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PotOnWheel
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 4/6/2002 4:00 AM (GMT -6) |   |
from Paul Evdokimov’s “The Sacrament of Love”, pp.107-110
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If no one has ever found a solution [to know what Art is ...], if every age looks for one in its own way, it is because love is always a new subject. We may indicate its three harmonics: Greek, scriptural, and modern.
In Plato, love inaugurates the dialectic of transcendance. The winged souls mentioned in Phaedrus are born from amorous passion.
But the object of love fades away, and it is rapidly transcended toward the sublime and the intelligible, the essence of which is profoundly impersonal. Eros is a spirit (daimon)^ an "intermediary mediating between the mortal and the immortal," a powerful means, a spark triggering the ascent toward the purely spiritual, where the sage "will suddenly have revealed to him a beauty that neither comes into being nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes." This is the ascension toward the impersonal idea, with no dialogue, no reciprocity of love. The beauty of a particular outward form is a reflection and a reminiscence of the Beautiful in heaven. The pursuit of this Beauty consists in moving beyond the particular beloved, even in leaving him behind. This is the boundary of love in Plato. Nonetheless, it is already a pre-ascesis that withdraws from the sensual, from the deception of the senses.
Denis de Rougemont mythanalyzes modern love, love as passion, and traces its origin to the myths of Tristan and Isolde, and that of Don Juan. Passion is consummated in great sorrow, through excessive suffering, and leads to a welcome death in the name of the mystique of night. At the other extreme, Don Juan is the one who cheats; he loves only his love and violates the truth of beings. He tastes women as one tastes fruit, without either giving or taking away the soul. In his own way Don Juan might possibly be Neopi atonic. He loves no woman in particular; he seeks "the feminine" of which every woman is but an imperfect reflection. In the end, he himself ceases to be a concrete individual and he becomes "a man without a name," insubstantial (Tirso de Molina).
The action of these myths is projected into the real life of couples, and triggers crises. If asceticism does not permeate eternal duration, duration begets a fearful boredom. The intensity of Tristan, not contained by time, endeavors to escape beyond time. The always new excitement of Don Juan is limited to just the first mornings of love and denies tomorrow, the duration. These are two ways of loving, both of which destroy the loved one.
Passionate "angelism" and the Tristan death-wish destroy the historic aspect of the beloved; they change into the Don Juan subversion which destroys the beloved's eternal dimension. In another connection, troubadour poetry idealizes love. But, unstable on account of its romanticism, thirsty yet Platonizing, powerless to remain on the summits of ascetic purity, its love fails in the face of the sarcasm of an easy libertinism, and it ends by praising death.
In Kierkegaard's romanticism, woman, "the gateway to heaven," becomes pure idea: "It is woman's misfortune to represent everything in the moment, and to represent nothing more in the next moment, without ever truly knowing what she properly signifies as woman." When man is no longer in need of inspiration, or when he feels threatened by duration, the woman no longer has any firmness or value in herself; she is not even a human subject, a person, but at the most a relative being, a poetic form of absence.
Marx and Freud do their utmost to tear away the romantic masks in order to discover the brutal reality of secret desires in the place of love, an exploitation of the one by the other. The unveiled humans are degraded to males and females. A misunderstood ascesis led Nietzsche to write, "Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it but degenerated into vice." When the Gospel is not accepted in its totality, the conflict between the spirit and the senses creates at once a profound lack of balance. Every solution that seeks to "unsex" the human being is an attempt on the creative will of God. To mortify Eros by mortifying the flesh is to dangerously desiccate the human being; it is to move from a scorn of the disturbing element to hatred of it.
"Man can be imagined without woman . . ."; he makes history without viewing it through the eye of the revelation of Scripture. However, St Paul says: "In the Lord woman is not independent of man or man of woman" (1 Co 11:11).
The Song of Songs, the most sublime of all poems, praises love and the sacred dyad of the nuptial union. [ Historians surmise that the Song was sung during the Jewish marriage ceremony. It recapitulates and enlarges upon the first utterance of human love, "This at last is flesh from my flesh" (Gn 2:22).] As a wedding song, it shows the betrothed searching for one another, but its real subject is neither the bucolic shepherd nor the beautiful Shulamite, but Love itself. The Song was written because of the theme expressed in the closing lines: "Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death. ... Its flashes are flashes of fire^ a most vehement flame" (Sg 8:6). As an image of the love of the betrothed, it is also a figure of the nuptial love between God and the human soul. The essential revelation of the Song is that human love has its source in God and is kindled by the tongues of the devouring fire of Jahweh, a nuptial Pentecost.
In his book, The Jasmine of the Faithful of Love, the great Persian mystic Ruzbehan Bagli of Shiraz views lived human love as a necessary initiation into the love of God. This is not the monastic conversion of Eros, but its transfiguration. In every beloved there is an encounter with the one and only Beloved, just as in every divine name the totality of Names is found again, due to the sympathetic union (umo sympathetica). Beauty is seen as a manifestation of the sacred (hierophany), an apparition of the divine (theophany)^ only if the love of God is lived in human love, the element to be transfigured and transmuted. Human love seems propaedeutic to divine love.
The Song brings together what Plato—and with him all the romantic or ascetic trends—dissociates. In Biblical anthropology, the love between a man and a woman has its origin in the love of God, and leads to God. The poetic form used by the Semitic genius praises the charms of beauty and humanizes love, but also raises it to the level of the divine. The Song transfigures passing desires into the unique thirst for the Absolute. In this manner. Scripture does away with every disembodied idealization and invites us to come to terms with the human being in its totality, baptized and destined for the Resurrection.
Edited by - PotOnWheel on 04/06/2002 09:02:38 AM | | Back to Top | | |
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