a prominent part, and spoiled many
a masterpiece. The German poets steered clear of these absurdities,
which even Dante did not escape.
At the famous courts of love, presided over by princesses, the most
extraordinary questions relating to love were discussed and decided with
a ceremonial closely following the ceremonial of the petty courts of
law. Andreas preserved for us a number of these judgments, some of which
prove the really quite obvious fact that love and marriage are two very
different things, for if spiritual love be considered the supreme value,
matrimony can only be regarded as an inferior condition. And it was a
fact that in the higher ranks of society,--the only ones with which we
are concerned,--a marriage was nothing but a contract made for political
and economical reasons. The baron desired to enlarge his estate, obtain
a dowry, or marry into an influential family; no one dreamed of
consulting the future bride, whom marriage alone could bring into
contact with people outside her own family. To her marriage meant the
permission to shine and be adored by a man who was not her husband. "It
is an undeniable fact," propounded Andreas as _regula amoris_, "that
there is no room for love between husband and wife," and Fauriel
translated a passage as follows: "A husband who proposed to behave to
his wife as a knight would to his lady, would propose to do something
contrary to the canons of honour; such a proceeding could neither
increase his virtue nor the virtue of his lady, and nothing could come
of it but what already properly exists."--Another judgment maintained
"that a lady lost her admirer as soon as the latter became her husband;
and that she was therefore entitled to take a new lover." At the court
of love of the Viscountess Ermengarde, of Narbonne, the problem whether
the love between husband and wife or the love between lovers were the
greater, was decided as follows: "The affection between a married couple
and the tender love which unites two lovers are emotions which differ
fundamentally and according to custom. It would be folly to attempt a
comparison between two subjects which neither resemble each other, nor
have any connection." A husband declared: "It is true, I have a
beautiful wife, and I love her with conjugal love. But because true love
is impossible between husband and wife, and because everything good
which happens in this world has its origin in love, I am of opinion that
I should seek an alliance of love outside my married life." All this was
not frivolity, but the only logical conclusion of dualistic eroticism,
incapable of blending sensuality and love. It was equally logical that
love between divorced persons was not only regarded as not immoral, but
as perfectly right and justifiable; it was even decided that "a new
marriage could never become a drawback to old love." In the old novel,
_Gérard of Roussillon_, the princess, beloved by Gérard, is married to
the emperor Charles Martel, and compelled to part from her knight. At
their last meeting, before a number of witnesses, she called on the name
of Christ and said: "Know ye all that I give my love to Sir Gérard with
this ring and this flower from my chaplet. I love him more than father
and husband, and now I must weep tears of bitter sorrow." After this
they parted, but their love continued undiminished though there was
nothing between them but tender wishes and secret thoughts.
Matrimony had no advantage over the love-alliance, not even the
sanction of the Church. A love-alliance was frequently accompanied by a
ceremony in which a priest officiated. Fauriel describes--without
mentioning his source--such a ceremony as follows: "Kneeling before his
lady, with his folded hands between hers, he dedicated himself to her
service, vowing to be faithful to her until death, and to shield her
from all harm and insults as far as lay within his power. The lady, on
her side, declared her willingness to accept his service, promised to
devote her loftiest feelings to him, and as a rule gave him a ring as a
symbol of their union. Then she raised and kissed him, always for the
first, usually for the last time." The parting of the lovers, too, was a
solemn act, resembling in many ways the dissolution of a marriage.
So that our solemn plighted troth
When love is dead, we shall not break,
We'll to the priest ourselves betake.
You set me free, as I do you,
A perfect right then shall we both
Enjoy to choose a love anew,
wrote Peire of Barjac.
It was far more easy to dissolve a marriage than a true love-alliance;
the husband had only to state that his wife was a distant relation of
his, and the Church was ready to annul the contract. But the
love-alliance--so Sordello maintained, in a long poem--should be more
binding than any marriage.
Only one love a woman can
Prefer. So let her choose her man
With care. To him she must be true,
For choosing once she ne'er may rue.
More binding than the wedding-tie
Is love; for a diversity
Of causes wedlock may divide,
By death alone be love untied.
The idea that marriage and love cannot be combined is therefore only the
logical conclusion of the fundamental feeling that love and desire
cannot together be projected on one woman.
If matrimonial love had not been questioned, the choice would have lain
between two alternatives: the canonisation of matrimony--an expedient
chosen by the Church--or a fusion of love and sexuality in our modern
sense. The first was a stage which humanity had left behind, for the
ideal of absolutely perfect and pure love had already been evolved, and
the world was not ripe for the second. The tendency of the rarest minds
was in the direction of a further idealisation of love, of freeing it
from all earthly shackles and bringing it nearer and nearer to heaven.
One of the early troubadours, Jaufre Rudel, Prince of Blaya, gave a
practical illustration to this feeling by falling in love with a lady
whom he had never seen. The story of his love was famous for centuries.
He loved a Countess of Tripoli, a Christian princess, and his whole soul
was filled with his imaginary picture of her. The _Provençal Biography_
relates that "he worshipped her for all the good the pilgrims had
narrated of her." In order to see her, he took the cross and journeyed
across the sea; he fell ill on the ship and was carried ashore in a
dying condition. The countess, on hearing of his great love, hastened to
the inn where he lay. As she entered his room, Jaufre regained
consciousness; he knew her at once and died happily in her arms. She was
so touched by his love that she henceforth renounced the world.--This
story is no fairy tale; it is well attested and universally accounted
genuine to-day. Jaufre's love, expressed in touching poems, was no
_amour de tête_, as it is sometimes called, but a genuine _amour de
coeur_, a purely spiritual love which asked nothing of the beloved
woman but permission to love her. There are other instances, and even in
later times it is not an infrequent occurrence in the case of
imaginative people (I need only mention Bürger and Klopstock).
We men of the present age look upon this eccentric woman-worship with
uncomprehending eyes. Perhaps we shall feel a little less bewildered
when we meet it, stripped of courtly theories and mediaeval fashions, in
some of the great men who are closely connected with our own period; in
Michelangelo, in Goethe, and in Beethoven.
The Church, dualistic and ascetic from its inception, waged war against
sensuality as the evil of evils. "As fire and water will not mix," wrote
St. Bernard, "so spiritual and carnal delights cannot be experienced
together." The toleration of matrimony was never more than a compromise;
we require no proof that as far as the Church was concerned, chastity
was the only real value. Even Luther took up that position, and to this
day Christianity and sexuality remain unreconciled. But both the
Catholic and the Protestant professions of faith regarded matrimony as
the lesser evil, a concession made to the enemy, in order to render
existence possible. It is very interesting to observe the position taken
up by the Church in connection with the new woman-worship which,
although it sprang from the most genuine Christian dualism, had for its
object not God, but mortal woman. The logical attitude of the Church
would have been one of welcome, for the chaste worship of woman which
regarded matrimony as an inferior state, was her natural ally. Two
clerics, the court-chaplain Andreas, and the prolific rhymester Matfre
Ermengau, actually elaborated the theory of spiritual love contrary to
the spirit of the Church, but both men hastened to utter a timely
recantation and recommendation of orthodoxy as the only means of
salvation. After establishing all the desirable details of love
according to substance and accidents, Andreas deduced that every love
not dedicated to God was bound to offend Him, and advanced eighteen
points against the love of woman, starting with the well-known argument
that woman was naturally of a base disposition, covetous, envious,
greedy, fickle, garrulous, stubborn, proud, vain, sensual, deceitful,
etc. "He who serves love, cannot serve God," he declared, "and God will
punish every man who, apart from matrimony, serves Venus. What good
could come from acting against the will of God?" Here we are face to
face with a grotesque position: the official Church favouring sexuality,
that is matrimony, as against the newer and higher standard of ascetic,
spiritual love. This attitude was quite logical, if not in the spirit of
religion and in contradiction to the principle of asceticism, yet in the
spirit of orthodoxy; for "whatever was not for her, was against her."
The brave, Janus-headed abbé was spokesman for the whole clergy, which
branded love not projected on God as _fornicatio_. In his recantation
Andreas upheld the previously-despised matrimonial state at the expense
of love; "love," he maintained, "destroys matrimony." Matfre did exactly
the same thing; after recapitulating in his _Breviari d'Amor_ all the
splendid achievements rooted in the cult of woman, he suddenly veered
round (at the 27,445th verse):
And Satan blows on their desire,
In monstrous flames leaps up the fire,
And maddened by the raging fiend,
From love of God and honour weaned,
They turn from their Creator's shrine
And call their mistresses divine.
With soul and body, mind and sense,
They worship woman's excellence.
Abandoned in her beauty revel,
And unawares adore the devil.
Three hundred years later the fanatical Savanorola stormed: "You clothe
and adorn the Mother of God as you clothe and adorn your courtesans, and
you give her the features of your mistresses!" which, as we shall
presently see, was literally true.
The clergy resisted all counsels of the _cortezia_ and _cavalaria_ with
the sure instinct desiring the continuance of existing conditions
rather than the victory of the higher conception. Some writers aver that
it was partly due to this fact that later on the cult of woman developed
into the cult of Mary. Again we are confronted by a process which in the
course of time has been repeated more than once: the spiritual-mystical
principle of Christianity entered upon a new stage, and took possession
of a new and important domain; but the Church, rigid and unyielding,
preferred clinging to a past lower stage rather than tolerating any
change. Had she been absolutely consistent, her greatest poet would be
on the index to-day, for, following his own intuition and ignoring her
rigid dogma, he introduced his beloved Beatrice into the Catholic
heaven.
The new spiritual love was not without its caricatures. Famous in
Provence for many strange exploits, committed in order to please his
lady, was the talented Peire Vidal. On one occasion he caused himself to
be sewn into a wolfskin and ran about the fields; but he was set upon by
dogs and so badly mangled that he nearly succumbed to his wounds. He was
an insufferable braggart, but never had any success in love. The prince
of caricatures, however, was the German knight and minnesinger, Ulrich
of Lichtenstein. He is responsible for a novel in prose, entitled _The
Service of Woman_, which is faintly reminiscent of Goethe's _Werther_.
As a page he commenced his glorious career by drinking the water in
which his lady had washed her hands; later on he caused his upper lip to
be amputated because it displeased his mistress, for "whatever she
dislikes in me, I, too, hate." On another occasion he cut off one of his
fingers and used it, set in gold, as a clasp for a volume of his poems
which he sent to her. One of his most famous exploits was a journey
through nearly the whole of Austria, disguised as Venus, jousting,
dressed in women's clothes, with every knight he met. But in spite of
his eccentricities, the tendency of his mind was not at all
metaphysical; he craved very obvious favours, but as a rule contented
himself with a kind, or even an unkind word. Incidentally, we learn that
he was married; but he devoted his whole life to "deeds of heroism" in
honour of his lady. Not the great book of Cervantes, as is commonly
believed, held up mediaeval court life to ridicule and destroyed it as
an ideal, but the life and exploits of this knight and minnesinger. The
same spirit animated Guilhem of Balaun. At the command of his lady he
had a finger-nail extracted and sent to her, after which he was
re-admitted to her favour.
Spiritual love was discovered by the Provençals, but the greater and
profounder Italian poets developed it and brought it to perfection. What
had been a naïve sentiment with the troubadours, became in Dante's
circle a system of the universe and a religion. The Italian poet,
Sordello, who wrote in Provençal, may be regarded as the connecting
link, and the forerunner of the great Italians. He died in the year of
grace 1270, and Dante, who was almost a contemporary, immortalised his
name in the _Divine Comedy_. The doctrine on which the _dolce stil
nuovo_ was based pointed to the love of a noble heart as the source of
all perfection in heaven and earth. Purely spiritual woman-worship was
regarded as an absolute virtue. The words of the last of the Provençal
troubadours, Guirot Riquier, "Love is the doctrine of all sublime
things"--was developed into a philosophy. I will quote a few
characteristic verses, omitting Dante for the present. One of the finest
lyric poems of all tongues and ages, written by Guido Guinicelli, begins
as follows:
Within the gentle heart love shelters him,
As birds within the green shades of the grove;
Before the gentle heart in nature's scheme
Love was not, or the gentle heart ere love.
(_Transl. by_ D.G. ROSSETTI.)
Cino da Pistoia says in epigrammatic brevity:
You want to know the inmost core of love?
'Tis art and guerdon of a noble heart.
A wonderful canzone by Guinicelli contains the following verses:
A song she seems among the rest and these
Have all their beauties in her splendour drowned.
In her is ev'ry grace,--
Simplicity of wisdom, noble speech,
Accomplished loveliness;
All earthly beauty is her diadem.
This truth my song must teach--
My lady is of ladies chosen gem.
(_Transl. by_ D.G. ROSSETTI.)
And Cavalcanti sings:
What's she whose coming rivets all men's eyes,
Who makes the air so tremble with delight,
And thrills so every heart that no man might
Find tongue for words but vents his soul in sighs?
(_Transl. by_ SIR THEODORE MARTIN.)
The sentiment which pervades these verses has lifted us into the higher
sphere which will henceforth be our main theme. The beloved was more and
more extolled; in her presence the lover became more and more convinced
of his insignificance; she was worshipped, deified. The overwhelming
emotion, the longing for metaphysical values which dominated the whole
epoch, had reached its highest characteristic, had reached perfection.
It proved the eternal quality of human emotion: the impossibility of
finding satisfaction, the striving towards the infinite; it soared above
its apparent object and sought its consummation in metaphysic. The love
of woman and the mystical love of God were blended in a profounder
devotion; love had become the sole giver of the eternal value and
consolation, yearned for by mortal man. Christianity had taught man to
look up; now his upward gaze lost its rigidity and beheld living
beauty--metaphysical eroticism had been evolved--the canonisation and
deification of woman. The ideal of the troubadours to love the adored
mistress chastely and devoutly from a distance in the hope of receiving
a word of greeting, no longer satisfied the lover; she must become a
divine being, must be enthroned above human joy and sorrow, queen of the
world. Traditional religion was transformed so that a place might be
found in it for a woman.
The reason for the recognition of spiritual love from the moment of its
inception as something supernatural and divine, is obvious. The heart of
man was filled with an emotion hitherto unknown, an emotion which
pointed direct to heaven. The soul, the core of profound Christian
consciousness, had received a new, glad content, rousing a feeling of
such intensity that it could only be compared to the religious ecstasy
of the mystic; man divined that it was the mother of new and great
things--was it not fitting to regard it as divine and proclaim it the
supreme value? The troubadours had known it. Bernart of Ventadour had
sung:
I stand in my lady's sight
In deep devotion;
Approach her with folded hands
In sweet emotion;
Dumbly adoring her,
Humbly imploring her.
Peire Raimon of Toulouse:
I would approach thee on my knees,
Lowly and meek,
I would fare far o'er lands and seas
Thy ruth to seek.
And come to thee--a slave to his lord--
I'd pay thee homage with eyes that mourn,
Until thy mercy I'd implored,
Heedless of laughter, heedless of scorn.
Raimon of Miraval had said, "I am no lover, I am a worshipper," and
Cavalcanti:
My lady's virtue has my blindness riven,
A secret sighing thrills my humbled heart:
When favoured with a sight of her thou art,
Thy soul will spread its wings and soar to heaven.
Peire Vidal:
God called the women close to Him,
Because he saw all good in them.
And:
The God of righteousness endowed
So well thy body and thy mind
That His own radiancy grew blind.
And many a soul that has not bowed
To Him for years in sin enmeshed,
Is by thy grace and charm refreshed.
The beauty of the adored was divine. Bernart of Ventadour wrote:
Her glorious beauty sheds a brilliant ray
On darkest night and dims the brightest day.
Guilhem of Cabestaing:
God has created her without a blemish
Of His own beauty.
Gaucelm Faidit:
The beauty which is God Himself
He poured into a single being.
And Montanhagol, anticipating Dante:
Wherefore I tell you, and my words are true,
From heaven came her beauty, rare and tender,
Her loveliness was wrought in Paradise,
Men's dazzled eyes can scarce support her splendour.
Folquet of Romans:
When I behold her beauty rare,
I'm so confused and startled by her worth,
I ween I am no longer on this earth.
A canzone which has been attributed to Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia and
Dante, reads as follows:
My lady comes and ev'ry lip is silent;
So perfect is her beauty's high estate
That mortal spirit swoons and falls prostrate
Before her glory. And she is so noble:
If I uplift to her my inward eye,
My soul is startled as if death were nigh.
Cavalcanti says:
Round you are flowers, is the tender green,
The sun is not as bright as your dear face,
All nature in her glorious summer-sheen
Has not so fair and beautiful a place,
It pales beside you. Earth has never seen
A thing so full of loveliness and grace.
The perfection which the mere presence of the beloved was supposed to
bestow on the lover, is here conceived more broadly and freely; not only
the lover, but all men are touched and transfigured by her appearance.
The sentiment of the lover aspired to become objective truth. This was
an important stage on the road from the spiritual to the deifying love,
which I have called metaphysical eroticism. Another rung of the ladder
of evolution had been climbed--the mistress had become queen of the
world and goddess, a being enthroned by the side of God. I will again
quote Guinicelli:
Ever as she walks she has a sober grace,
Making bold men abashed and good men glad,
If she delight thee not, thy heart must err,
No man dare look on her, his thoughts being base;
Nay, let me say even more than I have said,
No man could think base thoughts who looked on her.
(D.G. ROSSETTI.)
The same poet in his canzone, _Al Cor Gentil_ says:
"She shines on us as God shines on His angels."
When madonna dies the angels receive her, rejoicing that she has joined
them. The Provençal, Pons of Capduelh, anticipated Dante:
And now we know that the celestial choir
Sings songs of jubilee at her release
From this dull earth; I heard and am at rest;
Who praise His hosts, praise the Eternal Sire.
I know she is in Heaven with the blest,
'Midst flow'rs whose glory time can never dim
Singing God's praise, and blest by seraphim.
Nought but the truth from my glad lips shall fall,
In Heaven she is, enthroned above all.
Folquet of Romans wrote a letter to his beloved, in which he said
amongst other things:
Kneeling in church before God's face,
--A sinner to beseech His grace,--
And for my sins to make amends,--
'Twas you to whom I raised my hands;
Your loveliness alone was there,
My soul knew only of one pray'r.
I fancied "Our Father" framed
My trembling lips, when they exclaimed
Exultant at His sacred shrine:
Oh! Lady! All my soul is thine!
Lady, you have bewitched me with your beauty,
That God I have forgotten and myself.
Cino da Pistoia wrote the following commendatory prayer:
Into thy hands, sweet lady of my soul,
The spirit that is dying I commend;
And which departs so sorrowful that Love
Views it with pity, while dismissing it.
By you to His dominion it was bound,
So firmly, that it since hath had no power
To call on Him but thus: Oh, mighty Lord,
Whate'er thou wilt of me, Thy will is mine.
(_Transl. by_ C. LYELL.)
Lancelot, one of the great mediaeval lovers, possessed a lock of
Guinevere's hair, which he prized above all the relics of the saints.
When he parted from his mistress (whom he had loved not only
spiritually) he fell on his knees before the door of her chamber and
prayed as if "he were kneeling before the altar."
Spiritual love was obviously acquiring a religious tinge. The mistress
took the place of God; her grace was the source of all joy and
consolation; she led the souls of the dying to eternal life. God had
yielded His position to her, she had stepped to His side, nay, above
Him. With the curse of the Church still clinging to her, she had been
remoulded by man's emotion into a perfect, a celestial being. The God of
Christianity was in danger--would the new religion of cultured minds,
the religion of woman (unwilling to tolerate any other God beside her)
replace the religion of the masses? Was a reformation imminent? Would
the traditional religion be transformed into metaphysical eroticism,
dethroning God, enthroning a goddess? It is impossible to say in what
direction the spiritual history of Europe would have developed if Dante
had been merely a metaphysical lover, and not also an orthodox
theologian; if instead of penetrating to the vision of the divine
secret, he had fainted before the face of Beatrice....
The religion of woman and the dominant religion came to terms. This
compromise was possible because the Christian pantheon included a female
deity who, although she had not hitherto played a prominent part, held
an exceptional position: this was Mary, the Mother of the Redeemer. From
A.D. 400 to A.D. 1200, her rank had been on a level with the rank of the
antique goddesses; now the new emotion enveloped and revivified her. The
rigid, soulless image with the golden circle round the head slowly
melted into sweet womanhood. In Italy this sentiment inspired wonderful
paintings of the Madonna, and was responsible for the development of
portraiture in general. The hold of the overwhelming tradition was
broken. Rejecting the universal conviction that the historical Mary had
resembled the Mary of Byzantine art, the artist, under the dominion of
his woman-worship--which surpassed and re-valued all things--drew his
inspiration from the fulness of life. I do not agree with Thode that we
are indebted to the legend of St. Francis for the modern soulful and
highly individualised art. Its source must have been the strongest
feeling of the most cultured minds, and that was undoubtedly spiritual
love. The Jesuit Beissel wrote with deep regret: "Every master almost
formed his own conception of Mary, but in such a way that the hieratic
severity of earlier times disappeared but slowly." And he continued: "It
is true, the artists' models were the noble ladies of their period; not
only on account of their kindly smiling faces, but also on account of
the charming coquetry with which their hands drew their cloaks across
the bosom." And the art-historian, Male, says: "It is a remarkable fact
that in the thirteenth century the legend, or the story, of the Virgin
Mary was depicted on the doors of all our (_i.e._, French) cathedrals."
The difference between the Catholic and the Protestant world-principles
is strongly marked in this connection. Catholicism with its striving for
absolute uniformity, acknowledging no individual differences, but eager
to shape all life and all doctrines in harmony with one definite ideal,
very consistently pronounced one single, historical woman to be divine,
and made her the object of universal worship. This dogma had to be
rigid, immutable, and almost meaningless. Again, the historic and pagan
principle of Catholicism was maintained; a unique event in the history
of the world was immortalised and systematised and all new religious
conceptions were excluded. Catholicism invariably places all really
important events in the past, even in a quite definite period of the
past, a period unassailable by historical criticism. But with the
commencement of individual intellectual life the uniform, ecclesiastical
image of the Madonna gradually gained life and individuality. Just as
according to Protestant teaching every soul must establish its
individual relationship with God (which is subject to change because
individuality is not excluded as it is in Catholicism), so the
imaginative emotionalist created his own Queen of Heaven. Frequently he
was still under the impression--this was especially the case with
monks--that he was worshipping the ecclesiastical deity, when he had
long been praying to a metaphysical conception of his own. The great
Italian art since the fourteenth century, as well as the Neo-Latin and
German cults of the Virgin Mary were, though apparently still orthodox,
in their innermost essence the outcome of a personal desire for love,
and had therefore abandoned the teaching of the Church and become
Protestant. The fact that the so-called Protestant Church looked askance
at Mary, and that the rather coarse-minded Luther said, in his
annoyance: "Popery has made a goddess of Mary, and is therefore guilty
of idolatry," does not contradict my statement. The true Queen of Heaven
was a conception of the artist and lover, incomprehensible to those who
were only thinkers and moralists.
Through the legitimation of a divine woman open enmity between the
religion of woman and the religion of the Church was avoided. A woman
had stepped between God and humanity as mediator, intercessor and
redeemer. Every metaphysically-loving soul could conceive her as it
pleased, could love her and pray to her without being a heretic and
worshipper of the devil. Matfre had complained that men
Abandoned in her beauty revel
And unawares adore the devil.--
but now a means had been found to adore the beloved, and yet remain
faithful to God. Once in a way it was remembered that the adored,
strictly speaking, was the Mother of God--if for no other reason, for
fear of the Inquisition which the Dominicans had founded and placed
under the special patronage of Mary--her bodyguard as it were, defending
her from the onslaught of minds all too worldly. Very rarely the adored
earthly woman was identified with the official Queen of Heaven--(this
may have been done occasionally by monks); sometimes as in the case of
Michelangelo and Guinicelli, the beloved was the sole goddess; other
poets, among whom we may include Dante and Goethe, conceived her as
enthroned by the side of Mary.
At this point I must interrupt my argument, and briefly sketch the
position occupied by Mary in the western world from the dawn of
Christianity.
_(b) The Queen of Heaven._
During the first two hundred years Mary did not occupy a prominent place
in the Christian communities; even in the fourth century she was still
regarded as a human woman and denied divinity by St. Chrysostom, who
reproached her with vainglory. But in proportion as Christ transcended
humanity, and was more dogmatically and formally interpreted by the
Church--more especially the Greek Church--the desire for a mediator
between the wrathful Deity and sinful humanity grew more pronounced, a
mediator who, although a human being, could be endowed after the manner
of the ancient demi-gods with super-human virtues. The Mother of the
Saviour gradually assumed this position. She had been an earthly woman,
born of earthly parents, and would be able to understand human needs and
wishes, and she had become the Mother of God. Would not her intercession
have weight with the Son of God? Simultaneously with the growing
recognition of asceticism, the doctrine of the immaculate conception
gained ground; in the course of time this moment was more and more
emphasised, and virginity was set up as an ideal.
St. Athanasius (fourth century) had written: "What God did to Mary is
the glory of all virgins; for they are attached as virginal saplings to
her who is the root." At the close of the fourth century a long and
bitter controversy arose over the question as to whether Mary had
remained a virgin after the birth of Jesus. St. Ambrose, St. Jerome and
St. Augustine were in favour of this new doctrine. St. Ambrose, the
founder of Western music, was the first to praise her perfection in the
Latin tongue, and St. Augustine in his treatise _De Natura et Gratia_,
maintained that she was the only human being born without original sin.
This was the first important step towards the stripping of the Saviour's
mother of her humanity, and establishing her as a divine being. St.
Irenaeus contrasted Eve, the bringer of sin, with Mary, the second Eve,
the bringer of salvation, and St. Ambrose said: "From Eve we inherited
damnation through the fruit of the tree; but Mary has brought us
salvation through the gift of the tree, for Christ too, hung on the tree
like a fruit."
Hitherto Mary had not been worshipped; all prayers had been addressed to
God and to Christ. The idea of approaching her in prayer appeared for
the first time in a pamphlet entitled "On the Death of Mary," written
about the end of the fourth century, and Gregory of Nazianz pictured
Mary in Heaven, caring for the welfare of humanity. The fourth and fifth
centuries produced the first hymns to the Virgin, written in Syriac; but
orthodox bishops objected to her deification; St. Epiphanus (end of
fourth century) said: "Let us honour Mary by all means, but let us
worship only the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost."
This was the position of the evangelical and historical Mary before the
famous and decisive Council of Ephesus.
There is a very important fact which must not be overlooked. All the
nations dwelling on the shores of the Mediterranean, Semites, and
Egyptians, as well as Greeks and Romans, had been accustomed to the
worship of female deities. In the minds of the ancient peoples, woman,
the symbol of sex, had always been endowed with qualities of magic and
mystery. There was something supernatural in her power of bringing forth
a living specimen of the race, and in all cults the maternal woman
occupied a very important position. Had Christianity suddenly destroyed
this ancient and natural need? We know that the Church had assimilated a
great number of antique superstitions; nor were the female deities
sacrificed. The great Asiatic Mothers had not been forgotten; the very
ancient Babylonian Istar (Astarte), Rhea Kybele of Asia Minor, and above
all the Egyptian Isis, still lived in the heart of man,--subconsciously,
probably--as lofty, sacred memories, but nevertheless influencing his
life. The Egyptian Isis with Horus in her lap is the direct model of the
Madonna with the Child. She represented earth, bringing forth fruit
without fertilisation. "This religious custom (the worship of Isis),"
says Flinders Petrie, "exerted a powerful influence on nascent
Christianity. It is not too much to say that without the Egyptians we
should have had no Madonna in our creed. The cult of Isis was widely
spread at the time of the first emperors, when it was fashionable all
over the Roman Empire; when later on it merged into that other great
religious movement, and fashion and conviction could be combined, its
triumph was assured."
Advancing Christianity had depopulated the national pantheon. There must
have been a great sense of loss, especially among the lower classes, and
it does not require much psychological insight to realise that it was
the lack of female deities which more especially roused a feeling of
anxiety and distress. The masses were yearning for a goddess, and it was
at Ephesus, the classical seat of the hundred-breasted Diana, that the
stolen divinity was restored to them. The theologians were divided into
three camps. While some of them regarded Mary merely as "the mother of
man" others acknowledged her as the "Mother of God," and Nestorius
suggested as a compromise the title "Mother of Christ." At the synod of
Alexandria, in the year of grace 430, and at the council of Ephesus in
431, Nestorius was found guilty of blasphemy and deprived of his
bishopric. Henceforth Mary was [Greek: Theotochos], the "Mother of God,"
and her worship was sanctioned by the Church. "Through Thee the Holy
Trinity has been glorified," exclaimed Cyril joyfully, "through Thee the
Cross of the Saviour has been raised! Through Thee the angels triumphed,
the devils were driven back; the tempter was beaten and human nature
uplifted to Heaven; through Thee all intelligent creatures who were
committing idolatry, have learned the truth!" Loud rejoicing filled the
streets of Ephesus. When the judgment passed on Nestorius was announced,
the people exclaimed: "The enemy of the Holy Virgin has been overcome;
glory be to the great, the divine Mother of God!" The highest authority
in the land had re-established the public worship of the great goddess,
who had for many years been worshipped in secrecy. The ancient paganism
had triumphed over the spiritual intuition of the loftier minds.
According to ancient custom sacrifices were offered at Mary's shrine;
the second epoch of her history had begun.
In the East the worship of female divinities was older and more
spontaneous than in the Western world, and thus the cult of Mary existed
in the Orient long before it penetrated to Italy and thence into the
newly Christianised countries. The Virgin, who for the first few hundred
years had held a clearly defined position in evangelical history, had
become an independent object of worship. Festivals were held in her
honour; churches were dedicated to her; the will of the people triumphed
in the litany; art took possession of the grateful subject. The
tendency to make Mary the equal of Christ grew steadily. Metaphors
originally intended for Christ alone were used indifferently for either.
We constantly find her addressed as the "archetype, the light of the
world, the vine, the mediator, the source of eternal life, etc." Finally
she ceased being regarded as a passive participator in the work of
salvation, as the Mother of the Saviour, and was accredited with
independent saving power. John of Damascus (eighth century) first called
Mary [Greek: sôteira tou chosmou], and soon after she was styled
"Saviour of the World" in the Occident also. With this the cult of Mary
had reached its third stage, the stage which interests us; she had
become the object of metaphysical love. But before dealing with this
third stage, we must glance, in passing, at the ancient Teutonic tribes.
They, too, worshipped goddesses and sacred women; virginity, a virtue
not appreciated by the Orientals, here stood in high repute. According
to Tacitus and others, the Teutons looked upon the Virgin as a
mysterious being, approaching divinity more closely than all others.
Thus there was here, perhaps, more than on the shores of the
Mediterranean, a favourable soil for the cult of Mary. The
characteristics of Holda and Freya, as well as their perfect beauty,
were transferred to Mary, and Mary's name was substituted for the names
of the old auxiliary goddesses. In the oldest German evangelical poems
Mary does not yet rank as a divinity, she is merely extolled as the most
perfect of all earth-born women. In the "Heliand" (about A.D. 830) she
is called "the most beautiful of all women, the loveliest of all
maidens"; and the monk Otfried, of Weissenburg (860), calls her, "Of all
women to God the most pleasing, the white jewel, the radiant maid."
Mary had now taken her place by the side of God, and was commonly
addressed as divine. Anselm of Canterbury explains: "God is the Father
of all created things, Mary the Mother of all things recreated.... God
begat the creator of the world, Mary gave birth to its Saviour." Peter
of Blois declared that the Virgin was the only mediatress between Christ
and humanity. "We were sinners and afraid of the wrath of the Father,
for He is terrible; but we have the Virgin, in whom there is nothing
terrible, for in her is the fulness of mercy and purity." The twelfth
century produced the _Ave Maria_, the angelic salutation, the principal
prayer to Mary, which was introduced into all churches. The Italian
Franciscan monk, Bonaventura, and Peter Damiani, were above all others
instrumental in spreading the worship of the Virgin, and Damiani said of
her: "To Thee has been given all power in heaven and on earth." The
fresco of the Camposanto at Pisa, ascribed to Orcagna, shows the
transfigured Virgin sitting by the side of Christ, not below Him. The
numerous legends in which Mary, often regardless of justice and
propriety, delivers her faithful worshippers from all manner of dangers,
were written during the same period. One of the most famous of these is
the legend of Theophilus, the forerunner of Faust. In a German version
(by Brun of Schönebeck) dating from the thirteenth century, Theophilus
abjures God and all things divine, with the sole exception of Mary,
wherefore she saves him from eternal damnation. This poem therefore
shows us Mary as absolutely opposed to God.
We have now arrived at the third stage of the cult of Mary; the new,
spiritual love, translated into metaphysics, was projected on her; she
was approached by her worshippers with the ardent love which hitherto
had been the prerogative of earthly women. The two currents, the one
arising in ecclesiastical tradition, and the other in the soul of the
metaphysical lover, had met; the genuine spiritual cult of Mary was the
creation of the great metaphysical lovers, who existed not only in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but are met not infrequently later
on; man's irresistible need to raise woman above him and worship her,
created the true Madonna, for whose sake romantic souls of all times
have "returned home" into the fold of the Church, the true Madonna who
at heart is alien to the principles of the Church, but is re-born daily
in the soul of the metaphysical lover. The hierarchy knew how to take
advantage of and control this adoring love; the metaphysical lover
raised his mistress above humanity and prayed before her shrine;
religion said: "The celestial woman whom you may lovingly adore is here,
with me. All you have to do is to call her by the name I have given her,
and the kingdom of Heaven will be yours."
But on the other hand Mary represents to-day, and doubtless will do for
a long time to come, a dogmatically acknowledged deity, recognised by
the spirit of Protestantism as a remnant of Paganism, and duly detested;
the masses in Italy and Spain pray to-day to her image, as in bygone
days the masses prayed to the images in Greek and Roman temples. This
goddess is unchanging, and from the point of view of the psychologist
uninteresting.
It is not difficult to understand why the two conceptions of Mary (more
especially in the souls of the monks) were so often inextricably
intermingled; circumstances frequently demanded a complete fusion. As
late as in the nineteenth century, a romantic poet, Zacharias Werner,
said:
Oh, sov'reign lady, mistress of my fortune,
And thou, the Queen and ruler of the heavens,
(I cannot keep you sundered and apart.)
I shall endeavour to keep them sundered and apart as far as possible,
for I am only concerned with man's metaphysical emotion of love and its
creation, womanhood deified, and not with Catholic dogmas. With this
object in view, I will return to the poets previously quoted, and
continue the unfolding of the process of deification. As a rule the
metaphysical lovers were content with immortalising their feelings in,
very often, excellent verses, raising the beloved mistress above the
earth and worshipping her as the culmination of beauty and perfection.
The quite unusual craving to give her a place in the eternal structure
of the cosmos animated only one poet, Dante, who, combining the Catholic
striving for unity with spontaneous, magnificent woman-worship, created
a masterpiece which is unique in literature.
Typical among the later Provençals was Guirot Riquier. Several of his
poems which have been preserved to us make it impossible to say whether
they are addressed to an earthly woman or to the Queen of Heaven; these
poems mark, in a sense, a period of transition. They are exceedingly
vague, and it is not worth while to translate them; but as they are
dated it is interesting to watch the poet's love growing more and more
spiritual and religious, to see him gradually deserting his earthly love
for the Lady of Heaven. In one poem he prays to his lady "who is
worshipped by all true lovers," to teach him the right way of loving. In
the next he repents his all too earthly passion:
I often thought I was of true love singing,
And knew not that to love my heart was blind,
And folly was as love itself enshrined.
But now such love in all my soul is ringing,
That though to love and praise her I aspire
As is her meed--in vain is my desire.
Henceforth her love alone shall be my guide
And my new hope in that great love abide.
For her great love the uttermost shall proffer
Of honour, wealth, and earthly joy and bliss,
With her to love, my heart will never miss
Those who no gifts like her gifts have to offer.
She the fulfilment is of my desire,
Therefore I vow myself her true esquire;
She'll love me in return--my splendid meed--
If I but love aright in word and deed.
and one of his rather more religious songs ends as follows:
Without true love there is on earth no peace,
Love gives us wisdom, faith which will not swerve,
A noble mind and willingness to serve.
How rare a thing on earth in perfect ease!
To Thee, oh Virgin! Mother of all love,
I dedicate this song; if thou deniest
Me not, thou shall be my "sweet bliss." With Christ
I pray Thee, intercede for me above.
In this song, then, he calls Mary "his sweet bliss" (_bel deport_), a
name which he had previously given to a certain countess with whom he
had been in love. In the next poem, in which earthly love and love of
the Madonna are again brought into juxta-position, he commends himself
"to the Virgin, the sublime mother of love, on whom all my happiness
depends." One of his poems which begins in quite an earthly strain, ends
thus:
I feel no jealousy; for he whose soul
Is filled with yearning for his heavenly love,
Has purest happiness; he is her serf,
And he has all things that his heart can crave.
But long before this, in one of his very worldly poems there is a sudden
outburst, addressed to the Madonna: "He who does not serve the Mother of
God, knows not the meaning of love." Excellent proof of this intimate
connection between earthly and Madonna love is found in the poems of the
trouvere Ruteboeuf, who calls Mary his "very sweet lady."
Lanfranc Cigala wrote genuine love-songs to the Virgin. The following
are two stanzas from one of his poems:
I worship a celestial maid,
Serene and wondrously adorned;
And all she does is well; arrayed
In noble love and gentleness.
Her smile is bliss to all who mourn,
Her tender love is happiness,
And for her kiss the world I scorn.
Lady of Heaven, Thy heart incline
To me, and untold bliss is mine.
By day and night my only thought
Art, Mary, Thou. I am distraught
Say many men, for few can gauge
The ardour which consumes my soul.
I care not that they say bereft
I am of sense; the world I've left,
To worship Thee, love's spring and goal.
But other poems written by Cigala are unmistakably addressed to the
celestial Madonna; some of them seem to be written in a penitential
mood; he almost seems to repent of his former passionate adoration. The
same poet, in his love-songs, uses all the metaphors which are commonly
used for Mary (or for Christ), "root and climax, flower, fruit and seed
of all goodness."
A little older is an erotic hymn to Mary by Peire Guillem of Luserna; I
quote a few stanzas:
Thy praise is happiness unmarred,
For he who praises Thee, proclaims the truth,
Thou art the flower of beauty, love and ruth,
Full of compassion, with all grace bedight,
From Thy white hands we gather all delight.
The love of Mary had usurped the peculiar property of the love of woman:
it had become the source of poetic and artistic inspiration.
The songs of Aimeric of Peguilhan resemble those of Cigala; the former
bewails the decline of the service of woman; he sings of the "root and
crown of all noble things," but it is not quite clear whether he is
addressing an earthly or a heavenly lady. "Suffer my love, which asks
for no reward!" The terms, "friends" and "lovers" (_amans_) of the
Virgin are with these poets convertible terms, and the Virgin is styled
"the true friend" (_i.e._, the beloved).
Guilhem of Autpol wrote a fine poem to the Queen of Heaven, beginning:
Thou hope of all sad hearts who yearn for love,
Thou stream of loveliness, thou well of grace,
Thou dove of peace in fret and restlessness,
Thou ray of light to those who, lightless, grope.
Thou house of God, thou garden of sweet shades,
Rest without ceasing, refuge of the sad,
Bliss without mourning, flow'r that never fades,
Alien to death, and shelter in the mad
Whirlpool of life, to all who seek thy port.
Lady of Heaven, in whom all hearts rejoice,
Thou roseate dawn and light of Paradise!
Perdigon, among many worldly songs, wrote one to the _regina d'auteza e
de senhoria_, which might be translated thus:
Supreme ruler of the world,
Thy grace sustains
And maintains
The world.
Thou fragrant rose, thou fruitful vine,
Thou wert the chosen vessel of
Mercy divine.
Unsurpassed in the fusion of his earthly and his celestial lady was
Folquet de Lunel. Some of his poems cannot be classed with any
certainty.
The first poem which obtained a prize at the Academy of Mastersingers of
Toulouse was a hymn to Mary.
This very genuine sentimentalism appears strange to us; we cannot enter
into the feelings of that period. A modern philologist, Karl Appel,
regards Jaufre Rudel's pathetic songs, addressed by him to the Countess
of Tripoli:
Oh, love in lands so far away,
My heart is yearning, yearning....
as songs to the Madonna; but it is a matter of indifference to the lover
whether his heart's impulse, translated into metaphysic, is projected on
an unknown Countess of Tripoli, or a still more unknown Lady of Heaven.
It is not the loved woman who is of importance--what do we know of the
ladies who inspired the exquisite mediaeval poetry? They have long been
dust, and we may be sure that their perfection was no greater than is
the perfection of their grand-daughters. But the love of the poets is
alive to-day, an eternal document of the human heart, representing one
of the great phases through which the relationship between man and woman
has passed.
The following are a few stanzas by the German minnesinger, Steinmar,
which were later on adapted to the Holy Virgin:
In summer-time how glad am I
When over lea or down
A country lass mine eyes espy,
Of maidens all the crown.
Oh! Paradise! How glad am I
When o'er the heavenly down
God and God's Mother I espy,
Of women all the crown.
The Italian poets, far more profound than the Provençals, saw a goddess
in the beloved (whom they always addressed as Madonna), and humbled
themselves before her. Social differences, which played such a prominent
part in the North, are here ignored. The impecunious poet no longer
extols the princess, the wife of his lord and master. There is no
question of such a relationship; the poet is a free citizen of the town,
subject only to the emotion of the heart, and his song carries its own
reward. It has ceased to be the married woman's privilege to be lauded
and extolled; the maiden of unaristocratic origin, who to the poets
represents more strongly the ideas of purity and perfection, has usurped
her place. We know that Lapo Gianni, Dino Frescobaldi, Guinicelli and
Dante worshipped a maiden untouched by as much as a sensuous thought,
and Frescobaldi decided the question whether it were better to love a
married woman or a maiden, in favour of the latter. The feeling of those
lovers was pure and lofty, and they had the power of giving it perfect
expression.
In a canzone, the authorship of which is ascribed to both Cavalcanti and
Cino da Pistoia, it is said of the beloved dead that God needed her
presence to perfect Heaven, and that all the saints now worship her.
She was a miracle of perfection while she was yet on earth, but now:
Look thou into the pleasure wherein dwells
Thy lovely lady, who is in heaven crowned,
Who is herself thy hope in heaven, the while
To make thy mem'ry hallowed she prevails.
Of thee she entertains the blessed throngs,
And says to them, while yet my body thrave
On earth, I gat much honour which he gave,
Commending me in his commended songs.
(_Transl. by_ D.G. ROSSETTI.)
At the conclusion of his finest poem, "Al Cor Gentil," Guinicelli, next
to Dante doubtless the greatest poet of the Middle Ages, says: "God will
ask me after my death: 'How could'st thou have loved aught but Me?' And
I will reply: 'She came from Thy realm and bore the semblance of an
angel. Therefore in loving her, I was not unfaithful to Thee!'" Here we
have the perfection of metaphysical eroticism: the beloved woman is God;
he who loves her, loves God in her.
Cavalcanti maintained in a poem that an image of the Madonna actually
bore the features of his lady.
Guido, an image of my lady dwells
At San Michele, in Orto, consecrate,
And daily worshipped. Fair, in holy state,
She listens to the tale each sinner tells.
And among them who come to her, who ails
The most, on him the most does blessing fall;
She bids the fiend men's bodies abdicate;
Over the curse of blindness she prevails,
And heals sick languors in the public squares....
(_Transl. by_ D.G. ROSSETTI.)
And Guido Orlandi replies to him from the ecclesiastical standpoint, as
to a lost man: "Had'st thou been speaking of Mary, thou would'st have
spoken the truth. But now I must bewail thy errors."
A complete blending of sensuality and Mary-worship was achieved in an
Italian poem of the fifteenth century. The author of this poem addressed
Mary as "queen of my heart," and "blossom of loveliness," and goes on to
say: "I can tell by your gestures and your face that you respond to my
love; when you look at me, you smile, and when you sigh, your eyes are
full of tenderness.... Sometimes, in the evening, I stand below your
balcony; you hear my sighs, but you make no reply.... When I gaze at
your beauty, I burn with love, but when I think of your cruelty, I call
on death to release me." In this poem we have a caricature of
metaphysical eroticism.
In the sonnets of Petrarch, metaphysical love has become stereotyped.
Adoration has become a phrase (as Cupid has become a phrase with the
earlier poets). It is obvious that he loves Laura because the play on
the word Laura and _lauro_ (laurel) caught his fancy. I can find no
spontaneous feeling in the famous Canzoniero; all I see is erudition and
perfection of form. But among the few sincere specimens there is one
beautiful poem addressed to Mary: "_Vergine bella che di sol vestida!_"
which is not without erotic warmth. But the singer and humanist
expresses himself judiciously:
Oh, Thou, the Queen of Heaven and our goddess
(If it be fitting such a phrase to use).
So far we have observed the current which, emanating from the beloved
woman, lifted her into supernal regions and endowed her with
perfection--the mistress is stripped of everything earthly, the longing
which can never be stilled on earth, soars heavenward. Now we will
examine the opposite current; the current which emanates from the
Madonna of dogma, the Lady of Heaven who is the same to all men, in her
last stage, that is to say when she is finally enthroned by the side of
God. Many a monk--earthly love being denied to him--was driven to a
purely spiritual, metaphysical love by the fact of his being permitted
to love the Lady of Heaven without hesitation or remorse. She was the
fairest of women, and he was at liberty to interpret the meaning of "the
fairest" in any sense he chose.
The climax of the emotional worship of the ecclesiastical Mary was
reached by St. Bernard, the _Doctor Marianus_ mentioned on a previous
occasion. He was the author of sermons and homilies in honour of Mary,
and has been instrumental in dogmatising her worship by placing her side
by side with the Saviour. "It was more fitting that both sexes should
take part in the renewal of mankind," he says, "because both were
instrumental in bringing about the fall...." "Man who fell through
woman, can be raised only by her." "Humanity kneels at Thy feet, for the
comfort of the wretched, the release of the prisoners, the delivery of
the condemned, the salvation of the countless sons of Adam depend on a
word from Thy lips. Oh! Virgin, hasten to reply! Speak the word for
which the earth, the nethermost hell, and the heavens even, are waiting;
yea, the King and Ruler of the universe, greatly as He desires Thy
loveliness, awaits Thy consent, in which He has laid the salvation of
the world." Basing his description on the Revelation of St. John the
Divine, he draws her picture as follows: "Brilliant and white and
dazzling are the garments of the Virgin. She is so full of light and
radiance that there is not the least darkness about her, and no part of
her may be described as less brilliant, or not glowing with intense
light." And with increasingly pronounced erotic emphasis, passing from
the Church dogma of salvation to passionate fervour, he goes on to say:
"A garden of sacred delight art Thou, oh, Mary! In it we gather flowers
of manifold joys as often as we reflect on the fulness of sweetness
which through Thee was poured out on the world.... Right lovely art
Thou, oh, perfect One! A bed of heavenly spices and precious flowers of
all virtues, filling the house of the Lord with sweet perfume! Oh! Mary,
Thou violet of humility! Thou lily of chastity! Thou rose of love!" etc.
St. Bernard inaugurated that extraordinary blending of eroticism with
half-crazy, inconceivable allegories and fantasies, which lasted for
centuries. Here, again, we perceive the ideal of metaphysical eroticism,
which in the case of a loyal son of the Church could only refer to the
official Queen of Heaven, and consisted partly of the genuine emotion of
love, partly of allegorically constructed connections with the Church
dogma.
St. Bernard's emotional outbursts were comprehended and admired. His
authority was sufficient to override all scruples that might have stood
in the way of this downright description of Mary's charms. He became the
model for all her later worshippers; Suso, for instance, often quotes
him, and Brother Hans called him _the harpist and fiddler of her
praise_.
The great ecstatic poet, Jacopone da Todi, sang Mary's praise as
follows:
Hail, purest of virgins,
Mother and maid,
Gentle as moonlight,
Lady of Aid!
I greet thee, life's fountain,
Fruitladen vine!
Infinite mercy
Thou sheddest on thine!
Hope's fairest sunshine,
Balm's well serene!
I claim a dance with thee,
All the world's Queen!
Gate of beatitude!
--All sins forgiven,--
Lead us to paradise,
Sweet breeze of heaven!
Thou pointest us upward
Where angels adore,
White lily of gentleness
Thy grace I implore.
Mirror of Cherubim!
Seraphim laud thy grace,
All things in heaven and earth
Ring with thy praise!
The spiritual love of Mary especially appealed to the German temper.
Among the adoring monks Suso deserves particular mention. He laid great
stress on the difference between _high_ love and _low_ love. "Low love
begins with rapture and ends with pain, but high love begins with grief,
and is transformed into ecstasy, until finally the lovers are united in
eternity." He was keenly conscious of the older motive of the cult of
Mary, namely, the need of a gentle mediator between man and the
inaccessible Deity. "Oh, thou! God's chosen delight, thou dulcet, golden
song of the Eternal Wisdom, suffer me, a poor sinner, to tell thee a
little of my sufferings. My soul prostrates itself before thee with
timorous eyes, shamefaced. Oh! thou Mother of all mercies, I ween that
neither my soul nor the soul of any other poor sinner needs a mediator,
or permission to come to thy throne, for thou, thyself, art the
intercessor for all sinners." Compared to his forerunner, St. Bernard,
Suso exhibits a marked degree of intimacy in his relationship with Mary.
He describes heaven as a kind of flowered meadow, and Mary keeping
court, like any earthly princess. "Now go and behold the sweet Queen of
Heaven, whom you love so profoundly, leading the procession of the
celestial throng in great gladness and stateliness, inclining to her
lover with roses and lilies! Behold her wonderful beauty shedding light
and joy on the heavenly hosts! Eya! Look up to her who giveth gladness
to heart and mind; behold the Mother of Mercy resting her eyes, her
tender, pitiful eyes, on you and all sinners, powerfully protecting her
beloved child." The whole sixteenth chapter of the _Booklet of Eternal
Wisdom_ is an ardent hymn to the Madonna, almost comparable to St.
Bernard's prayer to Mary in Dante's _Divine Comedy_. It was written
about the time of Dante's death, not very long, therefore, after the
composition of the last chapters of the _Paradise_.
_The Life of Suso_ (the first German biography ever written) evidences
his adoration for the Lady of Heaven: "It was customary in his country,
Swabia, for the young men to go to their sweethearts' houses on New
Year's Eve, singing songs until they received from the maidens a chaplet
in return. This custom so pleased his young and ardent heart that he,
too, went on the eve of the New Year to his eternal love, to beg her for
a gift. Before daybreak he repaired to the statue which represented the
Virginal Mother pressing her tender child, the beautiful Eternal Wisdom,
to her bosom, and kneeling down before her, with a sweet, low singing of
his soul, he chanted a sequence to her, imploring her to let him win a
chaplet from her Child...." "He then said to the Eternal Wisdom" (and it
is uncertain whether he is addressing the mother or the child): "Thou
art my love, my glad Easter day, the summer-joy of my heart, my sweet
hour; thou art the love which my young heart alone worships, and for the
sake of which it has scorned earthly love. Give me a guerdon, then, my
heart's delight, and let me not go away from thee empty-handed."
_With a sweet, low singing of his soul_, this worshipper approached the
statue of the Queen of Heaven. This is love of woman undisguised, it
merely has a religious undertone. Other secular merry-makings were
adapted by Suso to his celestial mistress, as, for instance, the
planting of the may-tree, and he repeatedly makes use of similes and
metaphors borrowed from the chivalrous service of woman. He frequently
alludes to himself as "the servant of the Eternal Wisdom"; the meaning
of this expression is apparently intentionally obscured, but it has a
savour of the feminine. Suso pictured himself, after the manner of
lovers, with a chaplet of roses on his brow. In his _Life_ there is a
passage unsurpassed by the best of the minnesingers: "In the golden
summer-time when all the tender little flowers had opened their buds, he
gathered none until he had dedicated the first blossoms to his spiritual
love, the gentle, flower-like, rosy maiden and Mother of God; when it
seemed to him that the time had come, he culled the flowers with many
loving thoughts, carried them into his cell and wove them into a
garland; and after he had done so, he went into the choir, or into Our
Lady's Chapel, prostrated himself before his dear lady, and placed the
sweet garland on her head, hoping that she would not scorn her servant's
offering, as she was the most wondrous flower herself, and the
summer-joy of his heart."
Doubtless we here have an analogy to the religious feeling of the
mystics. The metaphysical lover is still under the impression that he is
worshipping the Mary of the Catholic Church; but as in the case of the
mystic the Christ of dogma is transformed into the divine spark in his
own soul, so the love of Mary has become undogmatic and pure
woman-worship, the ideal of the great lovers of that age.
Another prominent Madonna-worshipper was Conrad of Würzburg (died 1278).
He began his career as a minnesinger, but later on entered a monastery.
He was the author of a very extensive, and in part, poetical collection
of songs in praise of the Queen of Heaven. "The Golden Smithy" is an
interesting instance of the mingling of genuine metaphysical eroticism
and traditional Church doctrines. Conrad inextricably mingles all the
Biblical allegories more or less applicable to Mary, the stories of the
Gospels, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, etc., with his own
emotions, and thus creates a world of feeling which, though in many
respects exaggerated, still represents in its quaint unity something
entirely novel and unique:
Thy glorious form,
Though by beauty all envested,
Never passion has suggested
Nor has lit unholy fire
In man's heart, that gross desire
From thy purity should spring.
He, too, describes the celestial Paradise as a lovely garden, in which
Mary walks as queen, and he says of her celestial maidens, (perhaps a
reminiscence of the mythological German swan-maidens):
Thy white hand with blossoms
Their chaplets enhances,
Thou show'st them the dances
Of God's Paradise.
'Mid radiant skies
Thou gather'st heavenly roses.
The Italian Franciscan monk Giacomo of Verona also wrote poems to the
"Queen of the Heavenly Meadows". "On the right hand of Christ sits Mary,
more lovely than the flowers in the meadows and the half-opened
rose-buds. Before her face stand the heavenly hosts singing jubilant
songs in her praise, but she adorns her knights with garlands and gives
them roses." Just as Pons of Capduelh describes the transfiguration of
his earthly mistress, Jacopone describes Mary's ascent into Heaven,
where she is received by the angels singing songs of jubilee, their
_sanctus, sanctus, sanctus_, replaced by a joyful _sancta, sancta,
sancta_--a goddess has been received in the place of God.
Gottfried of Strassburg, the author of the sensuous and passionate epic
poem "Tristan and Isolde," composed a long poem in honour of Mary
couched in the well-known terms of the loving worshipper:
Thou vale of roses,--violet-dell,
Thou joy that makest hearts to swell,
Eternal well
Of valour; Queen of Heaven!
Thou rosy dawn, thou morning-red,
Thou steadfast friend when hope has fled,
The living bread,
Oh! Lady, hast thou given.
Thou sheen of flow'rs with love alight,
Thou bridal crown, all maids' delight,
Thou art bedight
With heaven's golden splendour!
Thou of all sweetness sweetest shine,
Thou sweeter than the sweetest wine,
The sweetness thine,
Is my salvation ever.
Thou art a potion sweet of love,
Sweetly pervading heaven above,
To sailors rough
Sang syrens sweeter never.
Thou enterest through eye and ear,
Senses and soul pervading,
Thou givest to the heart great cheer,
A guerdon dear,
A glory never fading.
The poet who wrote of Isolde's love potion here calls the Queen of
Heaven a _potion sweet of love_, a strange metaphor to use in connection
with the Mary of dogma. Another characteristic frequently alluded to is
her _sweet perfume_, an attribute which we to-day do not look upon as
exclusively celestial.
Quaintly delicate and tender are the love-songs of Brother Hans, an
otherwise unknown monk of the fourteenth century. He himself tells us
that he deserted his earthly mistress for the Queen of Heaven. Perhaps
the dualism between earthly and transcendent love has never been
expressed more clearly than by him; for in his case the worshipping love
did not gradually lead up to Mary, the essence of womanhood, but an
earthly love had to be killed so that the pure heavenly love could live.
Mary! Gentle mistress mine!
I humbly kneel before you;
All my heart and soul are thine.
And:
Oh, Mary! Secret fountain,
Closed garden of delight,
The Prince of Heaven mirrors
Him in thy beauty bright.
But after describing all the joys of heaven, Brother Hans comes to the
conclusion that a man knows about as much of celestial matters as an ox
knows of discant singing.
His relationship to Mary is tender, intimate and familiar:
Within my heart concealed
There is a secret cell;
At nightfall and at daybreak
My lady there does dwell.
The mistress of the house is she,
I feel her love and care about.
If she denies herself to me,
Methinks the mistress has gone out.
In another poem he prays to Mary to allow him to tear off a small piece
of her robe, so that he may keep himself warm with it in the winter.
Like Cino da Pistoia, who commended his dying soul not to God but to his
loved one, Brother Hans commends himself to Mary:
Thus I commend my soul into thy hands,
When it must journey to those unknown lands,
Where roads and paths are new and strange to it.
And:
Oh, come to me, thou Bride of God,
When my faint soul departs from me!
There remains one more motif to consider, a motif which in a way
completes the picture of the celestial lady: As men love and desire the
women of the earth, so God loves the Lady of Heaven. St. Bernard first
expressed this naïve idea, which makes God the Father resemble a little
the ancient Jupiter. "She attracted the eyes of the heavenly hosts, even
the heart of the King went out to her." "He Himself, the supreme King
and Ruler, so much desires thy beauty, that He is awaiting thy consent,
upon which He has decided to save the world. And Him Whom thou
delightest in thy silence, thou wilt delight even more by thy speech,
for He called to thee from Heaven: 'Oh! fairest among women! Let me hear
thy voice!'" etc. Here we have St. Bernard, the rock of orthodoxy,
representing God as Mary's languishing admirer! Suso is irreproachable
in this respect, but Conrad says that the colour of Mary's face was so
bright and made it so lovely,
That even the Eternal Sire
Was filled with sacred fire,
And all the heavenly princes....
Thus, at the turn of the fourteenth century the great celestial change
was complete: By the side of God, nay, even in the place of God, a woman
was enthroned. "The Virgin became the God of the Universe," says
Michelet, a thorough, though rather imaginative expert on the Middle
Ages. The people primitively worshipped idols. The clergy, headed by the
Dominican and Franciscan monks, introduced Lady Days into the calendar
and invented the rosary to facilitate the recital of the _Aves_; secular
orders of knighthood placed themselves under the Virgin's protection (La
Chevalerie de Sainte Marie), but the rarest minds, sublimating the
beloved, raised her into Heaven and worshipped her as divine. The
established religion was compelled to enter into partnership with the
great emotion of the time, metaphysical love, lest it ran the risk of
losing its sway over humanity.
And a feeling was born then which to this day constitutes one of the
striking differences between the Eastern and the Western worlds: the
respect for womanhood. It is based on the woman-worship of secular, and
the Madonna-worship of ecclesiastical circles. It is true that Jesus,
anticipating the intuition of Europe, had taught the divinity of the
human soul and recognised woman--in this respect--as on an equality with
man, but the instincts of Greece and the Eastern nations had proved to
be stronger than his teaching; for twelve hundred years woman was
despised, and more than once the question as to whether or no she had a
soul--in other words, as to whether or no she was a human being--had
come under discussion. The crude and primitively dualistic minds of the
period realised in her sex merely an embodiment of their own sensuality,
the enemy against whom they fought, and to whom they knew themselves
subject. The strongest argument in her favour which the first millenary
could adduce, was the fact that the Saviour of the world had been borne
by a woman, and that consequently her sex had a share in the work of
salvation; the idea that through the "other Eve" a part of the sin of
the first Eve was expiated. But genuine appreciation and respect were
only possible after base sensuality had been contrasted with spiritual
love, whose vehicle again was woman. Now the "eternal-feminine"--
contrasted with the "earthly-feminine"--drew the lovers upwards, and
this new emotion threw such a glamour over the whole sex, that it never
entirely died away; if to-day women are respected and their efforts at
emancipation supported, they are not indebted, as they are sometimes
told, to Christian ethics, but rather to the mundane culture which had
its origin at the courts of the Provençal lords, whose ideals ultimately
became the controlling ideals of Europe, and whose inmost essence still
influences the world.
The evolution of love had obviously arrived at a stage when respect was
considered due to women--though not perhaps to all women. I will not go
to the courts of the great for evidence, but merely relate an episode
from the life of the Dominican friar Suso: "In crossing a field, Suso
met on a narrow path a poor, respectable woman. When he was close to
her, he stepped off the dry path and stood in the mud, waiting for her
to pass. The woman, who knew him, was astonished. 'How is it, Sir,' she
said, 'that you, a venerable priest, are humbly standing aside to allow
me, a poor woman, to pass, when it were far more meet that I should
stand aside and make room for you?' 'Why, my good woman,' replied Suso,
'I like to honour all women for the sake of the gentle Mother of God in
Heaven.'"
It may seem extraordinary, but this absolutely unphilosophical, and
really paradoxical emotion, found an appreciator in the German
philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, the enemy of Christianity. In his _Essence
of Christianity_, as well as in his treatise _On the Cult of Mary_, he
refers to it more than once. "The holy Virgin," he says, "the Mother of
God, is the only divine and positive, that is to say, the only lovable
and poetical figure of Christian mythology, and the only one worthy of
worship; for Mary is the goddess of beauty, the goddess of love, the
goddess of humanity, the goddess of nature, the goddess of freedom from
dogma." Feuerbach is right. The Lady of Heaven stands for the delivery
from dogma, because she had her origin in spontaneous emotion, clothed
with but a few rags of dogma. "The monks vowed the vow of chastity," he
continues in his great work; "they suppressed the sexual impulse, but in
exchange they had the personification of womanhood, of love, in the
Virgin in Heaven. The more their ideal, fictitious representative of her
sex became an object of spontaneous love, the more easily could they
dispense with the women of flesh and blood. The more they emphasised in
their lives the complete suppression of sexuality, the more prominent
became the part which the Virgin played in their emotions; she usurped
in many cases, the place of Christ, and even the place of God."
Feuerbach then explains the need of man to project his noblest
sentiments on Heaven, and lays much stress on the necessity of believing
in the Mother of God, because the love of a child for its mother is the
first strong feeling of man. "Where the faith in the Mother of God
declines, the faith in the Son of God, and in God the Father, declines
also."
I will now leave the region of the historical and examine the emotion
whose reality and influence I have substantiated, from a timeless
standpoint, for my principal point is the psychical, and more
particularly the metaphysical consummation of the emotion of love. The
sole object of the abundant evidence I have been compelled to adduce is
my desire to prove the existence and significance of all the emotions
which stir the soul, and in the later Middle Ages strove so powerfully
to express themselves. My thesis that sexuality and love are opposed
principles will no doubt be rejected, for, under the strong influence of
the theory of evolution, all the world is to-day agreed that love is
nothing but the refinement of the sexual impulse. I maintain that (as
far as man is concerned) they differ very essentially, and I have
attempted to prove their incommensurability by submitting historical
facts. That they may, and will, ultimately merge, is my unalterable
conviction. My assertion that something so fundamental as the personal
love of man and woman did not exist from the beginning, but came into
existence in the course of history, at a not very remote period, may
seem even more strange. My only reply is that instead of advancing
opinions I have brought forward facts and allowed them to speak for
themselves. Moreover, to my mind the realisation of the intimate
connection of love and evolving personality is a far more magnificent
proof of the soundness of the evolutionary theory than the reflection
that we have received all things ready-made from the hands of nature.
Has it not been proved to us that the religious consciousness of the
divinity of the human soul was also evolved in historical time, and has
never again disappeared?
Every strong love which finds no response is fraught with the
possibility of an infinite unfolding; it may powerfully seize the whole
soul and make life a tragedy. But this tragedy is not of the very
essence of tragedy, inasmuch as here we have merely love confronted by
an unsurmountable obstacle, meeting and overwhelming it; the discord is
not inherent. Many a lover suffering from unrequited love, is born with
the tendency to become unhappy, with a secret will to the voluptuousness
of pain and melancholy; he will enjoy his unhappiness, perhaps become
productive through it. Thus, this deliberately unhappy love may be
regarded as an analogy to genuine metaphysical eroticism. For the
worship of woman is in its essence infinite striving; its object is
always unattainable, an illusion. Every earthly love, even if it finds
no response at all, may, in principle, be gratified, and is only unhappy
if external circumstances intervene. But the love of the Madonna is in
itself fraught with the tragic impossibility of requital; its foundation
is the recognition, or divination, of the fact that mortal women are too
insignificant for a passion which yearns for infinitude. A lover filled
with the longing to glorify a woman and worship her as a divine being,
has frequently experienced a certain disappointment. The beloved may
have died young--as did Beatrice--without his ever having come into
close contact with her; instinctively his soul turns heavenward--and
imagination has ample scope to transform and transfigure the dead. Or he
may have been disappointed in his mistress; it may have been that he,
attuned to pure, spiritual love, has found her all too human. He flees
from reality into the world of dreams, and envelops her with the veil of
mysteriousness and divinity. Purely spiritual love is an intense
emotion, and as men and women of flesh and blood cannot always live at
high pressure, hours of dejection and disappointment will necessarily
have to be experienced. The soul takes refuge in an illusion which
becomes more and more an end in itself, and gradually the lover creates
an inaccessibly lofty, celestial woman. For purely spiritual love
aspires to absolute transcendency; it cannot bear contact with every-day
life. The psychologists of the present day tell us that a feeling, in
becoming spiritualised, loses strength,--history teaches us that in the
case of great souls the opposite is the rule.
These suggestions purpose to explain the inception of an ecstatic love;
but the true metaphysical erotic is born and needs no outside stimulus;
his heart yearns for the inaccessible from the very beginning. There are
certain elements of feeling which must be present in his soul
simultaneously: a religious elementary feeling tending to the
metaphysical; the need of a sacred--a divine--being, as the foundation
of all existing things; a powerful and purely spiritual craving for
love, hurt, perhaps unconsciously, in early youth, and finally an
imagination endowed with plastic force--artistic tendencies. In the case
of the mystic the soul, too, is filled with the consciousness of the
divine; he, too, has the capacity for a great love, but with him it is
not the love of woman, but of something universal, not individualised,
the world, the cosmos, God.
While the mystic attempts to embody the inconceivable Deity in his soul,
the worshipper of the Madonna, like the artist, imaginatively creates a
being which he sets up for contemplation at the greatest possible
distance. The mystic is blind, as it were; he is yearning personified,
and he would force God into his soul. The metaphysical lover needs a
plastic figure which, in the extremest case, may represent the whole
world to him, and this figure must be a woman. It is a historical
accident that this woman is frequently connected with a woman of
ecclesiastical tradition, an accident strengthened by insufficient
creative power on the part of the lover, or lack of courage and
self-confidence. He is grateful for the support given to him by
tradition. The greatest metaphysical lovers, Dante, Goethe and
Michelangelo, freely created the objects of their love; the Protestant
Goethe--whom some people even accuse of paganism--clung more closely
than either of the others to the Mary of Catholicism (in the final scene
of _Faust_). The worship of the Madonna is the love of great solitary
souls, and--as is proved by Goethe--of the great souls in the hours of
their last solitude.
While there was only unindividualised sexual instinct, the chastity of
woman was of no account; we have seen that neither the Eastern nations
nor the Greeks attached any value to it. The woman who had best
fulfilled her vocation as a mother, was the woman most highly respected.
In the East, as well as with Jews and Romans, a woman could be divorced
by her husband for sterility. The only women who were, to some extent,
appreciated for their own sakes, were the Greek hetaerae. But when
asceticism became a moral value, chastity, too, was regarded as a
virtue, and personal love between two individuals invested it with a
profound significance. Henceforth woman should no longer be regarded as
the vehicle for the gratification of male sensuality; it should be her
mission to lead the lover to spiritual perfection. The fusion of the
older ideal of womanhood, the mother (acknowledged and sanctioned by
religion in the mother of the Saviour), with the newer ideal, the
Virgin, created the ideal of the late Middle Ages: the virgin with the
Child. Here the natural vocation of woman and the fantastic mission laid
upon her by man were united in a paradoxical higher intuition, and it
is superfluous to point out that the most irreligious minds of the
Renascence, as well as those of all later eras, have to this day
worshipped this ideal, and never wearied of representing it under new
forms.
But the worship of the Virginal Mother contains another element, an
element of which man in his contact with woman is deeply conscious: the
element of mystery. To a man a young girl, untouched by the faintest
breath of sensuality, has a quality of strangeness and mysteriousness
(this is probably a result of European sentiment), and at all times the
woman who has become a mother has been regarded with a slight feeling of
superstitious awe. In the Virginal Mother these two vaguely reverential
feelings are blended; she is a strange and awe-inspiring being, and man,
divining a mystery, bows down before her.
Otto Weininger was the first to give us a psychology of the cult of the
Madonna, and he did it in a manner which proved his entire comprehension
of this peculiar sentimental disposition. He realised and pointed out
the contrast between sexuality and eroticism (his terms for sexual
impulse and love), but in accordance with his extreme mental disposition
he left these two principles in irreconcilable conflict, while I regard
their antithesis merely in the light of a transient phase which will be
followed by a reconciling synthesis. Weininger is, I believe, in
conflict with spiritual reality when (guided by ethical, not
psychological considerations) he proposes the theory that a man endows
the beloved woman with all the lofty values he desires for himself. "He
projects his ideal of an absolutely perfect being on another human
being, and this and nothing else is the meaning of his love." "To bestow
all the qualities one would like to possess, but never can quite
possess, on another individual, to make it the representative of all
values, that is to love." It is a commonplace experience that genuine
love will awaken in the soul new and transcendent emotions, compared to
which all previous experience appears petty and insignificant. The waves
of this emotion are able to carry the lover to the infinite, or at least
his emotion will help him to divine the infinite. He sees, unexpectedly,
his inmost soul revealed to him, he has exceeded the limits upon which
he has hitherto looked as a matter of course; the barrier between him
and the universe has fallen, the whole world belongs to him; the egoist
becomes less selfish, the cruel man gentle, the dullard clairvoyant;
every man feels that he has become greater and more human. This is
neither illusion nor projection, nor is it a subtle, psychical
deception--it is sober reality. Weininger's suspicion of a delusion is
nothing but the result of his ascetic solipsism, refusing to accept
another being's help in his striving for perfection, a consequence of
the one-sided, sterile cult of his individual soul, a noble but puerile
pride refusing to be indebted to the world and to his fellow-men, the
fanatical, metaphysical dualism which is so often met with in the second
stage of eroticism, and to which stage he belongs.
Weininger shrank from the idea that an individual might be made the
means to an end, instead of being an end in itself. In my opinion his
justification for the translation of this formula--framed by Kant for
pure ethics--to empirical psychology, is doubtful. To use an individual
only as a means to an end which is alien to his inmost being, is
certainly immoral. But all social life is based on a mutual relationship
of means and ends; a man is an end in himself at the same time that he
is a means to other individuals and the community. The teacher is a
means as far as his pupils are concerned; the poet is a means in respect
to all who seek in his writings information or recreation. To carry the
stigmatisation of these facts to a logical conclusion, one would have to
call it immoral to accept anything from parents or teachers; one would
have to reject every good influence--which always comes from
outside--and become completely absorbed in the cult of one's own soul.
One would even have to object to being born, and would have to create
one's self out of nothing. It has always been regarded as the splendid
privilege of great men to exert an ennobling influence on others--why,
therefore, should the influence of a beloved woman on her lover be
objectionable?
Weininger's error in the sphere of eroticism arises from the fact of his
imprisoning love in a formula which is by no means applicable to it. In
love the mutual relationship of means and ends does not exist, the lover
feels that the beloved is always an end in herself in the highest sense;
he would find it impossible inwardly to establish such a relationship
between himself and her; very frequently himself, his well-being and his
life, are of no account to him if he can serve her. Weininger's
assertion that at the consummation of love every woman is merely the
means of gratifying a man's passion, is simply not true. On the
contrary, it is a characteristic of genuine love that the physical
embrace is of no great importance, does not even rise to full
consciousness. The personality of the beloved is everything, physical
sensation nothing. Weininger identifies love with passion and his
argument is easily refutable by the experience of many. In love there is
neither means nor end; if, however, categoric formulas must be used, one
might speak of a reciprocal action. Equally erroneous is his
corresponding assertion that the artist loves a woman spiritually, that
is, in the sense of deifying her, for the purpose of drawing from her
inspiration for his work. If he loves her, then his love is the alpha
and omega of his striving, and if love inspires him to achieve a
masterpiece, the effect of love on him must be considered great and
good, because it is a creative effect.
The extreme individualistic ideal would lead to an absolutely
unproductive view of life. Asceticism stands condemned because it is
unproductive. I may regard an Indian fakir who has become so godlike
that he can sustain life on six grains of rice a day, and draw breath
once every quarter of an hour--to say nothing of speech or
cleanliness--as a very strange individual; but I see nothing positive or
important in him. The road which leads from the individual to the
universal cannot be the rejection of the world; it must be its
perfection, resulting from productivity of mind, or soul, or deed. He
who on principle refuses to be productive, condemns himself to
annihilation in the higher sense. I admit that he who works at his own
perfection does good work, too; but it is the inexplicable secret of all
truly creative labour--in the highest as well as in the lowest
sense--that it must ultimately affect the world and eternity. The
strongest emotions, the inner illumination of the mystic and the love of
the great erotic, have been conceived in the _heart of hearts_; and have
ultimately grown beyond their creator, from the individual to the
universal. The more intimate and powerful the creative impulse has been,
the more retarded and abundant may, perhaps, be the effect. But the
chain which links the great soul to humanity cannot be broken, the work
will make itself manifest--the work of deed, the work of the mind, the
work of love--I do not say to "the public," but to life, to the world.
The creative personality alone is the father of the objective values of
civilisation.
The great love which led Dante, Goethe and Wagner to the summits of
humanity is in the highest sense positive and creative. And he who
realises that love is not subject to sexual impulse, who knows it as
something purely personal, foreign and even hostile to the genus, must
admit that it is one of the very highest of values. A contrary ethic is
sterile, Indian, unproductive, not European. I am well aware that
Weininger did not explicitly draw this conclusion; but he rejects
spiritual love because it endows the lover with new capacities, the
capacities of growth and perfection, and he is therefore in the last
resort a representative of philosophic nihilism.
_(c) Dante and Goethe_
The worship of woman found its climax in Dante. Through the work of his
youth, the _Vita Nuova_ and his masterpiece, _The Divine Comedy_, we can
trace step by step the stages of the road, beginning with a glimpse of a
young girl in Florence, and ending with the incorporation of a woman
into the world-system. We are face to face with an extraordinary process
of evolution. The young girl he had seen a few times, and who died in
her youth, goes on growing and developing in his soul, until, at last,
in him the will to raise woman above time into eternity, the will to
make her a member of the divine system, reaches its full realisation.
What had been begun by the troubadours and fully comprehended by the
poets of the _sweet new style_, reached completion in Dante, and, was
henceforth an eternal value for all humanity.
We see that the later troubadours were inclined to blend the lady of
their heart with the universal Lady of Heaven; the need of deifying the
loved woman was at the root of many dubious growths, and possibly these
early poets were also to some extent influenced by their dread of the
Inquisition (which never gained much importance in Italy). The new poets
deepened this feeling, stripped it of all externalities, and appeared
before the adored simply as lovers. They did not require the dogmatic
support of the Church, their own feeling was sufficient guarantee.
Dante, moreover, was possessed by a craving for an absolutely perfect
and consistent world-system, and had, besides, the power to build it up
and people it with sublime intelligences. And in this system, the crown
and perfection of the mediaeval-Catholic conception of the universe, he
assigned to the love of his youth a high and permanent place by the side
of the deities. Dante thus raised his individual feeling to a universal
dogma, and enriched the Catholic heaven by his personal love. What for
two hundred years had been a dream and a desire, had become a matter of
faith and truth. Now, and not until now, love and religion were one; the
love of a woman had been included in the system of eternal verities, and
had become identical with the love of immortality. "Love which moves the
sun and all the stars" was acknowledged as a fundamental feeling. The
anchoring of the subjective in the eternal was achieved in this
metaphysical setting: the deification of the beloved; and no greater
gift was ever vouchsafed to man than the creation of metaphysically true
beings and values. All that had been done before had merely prepared the
ground for this great deed: the enshrinement of the beloved in the heart
of the divine secrets.
The _Vita Nuova_, which is at once a glorified historical record and the
greatest testimony of metaphysical love, emphasises from the outset the
inspiring, purifying influence emanating from the beloved; Beatrice is
"the destroyer of all evil and the queen of all virtue." "When I saw her
coming towards me and could hope for her salutation, the world held no
enemy for me, yea, I was filled with the fire of brotherly love to such
an extent, that I was ready to forgive anybody who had ever offended me.
And whoever had begged me for a gift, I should have replied: Love! and
my face would have been full of humility." Even before his love had been
translated to the world beyond, he portrayed spiritual love as hardly
any other poet before or after him. The women of Florence ask Dante:
"Why doest thou love this lady, seeing that thou canst not even bear her
presence? Tell us, for the end of such love must be incomprehensible to
men." And he replies: "Ladies, the end and aim of my love is but the
salutation of that lady; therein I find that beatitude which is the goal
of my desire. And now that it has pleased her to deny me her salutation,
my whole happiness is contained in that which can never perish." And the
women: "Tell us, then, wherein lies such happiness?" "In the words that
praise my lady" (that is to say in the emotion which is an end in itself
and in its artistic expression). The lover never exchanged a word with
her; had he done so, attempting to establish a reciprocal relationship,
Beatrice, bereft of his idealising love, would have had to descend from
her pedestal and show herself a girl like all the rest. Not until after
her deification has become an established fact, does Beatrice (in the
beginning of the _Divine Comedy_) remember her lover and come to save
him. In one of his poems Dante says that not every woman could inspire
such a love, but only a woman of peculiar nobility of character. It is
very apparent that Dante, at first, was not sure of himself, and that he
only gradually discovered the new consciousness which was stirring his
soul; with every chapter the beloved recedes to a greater distance and
becomes more sacred to him.
It is quite in keeping with all this that our knowledge of this girl of
eighteen is very vague and uncertain. Some of Dante's commentators
believe her to have been a figment of his brain, a woman who never
lived, or an allegory of wisdom, virtue, the Church, theology, etc. But
at the death of her father Beatrice again behaves like any other earthly
maiden. There is a grain of truth in every one of these theories, for
Dante was a great scholastic as well as a great poet, and in more
advanced years he felt a need somehow to connect the love of his youth
with the system of the Church; this could be done in an allegorical way
without being inwardly untruthful.
Vague forces, which the lover himself realises as mysterious, run high
in the _Vita Nuova_ and in the poems; the lover has hallucinations in
sleep and sickness. In the third canzone Dante speaks of the
impossibility of comprehending what gave him a glimpse of the nature of
his mistress. It was a foreboding of new and great things, struggling
slowly and gradually to take shape, for the creation of a world-system,
one of whose supporting pillars was personal love of an individual, was
an unprecedented achievement. "When she speaks a spirit inclines from
heaven." The angels implore God to call this "miracle" into their midst,
but God wills that they shall have patience until the "Hope of the
Blessed" appears.
Love says of her can there be mortal thing
At once adorned so richly and so pure?
Then looks on her and silently affirms
That heaven designed in her a creature new.
(_Transl. by_ C. LYELL.)
Again and again recurs the motif of her beauty before which the world
must fall prostrate. In a sonnet not included in the _Vita Nuova_ he
says:
In heaven itself that lady had her birth,
I think, and is with us for our behoof;
Blessed are they who meet her on the earth.
(_Transl. by_ D.G. ROSSETTI.)
The lover has a foreboding of the fate awaiting him: "I have set my feet
into that phase of life from whence there is no return." He divines the
sorrow to which love has predestined him. But others, too, divining that
this man "expects more, perhaps, of love than others," ask him to
explain to them the essence of love, and he answers them with the famous
sonnet:
_Amor e cor gentil sono una cosa_
(Love and the gentle heart are but one thing.)
The death of Beatrice is accompanied by the same phenomena as was the
death of Christ: the sun lost its brilliance, stars appeared in the
sky, birds fell to the ground, dead, the earth trembled; God visibly
intervened in the course of nature.
For from the lamp of her meek lowlihead
Such an exceeding glory went up hence,
That it woke wonder in the Eternal Sire,
Until a sweet desire
Entered Him for that lovely excellence,
So that He bade her to Himself aspire;
Counting this weary and most evil place
Unworthy of a thing so full of grace.
(_Transl. by_ D.G. ROSSETTI.)
In the 29th chapter, which we, to-day, do not readily understand, Dante
established by a system of symbolical numbers a connection between
Beatrice and the Trinity; the deification of the beloved had been
achieved in thought and emotion, religion enriched by a new divinity.
"Love, weeping, has filled my heart with new knowledge," he says, at the
conclusion of the work of his youth. I repeat what I have already said
in another place, and supported by passages from the _Divine Comedy_: It
was never Dante's intention to write fictitious poems in our meaning of
the term, but at every hour of his life he was convinced that he was
proclaiming the pure truth; he knew himself to be the chosen vehicle for
the interpretation of the eternal system of the world.
At the conclusion of the _Vita Nuova_, Beatrice is a divine being,
devoid of all emotion--enthroned in Heaven; in the _Comedy_ she becomes
her lover's saviour and redeemer, and through him a helper of all
humanity. The love of the youth had found no response in the heart of
the Florentine maiden, but the soul of the glorified woman was inspired
by love of him. She trembles for him, and when Mary's messenger
admonishes her: "Why doest thou not help him who has loved thee so
much?" she sends Virgil to him as a guide and finally herself leads her
redeemed lover to God. Now she responds to his love; she has even wept
for him. This ultimately fulfilled, but always chastely hidden longing
for love in return, gives the woman-worship of Dante a peculiarly noble
charm. At the end of his journey through life he prays to her, who has
again disappeared from his sight, and his last confession is: "Into a
free man thou transform'st a slave."
Love's greatest miracle has been made manifest in him; it has
transfigured and purified him, and made of the slave of the world and
its desires, a personality--the fundamental motif of love.
There is a close connection between the metaphysical love of Dante and
Goethe's confession in the last scene of _Faust_, which reveals the
poet's deepest conviction, his final judgment of life. The confessions
of both poets are identical to the smallest detail. The _Divine Comedy_
represents the journey of humanity through the kingdoms of the world in
a manner unique and representative, applicable alike to all men, in the
sense of the Catholic Middle Ages. The fundamental idea of _Faust_ is
again the desire of man to find the right way through the world. Here
also the journey through life is intended to be typical; it is
undertaken five hundred years later; the scene is laid for the most part
on the surface of the earth, but the ultimate goal of the wayfarer is
Heaven. Hell, instead of being a subterraneous region, is embodied in a
presence, accompanying and tempting man; modern man has no faithful
guide; he must himself seek the way which to the man of the Middle Ages
was clearly indicated in the Bible. The love of his youth (which in the
case of Dante fills a book in itself) is merely an episode at the
beginning of the tragedy--the lover wanders through all the kingdoms of
the world, finally to return home to the beloved.
The last scene of _Faust_ is an unfolding of metaphysical love into its
inherent multiplicity; its summit is the metaphysical love of woman. All
human striving is determined and crowned by the saving grace of love.
Faust has no longer a specific name; he has dropped everything
subjective, and is briefly styled _a lover_; like Dante, he has become
representative of humanity. The hour of death revives the memory of the
love of his youth, apparently forgotten in the storm and stress of a
crowded life, yet never quite extinguished in the heart of his heart.
Margaret is present and guides him (as Beatrice guided Dante) upward, to
the _Eternal-Feminine_, that is to say, to the metaphysical consummation
of all male yearning for love. "The love from on high" saves Faust as it
has saved Dante. _The blessed boys_ (who, as well as the angels, are
present in both poems) singing:
Whom ye adore shall ye
See face to face.[2]
are again referring to the transcendently loving lover. Like Beatrice,
Margaret intercedes for him (intercession for her lover has always been
woman's profoundest prayer) with the Queen of Heaven:
Incline, oh incline,
All others excelling,
In glory aye dwelling,
Unto my bliss thy glance benign;
The loved one ascending,
His long trouble ending,
Comes back, he is mine!
These words are more intimate and human than the words of Beatrice, but
fundamentally they mean the same thing. Dante, meeting Beatrice again,
says:
And o'er my spirit that so long a time
Had from her presence felt no shuddering dread,
Albeit my eyes discovered her not, there moved
A hidden virtue from her, at whose touch
The power of ancient love was strong within me.[3]
But when he who has said so much beholds her face to face, he is
stricken dumb.
Beatrice receives Dante from his guide and herself unveils to him the
mysteries of life. Similarly Margaret beseeches the Virgin:
To guide him, be it given to me
Still dazzles him the new-born day!
and receives from on high the command which the symbolically burdened
Beatrice knows intuitively:
Ascend, thine influence feeleth he,
He'll follow on thine upward way.
As Beatrice approaches, the angels sing:
Oh! Turn
Thy saintly eyes to this thy faithful one,
Who to behold thee many a wearisome pace
Hath measured.
And with the fundamental feeling of Dante's _Divine Comedy_ Faust
concludes:
The ever-womanly
Draws us above.
The earthly love of his youth is fulfilled in the dream of metaphysical
love, in the dream of a divine woman. The genius creates, at the
conclusion of his life, the fulfilment of all longing. It may sound
paradoxical, but Faust--like Dante and Peer Gynt--unconsciously sought
Margaret in the hurly-burly of the world; not the young girl whom he had
seduced and deserted, but the _Eternal-Feminine_, the purely spiritual
love, which in his youth he divined, but destroyed, bound by the
shackles of desire. To Dante, to whom life and poem were one, as well as
to Goethe-Faust, the memory of first love remained typical of all
genuine, profound feeling; with Dante love and Beatrice are identical.
In the soul of these two men metaphysical love, the longing for the
eternal in woman, which they did not find on earth, gradually awoke to
life. Both place the glorified mistress by the side of another woman,
the Catholic Queen of Heaven. In Dante's, as well as in Goethe's
Paradise two women, a personal one and a universal one, are loved and
adored. The second woman, too, has her exclusive, ecstatic worshipper.
St. Bernard, the _Doctor Marianus_ of Dante, prostrating himself before
her, addresses to her the sublime prayer which begins:
Oh, Virgin! Mother! Daughter of thy Son!
and in _Faust_ we meet again the _Doctor Marianus_ burning--as the
representative of the totality of her worshippers--with the "sacred joy
of love" (Dante says
The Queen of Heaven for whom my soul
Burns with love's rapture)
and pronouncing the most beautiful prayer to the Madonna which the world
possesses, and which is almost identical with Dante's:
Virgin, pure from taint of earth,
Mother, we adore thee,
With the Godhead one by birth,
Queen, we bow before thee!
And, prostrated before her:
Penitents, her saviour-glance
Gratefully beholding,
To beatitude advance,
Still new pow'rs unfolding!
Thine each better thought shall be,
To thy service given!
Holy Virgin, gracious be,
Mother, Queen of Heaven!
In the Divine Comedy St. Bernard prays:
So mighty art thou, Lady, and so great,
That he who grace desireth and comes not
To thee for aidence, fain would have desire
Fly without wings.
The _Chorus mysticus_ could equally well form the conclusion of the
_Comedy_. The _inadequate_ which to _fulness groweth_, is what the
Provençals already, in their time, realised as _folly_, as a paradox:
the metaphysical love of woman, for ever remaining dream and longing,
always unfulfilled, the eternal-feminine.
As the _Mater Gloriosa_ appears, Dante exclaims:
Thenceforward what I saw
Was not for words to speak, nor memory's self
To stand against such outrage on her skill.
And Goethe:
In starry wreath is seen
Lofty and tender,
Midmost the heavenly queen,
Known by her splendour.
Here the "sacred fire of love," metaphysical eroticism, has reached its
absolute climax. The universe is represented by a divine woman, and man,
abandoning himself to her, worships her. Goethe's _Faust_ concludes at
this point, but Dante went further, right into the heart of the eternal
glory of the Deity, there to lose himself.
I have previously said that the last scene of _Faust_ was the final
unfolding of the manifold blossom of metaphysical eroticism, and I will
proceed to establish my point. Hitherto I have used the term
metaphysical eroticism always in its narrow sense of love of woman.
Henceforth I shall use it in its broader meaning of mystical love in
general, all love that is projected on the transcendental and the
divine. Emotion is the specific domain of humanity, its power, its
essence. And in the profoundest emotion, in love, a connection between
the temporal and the eternal may be divined. Hence the Christian mystery
of mysteries, God giving His Son to the world for love of humanity; God
unable to approach the world other than as a lover--sacrificing Himself
for the sake of love. We cannot conceive the Sublime with any other
principal function than that of love; for love is the deepest and
profoundest emotion of the human heart, and, in accordance with the
first postulate, must therefore be the soul of the universe. On this
point all mystics and all metaphysical ecstatics are agreed; "God is
love" is written in the Gospel of St. John. "Love which moves the sun
and all the stars," stands at the termination of Dante's masterpiece:
and in _Faust_ the _Pater Profundus_ confesses:
So love, almighty, all-pervading,
Does all things mould, does all sustain.
He is still wrestling for divine love; he still has to fight against the
temptations of doubt (of thought),
Oh, God! My troubled thoughts composing,
My needy heart do thou illume!
But the true enthusiastic lover of the divine, compelled to annihilate
himself so as to become absorbed in God, the lover who no longer knows
the difference between pain and delight, is represented by the _Pater
Ecstaticus_: The condition of rest is foreign to him, ceaselessly moving
up and down, he sings:
Joy's everlasting fire,
Love's glow of pure desire,
Pang of the seething breast,
Rapture a hallowed guest!
Darts pierce me through and through,
Lances my flesh subdue,
Clubs me to atoms dash,
Lightnings athwart me flash,
That all the worthless may
Pass like a cloud away,
While shineth from afar,
Love's gem, a deathless star!
These ejaculations completely exhaust the emotional life of the
self-destructive metaphysical erotic--he is conscious of nothing but his
passion of love which eclipses all else. With him the second form of
metaphysical love, the love-death, is reached. Goethe, in creating this
character, must have had in his mind the unique Jacopone da Todi. For
this rapturous love was the keynote of Jacopone's character, his whole
life was one great ecstasy:
My heart was all to broken,
As prostrate I was lying,
With dear love's fiery token
Swift from the archer flying;
Wounded, with sweet pain soaken,
Peace became war--and dying,
My soul with pain was soaken,
Distraught with throes of love.
In transports I am dying,
Oh! Love's astounding wonder!--
For love, his fell spear plying,
Has cleft my heart asunder.
Around the blade are lying
Sharp teeth, my life to sunder,
In rapture I am dying,
Distraught with throes of love.
And:
Oh, Love! oh, Love! oh, Jesus, my desire,
Oh, Love! I hold thee clasped in sweet embrace!
Oh, Love! embracing thee, could I expire!
Oh, Love! I'd die to see thee face to face.
Oh, Love! oh, Love! I burn in rapture's fire,
I die, enravished in the soul's embrace.
The legend has it that the heart of Jacopone broke with the intensity of
love. This would have been a love-death of cosmic grandeur.
Before Jacopone St. Bernard, in whom all the radiations of metaphysical
eroticism are traceable, was consumed by similar emotions. Some of his
Latin poems very much resemble the poems of his successor:
Oh, most sweet Jesu, Saviour blest,
My yearning spirit's hope and rest,
To thee mine inmost nature cries,
And seeks thy face with tears and sighs.
Thou, my heart's joy where'er I rove,
Thou art the perfecting of love;
Thou art my boast--all praise be thine,
Jesu, the world's salvation, mine!
Then his embrace, his holy kiss,
The honeycomb were naught to this!
'Twere bliss fast bound to Christ for aye,
But in these joys is little stay.
This love with ceaseless ardour burns,
How wondrous sweet no stranger learns;
But tasted once, the enraptured wight,
Is filled with ever new delight.
Now I behold what most I sought;
Fulfilled at last my longing thought;
Lovesick, my soul to Jesus turns,
And all my heart within me burns.
(_Transl. by_ T.G. CRIPPEN.)
We read in his writings: "Blessed and sacred is he to whom it has been
given to experience this in his earthly life; even if he have
experienced it only once, for the space of a fleeting minute. For to
melt away completely, as it were, as if one had ceased to exist, to be
emptied of self, dissolved in holy emotion, has not been given to mortal
life, but is the state of the blessed."
I shall have to refer to both men in a future chapter, when I shall
examine the degenerate growths of metaphysical eroticism; for the ardour
of their souls was frequently kindled by sexual imaginings; in the case
of emotional mystics it is often difficult to distinguish between
sensual conceptions and the pure love of God (a fact which does not,
however, justify the superficial opinion that all mysticism is diverted
sexuality).
It is obvious that this love of God is not the original creation of the
lover, as is the deifying love of woman, but the mystic love whose
self-evident object is God or eternity. Jacopone's (and later on
Zinzendorf's) love of Jesus, though projected on a historical
personality, was fundamentally the same thing. The love of God also--and
in this connection I might mention Jacob Boehme, Alphonso da Liguori,
Novalis--is metaphysical eroticism; but I have restricted my subject to
the metaphysical love of woman, and shall not overstep my limits. I will
merely elucidate a little more the last scene of _Faust_.
_Pater seraphicus_, a title given both to St. Francis and to
Bonaventura--requires but a few words: he, too, praises metaphysical
love, the essence of the supreme spirits.
Thus the spirits' nature stealing
Through the ether's depths profound;
Love eternal, self-revealing,
Sheds beatitude around.
But even the _more perfect angels_ cannot free themselves from the
dualism of all things human (body and soul)--an unmistakable confession
of metaphysical dualism:
Parts them God's love alone,
Their union ending.
The identity of the last scene of _Faust_, Goethe's masterpiece, and the
conclusion of Dante's _Divine Comedy_, is so obvious that I do not think
any one could deny it. I have pointed out the thought underlying both
works, and could easily advance further proof of their similarity, but I
will keep within the limits of the last scene which contains the
totality of metaphysico-erotic yearning, and I contend that it is very
remarkable that a lifetime after the composition of Margaret, Faust (and
with him Goethe) very old, very wise, and a little cold, having had
love-affairs with demi-goddesses, and having finally renounced the love
of woman, found his mission and his happiness in uninterrupted,
productive activity. He has discovered the final value in work. But the
long-forgotten heaven opens and the love of his youth comes to meet him.
Stripped of everything earthly, a divine being, she still loves him and
shows him the way to salvation, presented under the aspect of the
_Eternal-Feminine_--exactly as in the _Divine Comedy_. There must be a
reason for the uniformity of feeling in the case of the two greatest
subjective poets of Europe (Shakespeare was greater than either, but he
was quite impersonal), for the logical possibility that Goethe imitated
Dante, and borrowed his supreme values from him, cannot be maintained
for a moment. Their mutual characteristic is the longing for
metaphysical love. When these great lovers experienced for the first
time the sensation of love, their hearts were thrown open to the
universe, they had the first powerful experience of eternity, and they
became poets. The first love and the cosmic consciousness of genius were
simultaneously present, they were one in their inmost soul. (With the
philosopher it is a different matter, for to him the love of woman is
not fraught with the same tremendous significance.) This experience of
first love, awakening the consciousness of eternity, remained to them
for all time interwoven with religion and metaphysics--interwoven, that
is to say, with all transcendent longing. And though the aged Faust had
believed it to be buried in the dark night of forgotten things, it was
still alive in his inmost heart, and the dying man's vision of the
Divine took colour and shape from it.
The source of both great poems was the poet's will to assimilate the
world and recreate it, impregnated with his own soul; the secret motive
powers were the mystic love of eternity and the love of woman which had
outgrown this world and aspired to the next. To Goethe, thirsting to
give a concrete shape to his yearning, God and eternity were too
intangible, too remote and incomprehensible--but the woman he loved with
religio-erotic intensity was familiar to him. The Eternal-Feminine is
thus not fraught with incomprehensibility, but is rather, and this
necessarily, the final conclusion. For this conclusion is a profession
of metaphysical eroticism, that is to say, the _Eternal-Feminine_ in
contradistinction to the _Transitory-Feminine_. Both Dante, the devout
son of the Middle Ages, and Goethe, the champion of modern culture,
demand, in virtue of the inherent right of their genius, the
consummation of their mystic yearning for love in another life, and
achieve the creation of the divine woman. Precisely because Margaret was
nothing but a little provincial, Goethe could sublimate her into a new
being, for the greater the tension between reality and the vision of the
soul, the greater is the task and the more gigantic the creative power
which such a task may develop. It has been said that, in this scene,
Goethe revealed leanings towards Catholicism. I do not pretend to deny
it offhand, but I must insist on these leanings being understood in the
sense of my premises. Goethe took from tradition those elements which
were able to materialise his spiritual life and gave them a new
interpretation. We are justified in believing that he accepted nothing
but what was conformable to his nature; the Madonna represented his
profoundest feeling and, like Dante (I attribute the greatest importance
to this), he created a new deity, moulded in the shape of his first
love, and placed it by the side of the universal Queen of Heaven, the
Madonna of the Catholic Church, transformed by love.
The emotional life of both poets agrees fundamentally. They differ not
so much in feeling as in thought and in faith. Dante possessed
unshakable faith in the reality of his visions; eternal love in the
shape of Beatrice was awaiting him; his vision was pure, eternal truth.
The vision of Goethe, on the other hand, was poetic longing, tragical,
because the vision of the transcendent came to the modern poet only in
rare hours. Where Dante possessed, Goethe must seek, strive and err.
The deifying love of woman is, as we have seen, the extreme development
of the second stage, in which sexual impulse and spiritual love are
strictly separated, in which man despises and fights his natural
instinct, or abandons himself to it--which is the same in
principle--while his soul, worshipping love, soars heavenward. This
dualism of feeling corresponds to the persistent dualism of Christianity
and the whole mediaeval period. But as Goethe is frequently looked upon
as a _monist_, my proposition that he was a dualist _in eroticis_ will
possibly be rejected, in spite of the fact that his emotional life is
revealed to us with great lucidity. His first important work, his
_Werther_, which is also one of the most important monuments of
sentimental love, contains the germs of love as we understand it; the
love which is no longer content to look upon sexuality and soul as two
opposed principles, but strives to blend them in the person of the
beloved. I will revert to _Werther_ later on. This third stage, love in
the modern sense, is programmatically established (as it were) in
_Elective Affinities_, but all the rest of the very abundant evidence of
his emotional life exhibits the typically dualistic feeling. Many of his
early poems evidence sexuality pure and simple; in the _Venetian
Epigrams_ and in the _Roman Elegies_ it is even held up as a positive
value. In the third Elegy, for instance, the poet's sensuality is linked
directly to the famous lovers of antiquity, and everything which aspires
beyond it is rejected. In the same way his _West-Eastern Divan_ is
characterised by a gay sensuality with homo-sexual tendencies.
The sensual quality of Goethe's eroticism was partly spent in his
relationship with Christiane Vulpius. The following passage, which forms
an interesting counterpart to Goethe's famous correspondence with
Charlotte von Stein, is taken from a letter written to Christiane
Vulpius during his absence from home. "The beds everywhere are very
wide, and you would have no reason for complaint, as you sometimes have
at home. Oh, my sweet heart! There is no such happiness on earth as
being together."
If Christiane represented sensuality, unrelieved by any other feeling,
Frau von Stein represented the most important object of Goethe's craving
for spiritual love. These two liaisons were to some extent
contemporaneous; the _Roman Elegies_ and the famous letters to Charlotte
von Stein were written at the same period. When she reproached him with
his love-affair with Christiane, he replied with consistent dualism:
"And what sort of an affair is it? Whose interests are suffering by it?"
Frau von Stein, his senior by seven years, was thirty-four years old,
and mother of seven children when Goethe first met her. According to
Schiller she "can never have been beautiful," and in a letter to Koerner
the latter says: "They say that their relationship (Goethe's and
Charlotte von Stein's) is absolutely pure and irreproachable." It was a
great mistake ever to regard this relationship as anything but a purely
spiritual one; Goethe never felt any passion for Charlotte; he called
her "his sister," the "guide of his soul"; he told her of his little
love-affairs and was never jealous of her husband. The following are a
few typical passages culled from his letters, arranged chronologically:
"My only love whom I can love without torment!" Then, quite in the
spirit of the _dolce stil nuovo_: "Your soul, in which thousands believe
in order to win happiness," "The purest, truest and most beautiful
relationship which (with the exception of my sister) ever existed
between me and any woman." "The relationship between us is so strange
and sacred, that I strongly felt, on that occasion, that it cannot be
expressed in words, that men cannot realise it." The following passage
written by Goethe when he was thirty, might have been written by
Guinicelli or by Dante: "You appeared to me like the Madonna ascending
into heaven; in vain did the abandoned mourner stretch out his arms, in
vain did his tearful glance plead for a last return--she was absorbed in
the splendour surrounding her, longing only for the crown hovering
above her head." "I long to be purified in triple fire so as to be
worthy of you." He addresses a prayer to her and says: "On my knees I
implore you to complete your work and make a good man of me." "While
writing Tasso, I worshipped you." Charlotte knew intuitively what he
desired of her, and remained silent and passive like the Madonna. Not a
single sensual, or even passionate word, replied to all these
utterances.
In the course of time the relationship between the lovers became one of
equality; the note of adoration disappeared, and the keynote of his
letters became friendship and familiarity. "Farewell, sweet friend and
beloved, whose love alone makes me happy." In another letter he said
that all the world held no further prize for him, since he had found
everything in her. And just as spiritual love approached more and more
the mean of a familiar friendship, so was his sexuality concentrated on
a single woman, on Christiane, in this connection, too, seeking a mean.
But it is an important point that the fundamental dualistic feeling
remained unchanged. There was no woman in Goethe's life in regard to
whom he arrived at, or even aspired to, the blending of both emotions in
a higher intuition.
Even before his friendship with Frau von Stein, at the time of his
engagement to Lili Schoenemann, Goethe experienced a spiritual love for
a girl he had never seen. He calls Countess Auguste Stolberg "his
angel," "his only, only maiden," "his golden child," and says: "I have
an intuition that you will save me from great tribulation, and that no
other being on earth could do it." These letters also contain the
significant passage: "Miserable fate which has denied me a happy mean."
And touching the love of his youth, Lotte, Goethe wrote to Kestner: "I
really had no idea that all that was in her, for I always loved her far
too much to observe her."
The Princess in "Tasso" and "Iphigenia" who delivers Orestes from unrest
and insanity, are modelled on Charlotte. Tasso is unmistakably a
fantastic woman-worshipper, a fact of which Leonore is fully aware:
Now he exalts her to the starry heavens,
In radiant glory, and before that form
Bows down like angels in the realms above.
Then, stealing after her, through silent fields,
He garlands in his wreath each beauteous flower.
He loves not us--forgive me what I say--
His lov'd ideal from the spheres he brings
And does invest it with the name we bear.
He has relinquished passion's fickle sway,
He clings no longer with delusion sweet
To outward form and beauty to atone
For brief excitement by disgust and hate.[4]
And Tasso says:
My very knees
Trembled beneath me and my spirit's strength
Was all required to hold myself erect,
And curb the strong desire to throw myself
Prostrate before her. Scarcely could I quell
The giddy rapture.
The significant avowal addressed by Dante to Beatrice: "Into a free man
thou transform'st a slave," the seal of all great spiritual love, was
repeated by Goethe in his letters to Charlotte, and is again repeated in
Tasso:
Over my spirit's depths there comes a change;
Relieved from dark perplexity I feel,
Free as a god, and all I owe to you.
Very interesting is also a remark which Goethe made to Eckermann: "Woman
is a silver vessel in which we men lay golden apples. I did not deduce
my idea of woman from reality, but I was born with it, or I conceived
it--God knows how." These notable words, deliberately pronounced, reveal
Goethe's feeling very clearly; he knows that there is a little
self-deception in his attitude towards woman, but he consciously and
lovingly clings to it. His pronouncements are not contradictions; it is
natural, almost essential, that in the soul of the highly-gifted and
highly-developed representative of a mature civilisation the whole
wealth of human emotions should be revivified. He possesses all
psychical qualities--at least potentially--and one element after the
other regains life and becomes productive. We shall see this with
startling clearness when we come to examine the emotional life of
Richard Wagner. The intimate connection between the individual and the
entire evolutionary process of the race will then become evident.
It is remarkable that Dante, too, wrote a poem clearly expressive of the
fact that the beloved woman does not actually possess the qualities
ascribed to her, but that she has been endowed with them by the
imagination of her lover.
I shall discuss the emotional life of only one other poet in detail, and
that one is Michelangelo. For the most part the poets whose emotions
were akin to that of Dante and Goethe were men who created their ideal
woman because reality left them unsatisfied. In passing I will mention
Beethoven, and his touching letter to his "immortal love" ("My angel, my
all, my I!"), whose name, in spite of all the strenuous attempts to
discover it, is to this day not known with any certainty; even if it
should ever be discovered, Beethoven's "immortal love" will yet remain a
figment of his brain, based on a human woman.
Together with Beethoven, we may notice the other great "old bachelor"
Grillparzer, and his eternal fiancée Kathi Fröhlich, and the critical
Hebbel, who at the time of composing "Genovefa" wrote in his diary:
"All earthly love is merely the road to the heavenly love."
Before closing this chapter, I must draw attention to a strange fact in
connection with the psychology of races. All nations endowed with fair
mental gifts and a sympathetic understanding of nature, have in the
period of their youth and anthropomorphistic and animistic thought
worshipped light, and its source, the sun, as the supreme deity, the
giver of joy and abundance. All the benevolent deities of the Arians
were celestial beings, all the malevolent divinities spirits of
darkness: Olympian gods and the demons of the netherworld--Aesir and
Giants. To the naïve mind of the Indo-Germanic races it appeared a
matter of course that the sun, the conqueror of night and winter, the
fertilizing, life-giving deity, should be worshipped as the active male
principle, and represented as a god, while on the other hand the moon
was usually conceived as a female deity. In primitive Christianity
Christ, as the bringer of light, was worshipped under the symbol of the
sun. Thus we naturally find in the old and new Indo-Germanic languages
the designation of the sun--or the sun-god--of the masculine gender. In
the following words our word _sun_ is easily recognisable:
Savar and svari (the oldest Indo-Germanic tongue).
svar and surya (Sanscrit; savitar--the sungod).
saval (the oldest European language).
savel (Gracco-Italian).
sol (Latin and related languages).
In the Germanic languages and in the Prussian-Lithuanian both genders
occur. (Gothic sunnan and Old High-German sunno). _Sol_ in the Norse
Edda is a female deity, and the Anglo-Saxon _sol_ is also feminine. The
transition from the male to the female gender was achieved in the
Middle-High-German language of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and
the German language is the only one in which the word _sun_ is
feminine. As the old Teutonic deities of light were male (Baldur and
Sigurd), this change of gender must seem strange. The Germanic tribes at
all times observed natural phenomena with the greatest attention,
borrowed their ethical symbols from nature and used natural objects to
represent their highest values. The change of gender of the supreme
symbol of divinity, the sun, can only be explained by the fact that in
the period of woman-worship the highest value was no longer felt as male
but as female, that secretly a goddess had usurped the place of a god.
Very likely the minnesingers finally fixed the female gender when it had
become problematical, and worshipped the loved woman under the divine
symbol of "Lady Sun."
The great erotic, Heinrich of Morungen, says in one of his poems that
his lady is radiant "as the sun at break of day." And also:
My lady shines into the heart
As through the glass the sun does shine;
Thus the beloved lady mine
Is sweet as May, full of delight,
Unclouded sunshine, golden light.
Mary, who had been called _Maris Stella_, the morning star, gradually
assumed the symbol of the all-conquering sun. Suso, in one of his poems,
still clinging to the older epithet, makes use of a metaphor
corresponding to the breaking of the sun through clouds. "When the
radiant morning star, Mary, broke through the suffering of thy darkened
heart, it was saluted with gladness and with these words: Greeting,
beautiful, rising morning star, from the fathomless depths of all loving
hearts!" But he also calls Mary: "Thou dazzling mirror of the Eternal
Sun!" And his Biography contains the following beautiful passage: "And
his eyes were opened and he fell on his knees, saluting the rising
morning star, the tender queen of the light of heaven; as the little
birds in the summer time salute the day, so he saluted the luminous
bringer of the eternal day, and he spoke his salutation not
mechanically, but with a sweet low singing of his soul." This is pure
and genuine nature-worship mingled with the worship of Mary.
So much for Suso. In Goethe's _Faust_, Doctor Marianus prays:
In thy tent of azure blue,
Queen supremely reigning,
Let me now thy secret view,
Vision high obtaining.
It is obvious that here the Queen of Heaven and the sun are conceived as
one. Eichendorff makes use of the metaphor:
The sun is smiling languidly
Like to a woman wondrous sweet.
The typically un-Teutonic modern poet, Alfred Mombert, on the other
hand, conceives the sun as a youth, and contrary to all custom, calls a
poem: _Der_ Sonnengeist (the sun-spirit).
The great Italians, also, were not unaware of this change of the sex of
the supreme value; at the conclusion of the _Paradise_ there is a
passage (in St. Bernard's prayer) which points to a connection in
Dante's mind between the sun and the Queen of Heaven:
"The love that moves the sun in heaven!"
_(d) Michelangelo._
In Michelangelo we meet the spirit of Plato and the plastic genius of
Greece raised to a higher plane and lit by the peculiar glory of
Christianity--the conception of the soul as an absolute value.
Michelangelo was thrilled by a passionate love of beauty; beauty
absolute, eternal and immutable. He felt profoundly the need of
salvation, and he possessed an unprecedented power of spiritual vision.
In the end, added to all these things, came consuming love for a woman,
love raised to the pitch of self-destruction, an adoration which
entitles us to regard him, next to Dante, as the greatest metaphysical
lover of all times.
At the court of the Medici at Florence, Ficinio had founded a Platonic
Academy, where Plato's works and the writings of Plotinus--his greatest
pupil--were after two thousand years translated and elucidated. Many
read and a few understood, but only in Michelangelo did the spirit of
Platonic Hellenism revive and become productive; the Platonic ideal of a
purely masculine culture, aesthetically and spiritually perfect,
illumined his soul; once again the unconditional cult of beauty and the
love of the perfect male form, which speaks to us from the _Dialogues_,
quickened an imagination, and boyhood and youth were portrayed in a
manner which has never since been equalled.
Nearly all Michelangelo's youthful male figures--with the exception,
perhaps, of the gigantic David--deviate from the decidedly masculine and
approach the mean, the human in the abstract; thus they seem to us
imbued with a quality of femininity; they even exhibit decidedly female
characteristics. I have in mind first and foremost the youths depicted
on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (the most soulful adolescent
figures in the world), but also Bacchus, St. John, Adonis and the
figures in the background of the Holy Family at Florence. Cupid and
David Apollo (in the Bargello) are almost hermaphroditic, and even the
Adam, and the unfinished Slaves in the Bobili Gardens exhibit female
characteristics. Without going further into detail I would draw
attention to the breasts and thighs, which positively raise a doubt on
the question of sex. (I am referring to the two youths above the
Erythrean Sybil.) Seen from a distance they create the impression of
female figures, while the youth above Jeremiah is a perfect Hellenic
_ephebos_. On the other hand--with the exception of two of his early
Madonnas and, perhaps, Eve--he has not given us one glorified female
figure; all his women are characterised by something careworn and
unlovely; some of his old women--most strikingly the Cumaic Sybil--are
depicted with absolutely masculine features, masculine figures and
gigantic musculature. His ideal was the Hellenic ideal, was a human form
neither man nor woman; all extremes, but also all peculiarities and
everything personal, were, if not completely suppressed, at any rate
pushed into the background. We regard this ideal, which is alien to our
inherent nature, with a feeling akin to contempt, for the modern ideal
is male and female, but it nevertheless was of great moment in the
obliteration of sex and the accentuation of the purely human. The
Platonic (and also Michelangelo's) love of young men was in its essence
pure love of humanity, love of the perfect human body and the perfect
human soul, whose greatest harmony was achieved in the adolescent.
Moreover, the superior mental endowment of the boy made an intelligent
conversation--so highly appreciated by Platonists and neo-Platonists--
possible, whereas with a girl a man could only jest.
Civilisations and individuals inclining to erotic male friendships are
endowed with great plastic talent. Artists and poets whose genius lies
in the direction of the plastic arts rather than in music, frequently
have homo-sexual leanings. A musical talent, however, is as a rule
accompanied by the love of woman. I know of no great musician, or great
lyrical poet, inclined to erotic friendships with men. The simple song
suggests the love of woman, the artificial metre, let us say the Greek
rhythm, the love of man. I am, however, merely pointing out this
connection, without drawing any conclusions.
The poems addressed by Michelangelo to Tommaso dei Cavalieri breathe a
deep longing for friendship and complete surrender, but above all things
for a return of affection; all barriers between the friends must be
thrown down, "for one soul is living in two bodies."
These poems are calm and well-balanced, and differ greatly from the rest
of his poetry.
If each the other love, himself foregoing,
With such delight, such savour and so well
That both to one sole end their wills combine.
(_Transl. by_ J.A. SYMONDS.)
Michelangelo painted "Ganymede" for Tommaso, and even at a ripe old age
he addressed poems to Cechino Bracci, who died at the age of seventeen.
His contempt of woman, without which the spirit of classical Greece,
too, is unthinkable, formed a parallel to his male friendships.
In the prime of his life the Platonic element was superseded by the
other great element which stirred his soul so profoundly. Exceeding the
perfection of form of antique statuary, his later works throb with a
spiritual and passionate life quite peculiar to him; an inward fire
seems to consume his ardent figures. They are not creatures of this
earth, a breath of eternity has touched them; they are an embodiment of
the Platonic heritage which accounts all earthly things as symbols of
eternal beauty, fertilised and glorified by a deep mourning over human
destiny and a longing for deliverance. And when his years were already
beginning to decline, Vittoria Colonna came into his life, a semblance
and symbol of divine perfection. The love which took possession of him
transformed his whole life and lifted it into religion. In his
tempestuous soul this first love, coming so late in life, far exceeded
human limits; it became adoration and religious ecstasy. Michelangelo,
who could not tolerate in friendship any other relationship than that of
complete self-surrender and equality, threw himself into the very dust
before his love and debased himself almost to self-destruction.
His book of poems is filled with an unspeakable longing for the
perfection of earthly beauty and for eternity; and his beloved mistress
is the sole symbol of this metaphysical climax. Earthly beauty is but an
imperfect semblance of the divine beauty, the embodiment of which is his
love. We meet all the familiar motives; he is nothing before her; he is
unworthy of existence; he is like the moon receiving her light from the
sun; love has raised him from his base condition and is teaching him the
futility of all he had hitherto valued.
Yea, well I see what folly 'twere to think
That largess dropped from thee like dews from heaven
Could ever be paid by work so frail as mine.
(_Transl. by_ J.A. SYMONDS.)
And of love he says:
From loftiest stars shoots down a radiance all their own,
Drawing the soul above,
And such, we say, is love.
(_Transl. by_ HARFORD.)
His poems, which would proclaim him a great poet if he were not an even
greater sculptor, breathe an emotion unsurpassed in its intensity. They
reveal to us in an almost unique manner the emotional process which
culminated in the deification of the beloved. If we did not know that
Vittoria Colonna was an historical individual, not much younger than
Michelangelo himself, and (if we are to credit her portrait) a very
plain woman with a large masculine nose, we might be tempted to believe
her to be a mythical personage like Beatrice Portinari, or Margaret in
_Faust_. But the conviction that all true perfection was centred only in
her, now faced his art and threw its terrible shadow over it.
"Michelangelo conceived love in the Platonic sense," wrote his friend
and biographer, Condivi; but this is only a part of the truth. In the
heart of Michelangelo there took place the tremendous reconciliation
between the Greek cult of beauty and the religion of the beyond; he
blended the finest blossom of Hellenism with the profoundest spirit of
Christianity; he sublimated Plato and Dante into a higher intuition; the
_eroico furore_ of his contemporary, Giordano, had found an embodiment.
The two great rays which illuminated his life: the perfect earthly
beauty to which destiny had called him, and the boundless religious
longing, the last fundamental force of his soul, converged in the
glorified woman. Vittoria appeared to him as the solution of the
world-discord, a solution which he had no right to expect, a miracle.
She was the greatest experience of his great life, an experience which
almost broke him. More than once the thought of Vittoria filled him with
sudden dread. In her he had seen God and the world in one. The powerful
effect of this on so self-reliant a character, a man who had been unable
to find much sympathy with patrons and friends, to whom women had meant
nothing, may easily be imagined. All at once he had found a centre, and
more than that--a solution of all the discords of life, of the eternal
dualism of the earthly and the divine. His love was not the love of a
youth stretching out feelers to the world beyond, but the final creed of
a lonely life which had known nothing but beauty and divinity. With the
passion characteristic of him, he threw himself into this new experience
and made it his fate, flinging world and art aside. Before Vittoria he
ceased to be a sculptor and became a worshipper.
We realise the great difference between this worship and the worship of
Dante. The latter formed the consciousness of eternity, and became a
poet, early in life. He never doubted the profoundest truth, the
metaphysical importance of his love; but in the case of Michelangelo,
the love of an old man was the last event in a life consumed by
restlessness. The adoration of this mysogynist was almost an act of
despair; not a sweet delivery from doubt, but a source of fresh shocks.
It problematised his whole previous existence and nullified the work of
his life. For before this new experience--perfection, met in the
flesh--art broke down. The greatest of sculptors never made an attempt
to imprison the beauty which had appeared to his soul in marble or in
canvas, deeply convinced that such an achievement was beyond the power
of earthly endeavour.
Before Vittoria Michelangelo became deeply conscious of his inmost self;
she gave direction to his longing and was its symbol; she was the
perfection for which he had always striven--and he despaired of his art.
Thy beauty it befell in yonder spheres:
A symbol of salvation, bright'ning heaven
Th' Eternal Artist sent it down to earth;
If it diminish, years succeeding years,
My love will lend it but a greater worth.
Age cannot fade the beauty God has given.
And the conviction that only the idea of eternal beauty has any value,
and that all earthly things are as nothing before it, became stronger
and more tormenting. One instance from many:
As heat from fire, from loveliness divine
The mind that worships what recalls the sun,
From whence she sprang, can be divided never.
(_Transl._ by J.A. SYMONDS.)
In the same way he realised the futility of earthly love compared to
metaphysical love:
The one love soars, the other downward tends,
The soul lights this while that the senses stir.
And:
The highest beauty only I desire.
It is extraordinary, however, that even this ecstatic adorer vaguely
suspected that he himself might be the creator of the beauty which he
saw in his mistress. In a sonnet he asks Cupid whether her beauty
really exists, or whether it is a delusion of his senses, and he
receives the reply:
The beauty thou discernest all is hers;
But grows in radiance as it soars on high.
(J.A. SYMONDS.)
It is indescribably tragic to watch Michelangelo slowly despairing of
his own genius and art, and becoming more and more dominated by the
thought of the futility of all earthly things and all earthly beauty.
The religious conception of eternity and transcendent beauty, the _forma
universale_ became his last refuge. After Vittoria's death Michelangelo
said to Condivi: "I have only one regret and that is that I never kissed
Vittoria's brow or lips when she lay dying." More and more he brooded on
sin and salvation, incarnation and crucifixion. The beloved mistress had
become the sole herald of eternal truths. Melancholy and mourning took
possession of his soul with an iron grip; he could conceive of only one
happiness, death closely following on birth. But the thought of death
again was seized and symbolised with the old artistic passion:
And cleansed by fire, I shall live for ever.
And as the flames are soaring to the sky,
I, changed and purified, shall soar to heaven.
Oh, blissful day! When in a single flash
Time slips away into eternity--
The sun no longer rides across the skies....
Michelangelo was conscious of his near kinship with Dante; he
illustrated a copy of the _Divine Comedy_ which, unfortunately, is lost,
and wrote a poem on Dante in which the following lines occur:
Were I but he! Born for like lingering pains,
Against his exile, coupled with his good,
I'd gladly change the world's inheritage.
(_Transl. by_ J.A. SYMONDS.)
The paintings in the Sistine Chapel, with their materialised thoughts of
destiny, retribution and eternity, originated in a feeling akin to the
feeling underlying the _Divine Comedy_. Both here and there the creation
of celestial and infernal spirits was the outcome of the infinite
longing of the artistic imagination. Both men could spend the human and
creative passions with which their souls were thrilled only on the
supreme and universal. The eternal destiny of man, fate, sin, the
futility of all earthly things, the relationship of the world to God,
love surpassing all human limits and aspiring to the eternal--these are
the common objects over which they brooded. But while it was given to
Dante to create his picture of the world in harmony with his own soul,
and account it a true representation of the world-system; while his
world was a definite place with a beginning and an end, and his
life-work remained in harmony with his own soul, and the universe,
Michelangelo's lacerated soul could find peace only in the ultimate
truth, which filled his heart, and to which he yearned to give plastic
life, only to be unsatisfied after achieving it. George Simmel, in a
profound work, draws our attention to the infinite melancholy which
overshadows all Michelangelo's figures, because his genius aspired to
express the inexpressible. Even the supremest plastic representation of
the passion and longing for the transcendental which thrilled his soul
did not satisfy him. This tragedy is the tragedy of the metaphysical
erotic overflowing its own specific domain. Dante's faith in the
absolute value of his work and in the truth of the consummation of his
love in eternity--which was the sustaining power of his life--remained
unshaken, but Michelangelo lost his faith in his work; art and love
forsook him and withdrew into a transcendental world which he could
divine, but could not grasp. His faith was no blissful certainty; he
knew no more than the dark aspect of things; the imperfection of even
the sublimest, of his art and his love.
Shakespeare's genius could breathe life into all things human, and he
found satisfaction in doing so. Michelangelo's creative, plastic power
seemed illimitable; he possessed all the gifts an artist could possibly
have, but from year to year his conviction of the futility of all
earthly things grew to a profounder certainty. He had knocked at the
iron gate of humanity with his hammer and his chisel; they had broken
into fragments and sorrow made him dumb. There is a stage in the life of
every genius when he comes to this gate, when he has to show his
credentials and reveal the inmost kernel of his being. Dante attempted
to grasp the transcendental in one gigantic vision, Goethe timidly
shrank back from it.
In examining the prophets and youths in the Sistine Chapel, or the
chained men in the Louvre, who seem unable to bear existence, and are
therefore "slaves" of the earth; or in contemplating the half-finished
slaves in the Boboli Gardens, who seem almost to burst the stone in
their wild longing for a higher life; or in reading his last sonnets, we
can conceive a vague idea of the deep melancholy darkening the life of
this man, a gloom which was not the melancholy of the individual, but of
all humanity, unable and unwilling to deceive itself further. Can there
be a greater tragedy than the tragedy of this incomparable artist,
looking back at the work of his lifetime with despair?
For art and wit and passion fade and vanish,
Countless achievements, ever new and great,
Are naught but dross within the sight of heaven.
To Vasari he sent a sonnet denouncing the artistic passion which
abandons itself completely to art:
Now know I well that that fond phantasy
Which made my soul the worshipper and thrall
Of earthly art is vain.
(_Transl. by_ J.A. SYMONDS.)
Faith, is to him "the mercy of mercies," for he has never possessed its
deepest conviction.
But the passion which burned in him remained unquelled to the last: his
soul is torn between love and the thought of death.
Flames of love
And chill of death are battling in my heart.
He longed to break away from love and find peace, and he called on death
for delivery, but in vain:
Burdened with years and full of sinfulness
With evil customs grown inveterate,
Both deaths I dread that both before me wait,
Yet feed my heart on poisonous thoughts no less.
(_Transl. by_ J.A. SYMONDS.)
And later on he thanks love again for being his deliverer, and not
death.
Michelangelo poured all his heart into these last sonnets. We see his
solitary and heroic age overshadowed by the thought of death. His whole
soul is wrapped in gloom; art is vanity, love is sorrow, the thought of
the futility of all things frames the portrait of his love with a wreath
of black laurel. He ponders on his life, and comes to the conclusion
that
Among the many years not one was his.
This man, the supremest creative genius the world has known, accused
himself of having wasted his life.
No song of praise ever rose to the Deity from Michelangelo's heart, as
it did at least once or twice during his lifetime from the heart of
Beethoven. He never had one hour of true inward peace. He represents the
metaphysical world-feeling which (in addition to love) is the foundation
of the deification of woman, but it has grown into immensity, and has
been lifted to a higher plane; not only love, but all life is felt as
fragmentary and pointing to a world beyond. If at an earlier stage it
was the love of woman which could not find its consummation on earth, it
is now the whole of our earthly life and all our aspirations which can
only attain to their highest meaning and to final truth in a
metaphysical existence. The tragedy of metaphysical love has deepened
into the supreme tragedy of life.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] The quotations from _Faust_ are from the translation of Anna
Swanwick.
[3] The quotations from the _Divine Comedy_ are from the translation of
Henry Francis Cary.
[4] The quotations from Tasso are from the translation of Anna Swanwick.
CHAPTER III
PERVERSIONS OF METAPHYSICAL EROTICISM
_(a) The Brides of Christ_
Hitherto I have confined myself to the analysis of the emotional life of
man, but there are two other points which must be taken into account.
The first is the question of woman's attitude towards the lofty position
assigned to her by man; the second and more important one is the
question as to whether the women of that period exhibit in their
emotional life any traces of a feeling akin to the deification of their
sex? The reply to the first question is simple enough. Naturally the
adoration and worship of their lovers could not have been anything but
pleasant to women. There is a poem by the talented Provençal Countess
Beatrix de Die, which betrays genuine sorrow at the infidelity of her
friend, and at the same time leaves no doubt that she--and probably a
great many others--took the eulogies showered upon them by the
enraptured poets, literally. Once again woman accepts the position
thrust upon her by man, not this time the position of a drudge, but that
of a perfect and godlike being. Countess Beatrix credits herself with
all the qualities with which the imagination of her worshipper had
endowed her, as if they were unquestionable facts.
Hence all my songs will be with sadness fraught.
My lover fills my soul with bitter woe,
And yet is all the happiness I know.
My grace and favour all avail me naught.
My sparkling wit, my loveliness supreme,
They cannot hold his love and tender thought,
Of all my lofty worth bereft I seem.
But far more interesting than this psychological misunderstanding on the
part of the much-lauded sex, is the question as to whether the emotional
life of woman matured anything that can be called a worship of man? The
answer to this is a decided "no." At no time in the history of woman do
we find even the smallest indication of a parallel phenomenon; the
profound and tragic dualism of the Middle Ages--one result of which was
the spiritual love of woman--passed her by without touching her. In the
feminine soul conflict apparently results not in tragedy and
productivity, but in morbidness and hysteria.
It may be argued that the love of Jesus, which inspired both the nuns of
the Middle Ages and those of a later period, represents a type of
man-worship; but in examining all these more or less famous nuns and
ascetics we find, instead of genuine spirituality, a concealed and often
morbid condition, which in some cases degenerated into hysteria. The
dualistic period, the age of metaphysical love, made no impression upon
the female soul. There can be no doubt that the emotional life of woman,
in strict contrast to the emotional life of man, has had no evolution,
and can therefore have no history. It is unadulterated nature and, in
its way, it is perfect.
In studying the female mystics, we find an imitation of metaphysical
eroticism sufficiently transparent to be easily recognised, even by the
layman, as belonging to the domain of pathology. These ecstatics were
animated not by a pure, but by an impure spirit. Perverted sensualists,
they believed their hearts to be filled with spiritual love. Contrary to
the striving of the greater number of the men, who raised their love
into heaven so as to keep it pure, and made it one with their religious
aspirations, all the figures and symbols of religion were used by these
women as an outlet and a foil to their sexuality. The loving soul
repairing to the nuptial chamber is the transparent veil of desire
half-concealed by religious conceptions. Women have described similar
situations in metaphors which--for sensuous passion--leave nothing to be
desired, even the famous love-potion of Tristan is not wanting.
The material is abundant, and I have repeatedly touched upon it in
previous chapters. At the period of great mystical enthusiasm (the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries) this morbid love of God was a sinister
attendant phenomenon of true mysticism. Whole convents were seized by
epidemics of hysteria, the women writhed in convulsions, flogged each
other, sang hymns day and night and had hallucinations--for all of which
the love of God, or the temptation of the devil, were made responsible.
Among the more notable of these pseudo-mystics are Christine Ebner (the
author of a book entitled, _On the Fullness of Mercy_), and Mary of
Oignies, a passionate worshipper of Christ who mutilated herself in her
ecstasies and who, on her deathbed, still sang: "How beautiful art Thou,
oh, my Lord God!"
A shining exception among the German nuns of that time was Mechthild of
Magdeburg, a woman of rare gifts. She was a genuine mystic, but she,
too, revelled in fervent, sensuous metaphors, and it would be an
interesting task to separate the two elements in her case; but, having
admitted her genuine mysticism in a previous chapter, I will here
restrict myself to a few quotations which show her from her other side.
Her _Dialogue between Love and the Soul_ abounds in passages like the
following: "Tell my beloved that his chamber is prepared, and that I am
sick with love of him." "The closer the embrace, the sweeter the
kisses." "Then He took the soul into His divine arms, and placing His
fatherly hand on her bosom, He gazed into her face and kissed her right
well." Mechthild, too, was ready to die with love.
Everyone of the most celebrated Brides of Christ belonged to the Latin
race; they were hysterics, and as such have long been claimed by the
psychopathist.
The love of Jesus professed by Catherine of Siena (1347-1388), a clever
politician, who was in correspondence with the leading statesmen of her
time, found vent in passages like the following:
"I desire, then, that you withdraw into the open side of the Son of God,
who is a bottle so full of perfume that even the things which are sinful
become fragrant. There the bride reclines on a bed of fire and blood.
There the secret of the heart of the Son of God is revealed and made
manifest. Oh! Thou overflowing cup, refreshing and intoxicating every
loving and yearning heart." "I long to behold the body of my Lord!" And
straightway the bridegroom appeared to her, opened his side and said to
her: "Now drink as much of my blood as thou desirest."
But the saint who enjoyed the greatest fame--partly on account of her
frequent portrayal by the plastic arts--was doubtless St. Teresa
(Teresia de Jesus), a Spanish nun (1515-1582). During childhood and
early youth she suffered from serious illnesses, and on one occasion was
even believed to be dead. "Before I felt the presence of God," she says
in her biography, "I experienced for some time a very delightful
sensation, a sensation which I believe one is partly able to produce at
will (!), a pleasure which is neither quite sensuous, nor quite
spiritual, but which comes from God." She describes in her "Life" four
stages of prayer, which gradually lead the soul to God: "There is no joy
to be compared with the joy which the Lord giveth to the soul in its
exile. So great is this delight that frequently it seems that the least
thing would make it forsake the body for ever." "When the soul seeks God
in this way," the saint feels with supreme delight her strength ebbing
away and a trance stealing over her until, devoid of breath and all
physical strength she can only move her hand with great pain. The
delights experienced by her are described in great detail and very
sensuous language; hysterical conditions, such as painful convulsions,
and hallucinations, are represented as religious phenomena. "It is
dreadful what one has to suffer from confessors who do not understand
these things," she says in one of her writings with deep regret.
St. Teresa relates her life with the well-known long-winded
self-complacency of the hysterical subject. She frequently had visions
of Jesus, and again and again she emphasised the beauty of his hands.
"Standing by my side, he said to me: 'I have come to thee, my daughter,
I am here; it is I; show me thy hands.' And it seemed to me that he took
my hands in his, and laid them in his side. 'Behold my wound,' he said,
'thou art not separated from me; bear this brief exile on earth....'"
etc.
On one occasion she had a vision of an angel whom she describes as
follows: "He was not tall but small, very beautiful, his face so radiant
that he seemed to be one of the highest angels, who are, I believe, all
fire ... in his hand he held a golden spear, at the point of which was a
little flame; he appeared to thrust this spear into my heart again and
again; it penetrated my entrails, and as he drew it out he seemed to
draw them out also, and leave me on fire with a great love of God. The
pain was so intense that I could not but sigh deeply; yet so surpassing
was the sweetness of this pain that it made me wish never to be without
it. It is not physical, but spiritual pain, although the body often
suffers greatly from it. The caressing love between God and the soul is
so sweet that I implore Him of His mercy to let all those experience it
who believe that I am lying."
The treatise _Thoughts of the Love of God on some Words of the Song of
Songs_ is crowded with purely sensuous passages. In accordance with the
general custom, she interprets this naïvely sensual Semitic poem
allegorically, becomes tremendously excited in meditating on the kiss of
the beloved and discusses the question of what the soul should do to
"satisfy so sweet a bridegroom."
In the pamphlet _The Fortress of the Soul and its Seven Dwellings_, St.
Teresa describes similar states of mind: "The bridegroom commands the
doors of the dwellings to be closed and also the gates of the fortress
and its surrounding walls. In freeing the soul from the body, he stops
the body's breathing so that, even if the other senses are not quite
deadened, speech is impossible. At other times all sensuous perceptions
disappear simultaneously; body and hands grow rigid and it seems as if
the soul had left the body, which is scarcely breathing. This condition
is of short duration. The rigidity passes away to some extent, the body
slowly regains life, the breath comes and goes, only to die away again
and thus endow the soul with greater freedom. But this deep trance does
not endure long." She continues to describe her ecstasies and is careful
to point out the complete fusion of supreme delight and bodily pain.
Perhaps no hysterical subject has ever described her states of mind so
well. Her avowal (made in a letter to Father Rodrigue Alvarez) of her
complete unconsciousness of her body is quite in harmony with those
states of rapture. She wrote a number of spiritual love-songs which are
said to be conspicuous for their ardour and beauty; probably they have
never been translated from the original Spanish.
Finally there is the famous Madame Guyon (1648-1717), who--in addition
to many other works--wrote a very detailed autobiography. She lived with
her husband, whom she treated with coldness, finding her sole joy in her
spiritual intercourse with God. "I desire only the divine love which
thrills the soul with inexpressible bliss, the love which seems to melt
my whole being." God burns her with His fire and still trembling with
delight, she says to Him: "Oh, Lord! The greatest libertine, if Thou
didst make him experience Thy love as Thou didst make me experience it,
would forswear carnal pleasure and strive only after Thy divine love."
"I was like a person intoxicated with wine or love, unable to think of
anything but my passion," etc. The fact that she sought in this love the
pleasure of the senses is very apparent.
We are not concerned here with the problem of how far these women may be
regarded as pathological cases; all of them were filled with a vague
feminine desire for self-surrender, which they projected on a celestial
being, either because they did not come into contact with a suitable
terrestrial object, or because the impulse was abnormal from the
beginning. But their spiritual love never rose above empty
sentimentality and hysterical rapture. All of them, and some of them
were highly gifted, were thrilled with the love of Jesus, they had
visions of the "sweet wounds of the Saviour," and so on; but their
emotion did not kindle the smallest spark of creative power. The Queen
of Heaven, on the other hand, was a free creation of spiritually loving
poets and monks.
The women imitated metaphysical love and distorted it; sexual impulse,
arrogantly attempting to reach beyond the earth, reigned in the place of
spiritual, deifying love.
I have included these phenomena not for their own sakes, but to indicate
my boundary-line, for very frequently these women are cited as genuine
mystics. Even Schopenhauer mentions these "saints" in one breath with
German mystics and Indian philosophers; he calls Madame Guyon "a great
and beautiful soul whose memory I venerate." And yet there can be no
doubt that it is not the fictitious object of love which is conclusive,
but the emotion of the lover: the sensualist can approach God and the
Virgin with inflamed senses, but to the lover every woman is divine.
The result of this chapter is as far as our investigation is concerned,
negative. The deifying love of man has no parallel phenomenon in the
emotional life of woman.
(_b_) SEXUAL MYSTICS.
Sexual mysticism is a contradiction in itself, because true mysticism
has nothing whatever to do with sexuality. But frequently suppressed
sexuality, secretly luxuriating, takes possession of the whole soul, and
a religious construction is put on the results. The sexually excited
subject attributes religious motives to his ecstasy. I have no
hesitation in asserting that the majority of these ecstasies--especially
in the case of women--are rooted in sexuality, and that this so-called
mysticism is nothing but a deviation or wrong interpretation of the
sexual impulse. The same thing applies to the flagellants of the
declining Middle Ages, and some Protestant sects of modernity. The
raptures of St. Teresa and Madame Guyon, also, belong to this category,
however much the fact may be concealed by pseudo-religious conceptions.
I have no doubt that Eastern mysticism, too, grew up on a sexual
foundation, but (as I have done all along) I will limit my subject to
the civilisation of Europe.
This counterfeit mysticism, fed from dubious sources and calling itself
love of God, taints the pure intuitions of some of the genuine mystics
and metaphysical erotics; they were not always able to steer clear of
spurious outgrowths. (Here, too, the psychological naïveté of mediaeval
times must to some extent be held responsible.) Conspicuous amongst
these is St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who in his _Sermones in Canticum_
took the "Song of Songs" as a base for mystically-sexual imaginings.
There is nothing really new in this direction. But I will cite a few
stanzas written by St. Bernard which might equally well have come from
one of the amorous nuns:
TO THE SIDE-WOUND OF CHRIST.
Lord, with my mouth I touch and worship Thee,
With all the strength I have I cling to Thee,
With all my love I plunge my heart in Thee,
My very life blood would I draw from Thee,
Oh, Jesus! Jesus! Draw me unto Thee!
How sweet Thy savour is! Who tastes of Thee,
Oh, Jesus Christ, can relish naught but Thee!
Who tastes Thy living sweetness lives by Thee;
All else is void; the soul must die for Thee,
So faints my heart--so would I die for Thee!
(_Transl. by_ EMILY MARY SHAPCOTE.)
The greatest religious poet of all times after St. Bernard was Jacopone
da Todi, who also, though rarely, revelled in fervid utterances. The
Latin hymn, _Stabat Mater Speciosa_, ascribed to him, is spurious. I
quote a translation taken from the Rosary of the B.V.M.
Other Virgins far transcending,
Virgin, be not thou unbending,
To thy humble suppliant's suit.
Grant me then, to thee united,
By the love of Christ excited,
Here to sing my jubilee.
But he is undoubtedly the author of the following stanzas:
Soaring upwards love-enkindled,
Does the soul rejoice, afire
In her glad triumphant flight.
Earthly cares to naught have dwindled,
Love's sweet footfall's drawing nigh her
To espouse his heart's delight.
All transformed and naked quite,
Laughing low, with joy imbued,
Pure, and like a snake renewed,
Love divine will ever tend her.
But poems like the following undoubtedly originated in a truly religious
and pure sentiment:
Enwrapt in love thine arms Him fast enfolding,
So closely clasp Him that they loose Him never;
And in thy heart His sacred image holding,
Far from the path of sin thou'lt journey ever.
His death in twain shall blast thy callous heart
As once the solid rock He rent apart.
The most distinguished among the fervid lovers of God of later times
were the saints Jean de la Croix, Alfonso da Liguori, and François de
Sales. The _Tract of the Love of God_, written by François de Sales,
surpasses everything ever achieved in this direction.
I will not dilate further on this barren aspect of emotionalism so
easily traceable through the later centuries in many a Catholic and
Protestant sentimentalist, but will conclude this chapter with a brief
discussion of Novalis. If I mention this poet in this connexion it is
not because I desire to depreciate his genius, but because, possessing
as he did, in a rare degree, depth of feeling and power of expression,
he is an important witness of an unusual type. True, here and there his
poems are reminiscent of Jacopone, but he is not sufficiently ingenuous,
and is altogether too morbid to be classed with that ardent fanatic. He
shares with Jacopone and other poets the yearning to grasp
transcendental things with the senses, to approach the Deity with a love
which cannot be called anything but sensuous. Novalis' _Hymns to the
Night_ are the most magnificent example of this perfect interpenetration
of sensuous and transcendental love, and at the same time represent a
complete fusion of the love he bore to his fiancée, who died young, and
the worship of Mary. Night has opened _infinite eyes_ in us, and we
behold the secret of love unfolding itself in the heart of this poet, at
once unique and pathetic, lofty and morbid. The whole universe he
conceives as a female being for whose embrace he is longing. It is a new
emotion: neither the chaste worship of the Madonna, nor the
sexually-mystic striving to embrace with the soul. The night gives birth
to a foreboding which excites and soothes all vague desires. The lover
thus soliloquises of the night:
In infinite space.
Thou'dst dissolve,
If it held thee not,
If it bound thee not,
And thrilled thee,
That afire
Thou begettest the world.
Verily before thou art I was,
With my sex
The mother sent me
To live in thy world,
And to hallow it
With love.
Here the ancient, mystical longing to become one with God is conceived
under the symbol of the night. (A symbol which we shall meet again,
magnified, in Wagner's _Tristan_.)
Lo! Love has burst its prison.
No parting now shall be,
And life's full tide has risen
Like to a boundless sea.
One night of love supernal,
Only one golden song,
And the face of the Eternal
To light our path along.
In addition, Novalis was a perfect woman-worshipper. He loved the Middle
Ages and Catholicism. "The reformation killed Christianity; henceforth
Christianity has ceased to exist." "Catholicism preached nothing but
love for the holy, beautiful Lady of Christianity, who, endowed with
divine virtue, was able to deliver all loyal hearts from the most
terrible dangers." He wrote hymns to Mary in the style of the pietists,
emphasising more especially the principle of motherliness:
Oh, Mary! At thy altar
A thousand hearts lie prone,
In this drear life of shadows
They yearn for thee alone.
All hoping to recover
From life's distress and smart,
If thou, oh holy Mother,
Wilt take them to thy heart.
He idolised his fiancée, who died young. "Her memory shall be my better
self, a sacred image in my heart before which a sanctuary lamp is ever
burning, and which will save me from the temptations of the Evil One."
And through the mouth of Heinrich of Ofterdingen he proclaims: "My
beloved is the abbreviation of the universe; the universe is the
elongation of my beloved." "Heaven has given you to me to worship. I
adore you, you are a saint, you are divine glory, you are eternal life!"
This sentimental worship of woman, combined with an all-transcending
insatiable sensuousness, produced the peculiar sexually-mystic
world-feeling which is so characteristic of him. Night deeply moves his
soul, longing, the memory of the beloved woman, adoration for the
Virgin, his fantastic conception of an incarnated universe are fused
into one great emotion:
Praise to the Queen of the World!
The lofty herald
Of the sacred world.
The patroness
Of rapturous love!
Thou art coming, beloved--
Night has descended--
My soul is ravished--
Over is this earthly journey
And thou art mine again.
I gaze into thy dark, deep eyes,
And see naught but love and happiness.
We sink down on the altar of the night,
The soft couch--
The veil falls,
And kindled by the rapturous embrace,
Glows the pure fire
Of the sweet sacrifice.
The climax and unique example of sensuousness, unsurpassed for its
symbols of the physical embrace, is the hymn: "Few know the Secret of
Love." It is too long to give in full. The following are a few stanzas:
Would that the ocean
Blushed!
And in fragrant flesh
Melted the rock!
Infinite is the sweet repast,
Never satisfied is love;
Nor close, nor fast enough
Can it hold the beloved.
By ever more tender lips
Transformed, the past ecstasy
Grows closer, more intimate.
Rapturous love
Thrills the soul;
Hungrier and thirstier
Grows the heart.
And thus the transports of love
Endure for ever.
Here the remotest limit has been reached--sensuousness seems to flow
into eternity, voluptuousness would shatter the world to pieces and
create a new relationship of things. Before this poem all ecstasies of
sensuousness masquerading as cosmic emotion are dull and timid. The
transcendent symbols of Catholicism are used to guide the insatiable
sensuous imagination to metaphysics. "Who can say that he understands
the nature of blood?" Novalis may ask this question. It is truly blood,
human blood, longing to gush forth and pulsate through the body of the
universe.
In time to come all will be body
One body;
In celestial blood,
Float the enraptured twain.
The human blood has become _celestial blood_; the voluptuousness of man,
the voluptuousness of the world, and because the whole world is one
body, it needs no duality; sexuality which has become a cosmic law rules
over humanity, God, Christ and the universe. This hymn is the
immortalisation of voluptuousness. If the love-death is the
immortalisation of love unable to find satisfaction on earth, so its
counterpart, cosmic sensuousness is, in the last sense, orientalism.
Only a genius could invent a new, symbolic language to express feelings
so alien to the European. Earthly sensuality did not satisfy Novalis,
voluptuousness detached from man, voluptuousness in itself, was his
dream and his religion--the supremest creation ever achieved by
sexuality intensified into a cosmic emotion.
I think that I have now made clear the fact that the emotional life of
man is rooted in two elements, completely distinct from the beginning:
the sexual impulse and personal love. It is in studying the love of the
transcendental, that culminating point of so many feelings springing
from various sources, that the inherent contrast between the two
fundamental principles becomes most apparent; and that we realise why
they have always been intermingled both in theory and in reality.
We have last examined the attempt of sexuality to possess itself of the
whole universe; we will now turn our attention to the true union of both
erotic elements. This union occurred at the time when Goethe and Novalis
were bringing spiritual love and cosmic sensuousness to their highest
summit.
THE THIRD STAGE
(The Unity of Sexual Impulse and Love)
CHAPTER I.
THE LONGING FOR THE SYNTHESIS.
Humanity inherited the pairing-instinct from the animal-world; but as
differentiation progressed, this instinct tended to restrict itself to a
few individuals--sometimes even to a single representative only--of the
other sex. In the beginning of the twelfth century a new and
unprecedented emotion--spiritual love of man for woman based on
personality--made its appearance, and until modern times the two
fundamental erotic principles existed side by side without inner
relationship. Sexuality with its various manifestations has existed from
the beginning; the ultimate object of sexual intercourse is pleasure;
but here and there, and parallel with sexual pleasure, there have been,
in varying degrees of intensity, instances of spiritual love. In the
second half of the eighteenth century there appeared--timidly at first,
but gradually gaining in strength and determination--a tendency to find
the sole course of every erotic emotion in the personality of the
beloved, a longing no longer to dissociate sexual impulse and spiritual
love, but to blend them in a harmonious whole. Personality should knit
body and soul together in a higher synthesis. The first signs of this
longing became apparent in the period of the French revolution; (we find
traces of it in the works of Rousseau and in Goethe's _Werther_); it was
developed by the romanticists and represents the typical form of modern
love with all its incompleteness and inexhausted possibilities. The
achievement of this eagerly desired unity, which would be synonymous
with the victory of personality over the limitations of body and soul,
is the great problem of modern time in the domain of eroticism. The
characteristic of this third stage of eroticism is the complete triumph
of love over pleasure, the neutralisation of the sexual and the
generative by the spiritual and the personal. The physical and spiritual
unity of the lovers has become so much supreme erotic reality, that the
line of demarcation between soul and senses is completely obliterated.
In extreme cases--which are not at all rare--the bodily union is not
realised as anything distinct, specifically pleasurable; it does not
occupy a prominent position in the complex of love; sensuous pleasure,
the universal inheritance from the animal world, has been vanquished by
personality, the supreme treasure of man. The characteristic of the
first stage was the unquestioned sway of one of the elements of erotic
life, sensual gratification (this stage has, of course, never ceased to
exist), as well as the aesthetic pleasure in the beauty of the human
form. The second stage gave prominence to all those spiritual qualities
which were most appreciated, virtue, purity, kindness, wisdom, etc.,
because love rouses and embraces everything in the human soul which is
perfect. In the third stage, sensuous pleasure and spiritual love no
longer exist as separate elements; the personality of the beloved in its
individuality is the only essential, regardless as to whether she be the
bringer of weal or woe, whether she be good or evil, beautiful or plain,
wise or foolish. Personality has--in principle--become the sole, supreme
source of eroticism. In this stage there is no tyranny of man over
woman--as in the sexual stage--no submission of man to woman--as in the
stage of woman-worship; it is the stage of the complete equality of the
sexes, a mutual giving and taking. If sexuality is infinite as matter,
spiritual love eternal as the metaphysical ideal, the synthesis is human
and personal.
Before the eighteenth century, this new erotic union did not exist as a
phenomenon of civilisation, but occasionally we find it anticipated or
vaguely alluded to. Some of the early German minnesingers (such as
Dietmar von Aist and Kürnberg) sometimes betray, especially when
speaking through the medium of a woman, sentiments prophetic of our
modern sentimental ballads. The following verses by Albrecht of
Johansdorf, express the reciprocity characteristic of modern love:
When two hearts are so united
That their love can never wane,
Then I ween no man should blight it,
Death alone should part the twain.
Even more modern in sentiment are the following stanzas:
This is love's measure:
Two hearts and one pleasure,
Two loves one love, nor more nor less,
And both right full of happiness.
In woe one woe,
And neither from the other go.
Though Walter von der Vogelweide adopted the contemporaneous conception
of love as the source of everything good and noble ("Tell me what is
Love?") he never quite accepted it:
Love is the ecstasy of two fond hearts,
If both share equally, then love is there.
More ancient evidence even is the definition of marriage by the
scholastic Hugo of St. Victor, who had leanings towards mysticism:
"Marriage is the friendship between man and woman," he says.
My knowledge of the subject cannot, of course, be unexceptional, but I
do not believe that personal love of the third stage, that is, the
blending of both erotic elements, was quite definitely expressed before
the second half of the eighteenth century. We may be justified in
maintaining that the tension between sexuality and spiritual love had
been slackening in the course of the centuries, that sexuality was
conceived as less diabolical, and love as less celestial than
heretofore; but the principle had remained unchanged. Only the female
portraits of Leonardo da Vinci are deserving of special mention; the
great artist was possibly the first who artistically divined, if he did
not achieve, the synthesis. The exceptional position always granted to
his women--particularly to his Mona Lisa--must doubtless be ascribed to
this premonition. We may be certain that Leonardo not only as artist,
but as lover also, was ahead of his time; but he must be regarded as an
isolated instance. The three stages apply to the eroticism of man only.
His emotion soared from brutality to divinity, and then gradually became
human; his feeling alone has a history. The force which seized, moulded
and transformed him, had no influence over woman. Compared to man, she
is to-day what she was at the beginning, pure nature. Her lover has
always been everything to her; never merely a means for the
gratification of the senses, nor, on the other hand, a higher being to
whom she looked up and whom she worshipped with a purely spiritual love;
but at all times he possessed her undivided love, unable in its naïve
simplicity to differentiate between body and soul. The higher intuition,
the object of the supreme erotic yearning of man, for the possession of
which he has struggled for centuries, and even to-day does not fully
possess, has always been a matter of course to her. She whose truest
vocation is love, received from nature that which the greatest of men
have striven hard to win and only half succeeded in winning. Man's
profound dualism is alien to her; her greatness--but also her
limitation--lies in the simplicity and infallibility of her instinct,
which has had no evolution and is consequently not liable to produce
atavisms and aberrations. She is hardly conscious of the chasm between
sexual instinct and personal love. Wherever this is not so, we _may_
find intellectual greatness (as for instance in the case of the Empress
Catherine of Russia), but as a rule we find only morbidness, despondency
and callousness. To the normal woman the phenomena of dualistic
eroticism appear unintelligible, even unwholesome. The unity of love is
a matter of course to her, so that the third stage is practically male
acquiescence to female intuition.
Even in our time, when so much is said and written about modern woman
and her claims, her feeling is still perfect in itself; compared to the
discord and heterogeneity of man, she represents simplicity and harmony.
Both purely spiritual worship and undifferentiated sexual desire are
exceptions as far as she is concerned and must still be regarded as
abnormal.
This unbroken, determinative female eroticism may possibly be explained
(as Weininger explains it) by woman's sexuality, which is absolute, and
does not rise above the horizon of distinct consciousness, but
Weininger's dualism is in this direction attempting to value and
standardise something which in its essence is alien to his standard.
Psycho-physical unity, then, is the basic characteristic of female
eroticism, but the state of affairs in the case of male eroticism is a
very different one. A study of the gradual origin of the erotic elements
will facilitate a better understanding of the relevant phenomena.
In the case of woman, the primary sexual instinct pervades the whole
being; it has been refined and purified without any great fluctuations
or changes; in the case of man it has always been restricted to certain
regions of his physical and psychical life, and an entirely novel
experience was required before it could win to the final form of
personal love. This prize, in his case, is therefore enhanced by the
fact of being the outcome of a long conflict; the reward of a task still
showing the traces of the struggle and pain of centuries. The truth of
the words "Pleasure is degrading" had been established by experience.
A few historical instances, illustrating female eroticism, will uphold
my contention. In the remote days of Greek antiquity, we find an example
of undivided wifely love in Alcestis, whose devotion to her husband sent
her to voluntary death in order to lengthen his life. Wifely devotion
accomplished what parental love could not achieve. The _Alcestis_ of
Euripides represents a feeling very familiar to us. Penelope, the
faithful martyr, is a similar instance.
At the time when spiritual love, accompanied by eccentricities and Latin
treatises, gradually, and amidst heavy conflict, struggled into
existence, the soul of woman was already glowing with the emotion which
we, to-day, realise as love. I have three witnesses to prove this
statement. The _Lais_ of the French poetess Marie de France, based on
Breton and Celtic motifs, are permeated by a sweet sentimentality, very
nearly related to the sentiment of our popular ballads. They tell of
simple feelings, of love and longing and the grief of love. One of her
_lais_ treats the touching story of Lanval and Guinevere, and another an
episode of Tristan and Isolde.
De Tristan et de la reine,
De leur amour qui tant fut fine,
Dont ils eurent mainte doulour
Puis en moururent en un jour.
The naïve sentiment of these poems forms a delicious contrast to the
contemporaneous mature and subtile art of Provence, and the entire
erudite armoury of love.
A great baron declared that only the man who could carry his daughter in
his arms to the summit of a certain mountain--an impossible
feat--should win her hand in marriage. No man possessed strength to
carry her farther than half way. But the knight whom she loved secretly
went out into the world, and after years of searching, discovered a
magic potion able to endow him who quaffed it with enormous strength.
Full of joy he returned home and, his beloved in his arms, began the
laborious ascent. Strong and jubilant, he laughed at the potion. But
after a while, feeling his strength ebbing away, the maiden implored
him: "Drink, I beseech thee, beloved!" "My heart is strong, to drink
were waste of time." And again she pleaded: "Drink now, beloved, thy
strength is diminishing fast." But he, eager to win her only by his own
effort, staggered on and reached the summit, only to sink to the ground
and expire. The maiden, throwing herself on his lifeless body, kissed
his eyes and lips and died with him.
We recognise in this simple tale the new form of love, mutual devotion,
and the thought of the consummation of this love, the _Love-death_,
which was not definitely realised until six hundred years later. It
originated in the Celtic soul, as the worship of woman originated in the
Romanesque (the Teutonic soul shared in the development of both). It was
a dream of the suppressed Celtic race, spending its whole soul in dreams
and producing visions of such depth and beauty that even we of to-day
cannot read them without being profoundly moved.
Next there are three love-letters written in Latin by a German woman of
the twelfth century. In very touching words she tells her lover that the
love of him can never be torn out of her heart. "I turn to you whom I
hold for ever enclosed in my inmost heart." She promises and claims
faithfulness until death: "Among thousands my heart has chosen you, you
alone can satisfy my longing, and you will never find my love wanting. I
trust myself to you, all my hope is centred in you. I could say a great
deal more," she concludes, "but there is no need of it." And then
follow the charming German stanzas:
Thou to me and I to thee,
Knit for all eternity.
In my heart art thou imprisoned,
And I threw away the key.
Nevermore canst thou be free.
In the third letter she drops the formal Latin and addresses him in
intimate, simple German. But the man's replies are clumsy and strange,
and plainly evidence his uncertainty of himself: "You have put a human
head on a horse's neck, and the beautiful female form ends in an ugly
fish's tail." It looks as if a parting were inevitable.
But the most touching testimony from the Middle Ages is the famous love
story of Abélard and Héloïse. We probably possess no older document of
the passionate devotion of a woman, differing in nothing from the
sentiment of the present age, than the letters of Héloïse. Abélard
persuaded her to take the veil and repent in a convent the sin of
voluptuousness--but she knows nothing of God--her whole soul is wrapped
up in her lover: "I expect no reward from God, for what I did was not
done for love of Him.... I wanted nothing from you but yourself; I
desired only you, not that which belonged to you; I did not expect
marriage or gifts; I did not seek to gratify my desires and do my will,
but yours, and well you know that I am speaking the truth! The name of
wife may seem sacred and honourable to you, but I prefer to be called
your mistress or even your harlot. The more I degraded myself for your
sake, the more I hoped to find grace in your eyes.... I renounced all
the pleasures of the world to live only for you; I kept nothing for
myself but the desire to belong entirely to you." Abélard's replies are
pious sermons and theological treatises; he thinks of the love of the
past only as _the cursed desires of the flesh_, the snare in which the
devil had caught them, and urges Héloïse to thank God that henceforth
they are safe. "My love which entangled both of us in sin," he says in
one of his letters, "deserves not the name of love, for it was naught
but carnal lust. I sought in you the gratification of my sinful
desires," etc. He blessed the savage crime committed on him because it
saved him for ever from the sin of voluptuousness. What Héloïse loved
and treasured as her sweetest memory, was to him hell and devil's work.
He wrote to her almost as if in mockery: "What splendid interest does
the talent of your wisdom bear to the Lord day after day! How many
spiritual daughters you have borne to Him! What a terrible loss it would
have been if you had abandoned yourself to the lust of the flesh, had
borne, with travail, a few earthly children, while now, with joy, you
bear a great number of daughters for the kingdom of Heaven. You would
have remained a woman like all the rest, but now you are far exalted
even above men." This correspondence plainly reveals the tragedy of the
lacerated man of the Middle Ages, as compared to the never-varying
woman, emerging perfect from the hands of nature. A long and toilsome
road still stretches out before him; she had reached the goal, without a
struggle, at the outset. How strange is this cry of a mediaeval nun: "It
seems as if the world had grown old, as if all men and all living
creatures had lost their freshness, as if love had grown cold not in
many, but in all hearts."
What was really the final cause of the hostility to sensuousness
displayed by dualistic mediaeval Christianity? Was it not contained in
eroticism itself?
This hostility was based on the fact that the world knew as yet only
spiritual love and its antithesis, the sexuality which man shares with
the animals; the only salvation, not merely in the Christian sense, but
from the point of view of every lofty conception of civilisation, lay in
the victory over animalism. The contempt of and the struggle against
the lower form of eroticism animating the dualistic period was
absolutely consistent; asceticism represents the highest form of culture
attainable by that period. (The rejection of spiritual love was an
inconsistency on the part of the clergy.) The principle of personality
was the fundamental principle of Christianity; this is clearly expressed
by the fact that Christianity regarded the soul as the supreme value.
And what is the soul but the consciousness of human personality
conceived naïvely as substance? In the light of this higher intuition
sensuousness was bound to appear base and degrading.
It is therefore historically correct, though essentially an error, to
regard Christianity as the religion of asceticism, for the asceticism of
the Middle Ages was nothing but the immature stage of the principle of
personality. Directly spiritual love was no longer in opposition to
sexuality, directly a synthesis had been effected, Christianity should
have drawn the obvious conclusion from its fundamental principle and
acknowledged love, which united the hostile elements. Protestantism did
so, half-heartedly. Luther's vacillating attitude towards sexuality is
typical of this indecision. At heart he could not justify sexuality; he
regarded it, in the same way as did the Fathers of the Church, as an
evil with which one had to make terms. His sanction of marriage was
nothing but a crooked and ill-founded compromise; and as he remained at
the old dualistic standpoint, it could not have been otherwise. But the
moment the new sensuous-supersensuous form of love had come into
existence, it behoved Christianity, as the religion of personality, to
acknowledge it.
After this digression I return to the period of the inception of the
third stage of love. If I were writing a history of eroticism, I should
now have to describe the rococo period, a period essentially
rationalistic and devoted to pleasure, a period which believed in
nothing but the obvious and understood love only in the sense of sensual
pleasure. If sensuality had hitherto been evil--at least
theoretically--it now became obscene. Stripped of every grand and cosmic
feature, it degenerated into the principal form of amusement. The
eighteenth century, though instructive and interesting to the student of
eroticism, produced nothing new. Under the undisputed sway of France, a
period of sensuality set in, unparalleled by any other epoch in the
history of the race, except, perhaps, the early oriental epoch; even the
gynecocratic family of remote antiquity was openly revived by the ladies
of Paris. Casanova was the sexual hero of the age (as he is to some
extent the hero of our present impotent epoch). Indefatigable in the
pursuit of woman and successful until old age, he was a well-bred
sexualist without subtlety or depth. The Vicomte de Valmont, the hero of
Choderlos de Laclos' famous and realistic novel _Les Liaisons
Dangereuses_, an absolutely cold and cunning seducer, was its god. They
were seconded by the pleasure-loving Ninon de l'Enclos, who was still
desired at the age of eighty.
This ultra-refinement was followed by the loathing of civilisation and
love of nature expressed by Rousseau, Werther and Hölderlin; closely
allied to these passions was sentimental love, the direct precursor of
our modern conception of love. Its peculiarity lay in the fact that
although spiritual in its source, it yearned for psycho-physical unity,
and was therefore always slightly discordant. Rousseau was the first
exponent of this romantic nature cult and sentimental love of woman. He
represents the sharp recoil from the frivolity of the _ancien régime_,
and the beginning of the third stage of love. His _Nouvelle Héloïse_
(1759) was probably the first work in which sentimental love found
expression. In Goethe's _Werther_ (1774), which is a faithful portrayal
of the poet's personal feelings, it was represented more powerfully.
Werther's love was purely spiritual at its inception. "Lotte is sacred
to me. All desire is silent in her presence." But in the end he desires
her with unconquerable passion; a dream undeceives him about the nature
of his feelings, and as he clasps her in a passionate embrace he is
conscious of having reached the summit of his longing. This would seem
the goal of modern love, embodying all its previous stages. It is
interesting to find embodiments of the extreme poles in two incidental
characters; one has been driven mad by his adoring love for a woman and
wanders about the fields in November to gather flowers for his queen;
the other is a young peasant who kills his rival in jealous rage. But
Werther himself, steering a middle-course between these two extremes,
walks straight into modern love, which means death to him.
Both the _New Héloïse_ and _Werther_ are, sentimentally, efforts to
reach the synthesis _via_ the soul. Friedrich Schlegel, in his famous
_Lucinda_ (1799), tried the opposite way. He has been savagely attacked
for it by one side and lauded to the skies by the other, and when "the
emancipation of the flesh" became the motto of the day, he was glorified
as a martyr. The philosopher and theologian Schleiermacher saw in
_Lucinda_ a delivery from the tyranny of centuries. "Love has become
whole again and of one piece," he exclaims, joyfully calling the poem "a
vision of a future world God knows how distant." "Love shall come again;
a new life shall unite and animate its broken limbs; it shall rule the
hearts and works of men in freedom and gladness, and supersede the
lifeless phantoms of fictitious virtues." Schleiermacher also voiced the
idea of the synthesis: "And why should we be arrested in this struggle
(_i.e._, between love as the flower of sensuousness and the intellectual
mystical component of love), when in all domains we are striving to
bring the ideas, born by the new development of humanity, into harmony
with the result of the work of past ages?" His _Confidential Letters on
Schlegel's Lucinda_ have made the Protestant pastor Schleiermacher the
philosopher of the third stage of eroticism, as the chaplain Andreas was
the theorist of the second. The third stage gained its first footing
amongst the German romanticists. Women were largely instrumental in
achieving its victory. I will not go into detail but will confine myself
to mentioning in passing the names of Jean Paul, Henrietta Herz,
Brentano, Sophy Mereau, Dorothy Vest, Schelling, Friedrich Gentz. W. von
Humboldt records a conversation which he had in the year of the
Revolution with Schiller. The latter unhesitatingly professed his faith
in the unity of love. "It (the blending of love and sensuality) is
always possible and always there." But Humboldt was diffident, unable
fully to grasp the new conception. "I said that it would sever the most
beautiful, most delicate relationships, that it was too heterogeneous to
admit of coherence; but my principal argument was that in the majority
of cases it was out of the question...."
There is a document from the year 1779 which contains in its entirety
the modern conception of harmonious love, together with its ecstatic
apotheosis, the love-death, a document which puts the later theorising
romanticists and _Lucinda_ completely in the shade. I am referring to
the only one of Gottfried August Bürger's letters to Molly, which has
been preserved. It contains the following passages: "I cannot describe
to you in words how ardently I embrace you in the spirit. There is in me
such a tumult of life that frequently after an outburst my spirit and
soul are left in such weariness that I seem to be on the point of death.
Every brief calm begets more violent storms. Often in the black darkness
of a stormy, rainy midnight, I long to hasten to you, throw myself into
your arms, sink with you into the infinite ocean of delight and--die. Oh
Love! oh Love! what a strange and wonderful power art thou to hold body
and soul in such unbreakable bonds!... I let my imagination roam through
the whole world, yea, through all the heavens and the Heaven of heavens,
and examine every delight and compare it to you, but by the Eternal God!
there is nothing I desire so ardently as to hold you, sweetest and
heavenliest of all women, in my arms. If I could win you by walking
round the earth, naked and barefoot, through thorns and thistles, over
rocks and snow and ice, and, on the point of death, with the last spark
of life, sink into your arms and draw new life and happiness from your
loving bosom, I should consider that I bought you for a trifle."
To adduce more historical evidence of modern love would serve no
purpose; in the next chapter I shall discuss its metaphysical
consummation, the love-death. But I will briefly point out the not quite
obvious difference between synthetic love and sexuality projected on a
specific individual. In several of the higher animals the sexual
instinct is to some extent individualised, but nevertheless it is no
more than instinct, seeking a suitable mate for its gratification. All
the well-known theories of "sexual attraction," from Schopenhauer to
Weininger, accounting love as nothing but a mutual supplementing of two
individuals for the purpose of the best possible reproduction of the
species, do not apply to love in the modern sense, but to the sexual
impulse; they completely disregard the individual, and are only aware of
the species; they apprehend individualisation as an instrument in the
service of the race. But genuine personal love is not kindled by
instinct; it is not differentiated sexual impulse; it embraces the
psycho-physical unity of the beloved without being conscious of sexual
desire. It shares with the purely spiritual love the eagerness of man to
raise and glorify the beloved woman, without ulterior motive or desire.
This distinction may be called hair-splitting, and I admit that it is
frequently impossible to make it in practice, but it is important in
principle because it goes back to origins and finds in the metaphysical
climax of the third stage, the love-death, its practical anti-generic
proof. But with all this it is of common occurrence that spiritual and
sensual love are at different times projected on one and the same woman.
Schopenhauer's instinct of philoprogenitiveness has to-day become an
article of faith with the learned and unlearned. Schopenhauer was the
first, probably, to conceive the idea that love was the consciousness of
the unconscious instincts in the service of the species, and had no
other content or purpose than the will of the species to produce the
best possible offspring. In a chapter of his principal work, entitled
_The Metaphysics of Love_, he essayed to promulgate and prove his theory
in detail. "All love, however ethereal it may pretend to be, is rooted
solely in the sexual instinct; it is nothing more nor less than
specialised, strictly speaking individualised, sexual desire."
Schopenhauer's conception of love does not rise above this specialised
impulse. He calmly ignores all phenomena such as those I have described
because they do not fit his theory. With the exception of his cheap
observation that contrasts attract each other (which is the pith of all
his "truths") he does not adduce the smallest evidence for the truth of
his myth of "the genius of the species spreading his wings over the
coming generation." However much the results of breeders may be
applicable to the human species, they have nothing to do with love, and
the believers in the theory of the instinct of philoprogenitiveness are
silent on the subject of the best and most suitable subject for the
purpose; is it the law-abiding citizen? the restless reformer? or the
artist and thinker? Strange to say, the legend of the instinct of
philoprogenitiveness, intuitively conscious of the right way, is to-day
accepted even by scientists who are in sympathy neither with
Schopenhauer's nor with any other metaphysic. It is taken for granted
that love can only serve the purpose of the species; the fact that this
theory is both metaphysically and scientifically unsound is ignored. For
even leaving the genius of the species out of the question, his
intelligent comprehension of the "composition of the next generation" is
nevertheless devoutly believed in. Even Nietzsche, that
arch-individualist, was completely under the spell of this dogma, as is
proved by many of his utterances, for instance, by the well-known
socialistic definition of marriage as "the will of twain to create that
which is higher than its creators," and also by his theory that man is
not an end in himself but a bridge to something else. Nietzsche's
pronouncement that he has not yet found the woman whom he would like to
be the mother of his children, echoes the philosophy of Schopenhauer,
the superstition of the genius of philoprogenitiveness. The intrinsic
worth of love without any ulterior motive, without a view to pleasure or
to offspring, seems to have been unknown to Nietzsche. Schopenhauer's
hero puts the purport of love not in the actual individual, but in a
conception, and annihilates the value of the individual and the unique.
Every great emotion is an end in itself, and whatever we may read into
it of "purposes" and "expediencies," is an invention, and independent of
the emotion itself. The aim of the purely spiritual love of the second
stage was not propagation, and yet it was an emotion whose loftiness
cannot easily be surpassed. With the deification of woman love reached
far beyond the beloved into infinitude, and the phenomenon of the
love-death renders all the supposed generic purpose of love impossible.
But even if we ignored love altogether and admitted the existence of the
sexual instinct only, its mysterious endeavour in the interest of the
species would still remain pure imagination, and a conception far
inferior to that of the winged god of love. The instinct does not
possess a trace of "discretion," takes no interest in the weal and woe
of humanity, but is utterly selfish, seeking its own gratification and
nothing else.
The theory which fits so well into Schopenhauer's metaphysics has,
without it, neither sense nor support. There is no instinct of
philoprogenitiveness, but rather a pairing-instinct, and in addition to
this a conscious desire for offspring. The difference between these two
instincts is great, for as a rule, the pairing-instinct is not
accompanied by a wish for children (that it should be so unconsciously
is a theory not worth considering seriously), and the longing for
children very frequently exists without any sexual desire; to
manufacture an instinct out of those two inherently dissimilar impulses
is fantastic metaphysics and not spiritual reality. The history of
antiquity furnishes ample proof of my contention, for in the days of the
remote past the sexual impulse had its special domain, as well as the
wish for progeny, which was often regarded in the light of a duty.
The legend of the instinct of philoprogenitiveness which is to-day so
universally believed, is undoubtedly the result of the general feeling
that sexual intercourse as such is base and degrading. But because of
the more or less clear consciousness that sexual intercourse is really
what is most desired in love, and because of the lack of courage openly
to admit it, attempts are made to justify it from a social standpoint.
The task of establishing the equilibrium between love and sensuousness
has not yet been accomplished. What is so often realised as _the sexual
trouble_ has its origin in the fact that the higher stage has not yet
been finally reached. There is an infinite number of unions, all of
which have a flaw. Witness modern literature with its indefatigable
treatment of eroticism. If a complete unity is ever to be established,
then doubtless it will be the privilege of the Germanic race to achieve
it, for the Neo-Latin nations mean by love either the individualised
instinct, or the rare, purely spiritual love. But it is not likely that
the third stage will become a universal condition; in all probability it
will, for a long time to come, be limited to special individuals, and
even then only to specific phases of their lives. The feeling of the
great majority of men has not changed; it is primitively sexual; in the
state of mind which is called _to be in love_ it is centred on an
individual woman, to be, after a time, gradually stifled by other
interests. The emotional life of the majority of women, on the other
hand, is still what it was in remotest antiquity. Love impels woman into
the arms of a man to whom she remains faithful, until slowly her
instincts are transformed into love for her children. But in the case
even of the average woman, body and soul are equally affected; there is
no more terrible moment in a woman's life than the one in which she
discovers that the man to whom she has given herself has merely used her
as a means for gratification. Harmoniously organised woman has given
herself to a merely sexual man who sought in her only the satisfaction
of his senses. This also is the cause of the horror with which the
normal woman regards the prostitute, for the latter has made of herself
a means for the gratification of male sexuality, losing thereby her
inherent harmony and individuality. And it is also the reason why, in
spite of ethical convictions and logical conclusions, we should have
different standards for the loyalty of the husband and the loyalty of
the wife; in man sexuality is a distinct element, an element, it is
true, which we do not value, but which nevertheless exists and has, as
we have seen, a historical root. When a man gives way to his instincts,
his individuality is not only not destroyed, but it is hardly affected.
It is very different in the case of the woman; with her, emancipated
sexuality is synonymous with inward annihilation, for it has not the
support of the past and cannot exist independently. A man's spiritual
annihilation from the emotional sphere is unthinkable because his
organisation is naturally heterogeneous. The mere sexualist represents a
past stage of male eroticism which has been largely overcome, but he is
rarely so completely under the spell of sexuality that he cannot highly
develop other parts of his entity. The _double morality_ has, therefore,
an objective reason (though perhaps not a higher justification), and
would only be unjustifiable if man had achieved a complete erotic unity.
The more complicated life becomes, the more numerous and complex are the
relations between individuals and groups. A man is a member of a trades
union; he has political, artistic, sporting and social relations; he may
be a collector or interested in certain social phenomena, etc. In modern
civilisation every component part of the human personality is separated
from the entire personality and brought into a systematic connection
with similar component parts of other entities. Our social principle is
division of labour, not only in the community but also in the
individual. With one man one can talk only philosophy, with another
music, with a third personal matters, and so on. But because in this way
only one part of man, and never the whole being, can be satisfied at a
time, the desire to expend one's whole personality in one great
achievement, or in connection with another individual, is increasing
exactly in proportion as specialisation is increasing in the community
and in the individual. The more richly endowed and synthetic a man, the
more inappeasable will be his yearning to find the talents scattered
broadcast over humanity combined in one personality, and to give himself
wholly and entirely to that personality. The splitting up of man caused
by our social conditions is one of the principal causes of the longing
for the great and strong love which we hear so much discussed. The
yearning for the absolute, for perfection, no longer separating and
selecting but embracing man as a whole, annihilating body and soul in a
higher intuition, the longing for mutual self-surrender, for giving and
receiving an undivided self, is growing stronger and stronger. The idea
of modern love, a love embracing the whole breadth of human development,
is unequalled in human history. A single person shall stand for all
mankind. The lover has always been all the world to woman, but man has
possessed many things in addition to the beloved. Our age claims
(wherever it understands its own eroticism) that woman, on her part,
shall give to man all things in existence in a higher and purer form;
not only complete satisfaction of the senses, not only the lofty emotion
of spiritual love, but also friendship as a fellow-man; she shall be to
him the friend who meant so much to the Greek and the ancient Teuton. It
is self-evident that the true erotic of our time has very little to
spare for friendship, while on the other hand the man who is not erotic
in the true sense of the word, but merely sexual, has generally a poor
idea of woman and a great appreciation of male friendship. But modern
love does not only seek to combine all human relationships; it would
fain include work, recreation, art. The instinctive jealousy of every
occupation which she does not share with her lover, is nothing more than
a loving woman's fear that the things which belong to him exclusively
may become a danger to the unity of love. Whether such an all-absorbing
love is possible in richly-endowed natures, and whether it will not be
the cause of new conflict, are questions which cannot here be entered
upon. But one thing is certain: the great love cannot find its
consummation on earth.