Part 13 (1/2)
These e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns completely exhaust the emotional life of the self-destructive metaphysical erotic--he is conscious of nothing but his pa.s.sion 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.e.xual imaginings; in the case of emotional mystics it is often difficult to distinguish between sensual conceptions and the pure love of G.o.d (a fact which does not, however, justify the superficial opinion that all mysticism is diverted s.e.xuality).
It is obvious that this love of G.o.d is not the original creation of the lover, as is the deifying love of woman, but the mystic love whose self-evident object is G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 t.i.tle 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 beat.i.tude 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 G.o.d's love alone, Their union ending.
The ident.i.ty 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-G.o.ddesses, 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 a.s.similate 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, G.o.d 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.