Part 11 (1/2)
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 wors.h.i.+pping 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d loves the Lady of Heaven. St. Bernard first expressed this nave idea, which makes G.o.d 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 G.o.d as Mary's languis.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d, nay, even in the place of G.o.d, a woman was enthroned. ”The Virgin became the G.o.d of the Universe,” says Michelet, a thorough, though rather imaginative expert on the Middle Ages. The people primitively wors.h.i.+pped 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 wors.h.i.+pped her as divine. The established religion was compelled to enter into partners.h.i.+p 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 const.i.tutes one of the striking differences between the Eastern and the Western worlds: the respect for womanhood. It is based on the woman-wors.h.i.+p of secular, and the Madonna-wors.h.i.+p of ecclesiastical circles. It is true that Jesus, antic.i.p.ating 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.x, that it never entirely died away; if to-day women are respected and their efforts at emanc.i.p.ation 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 Provencal 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 pa.s.s. 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 pa.s.s, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 wors.h.i.+p; for Mary is the G.o.ddess of beauty, the G.o.ddess of love, the G.o.ddess of humanity, the G.o.ddess of nature, the G.o.ddess 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 chast.i.ty,” he continues in his great work; ”they suppressed the s.e.xual impulse, but in exchange they had the personification of womanhood, of love, in the Virgin in Heaven. The more their ideal, fict.i.tious representative of her s.e.x 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 s.e.xuality, 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 G.o.d.”
Feuerbach then explains the need of man to project his n.o.blest sentiments on Heaven, and lays much stress on the necessity of believing in the Mother of G.o.d, because the love of a child for its mother is the first strong feeling of man. ”Where the faith in the Mother of G.o.d declines, the faith in the Son of G.o.d, and in G.o.d 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 princ.i.p.al 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 s.e.xuality 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 s.e.xual 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 a.s.sertion 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 a.n.a.logy to genuine metaphysical eroticism. For the wors.h.i.+p 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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sion which yearns for infinitude. A lover filled with the longing to glorify a woman and wors.h.i.+p 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.